The Ultimate Guide to Women’s Nutrition: Hormones, Exercise, PMOS & Endometriosis with Dr Hazel Wallace

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Dr Faye Bate (0:58)

Almost 80% of active women have never received advice on how to properly fuel their bodies for exercise. And so much of the nutrition advice we're giving still isn't designed with women in mind. So today I'm sitting down with Dr Hazel Wallace, former NHS doctor and registered associate nutritionist, to understand how to eat as a woman, not a man.

Dr Hazel Wallace (1:19)

Most of the medical research we have is based on male bodies.

Dr Faye Bate (1:21)

We're talking about iron deficiency nutrition for PMOS or endometriosis, body image and so much more. After this episode, you'll never fall for another hormone balancing nutrition trend again. But before we get into the episode, if you could do one small thing that takes two minutes, subscribe to the YouTube channel or follow us on Spotify. It allows us to keep bringing you episodes for free to help you live a happier, healthier life.

Thank you, Dr Hazel. I am very, very, very excited to have you on the podcast. And before we get into nutrition for women, iron deficiency, conditions like endometriosis, what I do love to do before that is go into your reasons behind where you are now. Do you remember the moment you realized that nutrition could have such an impact?

Dr Hazel Wallace (2:08)

Yeah, I, so my backstory is when I was 14, I lost my father to a stroke. And that was obviously a very pivotal part of my life.

And despite being that young, I knew then that I wanted to go into health care. I never thought about it before. My dad was an accountant, so the thought process was I would do something similar. And I think the experience, being in and out of the hospital, although it happened over quite a quick period, I thought this is something I want to do.

And as I was doing placements, I was doing that during school to learn more about cardiovascular disease and really maybe got a bit obsessed with it and started to understand that our lifestyle really impacts the risk of that. So nutrition, exercise, stress, all of these things. And so I went into med school thinking I'm going to learn about all these things. I'm going to learn everything about nutrition. I'm going to prevent so many deaths. And as you know, I learned not very much if at all at med school. So in my first year of med school, I set up a blog called The Food Medic over 14, maybe 15 years ago now. And I was basically trying to take the research about how nutrition impacts health, not just cardiovascular disease, but other aspects of health and share it in a really digestible way. And Instagram was very new then. I set up an Instagram account. There was no intention behind it. Like it didn't, influencers didn't exist or anything. I just wanted to share what I was learning. And it just grew really quickly because I think then there was a big boom in the wellness industry with like lots of wellness bloggers who were saying very bizarre things. So I think the desire for someone who was maybe grounded in science was big. And so by my final year of university, I had two book deals and I was just like, wow, this is huge. Alongside working as a doctor, I then did my master's in nutrition and worked as a nutrition doctor for a little while, which was interesting. But it was a lot more clinical in terms of like working with patients, oncology, patients going through surgery who required parental nutrition. And then COVID happened and that was everything really.

Dr Faye Bate (4:23)

Suck it's toll, I can imagine, yeah.

Dr Hazel Wallace (4:25)

Yeah, I think I was deployed from the nutrition team onto a COVID team and I did that for a really long time. I would say 18 months I was in some kind of COVID specialty, be that ward-based intensive care. And then I did long COVID follow up. It was so intense and intensive care follow up. So I was unable to escape it even when the pandemic was kind of ending. I was still within it. And it was actually during COVID that I wrote my first women's health book, The Female Factor, because I had the plans to do it. And I think I was living alone. So if I wasn't at work, I needed something to do. And more and more research was coming out around that time about how most of the medical research we have is based on male bodies. And that was news for me because I was like, we weren't told this at medical school. That was quite enraging. And even as a woman, I was thinking, this makes so much sense for how I was being treated. And I was thinking, checking my own biases of how we treat women in the hospital, especially during COVID.