PCOS Diva Podcast

My mission on the PCOS Diva podcast is to help you get to the root cause of your PCOS symptoms. I know this can often feel like a complicated hormonal puzzle to solve.

Mold toxicity is one possible root cause you may not have thought about.

I sat down with mold expert, Bridgit Danner and asked her to teach us how toxic mold affects our bodies. If you are struggling with chronic health issues that just won’t go away, tune in to explore this important topic.

What you will learn:

- Common health symptoms of mold illness

- How to identify signs of mold in your home

- What’s involved in home remediation

- Home testing for mold toxicity (environmental and physical)

- Toxic mold detox techniques that really work

Join me for this high-spirited conversation with Dani Williamson. She is a family nurse practitioner with a thriving functional medicine practice called Integrative Family Medicine located in Franklin, Tennessee. Dani is proof that there is vibrant health after a lifelong diagnosis is handed to you. She is the author of a brand-new book, Wild & Well: Dani's Six Commonsense Steps to Radical Healing.

We cover a lot of ground together.

First, we explore the connection between unprocessed childhood trauma and autoimmune disease. She stresses how important it is that we address adverse childhood experiences so we can lessen their impact on the physical body and reverse disease.

Then we discuss her common-sense method of holistic healing which includes the following pieces: Eat well, sleep well, move well, poop well, de-stress well, and commune well.

Finally, she explains how you can AED your life: automate, eliminate and delegate everything you can to make space for YOU and your healing.

You will love her sense of humor and down-to-earth approach!

With PCOS, there's an increased risk of hypertension, high cholesterol, depression, anxiety, insulin resistance, diabetes, all things that can put us at risk for heart disease. So, I wanted to start a campaign to make people aware of these metabolic connections.

Ashley Levinson is a well-known PCOS advocate. She joins the podcast to talk about her viral online campaign called #Heart4PCOS which educates women on the connection between PCOS and heart disease.

She wants us to know that PCOS affects many different systems and organs of the body, including the heart. Unfortunately, this is not well known in mainstream health care so she is passionate about spreading awareness.

Learn how you can join in the #Heart4PCOS campaign and advocate for better research and education around this very important issue.

Anxiety is often a common state for women with PCOS. If your diet is good, you exercise, and you’re doing all the right things and still struggling with stress, you may need to go deeper.

In today’s podcast, I speak with Dr. Mark Halpern. He is a chiropractor, author, lecturer, and certified HeartMath practitioner, and the author of a new book called Coherence Revolution.

We talk about how HeartMath can help you overcome chronic stress and anxiety.

If you are new to HeartMath, let’s start by defining what it is:

“The HeartMath system empowers people to self-regulate their emotions and behaviors to reduce stress, increase resilience, and unlock their natural intuitive guidance for making more effective choices. This enables people to break through to greater levels of personal balance, creativity, insight, and health.”

Dr. Halpern takes HeartMath one step further in his movement Coherence Revolution.

Listen is as we explore:

- The origin of chronic stress: fight/flight/freeze

- Heart rate variability or HRV

- What is coherence and how do you get more of it

- How to create a daily coherence schedule for yourself

- How to join his Coherence Revolution today

I speak with my friend and neighbor, Liz Barbour, in today's podcast. She is a chef, a cooking instructor, the founder of The Creative Feast, and author of Beautifully Delicious: Cooking with Herbs and Edible Flowers.

She is passionate about helping people overcome their kitchen fears by teaching them basic, essential cooking skills. If food preparation is overly complicated or involves exotic ingredients, people get overwhelmed and resort to unhealthy food choices. She has a ton of fantastic tips to share on how to get back into the kitchen and sizzle with ease.

Liz is also an avid fan of intermittent fasting, and she hosts a Facebook group called Live Free and Fast, an Intermittent Fasting Support Group. I love her approach to intermittent fasting because it's not a one-size-fits-all. With PCOS and insulin resistance, it's important to listen to your body and take things slow. Liz shares valuable insights on how to make intermittent fasting work for you and also points out the obstacles to success.

