Heart to Heart with Hads

How I Help Clients Restore Their Menstrual Cycle

• Hadlea Shaw

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We map a practical, step-by-step method to restore a regular cycle by fixing digestion, upgrading daily meals, managing training stress, and using simple markers like stool quality, glucose, and temperature to guide changes. A client case with PCOS shows how small, targeted shifts in fiber, fats, and meal timing can bring periods back within 4–8 weeks.

• detailed health questionnaire across gut, liver, hormones, CNS
• digestion as the lever for hormone balance
• photo food logs and meal timing audits
• case study: PCOS intake, alcohol and caffeine cuts
• calorie increases and nutrient-dense meal plans
• Bristol Stool Chart targets and daily tracking
• strength training 2–3 days with low-intensity cardio
• blood glucose checks fasted and post-meal
• macro tweaks for insulin resistance
• selective supplements: magnesium, zinc, B6, chasteberry
• temperature tracking to confirm ovulation
• labs when cycles lag after lifestyle changes
• why fuel-first beats crash dieting for hormones

If you're somebody who is, you know, overweight and you want to lose 15 pounds in 90 days, that's where I come in, right? I have my own cycle method. You just heard the method here. And if you're ready to take that next step to go from being overweight to losing 15 pounds while also restoring your cycle and making sure that's healthy, I'm your girl, and I will be very, very happy to help you
Share it with your friends, family, somebody, another woman that may need to hear this


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SPEAKER_00:

Hello guys. Welcome back to the Little Potty Podcast. I've not been on here for a while. Don't ask why. I just couldn't find the groove of like what I want to talk about. And I know I say this every time. And I just need to be structured about okay, maybe this month I'll have a focus on this. Or these next, you know, two months I'll focus on this. And so I think to finish out October, I'm really just gonna talk about things that I think that you might think cool, that I think are cool. But also just like really highlighting on the things that I'm specifically helping with my helping my clients with at the moment. This microphone is just like not, it's covering my whole face right now. So I had a journal session this morning. Actually, I was sitting on I was laying on the ground. I'm a ground layer, especially when it's carpet, and I'm just sitting there writing, like journaling, da da da da. Like I literally have two whole pages here. If you're watching on YouTube, like I'm we're about to dive deep. And I was writing out of the corner of my eye, I saw a spider and I freaked out immediately. It's it like set my mood off. I was having a really good day, and I've only been an hour into the day, and then I saw that spider and it pissed me off. So I need to stop getting mad over or like flustered or annoyed over little things, and I can't sit here and blame that on my hormones because that's just simply not it. It's just me being overreactive over dumb little things, and so I just need to be more conscious about when that happens, why I'm doing it, like why I'm reacting so hard. Cause truthfully, it's it's really not that deep usually. So that's beyond the point. We're gonna get into today's the topic of today. And I just kind of want to explain the process of how I help women restore their cycle. So I'm gonna get into it. I'm gonna yap, we're gonna go deep into it. But essentially, the first thing that happens when somebody, you know, comes to me and they're like, hey, I haven't had my period for X amount of time, or my periods are irregular or they're painful or whatever it may be. The very first thing that I do is I'm like, okay, cool, let's let's do a let's do a questionnaire. So I have a very in-depth questionnaire process that all of my clients go through. And on that, there's different sections, right? And so the first section is like small intestine, you know, what's going on, and it'll ask questions that are pertaining to symptoms that are impacting or affecting the small intestine. When you get lowered down, you know, it would does liver, it does your central nervous system, musculoskeletal, like every little portion, organ, I guess you could say, of your body, and just based off the symptoms, and it kind of scores you and it'll tell you, okay, this is high priority, moderate priority, low priority, whatever. Mostly every time. The ones when they answer the hormone questions, right? I know for sure hormones are always high priority when they don't have their cycle. And then the digestion ones are always, almost always moderate to high priority. And that's because your digestion plays a huge role in your hormones. Because if you're not properly absorbing nutrients and food or you have some sort of bacteria going on inside of your gut, your body is going to struggle to make the hormones that it needs to one carry out a cycle, two, absorb the nutrients, right? And three, don't know what I was gonna say. So there you go. Because I lost my train of thought. Anyways, so like I said, looks at their current symptoms, you know. Usually there is GI distress, usually there's constipation, bloating, we'll see, you know, maybe sometimes undigested food in stool. And the questions that they're asking are very in-depth. Like whenever I can't even think of one, but I'm just trying to think off the top of my head. Like, do you get gas after like two hours after a meal? Like very in-depth on or like when you eat a meal, do you get nauseous or do fatty foods make you feel nauseous and you have loose stools? And very, very in-depth, right? So, this, like I said, digestion impacts the hormone health. So once, once we kind of get that, right, I have them go through a process of sending me a food log so I can see because obviously nutrition plays such a big part, and everybody overlooks this because they're like, Oh, I think I'm eating healthy, right? I've like, I think I'm eating healthy, and I'll just throw in one of my clients for an example that you know had a regular cycle. We come to find out we just figured out she has PCOS. And but what we what we saw is like this is what her day looks like. She was having, you know, a fair life protein shake for breakfast. She was having uh lunch with something like some meat and cheese, and maybe an apple. Dinner was like Brussels sprouts and chicken and like rice. And then she would have like another apple, right? Okay, cool. She had, you know, two servings of fruit in there. She had, you know, maybe 70, 80, 90 grams of protein. Um, but where's the fiber? Right. We have a couple of fruits, but we don't have enough vegetables. We're not having structured meal times. And so this is why I always get them to send me their food log for a whole week. I have them send me pictures so I can see exactly what they're putting in their bodies. You know, I they're sending me it at the times, and I'm like, okay, really? You're eating breakfast at 11 a.m. Okay, that's that's fine, no judging, but we're gonna have to fix that. Or like dinner is at, you know, 9 p.m. Just like things that I can see within their daily habits that we're going to change right off the bat. And, you know, once when they send me their pictures of how much they're currently eating, I'm able to put put what they're eating into my fitness pal so I can see kind of what their their intake is, but I also have them log it too. But I'm better at logging it because I know it. I know how to log things front to back. I know how much you know they're consuming that's going in. So that's kind of like put that on me. It's definitely a lot of work on me, but I don't care. I want them to like get in the groove of that accountability of sending their meals so that I can see what it's like. But also, too, your version of healthy look may look way different than my version of healthy. So that's why I have them send it. And really, when it comes down to nutrition, it's all about simplifying, right? And we're used to eating like, you know, what our family eats. So your family's eating this is just an example, like a chicken alfredo with sauce, and you're like, okay, well, this is healthy because like there's pasta, there's a little bit of vegetables, you know, there's a little bit of protein, but there's heavy cream, there's cheese, there's flour, all of these things that you're not taking into consideration when you think, oh yeah, I'm eating like a healthy balanced meal, when it's actually not the greatest thing for you. So going back to the example of my client Ali, you know, she sent me that, and I I don't know what her intake was, you know, maybe close to 1300, 1400 calories, not a lot of protein, not a lot of fiber. And so after she did that, you know, I kind of went in and I was like, hey, this is what we need to do. We're gonna put you on a little bit of anti-inflammatory. So I really, really gave her tons of fruits. I mean, lots and lots of fruits and lots of uh low inflammatory type of foods, you know, sweet potato, uh zucchini, carrots. Um I'm trying to think uh green beans, not green beans. That's not what I meant to say. Asparagus, things that are really um nutrient dense, have a lot of fiber that help with natural detoxification. You know, aloe vera just all the things help support her guts to help support liver detox. Because one thing too is she also she put in her intake form, like I said, is very in-depth, takes about 30, 20 to 30 minutes to complete that she drank a lot of alcohol, you know, like 12, 12 in a given week. And so we completely eliminated that, you know, her caffeine intake, we we brought that down a lot too. And those are all the things that I literally need to know every single thing about your life and your lifestyle in order to be able to help you change and make a change in your cycle. So after I have them send their pics, right, I kind of, you know, do the calorie intake and I really try to keep calorie intake pretty similar to what they're doing, and I start almost increasing it right away. Um for a little bit of time, I'll keep it similar just to build that consistency to see, you know. But then I immediately am like, okay, cool. We need to really, really bump this. And so I bump it up like almost three to 400 calories. Like I need to get I need to get them in the groove of eating more, relying on nutrition for energy rather than caffeine for energy. Um, and we really make everything very, very nutrient dense. And I make the meal plan specifically. It's not like here's your macros, here you go, goodbye. No, I make the meal plan, and then once they're to a spot where they understand things, then they can go in and you know, kind of make the meal plan, put in swaps here and there to kind of fit. We make sure digestion is solid, right? So when they're sending their weekly check-ins and making sure digestion is solid, you know, adding supplements, maybe depending on their, you know, their questionnaire, we're looking for regular form stools, we're looking for on the Bristol stool chart a four. And we're looking for that consistently once a day, once or twice a day, to ensure that, you know, digestion's good, right? Digestion, like I mentioned at the beginning, is if we are bad, likely hormones are suffering from it. So we always, always, always pay attention to digestion, and that's something that they know in their check-ins is like a constipat of loose stools, et cetera, the Bristol Stool chart. Um, and then after we've kind of you know solidified the baseline and we got everything going good, then we kind of go into, okay, what are we doing with exercise-wise, right? Because we don't want things to be too intense to where your body is, you know, complete stress and goes to low power mode and you know doesn't produce the hormones because stress is too high from the training, which you don't see that from a lot of people. I think that I'm just I think about myself because I train like a legit maniac, that I have had, you know, those issues of training too hard in that that one stressor making my cycle, you know, be gonzo. So every person's just dependent. I have to kind of see video-wise and just know by what you what kind of what you tell me where what your training intensities looked like, but like to keep training to three days a week. Um, just to ensure that things are smooth sailing regularly. Uh I hate, I hate that I keep saying uh, but it's like a placeholder for me. I'm gonna stop doing it. So two to three days of training, strength training, a little bit of low intensity cardio. We want to do some cardiovascular endurance type stuff too. And then, you know, have them send me their training video so that I can really assess their intensity if it's too much, too little. That's where that comes into play. And then another thing, too, that I love to add in is blood glucose. So, say I do have females with PCOS, and I actually have four clients that do have PCOS. I like to see the blood sugar. We want to make sure blood sugar is down because when blood sugar is down, inflammation is down, and when inflammation is down, that's when a cycle can persist, right? So, blood sugar, we add that in once we've kind of got digestion going, all these things going. We don't want to overwhelm, right? That's the thing I don't want to overwhelm my clients and say, hey, we're gonna focus on strength training, we're gonna focus on your digestion, we're gonna focus on all this all at once because then it gets overwhelming. And so taking things in certain phases, like, all right, this is what we're gonna work on now, and then we're gonna add this in, then we're gonna add this in. And some clients can handle it, right? But not everybody needs to go into this full-fledged tracking this and tracking this and tracking this. Some people just need simplicity and changing of their daily habits, right? So, especially those with insulin resistance, PCOS, we're gonna be doing blood glucose. We're gonna be checking that on a weekly basis, you know, fasted two hours post-perennial, two hours after a meal. And then if we do have, you know, PCOS client, we kind of have to do a little bit of nutrition strategy with them and keep fats a little bit higher and carbs a little bit lower to help offset that. Now, that doesn't mean we're doing zero carbs, right? It just means that carbs are a little bit lower than maybe we would do. Protein, moderate, carbs are like moderate to low, and fats are really, really high. So I think a very anti-inflammatory diet essentially is what it's a lot of oils and seeds and nuts, omega-3 fatty acids, salmon, avocado, and then the carbs coming from mostly veggies and fruits and things like nut butters, seeds, those are gonna have a little bit of trace, carbs, right? And then protein sources, we're gonna keep those too: eggs, beef, chicken, turkey, salmon, just like types of fish, haddock, haddock. I think that's how you say haddock. I don't I've been saying haddock, but I guess that's not right. So, with all that being said, right, these are this is just like the kind of standard process that I do with some people and it's helpful restore their cycle. And so once digestion solid, we're in a good spot. I don't love to add in tons of supplements, but you know, say cycle hasn't pushed through yet, which starting supplement recently, for my own under own understanding and learning is if we want to add in magnesium, zinc, uh B6 supplement to help with the LH and FSH, getting that up into a spot so that they can ovulate, so that they can't have a cycle. And then another thing too, you can also do is you know, triple dose magnesium to 800 milligrams in your luteal phase. And this can help offset some of those PMS symptoms. Another thing, too, is that I'm making sure that they have some sort of tracking device so that we can see their temperatures. Okay, you know, is your temperature rising after you ovulate? Because temperatures are not rising after ovulation, likely cycles not going to persist and push through. So we need that temperature to rise up. And, you know, we can do that with, like I said, supplementing the magnesium and the zinc. Chase to Berry is also another option, but aura ring, a garment or whoop, whatever track cycle or temperature, and you can use natural cycles, aura natural cycles. You can actually take your temperature every morning. That's what I did before I had the aura, and I would take my temp under my tongue and then it would sync to the app. And so you could see, you know, the fluctuations uh where you're at in your cycle if you have it right, if you have a regular cycle. So what we see usually is cycle come back within four to eight weeks of just changing diet, right? If not, then we got to take a look at training and maybe take a look at some other things. We got to take a look at labs, you know, what is progesterone, estrogen, FF LH, and FSH, estradiol looking like prolactin, CRP, you know, inflammation marker, cholesterol. We want to see cholesterol. So labs are almost like a like an option you can do after you've tried things, but even then it could be used first. I don't like to make everyone try like get labs right off the bat. And most of the time, clients that come to me already do have labs, but I do think it's a nice added touch so we can see, okay, are you insulin resistant? Is your testosterone too high, too low? Is your estrogen too high, too low? Same with progesterone. So with all that being said, and you can keep in the magnesium zinc B6 long term to help keep regular. Another thing too is like we love to keep food as high as we can so that we're getting in the most nutrients that we can. And I know a lot of clients that I see, they'll be like, what? I just want to lose fat. And it's like, okay, but you've already been eating little and you're still overweight and you don't have a cycle. And so it's all about optimizing the internal health before going into a fat loss phase. And I think that most coaches, fitness coaches, miss the mark here. And so that's why it's better to have someone like myself, a functional health coach who knows, hey, we can't just go into a straight up fat loss phase just for the just for the testimonial, just for the transformation. I think that's where a lot of coaches miss the mark. And that makes your health decline even more, makes your cycle be even more irregular. When in reality, if you just fed your body the right amount of nutrients and gave your body that time to have an adaptive metabolism, then your body would respond so much better. You'd have a better cycle, you would actually make your fat loss easier because you're fueling your body with enough nutrients. And it'd be easier when you do go into a fat loss phase, when you do go under a little calorie deficit, that your body already has the nutrients stored. So you can actually see a lot of progress happen with eating more nutrient-dense foods, being in a kind of quote-unquote maintenance phase while getting your cycle back. You want hormones to be healthy, healthy, healthy. Even if you're overweight, I don't recommend going straight into a deficit because you need to give your body nutrients from the good food and wipe out the bad food. So those are my thoughts on kind of hormones and kind of my process for going through and regulating menstrual cycle. And if you're somebody who is, you know, overweight and you want to lose 15 pounds in 90 days, that's where I come in, right? I have my own cycle method. You just heard the method here. And if you're ready to take that next step to go from being overweight to losing 15 pounds while also restoring your cycle and making sure that's healthy, I'm your girl, and I will be very, very happy to help you. So hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Got some good information takeaways from it and kind of my process. And if you guys have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out. And I'll see you in the next episode. Hope you guys enjoy this. Share it with your friends, family, somebody, another woman that may need to hear this. Okay, goodbye.