Hi, I'm Alisa Vitti.
I'm the founder and director of the FLO Living Hormone Center.
I'm the best-selling author of "WomanCode,"
and I'm the creator of the MyFLO period tracking app.
The FLO Living Hormone Center was really something that I needed
a long time ago when I was dealing with my own hormonal health issues
and I really wished there was a place
where I could've gone when my period started becoming problematic,
where I could talk to someone about the issues that I was struggling with,
where I could test my hormones as much as I wanted
or I could get some effective and natural treatment
and I could track how all my progress was going and how my symptoms were doing.
The FLO Living Hormone Center is really the first and only
global menstrual healthcare concierge platform where you can do all those things.
You can talk to someone, treat, test, track,
everything to do with your cycle and your hormones.
A lot of the messaging that we're given as women about our reproductive health
is lacking in enough science
and enough practical wisdom that we feel like we should also avoid it
and then it ends up causing us to make choices in our own healthcare of doing nothing,
which we know is really dangerous from great research that's long been out there.
The BioCycle study, for example, determined
that if you have untreated PMS in your 20s and 30sÑ
PMS is a serious hormonal imbalance
where you have too much estrogen and not enough progesterone
Ñif you let that go untreated, which, hello, everybody does, we just joke about it,
that will increase your likelihood of developing
the 4 big diseases of inflammation postmenopausally.
That's heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and dementia.
I don't think we should be joking about that.
I think if you have a friend who's complaining about PMS,
you should be like, "Oh my goodness! You're on fire!
You need to do something today so that you don't end up without your noodle at 60."
It's really important for us to understand how our bodies work,
to get really practical, useful information about what we can do to
interact with our endocrine system to optimize its performance,
and to understand how to troubleshoot things along the way. It is not complicated,
it is not mysterious, and your body is so responsive
to the right inputs. It's just amazing.
My experience of watching my body transform is not unique.
I've been doing this now for nearly 17 years with tens of thousands of women around the globe.
This is every woman's story.
I think it's just time that there's a place that you use.
You go to your gynecologist for your annual
and whatever other tests that you want to get done.
But then when you really need to take action around your cycle, there needs to be a place.
That's why I ended up opening up this center because I needed it and we all need it.
We all need this
place where we can go when things are getting a little off track with our hormones.
The whole thing with the pill is a big conversation.
I think women are starting to really ask more questions about this. Here we are:
We're eating clean, we're exercising in different ways that are really body-aware,
we're living these more health- and wellness-based lifestyles. Then,
we're taking this medication to suppress
something that is really part of our biological process.
I think a lot of younger women are starting to say,
"Gee, if I'm not using it necessarily for birth control,
why am I using it? What is the benefit here,
especially when there are so many side effects?
Because the truth of the matter is, when you take synthetic hormones,
you're not getting a period. You're suppressing ovulation altogether.
That is what the pill does.
It's a specific cocktail of estrogen and progesterone that simulates pregnancies
so that you stop.
You shut off the ovarian conversation altogether.
Then you're not actually having a bleed,
you're having something called a breakthrough bleed.
The days that you're taking, if you're taking the pill,
you're taking 5 days of a sugar pill,
and because you're not dosing with
that particular cocktail of estrogen and progesterone for those 5 days,
you have a little breakthrough bleeding, and some women don't have that at all.
In fact, over time, the more you take medication,
the period can just go away altogether.
That's important to know because women think,
"Oh, I'll take the pill and I'll still have my period."
No, you're not having a period at all.
You're not having the whole cyclical process happen
between the pituitary gland and the ovary and the uterus.
It's all shut off. That's first and foremost.
Second thing to know is that while you're on that medication,
whether it's delivered in the form of a ring or an implant or IUD or the pill,
that medication, because of the way they have to modify
and manipulate the molecular structure of these hormones in order for them to commercialize them,
they are not a perfect lock-and-key fit on your cell receptor sites for those hormones.
As a result, you can have all sorts of reactions to it.
I call this Synthetic Birth Control Syndrome.
You get on any of these medications and how many of us have that experience where you're like,
"Oh, something's wrong with me because I can't take the pill.
I've got to find one that works for me."
What that means is that you're just having an allergic reaction
to that synthetic, modified molecule,
that estrogen, that progesterone.
That's just short-term, immediate, while you start taking it.
But long-term, this synthetic hormone combination starts to
diminish and deplete key micronutrient stores in the body
that are essential for endocrine function.
This is the big problem and this is the link to future fertility.
Let's say you go on this medication because you have a diagnosed condition
like polycystic ovary syndrome,
like fibroids, like endometriosis, like heavy, terrible cramping and bleeding.
Once you have a diagnosis, that already means you are micronutrient deficient
in these key micronutrients, vitamins, minerals that your endocrine system needs to create
proper hormonal balance and you're already deficient, you're already depleted.
Then you take a medication on top of that that does 2 thingsÑ
1: Gives you a false sense of security,
making you feel like you have no more symptoms to address.
2: Actively, daily further depletes your bank account of these micronutrients.
By the time you get off, which can be a decade or longer,
you've now had a worsening of your original situation
and you haven't felt any of the symptoms
to put you into a position where you'd be motivated to take action.
That's all that these symptoms are. These symptoms are not a life sentence of,
"Oh, you're supposed to be suffering with your period forever."
It's just, "Hey, things are really not working in our favor.
We, as an endocrine system, cannot function optimally on your behalf.
We cannot produce a healthy cycle for you. We need your help
and symptoms are the call from the body to you.
We need you to do some things differently."
But, when you're taught... we live in this culture that says, "Oh, I don't know.
You just have some bad period luck
and the best thing to do is just medicate it and forget about it,
then of course you do nothing and you don't feel those symptoms.
Then there's this worsening of that pre-existing condition.
For that reason, it's really frustrating.
I see this unfortunately all too often where women then at 35, 37,
they've been on the pill for 10 to 15 years or longer, 20,
and they've had something going on that has been unaddressed
and then they go off and they want to get pregnant right away
and now they have to recover, major recovery time,
all that depleted micronutrient stores
and address the original hormonal imbalance and it takes time.
The longer that you are on the pill, the longer it takes to recover.
This is one of the reasons why I created the Balance by Flo supplement line.
After 17 years of researching
what are these essential micronutrients
that every woman needs for her endocrine system to function optimally.
I just wanted to create a set of formulations that would do that for women.
They're there for if you have a diagnosed condition or if you're taking the pill,
if you really feel like you need it for preventing pregnancy, or any of the devices,
make sure that you're supplementing adequately so that you're not further becoming depleted.
Your bank account isn't going into the red.
You can at least end the day with a neutral balance.
Your fertility is something that you don't want to take for granted.
We live in an environment that is replete with endocrine-disruptive chemicals
that are already compromising your body's ability to do the thing it's designed to do,
if you choose to reproduce.
There are chemicals in the environment, chemicals in your food,
chemicals in your home, chemicals in your makeup that are actively disrupting
your body's ability to produce balanced levels of hormones.
That over time can erode your ability to have regular ovulation and a healthy cycle.
From the point of view of men, sperm production worldwide
in the past 50 years has gone down by 50%.
These chemicals are not just affecting women, they're affecting men.
On the flipside, in terms of children,
it used to be just precocious puberty
we'd see in young females as early as 9,
but now we're seeing that also spill over into the males as well.
Precocious puberty is on the rise, which means
younger bodies are being exposed to these synthetic estrogens,
chemicals in the form of pesticide on lawn care and in the cleaning detergent at home,
and of course, pesticides and growth hormone in food.
It's stimulating the endocrine system too quickly
in a young person and they'll start developing at 9
when that should be more like 12 or 13.
Then on the flipside, we'll see this really impact fertility.
I think this is a major, major issue that's only going to get worse
as we continue to wreak havoc on our beautiful planet.
I think that you have to take personal responsibility.
You cannot wait for these things to get addressed.
Globally, you need to recognize that
you're in charge of what kind of chemical exposure you can control for.
Your home should be green.
Your cleaning products, your makeup, your food organic.
If you have children, you need to protect them even more consciously.
A little bit can go a long way in terms of exposure.
Even the choices of hand sanitizer you use.
Triclosan, this antibacterial chemical that's been put in hand sanitizers,
toothpaste, and dishwashing soap,
it's a known endocrine disruptor in men and women.
The FDA made such a statement.
It's not allowed to be in hand sanitizers anymore but it's still in a lot of toothpaste,
which you'd think you use toothpaste a little bit more than hand sanitizers.
Just be educated. Everything's out on the internet.
The Environmental Working Group is my favorite online resource
to check any chemical that you may be looking at on a product
to see how safe or unsafe it is and it's just so important.
As important as putting the right inputs into the system
is important for endocrine health and hormonal balance,
making sure the wrong things stay out is an equally important job.
When it comes to fertility,
you and your future child will thank you for the work that you put in today to preserve
your reproductive function and protect your egg quality, your genetic material.
This is the great thing about your body as a woman. You have early warning detection.
Those little period problems that are cropping up in your teen yearsÑ
acne, bloating, and PMS Ñthe red light is flashing on the indicator dashboard saying,
"Hey, something's not working." Taking action in your early 20s
and getting your hormones set up
because your body's going to heal so much more rapidly anyway because of your youth,
is such a gift to give yourself
instead of waiting until you're nearly 40 to start addressing your hormones.
It's going to be a longer process.
The endocrine system is marvelous.
It's really an extraordinary system
that I just don't think we spend enough time learning about
or getting intimate with and familiar with because it really runs the show.
I always joke when people say, "Oh, I'm free-thinking."
I'm like, "Well, you're as free-thinking as your hormones are balanced,"
because they're really running things.
For example, if you don't eat enough at the right frequency, spacing,
your blood sugar drops. This is called hypoglycemia in terms of the response.
The endocrine system, its primary job is to safeguard the transport of glucose
to the brain, the heart, and the muscle tissues.
It really doesn't like it when you screw around with how much you're eating
and when you're spacing out meals.
It likes a consistent calorie intake and consistent timing of meals.
When this hypoglycemic episode happens, the whole endocrine system gets into action.
Cortisol, insulin, things will start moving.
Even thyroid can be involved just to make sure that your body starts to
get access to glucose if you're not putting it in through dietary means.
Now, episodically, this is OK.
But if this becomes a chronic issue,
other things are going to start to take over.
This idea that you think that willpower is something that we have
at our disposal is nonsense when you look at the science.
What you have is you have is cortisol taking charge when there isn't enough glucose dietarily coming in.
Cortisol will talk to your fat cells and say,
"Hey, mobilize some of that stored fat and get it out into the bloodstream as quick as you can."
But over time the body doesn't like that either.
Then it starts to have some neurotransmitters come into play
that starts sending out more ghrelin and say,
"OK, we're hungry. We're starving. We're craving chips and whatever it is,"
just to get you into a place where you can be eating more calories to bring that blood sugar up.
You're not in control in those moments the way that you would like to think that you are.
Your hormones are really trying to guide you into right behavior
so that you and your body can be healthy.
It's not like they're running things,
but they're trying to help nudge you along the right direction.
If you want to just be a person who is up to things in life,
who's not feeling like you're behind the eight ball in terms of your energy,
your mood and other aspects of your health and you want to be proactive,
productive, creative, inspired, doing things,
you need to set the groundwork physiologically and biochemically to do that.
Hormones play a huge role in that. For me, balancing hormones,
the short-term payoff is you get to get rid of all those annoying symptoms
that plague you chronically throughout the month and you get to feel better.
Long-term, what's really the opportunity is that you get to prime yourself
for your best life, your best work, your best inspiration.
You get to really use your body as a tool to master your life.
That's really what it's about.
I went on Dr. Oz and did a demonstration that I had been doing for years
by using fruit juice to simulate the different colors of menstrual blood
on little white dishes to show women how they can use their monthly bleed as a blood test.
You can do this. You use it as a blood test. It's blood.
The specific color of it can actually tell you very clearly
the ratio between your estrogen and your progesterone.
You would want to know that because it would tell you why you're having PMS,
why you're maybe not being successful with your fertility journey.
You can watch that change, the color and texture of your bleed, month-over-month.
It's the best, easiest, most user-friendly self-assessment that you can doÑ
really looking before you flush at what's coming out of you
from a menstrual point of view.
This is so important that we actually built a free tool.
We think that every woman should have access to this.
It's the Period Type Quiz.
You can just go to the FLOLiving.com homepage
and answer 7 questions about the color of your period
and the texture and the things that we need to know
and it will tell you what's wrong with your hormones,
which is so empowering because then you'll know what to do.
It also tells you what to do, what foods to change, and how to get you into action right away,
because what's really exciting is once you start to play with your food a little bit
and then you see what's happening. Next cycle you start to notice,
"Oh, some of my symptoms are diminishing and look,
I'm seeing changes in terms of color of the bleed."
There are only 4 different things that it can be color-wise
so you can have what I call the brown type,
the pink type, the red type, the blue type.
Those 4 colors really determine whether or not you have not enough progesterone,
too much estrogen, not enough estrogen, or you have that perfect balance between the two.
That's really valuable information that every woman should know every month
because it's not static.
You could have things happen over the course of a year.
Holidays, stressful situations at work,
family stressors, changes in your diet, changes in your lifestyle,
major episodes of traveling, illnesses, all sorts of things.
Because of the link between the immune system and the endocrine system
[it] can impact what shows up for you monthly.
The best way for you to gauge how well your body is responding
to all of these different situations that arise
that are external to your endocrine function
and how it's impacting them, that's really where you can see it show up
and it's such a useful tool because then you can start to troubleshoot.
A lot of women then ask me the question,
"Well, how do you know what to do?" It's so easy.
That's what we developed the app for, so that you can
learn why you're having a symptom and then learn which foods to eat
to make it better and make it go away within a month or 2.
That's the thing I just loveÑ letting every woman know,
that if you make food changes that are appropriate for your particular set of hormonal issues,
you can bring them to resolution within 3 months, typically.
You can have a really wonky period today
and 3 periods from now, have it be what it should be.
That's not a very long time. That's not a lot of commitment.
Think about things you commit to for far longer
and you don't get results.
This is something that has major, major responsive
action in the body and it's encouraging.
The more you see your body performing better,
the more you're going to take care of your hormones.
That, of course, is the perfect biofeedback that we want to encourage.
I'm tracking things daily.
I don't wait for a monthly report
exclusively with the color of my bleed. That's like the final exam.
If you were to think about it, you want to take daily quizzes,
you want to look at how your body's performing daily,
but the final exam, if you did it right that month,
that will show up in the actual bleed phase.
For me, I'm looking at how is my energy,
how is my mood, how is my digestion,
how is everything going on these supporting cast member roles of the endocrine system.
If I've really gone off, which I don't do because for me,
I'm so hormonally sensitive, I really cannot,
I'll notice that I feel a little bit crankier or more tired
but I'm pretty committed to the program.
It's why I'm still able to have a period and have a healthy cycle.
The protocol works if you're on it 80% of the time.
You don't have to be perfect, which is great news.
That's how resilient your body is.
For someone like myself, I just know that I feel an extra 20% more fantastic
if I'm on protocol more exclusively.
There are things that are non-negotiable for me like
eating the right foods in the right phases of my cycle,
exercising the right way for the right phase of my cycle,
getting the right sleep hygiene perfected,
taking the right supplements,
and avoiding pro-inflammatory foods and endocrine disruptors.
These are just things that I do that I can't not do.
If I'm traveling, I still do them. I bring stuff with me.
It's just part of the fabric of my day-to-day life so it's not a big burden.
I built up those practices over time so that I have mastery over them now.
Wherever you are, if you're just getting started,
don't worry about how many different things I'm doing that you might not be doing.
Start with something. Start with something that resonates with you.
If you think, "Gee, I really should swap out all the chemicals in my home,"
and that feels like a straightforward thing, it's one and done, you throw out the bad stuff,
buy some new stuff and it's done, start with that.
Start where you can. If it's switching to organic,
start there and you'll start to see that you're actually making improvements.
A little bit goes a long way.
