Episode 130
Betty Murray:Modern Approaches to Hormonal Balance and Autoimmune Recovery
Betty Murray:
Modern Approaches to Hormonal Balance and Autoimmune Recovery
In this episode, I had the wonderful opportunity to chat with Betty Murray, a nutrition expert, PhD researcher, certified functional medicine practitioner, and speaker. We explored the critical role of hormones in autoimmunity and the importance of hormone balance for achieving optimal health.
First Aired on: Mar 11, 2024
Episode 130
Betty Murray:Modern Approaches to Hormonal Balance and Autoimmune Recovery
Betty Murray:
Modern Approaches to Hormonal Balance and Autoimmune Recovery
In this episode, I had the wonderful opportunity to chat with Betty Murray, a nutrition expert, PhD researcher, certified functional medicine practitioner, and speaker. We explored the critical role of hormones in autoimmunity and the importance of hormone balance for achieving optimal health.
First Aired on: Mar 11, 2024
Table of Contents:
Table of Contents:
In this episode:
In this episode:
Key Takeaways:
- Understanding the intricate link between hormones and autoimmunity and why achieving hormone balance is crucial for our health.
- Betty shares her personal journey from battling colitis to discovering the impactful role of diet on autoimmune diseases, leading her to the functional medicine field.
- The Hormone Reset Program and its benefits in helping women over 40 harness their hormones to lose weight, optimize sleep, restore energy, and thrive.
- The significant role lifestyle changes play in optimizing health, with a focus on diet modifications and stress management.
- Challenges in conventional medicine, particularly the common oversight of the root causes of autoimmune conditions and hormonal imbalances.
- Encouragement for women to take control of their health by understanding and managing their hormonal health, especially during perimenopause and menopause.
- Simple, yet effective lifestyle adjustments that can significantly impact hormonal health and autoimmune management.
Other Resources:
Other Resources:
Connect with Betty Murray
Connect with Betty Murray
Watch this interview:
Watch this interview:
Episode Transcript
Julie Michelson:[00:00:00] Welcome back to the Inspired Living with Autoimmunity podcast. I'm your host, Julie Michelson. And today I am joined by Betty Murray, nutrition expert, PhD researcher, certified functional medicine practitioner and speaker. Betty helps women over 40 harness their hormones to lose weight, optimize sleep, restore energy and thrive through her hormone reset program.
Julie Michelson: She is the host of the menopause [00:01:00] mastery podcast and the founder and CEO of living well Dallas functional medicine center and the coming into our own project. In today's conversation, we are talking about, you guessed it, hormones. Not only the connection between hormones and autoimmunity, but the importance of hormone balance and the role that lifestyle plays in optimizing health.
Julie Michelson: Listen in to find out how we both feel better in our 50s than we did in our 40s.
Julie Michelson: Betty, welcome to the podcast.
Betty Murray: Oh, thank you for having me, Julie. I'm so excited. You
Julie Michelson: This is one of my favorite topics to talk about. I always love to start with story because I'm guessing this is not what you were dreaming about doing when you were a little girl. So how did you enter this world?
Betty Murray: know, um, so that it is a circuitous route, which I think a lot of us in this community really were on. [00:02:00] Um, actually, at one point, I did want to be a doctor, you know, child of the late 80s. And I actually chose not to do that because at the time I was like, that's too much school. I don't want to be in school that long.
Betty Murray: You know, I was like, I liked business. So I went and got a business degree. But what really brought me to the functional medicine world was actually a diagnosis of colitis. Um, I had these episodes of digestive things as a kid. And I think anybody that's in my age group, you know, growing up in the seventies and eighties, you know, if your limbs didn't fall off, your parents would be kind of like dust you off.
Betty Murray: Just keep going. And so it was always like, well, you're just sensitive. Right. And then when I got into my twenties, it became much more pronounced and go to gastroenterology, get diagnosed with colitis, which for anybody that doesn't know what that is, it's an autoimmune digestive disorder. And I asked what I thought was a very obvious question.
Betty Murray: Could I change my diet? And change the trajectory of this disease and this, um, very obnoxious gastroenterologist. I'm just gonna be really honest. He was very [00:03:00] condescending. He barks this big laugh in my face and says, It has nothing to do with what you eat. That's really interesting because if I don't eat, I start to get better.
Betty Murray: And so I just started, you know, changing my diet. I went back to school, went back and got prerequisites to get into a master's program for nutrition. And kind of started down this road and ended up, you know, as soon as I got in there, I was like, Oh my gosh, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. And I was actually in IT at that time.
Betty Murray: Right. So I was in a completely different field. It's paid off well over the years, having that understanding. Um, but I ended up going back and kind of getting into private practice. And so through my thirties, um, mid thirties and on, once I started my practice, everything was kind of okay with digestion until I had about 38 going on 39.
Betty Murray: And it was like all of a sudden every hormone problem that you could imagine occurred. I got cystic acne, my period started getting heavier, I started losing hair, like all kinds of stuff. And at that point I'd already opened my clinic, I had [00:04:00] functional medicine, medical providers, I, you know, we had been practicing and I sort of was down this sort of rabbit hole of, at the time was perimenopause, but it didn't occur to me that I was in it already.
Betty Murray: You know, that early, right? And so I had a really awful forties. I'm just gonna be really honest. I gained weight. I used to bodybuild, right? I know how to manipulate the body and doing the same things that I did before. All of a sudden I gained 36, almost 40 pounds that I can't get rid of. for almost a decade.
Betty Murray: And, you know, all different kinds of treatments and everything. And so I decided to go back and really study for my PhD because I wanted to understand our hormone interaction, because to be honest, we aren't really studied in medicine and there's so much uniqueness. And so that's why I went back to get my PhD and I uncovered a bunch of things about our metabolism and what happens in perimenopause and menopause that leads to a lot of the concerns that we have.
Betty Murray: Um, and so that's really kind of where my specialty has shifted is really helping women [00:05:00] through this transition because of my own experience.
Julie Michelson: So amazing. You brought up literally, I think my biggest pet peeve in traditional allopathic Western medicine, which is gastroenterologists who. Still, to this day, are telling patients it doesn't matter what you eat. Or they're not even, you know, beyond that, patients that don't even know enough to ask, they're not asking, what are you eating?
Julie Michelson: I have actually a client currently with UC, and he was told to avoid vegetables. That's what he was told to avoid and it is like, Oh my goodness. I mean, to me, and again, this is why we have these conversations. So I'm so excited that you're here. This is literally why I have the podcast because I used to think I was really smart [00:06:00] and I had no idea that they were totally wrong when they said there was nothing I could do about my rheumatoid arthritis.
Julie Michelson: Right. And then all those years, I have a million directions. I hope you have five hours because you know, I, for, I think three years I kept saying, I think I have a thyroid problem. I think I have a thyroid problem. I think I have a thyroid. But then finally they were like, okay, you know, your, your TSH is off enough.
Julie Michelson: Now we'll give you some, you know, level, which wasn't what I needed. Um, so and of course it was right in that perimenopause period. Yes, I already had autoimmunity. And then, you know, it got worse. So I, I just love, I'm guessing your, your gut is good. Your weight is certainly great and you don't look like, you don't look like you've hit your 40s yet.
Julie Michelson: So you're doing something right.
Betty Murray: Thank you. I actually, you know, it's, it's funny. Um, [00:07:00] yes, my gut, my, my UC is in, is in remission without medication. Um, not that I haven't had flares, but I've only had like two in the last 20 years. Um, yeah, which is, I'm like, you know, I have, I'm very specific. I'm, I'm gluten free. I've been gluten free for 20 years.
Betty Murray: And, um, oddly enough, eggs, Eggs will drive a significant uptick in activity.
Julie Michelson: not. Unfortunately, it's not odd. It is one of the foods that makes me the saddest when people do have that sensitivity, but it's so common in autoimmunity. It's definitely on the list of suspects. Not, you know, gluten is to me across the board. So I'd be curious to hear what your anybody with an autoimmune diagnosis.
Julie Michelson: What are what's your approach regarding gluten?
Betty Murray: You know, I, I, I just look at it and say it's the only food that we know stimulates and cause the only fun, the only actual autoimmune condition we know the cause of, right? So at the end of the day, and it has association with all those others. So if you look at the incidence of rheumatoid arthritis and [00:08:00] celiac, you have a high correlation compared to.
Betty Murray: Not at all, right? Yeah. Celiac and ulcerative colitis. So to me, I'm like, okay, this is a food that we've heavily, heavily, um, changed by, by hybridization way, way back, right? To, to exhibit this protein, gluten a lot. The other thing is, is we also do a lot of things in the U S and Cornell came out with this study, looking at all the post processing chemicalization that we do to the flour to give it a certain behavior, which makes it more immune stimulating.
