Watch on DrTalks

Why Stress, Self-Talk, and Hormones Matter More Than You Think — with Rupina Meer

Healing Requires More Than Addressing Symptoms Rupina emphasizes that healing must include emotional safety, inner dialogue, and spiritual alignment—because the body can only relax and repair when we feel safe on the inside.
Integrating Functional and Conventional Medicine Creates a Stronger Path Forward Her breast cancer journey showed that the most empowered decisions come from love, not fear. Healing is rarely an either-or choice; blending both worlds can provide clarity and confidence.
Hormone Health Depends on Strong Foundations We discuss why blood sugar balance, a healthy microbiome, optimal detoxification, and stress regulation are essential—especially for women navigating perimenopause or menopause.

About the Expert

Julia Ward, MD

Dr. Julia Ward

Dr. Julia Ward is a compassionate and forward-thinking physician with over a decade of experience in functional medicine, known for her systems-based approach to healing chronic illness. She is the founder of Balanced Body Functional Medicine, where she helps patients uncover the deeper drivers of disease and restore health by addressing the body as an interconnected whole.
After earning her medical degree from the University of Southern California, Dr. Ward served in the U.S. Navy, practicing general, urgent, and emergency medicine both domestically and abroad. Her own personal struggle with unexplained fatigue led her to question the limitations of conventional medicine and ultimately guided her toward functional medicine.
While she initially focused on identifying root causes, Dr. Ward’s approach has continued to evolve. She now emphasizes the importance of how and when the body is treated—not just what is treated. Through her Balanced Body System Reset™ framework, she focuses on restoring nervous system balance, improving mitochondrial function, reducing inflammation, and addressing root causes in the right sequence to create lasting and meaningful healing.
Dr. Ward integrates advanced diagnostics, personalized care plans, and innovative therapies such as hyperbaric oxygen and ozone therapy, while also emphasizing foundational elements like nervous system regulation, lifestyle, and patient engagement. She believes that healing is not a one-size-fits-all process, but a guided journey that requires both strategy and active participation.
A lifelong learner, Dr. Ward continues to expand her expertise in areas such as precision genomics, brain health, and complex chronic illness. She is deeply committed to helping her patients not only feel better, but truly understand their bodies and take ownership of their health.
A devoted wife and mother of five, Dr. Ward brings both clinical expertise and personal insight to her work, with a mission to transform the way chronic illness is understood and treated.

More from Julia Ward, MD on DrTalks

Guest

Rupina Meer, FDNP

Rupina Meer, FDNP

Rupina Meer is a functional health practitioner who weaves together functional lab testing, mind-body practices, and spiritual insight to help women understand and resolve the deeper roots of their symptoms. Her own breast cancer journey serves as the foundation for her compassionate, integrative approach to hormone health, stress management, and whole-body healing.

More from Rupina Meer, FDNP on DrTalks

Self love is the greatest antidote to the wound of whatever it is that’s wounding us, whether it’s a cancer, whether it’s autoimmunity, whether it’s whatever it’s some incurable disease or diagnosis.

It’s like when you treat yourself, like we would never talk to ourselves, like we treat our child or our four boy baby. If your four baby had an accident, you wouldn’t chastise it and say, Oh my gosh, you’re so stupid.

That’s what we do to ourselves. We’re constantly berating ourselves, chastising ourselves. When I started treating myself like someone I loved. And not just when I got it wrong, right.

But when I got it wrong or when I wasn’t quite clear about something, I would still lean in with that grace and love. And my body started responding. That was the moment that things started shifting for me.

Welcome to the Functional Edge. I’m Dr. Julia Ward and this is where science meets real-world strategies for living healthier, sharper, and stronger. From uncovering hidden environmental toxins to unlocking peak performance and mental clarity, we cover it all.

Ready to take control of your health and thrive? Let’s dive in. Hi, and welcome to The Functional Edge, where we explore the science and stories behind root cause medicine.

