This week’s episode is all about the four foundations of endo health. I’m super excited about the upcoming launch of the Endo Warrior Circle, a subscription-based program where everything is broken down into these four essential foundations. Today, I want to give you a sneak preview of the overarching topics we'll be covering, and help you figure out what you need to support right now.
In today’s episode, you’ll hear:
-The foundations are what you need to build a solid base to help you create a sustainable approach to managing endo. Focusing on one thing at a time will help you make progress with your endo symptoms and sustain that progress for the long term.
- 1. Mindset and stress: Often overlooked, mindset and stress management are crucial. Believing that you can heal your body and improve your symptoms is the first step toward better health.
-2. Diet: an essential part to manage endo symptoms, and the best diet to focus on is an anti inflammatory diet.
-3. Sleep: Prioritizing sleep and having good sleep habits are crucial when managing endo symptoms. Sleep impacts your diet, stress, and mindset.
-4. Lifestyle: This includes movement, eating habits, creating space for healing, resting, and doing activities you love. A balanced lifestyle is key to managing endo and enhancing your overall quality of life.
-While supplements can be helpful, a quality diet is more important. Additionally, seeking help from mental health professionals, functional practitioners, acupuncture, pelvic floor therapy, and other resources can be extremely beneficial in supporting these foundations.
Making one positive change at a time creates a snowball effect, pushing your life in the direction you want. It’s tempting to change everything at once, especially when in pain, but sustainable progress comes from focusing on one foundation at a time. When you focus on one, the rest will improve because each foundation relies on the other. Doors are open from June 24th-28th. After that, you can join the waitlist. In the Endo Warrior Circle, we’ll dive deeper into these topics and more. I hope to see you there!
Resources:
Episode 34
Episode 35
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Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only. This may not be the best fit for you and your personal situation. It shall not be construed as medical advice. The information and education provided here is not intended or implied to supplement or replace professional medical treatment, advice, and/or diagnosis. Always check with your own physician or medical professional before trying or implementing any information read here.
Alyssa Chavez [00:00:01]:
Hey my friend, and welcome back to the Endo Belly Girl podcast. It's June, it's summertime. It's almost my birthday. As I'm recording this, my birthday is actually next week, so fun times all around. And actually my anniversary is the week after my birthday. So so many fun things coming up over here and just summertime fun, right? I am also just hard at work putting everything together for the upcoming membership that's going to be opening so soon as this episode is going to be aired. I absolutely can't wait to open up the doors to the endowarrior circle. It's been a long time coming.
Alyssa Chavez [00:00:44]:
So many of you have been asking for it, and I am super excited to actually get this thing off the ground and see all of you in there and actually get to see your faces and get to know you a little bit. So inside of that membership, just to give you a little sneak preview, I'm putting together this content library and it's going to have really a lot of information in there, but organized in a way where it's actually giving you as an endowarrior kind of a process to follow as far as organizing your diet and lifestyle and all the things to be endo friendly and figuring out just what works best for your unique body. But really, all that content, videos and things that are going to be in there are going to be organized based on these four foundations of endo health that I'm going to talk about today. Now, this is all things, they're all things that I've talked about before. In fact, it's like most of what I talk about on the podcast here. So it probably won't sound shockingly new to you, but it's just a new way to kind of organize and present this information. So what I'm going to do today on the podcast here is lay out the four foundations for endometriosis health and what that looks like so that you can see what you are in need of the most support in right now. And I really created this because I've been working with clients one on one for quite some time and have just been really kind of making notes for myself and thinking through things along the way and noticing these things that just keep coming up and seem to be the most important pieces for endowarriors.
Alyssa Chavez [00:02:36]:
And that's what I wanted to share with you all today. So the foundations, right? What really is a foundation? Well, think about how a house is built, right? I don't build homes myself, but I can at least picture what that would look like. Right. You start by laying the foundation. Right. You build a solid base for that house to be built on top of. And you need that because if you just start throwing up walls on top of the earth, that house is not going to be very stable. It may look really good as you're building it.
Alyssa Chavez [00:03:14]:
It may look awesome, but if you don't have that strong foundation, eventually it's all going to collapse. And that's really what the foundations are all about here, is creating that space for yourself, for your own health, building that foundation one little block at a time. And I do want to really speak to that part, building it one block at a time. Because, my friend, you don't have to do it all at once. This is where people get overwhelmed. And even within the membership, I invite people to take these steps one piece at a time. I'm going to kind of give just an overview of all of this today. But I really encourage you just to focus on one piece.
Alyssa Chavez [00:03:59]:
Pick one of the foundations and just make that your foundation for the next month or even the next three months. Right. So that you can create new habits in your life that are actually going to be sustainable and doable for the long term, rather than just trying to overhaul your life and make all the changes at once, which tends to not be quite as sustainable in the long term. So let's dive in. The four foundations of endo health. Just to put you out of your misery of suspense, over here are mindset and stress, diet, sleep and lifestyle. Those are the four foundations. Mindset and stress.
Alyssa Chavez [00:04:44]:
I kind of put those two together, diet, sleep and lifestyle. Now, these foundations are all connected, right? Each one supports the next, and they all work together to support your overall health. I've heard this thought of as like legs on a table, right? You need all four legs at the end of the day to hold the table up. Now, again, that doesn't mean you have to build all four legs at the same time. You can build them one at a time, but eventually you want to have all four legs there. So you have a nice stable table or a nice foundation for your house, depending on which visual you're going with today. Okay, so foundations, let's dive in. Let's do a little overview of what these are, what that looks like.
Alyssa Chavez [00:05:30]:
Foundation number one, mindset and stress. I put these together because I really feel like they go hand in hand. These two are so often overlooked. There is a huge connection, though, between stress and mindset and endometriosis and your body's ability to heal. If you do not believe that your body can ever feel better or that the things that you're doing will ever work. It won't. I don't care if you're eating the most perfect diet that was ever created, if there is such a thing. If you don't actually believe that your body can heal, that your symptoms can improve, it won't.
Alyssa Chavez [00:06:16]:
Right, because our bodies fall right in line with what our minds are thinking. But the opposite is also true. If you fully, wholeheartedly believe that your body can get better, your health can get better, you can feel better than you do right now. Today, your body will do it. I've seen it happen time and time again. So that mindset and stress piece is huge, right? When we're talking about a holistic approach, this is where it's at. Holistic doesn't just mean what you're eating. Holistic is looking at all of you.
Alyssa Chavez [00:06:58]:
Your mind, your body, your spirit, the whole picture of who you are as a person, as a human being. Now, I, of course, started what I'm doing going into nutrition. I studied nutrition first and foremost. So maybe it comes as a surprise coming from a functional nutritionist. But this, the mindset and stress is foundation one for a reason. I did put the foundations in a certain order for a reason. It was not random. I always say, you can't out supplement a poor diet, but you also can't out diet a mountain of stress.
Alyssa Chavez [00:07:45]:
Foundation number two. Diet. Diet's something I talk about a lot. I've quite a few previous episodes we've talked about diet. We've unpacked things. We've taken a deep dive into all things diet. Feel free to go back and binge episodes to really learn more about that. But just to really cover kind of the basics today, right? Anti inflammatory diet.
Alyssa Chavez [00:08:14]:
Right. Focus on whole food, lots of nutrients, avoiding the processed foods, vegetable oils, sugar, some of those potentially inflammatory foods like gluten, dairy, corn and soy. Some of this is individual, right? If you've listened to me for any length of time, you know that I am all about bio individuality when it comes to diet. That's actually a big part of what we talk about within the content in the membership. But that's kind of your foundation right there. But just diet. And there's so many layers to diet. There's so many things that we're going to be covering within the membership.
Alyssa Chavez [00:08:52]:
But just know that is definitely one of the foundations. If it's not something you already have worked on, have done some. Some tweaking and play around, playing around with your diet, definitely something that you want to be thinking about. Foundation number three is sleep. Of course, sleep's an important one. It sounds so simple that it's often overlooked. Right. We all have heard for years and years that you need to be sleeping, but are you actually, are you actually sleeping for eight or 9 hours per night? Do you prioritize sleep in your life? Do you have good habits surrounding sleep that actually supports your body's ability to sleep? Because guess what, my friend? You need sleep in order to heal and repair your body, in order to detoxify, in order to digest, in order to rest.
Alyssa Chavez [00:09:51]:
And sleep is going to have huge impacts on your diet. Right? You've probably all experienced this before. If you don't sleep well, you wake up the next day, you're kind of tired and cranky, and you start craving sugar and, you know, chips. You're probably not going to be over there cooking a bunch of broccoli when you didn't sleep well. Your sleep is also going to impact your stress and your mindset. We don't feel our best when we're tired. We don't feel our best when we haven't gotten a good night's sleep. And that's going to impact your mindset as you go into the next day.
Alyssa Chavez [00:10:27]:
So each one of those foundations helps to hold up the other foundations. I don't know if that really works with the foundation analogy, but just roll with me on that. And foundation number four, lifestyle that really, to me, just covers everything else that you do, how you live your life. Are you creating a space for healing? Right. How's your movement? How are your eating habits, not just what you eat, but how you're eating when you're eating, are those eating habits supporting your overall digestive health? Your blood sugar? Right. Are you allowing time for rest and recovery in your life? Are you actually filling up your cup and nourishing yourself? Like, having fun, doing things that you love, right? Not just the things that you have to do, spending time with people or pets that make you happy and that bring you joy to be with laughter, right. Are you getting outside? Right. What are the things that really make you feel good and feel like yourself and feel like you want to continue this life? Right.
Alyssa Chavez [00:11:46]:
The more that we're really nourishing ourselves inside and out, the better we feel, the better choices you're going to make. So this all becomes like a big snowball effect. That's the cool thing. And I see this all the time with my clients, too. You make one change one small change. Maybe you just go from eating a bunch of processed foods to just adding one vegetable in your day and you start to notice a difference, right? Or maybe you just start to eat breakfast and you hadn't eaten breakfast in years, and you start to notice some positive changes in your health. And those positive changes, guess what? They're going to make you want to do more. It's amazing how this works.
Alyssa Chavez [00:12:29]:
I see this time and time again, and this is why I always encourage people to not try to do all the things at once. And I get it. When you're in the thick of your endosymptoms and you're not feeling well and you're in pain and you're struggling with your fatigue, and you've got all these symptoms going on. Oh, my gosh. I can't tell you how much I understand what that feels like, to just want to change everything in your life and start from the ground up and just work on building, quote, unquote, this perfect lifestyle and diet to support your endometriosis. I get it. Absolutely. I get it.
Alyssa Chavez [00:13:10]:
Cause I've been there. I get it because I've been there. I've been exactly where you are. That's how I started this whole journey in the first place. I was interested in learning how my dietary habits could impact my endometriosis. And you know what? Exactly the story I was just telling, that's really what happened to me, right. Looking back, my very first dietary change that I ever made was cutting out gluten from my diet. And I'm sure I've told this story before, but in case you haven't heard it, I'll give a little recap.
Alyssa Chavez [00:13:44]:
When I first found out that I had, and actually, I'm lying to you, it wasn't when I first found out that I had endometriosis. It was when I was going through IVF. I've talked before about a little bit about my fertility journey so far, but a few years ago, actually, I think at the time of this recording, this was like four years ago. Now it's been a minute. My husband and I, you know, decided to go ahead with IVF. And, you know, fair warning for anybody who. Who may be struggling with this stuff, this is going to talk about some topics that may not be super comfortable for you. So feel free to fast forward, like, a minute if you're not wanting to hear about this stuff.
Alyssa Chavez [00:14:28]:
But after doing these couple of rounds of IVH, which we were told were kind of our only option to have a family, ended up having a miscarriage, and it was super devastating. It was, you know, huge challenge in my life, but also it changed my life in so many ways. And I know this is going to sound like a weird thing to say, but in many ways, I'm thankful for that moment because I think if not for that, I wouldn't have become the person that I am today, if that makes any sense. Not that I'm thankful for having gone through that, but I am thankful for the result of that. And the result was that I realized I needed to do something different in my life, that I was unhealthy, I wasn't feeling well. I was in a lot of pain and fatigue and obviously struggling with fertility. And just all these things were going on. I knew that I was feeling worse with all of these medication that I was on, and I hated it.
Alyssa Chavez [00:15:27]:
And so I wanted to learn more about how I could support my own body. How can I feed myself and fuel myself? That's going to make an impact. The very first thing that I did, not saying that this is the route that everybody needs to follow, but the very first thing that I did was I cut gluten from my diet just as an experiment, because I heard that it could have a big impact for endometriosis, and it can certainly contribute to inflammation for a lot of people. And that way more people have gluten intolerances and sensitivities than really know about it because we tend to think of those reactions coming up as dietary things. And I didn't really have that so much, but I did have a lot of the inflammation and pain going on. So I decided to experiment with that. And in the one month that I cut out gluten, initially saw huge changes already in my digestion, in my energy levels, in my pain levels. Things were shifting and changing, and that gave me the motivation to want to do more.
Alyssa Chavez [00:16:28]:
Like, oh, that actually worked really well for me. What else can I do? And ended up making a lot more dietary changes along the way. And I was somebody, mind you, who thought I already was eating really healthy, and in a way, I was, but it just wasn't quite right for my body and my unique biology. So really learning what was best for me was huge, was life changing. And I've made some pretty massive changes to my diet. But it wasn't like this waterfall all at once of just overloading, overhauling everything that I'm doing right. It was like little bits at a time, little tweaks over time to get to where I am today. And that's really what I encourage everybody else to do.
Alyssa Chavez [00:17:12]:
So that was kind of a long little tangent there, but I just thought it was something that needed to be said. It actually wasn't even in my plans to talk about today, but here we are. That's okay. Improv podcast recording today just felt like something we needed to talk about. Alright, so we covered the four foundations, which if you forgot what they were over the course of my little tangent there, they were. Mindset and stress were foundation number one, diet was foundation two, sleep was foundation three, and lifestyle was foundation four. So those really are the foundations. There's a few other things that I do like to talk about as well, and these are definitely things that we'll talk about in the membership too.
Alyssa Chavez [00:17:58]:
But these are the things that I consider. They're not really foundations, but they can be really supportive for your body. Supplements, right. I always like to say you can't out supplement a poor diet. So that's why diet is a foundation and supplements are not. They are intended to be a supplement to everything else that you're doing. But that being said, I love me some supplements. There's some really good ones out there.
Alyssa Chavez [00:18:24]:
There's some wonderful companies doing some amazing things and they really can have huge benefits on our bodies in ways that sometimes diet and lifestyle just can't address on their own. Targeted support is what I'm all about. Right. Not just throwing random supplements. So we'll talk a little bit about supplements and, you know, which ones might be helpful, which ones may not be helpful, how to know what might actually be helpful for you. Those are all things we're going to be talking about. And the other thing I want to talk about here was just knowing when to outsource. Right.
Alyssa Chavez [00:18:55]:
This is like the secondary piece right after, after you've dialed in those foundations or maybe at the same time. Right. If you need support in dialing in the foundations. Absolutely right. It can be super helpful to have a coach and a guide along the way with some of that stuff too. Just dialing in, nutrition, functional testing to assess the root cause of your symptoms, acupuncture, pelvic floor therapy, mental health professional, just all ways that you can outsource help and guidance along your journey should you need that. Right. All things that we're going to cover within the endowarrior circle membership, which is coming up really soon.
Alyssa Chavez [00:19:40]:
I'm looking at the calendar here and as this episode is going to air, the endowarrior circle is going to be coming out like next week. So doors will be open. If you're listening to this in real time, doors to the Endo warrior circle will be open June 24 through 28th only. It's not going to be open to just jump in any time. So if you know that you want to get in there, make sure that you get in there during that time. If you want to make sure that you get all the information about that and are the first to know when those doors open, hop on the wait list. You can join that in the link in the show notes. You can also head to endobellygirl.com join where you're going to find find all of the information about the membership and how to get in there.
Alyssa Chavez [00:20:31]:
And that's actually the page that you can hop onto to actually join. If it's during that time when the doors are open, you'll see all the information. So I hope to see you in there, my friend. I hope those foundations were helpful for you to kind of give you some guidance on where to head next in your endo journey. And I hope you have the most wonderful day, my friend, and enjoy some summer time. I know we're just about to the summer solstice here. It's going to be officially summer, so please go enjoy your life, soak it all up and we'll talk soon, my friend.