Betty Murray: So to me, I'm like, okay, we don't need any more Franken food in our diet. So for the most part, if you have an autoimmune condition, I would recommend taking it out and keeping it out. And generally speaking, I don't tell people that don't come back positive to a gluten sensitivity test or autoimmunity that they have to be gluten free.
Betty Murray: But most people recognize when they remove it from their diet, or at least vastly, yeah, they, they feel better. So I'm like, who would eat stuff every day that makes you feel bad?
Julie Michelson: Right, but most people are [00:09:00] eating in and don't realize that it's a contributing factor to how they feel. So, you know, unless you're working with somebody, you may not, you may not understand. Um, I know I'm always kind of roll the dice at everybody and I respect everybody's perspective. Um, It is the one food that I recommend across the board with my clients, you know, that is it just because I want people to do the reintroduction so they feel it
Betty Murray: Yep. Yeah, you got to go through it.
Julie Michelson: in 10 years they don't care what Julie told them to eat.
Julie Michelson: That's for sure. Um, but it is to me something that, you know, if you have autoimmunity and you, you know, do the work to heal your gut, why would you put that back in? Well.
Betty Murray: I
Julie Michelson: I love that. I love that. That's, so let's, there's again, so many directions. Let's talk about perimenopause a little bit. Um, First of all, you, like you said, it wasn't really on your radar.
Julie Michelson: It's not usually on people's radar in their thirties, yet it's not that uncommon that people are [00:10:00] noticing changes in their thirties. I
Betty Murray: Right. You know, I remember when I was in school, you know, I can't, it was a class, you know, and one of the instructors said, a geriatric pregnancy is a pregnancy after 29. You know, I'm in my mid 30s. And I was like, I'm still not mature enough for children. You know, they'd be like,
Julie Michelson: think that those two words should never be, I know they are still used, they should never be used together, geriatric and pregnancy. Uh uh. Right.
Betty Murray: but I think, but you know, we look at that and we go, okay, and there's, you know, there's some really great companies out there that are really working on ways to preserve ovarian function long term, right? But the reality is we were not designed to live that long.
Julie Michelson: Right.
Betty Murray: You know, 200 years ago, our lifespan was less than 40 150 years ago, at the turn of the century, or 125 at the turn of the century, our average lifespan was 57 years, right?
Betty Murray: So if you went through menopause at like average age of 52, who cares? Like, you didn't live very long. But now we're living 3040 [00:11:00] years after that, right? And so the reality is, for a lot of us that may start early, right? We may actually start to experience that. And what's really driving it is, Is changes in the two major hormone groups that drive our our our cycle and our fertility and in most cases that perimenopause that starting is actually the decline of the hormone that's that has the highest spike in the second half of your cycle.
Betty Murray: So right in the middle of the cycle, generally, we have ovulation, which is driven by luteinizing hormone, pituitary hormones called luteinizing hormone and FSH, uh, follicular stimulating hormone, and then a peak of estrogen. And then as the egg pops out, because that's what makes the egg pop out, right?
Betty Murray: Then that, that follicle kind of closes in on itself and it makes a hormone called progesterone. Well, what happens is we don't always have an egg pop out and so we don't get the collapsing and we get a reduction in progesterone, which is the second hormone that helps make sure that everything's sort [00:12:00] of prepared in the uterus for implantation, right, to grow a baby.
Betty Murray: And so when progesterone starts to decline, we now have estrogen and progesterone out of balance to each other. And so often you'll see symptoms like cystic acne. horrible acne along my chin and jawline, you know, that was painful. And, you know, my hair started thinning and insomnia that I was never a good sleeper, which is a whole nother conversation, but what was kind of poor sleep became just horrifyingly bad.
Betty Murray: And, you know, mood swings, my period started getting closer together. Right. So as I enter into my forties, they were every 21 days. So I was like, well, that's awesome.
Julie Michelson: This is not great.
Betty Murray: I feel like every other two weeks, I've got something going on. And so, um, so what women need to understand is that process of hormone changings that we, that we often use the word menopause around is that that's that the average woman has seven to eight years of that, which means some of us are outliers, we get 15.[00:13:00]
Betty Murray: And some of us might get like one to two, right? But, but it is because of those hormone changes, and we get gaslighted by Western allopathic medicine that it's just a headspace problem. You've got a depression issue, an anxiety issue, or you just need to get yourself together and do some cognitive behavior therapy.
Julie Michelson: Yeah. Or, the other, the other thing that people, women are told all the time, yes, after they're offered the antidepressant that they may refuse, um, is this is just part of being a woman.
Betty Murray: Yeah, deal with it.
Julie Michelson: Too bad. So sad. So I want to talk about, uh, if you're willing to go there, this, this idea of, um, optimal hormone balance versus what somebody who is even older than you grew up here, you know, again, that's part of being a woman, right?
Julie Michelson: rough cycles, heavy bleeding, you know, breast tenderness, the mood swings that I'm not even talking [00:14:00] perimenopause. I'm talking in general. Um, but I want to talk a little bit about the, that, you know, the role of that balance between progesterone and estrogens and how that affects us.
Betty Murray: Yeah. So, you know, so estrogen's job is to really prepare the uterine lining. So what it does is sort of flood. Think of it as a uterus lining. It's going to flood that area with blood, right? Sort of prep it. And then progesterone is kind of there to finish making the garden fertile for implantation, right?
Betty Murray: So we can grow a fetus into a human being. Um, and a lot of this experience, here's, here's the reality. Yeah. All of us have variability in our hormones, right? So, so I remember, you know, I was kind of a little scrawny kid until I hit puberty. And it was kind of like everything exploded at once. So I kind of went both directions at once.
Betty Murray: So I got a booty on me and I got boobs. Like over a summer, it was all of a sudden
Julie Michelson: Well, you balanced, at least.
Betty Murray: yeah, it balanced. But [00:15:00] I went from like nothing to everything, right? And it was like, but I always wanted to have that little ballerina body. And I was like, I'm not, I'm stocky and I've got curves everywhere. And so, you know,
Julie Michelson: Feminine. It's a feminine figure, by the way.
Betty Murray: Yeah, a very feminine figure. Yes, we we we prize this not this, um, different hormonal balance figure in the in the West, but in a lot of other places that's actually sought after because that also is a sign of fertility, right, just sort of a natural sign. So You know, so we have women that produce a lot more hormones, particularly estrogen, because that's the feminizing hormones.
Betty Murray: So the more curvy you are, we can say in general, the more likely you are, if we were tracking your hormones over time, we would see that the estrogen levels are pretty robust, where a woman who might be, so I have a friend of mine who's very tall. And willowy, so it has narrow hips, very willowy, not big chested, those kind of things.
Betty Murray: Her estrogen levels relative to mine are likely lower. Still fertile, still all those other things, [00:16:00] but lower, so variability between women. But when we start to enter into like hormone changes when those hormones aren't aren't extremely balanced to each other, right? So progesterone and estrogen, particularly over that second half of the cycle, should kind of cycle together.
Betty Murray: So if all of a sudden that gap isn't consistent, then you start getting things like You might have situations where you don't have periods on a normal basis, um, often associated with polycystic ovarian syndrome, but there could be other reasons, and that means that you're not getting true ovulation, so the hormones aren't peaking to cause the egg to pop out of the egg carton.
Betty Murray: Um, you could have situations where estrogen is high, progesterone doesn't make it there, so you might get fibroids, heavy periods, cloudy periods, pain,
Julie Michelson: And you can have that, you know, as soon as you start cycling and that's what I'm excited to dig into a little bit. Um, because again, Western medicine just doesn't [00:17:00] look at, you know, if your estrogen falls in their range on their blood test. They don't talk about estrogen dominance, you know, it's either hot, you're either in range or out of range.
Julie Michelson: And if you're in range, they, they just, I never heard the words estrogen dominance until I found functional medicine and it, it just, all of those. symptoms of discomfort that so many even young women are dealing with the I'm not even talking about, you know, usually if you're already dealing with that, then, you know, perimenopause is really not going to be fun.
Julie Michelson: Um, but just getting that progesterone, like you said, to follow estrogen, that second half of the cycle literally can be life changing. My daughter, I think, ran around her university campus, like telling her friends, like, You have to deal with that. You should go to a functional medicine doctor and get your hormones checked.
Julie Michelson: Right. Because again, to change that [00:18:00] conversation of, we should just, you know, suck it up buttercup. We're women and it's supposed to be miserable. It's not.
Betty Murray: Right. Right. Yeah. So a lot of us may already be that way. And actually when most girls start their cycles, they are in an estrogen dominant state because we have to have a certain amount of body fat for our body to sort of turn that stuff on. Right. Cause that's a sign of fertility. And then one of the enzymes that help us make testosterone into estrogen is also expressed in the fat cells.