I’m Dr. Julia Ward, and today I’m thrilled to be joined by Rupina Mir, a functional health practitioner who blends advanced functional lab testing with a deeply spiritual science meets soul approach.

Her work is shaped not just by 12 years in integrative nutrition, but by her own seven-year breast cancer history. Healing Journey, an experience she alchemized into wisdom and a mission.

Rupina helps conscious-driven women turn health setbacks into fierce comebacks by uncovering the hidden opportunities behind their symptoms, preventing recurrence and restoring trust and unshakable freedom in their bodies.

Today, she’s a lighthouse for women who feel unheard, misdiagnosed, or told that their labs are, quote, normal when they feel anything but. So please welcome the incredible Rupina Mir.

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be here. Absolutely. Well, tell us a little bit about your tumor to truce healing journey and how the cancer kind of cracked open you to the wholeness.

So gosh, I’ve had multiple dark nights of the soul with my own health, but this latest one, the breast cancer thing, which was a very long, very nonlinear healing journey, really opened me up to wholeness.

Ironically, I call it my divine lesion because it wasn’t a misfortune. It was an initiation. It was my sacred teacher that really taught me how to let go, how to surrender and how to let a greater divine intelligence turn me back to that innate blueprint that’s embedded in our DNA and that’s available to all of us.

Sometimes we just have to get out of the way and stop trying to control how it’s going to happen. So a little bit about me is, you know, Previously, I was an MBA in the corporate world that used to just live on stress, live on seums.

I had no idea that stress was like literally throwing gasoline into an already roaring hormonal fire. took a radical left turn and went into integrated nutrition.

Eat like my life depended upon it. It was puritanical and extremely didactic about my macronutrient ratio and movement and meditation and all of that.

And that did helped me a lot for several years till this breast cancer diagnosis. And I realized that it wasn’t something that I just wanted to cut out because I had a previous stint with cervical cancer.

It was just stage zero, stage one. And at that time I was in the corporate world. I didn’t know anything about intravenous nutrition. So I just did whatever the conventional doctors asked me to do.

It was snip snip, easy peasy, lemon squeezy. And I didn’t even feel victimized like a like a cancer patient at the time, but it did invite me to start listening to those whispers of wisdom from within and start developing like, why is this?

I always had this deep hunger for the science and the soul of healing and why things happen. Even when I was eating so perfect, so-called, I could have been the poster child, right, for perfect eating and macros and all of that.

And then I realized I I’m deeper down the rabbit hole and I did Joe dispenser’s work and I’m an advanced meditator and I started studying about epigenetics.

Epi is what’s above the genes and it’s nutrition and your thoughts and your stress and all of that shapes the genes are like Christmas tree lights that turn on and off and we now know that genes load the gun, but it’s the environment that pulls the trigger.

So it went so much beyond what I was consuming on my plate to what I was consuming at the consciousness level, right? Like I was perfect with my macros, but I was still not treating myself like someone I love and just so harsh and so critical and that self-talk.

Yes, the thing that the immune cells are constantly eavesdropping on the conversation we’re having with ourselves. Yeah, my gosh, you couldn’t get this right.

Or how could you that was so stupid of you. And this banter goes on all the time. Yeah, and so my immune cells were responding to that and then I was getting frustrated that gosh My immune system is never cooperating with me and every time I had a big talk or I had to travel or anything big It’s like I would fear disease and I would manifest it because I hadn’t connected the dots between my fear around disease and how I was actually co-creating that so It was a lot of that with this time, you know, and just really finally letting go.

And then I also had pigeonhole healing. I thought that, oh, healing has to come through nutrition. It has to come through meditation. It has to be a mystical moment, but that wasn’t the way it came.

Eventually I had to surrender to surgery, something I had resisted. for six and a half long years. And then two weeks after the surgery, my oncologist came bounding into the womb and she said, did you see, did you see?

