Welcome to the Brilliant Fertility Podcast. I'm your host, dr Katie Rose, and this podcast exists to help illuminate the path ahead of you. With expert interviews, clinical pearls and real client success stories, my intention is to bring you hope for what's possible on this journey and to give you tools and resources to navigate the ups and downs on the road before you. If you find this podcast helpful, don't forget to subscribe on your favorite listening platform. And I have a big request If you have a minute, can you leave us a five-star review and let us know what did you learn? What did you come away with? Did you leave with that spark of hope? This helps more people like you find the podcast. My mission is to support as many humans as possible on their path to become parents and by you sharing and subscribing, you're part of that mission too, and I'm so grateful for you for being here here. Welcome back to the Brilliant Fertility Podcast. Friends, I am podcasting from my bed today because I can, and I was having a spontaneous moment of gratitude as I logged on to record just going like holy crap, like that's pretty cool that I can just work from my bed when I want. And the reason I'm working from bed is. I kind of had a interesting experience with an energy crash. It's been a long time since I've had that experience and I think it was a reminder of my habits, a reminder of how important it is to nourish oneself, and a nudge to talk about this on the podcast, because when this is a repeated issue, we start to see problems in menstrual cycles, we start to see problems with fertility as well. So what the hell am I talking about here? I am talking about energy. I'm talking about how you fuel your body, how you listen to your body and, ultimately, you know how our habits really can influence our cycles. This is going to be a two-parter type episode, so in this first part I'm going to be talking about energy and your experience of you know. Do you have sustained energy throughout the day to complete everything that you want to do and still feel pretty good until it's time to go to bed, or do you find yourself on a bit of an energy roller coaster? My tongue's about to go on a roller coaster, but I had this experience, so I'll just I'll preface it with where we ended.

Standing in the aisle at Costco, I was looking at these gorgeous house plants and I mean gorgeous. I was like, how do I fit these in my cart? How do I fit these in my car? Because I had all these boxes to donate already in the trunk of our minivan. So I was like, oh man, how can I get all of these plants? If you've been following me for a while, you know that we are on the verge of our brand new office building being done. Hope to God, it's this month and so I'm finally starting to get to do some fun stuff like decorate Anyway. So I'm looking at these plants and I'm like how many of these can I fit in my cart?

My kids, meanwhile, have gotten out of the cart. They're in the same aisle, maybe like 10 feet down, there's these huge plush stuffed animal type things. One of my sons is trying to convince me to let him catapult himself into this giant box. The other one is trying to drag the plush thing like out of the box, and it's hilarious now looking back on it.

But I just had like this moment of I'm done, I have to get out of here. I'm so overstimulated we have to leave, like no plants. What's in our cart is everything that we're getting. We have to get out of here and when we got in the car, oh my God, it was so hot, of course, it was like 110 degrees in the air. So inside the car it was so hot and I was just like, oh my God, I have to get out of here so quickly. And my kids were like, oh, what has happened? Like we've we've like had moments with mom, of course, before, but like this was like I felt like I was going to pass out. And ultimately, as I looked back on the day, ultimately, as I looked back on the day, there were some rookie mistakes. And I mean rookie because I've been in my body for a long time, I've really practiced listening to my body and honoring it and I've counseled hundreds, if not thousands, of people on how to listen to their own body and honor their body and fuel their body. And so, when I look back on the day, the way it started, we were going to head out the door early going on this adventure of our city Last week of summer for my kids before they head back to school, and we wanted to have a really fun day, so we wanted to get out the door early.

I made a smoothie for breakfast, so there's a good amount of protein in that smoothie, but historically I do try to eat food that I have to chew for breakfast. And then, after our first adventure, which was a walk through a wetlands, like doing some bird watching and frog finding, and it's already starting to warm up we went to a local cafe and I had an iced coffee, which I never do in the middle of the morning. If I have any coffee, it's usually like half a cup right after I eat breakfast. And then I had like a little bit of a snack, like some egg from my son's breakfast burrito. And then we went about our adventures. I packed snacks I wasn't hungry so I didn't eat any of them. And by the time we got through our next couple adventures, we did a tour around the University of Arizona, where I went to college. We went to the Children's Museum, we made a pit stop at Starbucks so that my kids could pee and we got cups of ice because their ice is good. And then on our way home we were going to Costco and I figured, okay, I'll get some good stuff at Costco and at home I'll make some lunch. But it had gone too far.

