Why does the weight suddenly shift to your belly? Why does “doing all the right things” stop working? And why do your labs look “normal” while you feel anything but? In this episode of PCOS Unfiltered, Lindsie sits down with registered nurse, board-certified nurse coach, and founder of Purely Present Health, Beverly Mazza, to unpack the metabolic side of hormone shifts — especially in PCOS, perimenopause, and menopause. Together, they explore how insulin resistance often shows up before traditional lab markers turn red, why A1C doesn’t tell the whole story, and how tools like continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) can offer powerful insight — even for women without diabetes. They also dig into something often overlooked in metabolic health conversations: stress, sleep, nervous system regulation, and how your body’s sense of safety directly impacts blood sugar, weight loss resistance, and hormone balance. This conversation is empowering, validating, and deeply practical. If you've felt confused, stuck, or blamed by generic health advice, this episode will help you understand what's really happening beneath the surface. You are not broken. Your body is communicating.
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(0:00 - 0:16) This is what these are. So then the glucose is like out in the bloodstream and people can picture that. And we're always supposed to have a certain level of sugar like in the blood, but we can have too much and we have too much, right? The sugar really can't go anywhere without the help of insulin.
(0:16 - 0:37) So that's another hormone that's released from the pancreas. And so that basically kind of senses their sugar, the pancreas sends out some insulin. I always say, I like to think of like insulin as like the key that's like, you know, unlocking all the doors around the different cell receptors and saying, okay, glucose, like enter, like get out of the blood, you know, to a certain level, move along, move along.
(0:37 - 0:56) And it does that in a, you know, in an optimized state with a balance of here's enough insulin, I'm clearing that glucose, we're keeping this healthy range over time. Hey friend, welcome back to PCOS Unfiltered. I'm Lindsie, former ER nurse turned health coach and author of Healing Beyond the Diagnosis.
(0:57 - 1:43) Today's episode is a must listen if you've ever felt like your body changed out of nowhere, especially if you've said things like, why is the weight suddenly going to my belly? Why am I doing the same things but nothing is working anymore? Or my labs look fine, but I feel anything but fine. Because we're diving into the metabolic side of hormone shifts, the part that often gets overlooked when we talk about PCOS, perimenopause and menopause. I'm sitting down with Beverly Mazza, a registered nurse, board certified nurse coach and founder of Purely Present Health, an integrative and functional health practice supporting women in midlife who are navigating insulin resistance, pre-diabetes, weight loss resistance and the hormonal rollercoaster of perimenopause and menopause.
(1:43 - 2:20) In this episode, we're talking about the metabolic changes Beverly sees first in women as hormones shift, why blood sugar and insulin matter even when your A1C still looks normal, how continuous glucose monitors, CGMs, can be used as a personalized awareness tool, not just for diabetes. And one of my favorite overlaps, how stress, sleep and nervous system regulation can directly impact metabolic health. And a quick teaser before we start, if you've been wanting a real life way to stop spinning in your head and start building body trust skills you can use daily, you're going to love what I'm posting next.
(2:21 - 2:36) Stay tuned at the end for more details. Now, as a reminder, the content shared on PCOS Unfiltered is for informational and educational purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by the host and guests are not intended to serve as medical advice.
(2:37 - 2:52) Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional before making any changes to your diet, exercise or treatment plan. The information shared is based on personal experience and expert interviews and is not a substitute for professional medical guidance. Okay, let's dive in.
(2:52 - 3:07) Here's my conversation with Beverly Mazza. Welcome and welcome to Beverly. I'm super excited to have you on fellow nurse as well.
(3:07 - 3:24) So it's always great to get the perspective, you know, I've been practicing at the bedside for several years now, but it's always great to get somebody else's perspective and I love how you integrate, you know, all these other things into your practice. So I'm super excited for this episode. So let's kind of just dive in.
(3:24 - 3:45) You specialize in women's metabolic health. So we all know hormones shift across all phases of life. You know, whether you are dealing with PCOS, if you've been into perimenopause and menopause, what changes do you notice first from the metabolic perspective? Thank you, Lindsie.