Betty Murray: So there's a relationship to body fat and estrogen levels. That's a big thing for people to understand. The reality is the first year or two often for girls, we have horrible, I remember my cycles just being awful, you know, just like you needed to stay home because it was a, a crime scene, and also you thought you were dying, right?
Julie Michelson: Right.
Betty Murray: it's horrible.
Julie Michelson: I must be hemorrhaging. Like,
Betty Murray: Right, right. And you're like, no,
Julie Michelson: I can't have this much blood.
Betty Murray: Right, right. But the problem is, is progesterone hasn't started regulating appropriately with estrogen. So often we get painful periods and it sort of normalizes. The [00:19:00] reality is too, is a lot of times people will intervene and start birth control because it's inconvenient today.
Julie Michelson: Oh, can we go there,
Betty Murray: Yes.
Julie Michelson: Because again, it did to me, this is the same, you know, here, take a biologic and maybe a steroid for your ulcerative colitis and don't change diet. And here, let's throw birth control pills. Why? You know, I am beyond a fan of bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. What is the difference when we're talking birth control, which is often, I mean, whether it's the pill or, uh, you know, an implant, I mean, what they're doing to young girls is insane.
Julie Michelson: I think now that I know better, um, let's talk about that a little bit. Why, why don't we want to just throw kids on the pill to regulate their cycles?
Betty Murray: Yeah, so, you know, so birth control was really designed to do exactly what that is, right? Which is to avoid an [00:20:00] unwanted pregnancy and not, you know, without getting into political things and things like that. It's important for girls and women to be able to regulate their own fertility, right? Because because that's a human right at the at the very end.
Betty Murray: But, It's particularly in the last 30 years, it has become kind of, Oh, if you have periods, that's just, you know, that's frustrating and annoying. So let's suppress them, um, or it's for acne or it's for convenience or it's because they're painful and often we can do things nutritionally in other ways that make a lot of those symptoms better and they just don't go into it in conventional medicine.
Betty Murray: But the reality is. birth control pills essentially stop you from ovulating. So they make your body think that you are in a menopausal state, right? So 17 years old, getting it for acne, but your body's operating as if it's menopausal. When we look at the data, so if you look at the research out there, the women who are on preventative birth control, Whether it's for acne or whatever, [00:21:00] starting at a younger age, particularly younger ages, have more likelihood to be put on antidepressants, sleep medications, you know, those kind of things.
Betty Murray: So you look at that and you go, well, why is that? I'm like, let's see, that's the first line defense in the last 20 years for women going through menopause, because instead of fixing the problem, which is the hormones being gone, they're covering up the symptoms of having no hormones, right? So the challenge is, is if we're using those medications to convenience menstrual cycle.
Betty Murray: We probably will also then end up having to stack medications because mood problems are often part of that, sleep issues are a part of that, and you know, and you don't know what you don't know. So I'm gonna explain it kind of why I say that. I went on birth control when I went into college. I was like, okay, you know, I want to make sure that If I choose to be sexually active, I don't have an oops.
Betty Murray: I want to have my life and my career how I want to do it. And so I did that, but my mood was bad, right? And I just thought that's me being in my [00:22:00] 20s. And, um, you know, it got worse and worse. So I was actually in the clinical trial that trialed Serafirm, which is Lexapro, or I'm sorry, Zoloft, pardon me, Zoloft for PMDD.
Betty Murray: Which is a very bad, very bad version of PMS. We'll put it that way. Um, cause I was always like, man, if I said what was going on through my head.
Julie Michelson: they would lock me up.
Betty Murray: but I was, I was in this space where I was like, you know, every two weeks, every other, you know, every two weeks out of the month, I would just be in this horrible mental space.
Betty Murray: And so I was looking for answers and I was also, I liked research. And so I was like, Oh, I'll be a research Guinea pig. I'll try it. And I was put on this medication, kept on birth control. And actually I got to the point where I withdrew myself from the study because they kept raising the dose. Cause I was like, it's not helping.
Betty Murray: It's not helping. It's not helping. But I got to the point actually where I was having serotonin syndrome, which. which you can see outwardly because I was grinding my teeth, you know, so if you've ever seen somebody doing things like ecstasy, that's why their jaw moves like that because it's too much of that [00:23:00] circulating.
Betty Murray: So they had overdosed me and I had gotten to the point where I was being overdosed and I also didn't care about anything in my life. I'm like, okay, so I'm not feeling suicidal and also homicidal at the same time, but I also don't care. And I was like, I'd rather have all of that than none of that, but I didn't, it didn't ever occurred to me that it was the, basically the birth control pill that put me into like a fake menopause,
Julie Michelson: it's from the beginning, like, let's go back to,
Betty Murray: this is it. You know, on top of my gut stuff and everything else, I was just like, Oh my gosh. You know, so, so a lot of times women may be experiencing these symptoms because they use birth control. Now the reality is we don't have bioidentical forms of birth control. Right? We don't have bioidentical forms.
Betty Murray: And there's a lot of reasons why that is true.
Julie Michelson: sure. Yeah. If you, I mean, if you're at least with that approach of like, let's stop, I mean, there is nothing that would support the body and stopping ovulation in a younger woman because that's not a natural [00:24:00] state. Yeah. So that makes sense. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And, and. Yeah, the just and the other the risks and the side effects and the I mean, I smoked when I was in college, I was on the pill when I was in college, you know, like, all
Betty Murray: to the 80s. You didn't smoke. You had to. It's part of the job. You
Julie Michelson: right, it was the law.
Betty Murray: stupid stuff.
Julie Michelson: Um, you know, so it's like, if I ever had any question of, you know, if there was an intention for me to still be here, there's lots of reasons why I could not be here at this point. Um, and, and so I think the, the conversation is important for younger. And then I think of, you know, you think of autoimmunity, you know, the just younger and younger and younger.
Julie Michelson: Um, and. You know, one of the reasons we're talking about this is, you know, autoimmune numbers, it's, you know, in women, we're like 75 percent of the autoimmune [00:25:00] population. Hormones are directly connected. Um, and so it, it just, now when I think of these young girls in high school already with autoimmunity and then they go to the gynecologist and they're handed birth control pills because for their acne, their cycle, their whatever.
Julie Michelson: Um, it's, it's upsetting
Betty Murray: No, I agree.
Julie Michelson: the 80s are over. We know better now. We should know better now.
Betty Murray: Yeah. And it's, you know, it is, for me, it's like, it's, for me, it's a little bit of a dance because I also look at it and say, you know, we, because we don't have really good birth control, we also, it's like, we have to weigh all of those. And sometimes we have to, Yeah, we have to kind of go, okay, maybe, maybe I am going to do it, but I'm going to do the one that has the least impact.
Betty Murray: And, you know,
Julie Michelson: Well, and to be fair, I'm not even talking about it for birth control for birth control.
Betty Murray: yeah, it's more for when we use it for other
Julie Michelson: it. For women that have hormone imbalance, young women, women of all ages that have [00:26:00] hormone imbalances and are symptomatic, probably estrogen dominance or something. And that's the band aid that they're given.
Julie Michelson: That's, I'm not even, because
Betty Murray: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: other episode we
Betty Murray: Yeah, totally. Totally. Yes.
Julie Michelson: you know, and the, I'm all about empowerment and, and all of that, but most. Teenage girls are not equipped to make educated decisions for, you know, or they're not thinking all they're thinking is I want the acne to go away or I, you know, I don't want to feel like I'm hemorrhaging once a month or be cranky or whatever their, their symptoms are that they're struggling with.
Julie Michelson: Um, and so, you know, I, I just think that that piece is really important. Um. So I just, I love that. So let's talk a little bit about this idea of, and not, we, we've done deep dives kind of, uh, [00:27:00] in the past on, you know, the X chromosome and female hormones and that being, you know, one of the players, at least major player as to why women have you know, so much more autoimmunity than men.
Julie Michelson: Why do you think though, in general, I mean, it's, it's on the rise. Like it's just rampant.
Betty Murray: Yeah. I mean, I think there's a whole bunch of things. I mean, I think definitely we know that estrogen is immune stimulating. Progesterone is immune calming. So, you know, depending on where you are in your cycle, what your natural sort of fluctuation is. And then most of us see an uptick in our 40s because we are by definition, estrogen dominant.
Betty Murray: Because progesterone is always on the, already on the decline. And so if we don't replace progesterone, we're more likely to do that, which is why you see, you see an uptick in that autoimmune activity at those big hormonal periods. Right. So, so if we take that premise and we know that that women to men, it's like, you know, 10 [00:28:00] to one women to men and most autoimmune conditions.
