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Why Stress, Self-Talk, and Hormones Matter More Than You Think — with Rupina Meer

Dr. Julia Ward interviews functional health practitioner Rupina Meer about mind-body healing, hormone balance, chronic stress, functional lab testing, and the deeper emotional roots of chronic symptoms.

Rupina Meer is a functional health practitioner who weaves together functional lab testing, mind-body practices, and spiritual insight to help women understand and resolve the deeper roots of their symptoms. Her own breast cancer journey serves as the foundation for her compassionate, integrative approach to hormone health, stress management, and whole-body healing.

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About the Expert

Julia Ward, MD

Dr. Julia Ward

Dr. Julia Ward is a compassionate and forward-thinking physician with over a decade of experience in functional medicine, known for her systems-based approach to healing chronic illness. She is the founder of Balanced Body Functional Medicine, where she helps patients uncover the deeper drivers of disease and restore health by addressing the body as an interconnected whole.
After earning her medical degree from the University of Southern California, Dr. Ward served in the U.S. Navy, practicing general, urgent, and emergency medicine both domestically and abroad. Her own personal struggle with unexplained fatigue led her to question the limitations of conventional medicine and ultimately guided her toward functional medicine.
While she initially focused on identifying root causes, Dr. Ward’s approach has continued to evolve. She now emphasizes the importance of how and when the body is treated—not just what is treated. Through her Balanced Body System Reset™ framework, she focuses on restoring nervous system balance, improving mitochondrial function, reducing inflammation, and addressing root causes in the right sequence to create lasting and meaningful healing.
Dr. Ward integrates advanced diagnostics, personalized care plans, and innovative therapies such as hyperbaric oxygen and ozone therapy, while also emphasizing foundational elements like nervous system regulation, lifestyle, and patient engagement. She believes that healing is not a one-size-fits-all process, but a guided journey that requires both strategy and active participation.
A lifelong learner, Dr. Ward continues to expand her expertise in areas such as precision genomics, brain health, and complex chronic illness. She is deeply committed to helping her patients not only feel better, but truly understand their bodies and take ownership of their health.
A devoted wife and mother of five, Dr. Ward brings both clinical expertise and personal insight to her work, with a mission to transform the way chronic illness is understood and treated.

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Guest

Rupina Meer, FDNP

Rupina Meer, FDNP

Rupina Meer is a functional health practitioner who weaves together functional lab testing, mind-body practices, and spiritual insight to help women understand and resolve the deeper roots of their symptoms. Her own breast cancer journey serves as the foundation for her compassionate, integrative approach to hormone health, stress management, and whole-body healing.

More from Rupina Meer, FDNP on DrTalks

Self love is the greatest antidote to the wound of whatever it is that’s wounding us, whether it’s a cancer, or whether its autoimmunity, whatever its some incurable disease or diagnosis.

It’s like when you treat yourself, like we would never talk to ourselves like, we treat our child or our four boy baby. Like you would never say, if your four baby had an accident, you wouldn’t chastise it and say oh my gosh, they’re so stupid.

That’s what we do to ourselves. We’re constantly berating ourselves, chasteizing ourselves when I started treating myself like someone I loved. And not just when I got it wrong, right.

But when i got in wrong or when wasn’t quite clear about something, I would still lean in with that grace and love. And my body started responding. That was the moment that things started shifting for me.

Welcome to the Functional Edge. I’m Dr. Julia Ward, and this is where science meets real-world strategies for living healthier, sharper and stronger. From uncovering hidden environmental toxins to unlocking peak performance and mental clarity, we cover it all.

Ready to take control of your health and thrive? Let’s dive in. Hi and welcome to The Functional Edge, where we explore the science and stories behind root cause medicine.

I’m Dr. Julia Ward, and today I am thrilled to be joined by Rupina Mir, a functional health practitioner who blends advanced functional lab testing with a deeply spiritual science meets soul approach.

Her work is shaped not just by 12 years in integrative nutrition, but by her own seven-year breast cancer history. Healing Journey, an experience she alchemized into wisdom and a mission.

Rupina helps conscious-driven women turn health setbacks into fierce comebacks by uncovering the hidden opportunities behind their symptoms, preventing recurrence and restoring trust and unshakable freedom in their bodies.

Today, she’s a lighthouse for women who feel unheard, misdiagnosed, or told that their labs are, quote, normal when they feel anything but. So please welcome the incredible RUPINA Mir.