(3:45 - 4:15) I'm really excited to be here and you know, chat nurse to nurse too and kind of talk about what I've been seeing both in primary care and like one-to-one with my private clients too, serving women particularly in sort of this perimenopause and menopause state, which just for clarity, like it's a big age range we're really talking about. So I know some women might say, like, I don't even know if that's me. And so there's no like definitive age, but I feel like roughly sometimes people are saying like, you know, from 35, like on until, you know, we've actually hit that menopause.
(4:15 - 4:45) So, you know, for some women, that sort of transition of when our hormones are changing where we call it the roller coaster, right? Which most of us are feeling is, you know, for some women, it might be a short period of time, but for many women, it can go on, you know, for even like 10 years, right? This can go on for a while. So it's definitely not something that kind of, we just, I always tell people like, we're not just like pushing through. We wanna understand and we wanna understand what we can do to optimize, right? Our hormones and our health and also like what habits we might need to lean into, change, investigate.
(4:45 - 5:05) So for me with a focus around metabolic health in particular, a lot of what I start seeing, you know, kind of first thing some of the women's will say is obviously there's like those symptoms of, you know, women might have, you know, menstrual changes, of course, right? They might have mood changes. They might have energy changes. They might have sleep changes.
(5:05 - 5:26) They might have changes in libido. You know, all of this, of course, but in the background of a lot of this, a lot of women I feel like don't really tie together but are also experiencing is sort of these metabolic health shifts. And the most, I would say obvious one, because I would say it's the most bothersome one is changes in their figure and their body composition.
(5:26 - 5:44) So this could look like weight loss resistance, right? Or, you know, maybe after having a child, right? Some women go right from childbearing right into this perimenopause. This also could be weight gain, seemingly out of nowhere, a lot of the women say. So they're like, I've always been pretty physically fit.
(5:44 - 6:35) I'm doing the same things. I haven't changed my diet too much, but I've put on, you know, five pounds for the last couple of years and it seems to all be in my belly, right? So the actual where the weight is landing too can tell us something about this. So that's a big one too from sort of, I would say from a nursing and a lab work perspective, some of the things we start seeing shifting, of course, are changes in that average of that three month blood sugar and the hemoglobin A1C, which many women will have done, you know, just as a routine screening with their doctors, which is giving us just a three month average, right? We'll talk about that a little bit more, but they might've seen that they were in this normal range, right, that certain percentage, and then they see all of a sudden it's red, right? So they've crept over into this red zone, which is typically this pre-diabetic state.
(6:35 - 7:00) So the state between this like insulin resistant and the diagnosis of a type two diabetes. We're not talking about type one autoimmune diabetes in this sense. We also might be seeing increasing cholesterol levels, particularly that LDL or like the bad, right? We're kind of breaking that kind of conception apart right now, but the LDL cholesterol and maybe the HDL protective cholesterol actually going down.
(7:00 - 7:17) We might see their triglycerides going up a little bit. And then they're like, wait, like I'm not eating anything different, right? And there's, you know, we have to do some re-education around, you know, dietary cholesterol is a part of this, but it's not everything, right? It's very hormone driven. So those are some of the big changes we see.
(7:17 - 7:35) Sometimes we see increases in their like generalized inflammatory markers. So things like an HSCRP, which is highly tied to like cardiovascular health. So doctor may be checking that, may not be, but for some people, they might for the first time see those markers shifting a bit.
(7:36 - 7:55) Uric acid is another one that sometimes we'll look at and people see that and they're like, I don't have gout, right? Everyone ties like that uric acid to gout. And it's like, yes, though you actually could have a gout flare and actually have those be not in a high level. But sometimes that's also kind of a marker we can look at and see is that's a little bit, cause that's tied closely to metabolic health.
(7:56 - 8:28) And then of course, when we're looking at like kind of their comprehensive metabolic panels, I'm always queuing into like, what are their like liver enzymes? So we know this connection between metabolic health and what we call like a fatty liver disease, right? So this metabolic liver disease that's independent of the alcohol liver disease that many of us have come to know. And we can start seeing maybe some elevations showing that the liver's in a little bit of stress as well. So those are some of the ones that are kind of coming to the top of my mind that we're kind of like looking at, looking at metabolic picture.