"WomanCode" is this book that I wrote and it was published in 2013.
I wrote it because it was the conversation I had been having in my professional career
with my clients for over a decade and I thought, "This is the protocol.
I want women to know about it.
I want them to understand about endocrine disruptors.
I want them to understand that once you have a diagnosis,
it doesn't mean you're stuck with it for life."
I wanted them to understand how their hormones workÑ what they are,
the symphony of how they work together, how things can throw them off.
I want it to be a very practical, tactical book about how your body works and what to do.
It's the sex ed that you never got but really should have gotten
about being female and having a female biochemical operating system
and how you interact with that to optimize its function.
In chapter 5 of that book is this magical chart.
I created this concept called Cycle Syncing
almost 20 years ago. I was in the course of my research
just piecing together that for each of
the 4 different hormonal ratios you have, that 1 per phase of the cycle,
(there are 4 phases of the cycle)
you need to be eating specific foods to both offset
and support the metabolism and production of different hormones in that phase
and then also exercising the right phase, not to further deplete your hormonal balance.
If you are balanced, you get to take advantage of this,
the beneficial effects on your brain chemistry for heightened productivity and creativity.
If you read on the Amazon page,
all the women who've gotten pregnant and gotten their cycles back...
I had a woman on a recent Facebook Live that made me cry
even though I hear this all the time, it still moves me.
This is why I do it, because I know what it feels like.
She just said, "I just wanted you to know..."
15 years she had been struggling with endometriosis, she said,
and 3 months on the protocol, went in, did all the testing and has been cleared.
It's gone.
This is what is possible for women.
I expected all of that because I had been using this protocol in my practice,
in my center in New York for 12 or 13 years at that point.
The thing that was really surprising was the response to this chart in chapter 5.
"Can you turn this into something that I can use every day?
I can't remember all the details of the things that I should be doing in each phase,
the foods I should be eating in each phase."
My relationship with my community is very dynamic.
When they want something is when I make something.
They really wanted this to be an app.
It took me a couple of years to do it. At the same time, I was having my daughter.
We launched it just at the beginning of 2017
and the response to that has been remarkable.
The MyFLO app, yes it tracks your period
and it's the first functional medicine period tracker where you
learn why you're having a symptom and what to do about it with food and supplements.
That alone is fantastic.
It will tell you where you are in your cycle,
what activities to select that are ideal for that phase,
how to eat, how to exercise, all those things. You just tap what you want,
select, and schedule it into your own calendar.
It's really about liberating ourselves from the oppressive construct
that we somehow have to fit our personhood
into a 24-hour male circadian paradigm that really optimizes for their hormonal patterns.
But we have both the 24-hour circadian pattern
and a 28-day hormonal pattern
that happen concurrently and we have to actually work with that to feel good
and to be our most productive and creative selves.
When you try to squeeze yourself into that 24-hour matrix only,
you not only feel very frustrated
and you don't feel like you're being your most productive self,
but also, you start to develop that inner critical voice.
The volume of that gets really loud, like,
"Oh gee, why can't I do the same thing every day that I said I was going to do?
Why do I feel like last week I was in that boot camp class
and I was the star student and this week, I wish I could melt out the back door?
Something's wrong with me."
Trying to even just fit into a male system is flawed thinking.
It makes us feel symptomatic, doesn't help with PMS or any other period stuff.
It also makes us feel really negatively about who we are
and how we're working in the world, which just need not be
because the truth of the matter is,
you happen to be encoded and that's why I called the book "WomanCode."
You are encoded with the same cyclical creation energy
that you see in the seasons and nature and how a seed germinates in different stages,
from planting to vegetable, that whole thing.
It's imbued in your unique female biochemistry
and understanding how to harness that is pretty powerful stuff.
That's what's been super exciting about the response to "WomanCode,"
not only do women feel like they finally have the,
as they call it, "The Little Purple Period Bible,"
that if anything is going on with their hormones, they can really troubleshoot from the book,
but they're given a whole new perspective and it feels like a reclamation for them,
for all of us, to say, "We don't need to be like men.
We need to be like women and that's a much better deal."
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