Lara Briden - The Period Revolutionary
Leading the change to better periods and hormones
Insulin resistance is the condition of having chronically elevated insulin and plays a role in women’s health conditions including PCOS, acne, fibroids, and heavy periods.
If you suffer from acne or treat acne, then 2012 was an important year. That’s when this ground-breaking paper came out of Germany: Diet in Acne: Further Evidence for the Role of Nutrient Signalling in Acne Pathogenesis.
One sentence from the abstract says it all:
“Acne should be regarded as an mTOR-driven disease of civilization, like obesity, type 2 diabetes and cancer induced by Western diet.”
As my patients can tell you, I prescribe magnesium for almost every hormonal condition, including PCOS, insulin resistance, PMDD, migraines, and perimenopause.
Magnesium deficiency is common because modern soils are depleted, and your body dumps magnesium during stress. So, if you’re under stress, you probably need magnesium.
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Sugar is a carb. It is the worst carb. This should be stating the obvious, I know, so apologies if you already understand this. But I really feel it needs to be said because I’ve had some distressing conversations with patients. They’re very careful to avoid a potato with dinner, but think it’s fine to have a little something for dessert. “Potatoes are a bad carb,” they tell me.
How did we get to the point where starch with the evening meal is believed to cause more weight gain than dessert? Why do people fear rice, but are happy to eat natural sweeteners like dates or agave which are almost pure fructose?
Our stress response system—the HPA axis—is calibrated for intermittent, severe threats such as lions. Not for the incessant, trivial threats of modern life, such as difficult phone calls. We don’t want our hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis to charge up and release cortisol every time we drive in heavy traffic, but it will do so.
If you’re like me, you’re trying to ease up on the HPA throttle. I practice yoga. I take magnesium. I switch off my computer in the evening like a good naturopath. I sternly instruct my HPA axis to power down, but I must say that it does not always listen. If I could only be more Buddha-like, then I would not need to coax my HPA axis with a herbal medicine like Rhodiola.