Can Cycle Syncing Help Bring Your Hormones into Alignment? (with women's hormone expert Alisa Vitti)

0:02When you are pioneering anything or introducing new ideas to the culture, you get criticized. You do? Yeah. Did you hear about that? I didn't find the one. I found someone I respected and we made it the one. In a sort of longing kind of view of love, people understand each other as if by magic. Nothing in itself is addictive on the one hand. On the other hand, everything could be addictive if there's an emptiness in that person that needs to be filled. I now know that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when you change your energy, you change your life. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. This is the Goop Podcast, bringing together thought leaders, culture changers, creatives, founders, and CEOs, scientists, doctors, healers, and seekers here to start conversations because simply asking questions and listening has the power to change the way we see the world.

0:58Here we go. My guest today is Elisa Vitti. Elisa is a functional nutritionist and women's hormone expert. She is also the author of two fantastic books. The first is called Woman Code and the second is In the Flow. Elisa is the founder of Flow Living, a hormonal healthcare platform and the creator of a highly rated period tracking app called My Flow, designed to help women optimize their diet, fitness, and lifestyle according to their cycle. Her own diagnosis with PCOS is what led her to find alternative ways to heal. She eventually created her cycle syncing method, but I will let Elisa tell you all about that today.

1:40So let's get to my conversation with Elisa Vitti.

1:47I'm so happy to have you on the Goop podcast. You've done such novel, unique work in this space of hormones. And there's so many women who don't want to use HRT or can't use HRT. And I get asked this question all the time. Like if I don't want to take HRT or, you know, like for example, one of my friends had a hormonally sensitive breast cancer. So she's not allowed to take HRT and she's really struggling with all of these hormonal changes. And so this is such an amazing approach. Will you tell us, first of all, about, I think we should start with cycle syncing just to kind of set the context for everybody, because this is something that you developed nutritionally and functionally to help women through these hormonal changes.

2:46So tell us a little bit about how you got the idea and how you started to chart out cycle syncing. I mean, it's been part of the whole journey of my career in taking care of women. I've been doing this now for 25 years and you are a functional nutrition expert and women's hormones expert. And what I started to see over the years is just the disproportionate number of women suffering from hormonal issues compared to men. And I wanted to dig into more why that was. The first, I would say, decade of my practice in Manhattan, I was seeing a lot of women with every kind of menstrual disorder from PCOS to fibroids to perimenopause and infertility and everything in between.

3:42And so really evolving a protocol that helped them recalibrate their endocrine function was certainly the first order of business. But then I was just sort of looking globally at, well, why is this so much worse for women? What are we missing? Where's the blind spot here? Why does 80 % of the female population struggle with these issues when it's like under 20 % for men? Like we had to be missing something. So I just kept diving into the research and I uncovered this little known biological rhythm that women have called the infradian rhythm. And we all know about our circadian clock and how essential it is to take care of that.

4:26But what, you know, you don't know what you don't know, and you can't take care of what you don't understand. And this infradian rhythm was just really game-changing in terms of my understanding of how the female body, in terms of its hormonal needs, really needs to be approached. It affects so many key systems of the body, Gwyneth, from your brain to your metabolism, to your immune system, your gut microbiome, your sexual response, obviously your menstrual cycle. But we just, it was a total blind spot. And because of that, this sort of answered the question for me, why are so many more women suffering?

5:04Well, we're actively disrupting this infradian rhythm and we don't even know we're doing it. And then that sort of tied into the second sort of revelation I had when I was looking at the researchers. I said, my gosh, you know, this is about the time when, I think it was maybe six or seven years ago when HIIT workouts were like the glorified everywhere in the news, the gold standard of if you do this, all will be solved, all your problems will be magically fixed. And when you dive into these studies, the vast majority of these studies are conducted on men and sometimes, but not often, include postmenopausal women.