And I’m like, no, I haven’t. And she’s like, all margins clear. I don’t even need to see you for six months. And suddenly I was freed from that sentence.

when I fully surrender. Yeah, that’s awesome. I do run into a lot of patients probably just because of, you know, I’m running a functional medicine practice.

Patients approach me with have cancer and I want to do all the alternative treatments. I don’t necessarily want to do any of the traditional treatments.

And I feel like you really have to combine both. You know, if you depend too much on one or the other, you’re just not going to get as good a result as if you combine them.

And I love what you said about your immune system is listening to your thoughts. It’s like eavesdropping on your thoughts. And I think the most powerful tool we have to heal is not a supplement, but it’s the sound and the sound of our own voice because the nervous system actually treats our sound as if it’s somebody else’s, right?

So what are you saying to your body and what is that that you’re co-creating with your body? You know, I really started leaning more into into gratitude and being so grateful for this vessel that I inhabit.

That’s awesome. And I love what you said about, that was a big, big lesson for me, the combination, right? Like you don’t have to choose between meditation and medicine.

You don’t have to choose between data and the divine. You can go whichever way that, and at this point I’m really agnostic as to whatever I work with people diagnosed with so-called incurable illness.

And I’m like, whatever, if you want to go down the path of chemotherapy or radiation, that’s fine. If that’s what you’re drawn to, there’s so much more you can also do holistically to protect yourself from the EMOs so that it doesn’t cripple your immune system and all of that.

But my biggest takeaway I would share with any of your listeners who are facing some dark diagnoses and are on that threshold wanting to make the right decision Yeah.

Is that if I had gone into surgery when I hadn’t fully surrendered or if I had gone in with fear or with a victim mindset, I know 100% that I wouldn’t have had the outcome that I did.

Right. It was only when I surrendered fully. In fact, when I was in the waiting, my sister is a medical doctor and she had been telling me for years that something like this isn’t gonna go away on its own.

And I said, well, thank you. That’s your opinion. But I have a different opinion and I’m not gonna feel that way. And that was my POV and I clung to it, you know?

And she kept saying, I just wish you had made that choice earlier. And in hindsight, yeah, it would have been nice. I could have saved myself a lot of suffering.

But when I made that choice, it was when I had fully just freed myself with any of the fear, the resistance. And that had I gone into it with fear and resistance, I think it’s what I’m trying to say is for your audience listening, if you’re on that threshold, choose love over fear, right?

It’s like, whatever brings you closer to fear, feeling like, oh, you’re oncologist or your husband or whoever is saying you’ve got to do the surgery and you’re doing it out of fear.

Then you might want to rethink it because you want to get to the place. where you’re really coming from a place of love with whatever modality, whatever treatment we’re embracing.

Yeah. Yeah. And then that’s going to really move the needle. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. What are some of the emotional truths or lessons that you discovered from this radical adversity or this terrifying diagnosis?

And what would you say to someone in the audience who is in your shoes and dealing with a fearful scenario or stuck in this overwhelmed kind of mode? So, I mean, I think we already touched on that a little bit, right?

Like, treat yourself like someone you loved. I didn’t treat myself. I think self-love is the greatest antidote to the wound of whatever it is that’s wounding us, whether it’s a cancer, whether it’s autoimmunity, whether it’s whatever it’s some.

incurable disease or diagnoses, it’s like when you treat yourself, like we would never talk to ourselves, like we treat to it, talk to our child or our four boy baby, right?

Like we would never say, if your four baby had an accident, you wouldn’t chastise it and say, oh my gosh, you’re so stupid. How could you do this? How could you have an accident?

But that’s what we do to ourselves. We’re constantly berating ourselves, chastising ourselves. And so when I started treating myself like someone I loved, And not just when I got it wrong, but when I got it wrong or when I wasn’t quite clear about something, I would still lean in with that grace and love and my body started responding.

That was the moment that things started shifting for me. Yeah. Yeah. I think that is so huge. Yeah. It’s not just what you’re consuming on your plate.

