How to help heal PCOS with your diet and lifestyle
The natural way to heal.
Dr Nat Kringoudis shares her tips on how to heal Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) by making changes to your food choices and lifestyle.
There are several important factors in the treatment of PCOS. I’ve broken it down to four key points.
1. Diet and lifestyle
These are vital for women with PCOS, as for all women. Undoing the vicious cycle of PCOS sugar cravings starts with following a wholefood diet. Gut health is imperative. If the gut isn’t assimilating, we can’t readily use the fuel we’re putting in, and it gets stored as fat. Food allergies and intolerances will also compromise absorption. If you can’t absorb, you can’t nourish or heal.
2. Exercise smarter, not harder
Weight training and low body weight both place stress loads on the body, causing spikes in stress hormones. So short bursts of training will be healthier than slogging it out like a machine. I’m also a big fan of incidental exercise and activity that uses your whole body such as gardening, spring cleaning, or walking instead of driving to the local shops. I used to think slogging it out at the gym and sweating up a storm was the only way to keep my weight in check. Turns out I had to learn the hard way how wrong and counterproductive that was. Intensity is key, not necessarily duration.
3. Love your liver
Second only to gut health is liver health. Your liver is responsible for cleansing the blood and moving out the gunk. It’s like a sponge, mopping up the toxins that would otherwise be polluting your body. From a Chinese medicine viewpoint, stress substantially upsets the liver. Consider doing an alkalising cleanse with a short-term, plant-based diet for a week or two, starting each morning with lemon water and ending each day with a probiotic. In just a few days you’ll begin to feel a million bucks.
4. Healing the mind and alleviating stress
This is the most powerful tool in the treatment of PCOS and hormone imbalance. Your thoughts and beliefs influence the way in which your tissues, cells and hormones communicate. If there are unresolved emotional issues, it’s time you sorted them out (easier said than done, I know). But your body sees this as another form of stress and will continue to be affected by anxiety or depression or fluctuating hormones until it’s addressed.
Here’s the thing – stress of any kind does evil things to the body. Stress of any kind lessens normal body function. Stress of all kinds affects fertility. This is the bottom line.
