What a week! You hit your best times for each run. But the following week, it's as if you are jogging with weights tied to your ankles. What's going on? Well, hormones and functions can have an impact in your physiology down to cell hydration. Dr. Beth Westie explains more in this discussion on hormone balance and health and fitness tie-ins.

Listen and learn

• How her own story of painful ovarian cysts lead her to research menstrual cycle phases and hormonal imbalance treatments beyond western medicine,
• What eastern medicine's take on "eating for my hormones" means regarding basal temperature fluctuations, and
• How all this adds up to "leaning in" to the ebb and flow of your hormone levels and why it makes a difference in how you will feel. 

Dr. Beth Westie is a chiropractor, author, and speaker and hosts the Female Health Solution Podcast. Years ago, she suffered painful ovarian cysts that would burst monthly and reform. When she sought help in an emergency room from pain, the prescription of birth control and Vicodin didn't sit well with her. She got to work, researching and calling on her own training to figure out what she could do for a your-hormones-are-off diagnosis. Her background in eastern medicine helped and she eventually understood that women experience several different body types over their lives. She says she started "eating for my hormones," and that made all the difference.

She explains that her hormone levels were too high and her body wasn't processing them out of her system in a healthy way. Different monthly hormonal phases effect physiology and metabolism, even causing basal body temp change. Both estrogen and progesterone have very different effects. For example, one's basal body temperature is higher when progesterone levels increase post-ovulation.  It helps to match the tone of one's food to one's basal body temp. During the estrogen phase, when the basal temp is lower, it works well to eat cooling foods.

For the progesterone phase, it's beneficial to eat warming foods like beef, ginger, or cinnamon. But this is just the type of the iceberg. She goes through numerous other effects and how to work with and support the body's efforts. She even addresses the propensity of the medical field to leave women out of research, sequestering ailments to female-only labels that didn't receive proper investigation. 

For more about her, see her website: drbethwestie.com.

Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK