58: Changing your diet for your PCOS + dealing with judgement from others about your lifestyle changes

The PCOS Nutritionist Podcast

What happens if you have gone plant based for lots of different reasons - a lot of it being ethical reasons - and then you find out that it's not really working for your health and maintaining that way of eating along with making sure your health is in check is making your diet feel very restrictive? So you’re having this internal dilemma because you feel so strongly about the reasons why you chose to remove animal products.

Nutrition has become a hugely controversial topic now. Everyone eats, so everyone has an opinion on what diet is ‘best’, even if they have no tertiary level nutrition education whatsoever. Because there’s a lot of misinformation floating around now - especially around what way of eating is best for PCOS - it can become a bit of a minefield to navigate.

Everything I’ve described above is what today’s podcast guest, the lovely Francesca who I got to know in The PCOS Protocol, was dealing with. She was a devout vegan - for ethical, environmental and health reasons. Since she had become so much a part of the vegan community, being plant based really became a part of who she was. When she joined the Protocol, her main issue was infertility. During the time I was working with her, we found that her insulin wasn't functioning properly - her root cause. Her diet became very restrictive.

The only answer was to expand her diet and she started reintroducing some free range eggs. Now eating eggs again may seem like nothing to you but this is such a hard thing when it's not just about ‘eating eggs’ again. When you identify yourself with a way of eating, it often becomes your whole way of looking at the world, ethics and morals - it essentially becomes an extension of your identity. So when that has to shift, it becomes a very hard thing to manage. And that’s not just with moving away from a plant based diet, for you it may be that your a devout follower of keto but you actually need some carbohydrates in order to get your period back.

Everyone talks about going keto, vegan, vegetarian, paleo and so on but no one is really talking about becoming un-vegan, un-keto etc. If you do have to change your diet away from something you’ve been doing for so long, how would you go about that process?

This is why I really wanted to share Francesca’s story with you all on the podcast - so you can hear someone who’s done the hard yards and can give you some advice on how she approached this process.

This episode is for you if:

• You are a devout follower of a specific way of eating (whether that’s plant based, keto, paleo - whatever it is!)
• You’re struggling to choose between your ethics/morals and your health when it comes to food
• You don’t seem to be making any progress with symptoms even though you’re eating “healthy”
• Talking about your diet with anyone seems very stressful or causes lots of opinions and unsolicited advice

Some things we cover in this episode:

• Dealing with people’s opinions on how you choose to eat or changing the way your eating
• How diet can affect our PCOS, our cycles and ultimately our fertility
• Getting pregnant with PCOS
• How to figure out the best way to find balance between eating in a way that you believe in as well as eating in a way that’s physiologically best for YOU
• Changing your eating habits
• The stigma around being vegan or not being vegan
• How to approach conversations full of unsolicited diet advice (ugh)
• When a way of eating becomes your identity
• How to figure out what diet is best for you and your PCOS

Links to our programs:

• The PCOS Protocol