It’s what you’re consuming at the consciousness level. And that includes your, the sound of your own voice and also the sound, you know, first we’ve all heard that you are the sum total of the five people that you hang out with the most.

So, you know, are you constantly exposed to social media or the news or whatever? And that is impacting your consciousness. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it’s a lot of people don’t realize the inner critic voice in their head that, you know, it’s been such an ingrained habit, you know, for so many years.

You can sometimes sort of forget that you’re speaking harshly to yourself. So I think The first step is really just sort of recognizing like how am I thinking of myself?

How am I treating myself? Exactly. Awareness. Awareness and just being the witness, right? Like just being, I’m feeling this way or I’m feeling a negative emotion.

I wonder why. Just lean into that emotion versus immediately going to, oh my gosh, I’m feeling, or I can’t get it right, or I’m so this or that, or putting a label on it.

Just lean into it, get curious, and just witness and observe. Yeah, yeah. So as a functional practitioner and a hormone expert, what are your top three functional tips to overcome stress for busy women preparing for this holiday madness that we’re in now?

So I would say I call it embrace the elimination diet. And it’s kind of similar to what we’ve been talking about. And you don’t have to, your audience shouldn’t be rolling their eyes thinking, here she goes with eliminating sugar.

dairy or caffeine and all of that, but it’s really eliminating those thoughts that are of perfectionism, of getting it right, of finding the perfect gift for everybody on your list or for fights that, you know, we want her to fight, flight or freeze, but there’s also the fawning part, right?

When you’re people pleasing, right? That’s a huge disruptor to the nervous system. So when you’re constantly people pleasing, that’s not very healing to you.

So step out of that fawning mode and just give yourself some grace and love and treat yourself like someone you love this holiday season instead of the perfectionism paradigm.

Yes, yeah. I think it’s all about setting expectations. You know, you have in your mind what, say, a perfect holiday dinner would look like, you know, and then when it doesn’t turn out just that, just so, you know, sometimes in that overly critical mode again.

Exactly, berating yourself or this dish or comparing yourself. I think comparison is one of the biggest things that can really reduce, lower your vibration, right?

And then make you feel less than optimal. So yeah, just be aware of that. The other thing I would say is to, you know, all of our hormones are made out of cholesterol.

Cholesterol is so… Yeah, it is. And as you know, as a functional medicine doctor that I’m sure people come to you all the time and say, oh, my LDL is crazy, my ACL, but they’re looking at total cholesterol.

They’re not looking at particle size and all of your adrenal and sex hormones are made out of something called pregnenolone, which is the substrate of cholesterol and B vitamins.

So if you don’t have enough fat, which I see a lot of younger women, Going through events and they’re dramatically reducing their macros with fats because there’s so much fat shaming in our culture.

But that’s actually creating dysmenorrhea or amenorrhea, right? Because you’re not producing enough pregnenolone to make enough sex hormones for you to even have a cycle.

So face the big fat lie is what I call it a lot cholesterol. Yeah, we definitely need enough cholesterol and we’ve seen this too when people have their cholesterol driven down by medications like statins.

If it gets too low, it’s going to cause cognitive problems too because our brain is made of cholesterol. We need enough. But yeah, we absolutely have to incorporate some healthy fats into our diet.

And eating healthy fats will not make you fat. Exactly. I think that’s such a good point because it’s unfortunate that the word fat, the macronutrient fat, is the same as the word fat on your on your lips, right?

But yeah, eating fat doesn’t, and obviously I’m sure many people are going on the keto or whatever. It’s not about so much about the bandwagon of whatever the diet is, but I believe in something called metabolic typing, where we actually find out the person’s genetic and ancestral imprints, like which way are their cells leaning?

So somebody could be a fast oxidizer, meaning that they turn food into ATP fuel very fast. And so those people, if they’re vegetarian, then that would be a recipe for disaster, right?

Because vegetables already oxidize fast, so they need more higher protein and fats to stabilize that fast oxidizer. or tendency that their cells have, right?