Betty Murray: The other thing you have to look at is what could be the other drivers. So we know viral infections, bacterial infections, mold toxicity. Chemical toxicity, right? Take the hormones and sort of move that over because we can't it's like we can't necessarily change that per se. We can modulate it. But the other thing is, is as as far back as 250 years ago, the vast majority of what we were exposed to on the planet were was organic just by default.
Julie Michelson: Right.
Betty Murray: Really, Bronze Age. So like, we're gonna go real far back. Bronze Age is the first time man innovated past nature, right? So, so literally, and then if you jump forward to World War II, that's where we see this dramatic uptick in toxins. So depending on which thing you read, you're looking at like 95 to to 100 and something thousand chemicals have been added to our environment, some of which are hormonal, right?
Betty Murray: So they look like hormones, particularly estrogen to the [00:29:00] body. And depending on how efficient we are at kind of getting rid of those things, we will have a higher estrogen burden. Um, and, and depending on how we detox them, some of those, uh, pathways can amplify changes to the DNA and other things. So we can see higher uptick in cancers and immune modulation is going to be part of that.
Betty Murray: And so. Part of what I think is going on is we just have too many toxins that look like hormones in our body that bogs our body down. And then if we are a woman who already leans a little bit one way or the other, we get extra burdened, right? Um, and then all we need is a stacking of something else, another illness, too much stress.
Betty Murray: You know, there's, there's, it's never just one thing, you know, everybody's always like, I want the silver bullet.
Julie Michelson: I know. I do. I remember when I got really excited about Functional medicine and was like, I want to find my root cause, you know, singular, like, Oh, oops. Um, and I do, I think we have as women that compounded, you know, we've got the [00:30:00] estrogen, we've got the, we have very different immune systems from men so that we can carry babies.
Julie Michelson: It's, it's Set up that way, you know, um, and then the end, you know, toxins in general, endocrine disruptors, you know, estrogen, estrogen, estrogen, um, and I'm not bad. We all the estrogen is a good thing. It's not a bad thing, but also we have a higher percentage of body fat. Where do we store our toxins in our body fat?
Julie Michelson: And so take somebody like me Perfect storm, you know, I am literally I'm not just not a good detoxer I'm a collector.
Betty Murray: Oh, a hundred
Julie Michelson: I've ever met my body is like, oh, let's keep that forever So add that to you know, even though I was a petite You know, I was skinny when I hated that word. Um, as a kid. Well, book makes perfect sense in hindsight because now I know I had celiac and I wasn't absorbing nutrients.
Julie Michelson: You know, I ate like a [00:31:00] truck driver. Um, but like these things all compound, right? And so, and then Take somebody in with the shifts of hormones, those times in life and somebody with higher estrone who's put on belly fat, then that's hard to, you know, it just, it becomes this cycle. Um, it's like the perfect storm, really, of if, like you said, if it's not autoimmunity, it's gonna, you know, it's cancer, it's metabolic syndrome, all of the, the things, but the good news is we can actually take action to prevent and or fix.
Julie Michelson: And so, and that's what you and I. Do all day long.
Betty Murray: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, um, it's understanding that, you know, a, you got to look for all those things. You have to look for the toxins, the gut health, your hormone balance, because how you felt when you were 20 and what was going on with your hormones, it's going to be different than [00:32:00] 35. It's going to be different than 45.
Betty Murray: Absolutely different at, you know, your 50s. I'm 54, you know, so it,
Julie Michelson: we're the same age, see, and you look like a baby.
Betty Murray: is, so the reality is, is, is we have to respect the fact that our hormones are different throughout the month, they're different throughout our timelines of our life. Especially like when we have babies and things like that, we have a lot of immune regulation that happens.
Betty Murray: And so. We see those, those incidences sort of changing that. And I think once you understand that and you understand that you can also get to the baseline problems, like get rid of the toxins, fix the gut, you know, get rid of mole, all those things, get rid of all the things that we look at functionally.
Betty Murray: Then the total load comes down, right? It's never ever like, Oh, I just don't do that anymore. And it goes away. It's usually total load. And I think, and I think that's the kind of home message people need to have is that there is things you can do. You don't have to be stuck here. I feel better.
Julie Michelson: Oh, me too.
Betty Murray: 35,
Julie Michelson: I was gonna, I wanted to say, you know, as we're saying cycles, right? [00:33:00] Monthly decades, whatever it, I was going to clarify that you weren't saying being in your fifties means you should feel worse than you did when you were younger. I didn't think I would, I would. Live to see 50 and I definitely feel better than I did in my 30s and 40s without a doubt But I've I'm always I was gonna say I've done the work.
Julie Michelson: I'm always doing the work, right? This is a constant process because we're bombarded with Toxins stressors all the things and so when we create that resilience, that's what can make your 50s like the best Right
Betty Murray: it is that is true because I truly do feel significantly better, you know, I have cardiovascular fitness is equal to if not better than when I was in my late 30s, you know, my strength isn't quite what it was, but I was powerlifting in my early 30s, but pretty significant strength for my age.
Betty Murray: You know, I I sleep better. My mood is [00:34:00] better. All of those things are better. And a lot of it means that you have to do that lifestyle groundwork. And again, it's lifestyle. You don't get to do it and then you're done with it,
Julie Michelson: Right.
Betty Murray: you know, which is where the challenge really comes in. Because most people that's not how we're wired as a human to work,
Julie Michelson: We, it's the checklist mentality. I did that.
Betty Murray: Yeah, it's like we have to keep sort of reiterating that and sort of putting the, you know, putting the effort in because, um, but if we do that, we get a better life on the other side, which I think is important for people to understand wherever they are in that timeline, you
Julie Michelson: Absolutely. Absolutely. And to circle all the way back to the beginning of the conversation of we're living longer. Um, you know, it's not about being alive. It's about living well, right. And it's the back to that health span. Um, I have no interest. I watched my grandmother pretty much lay in her bed for like a decade.
Julie Michelson: Just and her body was healthy. Her brain was gone and it was [00:35:00] hard. I like who want, I don't want to do that. No, to live like this until I'm done. And then I'm done.
Betty Murray: Exactly. Exactly. I would say that risk for dementia, Alzheimer's is a primary driver for most of the people that my team and I see, you know, they're like, that scares me probably more than anything else. You know?
Julie Michelson: Well, and I say, use it as a motivator. Um, because all of these lifestyle areas. Again, it's for what you're doing to prevent dementia and or reverse dementia is the same as what you're going to be doing to prevent or reverse autoimmune symptoms and, and live that healthy life. Um, I, you know, that's one of the things that I think is so exciting and empowering.
Julie Michelson: You know, it's, it's a total opposite from like diagnosis. pill, right? Like let's find this diagnosis and this is what you need to do. If we're addressing those lifestyle areas where, you know, you [00:36:00] mentioned, you know, cardiovascular fitness, all the things, um, wellness is wellness,
Betty Murray: Yeah,
Julie Michelson: what it comes down to.
Betty Murray: absolutely. Yeah. And it's, yeah. And those are diseases of lifestyle. And so, yeah, we have to just look at it that way and take proactive steps for sure.
Julie Michelson: Yeah. I love it. Which is again, where we do have power. Even if you've seen a doctor like Betty has seen, or like I have seen, um, You know, they, they don't know everything and, um, you need to just keep moving until you find the right support.
Betty Murray: Yeah, and it is, you know, I always think kind of like duly noted, right? Everybody's, you know, everybody has the opportunity to share their knowledge, right? And I by no means know everything. And I have changed my tunes on things when I've learned something new that challenges my bias. Um, but it does take kind of a team.
Betty Murray: So I think that's the other thing is because our medical [00:37:00] system is designed as, you know, the patient really isn't driving it. The Actuary in the insurance company that's telling you how you're going to get treated and what's going to get done. Um, when we removed that relationship, it really left, you know, people really not understanding that they have control and you probably need a team of individuals to really help you that, you know, we don't have a Swiss army knife.
Betty Murray: We don't have a Swiss army night practitioner. That's the king of everything. So, and so you, you have to proactively look for that in your life because the Western medical system is not going to find that for you.
Julie Michelson: I love that and we all deserve a team and, and the healing and the support that we can get when we create a team and find the correct team is, is amazing and nobody has all the answers, you know, for sure. And, and so I love, you know, I work in conjunction with my partner a lot. He's a physician. He's a fantastic functional medicine physician, [00:38:00] but I, some of his patients need support.
Julie Michelson: Right. So he's not coaching them. He's not, you know, we work in different ways to support people in different ways. And I say, you know, find what resonates and then build your team. I love that. And find practitioners who want to be part of a team. Right. I think that's a great indicator when you are meeting with somebody or going for a consult and if they're like, they have all the answers, I would maybe move on and try to find somebody else that wants to be part of your team.