Thank you so much. Thank You for having me. It’s an honor to be here. Absolutely. Well, tell us a little bit about your tumor to truth healing journey and how the cancer kind of cracked open you to the wholeness.

So gosh, I’ve had multiple dark nights of the soul with my own health, but this latest one, the breast cancer thing, which was a very long, very nonlinear healing journey, really opened me up to wholeness.

Ironically, i call it my divine lesion because it wasn’t a misfortune, it was an initiation. It was my sacred teacher that really taught me how to let go, how the surrender and how do you let a greater divine intelligence turn me back to that innate blueprint that’s embedded in our DNA and that available to all of us sometimes we just have to get out of the way and stop trying to control how it’s going to happen so little bit about me is you know Previously, I was an MBA in the corporate world that used to just live on stress, live.

I had no idea that stress was like literally throwing gasoline to an already boring hormonal fire. And I then. took a radical left turn and went into integrated nutrition, ate like my life depended upon it.

It was puritanical and extremely didactic about my macronutrient ratio and movement and meditation and all of that. And that did helped me a lot for several years till this breast cancer diagnosis.

And I realized that it wasn’t something that I just wanted to cut out because I had a previous stint with cervical cancer. It was just stage zero, stage one.

At that time, I was in the corporate world. I didn’t know anything about endocrine nutrition, so I did whatever the conventional doctors asked me to do.

Snip, snip, easy peasy, lemon squeezy, and I don’t even feel victimized. like a cancer patient at the time, but it did invite me to start listening to those whispers of wisdom from within and start developing like, why is this?

I always had this deep hunger for the science and the soul of healing and why things happen. Even when I was eating so perfect, so-called, I could have been the poster child, right, for perfect eating and macros and all of that.

And then I realized I I’m deeper down the rabbit hole and I did Joe dispenser’s work and i’m an advanced meditator and started studying about epigenetics and epi is what’s above the genes and it’s nutrition and your thoughts and your stress and all of that shapes the jeans are like Christmas tree lights that turn on and off.

And we now know that jeans load the gun, but it’s the environment that pulls the trigger. So it went so much beyond what I was consuming on my plate to what was I consuming at the consciousness level, right?

Like I was perfect with my macros, but I still not treating myself like someone I love and just so harsh and so critical. And that self-talk is the thing that the immune cells are constantly eavesdropping on the conversation we’re having with ourselves.

It’s like, oh my gosh, you couldn’t get this right. Or how could you? That was so stupid of you. This banter goes on all the time. Yeah, and so my immune cells were responding to that and then I was getting frustrated that gosh My immune system is never cooperating with me and every time I had a big talk or I could travel or anything big It’s like I would fear disease and I wouldn’t manifest it because I hadn’t connected the dots between my fear around disease And how was actually co-creating that so?

It was a lot of that with this time, you know, and just really finally letting go. And then I also had pigeonhole healing. I thought that, oh, healing has to come through nutrition.

It has come from meditation. That has been a mystical moment, but that wasn’t the way it came. Eventually I had to surrender to surgery, something I resisted.

for six and a half long years. And then two weeks after the surgery, my oncologist came bounding into the womb and she said, did you see, and I’m like, no, I haven’t.

She’s like all margins clear. I don’t even need to see you for 6 months. Suddenly I was freed from that sentence. when I fully surrender. Yeah that’s awesome.

I do run into a lot of patients probably just because of you know I’m running a functional medicine practice. Patients approach me with have cancer and I want to do all the alternative treatments.

i don’t necessarily want do any of the traditional treatments and i feel like you really have to combine both. You know if you depend too much on one or the other you’re just not going to get as good a result as if And I love what you said about your immune system is listening to your thoughts.

It’s like eavesdropping on your thought. And, I think the most powerful tool we have to heal is not a supplement, but it’s the sound and the sounds of our own voice because the nervous system actually treats our sound as if it is somebody else’s, right?

So, what are you saying to you body and what is that that you’re co-creating with your body? So I really started leaning more into into gratitude and being so grateful for this vessel that I inhabit.

That’s awesome. And I love what you said about, that was a big, big lesson for me, the combination, right? Like you don’t have to choose between meditation and medicine.

You don’ have choose to between data and the divine. It’s like you can go whichever way that, and at this point, I’m really agnostic as to whatever I work with people diagnosed with so-called incurable illness.

