exercise Archives – Wild Lyons Wellness

9 things I would go back and tell my younger self about health and nutrition

Let’s come together and teach our daughters that their bodies were not mistakes. Teach our daughters to love their bodies. That they don’t need to be altered. That by denying and erasing the body they were given they are denying where they came from, their mother. Teach our daughters how to tune in to their bodies, menstrual cycles, intuition and emotions. Teach our daughters how to cook, move their body and properly nourish themselves for health, not a body size. Allow them to have fun, play and relax and never lose sight of who they are. We have the ability to change the trajectory of our future generation. Most of us are starting to wake up and it’s a beautiful thing. What is one thing you would go back and tell your younger self? 👇🏻

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The 6 biggest mistakes women make when trying to balance their hormones

Anytime a woman does not feel good or shows an inkling of emotion the blame is put on hormones. Apparently women are not allowed to feel unwell or show feelings or emotions without being told they are hormonal.

I appreciate the acknowledgement that women have different physiology than men. Truly I do but that does not make us hormonal wrecks.

In fact, your hormone problems are not related to your hormones at all but rather your stressful lifestyle that has created a cascade of imbalances in your body. Hormones are always downstream.

Women are not meant to live in chronic fight or flight.

Women are not meant to go-go-go all the time living in masculine energy 24/7.

Women no longer have community and support.

We no longer know what it means to relax and slow down.

We are no longer taking care of ourselves.

And in turn we put our health and well-being on the back burner.

We over-commit, our nutrition sucks, we constantly forget to eat, we don’t sleep well, everything seems like a burden, we get consumed in diet culture and do stupid things like starve ourselves, go on restrictive diets and over-exercise…

We seek quick fixes rather than doing the hard work to change our lives.

You get to choose your version of hard but spinning your wheels trying bandaids, diets and supplements to be left discouraged sounds a lot harder than taking care of yourself and getting your internal environment healthier to actually balance your hormone.

A few of the most important factors:

+ Sleep 7-9 hours every night
+ Eliminate endocrine disruptors – water, skincare, makeup and cleaning products
+ Eat a traditional, mineral rich diet, eat every 3-4 hours, combining carb, protein and fat
+ Get more in touch with your feminine – create slow mornings and evenings, cook all your meals at home, get out in nature, garden, show emotions, be creative, laugh, sing and play, and tune in to your menstrual cycle
+ Possibly address digestion, liver, thyroid, adrenals and minerals
+ Evaluate stressors to help your body feel safe

These are the things that matter.

Be honest with yourself.

Are your hormone issues really hormonal?

Or is it the life you are living?

Cycle syncing for hormone balance

You walk into your holistic doc or nutritionists office and you tell them about all the hormonal symptoms you are experiencing. They recommend seed cycling.

You are ecstatic thinking OMG this is the answer to all my prayers and I only have to eat a tablespoon of “healthy” seeds everyday!

Right? Wrong. A for effort tho!

Girlfriend let’s learn a bit about our bodies ok?

One of the biggest reasons we are riddled with symptoms is because we are going against our physiology as women.

To break it down real quick.

Women have a 28 day infradian rhythm and men have a 24 hour hormonal cycle that flows with their testosterone and cortisol levels. This 24 hour rhythm ironically enough flows perfectly with day to day life in America.

Ahh that american dream. Wake up, get to work, work hard all day for 8 hours, workout, come home, eat dinner, go to sleep and do it all over again.

In other words, the grind, this go-go-go lifestyle never took our hormones into consideration. As women we need to adjust our exercise, work, and social lives.

We think we “just can’t hang” and that there is something wrong with us for being so exhausted, moody and symptomatic.

We are not allowed to rest, we are not allowed to be tired, we are not allowed to take a day off.

We simply are not allowed to be a women. We are just these robotic creatures living in a man’s world.

Not to mention. Women are excluded from studies. YUP, all those studies on diets, pharmaceuticals, exercise, hormones, have been done on men because women are just too complicated with our 28 day cycles and hormones.