Julie Michelson: For sure.
Betty Murray: Yeah. Yeah. I always tell people it's like if you had to rewire your house electrically, you're not going to go hire a handyman, right? Because a handyman just like, he'll put a doorknob on, might put a new faceplate on, but you're going to hire a master electrician, you know? So your, your, your medical team or your healthcare team needs some master electricians and a master plumber and that kind [00:39:00] of thing.
Betty Murray: And, but you also need that person that is helping. bridge the gap because the truth is you could have all the fancy tests in the world and I, I tell all of our patients this, you can have all that stuff done, you could get to and understand the root cause, but it's in the day to day execution of what you need to do to repair and, and improve all those things and then keep it is where the rubber hits the road.
Betty Murray: Knowledge doesn't
Julie Michelson: I have a job.
Betty Murray: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: Right. This
Betty Murray: have, you have to have action.
Julie Michelson: Right, right. It's not a lack of if we could all just read a book, like I would have never gotten sick or I would have healed quicker. Right. Yeah. Um, and so I love that, that, you know, we have this amazing community of, of people to, to give the support and, and be that, that team member that people need, you know, it's the, I always say it's the how to in your life that is, you're not finding that in the book, right?
Julie Michelson: It's like, Oh, I read, I should do this [00:40:00] thing. I don't know how to get that done. So I love that. That's the perfect segue into our final question, which is according to Betty, what is one step that listeners can take today to start to improve their health?
Betty Murray: Oh my gosh, there's so many things I would
Julie Michelson: I know it's such a hard question.
Betty Murray: You know, so, so here's the thing that I, I really think is like we identified toxins are, you know, they're ubiquitous. You know, I wrote a book 12 years ago about detoxifying, but the truth is, is you go through, like, let's say you do a big detox thing.
Betty Murray: You're going to retox as soon as
Julie Michelson: Yep. Oh, I love that. Yeah.
Betty Murray: Right, so you're going to retox. There's no way to get 100 percent away, but that is the area across the board and all the big health concerns that if we look at it just slowly and incrementally, you know, we start with maybe the easy stuff. So maybe I go, okay, I'm going to look at my home cleaning products and I'm going to start replacing them with [00:41:00] natural and organic.
Betty Murray: You know, cleaners that aren't toxic and that you just sort of look at it. It's like I'm peeling back the layer of an onion. So I start with the outside and I do the first thing, right? And then I stopped buying my water and plastic water bottles because I want microplastics and all that stuff. And then I'm going to go.
Betty Murray: Okay, the next thing I'm going to do is look at my body care products. And if we just slowly peel back the layer of that onion, you're still going to get exposures. That's that you're going to walk outside. You're going to walk in your house, which is actually more toxic than the air outside. Okay. Okay.
Betty Murray: Okay. Okay. But if we can do the things that we have some agency over, we're going to start taking the load away and it becomes something that becomes sustainable. And also, if you're a, if you're a mom or a grandma or something like that, you're also going to teach your example to your family. Our children don't do what we tell them to do.
Betty Murray: They do what we, they see. So you also help implement healthier things in the next generation, which will actually help change the planet. You know, we caused most of the problem, our generation before us and us. Right. So we need future generations to recognize that we can actually clean [00:42:00] it up. And I think that I think looking at it because it's empowering, not overwhelming is really important.
Betty Murray: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: that. And to, to highlight what you had said before, it's the reducing that total burden, right? We're never the, we're a, we're never done cleaning up toxins. We're, you know, you should never be done reading labels, . Um, but when we just manage step by step, and I love that, you know, you highlighted, look at how much you got in there, in that one step, you know?
Julie Michelson: But by starting in our home, which is. It's typically more toxic than out and about in the world and we don't think of it that way. Um, we really can empower ourselves and, and do it in a way that's not overwhelming. And I love that you, you know, there is no, the right first step is the step that you can successfully take.
Julie Michelson: So start somewhere painless and you know, I always had, and again, it's not about perfection. I had one client she did [00:43:00] every single everything cleaned up all the things and then I said what kind of shampoo are you using and she said, I'm not telling you because that's non negotiable. I was like, that's fine, because you have literally cleaned up every other exposure in your home.
Julie Michelson: So it's, it's not about perfection. And I think so many of us ended up in this. Pickle that we're in because we're perfectionists. And so giving ourselves a little grace of, again, that better is better, um, is, is a good thing. And it's just like the rest of the lifestyle stuff. We're never done. I love the, I'm going to quote you, I love that you're going to retox because we are.
Betty Murray: Yeah. As soon as you walk out of your house and perfectionism in itself has its own level of toxicity.
Julie Michelson: toxin. Yeah.
Betty Murray: It's another toxin. It's just it's a different kind of burden. But yeah. So the less we see it that way and the more we just see I'm doing something incremental every day, just [00:44:00] like learning math. I hated math.
Betty Murray: Right. But. You know, it all compounds on each other and you get better at it, you know, and it was always every time I went to college, it was always the last class I took, I'd leave like all the other ones. I mean, like, okay, now I got to do statistics, like PhD program last class was like
Julie Michelson: Gotta do it.
Betty Murray: statistics. And that was the only one I was like, because I, you know, but I understood it was incremental, you know, and so they compound.
Betty Murray: So everything that we do compounds and that's the way to look at it.
Julie Michelson: I love it. I love it. So for people that are listening on the go, which is how I tend to listen to podcasts, where's the very best place to find you?
Betty Murray: Yeah. Thank you. So I have menopause mastery podcast and I put one out every week and you can always find me at bettymurray. com and the last, I'll spell it B E T T Y M U R R A Y. com. And so either one of those places, but I'm obviously podcasting once a week too. So
Julie Michelson: And I say, check out her podcast. It's, it's amazing. And you'll learn, [00:45:00] continue to learn a lot, which is fantastic. Betty, thank you so much. You really gave us a lot to think about today and a lot of gold
Betty Murray: Good. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Julie. I'm excited to be here.
Julie Michelson: for everyone listening. Remember you can get the transcripts and show notes by visiting inspiredliving. show. Hope you had a great time and enjoyed this episode as much as I did. I'll see you next week. [00:46:00]
Julie Michelson: She is the host of the menopause [00:01:00] mastery podcast and the founder and CEO of living well Dallas functional medicine center and the coming into our own project. In today's conversation, we are talking about, you guessed it, hormones. Not only the connection between hormones and autoimmunity, but the importance of hormone balance and the role that lifestyle plays in optimizing health.
Julie Michelson: Listen in to find out how we both feel better in our 50s than we did in our 40s.
Julie Michelson: Betty, welcome to the podcast.
Betty Murray: Oh, thank you for having me, Julie. I'm so excited. You
Julie Michelson: This is one of my favorite topics to talk about. I always love to start with story because I'm guessing this is not what you were dreaming about doing when you were a little girl. So how did you enter this world?
Betty Murray: know, um, so that it is a circuitous route, which I think a lot of us in this community really were on. [00:02:00] Um, actually, at one point, I did want to be a doctor, you know, child of the late 80s. And I actually chose not to do that because at the time I was like, that's too much school. I don't want to be in school that long.
Betty Murray: You know, I was like, I liked business. So I went and got a business degree. But what really brought me to the functional medicine world was actually a diagnosis of colitis. Um, I had these episodes of digestive things as a kid. And I think anybody that's in my age group, you know, growing up in the seventies and eighties, you know, if your limbs didn't fall off, your parents would be kind of like dust you off.
Betty Murray: Just keep going. And so it was always like, well, you're just sensitive. Right. And then when I got into my twenties, it became much more pronounced and go to gastroenterology, get diagnosed with colitis, which for anybody that doesn't know what that is, it's an autoimmune digestive disorder. And I asked what I thought was a very obvious question.
Betty Murray: Could I change my diet? And change the trajectory of this disease and this, um, very obnoxious gastroenterologist. I'm just gonna be really honest. He was very [00:03:00] condescending. He barks this big laugh in my face and says, It has nothing to do with what you eat. That's really interesting because if I don't eat, I start to get better.
Betty Murray: And so I just started, you know, changing my diet. I went back to school, went back and got prerequisites to get into a master's program for nutrition. And kind of started down this road and ended up, you know, as soon as I got in there, I was like, Oh my gosh, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. And I was actually in IT at that time.
Betty Murray: Right. So I was in a completely different field. It's paid off well over the years, having that understanding. Um, but I ended up going back and kind of getting into private practice. And so through my thirties, um, mid thirties and on, once I started my practice, everything was kind of okay with digestion until I had about 38 going on 39.