So I know, looking back on this morning, my big mistakes were not eating a real breakfast. Sorry folks, I know some of you do the smoothies pretty religiously for breakfast. It's better than nothing. It does not sustain me. So that was rookie mistake number one. Rookie mistake number two was that iced coffee in the middle of the morning. I did have some half and half in it, but like that's, that's not real calories, it's not real sustenance and that caffeine is going to give you that, you know, adenosine rush so that you get some energy. I didn't really need it for the energy, I kind of just wanted it because I love the taste of coffee. Coffee is delicious. We never get to go downtown to this particular area, so it was a treat.

Yeah, and then we just spent longer than I intended to at the Children's Museum because they had so much cool stuff there. So all of it was in good fun and joy. But waiting for me, that extra 90 minutes beyond when my body is used to having lunch, was apparently just too much, too much, and my nervous system, my blood sugar, bottoming out, was like nope, we're done, we got to go, and it took me a while to recover. So still, as we are a couple of days out from that, just whenever I can, I am really intentionally slowing down. We've just had a very full, really intentionally slowing down. We've just had a very full schedules, full lives, full, you know, cleaning out of stuff in our house, getting prepped for this building getting done, and I I know that for me I have to be more intentional about slowing down, and why this is important is because I do really in-depth reviews of my new patients' lifestyles and we go through and audit their nutrition as well, and I can't tell you how often I see a similar pattern when we ask people like tell me what you've eaten in the last 24 hours? And so often it is a smoothie for breakfast, something caffeinated mid-morning. Sometimes they're so busy they're skipping lunch or they're just having a snack and they're not even really getting a full meal all the way until dinnertime.

What are the long-term consequences of this? It's not pretty. On the hormones, let me tell you that there's a concern that comes up when our body feels undernourished, when it acknowledges that we are just rushing all the time. Yes, we do see an activation of our stress hormone cascade. So we'll see more cortisol output in some people and other people who this has been a chronic pattern for even longer. The brain is really intelligent. It understands what we need to survive and it will actually put a damper on your ability to release cortisol when your blood sugar goes down. And those are the people that I actually worry about more, because they can't get their blood sugar up as easily. Their crash tends to be harder.

Hi, I have feeling that's where I've been because, like I said, life has been full. And if that's you, if you've had chronic stress, then we have to be even more intentional about how you fuel your body, how you use caffeine and how hard you push yourself. You can't just expect to continue pushing yourself and practicing the way you've been practicing your lifestyle and expect a different result. So I know that it's. It feels like so tempting, feels like it could be so easy just to say, hey, what can I take for adrenal support? You know, let's slap some adaptogens on there and call it a day and, yes, that is a helpful bandaid. I did start taking my adrenal support again when this happened a couple of days ago. I just not really felt like I needed it recently and that was a good reminder.

But we can't expect a supplement alone to make up for a shitty lifestyle for shitty habits. It's just not possible. It can buy us some space, it can buy us some time. Yes, we've got some good data on what some of these supplements can do in regulating the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis and we call tonifying the stress hormone response. But if we don't actually address the underlying factors, those supplements can only go so far, and I think it's really really important to get honest about how we are nourishing ourselves. I know there's a lot of you who are listening to this and be like okay, but I do, I, I I do eat breakfast, I don't drink caffeine, I'm I still crash out in the middle of the afternoon. I don't know what else I could possibly be doing to promote better energy, and we will talk in future episodes about how there's other factors that we can look at to address why someone might be fatigued beyond getting those lifestyle pieces in board. But we have to have that foundation first.

