BONUS: Navigating Female Hormones, Metabolism, Sleep and More with Dr. Stephanie Estima | Hormones, Metabolism, Sleep

Cynthia Thurlow (0:00)

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Welcome to Everyday Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, nurse practitioner, Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower, and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.

This is Bonus Monday, your most downloaded favorite podcast. I love that this community runs the gamut from medical professionals, research scientists, science writers, personal trainers, and more. These are your favorite, most loved podcasts of the last five years. I could not be more proud of the diversification of guests that appeal to all of you. Thanks for tuning in. I was joined today by the amazing and wonderful Dr. Stephanie Estima, facilitating listeners' questions. She joined me most recently on episode 272, where we dove into women's health. And she had previously joined me on episode 123 Dr. Estima is an exceptionally well-read and well-versed clinician. She is an expert on female metabolism and body composition, and the author of the incredible resource called The Betty Body, and the host of a podcast called The Better Podcast, of which I've had the honor of being a guest myself. She is absolutely one of the most aligned voices in the health and wellness space with me. And today, we facilitated conversations from both of our communities, including questions on how to navigate balancing hormones while breastfeeding and not getting sufficient sleep, issues related to preconception and how to properly track your cycle, the best contraceptives for younger women, ways to support detoxification, as well as fibrocystic breasts, navigating autoimmune conditions and fibromyalgia, and how to determine how hard to push your workouts. Lots of questions related to weight training, especially around your cycle, favorite pre-workouts, favorite supplements, especially for perimenopause and menopause, hormesis, and so much more. There's no question that Dr. Estima is a very popular podcast guest, and I know you will enjoy this conversation as much as I did recording it.

Welcome back, Dr. Estima. Always a pleasure to have you on, and another AMA, a hotly requested AMA episode number two for the year.

Stephanie Estima (3:19)

Well, I am just thrilled to be back with you, my friend, and I think we're going to have, just looking at some of the questions we were just talking about in the pre-chat, we're going to have some great conversation today in serving our communities in terms of all the pressing questions that everybody wants to know about pregnancy and weight training and nutrition and all the things. I think I'm looking forward to our conversation today too.

Cynthia Thurlow (3:39)

Absolutely. So this is a question that came in from Martina. It's a question about the lack of sleep during breastfeeding and boy, do I remember those days and those years. I know sleeping is fundamental to hormone health, but I'm still breastfeeding a lot during the night. Is there anything I can do to help stabilize my hormones? The baby is 20 months old, I still don't have my period back.

Lots of nuance there.

Stephanie Estima (4:04)

Lots of nuance there. Yeah. First of all, congratulations on your 20-month-old. I remember those days as well. My first child, I breastfed him, we were about 18, 19 months, and then he started weaning. Then my second child, we breastfed, it was well over three years. I know exactly. Then he did not want to end.

He's like 10 right now. If he can still do it, he might exercise that option. I know where she is in terms of the waking up overnight, maybe the baby had a nightmare, or they're just establishing their own circadian rhythm still, like 20 months is still quite young for them to have a regular sleep-wake cycle.

The first thing I'll say is I don't have a great answer here in terms of how can you sleep soundly through the night. I don't think at this point in the game, from the women that I've, my own experience, the women that I've talked to, I don't think that you're going to sleep through the night, nor should you expect that you or your baby should either. Something to consider though, in terms of getting the amount of sleep that you need, would be to consider more of like a biphasic sleep schedule, right? So in other words, embracing the siesta, like the afternoon nap, right? So when your baby naps, the temptation is to cook, clean, get ahead of something. But what you probably should be doing if you're not already doing it, is to lay down either with your baby or if the baby is sleeping in a crib or something, for you to sleep down and like to go down and sleep and have a nap there. There is some, especially for new mothers, and I would classify her still as a new mother with a 20-month-old, that biphasic, like that two times in the day that you're sleeping. One overnight, albeit disrupted, and then a second time can be a way for you to make up that sleep debt that you may be accruing, and it'll help you function. The only caveat I would say is if you're sleeping too late in the afternoon, typically after 4 PM, if you're starting to take naps, but usually 20 months, they need a nap around noon, one, two o'clock. You're probably going to go down at the right time. But I would say that if you're feeling very drowsy, let's say at 4 or 5 o'clock, try to push that to your bedtime. Maybe you go to bed that evening at 8.3 or 9 with the baby, and then however long, maybe you're up at one or two breastfeeding the baby. But then you know that you're going to get another sleep session sometime in the early afternoon when baby goes down for his or her afternoon nap.