And, whatever, if you want to go down the path of chemotherapy or radiation, that’s fine. If that what you’re drawn to, there’s so much more you can also do holistically to protect yourself from the Emo so that it doesn’t cripple your immune system and all of that.

But the biggest thing, my biggest takeaway I would share with any of your listeners who are facing some dark diagnoses and are on that threshold wanting to make the right decision Yeah, is that if I had gone into surgery when I hadn’t fully surrendered or if i had Gone in with fear or with a victim mindset I know 100% that I wouldn’t have had the outcome that i did Right.

It was only when i surrendered fully In fact when, I was in the waiting my sister is a medical doctor and she had been telling me for years that something like this isn’t gonna go away on its own.

And I said, well, thank you. That’s your opinion. But I have a different opinion and I’m not gonna feel that way. and that was my POV and clung to it, you know?

And she kept saying, I just wish you had made that choice earlier. In hindsight, yeah, it would have been nice. I could have saved myself a lot of suffering.

When I made the choice, It was when I had fully just freed myself with any of the fear, the resistance. and that had I gone into it with fear and resistance, I think it’s what I’m trying to say is for your audience listening, if you’re on that threshold, choose love over fear, right?

It’s like whatever brings you closer to fear feeling like, oh, you are oncologist or your husband or whatever saying you’ve got to do the surgery and you doing it out of fear.

And you might want to rethink it because you want get to the place where you’re really coming from a place of love with whatever modality, whatever treatment we’re embracing.

Yeah. And then that’s going to really move the needle. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. What are some of the emotional truths or lessons that you discovered from this radical adversity or this terrifying diagnosis?

And what would you say to someone in the audience who is in your shoes and dealing with a fearful scenario or stuck in this overwhelmed kind of mode? So I mean, I think we already touched on that a little bit, right?

Like treat yourself like someone you loved. I didn’t treat myself. Self love is the greatest antidote to the wound of whatever it is that’s wounding us, whether it’s a cancer, or whether its autoimmunity, whatever its some incurable disease or diagnosis.

It’s like when you treat yourselves, we would never talk to ourselves like we treat to it. talk to our child or our four boy baby, right? Like you would never say if your four baby had an accident, you wouldn’t chastise it and say, Oh my gosh, they’re so stupid.

How could you do this? How would you have an act? That’s what we do to ourselves. We’re constantly berating ourselves, chasteizing ourselves and so when I started treating myself like someone I loved, And not just when I got it wrong, right.

But when i got in wrong or when, I wasn’t quite clear about something, i would still lean in with that grace and love and my body started responding. That was the moment that things started shifting for me.

Yeah. So I think that is so huge. Yeah, it’s not just what you’re consuming on your plate. It’s what your consuming at the consciousness level. And that includes your, the sound of your own voice and also the sounds, you know, first we’ve all heard that you are the sum total of the five people that hang out with the most.

So, are you constantly exposed to social media or the news or whatever, and that is impacting your consciousness. Yeah. Yeah, and I think it’s a lot of people don’t realize the inner critic voice in their head that, you know, it has been such an ingrained habit, for so many years.

You can sometimes sort of forget that you’re speaking harshly to yourself. So I The first step is really just sort of recognizing like how am I thinking of myself?

How am i treating myself exactly? Awareness awareness and just being the witness right like just Being i’m feeling this way. I’m getting a negative emotion I wonder why I just lean into that emotion versus immediately going to oh my gosh i’M feeling or I can’t get it right or um So this or that or putting a label on it.

Just lean in to it get curious and Just witness and observe Yeah, yeah. So as a functional practitioner and a hormone expert, what are your top three functional tips to overcome stress for busy women, you know, preparing for this holiday madness that we’re that were in now?

So I would say I call it embrace the elimination diet and it’s kind of similar to what we’ve been talking about and you don’t have to, your audience shouldn’t be rolling their eyes thinking here she goes with eliminating sugar or dairy or caffeine and all of that, but it is really eliminating those thoughts that are of perfectionism, of getting it right, finding the perfect gift for everybody on your list.

for fights that, you know, we want her to fight, flight or freeze, but there’s also the fawning part, right? When you’re people pleasing, that’s a huge disruptor to the nervous system.

So when you are constantly people-pleasing, That’s not very healing to you. Right. Step out of that fawning mode and just give yourself some grace and love and treat yourself like someone you love this holiday season instead of the perfectionism parada.