(8:28 - 9:29) And then of course, if we have access to this, and many women do now, either at home or in a doctor's office at a gym, is if they've been tracking their body composition, which actually tells us not just how much pounds they weigh, right? But like what makes up those pounds? And so these compositions or impedance scales will say how much of this is actually body fat? How much is skeletal muscle? How much, some of them can even do visceral fat, which is even more advanced. And if they've been checking that over a period of time, they start seeing that potentially maybe they have a little bit more visceral fat, a little bit more body fat, maybe they're losing some skeletal muscle, or maybe they always were able to gain, right? And see gains each year, and now they're not from age. And so always kind of like looking at all of this in this totality to be like, okay, like what are some of these markers we can look at to try to like help optimize you? And then I would say thyroid health would be the other one I would throw in there because that can be heavily influenced with metabolic health.
(9:29 - 9:40) And some women start seeing shifts in their thyroid function to be suboptimal too. I'll probably think of more as we keep talking too. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you have to look at the big picture for sure.
(9:40 - 10:01) The weight gain out of nowhere that you mentioned, I feel like that's a lot of what I see with women with PCOS. And as we know, there is a tie to insulin resistance, you know, with PCOS, so that seems to be a key without diving into lab work. That seems to be one of the big things that like you mentioned, especially around the abdominal area.
(10:01 - 10:15) And then they try everything and anything and they just won't budge. Absolutely, yeah. And even you mentioned that too, like fasting insulin is something that I really like to look at.
(10:16 - 10:39) Not all docs will order it. You know, some maybe with known PCOS are suspected, that's typically probably one they would look at because we would likely maybe see that would be elevated like in a suboptimal level, which is gonna obviously give us a little bit more information that we're kind of existing in this insulin resistant state, which can be contributing and driving sort of these weight changes, weight gain, weight loss resistance too. Yeah, yeah.
(10:39 - 11:05) Are there any, like I know I recommend a scale, but you know, you were talking about the body composition and everything too, because there, I mean, you can get these scales at home now after like I know there's some gyms that have like super fancy ones of course, but you can get these at home. I mean, maybe they're not 100% accurate, but I feel like you can track like trends probably with that. I don't know if that's something you will talk to your clients about or see.
(11:06 - 11:36) Yeah, 100%. Yeah, there's a lot of different, I really like these as a device, especially, you know, anyone who's working on like body composition changes, weight management, because it can be hard, you know, you get so fixated on those pounds and we don't know what these pounds, you know, what they are. So pretty well, like even as inexpensive, some of these as like $25, right? They're not obviously gonna be like the full extents of what we might see in like a medical office, but for general trends and tracking, I do find that a lot of like my patients and clients find it pretty helpful.
(11:37 - 12:06) Same with the kind of ones at the gym, then of course you can step up into like the high grade ones and it's great, but sometimes people might invest in that like out of pocket, like getting a DEXCA scan or something like that for a couple hundred dollars and do that maybe once a year, but in between kind of do these more like economical things to keep track. And there's a lot of, you know, variations with pounds. What's nice about the composition is you can kind of see like the water fluctuations, like the, you know, the muscle fluctuations, the fat and things like that.
(12:06 - 12:32) So I think as long as, you know, tracking composition is appropriate for the person, I'm always sensitive. I definitely work with some patients and clients too, where, you know, that's not appropriate for them, right? Like this daily weigh in, weekly weigh in, like that's not what we're gonna be using. And so I think just respecting the individual and having that conversation I find is really helpful, but for people that, you know, they feel okay about it, I think it's a great tool.
(12:33 - 13:05) But I also work with many patients and clients too, where we're kind of going off of like symptoms, how we're feeling and maybe, you know, tracking those labs in the background, but we're taking that approach as opposed to like a number approach, which again, you have to be sensitive to that. Oh yeah, yeah, that's what I find with my clients a lot. I tell them, I'm like, we weigh in the beginning, we weigh, you know, a month, six weeks later, like put that scale away, because I find a lot of the women that I work with, they focus so much on that number, on the scale.