5:44Neither group has an active infradian clock. And in the male category, they don't even have female hormones. And so the research that is being done, of course, we have come to understand since, is really gender biased. But we're sharing it to everyone in a way that's sort of misleading, saying this is globally beneficial. You can all try it and we'll have the same benefits. But when you look at the history of women on ketogenic diets, women on paleo diets, women on all of these types of diets, they just don't work the same way. And in fact, as I was digging into the research, we really see that they have the opposite effect in women in their reproductive years.

6:34And so that's sort of what the light bulb moment was for me. It's like, okay, we have all this gender bias research. Women are doing all the things that optimize male hormonal biology and disrupt female hormonal biology. And we need a system that That organizes our self-care around this infradian rhythm so that we can take care of it and not keep disrupting it and having all these symptoms. Because the symptoms that women struggle with the most are things that really line up with those six key systems of the body that the infradian rhythm governs. Can you explain to me a little bit what is the infradian rhythm and what are the different kind of sections of the rhythm?

7:19So let's start with what we know. All of us understand a circadian rhythm, right? And circa dia, circadian, around the day. It just means that this biological clock runs on a 24-hour cycle. Infradian means longer than a day. And in women, this clock governs the menstrual cycle. But just like it's too simplistic to look at the circadian rhythm and say it just governs sleep-wake cycles because we know it governs so much more the timing of pretty much every function of the body within a 24-hour period. For example, I always like to give this example. Thank goodness you have a circadian clock because if not, you could be woken up in the middle of a REM sleep cycle with a bowel movement urge, right?

8:05It may be terrible, chaos, biological chaos. But that's what that circadian rhythm does more than just give you those cues to wake up and go to sleep, it's governing the timing of all of those small things that are happening inside the body. The infradian rhythm, yes, it will give you that sense of when you're ovulating, when you're menstruating, it'll keep that rhythm. But it's also giving a rhythmic effect on your metabolic speed, for example. In the first half of your cycle, as we'll get into when I start explaining this a little bit more, you know, the first half of your cycle, your metabolism is slower.

8:45Second half of your cycle after ovulation speeds up, right? Resting cortisol levels are different, you know, just so many different things shift as this infrating effect, you know, has its impact across the month. And how were you first able to chart that? Is this like existing data that none of us have just ever come across or heard of? I mean, there are so many studies that went into the publication of the, in the flow book. We had to actually build a website to publish all the studies so that we didn't have to print them all out. But yes, I was pulling massive amounts of research looking at cortisol patterns across the cycle, blood sugar patterns across the cycle, gut changes across the cycle, micronutrient level shifts across the cycle, really pulling as much research as I could to really understand what are the facts that we can build a supportive method on top of.

9:43And that's how the whole process was created. And presumably there's a biological reason, right? That our metabolism speed up and slow down in the luteal phase versus, right? So what is the biological reason for those things that, you know, cortisol changes depending on which phase and, and then how, how do we look to support that? And are we into those things or are we trying to counteract like, Oh, you know, my metabolism is slowing down because it's the first half of my period. Am I leaning into that? Cause it's biologically correct. Or like, how should I approach this? Start with the first part, which is why, why, what's the reason for this?

10:26I mean, I think fundamentally, if you take the 10 ,000 foot view perspective, it really does revolve around our reproductive capacity. So, and as I charted out in the first, I think the second chapter of In the Flow, I really wanted to put it in front of women's perspective, how powerful of an operating system they have, how efficient of an engine they have. And we see that a lot metabolically, nutritionally. So you are every month doing two pretty strenuous things, let's say, from a micronutrient perspective. One is ovulating. And the second is 3D printing an organ called the endometrium. You know, you manufacture that fresh out of the ecosystem of the micronutrients you consume every month.

11:22So that's why your metabolism speeds up post ovulation so that you can really manufacture that organ and make it as rich and nutrient dense as possible. You need to be hungrier to eat more so that you have more micronutrients available to do it. And that's fundamentally that part of it, right? And then you want to eat more so you keep your blood sugar stable as more of those micronutrients are going to the manufacturing process. In the first half, it's less strenuous, right, except for that peak ovulation moment, and you'd need less calories, right? It doesn't mean that your metabolism is slowing down to such a degree that you would gain weight and you would need to counter effect that with changes to your diet.

12:07Quite the contrary. Because this is sort of a part one, part two in terms of a metabolic shift, you want to lean into it because you get that carb cycling, you get that sort of metabolic conditioning that eating the same way day in and day out, which has been the gold standard for as long as we can all remember in the diet culture, doesn't serve your female ecosystem, but works really well for the male ecosystem, which their testosterone and their hormonal patterns run on a circadian only rhythm. So they should eat the same calories day in and day out. It will optimize their metabolic function.

12:47But for you, for women, striving to eat the same calories each day throughout the cycle really puts you at a disadvantage in so many ways and exacerbates anxiety, exacerbates PMS, ages your ovaries faster, decreases your fertility. I mean, just that one, just getting that one thing wrong has such profound impact. And why? Because sex Sex hormones are one thing, but your master regulating hormones are insulin, cortisol, and oxytocin. And if you're doing things with your diet and lifestyle that are disrupting those master regulating hormones, you're going to have a downward sort of negative impact on the sex hormone production, which so many women have.

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14:41So what should we be eating in the different phases of our cycle? And one should be leaning into, I mean, it's really incredible to hear you talk about the downstream impact of calorie restriction during some of these phases. And I think culturally it's so embedded in so many of our minds. And it's interesting that it could be actually counterproductive to maintaining the weight that you feel all the best at, right? So how should we rethink the way that we eat based on these phases? Like what should we be eating? And by the way, this is tell everybody about the app that you created, which helps with this.

15:19Oh, yes. So the MyFlow app, it's it and it's important to make sure you're getting the correct app, it has a circle icon, and it says my flow. That's the app that I built that, you know, really personalizes the cycle syncing method to your unique menstrual cycle so that you're getting recipes and meal plans and workout videos and a whole calendar planner inside of this app to help you're going to touch on this as well. But exercise is a whole other second. Yes, it's a So there are three pillars to the method. The first is modulating your diet across the cycle, which I'll break down in a minute.

15:56The second is modulating exercise across the cycle. And the third is playing to your cognitive strengths that are shifting due to the hormonal changes in your body throughout the cycle to be more productive with less stress. And it's a revolutionary way to live. It's putting your biology and your hormonal reality at the center of your life, as opposed to how it exists today, which is at the margins and you're swimming upstream. Everything is so much harder. Whatever your personal goals are, whether it be healthy weight or healthy skin or healthy fertility or healthy perimenopause or a healthy libido or just crushing it in your career, if you don't organize your self-care and your life around the hormonal reality that is happening, whether you like it or not, it's all so much harder than it needs to be.

16:53And I think that's the best news that I can give, which is that it can all be so much easier, so much easier. Everything you want to go after can really become something that's a constant state, a flow state, which is why I actually named the book In the Flow, because I was fascinated years ago, 20 years ago, by this concept of like, you know, peak flow states. And I said, well, it's really interesting how men are talking about maintaining peak flow states. And I would try all the things, you know, that were being talked about. But none of it really worked for very long, because after about a week or two, depending on where I was in my cycle and not realizing it, all of those things didn't create a peak flow state, actually put a drain on my energy and everything else.

17:37And so there is this idea of creating a reality in which you can stay in a peak flow state as a female by putting your hormones at the center of your routine. And that's something I think, also backing up, we have no choice but to do it at this stage because the endocrine disruptive chemical load that we're all exposed to is greater in a 30-day period than our grandparents' generation was exposed to in their entire lifetime. Rates of precocious puberty are on the rise in both boys and girls. Infertility is on the rise at younger and younger ages across the genders. And women are starting their second half of perimenopause much younger than really any generation before, which is a sign of rapid ovarian aging due to kind of all the stressors that are taking place on our delicate hormone system.

18:37So this is not sort of a nice to have thing. This is really a lifeline of how do you take care of your hormones in an environment that's really constantly disrupting them. And it's something that you would want your daughter to start as soon as she starts menstruating and you'd want to kind of continue doing this until your very last period. So it's not a diet. It's not anything sort of like that. It's really just a practice, right? That you come to day after day, cycle phase after cycle phase, month over month for decades to help you navigate all the different hormonal inflection points that you'll experience.