Yes, yeah. I think it’s all about setting expectations. You know, you have in your mind what, say, a perfect holiday dinner would look like. Exactly. And then when it doesn’t turn out just that, just so, sometimes in that overly critical mode again, instead of…

Exactly, exactly. Berating yourself or this dish or comparing yourself. Yes. Comparison is one of the biggest things that can really reduce lower your vibration, right?

And then make you feel less than optimal. So yeah, just, be aware of that. The other thing I would say is to, you know, all of our hormones are made out of cholesterol.

Cholesterol is so Yeah, it is. And as you know, as a functional medicine doctor that I’m sure people come to you all the time and say, oh, my LDL is crazy, or my ACL, but they’re looking at total cholesterol.

They’re not looking particle size and all of your adrenal and sex hormones are made out of something called pregnenolone, which is the substrate of cholesterol and B vitamins.

So if you don’t have enough fat, going through even some, they’re dramatically reducing their macros with fats because there’s so much fat shaming in our culture.

But that’s actually creating dysmenorrhea or amenorrhoea, right? Because you’re not producing enough pregnenolone to make enough sex hormones for you to even have a cycle.

So face the big fat lie is what I call it, a lot of cholesterol. Yeah. Yeah, we definitely need enough cholesterol. And we’ve seen this too, when people have their cholesterol driven down by medications like statins.

If it gets too low, it’s going to cause cognitive problems too. Because our brain is made of cholesterol, and we need it enough. But we absolutely have to incorporate some healthy fats into our diet.

And eating healthy fat will not make you fat. Exactly. That’s such a good point because it’s unfortunate that the word fat, the macronutrient fat is the same as the words fat on your on your lips, right?

But yeah, eating fat doesn’t, and obviously I’m sure many people are going on the keto or whatever. It’s not about so much about the bandwagon of whatever the diet is, but I believe in something called metabolic typing, where we actually find out the person’s genetic and ancestral imprints, like which way are their cells leaning?

So somebody could be a fast oxidizer, meaning that they turn food into ATP fuel very fast. And so those people, if they’re vegetarian, then that would be a recipe for disaster, right?

Because vegetables already oxidize fast, so they need more higher protein and fats to stabilize that fast oxidizer. or tendency that their cells have, right?

And then we also look at the autonomic nervous system whether somebody is sympathetic or parasympathetic or they’re balanced in between. And so there’s different diet types based on what your cells lean towards and so that can give you a wonderful starting point for the macronutrient ratio and then obviously we tweak that based how did it impact you and how do you feel with energy and satiety and cravings and a fixed macronutrient ratio, but if a starting point so that we can then dial in and find the optimal macro nutrients for that person.

But for whatever, the fats are absolutely essential as is fiber. Fiber is the answer hero When it comes to hormone health, because if you’re not eliminating the metabolized hormones, which the liver is sluggish or the bile is, slugish, then they make a U-turn and come back like bad karma and you don’t want that.

So the golden rule of estrogen is use it or lose it. You don’ want it coming back and recirculating. And that’s when it can go into the more toxic pathways.

Yeah. which is what happened with me because I had an estrogen and a progesterone receptor positive cancer. And so you really want, I mean, as a hormone balance, like I call it the three-legged stool.

So you’ve got to fix your blood sugar first. It’s about glycemic stability, microbiome, because your microbiomes were 90% microbial, they’re only 10% human.

The kind of bugs that you have in your gut drive your neurotransmitter function and they do so much of the heavy lifting and produce the B vitamins and so forth.

If you more of a pathogenic bacteria and not enough of friendly or enough the commensals, then it’s going to really impact the way you feel and what kind hormones you’re synthesizing.

And then of course the organs of elimination, the liver. So those are the three legs of the stool. Let’s say it’s blood sugar, microbiome balance, and then liver, so you don’t necessarily fix them because there’s this big thing right now as everybody is on BHRG or whatever.

But if you’re low in hormones, yeah, I mean, it is not just about supplementing with hormones. It’s about those lifestyle choices, like how are you sleeping?

Is your nutrition aligned to your genetic? You see a lot of that in your projects. And I will say too, on the blood sugar note, I see A lot Of women who look very healthy, they’re exercising, They’re eating clean, but they are in maybe A high stress job, or maybe they Are just a high stressed mom.