And then we also look at the autonomic nervous system, whether somebody is sympathetic or parasympathetic or they’re balanced in between. And so there’s different diet types based on what your cells lean towards.

And so that can give you a wonderful starting point for the macronutrient ratio. And then obviously we tweak that based on how did it impact you and how do you feel with energy and satiety and cravings and so forth.

So it’s not, a fixed macronutrient ratio, but it’s a starting point so that we can then dial in and find the optimal macronutrients for that person. But for whatever, the fats are absolutely essential, as is fiber.

Fiber is the answer. when it comes to hormone health because if you’re not eliminating the metabolized hormones, which the liver is sluggish or the bile is sluggish, then they make a U-turn and come back like bad karma and you don’t want that.

So the golden rule of estrogen is use it or lose it. You don’t want it coming back and recirculating. And that’s when it can go into the more toxic pathways.

which is what happened with me because I had an estrogen and a progesterone receptor positive cancer. And so you really want, I mean, I say hormone balance, I call it the three-legged stool.

So you’ve got to fix your blood sugar first. It’s about glycemic stability, microbiome, because your microbiome, I mean, we’re 90% microbial, we’re only 10% human.

So the kind of bugs that you have in your gut drive your neurotransmitter function and they do so much of the heavy lifting and produce the B vitamins and so forth.

If you have more of the pathogenic bacteria and not enough of the friendly or enough of the commensals, then it’s going to really impact the way you feel and what kind of hormones you’re synthesizing.

Yeah. And then of course the organs of elimination, the liver. So those are the three legs of the stool. I’d say it’s blood sugar, microbiome balance, and then liver.

So you don’t necessarily fix on it as this big thing right now, as everybody is on BHRG or whatever. But if you’re low in hormones, yeah, I mean, it’s not just about supplementing with hormones, right?

Yeah. But it’s about those lifestyle choices, like how are you sleeping and is your nutrition aligned to your genetic? I’m sure you see a lot of that in your projects.

And I will say, too, on the blood sugar note, I see a lot of women who look very healthy. They’re exercising, they’re eating clean, but they’re in maybe a high-stress job, or maybe they’re just a high-stress mom.

And they’re in this what I call survival mode. And they’re pumping out a lot of cortisol. And the cholesterol is the parent compound. And from cholesterol, your body’s either going to make cortisol or pregnenolone.

And then pregnenolone goes all to make the other sex hormones. But if you’re having to constantly make cortisol, that sort of takes away from the pregnenolone pool, but it also raises your blood sugar.

So people can sort of look this almost pre-diabetic picture, not because their diet is particularly bad, but because they just have so much stress. So I think in these cases, having people wear a continuous glucose monitor for a couple of weeks can be really eye-opening.

can be a game changer. I agree because even though I mean back in the day we used to say that stevia is a hypoglycemide and it doesn’t impact blood sugar but I’ve actually seen with multiple times it’s one person can eat stevia and it’s not going to impact their blood sugar but another person spikes crazy.

Yeah. Even with the so-called healthy sugars or even with something innocuous like tomatoes, right? One person can eat tomatoes and their blood sugar is crazy and you can only get that kind of data through a CGM.

Yes. Yes. You don’t have to do it all the time, but just wear, you know. They usually last a couple of weeks. Yeah. I wore one for a couple of weeks and I was really amazed at, you know, one evening we, you know, I didn’t eat much dinner and we went out dancing, right?

And so we’re up all night dancing. I’m like, for sure. I’m not eating any food, not drinking any alcohol, out dancing, doing physical exercise. And yet my blood sugar remained really high, like over a hundred.

And I know it was just all the cortisol. Yeah, so super interesting kind of stuff. I would say another comment too about digestion and a lot of women have had their gallbladder removed.

So they’re not producing very much bile. So that means that they’re not breaking down fats really well. They’re not absorbing these fat-based nutrients like A, D, K, E, Exactly.

