Oh hello, welcome to Healthy Ish. You are tuned into the daily podcast from Body and Soul. I am your host, a Felicity Haley. Nutritionist and TV presenter. Zoe Bingley Pullen is in the studio today. She's in the Body and Soul house and she is joining us to well talk about her new book. It is called Eat Your Way to Healthy Hormones. So she's going to give you all a refresher in hormone health, plus the ideal diet to
consume for optimal regulation, and the drinks. There's always a question about what to drink to help regulate your hormones, Well, she's here to answer it. If you like what you hear from Zoe, make sure you're listening to Extra Healthy Ish, where she shares more about her journey with hormone health and you get a light out of that one. Search for our sister pod, Extra Healthy Ish wherever you get your podcasts.
So we nice to have you back on the podcast.
Always love you to be here. Love love chatting health, Love talking to you, Felicity.
Yeah, likewise, and congratulations on your new book.
Yeah selling fast.
Yeah, Look, it's been a really exciting journey. We presold five thousand copies. I definitely had that moment. I was like, oh my god, thank god, thank got it because I actually felt like I had imposter syndrome until I held it in my hand. So I'm sure a lot of women people in general do get that feeling. But we all kind of battle our internal self work.
Anyway, that's a whole that's a whole other talking. Give us some refresher What are hormones? What do they do?
Okay, So, hormones are chemical messengers, and what they do is they actually sort of regulate a lot of our biological processes such as metabolism, growth, the regulation of our thyro the regulation of our.
Blood sugar levels.
And they're governed by something called the endocrine system. So we kind of need to look at the endocrine system as kind of the mothership in some component where basically what that's actually doing is sending messages through blood to these different organs, telling us to release different hormones as certain periods of time. Now, the wonderful thing about the enderkind system, it's got something called a feedback system, a
negative and a positive feedback system. So for example, say you're highly stressed and then basically your adrenals are kind of overloading. It will send other messages to say thyroid, or we will send messages to insulin saying, look, we need a little bit of help right now. Can you step in and give us assistance. That's fantastic, But the problem is we don't want to be exhausting any one particular you know, organ or any one particular hormone, because they are all important.
I feel like hormones are having their moment in the LiLine. Everyone's talking about them.
Sure, Look, I think it's interesting also because often what we refer to as hormones is those reproductive, reproductive, those sex hormones as well, so you know, testosterone, estrogen, poteston, And often what we do is we refer to them more as being a women thing. So if you look at the end of crimes system, we all have exactly the same hormones, but we have them in certain percentages
at certain times of our life as well. So we never want to discredit as this is more of a female thing, because often we get that topic of women have more hormones. I'm like, no, they don't.
Women don't have more hormones.
They does have certain percentages of more hormones at certain times same as men.
You know, that's a really good point because we're brought up thinking, oh, you're like, hormones are a women's issue. Yeah, whereas no, we have exactly the same one exactly going around. There's the blokes in our lives. Actually, So how can diet help. Is it stabilize or yeah, I mean I don't want to use the word.
Balance or we don't throw that word around. Yeah, healthy hormones.
Yeah, Look, I think what's important to know is, first of all, we kind of need to take a step back and think about, well, what are hormones and how do we actually build them. So you've got sort of three categories of hormones. You've got our lipid hormones, which is fat produced or cholesterol produced. We have our amino
acid hormones, which obviously is protein produced. And then we also have our peptide, which has got a lot to do with a combination of both those food groups but also very much related.
To our digestion. So when I look at that.
In itself, if you don't have the right balance of those foods in your diet, it doesn't matter what phase or what stage that you're in. You might not necessarily be building these hormones correctly as well. So I kind of like to sort of start sort of foundationally to begin with. And I often say to clients, like, you know, think of it kind of as a ratio of three two one every single plate you want to have, you know, three parts carbohydrate, two parts protein, and one part fat.
And that's whether it's a main meal or a snack, because then once you're more likely to guarantee is you've got a cross section of all of those necessary food groups to then come in and build those necessary hormones as well. Now that's one component of it. The second ponent component you want to actually look at is how do we absorb? Like are we absorbing these foods as well?
An interesting fact is that when we look at that microbio and we have estrogenic bacteria in there as well, we have bacteria that actually helps to rid estrogen out of our microbiome as well. So if you've got yeah, it's really fascinating, isn't it.
Like?
