Jonathan Steedman (00:03.116)

Hey team, really excited to talk you about this topic today because I think it's a criminally overlooked part of the weight loss journey that a lot of people start. They start and you know, if you're in the group, you've got a really good everyday plan, you've got your meal plan, you've got your backup options, so you've got some flexibility built in. You know, you've got a plan for the weekend and travel, so we've got all of that sorted, right? But we don't have a plan for something that happens fairly regularly.

quite consistently, hopefully, right? And something that for some people can be really, really impactful on their ability to maintain their progress, right? There's a whole heap of hormonal, mental, metabolic, physical disruptions, which can make sticking to your normal plan really, really difficult, okay? So there's a few little tweaks that I'm gonna recommend today, a few little strategies that you can build in to make sure that...

you can kind of build your plan around your menstrual cycle so it no longer pushes you backwards with your progression. Some of you may need to pause your progress during that time, right? Depending on how, know, some people, you know, find a bit of, it's a mild impact, but if you're finding it's quite a severe impact, then I think accepting that your goal during that time should be to maintain your progress, that's a really powerful thing because yeah, maybe.

Maybe you're making progress three weeks out of every month but that's so much better than making progress for three weeks and then kind of derailing that progress for a week and having that as your pattern which I think historically for a lot of people that has been the case. So the one thing or one big caveat I want to put out there is you may find that this is not as sciency or as specific or as prescriptive as you were hoping and that's intentional because I like science, I like evidence.

and the evidence is just simply not there to recommend direct things. Right? We'll touch on that in a little bit. This is your menstrual cycle. This is not a high school biology lesson. I'm not gonna go through this. I'm not even gonna read those words out. That's what it is. If you want to know more about your menstrual cycle or if you live with someone who menstruates and you wanna know more about their cycle, which I highly recommend, this is a phenomenal book. I don't usually recommend books on nutritional science, because they often can be

Jonathan Steedman (02:25.974)

horrible, but Dr. Jen, I think it's Gunter. She's a Canadian obstetrician and gynecologist and she's phenomenal. So read this book if you want to get a really good kind of background. No BS, very science-based. The Science, Medicine and Mythology Administration. If you want that, this is the book. But that's why I'm not going to dive deeply into that. But again, there's been this growing

kind of push on social media of diets to be built around your cycle and then training around your cycle. So during the luteal phase, you oxidize, I'm a bit more insulin resistant, so you should have less carbohydrates. then after you've menstruated, then you're really insulin sensitive, so you should eat lots of carbs. And that's when you're your strongest, if you're training. There's all of this stuff, which is essentially taking very preliminary research in small populations.

and extrapolating it out and essentially reaching the point where they're making recommendations that aren't really grounded in the body of evidence. They're not grounded in the science. yes, research around menstruation and diet, and particularly the menstrual cycle around diet and exercise is criminally poor. Or not poor, sorry, but just there's not much of it, unfortunately. That doesn't mean...

that that influencer who's saying you should hit PB during this phase and you should eat more fats during this phase and less carbs during this phase knows something that the scientists don't. They're just making it up. Hopefully, potentially in the future, we will have, we can be more specific with recommendations, but essentially, this is the best recommendation I can give you. And that is to know thyself, right? To know what your individual experience is with your menstrual cycle. And that's also gonna change through different stages of life, you know?

pre-pregnancy, post-pregnancy, all of these things are going to shift things around. And so you might find that your experience and your strategies change as you age. And that's important to keep up with as well. Right? So what I'm going to do is give you some broad kind of the experience that I've seen with, you know, the thousands of clients that I've worked with and just some habits that you can bring in if you need to. So firstly, if you menstruate and you don't really notice too much disruption to your training and nutrition,

Jonathan Steedman (04:49.046)

Well, I probably should said at the top of the video, don't watch this video. Sorry, I've just wasted a few minutes of your time already. But don't bother with the rest of it. You don't need it. Okay, you're not going to gain anything by making changes if you don't need them. Right. But if you do find that my mood drops or my energy is lower, I get increased cravings or lower, you know, performance in the gym, I would strongly recommend just jotting that down in some fashion. So you can start to build a little bit of a bit of a history bit of a journal and then you can start

noticing some patterns and then we can start proactively doing something about it. So the luteal phase is the main one that we will set. wasn't going to say the words and I just said the luteal phase. That's this. That's probably the most sciencey word I'll say. No, I'll probably say prostaglandins later. This is the second most sciencey word I'll say today. That's the phase that essentially is right before actual menstruation. And so this typically, if you're going to find a phase of the menstrual cycle, tricky.

statement. It's this phase, right? Now this could be two days, it could be seven days. Again, know thyself. Everyone's kind of length of not just the length of the luteal phase, but also the length of the potential disruption is very varied. So take that time to track, figure out when is your danger zone. But during this time, you know, we see physical, you know, you've got physical discomfort, there can be mental mental health impacts. There's hormonal shifts. And a big one that happens in the luteal phase as well.

is we can see your metabolism, your metabolic rate can shift a little bit, right? So sometimes we see in the luteal phase, your metabolic rate actually, hang on, let me get my hands right, goes up, right? And so if that metabolic rate has gone up, particularly if you were trying to lose fat and you've calculated to get into a deficit, so already you've calculated that I'm burning this many calories and I'm gonna eat this many calories. That is my deficit, that's gonna help with fat loss. And maybe prior to the luteal phase that was going,

totally fine. What can happen is this metabolic rate can bump up. And so now we see the gap between what you're eating and what you're burning has widened. Now already forget all of the other potential symptoms of your period. That's gonna make things hard, right? Just in general, know, someone who doesn't menstruate when we increase the size of the deficit, it can get harder. You can get hungry or you can get crankier. Now we're doing that.

Jonathan Steedman (07:10.988)

plus you're having all of the other potential disruptions and symptoms of your menstrual cycle, particularly at this phase. And so that's a huge reason why this phase can be really tricky for people. You get hungry because literally the gap between what you're eating and what you're burning widens, and then it's kind of amplified by the other discomfort and the other kind of disruptions, right? So there's not too many things, unfortunately, that we can do nutritionally to significantly change

symptoms or significantly change the mental health side of things. There's a few little things we can do, but it's probably beyond the scope of this. But the fairly simplistic but important take home initially is to eat more. if my camera's mirrored. If I'm burning this and I'm eating this and for a certain phase in the month, my burning goes to here, my metabolism goes to here, then

Ideally, I would do this. My food would raise to track it. Now you can't exactly calculate. No, my metabolism goes up 136 calories during the luteal phase. So I will eat an extra hundred. It's not like that. But we do just want to kind of still follow that pattern, right? So for some people, it helps to do this. Like I said, up the top, if for you, this is a very disruptive phase, I actually would prefer you to do this, right? Do you see that choreography? So.

your metabolism goes up, but I don't just want you to increase your food a little, I actually want you to come virtually back to maintenance so you are no longer in a deficit. So you've got the energy mentally and physically to deal with the other disruptions and to not fully, got it, massively exceed your calorie intake and put yourself backwards in your weight loss progression. So what you would do is you would eat more. Now, you know, go and check out the...

strategies on specifically how we would eat more. That's in the hunger helper around, you know, adding an extra snack or two, maybe focusing on a bit more protein, adding extra carbohydrate serves at lunch and dinner. You know, we'd also potentially look at, I say potentially, I would probably intentionally increase the frequency of dessert. Maybe you change up what it is, maybe you change the portions up, remember to use the just enough strategies. you know, and you're just enough during this phase may be different to what it is outside of this phase. And that's also totally fine. Right. So

Jonathan Steedman (09:34.066)

Overall, overarching thing, pardon me, is to eat a little bit more. But we can be a little bit specific with how we do that. But I know that sounds overly simplistic, but it has solved this for so many people. You get some support, you get some fuel, you remove one of the frustrating and difficult disruptions and symptoms of this phase. And so that makes it much easier to navigate the others. And then when you come out the other side, you've just maintained where you are and you pick up where you left off and off you go.

Right. I also wanted to touch on bloating because I know that can be a big part of it for some people to a degree. There's we'll talk on a few things that you can do to reduce it. I would not say that we're going to eliminate it naturally. Just, you know, the thickening of the uterine wall and just the whole process. We're going to still have some bloating and some discomfort, you know, particularly, you know, the rise in prostaglandins. That's a word I promised I was going to say that can.

very close to the lining of your gut can increase basically your gut sensitivity to a few things which can exacerbate the bloating as well. One thing you can do particularly if you're already a little bit prone to, if you're already sensitive to higher FODMAP foods is maybe be a little bit, maybe go a little bit lower FODMAP during that time. Please notice the bold writing though. We're talking about maybe reducing the high FODMAP foods, not removing the high FODMAP foods.

So just a really big ticket items. I don't want you to avoid everything, but you might find if there's something that you're kind of sensitive to, but you're okay most of the time during this phase, may be not, you might need to reduce it a little bit more aggressively. So those very big high FODMAP fobs, drop those if you need more specific help, just shoot me a message in school. Cause I don't want you to cut out. What you can do is you can go really low FODMAP and then you go really low fiber and that can actually make things worse. So don't do that.

Okay, we've got to be careful with that balancing act. A couple of other things that can help with bloating. This is just in general as well, but just keeping your hydration up. I'm not overdoing it, but also not underdoing it. Underdoing it can actually lead to a little bit of water retention, which makes things worse. So just trying to sip on water kind of regularly throughout the day, as always drinking enough. So your urine is light yellow through to clear. It doesn't have to be clear all the time. You probably don't need four liters a day unless you're working outside in high humidity five days a week. But you know, for most people it's going to be that.

Jonathan Steedman (11:57.614)

for 1.8 to 2.5 if I was to be held to a number. The other thing is just gentle movement. Again, some people might find that during this phase they can continue to exercise and move as they normally do. And if that's you, go for it. But if you find that you are more uncomfortable and you're more bloated, maybe doing some gentler movement, maybe swapping out some of the higher intensity stuff for something lower intensity, yoga, polities, walking, swimming, that sort of thing. If you don't typically do any movement,

now would be a really great time to add some of that gentle movement because getting the blood flowing, gravity, all of those things can actually help move things through and help reduce that bloating as well. So really great for everybody. And then the last thing is just looking at trying to up, you may not need to, but potentially reducing your alcohol and or your coffee intake, both of those things are known gut irritants. And you might find that particularly just during this phase, you're extra sensitive to them. So it might be worth, you know, again,

You may not need to remove them entirely, but you might find if you're a two coffee a day person, maybe one coffee a day makes your gut feel a bit better during this phase. Cool. So I hope that helped. Like I said, sorry, there's no specific protocol. I just really like being evidence-based. And so if you've got questions, hit me up in the school group or send questions, DM me. Otherwise,

Yeah, I'm excited to hear how adding that structure to your day is going to help.