(13:06 - 13:28) And then I'm like, that's also stressing you out more, you know, you're gonna have the water weight, you're gonna have, depending on your cycle or, you know, there might be a few things here and there that's gonna fluctuate. We just have to look at the trend over time and again, how you're feeling, how your clothes are fitting and all of that versus just focusing on that number on the scale because that just, yeah, adds more to it. I find that a lot of times for sure.
(13:30 - 13:55) So when someone comes to you feeling stuck, you kind of mentioned, you know, like you said, a lot of stuff there, maybe they're gaining weight, blood sugar is creeping up, you know, labs, labs are out of whack, all that stuff. And they feel like they're still eating well, they're doing all the right things. Where do you usually start with them? Yeah, I always like to start with like, with a good like medical history, you know, when I am talking with them.
(13:56 - 14:48) So it is looking at the lab markers for sure, just from like a, you know, educational standpoint for the patient of like, you know, these are markers, can we trend these at all? Do you have a couple of years worth we can look at and maybe spot some patterns in here? If you haven't had lab work done, can you go back to your primary care doctor and like ask for this and maybe these are certain tests and why, you know, based off of what you're feeling. So I always think that's helpful to like, have those numbers and find that it's kind of validating because sometimes you do see something in there that can like, you can then educate the patient and they actually feel empowered because they like understand, oh, like this is how this has been tracking so I can take action with that. So definitely like clinical history, you know, medical history, their medication too, because as we know that medications can play a part in weight loss resistance and weight gain that some patients aren't even aware of.
(14:48 - 15:08) You know, it's like, had no idea some of this was going on in the background for them and not in a sense of like, you're gonna stop this medication, but like we need to have, you know, we need to realize that this is sort of the reality of what's going on. So the good medical history for sure too. And then really, I like to talk about sort of where they've been in sort of their weight journey.
(15:09 - 15:25) And I always like to start there because I find, you know, everyone's story is so unique and very personal to them. And, you know, for some it might be a lifelong struggle with their weight. For other women, you know, it's been a year and it's been since they had these hormone shifts.
(15:25 - 15:52) And so oftentimes like how I support someone and coach around this, like, I think the energy behind the efforts and the story behind the person makes such a big difference I have found when I'm supporting these women and not, you know, that like one is more valid over the other as far as like pushing them to like manage their weight. But there's just a story behind that. So I like to be sensitive to that too.
(15:52 - 16:10) Like if it's somebody who's like struggled their whole life, you know, with their weight, there's a lot there. There's a lot to unpack. There's often a lot for them to share of things that they've tried, a lot of like cycling through, crash diets, binge eating, medications, supplements, like a lot of things like that.
(16:11 - 16:32) You know, in some women though, it might be their first touch point where they're just, you know, just the weight that's starting to bother them within this past year or so. So all of that is gonna inform, you know, how I support someone and coach them because they're very different places. And I'm sure you find that too with everyone, kind of meeting people where they're at.
(16:32 - 17:00) I like to get to know like my clients and patients too, cause it's like, what's the personality behind it too? I find like some people they're like, you know, tell me what to do, give me the checklist, I will execute and I will execute it with an A. And other people it's like, and that's actually how they thrive. Like they want that directive, you know, obviously with the support of coaching. But other people, you know, I think it's a gentler approach.
(17:00 - 17:31) And sometimes we're just like peeling back that onion, right? We're getting to these deeper layers and we're trying to figure out like where the struggles are and, you know, where can we optimize? But also I have a big kind of my philosophy on what somebody's like capacity to optimize, right? So for every woman, this might be different because for somebody they might be like, I'm really not eating well. Like I'm actually not exercising. I have a really stressful job and I have my kids and I have taken care of my aging parents.
(17:31 - 17:51) And like, they might check like every box that we might look at and be like, this person like has just a really high load. So typically it's not the person that you're gonna sit down with and be like, we're gonna change everything about the way you eat, right? And like, you have to get your eight hours of sleep and like, you gotta start getting to the gym five days a week as such. So all of that becomes so individualized.