Betty Murray: And it was like all of a sudden every hormone problem that you could imagine occurred. I got cystic acne, my period started getting heavier, I started losing hair, like all kinds of stuff. And at that point I'd already opened my clinic, I had [00:04:00] functional medicine, medical providers, I, you know, we had been practicing and I sort of was down this sort of rabbit hole of, at the time was perimenopause, but it didn't occur to me that I was in it already.
Betty Murray: You know, that early, right? And so I had a really awful forties. I'm just gonna be really honest. I gained weight. I used to bodybuild, right? I know how to manipulate the body and doing the same things that I did before. All of a sudden I gained 36, almost 40 pounds that I can't get rid of. for almost a decade.
Betty Murray: And, you know, all different kinds of treatments and everything. And so I decided to go back and really study for my PhD because I wanted to understand our hormone interaction, because to be honest, we aren't really studied in medicine and there's so much uniqueness. And so that's why I went back to get my PhD and I uncovered a bunch of things about our metabolism and what happens in perimenopause and menopause that leads to a lot of the concerns that we have.
Betty Murray: Um, and so that's really kind of where my specialty has shifted is really helping women [00:05:00] through this transition because of my own experience.
Julie Michelson: So amazing. You brought up literally, I think my biggest pet peeve in traditional allopathic Western medicine, which is gastroenterologists who. Still, to this day, are telling patients it doesn't matter what you eat. Or they're not even, you know, beyond that, patients that don't even know enough to ask, they're not asking, what are you eating?
Julie Michelson: I have actually a client currently with UC, and he was told to avoid vegetables. That's what he was told to avoid and it is like, Oh my goodness. I mean, to me, and again, this is why we have these conversations. So I'm so excited that you're here. This is literally why I have the podcast because I used to think I was really smart [00:06:00] and I had no idea that they were totally wrong when they said there was nothing I could do about my rheumatoid arthritis.
Julie Michelson: Right. And then all those years, I have a million directions. I hope you have five hours because you know, I, for, I think three years I kept saying, I think I have a thyroid problem. I think I have a thyroid problem. I think I have a thyroid. But then finally they were like, okay, you know, your, your TSH is off enough.
Julie Michelson: Now we'll give you some, you know, level, which wasn't what I needed. Um, so and of course it was right in that perimenopause period. Yes, I already had autoimmunity. And then, you know, it got worse. So I, I just love, I'm guessing your, your gut is good. Your weight is certainly great and you don't look like, you don't look like you've hit your 40s yet.
Julie Michelson: So you're doing something right.
Betty Murray: Thank you. I actually, you know, it's, it's funny. Um, [00:07:00] yes, my gut, my, my UC is in, is in remission without medication. Um, not that I haven't had flares, but I've only had like two in the last 20 years. Um, yeah, which is, I'm like, you know, I have, I'm very specific. I'm, I'm gluten free. I've been gluten free for 20 years.
Betty Murray: And, um, oddly enough, eggs, Eggs will drive a significant uptick in activity.
Julie Michelson: not. Unfortunately, it's not odd. It is one of the foods that makes me the saddest when people do have that sensitivity, but it's so common in autoimmunity. It's definitely on the list of suspects. Not, you know, gluten is to me across the board. So I'd be curious to hear what your anybody with an autoimmune diagnosis.
Julie Michelson: What are what's your approach regarding gluten?
Betty Murray: You know, I, I, I just look at it and say it's the only food that we know stimulates and cause the only fun, the only actual autoimmune condition we know the cause of, right? So at the end of the day, and it has association with all those others. So if you look at the incidence of rheumatoid arthritis and [00:08:00] celiac, you have a high correlation compared to.
Betty Murray: Not at all, right? Yeah. Celiac and ulcerative colitis. So to me, I'm like, okay, this is a food that we've heavily, heavily, um, changed by, by hybridization way, way back, right? To, to exhibit this protein, gluten a lot. The other thing is, is we also do a lot of things in the U S and Cornell came out with this study, looking at all the post processing chemicalization that we do to the flour to give it a certain behavior, which makes it more immune stimulating.
Betty Murray: So to me, I'm like, okay, we don't need any more Franken food in our diet. So for the most part, if you have an autoimmune condition, I would recommend taking it out and keeping it out. And generally speaking, I don't tell people that don't come back positive to a gluten sensitivity test or autoimmunity that they have to be gluten free.
Betty Murray: But most people recognize when they remove it from their diet, or at least vastly, yeah, they, they feel better. So I'm like, who would eat stuff every day that makes you feel bad?
Julie Michelson: Right, but most people are [00:09:00] eating in and don't realize that it's a contributing factor to how they feel. So, you know, unless you're working with somebody, you may not, you may not understand. Um, I know I'm always kind of roll the dice at everybody and I respect everybody's perspective. Um, It is the one food that I recommend across the board with my clients, you know, that is it just because I want people to do the reintroduction so they feel it
Betty Murray: Yep. Yeah, you got to go through it.
Julie Michelson: in 10 years they don't care what Julie told them to eat.
Julie Michelson: That's for sure. Um, but it is to me something that, you know, if you have autoimmunity and you, you know, do the work to heal your gut, why would you put that back in? Well.
Betty Murray: I
Julie Michelson: I love that. I love that. That's, so let's, there's again, so many directions. Let's talk about perimenopause a little bit. Um, First of all, you, like you said, it wasn't really on your radar.
Julie Michelson: It's not usually on people's radar in their thirties, yet it's not that uncommon that people are [00:10:00] noticing changes in their thirties. I
Betty Murray: Right. You know, I remember when I was in school, you know, I can't, it was a class, you know, and one of the instructors said, a geriatric pregnancy is a pregnancy after 29. You know, I'm in my mid 30s. And I was like, I'm still not mature enough for children. You know, they'd be like,
Julie Michelson: think that those two words should never be, I know they are still used, they should never be used together, geriatric and pregnancy. Uh uh. Right.
Betty Murray: but I think, but you know, we look at that and we go, okay, and there's, you know, there's some really great companies out there that are really working on ways to preserve ovarian function long term, right? But the reality is we were not designed to live that long.
Julie Michelson: Right.
Betty Murray: You know, 200 years ago, our lifespan was less than 40 150 years ago, at the turn of the century, or 125 at the turn of the century, our average lifespan was 57 years, right?
Betty Murray: So if you went through menopause at like average age of 52, who cares? Like, you didn't live very long. But now we're living 3040 [00:11:00] years after that, right? And so the reality is, for a lot of us that may start early, right? We may actually start to experience that. And what's really driving it is, Is changes in the two major hormone groups that drive our our our cycle and our fertility and in most cases that perimenopause that starting is actually the decline of the hormone that's that has the highest spike in the second half of your cycle.
Betty Murray: So right in the middle of the cycle, generally, we have ovulation, which is driven by luteinizing hormone, pituitary hormones called luteinizing hormone and FSH, uh, follicular stimulating hormone, and then a peak of estrogen. And then as the egg pops out, because that's what makes the egg pop out, right?
Betty Murray: Then that, that follicle kind of closes in on itself and it makes a hormone called progesterone. Well, what happens is we don't always have an egg pop out and so we don't get the collapsing and we get a reduction in progesterone, which is the second hormone that helps make sure that everything's sort [00:12:00] of prepared in the uterus for implantation, right, to grow a baby.
Betty Murray: And so when progesterone starts to decline, we now have estrogen and progesterone out of balance to each other. And so often you'll see symptoms like cystic acne. horrible acne along my chin and jawline, you know, that was painful. And, you know, my hair started thinning and insomnia that I was never a good sleeper, which is a whole nother conversation, but what was kind of poor sleep became just horrifyingly bad.
Betty Murray: And, you know, mood swings, my period started getting closer together. Right. So as I enter into my forties, they were every 21 days. So I was like, well, that's awesome.
Julie Michelson: This is not great.
Betty Murray: I feel like every other two weeks, I've got something going on. And so, um, so what women need to understand is that process of hormone changings that we, that we often use the word menopause around is that that's that the average woman has seven to eight years of that, which means some of us are outliers, we get 15.[00:13:00]
Betty Murray: And some of us might get like one to two, right? But, but it is because of those hormone changes, and we get gaslighted by Western allopathic medicine that it's just a headspace problem. You've got a depression issue, an anxiety issue, or you just need to get yourself together and do some cognitive behavior therapy.
Julie Michelson: Yeah. Or, the other, the other thing that people, women are told all the time, yes, after they're offered the antidepressant that they may refuse, um, is this is just part of being a woman.
Betty Murray: Yeah, deal with it.
Julie Michelson: Too bad. So sad. So I want to talk about, uh, if you're willing to go there, this, this idea of, um, optimal hormone balance versus what somebody who is even older than you grew up here, you know, again, that's part of being a woman, right?
