Welcome to the R.U. Menstrual podcast where we dive deep into all things women's health to support you on your healing journey.

I'm Amanda Montalbo, functional and integrative dietitian, also known as the hormone healing RD.

If you enjoy this podcast and you want to keep learning, check out the podcast Patreon where I share a bonus episode with additional downloadable resources each week.

You can go to patreon.com forward slash hormone healing RD or check out the link in the show notes.

All right, we are on episode two of season five talking about a holistic approach to optimizing cortisol. I feel like

cortisol is a very trendy word lately. I often get questions about how do I optimize my cortisol

level? How do I lower cortisol is probably like the most common one? Or how do I raise cortisol

if someone has done lab testing and they have very low levels.

And so I thought I would put together an episode that goes through five main areas that I like to focus on when I'm thinking about how can I help this person have healthy cortisol levels because we don't

always want to lower them or raise them.

We want to understand why are they out of balance in the first place.

So the fine being areas that I'm going to cover are nourishment and blood sugar, of course,

supporting minerals for a healthy stress response.

And I'm going to go through some tips on how to do that.

Light exposure is a big one.

I'm going to talk a little bit about circadian rhythm too, but I have a previous episode on that, so I'm going to link it. Information inputs and stimulation, another huge area for

cortisol levels, and then talking about your daily rhythm. What does that look like? How can we

support that to help, again, optimize? Because if we're not looking at all these areas and getting a full picture

as to why cortisol is higher, low, out of balance, whatever that imbalance may be for you,

then it's, I just think it's doing a disservice. And it's not going to help you get those long-term

optimal levels of cortisol, you know, that's healthy and it's going to help you feel good. And ultimately,

we're never going to get rid of all stress. I think that's something where now people know

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