(17:51 - 18:07) I like to say, I think about everything as like levers in our health and like, what lever are we gonna pull first? Are we gonna pull one of these levers, right? And we're gonna work on that for a few months. Maybe we'll do two together. Maybe like you think that you wanna pull this one.
(18:07 - 18:37) So maybe it's just like, okay, I need to go to the gym five days a week, right? And so that's, they're like very fixated on that. And we're like, movement and exercise is definitely part of this. But you've also shared that, you know, you're sleeping four and a half hours a night, you're waking up, right? So your sleep is really not good, right? And that's impacting the food choices you're making and like even your capacity to be able to go to the gym and make gains, right? And have the body feel like it's in a rebuilding state.
(18:37 - 18:57) So I love to just really get in there and be like, what am I hearing? Like, I know like, what does someone like wanna be doing, but also to set them up for success is like what actually makes the most sense for the person in front of me. Yeah, yeah, such a good point. Yes, because yeah, I was gonna say, and just their readiness and their willingness to make those changes.
(18:57 - 19:30) So like you said, you have to kind of start gentler with some than others, which is fine because it is, it's a marathon, not a sprint, right? I mean, no matter if you're hitting it hard, right off the bat, I feel like there's still, they have to know it's, we're in this for the long run. They're gonna make these changes and it's something that's gonna last, yeah. I think typically too, if they're kind of coming from a place, everyone's first thought is obviously like eat well and exercise and of course, nutrition is a huge cornerstone of this.
(19:30 - 19:54) And of course, movement is a huge cornerstone. But then again, I'm also like, hey, maybe we're actually gonna start with supporting your stress response system and we're gonna focus on your sleep. And so for some people, they might be like, what? Like, what are we doing here? But I've actually had like some of my clients actually reflect that, that was just like almost like a breath of fresh air because they were like, I've just always, I've been working on my weight, working on my weight, like trying to do this.
(19:54 - 21:03) And now you've like given me permission to do a meditation every night, like, okay. And like, you've helped me understand that this is intimately related to my weight health and optimizing my hormones and my body, finding a place of safety, which is gonna make everything work better in this symphony. And so I love kind of like bringing that into that conversation when everything's been so simplified and like just eat healthy and exercise as we see like that banner across the annual lab work from doctors, well-meaning, but as I'm sure you know, from like clients or patients, they're just like, okay, but like, what does that really mean for me, right? Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's where you and I align, I feel like so well, because that's when somebody starts with me, same thing, I'm like, let's do some simple breathing exercises, let's do some deeper inner work to see like what's going on and help regulate that nervous system because otherwise all the other changes aren't going to stick and they're not gonna mean anything if your body doesn't feel safe enough to make these changes, your body and your mind, I should say, yeah. (21:06 - 22:12) PCOS is often talked about as a hormone condition, but as we already kind of mentioned, metabolism plays a big role too. So why is blood sugar and insulin such an important part of that picture? Yeah, from the blood sugar, like, you know, insulin picture when we think about how that relationship works, you know, blood sugar is impacted by food, obviously, this is the big one, but it's also impacted by, I think it's like 40 other factors, right? So it's not all nutrition-based, but talking about it from like a nutrition thing, and it's not just what it is, lots of times it's like, you know, when was it, right? Also in a context too, what was it with? But when we think about, you know, in its most simplest forms, you know, in the macronutrients, those carbohydrates that are broken, you know, we eat them, they're digested, going through the system, then they're broken down to glucose, right? This is what these are. So then the glucose is like out in the bloodstream and people can picture that, and we're always supposed to have a certain level of sugar, like in the blood, but we can have too much, and we have too much, right? The sugar really can't go anywhere without the help of insulin.
(22:12 - 22:33) So that's another hormone that's released from the pancreas. And so that basically kind of senses their sugar, the pancreas sends out some insulin. I always say, I like to think of like insulin as like the key that's like, you know, unlocking all the doors around the different cell receptors and saying, okay, glucose, like enter, like get out of the blood, you know, to a certain level, move along, move along.
