Hey Soul Cyster!

I was diagnosed with PCOS when I was thirteen. Back in the day they just put you on birth control pills and told you to lose weight. Easier said than done! Now there are many more treatment options for women with PCOS and many that are natural and proven effective. The problem is with so many women going undiagnosed; these treatments are often overlooked (especially when it comes to infertility). Infertility is BIG BUSINESS. Many women going through the process and spending their life savings have PCOS. The issue lies in that you don’t necessarily have to have cysts in your ovaries to have PCOS. Not all Doctors believe this though. If the ultrasound is clear, PCOS is not the issue. This is not the case. I have had many ultrasounds in my life, sometimes I have had so many cysts in my ovaries that it looked like a pile of pearls and at other times the ultrasound was clear. It is better to look at the list of symptoms I posted yesterday and decipher from there. Like I said, I can pretty much pick PCOS women out of a line up. The signs are clear even when the ultrasound results are not.

In today’s post I am going to talk about dietary intervention for PCOS. As I said yesterday, it all comes down to high insulin levels. If you control the amount of insulin the body releases, you produce fewer male hormones. The way to control insulin is to limit the amount of sugar and carbohydrate you ingest. In general, we eat way too much carbohydrate (and not nearly enough protein and good fats). Fat is not the enemy, carbs are. The underlying issue is insulin resistance. It is complex and there are many factors that contribute but here is the “Coles notes” version:

Insulin resistance occurs when cell receptors do not respond to the action of insulin. When this occurs the cells don’t get the glucose from the blood, blood glucose levels remain high and a signal is sent to the pancreas to make more insulin. High circulating insulin and high blood sugar lead to high levels of androgen (male hormones) and fat storage.

How do we fix insulin resistance? It all comes down to what you eat. To treat PCOS and reverse insulin resistance follow these dietary rules. They work, I am proof.

1)      Limit your carbohydrate intake to under 100 grams per day. Some people may need to reduce it to less depending on how insulin resistant you are. I find I feel my best and my symptoms are lessened if I keep my carb count to under 50 grams. Most people get over 200 grams of carbohydrate daily in North America….way too much!

2)      Eat a whole food diet and avoid artificial sweeteners. Try to avoid processed foods as much as possible. Look at food as your medicine and your healer.

3)      Fat is not bad but you want to make sure you are balancing your fats. I am not a fan of vegetable oils in general (corn, canola, vegetable), they are too high in omega-6 fats which can cause inflammation. We get far too much of them in our diet. What you want to be eating is good quality saturated fats like coconut oil and butter. Now there is some limited research that showed that a high fat diet caused an increase in insulin resistance in rats. I don’t put a lot of faith in it though because they didn’t control the calories or the source of fat. Make sure you also get omega-3 fats from fish, nuts and seeds. They have been proven to increase the cells sensitivity to insulin.

4)      Eat fibre and lots of it! Try to get 30-40 grams daily (the average Canadian gets around 10 grams per day). Fibre is proven to reduce insulin resistance. There are lots of benefits to fibre but that’s a post for another day!

Make these 4 dietary changes and you will notice a marked difference in symptoms such as hair growth, acne and abdominal weight. In time, your menstrual cycle should start to regulate as well. Control the insulin and you will control the PCOS.

I will talk about natural and conventional methods of treatment in my next post. It is amazing what help is out there that many people don’t know about.