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.

In this episode, I am covering how to use hair tissue mineral analysis or H.J.MA to assess your

stress.

And this is, I talked about this in the previous episode. If you listen to the thyroid episode,

yay. I think it's so cool to use H.D.A. to give you a bigger picture of what's going on with thyroid.

But I talked about stress a lot. And I said, make sure you listen to the stress episode, if you have thyroid concerns. It's important for everyone, but especially that. And I love

it for assessing thyroid health. I think one of the most valuable parts of the H.T.MA is how we can

assess our stress. You can understand what stage of stress you're in and why you may or may not be

handling stress well. For most people, I would say it's a pretty big eye-opener and something

that can finally lead to confronting your stress and making lifestyle changes. I know I felt like

called out by my hair test, the first one I ever took, and many, many after that.

But it's, and that's a lot of times, like, why I'll do it. It's, I like seeing data. I'm

definitely one of those kind of people. As I've, you know, longer have gone on my healing journey,

I don't need to see it as much. I think that's just like a part of trusting your body. But I definitely,

it was really helpful for me in the beginning and seeing like, oh my gosh, you are in, your metabolism

is super slow. My copper was super high. Calcium was super high. I looked incredibly stressed,

but sluggish, which is exactly how I felt. So it was good to see. I've also had tests after that

that were like fast for super low minerals, very eye-opening things. And not that we need to have a test

to make changes, but I do think it can be helpful for a lot of people, especially for those that

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