(22:33 - 22:59) And it does that in a, you know, in an optimized state with a balance of, here's enough insulin, I'm clearing that glucose, we're keeping this healthy range over time. Well, we can often see so sometimes is like, just that demand when we call like insulin resistance, sometimes as we say, like, I like to think of that like a lock in that key to move that sugar just gets really rusty. Or we say like insulin resistance is really like that term.
(22:59 - 23:11) And so the pancreas is like, okay, here's more insulin, right, here's like more keys, like let's clear this sugar out. Okay, still not working, here's some more, here's some more. And of course, that's kind of creating the stress.
(23:11 - 23:38) And sometimes we can capture that if we did do a fasted insulin level, we might be able to actually see, and I've seen this with, especially with PCOS patients, that that's high, it is high. And so it's showing us that can be high, but your average blood sugar, right, especially on the hemoglobin A1c, and we'll talk about the CGMs a little bit. Sometimes even on CGM at that point, things can still look pretty darn good, but we see the insulin levels quite high.
(23:38 - 24:08) And so that's telling me that we're suboptimal, right, in this relationship, even if like one kind of like looks okay now. And of course, we know those high insulin levels, insulin is kind of like a fat storage hormone promoter as such, and so it can be really hard to release weight if that insulin level is staying up high. So we tend to target getting the blood sugar down, right, and supporting that to try to get those insulin levels and try to keep those a little bit lower.
(24:08 - 24:44) So that's definitely an opportunity to look in and how are we doing that, right? Of course, we're doing that through nutrition and we're doing it through movement. I use like the glucose monitors, which we can talk about to track, trying to reduce inflammation, trying to reduce stress, optimize maybe any nutrients where we might see gaps in the diet and things like that. But all of that kind of comes together to try to make the body be more insulin sensitive, meaning when we're kind of, we're able to regulate that insulin glucose relationship and the receptors and like everything's happy and in balance.
(24:44 - 25:11) And it can take time because it takes time sort of for these signaling pathways to kind of become suboptimal over time. And as we know, it's really, it's involving the brain, it's involving obviously like the ovaries, like it's like kind of touching on everyone. And as I'm sure you speak of up to a lot when we think of like PCOS, people are like, oh, it's not just like a reproductive, like this is a whole hormone symphony for many women, particularly grounded in like metabolic health.
(25:12 - 25:43) Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. You have to, again, yeah, it's affecting so many things. I mean, and I think we talked about this when we first, you know, when we first talked and how insulin isn't really looked at too much by physicians, but kind of mentioning that's almost kind of a first line of, you know, indication that something could be happening before the glucose and the A1C actually are elevated.
(25:45 - 26:09) Yeah, so yeah, so let's kind of dive in a little bit deeper to the CGMs that you mentioned, because I, like I'm interested in this. I, my plan this year is to wear one for a little while and see what's going on, because I also just kind of like to nerd out on that stuff. But yeah, that's a big part of what you work, you know, with your patients, everything, you include CGMs in that picture.
(26:10 - 26:43) And a lot of people maybe think that it's only for diabetes. So can you talk about what these are, continuous glucose monitors and who they may benefit? Yeah, so yeah, traditionally, you know, when these first, you know, came on the market, it was for diabetics, even more like type one diabetics, right, to kind of alleviate having to do the finger sticks. So normally, traditionally, you know, you would have to take a small little sample of the blood from the tip of your finger, doing that, you know, six, eight, 10 times a day. (26:43 - 26:59) I'm sure as a nurse, you probably remember that with patients at the bedside. And that's kind of what we had. So as, you know, you know, technology moved on, these continuous glucose monitors were actually able to measure the amount of sugar in the fluid underneath the skin.
(26:59 - 27:12) So either kind of on the belly or the back of the arm and the fleshy areas, which they call actually the interstitial fluid. And they saw that this was pretty similar to what a blood level would be. So it's not measuring the blood, but a pretty good proxy for it.
(27:12 - 27:45) So it's been used for that for some time now. Of course, you know, they were more expensive, the insurance limitations as such. They were expanded a little bit more for maybe type two diabetics on insulin, as far as like insurance coverage goes or how you might see somebody working with these maybe with their endocrinologist to help guide like treatment decisions, right? And then I would say more of recently over the last couple of years, we maybe started seeing people use these actually in a little bit more of a preventive stance as the prices have come down.