Our cyclical nature is never put into consideration and we simply can not live a happy, healthy life in a masculine energy driven world.

Once you start living in sync with your cycle, get back to nature and the way your physiology intended you will likely start noticing you feel less drained, have more energy overall, are able to finally lose weight, feel less stressed and happier, have more confidence, and feel more aligned with your work.

Give it a try! Oh and ditch the seed cycling BS.

Stop Trying to Make Fasted Workouts Happen!

But Laura, how else am I supposed to burn calories from yesterday? ✋🏻🙄

I can’t believe diet culture has spewed such bullshit information without any consideration for female physiology.

Whether your goal is to lose weight, feel better, balance hormones, fix your gut, lessen anxiety or depression, etc.. Working out fasted will not help the situation and will probably make matters worse overtime while it continues to suppress your metabolism.

If I had a dollar for every time a client comes to me feeling like complete shit and puts on a solid amount of weight after months or even years of fasting. I’d be a rich bitch.

Something we fail to recognize is that fasting is a massive stressor. Add this stress on top of all the other stressors we are exposed to from EMFs, blue light, toxin exposure, fight with family or friends, meeting deadlines at work, social media, speaking poorly to yourself, you name it… Hans said it “to be totally without stress, is to be dead.”

Girl, you’re stressed in some way shape or form. The world we live in is stressful.

The female body is super sensitive to stress. And anytime it perceives something as a threat it holds on to weight for dear life and will also start sending you signals that it’s not working through symptoms.

But Laura our ancestors fasted all the time. Oh gosh, silly me. Where our ancestors exposed to all the stressors we are today? NO.

More stress = a higher mineral/ nutrient burn rate aka you require more nutrients, more often.

So let’s cut to the chase, what happens when you fast?

You are forcing your body to go through a super stressful process to create it’s own fuel rather than just giving it what it needs this creates a rise in cortisol. As a result your thyroid activity is suppressed and your hormones are affected, estrogen rises and progesterone drops.

And no, your coffee doesn’t cut it as pre-workout, I don’t care if you put an entire cows worth of creamer in that sucker. Coffee after a full meal, always.

Girlfriend, stop trying to make fasted workouts happen. It’s just not going to happen.

Your body deserves to feel happy, safe and nourished. Don’t force it into an unnecessary famine.

Hormone and Gut-Friendly Exercises

I know, I know “But Laura, I love HIIT + running”

Do you actually love these types of workouts or are you in the constant mind fuck of whether or not you are doing enough to earn your food and think intense exercise is the only way?

I’ve been there. I used to be a HIIT + running machine. If I didn’t get in an intense enough workout I was a failure, the guilt would kick + I would instantly be questioning every single thing I put in my mouth for the day.

If only I knew the damage I was causing to my metabolism.

What if I told you that all these high endurance exercises could be one of the reasons your hormones + gut are F’d up?

Why? Because these workouts are STRESSFUL. I can guarantee 99.9% of us are stressed out in one way shape or form (the damn world we are living in right now is stressful).

Add in these demanding workouts on top of other stressors in your life + you are asking for a disaster. During these workouts your body releases the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol while suppressing your thyroid. What does the thyroid do? Well, it’s the main conductor of your metabolism, in other words, it is responsible for every single process in the body.

If you already have stress driven hormonal conditions like PCOS, HA, endometriosis, low progesterone, estrogen dominance, struggling with infertility… Let’s be real, all hormonal imbalances are stress driven- these workouts are not doing you any favors.

Our hormones are very sensitive to stress. For example, as the body uses up more progesterone to manufacture the stress hormone cortisol it will leave us with an excess of estrogen aka estrogen dominance.

Wondering why your digestion sucks?

During these high intensity workouts + running blood gets diverted away from your digestive system to your working muscles. Stress hormones are also released as your bodies main concern is making sure your muscles are functioning optimally so you can run away from that invisible bear. Stressed out body = poor digestion and absorption of nutrients.

Before you start thinking you need to run your body into the ground (literally) just know you don’t need to run, do HIIT or crossfit to be “healthy.”