And they’re in this what I call survival mode and that they are pumping out a lot of cortisol. And the cholesterol is the parent compound and from cholesterol your body is either going to make cortisol or pregnenolone.

sex hormones. But if you’re having to constantly make cortisol, that sort of takes away from the pregnenolone pool, but it also raises your blood sugar.

So people can sort look at this almost pre-diabetic picture, not because their diet is particularly bad, because they just have so much stress. I think in these cases, having people wear a continuous glucose monitor for a couple weeks can be really eye-opening.

can be a game changer. I agree, because even though, I mean, back in the day, we used to say that stevia is a hypoglycemide and it doesn’t impact blood sugar, but I’ve actually seen with multiple kinds, it’s one person can eat stevias and its not going to impact their blood.

But another person spikes crazy. Yeah. Even with the so-called healthy sugars or even with something innocuous like tomatoes, right? One person could eat tomatoes and their sugar is crazy and you can only get that kind of data through a CGM.

Yes. Yes. You don’t have to do it all the time, but just wear, you know. They usually last a couple weeks. Yeah. I wore one for a few weeks and I was really amazed at, one evening we, I didn’t eat much dinner and we went out dancing, right?

And so we’re up all night dancing. And I’m like, for sure I am not eating any food, not drinking any alcohol. Right. Out dancing doing physical exercise and yet my blood sugar remained really high, like over a hundred.

Yeah, so super interesting kind of stuff. I would say another comment too about digestion and a lot of women have had their gallbladder removed. So they’re not producing very much bile.

That means that they are not breaking down fats really well. They’re fat-based nutrients like A, D, K, E. Exactly. They just can’t absorb that. So in those cases, they need to make sure that they’re taking some sort of replacement like ox bile.

Absolutely. Or some digestive enzymes. Right. Right, right. Because it’s not just what you’re digesting. It’s what your absorbing. And really, yeah, bile, I always say bile is like that detergent that breaks down the fats.

If you don’t have enough of it, then it is going to create that sluggish digestion and malabsorption, which was quite prevalent. Can you walk us through like how you approach treating patients who are dealing with menopausal symptoms?

Sure. So I run functional labs like some foundation. I’ll do a very detailed intake and where I take pride is in really sort of recognizing the patterns.

connecting the dots. So if somebody has come in, even with hormonal balance, I’ll still run based on my intake, not necessarily the same set of labs, but there’s some foundational labs that I always run, including say maybe the Dutch, the GI map, maybe metabolic typing, because that gives us a good sense of that person starting macronutrient ratio.

and then some sort of IgG food sensitivity, because a lot of people don’t realize, I mean, it’s like having a paper cut is not a big deal, right? But if you keep having paper cuts every day, then it contributes to that cascade of inflammation.

So if your immune system has identified even the healthiest food in the world, such as kale, as something that it is mounting an inflammatory response to, than each time you’re eating kale is your immune antigen library is recognizing that food that, oh, that’s an invader, you know?

And then it becomes hypervigilant. And once the immune system starts shooting down a good guy as a bad one, That’s the genesis of autoimmunity, right?

So we look at those food sensitivities and then I sort of connect the dots behind all of those different labs with clinical correlation and, and for health success protocol and the DRESS stands for diet, rest, exercise, stress meds, women’s supplements.

So a lot of times I think in our instant gratification culture people come and say well what can I take for this or what and that’s just the allopathy model and I always remind them Supplements are only 20% of drugs.

I mean, there are so many other hidden healing opportunities that we discover in their labs, right? Like which may or may not be connected to the symptom that symptom come way later.

There’s other things that are going on upstream. So we kind of consider ourselves at FDN as these metabolic detectives where we look at the different foundational systems of the body to see where function has been lost and by how much.

And then we curate a personalized DRESS program to restore function. That’s great. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Yes, I love running those food allergy tests for people because it does uncover a lot of hidden sources of inflammation.

Absolutely. Their tests will come up for not a true allergy, which is an IgE. but a sensitivity, which is an IgG, and that’s more of a delayed reaction.

Absolutely. And I’ll say, look, you’re reacting to walnuts. Yes. My gosh, I eat walnuts all day every day. Every day, right. We’ve got to stop that. It reminds me, as you said, because it’s delayed and it is not that immediate anaphylactic, it could happen 24, 48, 72 hours after you’ve consumed the food.

So unless you’re taking really meticulous notes, it’s very hard to pinpoint that, oh, Asha ate walnuts. And then two days later, I had arthritis, right?

I mean, why is suddenly your rheumatoid arthritis act up because your immune system has tagged walnuts as an enemy and an inflammatory food. So looking at all these different things and then sort of custom curating is really helpful.

And then just to back up a little bit when you were talking about testing, you mentioned the Dutch test and just for people that don’t know that’s a dried urinary test.

Dried urine test for complete hormones, right. It’s beautiful, it’s considered the gold standard, as you know, Dr. Julia, for hormones, except for, I guess, saliva, if somebody’s really not sleeping at night, or sometimes I think the salivary cortisol, they say, saliva cortisol is the goal standard as opposed to urine, because you can get different.

Yeah, think it depends who you ask. Right, exactly. This saliva test were definitely around before the urinary test, the dried urine test. Yes. So there’s some, some people that are still very much in this salivary camp.

Yes. but it just depends who you talk to. There’s conflicting information for people that feel it. I personally like doing the dried urine test better because I feel like it’s so much easier than doing a saliva test.

It is. Yeah. Which, I mean, it easier to pee on a strip than it is to gather this much of saliva in a test tube. Absolutely. And it gives you the breakdown products.

So I think it give you more information. The metabolites. Yes, exactly. That’s why, yeah, there’s, at looking at not just the free hormones, but also the metabolites, which can tell us where the person maybe there’s something is breaking down in their top.

Yeah. Or so forth. And yeah, it gives us patterns so we can kind of look at the problem upstream. And now we have an at-home urinary testing device called the MIRA, which is really awesome because now you can test your estrogen, progesterone, FSH, LH every day.

And that’s really valuable because women’s hormones are constantly a moving target. Absolutely, they’re dynamic. They’re not static. So it’s ideal not only for women trying to conceive, but in this perimenopausal range, which has its own unique challenges are a moving target, you know, irregular and right, right.

And sometimes people don’t even know when I tell them, take it on day 21. They’re like, I don’ know what day. 21 is because all bets are off. Right. And so this MIRA can be really helpful for those who are like, I haven’t had a period in three months and then suddenly I have no period.

So now what do I do? So it helps you assess where you are in your cycle and it’s at home testing. It connects to an app on your phone. You can actually enter your symptoms on each day so that you could correlate symptoms with hormone levels.

So that’s really fantastic because, you know, in all testing past, it was always just a snapshot in time, just one day out of a whole month. And now we can actually really look at the whole months and see what’s going on.

Yeah. I think that is invaluable. Yeah. Well, tell us about your free gift, the Hormone Myth Breakthrough Blueprint, and why most women aren’t discovering these mistakes from their doctor.

So yeah, your listeners can go to zen-tion.com and just download the hormone breakthrough blueprint where I’ve broken down the five biggest mistakes that lifestyle choices are creating with hormonal imbalance and that most of them are not having that conversation with their doctors about that.

Because again, when you go to a conventional doctor, it’s more about exogenous hormone supplementation, which there may be a time and a place for that, and I think that those are a missing piece of the puzzle, but they’re not the entire piece.

Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of like natural stuff out of yeah. There’s A lot Of lifestyle, you know, how is your sleep and again your nutrition and your macronutrients and how are you?

Yeah responding to stress because stress is ubiquitous and you Know we’re all Dealing with it, but it’s how you perceive it And the meaning you give behind the stress.

Yeah going to continue that trajectory of either healing or disease for that person So you’ve got to have some kind of practices to modulate the stress response.

So yeah, it’s all broken down over there. That’s great. Yeah. I think a lot of women have been under a a of stress for so long, especially if you’re raising kids and trying to hold down a job, you know, just sort of you feel like you are at this maximum stress level and then things calm down and you like, well, okay, now I’m not stressed.

Well, you’re still stressed, but you’ve normalized the stress to the point where you don’t think that you are stressed. That’s it. And I still get patients occasionally that come in and say, you know, I’m fearful of hormones.

I don’t necessarily want to do hormones, and again, there are a lot of natural things that you can do to help self-regulate and minimize symptoms, basically.

Just going sugar-free will get rid of hot flashes, just as an example. Exactly, exactly. That’s huge, but that’s not the sexy solution that somebody comes in for, right?

They’d rather get a cream or a pellet or something, not have to deal with their diet or not to have deal those big stressors such as how they’re talking to themselves or are they in a soul-sucking job or they are in toxic relationship or what have you.

But those are the big things that unravel our health more than anything else. Those addressed in turn with supplements and exogenous hormones can be wonderful, but if you’re just doing exogenous hormones as a standalone, I’m afraid that’s not going to move the needle.

Yeah, absolutely. And I do see that too where, you know, women have come in and say, ”I only want my hormones tuned up. I don’t necessarily want to deal with, You know I want make any diet changes.

Yes, a lot of supplements. And so, okay, we’ll do your hormones. And then they come back and like, ah, I didn’t really feel any different. Whereas their friend who referred them in, it was life changing for them because it’s a completely different situation.

Absolutely. Yeah. I agree. I agree. I mean that that work needs to be done because I think we unfortunately we live in an instant gratification culture and it’s like the allopathic model is a pill for what ails you.

That’s what we’re all been indoctrinated on, right? So it is very difficult to make these lifestyle choices and look at how you’re perceiving stress and have that awareness, put some practices in place or change your diet or your sleep and all of that.

But those are just as pivotal in balancing hormones as any supplement or pill that you can pump. Yeah, absolutely. You know, when I first started practicing functional medicine, I was more of that mindset of here’s a supplement, you know.

Instead of a drug, here is a complement. And it was still that sort of same mentality of just symptom, well, then, but over the years, as I’ve learned more and done more studying, see the importance of, calming the nervous system, making sure that emotionally you’re okay.

Exactly. do a healing, do it, you know, getting outside, exercise is huge. I mean, I can’t say enough things about exercise. So if the human body was meant to move, right, when you start moving.

Absolutely, it’s meant move. But if somebody is in that exhaustive phase of HP access dysregulation, where their adrenals are just buttering and they’re not reducing anything, I see a lot of those women that they’re still pushing themselves and going to CrossFit and then they collapse.

They’re like, I literally can’t do anything now. And I’m like first of all, your vital reserve bank account, which is your life force, you’re cheese, so depleted.

We’re trying to restore and put money back in that vital reserves, but you don’t want to spend that on exercise. Not yet. At some point, yeah, when we get it back up, we will.

But if you do it prematurely, then you’re just going back into that exhaustive. Yes. Which is so critical. So it’s exercise in line with what’s happening metabolically and with the metabolic chaos, their flavor of metabolic that they’ve curated.

Right. And so I think exercise versus everyone. It’s like the way you exercise is different than what you, I mean, you could get away with CrossFit and you know, kickboxing and all of that because it, exercise is very catabolic.

It raises cortisol, but if you’re already like tanked out, then it may not be that, more gentle or yin-yob or something. So again, their size aligned with their metabolic type.

I think everything, this is really the era of personalized and precision lifestyle medicine, right? So it’s not just, keto for all, or paleo, a pig, all a vegan for a while.

No, I mean, it depends if you’re a fast oxidizer or a slow oxidize, are you sympathetic, parasympathetic, and then again, with exercise, that depends.

There’s just so many variables. And so that’s where I really kind of curate that personalized protocol for someone. That’s awesome. Well, where can people find, you mentioned your website before, but go ahead and repeat it again and we’ll put this in the show notes for where people can contact you.

Absolutely. So it’s a Zen. It’s like the Zen dash. Like the word nutrition, but just replace NU with Zen, so Zen-trition.com. And if somebody is interested and wants to learn more, they can go to ZenTrition. Com forward slash book dash now, and that will get you a free consultation where we can decide if this is the optimal approach for you.

Great. That’s really awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. And thank everyone for joining me on The Functional Edge. I hope today’s episode gave you fresh insights and practical tools to level up your life.

If you found value in what you heard, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button and share the podcast with someone who needs it and leave a review. It’s the best way to support our mission of bringing powerful health solutions to more people.

So for more resources, updates, and behind-the-scenes content, visit drjuliaward.com. And until next time, stay strong, Stay healthy, And keep living on the functional edge.

Thank you. If you’ve found value in what you heard, don’t forget to hit subscribe, share the podcast with someone who needs it and leave a review. It’s the best way to support our mission of bringing powerful health solutions to more people.

For more resources, updates and behind the scenes content, visit drjuliaward.com. Until next time, stay strong, Stay healthy and keep living on the functional edge.