Michele C Hedge: Hormones, Thyroid Function & Nourishing our Bodies

180 Nutrition We were told recently that one in four woman show symptoms of an under-active thyroid! So we had no hesitation on focusing some of our podcast today on low thyroid function and some action steps you can start straight away to help.

 

Today we welcome backMichele Chevalley Hedge.Michele is a Nutritional Medicine Practitioner, (Adv. Dip of Nutritional Medicine, Australia Traditional Medicine Society) and the author of many health related articles. She also has proven strategies to incorporate good nutrition into a fast paced family, as the mother of three teenage children and her own busy practice. She can empathise with all types! A Healthy View recently has expanded Sydney operations to open in New York, with its new online family wellness program Low Sugar Lifestyle.

 

Questions we ask in this episode:

• How can our hormones influence our weight?
• What can we eat to nourish our hormones?
• What supplements are beneficial for hormone health?
• What are your thoughts on soy (milk/products) as it has been linked to hormone issues?
• If you wanted to break your hormones what would you do?
• And much much more...

 

Transcript

Hey, this is Guy Lawrence from 180 nutrition and welcome to this week’s episode of “The Health Sessions.”

We welcome back today Michele Chevalley Hedge on the podcast and if you aren’t familiar with Michele and didn’t hear her podcast last year she is a nutritional medicine practitioner. She’s also author of “Beating Sugar Addictions for Dummies.” She’s been a contributor to the Huffington Post, Good Health Magazine, Women’s Fitness, The Sunday Telegraph, The Morning Herald, ABC Radio and Sunrise Channel Seven Weekend Breakfast Show to name a few. It’s actually much bigger than that.

She has a wealth of experience and we are very happy to get her back on the show today where we delve into the topic of hormones. Hormones we feel are a massive contributor to one’s health and how do we knock our hormones out of luck, how can we bring the back in, what influences it, what roles they play in the body.

Thyroids is a common issue, adrenals, cortisols, the list goes on, leptin, serotonin, melatonin. I’m just recapping the interview today but it was an awesome interview.

She shed so much light on the subject and if you are one of those people that is delving into health but are still trying to figure out getting a better night’s sleep, dropping a few kilos of weight and you doing things but still getting frustrated then this is definitely an area we encourage you to look at and as we share the strategies with you and tap into Michele’s wealth of experience today I have no doubt you are going to enjoy this episode.

If you do please leave us a review on iTunes, iAsk. It’s very simple to do, if you can hit the five stars, subscribe to our podcast and also leave the review that will help our rankings. More people can find us and tap into this great information that we love to put out there and share with you guys.

If you are struggling, most people have to do it from the phone. iTunes can be a little bit fiddly but when you open up the podcast app don’t go to your saved [00:02:00] episodes of 180, actually go to the search field, type in 180 nutrition, bring it up from there and then there’s a button where you can say write a review.

It takes two minutes to do and just tell us what’s been helping you, how you listen to the podcasts. We really truly love getting the feedback and love hearing from you guys and it’s more fugal to keep this out there because we’re reaching a lot of people and it’s definitely changing lives which is fantastic. Include the analysis as well.

Anyway let’s go over to Michelle and enjoy the show, cheers.

Stu:Let’s do it.

Guy:All right. His, this is Guy Lawrence, I’m joined with Stuart Cook as always, hi Stu?

Stu:Hello mate.

Guy:And our lovely guest today Michele Chevalley Hedge, Michele welcome back to the show.

Michele:Hello Stu, hello Guy, hello everybody out here.

Guy:Great to have you back Michele, obviously we were just offline talking about the podcast and we’re picking up more and more listeners every week, new listeners so I’m pretty sure they’ll be a lot of guys out there that happened to hear the previous podcast when you came in last year. Can you just describe for everyone a little bit about yourself, what you do and why we’re super excited to have you back in the show?

Michele:Sure, thank you. Thank you for having me back. I’m a qualified nutritionist and sometimes some of the well-known health editors or even doing a little bit of television will introduce me as Michele Chevalley Hedge, the modern day nutritionist, the nutritionist that likes a little bit of coffee and a little bit of wine and that initially made me very upset. I was like, “Oh no,” and then it really made me real.

That’s a really big part of our philosophy at A Healthy View, my practice, is that we are qualified nutritionists but we really understand real busy people and we like to have a non-extreme approach.