Julie Michelson: rough cycles, heavy bleeding, you know, breast tenderness, the mood swings that I'm not even talking [00:14:00] perimenopause. I'm talking in general. Um, but I want to talk a little bit about the, that, you know, the role of that balance between progesterone and estrogens and how that affects us.
Betty Murray: Yeah. So, you know, so estrogen's job is to really prepare the uterine lining. So what it does is sort of flood. Think of it as a uterus lining. It's going to flood that area with blood, right? Sort of prep it. And then progesterone is kind of there to finish making the garden fertile for implantation, right?
Betty Murray: So we can grow a fetus into a human being. Um, and a lot of this experience, here's, here's the reality. Yeah. All of us have variability in our hormones, right? So, so I remember, you know, I was kind of a little scrawny kid until I hit puberty. And it was kind of like everything exploded at once. So I kind of went both directions at once.
Betty Murray: So I got a booty on me and I got boobs. Like over a summer, it was all of a sudden
Julie Michelson: Well, you balanced, at least.
Betty Murray: yeah, it balanced. But [00:15:00] I went from like nothing to everything, right? And it was like, but I always wanted to have that little ballerina body. And I was like, I'm not, I'm stocky and I've got curves everywhere. And so, you know,
Julie Michelson: Feminine. It's a feminine figure, by the way.
Betty Murray: Yeah, a very feminine figure. Yes, we we we prize this not this, um, different hormonal balance figure in the in the West, but in a lot of other places that's actually sought after because that also is a sign of fertility, right, just sort of a natural sign. So You know, so we have women that produce a lot more hormones, particularly estrogen, because that's the feminizing hormones.
Betty Murray: So the more curvy you are, we can say in general, the more likely you are, if we were tracking your hormones over time, we would see that the estrogen levels are pretty robust, where a woman who might be, so I have a friend of mine who's very tall. And willowy, so it has narrow hips, very willowy, not big chested, those kind of things.
Betty Murray: Her estrogen levels relative to mine are likely lower. Still fertile, still all those other things, [00:16:00] but lower, so variability between women. But when we start to enter into like hormone changes when those hormones aren't aren't extremely balanced to each other, right? So progesterone and estrogen, particularly over that second half of the cycle, should kind of cycle together.
Betty Murray: So if all of a sudden that gap isn't consistent, then you start getting things like You might have situations where you don't have periods on a normal basis, um, often associated with polycystic ovarian syndrome, but there could be other reasons, and that means that you're not getting true ovulation, so the hormones aren't peaking to cause the egg to pop out of the egg carton.
Betty Murray: Um, you could have situations where estrogen is high, progesterone doesn't make it there, so you might get fibroids, heavy periods, cloudy periods, pain,
Julie Michelson: And you can have that, you know, as soon as you start cycling and that's what I'm excited to dig into a little bit. Um, because again, Western medicine just doesn't [00:17:00] look at, you know, if your estrogen falls in their range on their blood test. They don't talk about estrogen dominance, you know, it's either hot, you're either in range or out of range.
Julie Michelson: And if you're in range, they, they just, I never heard the words estrogen dominance until I found functional medicine and it, it just, all of those. symptoms of discomfort that so many even young women are dealing with the I'm not even talking about, you know, usually if you're already dealing with that, then, you know, perimenopause is really not going to be fun.
Julie Michelson: Um, but just getting that progesterone, like you said, to follow estrogen, that second half of the cycle literally can be life changing. My daughter, I think, ran around her university campus, like telling her friends, like, You have to deal with that. You should go to a functional medicine doctor and get your hormones checked.
Julie Michelson: Right. Because again, to change that [00:18:00] conversation of, we should just, you know, suck it up buttercup. We're women and it's supposed to be miserable. It's not.
Betty Murray: Right. Right. Yeah. So a lot of us may already be that way. And actually when most girls start their cycles, they are in an estrogen dominant state because we have to have a certain amount of body fat for our body to sort of turn that stuff on. Right. Cause that's a sign of fertility. And then one of the enzymes that help us make testosterone into estrogen is also expressed in the fat cells.
Betty Murray: So there's a relationship to body fat and estrogen levels. That's a big thing for people to understand. The reality is the first year or two often for girls, we have horrible, I remember my cycles just being awful, you know, just like you needed to stay home because it was a, a crime scene, and also you thought you were dying, right?
Julie Michelson: Right.
Betty Murray: it's horrible.
Julie Michelson: I must be hemorrhaging. Like,
Betty Murray: Right, right. And you're like, no,
Julie Michelson: I can't have this much blood.
Betty Murray: Right, right. But the problem is, is progesterone hasn't started regulating appropriately with estrogen. So often we get painful periods and it sort of normalizes. The [00:19:00] reality is too, is a lot of times people will intervene and start birth control because it's inconvenient today.
Julie Michelson: Oh, can we go there,
Betty Murray: Yes.
Julie Michelson: Because again, it did to me, this is the same, you know, here, take a biologic and maybe a steroid for your ulcerative colitis and don't change diet. And here, let's throw birth control pills. Why? You know, I am beyond a fan of bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. What is the difference when we're talking birth control, which is often, I mean, whether it's the pill or, uh, you know, an implant, I mean, what they're doing to young girls is insane.
Julie Michelson: I think now that I know better, um, let's talk about that a little bit. Why, why don't we want to just throw kids on the pill to regulate their cycles?
Betty Murray: Yeah, so, you know, so birth control was really designed to do exactly what that is, right? Which is to avoid an [00:20:00] unwanted pregnancy and not, you know, without getting into political things and things like that. It's important for girls and women to be able to regulate their own fertility, right? Because because that's a human right at the at the very end.
Betty Murray: But, It's particularly in the last 30 years, it has become kind of, Oh, if you have periods, that's just, you know, that's frustrating and annoying. So let's suppress them, um, or it's for acne or it's for convenience or it's because they're painful and often we can do things nutritionally in other ways that make a lot of those symptoms better and they just don't go into it in conventional medicine.
Betty Murray: But the reality is. birth control pills essentially stop you from ovulating. So they make your body think that you are in a menopausal state, right? So 17 years old, getting it for acne, but your body's operating as if it's menopausal. When we look at the data, so if you look at the research out there, the women who are on preventative birth control, Whether it's for acne or whatever, [00:21:00] starting at a younger age, particularly younger ages, have more likelihood to be put on antidepressants, sleep medications, you know, those kind of things.
Betty Murray: So you look at that and you go, well, why is that? I'm like, let's see, that's the first line defense in the last 20 years for women going through menopause, because instead of fixing the problem, which is the hormones being gone, they're covering up the symptoms of having no hormones, right? So the challenge is, is if we're using those medications to convenience menstrual cycle.
Betty Murray: We probably will also then end up having to stack medications because mood problems are often part of that, sleep issues are a part of that, and you know, and you don't know what you don't know. So I'm gonna explain it kind of why I say that. I went on birth control when I went into college. I was like, okay, you know, I want to make sure that If I choose to be sexually active, I don't have an oops.
Betty Murray: I want to have my life and my career how I want to do it. And so I did that, but my mood was bad, right? And I just thought that's me being in my [00:22:00] 20s. And, um, you know, it got worse and worse. So I was actually in the clinical trial that trialed Serafirm, which is Lexapro, or I'm sorry, Zoloft, pardon me, Zoloft for PMDD.
Betty Murray: Which is a very bad, very bad version of PMS. We'll put it that way. Um, cause I was always like, man, if I said what was going on through my head.
Julie Michelson: they would lock me up.
Betty Murray: but I was, I was in this space where I was like, you know, every two weeks, every other, you know, every two weeks out of the month, I would just be in this horrible mental space.
Betty Murray: And so I was looking for answers and I was also, I liked research. And so I was like, Oh, I'll be a research Guinea pig. I'll try it. And I was put on this medication, kept on birth control. And actually I got to the point where I withdrew myself from the study because they kept raising the dose. Cause I was like, it's not helping.
Betty Murray: It's not helping. It's not helping. But I got to the point actually where I was having serotonin syndrome, which. which you can see outwardly because I was grinding my teeth, you know, so if you've ever seen somebody doing things like ecstasy, that's why their jaw moves like that because it's too much of that [00:23:00] circulating.
Betty Murray: So they had overdosed me and I had gotten to the point where I was being overdosed and I also didn't care about anything in my life. I'm like, okay, so I'm not feeling suicidal and also homicidal at the same time, but I also don't care. And I was like, I'd rather have all of that than none of that, but I didn't, it didn't ever occurred to me that it was the, basically the birth control pill that put me into like a fake menopause,
Julie Michelson: it's from the beginning, like, let's go back to,
Betty Murray: this is it. You know, on top of my gut stuff and everything else, I was just like, Oh my gosh. You know, so, so a lot of times women may be experiencing these symptoms because they use birth control. Now the reality is we don't have bioidentical forms of birth control. Right? We don't have bioidentical forms.