19:16So, okay, back to the food. Yeah, getting back to the food. Only a little passionate about your period. I'm probably the person who loves your period the most, but if I can infect you with just a little bit of excitement about your period, I will have done my job here today. Okay, so the food piece, it's two-pronged. First, we want to make sure we're dialing in the caloric intake properly. So relative to what's appropriate for your height and your weight, in the first half of the cycle, you can have about 250 calories less per day compared to the second half. Once you're done ovulating and you're in the luteal phase, you want to eat, studies show, 279 more calories per day relative to what your normal is.

20:02So you kind of want to titrate down and up depending on whether you're in the first half or the second half of your cycle. But then we take it a step further because we want to bring in that functional medicine approach, which is really looking at how can we use food strategically to deal with all the fluctuating hormones. For example, so many women struggle with mid-cycle symptoms during ovulation. They can break out on their chin. They can have breast tenderness. They can have even mid-cycle cramping, sometimes spotting, bloating, even mood swings, right? All of this is indicative of estrogen overload or estrogen dominance as a lot of people refer to it, but it's more really the body's inability to break down and metabolize that estrogen efficiently due to the lack of correct micronutrients in the liver and in the large intestine.

20:55So the cycle phases are broken out. There's a very, you know, it's gone viral on TikTok at this point. So everybody knows the in the flow food chart. And each of the four phases has a specific list of foods that are based on Chinese medicine, traditional Chinese medicine theory to really look at how do we use food to support the liver, for example, in the ovulatory phase when estrogen is at its peak level. You're going to have the most estrogen of any day of the cycle. And what would be an example of that? Like what you would eat? So you would eat in a day, mostly raw, cruciferous things, smoothies, emphasis on raw vegetables, things that are going to give you lots of micronutrients to help the liver kind of recruit B vitamins and vitamin C, selenium, all of these things to help it go through its three stages of detoxification.

21:47So plenty of fruits and vegetables, and you can do them in a way that's going to feel pretty comfortable for most women. Like, oh yes, I'm happy to have a salad. I'm happy to have a smoothie. This all feels relatively familiar to me. Then we get to the luteal phase, right? This is the longest phase of the cycle. It's 10 to 12 days. Now our metabolism has sped up. So we're eating more calories, but we have to eat smart calories, calories that are slow burning and sustainable so that we don't have a blood sugar crash, which will exacerbate our PMS. And we're going to be shifting kind of what we're eating to deal with the introduction of progesterone, which enters the party during the luteal phase.

22:26And it's my favorite hormone. And this is my favorite phase of the cycle. This phase is your power phase. And I'll explain more about why when we talk about brain chemistry changes. But if you take care of yourself during this phase, you should feel no symptoms of PMS at all. What? None. I feel like we need to pause on that because the cultural narrative has been so longstanding, just really saying it's inevitable that you'll feel unwell for parts of the cycle. That is just your destiny as a woman and there's no escaping it. That is the biggest load of horse poop that you've ever been fed. You are biologically designed to feel fantastic every day of the month.

23:22And anytime you don't, it's just an opportunity for you to look at how you can refine your self-care and tweak things. But in this luteal phase, you'll eat more calories, but you're also going to eat slower burning carbohydrates and more cooked cruciferous vegetables. Progesterone slows down the transit time in the gut, can create a semi-constipated state where you have struggles to have bowel movements. We don't want this because estrogen is still surging and we do need to get that out through the bowels every day. So we have things like, you know, Buddha bowl, right? Like brown rice and some black beans and some cooked kale or cooked cabbage and protein and some avocado.

24:01Again, very nourishing. Eat as much as you feel comfortable eating and watch your blood sugar feel stable. watch your energy and mood feel stable. All of this is a sign that you're moving in the right direction. If you feel hangry, if you feel like you've woken up from the bottom of a bag of chips out of a trance of like, you know, binge eating, you haven't been setting yourself up for success earlier in the day, right? You want to eat this way, breakfast, lunch, and dinner so that you don't have any, you know, major cravings and that you feel happy. So much luteal phase anxiety is just mismanaged blood sugar because, again, we don't know about this infradian effect.

24:40We're trying to keep eating the salads and smoothies that worked for us a week ago, and we don't feel good, right? But when we change that, we feel great. And then when we get to the menstrual phase, I indicate for women to shift again. You can watch your own appetite. A lot of women feel the intense metabolic spike from the luteal phase to start downshifting. They feel like they need less food, but they still need that nutrient dense food. So we want to replenish the lost micronutrients, which studies show that we are slightly more deficient in things during the menstrual phase. So we want to eat more animal protein, more fats, things that are going to hold us, but maybe not fill our bellies and deal with any bloating or things of that nature.

25:24So it's really a two pronged approach, calories plus how can the food help us with metabolizing estrogen, stabilizing blood sugar, et cetera. Yeah. And so when you, when somebody signs up for the app, which is like consistently ranked in the top 10, because it's so good. So does the app get to know kind of our cycles and then recommend what we should be eating kind of keep us on track? Exactly. And it will customize your recipes for you. You can even search like other favorite recipes that everybody else is making in that phase. And it's quite fun to see what everybody likes. That's amazing. And before we get on the exercise subject, which I want to, you said something earlier around like paleo and keto diets.

26:13I have a lot of women friends who are like very strict keto people. I've never tried it, but I've been paleo on and off for a while because of the, you know, lowering inflammation impact. But tell, tell me a little bit why those are not good to do kind of around the whole infradian system. And I'll throw in intermittent fasting there as well. I'll throw it. Let's just throw that in. I want to know everything. So when I was doing my research, I was really shocked to see that, you know, in the examples of keto and, you know, keto and paleo can be very similar depending on how you structure them and intermittent fasting that for women in their reproductive years.

26:58Now, I want to say if you're postmenopausal, intermittent fasting is great. When I am postmenopausal, I will be doing a lot more of that. But as I am still cycling, I am cycle syncing. And what I saw in the research was that, for example, the benefits of intermittent fasting on autophagy, on metabolism, on cognitive health, on thyroid health, all these things that were studied on men and post-menopausal women, in reproductive women, it was the opposite. It was sort of not helping their brains. It was disrupting their thyroid. Same thing with keto and paleo. It was, in some cases, shrinking ovary size.

27:41Yeah. So there were just a bunch of red flags saying, these things, if we're going to be universally saying like intermittent fasting is good for everyone, then let's study it on everyone and not just men and postmenopausal women, because all these women in their reproductive years, you know, and again, I've been seeing women for 25 years now, whenever there's a new fad, I usually see the fallout in their cycles, right? So with women, for example, who were, PCOS is a great example of this. These women are struggling as I used to when I used to suffer from PCOS, with their weight, with acne, it's so all-consuming, that disorder, that you will try anything to feel better.

28:25And so if the news cycle is saying, okay, keto is the thing now that's going to help, you'll try it. But a lot of these women were having worsening symptoms, or women who didn't even have PCOS would be doing keto, and then their cycle would just get all distorted, either too long or too short or heavier. You know, so just we have to consider that the hormonal clock or the hormonal heartbeat of estrogen that women have every month needs careful, distinct consideration. and if we're not studying it, it's really harmful to just go out and say, well, even though we didn't study your specific biology, this very extreme form of, you know, nutritional manipulation is fine for you to try, right?

29:12And I think that's the thing. And I think women are so frustrated and rightfully so jaded that they've been, you know, marketed to for decades about this is the magic thing that's going to help you lose weight. You know, as somebody who's been I'm five foot six, I'm 140 pounds. I've been 210 pounds, you know, twice in my life at the height of my PCOS and post-pregnancy or when I came out of the hospital after I gave birth. And, you know, how do you maintain a 70 pound weight loss for a long time is really understanding how to cater to your metabolism as opposed to fighting it. Fighting it just, you know, ends in a losing battle.