They just can’t absorb that. So in those cases, they need to make sure that they’re taking some sort of replacement like ox bile. Absolutely. You know, or some digestive enzymes.

Right, right, right. Because it’s not just what you’re digesting, it’s what you’re absorbing. And really, yeah, bile, I always say bile is like that detergent that breaks down the fats.

And if you don’t have enough of it, then it’s going to create that sluggish digestion and malabsorption. which yeah was quite prevalent. Can you walk us through like how you approach treating patients who are dealing with menopausal symptoms?

Sure. So I run functional labs like some foundation. I’ll do a very detailed intake and where I take pride is in really sort of recognizing the patterns and connecting the dots.

So if somebody has come in, even with hormonal balance, I’ll still run based on my intake, not necessarily the same set of labs, but there’s some foundational labs that I always run, including say maybe the Dutch, the GI map, maybe the metabolic typing, because that gives us a good sense of that person starting macronutrient ratio, and then some sort of IgG food sensitivity, because A lot of people don’t realize, I mean, it’s like having a paper cut is not a big deal, right?

But if you keep having paper cuts every day, then it contributes to that cascade of inflammation. So if your immune system has identified even the healthiest food in the world, such as kale, as something that it’s mounting an inflammatory response to, then each time you’re eating kale is your immune antigen library is recognizing that food that, oh, that’s an invader, you know, and then it becomes hypervigilant.

And once the immune system starts shooting down a good guy as a bad one, that’s the genesis of autoimmunity, right? So we look at those food sensitivities and then I sort of connect the dots behind all of those different labs with clinical correlation.

and then put together a curated what we call a DRESS for health success protocol and the D-R-E-S-S stands for diet, rest, exercise, stress management, and supplements.

So a lot of times I think in our instant gratification culture, people come and say, well, what can I take for this or what? And that’s just the allopathy model and I always remind them Supplements are only 20% of drugs.

I mean, there are so many other hidden healing opportunities that we discover in their labs, right? Which may or may not be connected to the symptom. That symptom comes way later.

There’s other things that are going on upstream. So we kind of consider ourselves at FDN as these metabolic detectives where we look at the different foundational systems of the body to see where function has been lost and by how much.

And then we curate a personalized DRESS program to restore function. That’s great. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Yes, I love running those food allergy tests for people because it does uncover a lot of hidden sources of inflammation.

Absolutely, absolutely. Their tests will come up for not a true allergy, which is an IgE. Exactly, that’s an IgE. but a sensitivity, which is an IgG, and that’s more of a delayed reaction.

And I’ll say, look, you know, you’re, you’re reacting to walnuts and they’re like, gosh, I eat walnuts all day every day. And it reminds me, as you said, because it’s delayed and it’s not that immediate anaphylactic, like hives or whatever, it could happen 24, 48, 72 hours after you’ve consumed the food.

So unless you’re taking really meticulous notes, it’s very hard to pinpoint that, oh, Asha ate walnuts. And then two days later I had arthritis, right?

I mean, why did suddenly you’re. rheumatoid arthritis act up because your immune system has tagged walnuts as an enemy and an inflammatory food. So looking at all these different things and then sort of custom curating is really helpful.

And then just to back up a little bit when you were talking about testing, you mentioned the Dutch test and just for people that don’t know that’s a dried urinary test.

dried urine test for complete hormones, right? It’s beautiful. It’s considered the gold standard, as you know, Dr. Julia, for hormones, except for, I guess, saliva, if somebody is really not sleeping at night, or sometimes I think the salivary cortisol, they say, I mean, salivary cortisol is the gold standard as opposed to urine because you can get different.

Yeah, I think it depends who you ask. Right, exactly. This saliva test were definitely around before the urinary test, the dried urine test. Yes. So there’s some people that are still very much in the salivary camp.

Yes. But it just depends who you talk to. There’s conflicting information for people that feel it. I personally like doing the dried urine test better because I feel like it’s so much easier than doing a saliva test.