So besides having a busy practice [00:04:00] we also write for many different publications, The Huffington Post, Body and Soul, I wrote a book last year called “Beating Sugar Addictions for Dummies.” Wiley publishing out of New York City commissioned me to write that and I said, “Why ask me to write this? Why aren’t you asking Sarah Wilson and David Gillespie?”

I said, “They’re fantastic in these spaces,” which they are and they said, “Michele the reality is you’re a qualified nutritionist who has been talking about sugar way before sugar was sexy.” That was a lot of fun to write.

We ran programs, we ran retreats, do lots of corporate presenting, do lots of school presenting and so our specialty, our area of specialty is always been talking about sugar but we treat patients for all sorts of reasons, from hormonal dysfunction to weight to ADHD to cognitive dysfunction.

I’m very big in the area of mental health and nutrition. I’ve been speaking a lot on that. Last year I spoke with the Dalai Lama “Happiness and Its Causes,” vitality, energy and serotonin which I want to talk about today.

Guy:Great. Thanks Michele.

Stu:Michele you mentioned hormones as well and that’s the topic that we really want to cover today because a lot of people aren’t aware that their hormones could be holding them back where health is concerned and it can be a culprit in weight loss, weight gain, fatigue, sleep issues, autoimmunity. I wondered if you could just tell us about our hormones. Our listeners right now, what are they and why do we need to support them as we grow older?

Michele:I was so [inaudible 00:05:43] when I got your email to have this podcast and to specialize and talk about hormones because it’s an area of great interest to me.

I’m writing a book about resetting your hormones. [00:06:00] I’m thinking about the tittle could be “It Could Be Your Hormones: Weight, Sleep, Autoimmune.”

Hormones are the special chemical messengers in our body that are incredibly powerful and they affect everything that we do. They affect our sleep, they affect our weight, they affect our energy levels, they affect our autoimmune system, they affect our moods, emotions.

Just on a funny note any woman who has premenstrual tension or any newly pregnant woman who will have hormones firing around their body or any woman going into menopause will immediately know the power of hormones.

I laugh about those things and try to make jokes about them but hormones are incredibly powerful. But some of the ones that we would know even if you’re not in the world of nutritional wellness, things like cortisol, things like insulin, things like leptin, things like melatonin, progesterone, these are all hormones that we really need that for optimal health we need to be safeguarding these type of hormones and how they function in our body.

Guy:Fair enough, I was wondering like when you say [inaudible 00:07:22] what’s the general perception and awareness? You’re in the firing line, you see a lot of people in your practice and your talking. Are people that tuned in or aware about hormones and how they can govern the body from different things?

We see a lot of people inquiring about weight loss especially as you can imagine and they just assume it’s going to be hitting the gym, exercising, cutting up the calories and away we go but obviously it’s a much more complex issue than that.

Michele:I think Guy that that’s a great question. What I think is that as people tend to get [00:08:00] more into nutrition and wellness, they start to look beneath the surface a little bit of just food and start to think, “Wait a minute, what else could be possibly going on in my body?”

So we always say, “Let’s look beneath the surface. Let’s look at what’s happening with your thyroid hormones. Let’s look at what’s happening with your blood insulin hormones. Let’s look at what’s happening with your cortisol hormones.”

Can we Segway and just go into cortisol just for a moment?

Guy:Sure.

Michele:Great. Here’s the thing about cortisol, people will think that they possibly can be gaining weight from food and the reality is yes, poor food choices will lead to insulin dis-regulation, blood sugar dis-regulation insulin being one of our hormones we really want to safeguard.

What happens is people are thinking that that’s all about food and poor food choices. However stress and if we wake up in the morning and we are going and going and going and going and our adrenal glands are on fire, our adrenal glands pump out our cortisol, our cortisol pumps out glucose and this is a wonderful mechanism in the body.

Human nature is amazing because thousands of years ago the body was meant to see a saber tooth tiger, our adrenals were meant to go on fire, our cortisol was meant to pump, our glucose was meant to pump out, kill the saber tooth tiger, glucose goes down, cortisol goes down, adrenal goes back to resting and say, “Thank you very much.”

These days we pop out of bed, we go, “Make somebody breakfast, feed the dog, get to the gym, I better do this, I better do that [00:10:00], oh my goodness, I’ve got the 10:30 meeting,” so we’re going and we’re going and we’re going and we’re going all day long.

I’m not living in ivory tower because this is myself sometimes but I have a very big observation that what’s happening to people is they are creating excess glucose around their body all day long and creating insulin resistance just from stress.

Guy:I was just about to ask you that, can you create excess glucose and spike insulin just from stress?

 

Full Transcript here: