We have a big one for you today on the Get A Drip Podcast. I spoke to nutritionist Pippa Campbell all about hormones and weight loss and, sorry gentlemen, this one is mainly for the ladies. We talk about why us females are more likely to have a harder time with our hormones, what hormone imbalances look like and how hormones can affect our weight.
So Pippa, you’re a nutritionist but you specialise in hormones and weight loss is that correct?
That’s my area! Although weight loss has never been an issue for me personally, helping women lose weight is something that I find so rewarding. I specialise in a hormone balancing weight loss. I’ve been doing that for many years.
The reason why I got into it so many years ago was because I used to suffer horrifically with PMT from the age of about 19. I got my period at an early age, I was 12 and getting my period every 2 weeks so there was obviously a hormonal imbalance.
Now in those days, you didn’t go to the gynaecologist if you had ongoing problems like this. I went to the GP and he just put me on the pill so then I didn’t get my period. I really didn’t want anything artificial in my body anymore so I came off [contraception] at about age 18.
My PMC was horrific, two months out of every month. I felt exhausted, I didn’t really get period pains, no sort of chronic pain. But I felt dizzy, I felt shaky, I felt really emotional.
Diet definitely helped and supplements were the icing on the cake. When I did the DNA testing, I’m a certified nutrigenomics practitioner for LifeCodeGX. I was then able to finally understand what was going on.
Would you say that hormone imbalances affect women more than men?
Absolutely. Men can also have hormone imbalances of course. But when I’m talking about hormones, I suppose I’m specifically talking oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone and the like. Thyroid hormones also definitely come into play as well.
I suppose it’s like an orchestra as they all work together so we always have to look at everything in balance.
You mentioned before that there are people that sometimes experience anxiety as one of their symptoms of a hormone imbalance. I’m sure there’s so many ways that a hormone imbalance can manifest itself. What are some of the most common signs that you see of a hormone imbalance?
We’ve got so many different hormones but if let’s focus on the female sex hormones- oestrogen and progesterone. So while they’re getting their periods, they might experience the symptoms that I was talking about such as extremely heavy periods. It could be anxiety. Some people can’t sleep, they feel very anxious. Sometimes people can feel very sad and very down and that they don’t feel quite right. A lot of women say they don’t feel right; they feel like they’re having an out of body experience.
How can our diet help hormone imbalances?
The first thing we want to do is to get rid of the rubbish because it’s inflammatory. Throw away the crips! I would recommend going lower carbohydrate, I’m not saying keto, I’m not saying people have to go high fat but I definitely think that finding the amount of carbohydrates is key. I would eat three meals a day and no snacking because every time we eat, we would release incidents and no snacking.