It is. Yeah. I mean, it’s easier to pee on a strip than it is to gather this much of saliva in a test tube. Absolutely. And it gives you the breakdown products.

So I feel like it gives you more… The metabolites. Yes, exactly. So yeah, I mean, I agree. I think the Dutch test is very good. at looking at not just the free hormones, but also the metabolites, which can tell us where the person may be that something is breaking down in their top location or so forth.

And it gives us patterns so we can kind of look at the problem upstream. And now we have an at-home urinary testing device called the Femira, which is really awesome because now you can test your estrogen, progesterone, FSH, LH every day.

And that’s really valuable because women’s hormones are constantly a moving target. Absolutely. They’re dynamic. They’re not static. So it’s ideal not only for women trying to conceive, but in this perimenopausal range, which has its own unique challenges.

Yeah, indeed. The perimenopausal are a moving target. Absolutely. And the periods become irregular. Right, right. And sometimes people don’t even know when I tell them, take it on day 21. They’re like, I don’t know what day 21 is because in perimenopausal, all bets are off, right?

Right. And so this MIRA can be really helpful for those who are like, I haven’t had a period in three months and then Sunday I had my period. So now what do I do?

So it helps you assess where you are in your cycle. And it’s not home testing, which would be convenient. It connects to an app on your phone. You can actually enter your symptoms on each day so that you could correlate symptoms with hormone levels.

So that’s really fantastic because, you know, in all testing past, it was always just a snapshot in time, just one day out of the whole month. And now we can actually really look at the whole month and see what’s going on.

Yeah, I think that’s invaluable. Yeah. Well, tell us about your free gift, the Hormone Myth Breakthrough Blueprint, and why most women aren’t discovering these mistakes from their doctor.

So yeah, your listeners can go to zen-tion.com and just download the hormone breakthrough blueprint where I’ve broken down the five biggest mistakes that lifestyle choices are creating with hormonal imbalance and that most of them are not having that conversation with their doctors about that, right?

Because again, when you go to a conventional doctor, it’s more about exogenous hormone supplementation, which there may be a time and a place for that.

And I think that those are a missing piece of the puzzle, but they’re not the entire piece. Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of like natural stuff. Yeah, there’s a lot of lifestyle, you know, how is your sleep and again, your nutrition and your macronutrients and how are you responding to stress because stress is ubiquitous and you know, we’re all dealing with it but it’s how you perceive it and the meaning you give behind the stress that’s going to continue that trajectory of either healing or disease for that person.

So you’ve got to have some kind of practices to modulate the stress response. So yeah, it’s all broken down over there. That’s great. Yeah, I think a lot of women have been under a lot of stress for so long, especially if you’re raising kids and trying to hold down a job, you know, you’re just sort of you feel like you’re at this maximum stress level.

And then things calm down a little bit and you’re like, well, okay, now I’m not stressed. Well, you’re still stressed, but you’ve normalized the stress to the point where you don’t think that you’re stressed.

That’s it. That’s it. Yeah. And I still get patients occasionally that come in and say, you know, I’m fearful of hormones. I don’t necessarily want to do hormones.

And again, there are a lot of natural things that you can do to help self-regulate and minimize symptoms, basically. Yeah, absolutely. You know, just going sugar-free will get rid of hot flashes, just as an example.

Exactly. Exactly. That’s huge, but that’s not the sexy solution that somebody comes in for, right? They’d rather get a cream or a pellet or something and not have to deal with their diet or not have to deal with those big stressors such as how they’re talking to themselves or are they in a soul-sucking job or are they in a toxic relationship or what have you.

But those are the big things that unravel our health more than anything. And if those addressed in turn with supplements and exogenous hormones can be wonderful, but if you’re just doing exogenous hormones as a standalone, I’m afraid that’s not going to move the needle.

Yeah, absolutely. And I do see that too where, you know, women have come in and say, I only want my hormones tuned up. I don’t necessarily want to deal with, you know, I don’t want to make any diet changes.