And often we kind of we don't sort of see the connection necessarily between hormones and gut health. And we obviously have that brain gut access that feedback system where you know, the brain is talking to the gut and the gut's talking to the brain. You know, that symbiolic kind of nature that's actually happening. But what we don't often think about is what role does the gut play
in actually hormones. Now it's plays a massive role because you might be producing them, but if you're not getting rid of them, you're going to have some increase or you'll have some build up of estrogen or toxins within the body as well. So we very much need to look at kind of you know, what is the type of fiber that we're getting in our diet. We need to get a lot of what we call sort of
prebiotic type fiber, so that's resistant start. You know, it could be things like you know, when we heat and cool potatoes, green bananas, lentils, canellini.
Beans, green bananas.
Yeah, so actually there's something within the sugar component and the fiber that actually means that a green banana has more of these resistance start before they write it before they rest, like kid's not. Yeah, Well, I think it's because it makes you can upset your starting. Because resistant starts, by nature is resistant to be broken down till it gets to the colon and the colins we've got all that bacteria there.
Or rose lead to the gut. I just feel like everything comes back to the good sense. What I want to ask you is the healthy drinks, because you've got a spit in your book about this and I found it quite interesting. Yes, So what healthy drinks can help us well maintain healthy?
Yeah?
Look, I mean again, even we want to very much look at some liver supporting drinks. You know, things like dandelion tea as opposed to coffee, purely because we've got these pathways within our liver that require certain enzymes. Now everything every time we tap into drinking coffee or alcohol or the wrong types. As I sit here with no judgment, no no judgment, I am a nine ten o'clock coffee girl as well as you. Yeah exactly, I may have had one before this actually today just to give me
that little bit of a pep. But again, things that actually helped to stimulate that liver pathway. So things like you know all those beautiful big carotalis beetroot carrots, you know, the grapefruit, lemon, lime. So having a juice every single day is beautiful drinking green tea because it's got these beautiful polyphenols and big antioxidants in there, and things like your dang But lots and lots of water flushing as much as you can.
Squeeze of strawberry, squeeze of lime, squeeze you know, put some internet bit of ginger.
I forget to do that, but it's so it's so refreshing, it's gorgeous.
You just get a jug of water with lime fills.
And particularly in Australia, so it's so hot here.
Now your book actually goes into different age groups, Yes, but perhaps give us a few more foods that we can eat regularly, no matter what your age, that can help. So first of all, we want to remember that we need a lot of fats in our diet.
Hormones are primarily built from fats. So making sure that you've got a good form of mono on sat CD or essentral fatty acids, so fish, avocado, extravergin olive oil, nuts and seeds. But also making sure again we've got a good amount of those right types of proteins. But we can sort of double up. We can have the proteins that are vegetarian that have also got the fiber
in there. We've got things like your kinoa, you cant leini beans, and all the legumes and pulses, because again they're going to be part of the building block, but they're also going to help with the fiber component of pulling it all out and getting rid of all their excess toxins within our body as well. But vital estrogens are a really interesting topic and they get a bit of a bad name. They're modulators of estrogen. So what that means, at any phase, at any state, we should
be having vital estrogens. They do not give you cancer, they do not They mimic the behavior of estrogen, but they're not estrogen. So again, getting these foods in the diet, and that's things like sweet potato, it's papaya, it's some pomegranate, it's sesame seeds, it's different nuts and seeds. We need about fifty milligrams of these foods in our diet. So for example, it's about having something like a quarter of
a cup fifteen grams of flax seed. It might be something like, you know, sixty grams of sesame seas two hundred grams of tofu make us smoothie in the morning. Puts some beautiful silk and tofu. You're getting fight all Esrodren, You're getting protein in there as well. Put all your love your fruits.
Can make it my personal chef. Please, yes, no problem.
Sure, I'm very expensive, very bad night joking well, very.
Joking about that. Zoe, thank you for coming on help Fish.
Thank you very much. I always love talking to you.
Zoe's book is out now.
It is called Eat Your Way to Healthy Hormones and Zoe is also doing a fortnight retreat at Gwinghana Lifestyle Retreat in Queensland from December first to the fifth. I will leave a link to that in the show notes if you are keen to sign up. Hey, I hope you did enjoy this chat. If you did, tell us rate and review this podcast. If you have any ideas for upcoming apps, just DM me at Felicity Harley anything else, head to body insoul dot com dot follow us on socials.
Grub Our print edition which is out in your local Sunday paper and until tomorrow Still Healthy