Listen in as we discuss:

-How to make vegetables taste delicious (so you actually eat them)

-How to take simple dishes and elevate them

-The disadvantages of a traditional Keto diet

-Explore the different intermittent fasting protocols

-How to ease into intermittent fasting

-Obstacles to successful fasting

In this episode, I talk with Dr. Madiha Saeed about how to raise healthy children. She's also known as the Holistic Mom, MD. She's a family physician and bestselling author. She has a brand-new book out called The Holistic RX for Kids, parenting healthy brains and bodies in a changing world. And she is a mom of four young boys, so she knows a thing or two about getting kids to eat healthy inside and outside of the home.

We share practical and accessible tips to use immediately so children can implement healthy habits long-term.

Listen to discover:

- What is a holistic approach to getting children to eat healthily

- How to educate and empower children to be mindful of their bodies

- How to be a healthy role model

- Teaching children to notice how food makes them feel

- Redirecting the child’s focus to her “big why” to strengthen diet changes

- How to stock your kitchen for success: Providing healthy alternatives

- Easy food combos for eating the whole food rainbow

So often with PCOS, doctors don’t prescribe the inner work that is absolutely necessary for healing. Instead, you are given what you hope is a magic pill that will “fix” your symptoms.

When that doesn’t work, you are left with a host of negative emotions that spiral out of control and it’s easy to get stuck in a victim mentality.

In this episode, I talk with Michelle Chalfant about The Adult Chair, her transformational model of self-realization that blends simple psychology with grounded spirituality.

She explains that we are all made up of three distinct parts: the inner child, the adolescent, and the adult. Each part is developed separately through our lives and serves an important role in our overall emotional well-being. The Adult Chair Model uses three chairs to represent these perspectives: the child chair, the adolescent chair, and the adult chair.

Unfortunately, most of us are sitting in that adolescent chair.

Listen to discover:

Why your inner child holds the keys to unlocking your pain

Practical tools to use to connect with your inner child

How to stay present in the moment and not make faulty future assumptions

The importance of feeling your emotions

How to love and witness all your fragmented parts to restore the whole true self

Are you ready to be inspired by the courageous story of my former client Nafsheen Luhar? I know this podcast will open your heart and help you rediscover hope that you, too, can have a happy ending. 

Like so many women with PCOS, Nafsheen experienced a traumatic childhood that led to weight issues, low self-esteem, self-harm, PCOS, and uterine cancer – her final wake-up call.

But Nafsheen didn’t remain a victim for long. 

In her darkest despair, she found an inner power that led her out of pain. 

And she learned to love herself, partner with her body, and move beyond limiting beliefs to access her creative center.  

She came to understand that the suffering was precisely what she needed to fulfill her purpose.

Now she expresses her soul’s work as a respected photographer, transformational coach, self-love advocate, and speaker.

I invited Courtney Marchesani to join me on this podcast to talk more about the highly sensitive person and to explore how it relates to PCOS.

Courtney specializes in the often-hidden mental health and emotional struggles of Highly Sensitive People (HSP). HSP's were first written about by Dr. Elaine Aron in her book The Highly Sensitive Person. Often overwhelmed by the intensity and stimulation from the world, HSP's make up roughly 15 to 20% of the population.

She won the Hay House 2017 Writer's Workshop Book Contest with her proposal Four Gifts of the Highly Sensitive which identifies four specific archetypes of the highly sensitive person.

Listen in (or read the transcript below) as we discuss:

- Definition & characteristics of the Highly Sensitive Person

- How PCOS, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, gastrointestinal disorders, and fascia tension present in the HSP

- How inflammation, which is one of the root factors of PCOS, is actually adding to the sensitivity

- Tips and tricks to thrive as an HSP

- The gifts of being sensitive

Dr. Renee Wellenstein is a double board-certified Ob/Gyn with over 20 years of experience.

When she found herself struggling with deep burnout and found no solutions in traditional treatment, she began searching for safe, reliable, and proven natural treatments. Now Dr. Renee empowers women to take control of their health, jumpstart energy, improve confidence, and re-ignite their libido using natural techniques that work. Listen in or read the transcript as we discuss her process as well as:

- Why burnout and low libido it isn’t always about hormones

- The role of stress, toxins, insulin, glucose, & estrogen dominance

- Strategic & limited supplement suggestions

- Her “Non-Negotiable” self-care habits