(27:45 - 28:23) And we can touch on that a little bit, still a little bit of the wild west there, but using it maybe, you know, with a diagnosis of maybe type two diabetes, but maybe they don't actually aren't on insulin, but maybe a doctor said, hey, let's get an idea of what's driving your sugars up. Same thing with pre-diabetes. And now I would say in this landscape, since they've moved from prescription only, at least here in the US, to over-the-counter, what they call now biosensors, is anybody can buy them, right? And so I can see people using this, you know, with pre-diabetes early stages.
(28:23 - 28:58) A lot of times if they're on that borderline and they're about to head over into the red, if they've noticed, okay, in my annual lab work every single year, my hemoglobin A1C has increased or every single year my fasting glucose has increased, or maybe they had the suboptimal metabolic health markers, as I said, the cholesterol, maybe they're struggling with the weight loss resistance or the weight gain. And as I like to talk about, I'm like, is blood sugar part of this picture? I also have just sort of the optimizers, right? That just are wearing all the wearables. They wanna get this baseline.
(28:59 - 29:11) I also have, you know, patients and clients that might use it for like understanding symptoms. So like maybe they really get headaches after they eat or they're super low energy. Maybe they get fatigued.
(29:12 - 29:35) You know, from a weight management perspective, some people find it very helpful. One, because they're kind of journaling and tracking their activity and their lifestyle and their diet, but they're also able to pinpoint, oh, a glucose spike is related to a crash, which is why I'm always heading to the vending machine or heading to Starbucks at two o'clock or why I'm always exhausted at three o'clock. It's because my lunch every day was driving my blood sugar up.
(29:35 - 29:49) Similar sometimes in the morning when someone's like, I had breakfast and I'm always like, this was so common. I'm always starving two hours after I eat breakfast and I always have to eat again. And we can tie that back and say, well, look, let's see what was going on on the glucose monitor and things.
(29:50 - 30:08) Poor sleep is another one. You know, what's going on after you eat that dinner and maybe that evening snack and what are your blood sugars doing overnight? So this can be an opportunity for intervention here. I love this conversation with Beverly because it brings so much clarity to something so many women are experiencing.
(30:09 - 30:27) Hormonal shifts don't just change your mood or cycle, they change your metabolism too. If there's one thing I hope you're walking away with, it's this, you are not broken, you're not lazy and you're not failing because generic advice isn't working. Your body is giving you data through symptoms, through patterns, through trends and labs.
(30:27 - 30:48) And as Beverly said so well, the goal is to figure out which lever to pull first based on your capacity and your season of life. If you want to connect with Beverly, you can find her at purelypresenthealth.com and on Instagram at purelypresenthealth. She also has a resource for women in perimenopause navigating prediabetes and metabolic shifts.
(30:48 - 30:59) And honestly, if you have PCOS or suspect insulin resistance, you'll probably find it helpful too. I'll link everything in the show notes for you. And as promised, let's talk about what's coming up next.
(30:59 - 31:45) Mindful to mindful, our live workshop on March 15th at noon Eastern. This workshop is for you if you've tried everything and feel like you're stuck between two extremes, either trying to be perfect with food or feeling like you can't follow through at all. Inside this live experience, we're going to teach you how to recognize what kind of hunger is actually driving the urge to eat so you stop guessing, calm the nervous system before food decisions because dysregulation changes everything, create a simple repeatable rhythm that supports your hormones, blood sugar, and cravings, and shift from mindless autopilot to confident self-led choices without tracking, obsessing, or starting over every Monday.
(31:45 - 32:02) If you've been telling yourself, I know what to do, I just can't stay consistent, this is for you because we're not doing more discipline. We're building the skills that make consistency feel possible. Check the show notes to register for Mindful to Mindful on March 15th.
(32:02 - 32:20) And if you love this episode, it would mean the world if you leave a review, share it with a friend, or screenshot it and tag me so I can thank you and reshare. Now, all right, I am sending you so much love and I will see you on the next episode of PCOS Unfiltered. Nourish, Heal, Thrive.