Women's Health Book Club 📚 Update
As we expected, women are being incredibly misguided by the broken health system today.
Hello Beautiful People, thank you for being here. Your innate capacity to learn and grow is so very important and deserves to be celebrated. Personally, I’m very grateful for you as someone with an open mind! Respect to you.
Now let’s dive into this week’s update!
As part of my latest adventures this Summer, I began to put together a virtual book club that you may have heard about by now!
This last Sunday, my book club collaborator, Noelle Malpeso, and I launched our first session virtually over Zoom. And after some anticipated technical difficulties in the beginning, we were able to give space for this really valuable discussion, focusing on women’s health and hormones - and most specifically the highly controversial role and excessive overuse of female birth control in healthcare today.
Noelle did a great job with the education section as our guest provided some personal testimony that put a spotlight on just how atrocious the experience can be for so many women.
Noelle is a superstar when it comes to women’s health and hormones. You’ll soon see why this topic is so very important in a few quotes I’ve included throughout today’s story. We polled our audience and our community members chose to read Woman Code by Alisa Vitti. So far, we’ve had the group read only the Intro and Chapter One. Golden nuggets of discussion and education started jumping out at readers nearly as soon as they started reading!
Blatant Ignorance or Probable Malpractice?
As we expected, women are being incredibly disserviced and misguided by the broken health system today. It’s sad but it’s true. It’s incredibly common, and incredibly unnecessary if you ask me. There is an unimaginable disintegration that occurs for women when food, pharma, body image, puberty, and cultural pressures all congeal together around the same age for most young women leading them down similarly broken roads paved by our terribly misinformed healthcare systems positioned to support women today.
Thankfully, in our modern era we don’t have to only rely upon the recommendations of a dry and impulsive doctor who is increasingly burned out and overwhelmed with little time to even look you in the eye. We have phenomenal podcasts, books, youtube educational series and more resources available to us to dig deep, learn more, and open our minds and hearts to “what could be…”
As Noelle shared in our community, MINDSET IS KEY in the healing process. Our beliefs inform our decisions and provide a feedback loop to our DNA. As I have written about extensively in the past, our thoughts and feelings and beliefs have a remarkable influence on our health trajectory.
It is with this compassion and empathy that runs through my blood that sparked me to start writing and talking about this topic many years ago. A few of those stories published here on Substack are shared below for your convenience.
Today, I’m going to share some of our favorite quotes so far and illustrate the vision, mission, and expectations we have with furthering this discussion in the future.
Woman Code - Alisa Vitti
You will learn how to connect the dots between your symptoms, your biochemistry, and food. This prescriptive program over the past decade has successfully helped thousands of women regulate their periods, clear up their skin, lose weight, alleviate PMS, get pregnant naturally, have more successful IVF, restore their energy, improve their moods, and have better sex. Vitti's revolutionary five-step program gives you the insight and tools you need to:
Work in harmony with your body's natural rhythms
Minimize the impact of toxins in the environment, your diet, and the products that you use
Target and support the parts of your endocrine function (blood sugar, adrenals, elimination, or reproduction) that need attention
Tap into the immensely transformative power of your feminine energy
Passionately and strategically, the WomanCode protocol gives women from their teenage years to perimenopause the keys to unlock their hormone health. Giving a brain to ovaries explanation of what is going on inside your endocrine system, Vitti can help your whole body thrive. Now that you have turned on your healing power, you are better able to power up your purpose in life. If we're in the flow of our internal rhythm, we'll also attract effortless opportunities, enjoy moments of creative expression, and connect intimately with others - that's when we're in the flow of our power, our life-force energy, and our fullest potential.
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We believe everyone deserves the chance to learn more about their body and biology. You can take back control of your cycle and reclaim your vitality. You can gain a deeper understanding of how your hormones function and interact. You can equip yourself with practical strategies to support hormone balance and overall well-being. - Noelle & Jonathan
Notable “Quotes”
“Giving birth control pills and other medications to women to regulate their periods, improve their fertility, or enhance their sex drive is akin to putting a piece of tape over the flashing indicator light on the dashboard of your car and pretending you have addressed the engine problem rather than looking under the hood and dealing with the underlying issue.” - Pg. x Forward
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“Many of us have the opportunity to have it all and do it all- but that downside is that while juggling careers, love, travel, and families we’re not giving our bodies the support they need to sustain these demands. Current diet and lifestyle trends afflict women with problems related to their reproductive health. These issues affect us in our teens, conception years, and menopause. - align our feminine selves with our hormones” - Intro. Page 2
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“When you're healthy and feeling well, you have the energy to move in the direction of your dreams and to create the life you want to live. That's why I'm so passionate about helping women: when your endocrine system is working at its best, you're more excited about yourself and about life. This, in turn, leads you to attract greater opportunities, enjoy moments of creative expression, and connect more intimately with others. That's when you'll feel the fullness of your power, your life-force energy, and your fullest potential.” - Intro. Page 5-6
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“Furthermore, when you don't know how things work and have the misunderstanding that hormones are illogical, erratic, and chaotic, you can't even believe that your body is capable of performing any better. As a result, many women fall into the trap of believing that suffering is an inevitable part of being born with a female body. It's no wonder, then, that misinformation has become an enormous FLO Blocker in women's lives today and has put hormonal health on the line for millions of women.” Ch. 2. Page 34
Action Steps and Practical Advice from Noelle this Week
As a woman, if you are not familiar with your cycle then you can spend some time with the MyFlo App (image below) to help better understand where you are at in your cycle as well as track any symptoms or experiences you want to make a note of within the app.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions and seek out second opinions from qualified medical professionals. Unfortunately, many women walk through several stages of their life without ever having open and authentic conversations about their period, their hormones, or how it all relates back to their divine energy and overall health & vitality.
Start small. One small step for you to think about is all about supporting Blood Sugar Balance. Your quick tip is try what we call “Food Sequencing” where you prioritize consuming your food as part of the meal in the following sequence:
1. Protein. 2. Non-starchy vegetables. 3. Healthy Fats and 4. Complex Carbs. This method is helpful for many reasons, e.g. slowing down the blood sugar response you have after meals.
ZigZag Nutrition represents the pursuit we share as we strive to live this life as best as we can, learning and growing, flexing and adapting along the way to better align ourselves to the most nutritious life and lifestyle that meets our needs and nourishes our body, mind, and spirit - together.
Thank you for being here. Please consider sharing this story with a friend or use it as a catalyst for conversation. See you next time! 🤙
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