So this conversation really is for those who need a strong foundation in their lifestyle to promote good energy and to promote healthy menstrual cycles, healthy production of the ovarian hormones, more than anything, because when we have an activation of the stress hormone cascade, what can happen eventually is we see a shift in blood flow. It goes away from the reproductive organs because those are not vital organs. So when the body recognizes like we are in this state of fight or flight, we're going to send our resources to the vital organs, to the brain, so we can focus, to the heart, so that we can pump blood, and that redirects our blood flow away from the reproductive organs, also away from the digestive tract. So if you tend to be someone who has a lot of digestive symptoms related to stress, this conversation could also be helpful. But in the grand scheme of things, what I often see in people who have these patterns where their energy crashes out as a result of pushing too hard, not getting enough protein, not having regular meals, relying on caffeine or even just enjoying caffeine because they like coffee, they like caffeinated substances, like me, and like these patterns. Eventually we see this reflected in the menstrual cycle, and how it reflects for me personally is increase in PMS and shorter luteal phase. So I know this because I've tracked my cycles. I've charted my cycles diligently for nine years, less diligently the past year because I've just gotten to a point where I feel like I needed a little break from like a hardcore temperature tracking. But I know what phase my body is in based on the other metrics of cycle awareness, and I know when my luteal phase is short. I'll look back at the whole month and go hmm, what else was going on this month? Did I get sick? Was there a big stressor? Was I really not very intentional about getting my high protein breakfast? All of those things I know make a difference for me and my body. It might be something different for you and your body. So this is all to say slow down, listen to your body, check in with your habits and make sure that they are actually sustaining you and nourishing you.

And the part two of this conversation is all about habits. Are your habits sabotaging your fertility or are your habits setting you up for fertility success? And what happens if you have a hard time sustaining a habit or building a habit? These are all really important questions that we humans tend to beat ourselves up over. So, before you beat yourself up, I want you to take this opportunity to really honestly assess how are your habits supporting your energy day to day? How does your cycle look throughout the month, remembering that your cycle is a vital sign. What does your bleed look like what is your luteal phase length? Look like, how is your cervical fluid production around ovulation?

It's all connected. I know we live in this world where medicine has been kind of parsed out in such a way that we've got specialists for everything, we've got all the ists, and that can sometimes make us feel like, okay, this whole section of my body goes to this endocrinologist, we have the gastroenterologist, we have the neurologist. But we have to remember, like this is just one body, we can't actually compartmentalize all of these. Everything is communicating within the body, everything is connected. So your day-to-day energy is absolutely connected with your hormone cycles. Your day-to-day energy is absolutely connected with your mitochondrial function, which also is connected to your egg quality. So all of this is important, it matters.

And if you are headed down the road of IVF and no one has asked you questions about your energy, no one has asked you questions about your nutrition habits or your caffeine habits or how hard you push yourself, we have to be having these conversations. So I hope that my energy crash can help you avoid such a thing. Goodness, it had been probably years since I had experienced that type of crash, and it wasn't even hangry again, because I didn't actually have an appetite that day, but it was just like this, like powering down feeling that was so interesting to look back on, not fun in the moment. So I am always curious to know, listeners, if you've experienced something like this or if you do notice that your energy is on a little bit of a roller coaster. You're reliant on caffeine, whatever that looks like for you. I just love knowing what you got out of an episode so you can shoot me a DM on Instagram. You can send us an email at info at brilliant fertilitycom. We love hearing from you and we love getting ideas about what to record next because you know, truly, you guys are my biggest inspiration.

All right, on a final note, um, something that has just been on my heart so much over the last almost two years now, but, you know, heightened with more images and the media, and especially like having conversation about having my energy crash out because I missed lunch. It just feels like, oh, I'm already getting a little activated around it. It feels so wild, like how, how much I was affected by that physically, when there are people all over the world who are like literally starving, and to not acknowledge this feels I don't know very. It felt very inauthentic to me, and many of you know, because you've been in my world for a while, that 10% of all of our program sales have always gone towards charitable donations, organizations that are doing meaningful work in the world the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund. There are also many other organizations that are doing amazing work trying to get food into areas that aid has been blocked or famine has been present. World Central Kitchen comes to mind as well.

So I want you to know that if any resources that you have purchased from us have helped you, I want to thank you for purchasing and thank you for also doing that so that we could make that donation as well, and I will link some of our resources in the show notes for today.

The cycle charting for conception and rewrite your story are both really great options to build your foundation when it comes to fertility, and when you buy from us, you know that part of that is also going to a good cause. So thank you so much for your support. I know that it's hard to acknowledge some of these things that are going on in the world, especially as you prepare for what is hopefully the most exciting and joy-filled experience of your life, but I also very much believe that part of my role on this planet is to help acknowledge that duality. We can be joyful, we can be grateful and we can see what's happening and stand up for good. Anyway could go on lots of various tracks with that today, but more than anything, always in. So much gratitude for you for listening, for being here, for sharing this work and for sharing your feedback Until next time. Thank you so much.