I don’t want to take a lot of supplements. That’s right. And so, okay, we’ll do your hormones. And then they come back and like, I didn’t really feel any different.

Whereas their friend who referred them in, it was life changing for them because it’s a completely different situation. Yeah, I agree. I agree I mean that that work needs to be done because I think we unfortunately we live in an instant gratification culture and it’s like the allopathic model is a pill for what ails you that’s what we’re all been indoctrinated on right so it’s very difficult to make these lifestyle choices and look at how you’re perceiving stress and have that awareness, put some practices in place or change your diet or change your sleep and all of that.

But those are just as pivotal in balancing hormones as any supplement or pill that you can pump. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You know, when I first started practicing functional medicine, I was more of that mindset of here’s a supplement, you know, instead of a drug, here’s a supplement.

And it was still that sort of same mentality of just symptom, you know. But over the years, as I’ve learned more and done more studying, I see the importance of, you know, calming the nervous system, making sure that emotionally you’re okay.

Exactly. do a healing, do it, you know, getting outside, getting exercise is huge. I mean, I can’t say enough things about exercise. So if the human body was meant to move, you know, when you start moving.

Absolutely, it’s meant to move. But if somebody is in that exhaustive phase of HP access dysregulation, where their adrenals are just buttering, and they’re not producing anything, I see a lot of those women that they’re still pushing themselves and going to CrossFit and then they collapse.

They’re like, I literally can’t do anything now. And I’m like, well, first of all, your vital reserve bank account, which is your life force, your cheese, so depleted.

And we’re trying to restore and put money back in that vital reserve, but you don’t want to spend that on exercise. Not yet. At some point, yeah, when we get it back up, you will.

But if you do it prematurely, then you’re just going back into that exhaustive. Yes. Which is so critical. So it’s exercise in line with what’s happening metabolically and with the metabolic chaos, their flavor of metabolic chaos that they’ve curated, right?

And so I think exercise versus everyone and it’s like the way you exercise in your forties and is different than what you, I mean, you could get away with CrossFit and, you know, kickboxing and all of that because it, you know, exercise is very catabolic.

It raises cortisol, but if you’re already like tanked out, then it may not be that, you know, more gentle or yin-yob or something. So again, exercise aligned with their metabolic type.

I think everything, this is really the era of personalized and precision lifestyle medicine, right? So it’s not just, keto for all, or paleo, or pegan, and all of vegan for all.

No, I mean, it depends if you’re a fast oxidizer, or a slow oxidizer, or you’re sympathetic, parasympathetic. And then again, with exercise, it depends.

There’s just so many variables. And so that’s where I really kind of curate that personalized protocol for someone. That’s awesome. Well, where can people find, I know you mentioned your website before, but go ahead and repeat it again.

And we’ll put this in the show notes for where people can contact you. Absolutely. So it’s a Zen. It’s like the Zen dash, it’s like the word nutrition, but just replace NU with Zen.

So zen-trition.com. And if somebody is interested and wants to learn more, they can go to zen-trition.com forward slash book dash now. And that will get you a free consultation where we can decide if this is the optimal approach for you.

Great. That’s really awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. And thank you everyone for joining me on the functional edge. I hope today’s episode gave you fresh insights and practical tools to level up your life.

If you found value in what you heard, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button and share the podcast with someone who needs it and leave a review. It’s the best way to support our mission of bringing powerful health solutions to more people.

So for more resources, updates, and behind-the-scenes content, visit drjuliaward.com. And until next time, stay strong, stay healthy, and keep living on the functional edge.

Thank you. Thank you for joining me on the functional edge. I hope today’s episode gave you fresh insights and practical tools to level up your life. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard, don’t forget to hit subscribe, share the podcast with someone who needs it, and leave a review.

It’s the best way to support our mission of bringing powerful health solutions to more people. For more resources, updates, and behind the scenes content, visit drjuliaward.com.

Until next time, stay strong, stay healthy, and keep living on the functional edge.