Betty Murray: And there's a lot of reasons why that is true.
Julie Michelson: sure. Yeah. If you, I mean, if you're at least with that approach of like, let's stop, I mean, there is nothing that would support the body and stopping ovulation in a younger woman because that's not a natural [00:24:00] state. Yeah. So that makes sense. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And, and. Yeah, the just and the other the risks and the side effects and the I mean, I smoked when I was in college, I was on the pill when I was in college, you know, like, all
Betty Murray: to the 80s. You didn't smoke. You had to. It's part of the job. You
Julie Michelson: right, it was the law.
Betty Murray: stupid stuff.
Julie Michelson: Um, you know, so it's like, if I ever had any question of, you know, if there was an intention for me to still be here, there's lots of reasons why I could not be here at this point. Um, and, and so I think the, the conversation is important for younger. And then I think of, you know, you think of autoimmunity, you know, the just younger and younger and younger.
Julie Michelson: Um, and. You know, one of the reasons we're talking about this is, you know, autoimmune numbers, it's, you know, in women, we're like 75 percent of the autoimmune [00:25:00] population. Hormones are directly connected. Um, and so it, it just, now when I think of these young girls in high school already with autoimmunity and then they go to the gynecologist and they're handed birth control pills because for their acne, their cycle, their whatever.
Julie Michelson: Um, it's, it's upsetting
Betty Murray: No, I agree.
Julie Michelson: the 80s are over. We know better now. We should know better now.
Betty Murray: Yeah. And it's, you know, it is, for me, it's like, it's, for me, it's a little bit of a dance because I also look at it and say, you know, we, because we don't have really good birth control, we also, it's like, we have to weigh all of those. And sometimes we have to, Yeah, we have to kind of go, okay, maybe, maybe I am going to do it, but I'm going to do the one that has the least impact.
Betty Murray: And, you know,
Julie Michelson: Well, and to be fair, I'm not even talking about it for birth control for birth control.
Betty Murray: yeah, it's more for when we use it for other
Julie Michelson: it. For women that have hormone imbalance, young women, women of all ages that have [00:26:00] hormone imbalances and are symptomatic, probably estrogen dominance or something. And that's the band aid that they're given.
Julie Michelson: That's, I'm not even, because
Betty Murray: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: other episode we
Betty Murray: Yeah, totally. Totally. Yes.
Julie Michelson: you know, and the, I'm all about empowerment and, and all of that, but most. Teenage girls are not equipped to make educated decisions for, you know, or they're not thinking all they're thinking is I want the acne to go away or I, you know, I don't want to feel like I'm hemorrhaging once a month or be cranky or whatever their, their symptoms are that they're struggling with.
Julie Michelson: Um, and so, you know, I, I just think that that piece is really important. Um. So I just, I love that. So let's talk a little bit about this idea of, and not, we, we've done deep dives kind of, uh, [00:27:00] in the past on, you know, the X chromosome and female hormones and that being, you know, one of the players, at least major player as to why women have you know, so much more autoimmunity than men.
Julie Michelson: Why do you think though, in general, I mean, it's, it's on the rise. Like it's just rampant.
Betty Murray: Yeah. I mean, I think there's a whole bunch of things. I mean, I think definitely we know that estrogen is immune stimulating. Progesterone is immune calming. So, you know, depending on where you are in your cycle, what your natural sort of fluctuation is. And then most of us see an uptick in our 40s because we are by definition, estrogen dominant.
Betty Murray: Because progesterone is always on the, already on the decline. And so if we don't replace progesterone, we're more likely to do that, which is why you see, you see an uptick in that autoimmune activity at those big hormonal periods. Right. So, so if we take that premise and we know that that women to men, it's like, you know, 10 [00:28:00] to one women to men and most autoimmune conditions.
Betty Murray: The other thing you have to look at is what could be the other drivers. So we know viral infections, bacterial infections, mold toxicity. Chemical toxicity, right? Take the hormones and sort of move that over because we can't it's like we can't necessarily change that per se. We can modulate it. But the other thing is, is as as far back as 250 years ago, the vast majority of what we were exposed to on the planet were was organic just by default.
Julie Michelson: Right.
Betty Murray: Really, Bronze Age. So like, we're gonna go real far back. Bronze Age is the first time man innovated past nature, right? So, so literally, and then if you jump forward to World War II, that's where we see this dramatic uptick in toxins. So depending on which thing you read, you're looking at like 95 to to 100 and something thousand chemicals have been added to our environment, some of which are hormonal, right?
Betty Murray: So they look like hormones, particularly estrogen to the [00:29:00] body. And depending on how efficient we are at kind of getting rid of those things, we will have a higher estrogen burden. Um, and, and depending on how we detox them, some of those, uh, pathways can amplify changes to the DNA and other things. So we can see higher uptick in cancers and immune modulation is going to be part of that.
Betty Murray: And so. Part of what I think is going on is we just have too many toxins that look like hormones in our body that bogs our body down. And then if we are a woman who already leans a little bit one way or the other, we get extra burdened, right? Um, and then all we need is a stacking of something else, another illness, too much stress.
Betty Murray: You know, there's, there's, it's never just one thing, you know, everybody's always like, I want the silver bullet.
Julie Michelson: I know. I do. I remember when I got really excited about Functional medicine and was like, I want to find my root cause, you know, singular, like, Oh, oops. Um, and I do, I think we have as women that compounded, you know, we've got the [00:30:00] estrogen, we've got the, we have very different immune systems from men so that we can carry babies.
Julie Michelson: It's, it's Set up that way, you know, um, and then the end, you know, toxins in general, endocrine disruptors, you know, estrogen, estrogen, estrogen, um, and I'm not bad. We all the estrogen is a good thing. It's not a bad thing, but also we have a higher percentage of body fat. Where do we store our toxins in our body fat?
Julie Michelson: And so take somebody like me Perfect storm, you know, I am literally I'm not just not a good detoxer I'm a collector.
Betty Murray: Oh, a hundred
Julie Michelson: I've ever met my body is like, oh, let's keep that forever So add that to you know, even though I was a petite You know, I was skinny when I hated that word. Um, as a kid. Well, book makes perfect sense in hindsight because now I know I had celiac and I wasn't absorbing nutrients.
Julie Michelson: You know, I ate like a [00:31:00] truck driver. Um, but like these things all compound, right? And so, and then Take somebody in with the shifts of hormones, those times in life and somebody with higher estrone who's put on belly fat, then that's hard to, you know, it just, it becomes this cycle. Um, it's like the perfect storm, really, of if, like you said, if it's not autoimmunity, it's gonna, you know, it's cancer, it's metabolic syndrome, all of the, the things, but the good news is we can actually take action to prevent and or fix.
Julie Michelson: And so, and that's what you and I. Do all day long.
Betty Murray: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, um, it's understanding that, you know, a, you got to look for all those things. You have to look for the toxins, the gut health, your hormone balance, because how you felt when you were 20 and what was going on with your hormones, it's going to be different than [00:32:00] 35. It's going to be different than 45.
Betty Murray: Absolutely different at, you know, your 50s. I'm 54, you know, so it,
Julie Michelson: we're the same age, see, and you look like a baby.
Betty Murray: is, so the reality is, is, is we have to respect the fact that our hormones are different throughout the month, they're different throughout our timelines of our life. Especially like when we have babies and things like that, we have a lot of immune regulation that happens.
Betty Murray: And so. We see those, those incidences sort of changing that. And I think once you understand that and you understand that you can also get to the baseline problems, like get rid of the toxins, fix the gut, you know, get rid of mole, all those things, get rid of all the things that we look at functionally.
Betty Murray: Then the total load comes down, right? It's never ever like, Oh, I just don't do that anymore. And it goes away. It's usually total load. And I think, and I think that's the kind of home message people need to have is that there is things you can do. You don't have to be stuck here. I feel better.
Julie Michelson: Oh, me too.
Betty Murray: 35,
Julie Michelson: I was gonna, I wanted to say, you know, as we're saying cycles, right? [00:33:00] Monthly decades, whatever it, I was going to clarify that you weren't saying being in your fifties means you should feel worse than you did when you were younger. I didn't think I would, I would. Live to see 50 and I definitely feel better than I did in my 30s and 40s without a doubt But I've I'm always I was gonna say I've done the work.
Julie Michelson: I'm always doing the work, right? This is a constant process because we're bombarded with Toxins stressors all the things and so when we create that resilience, that's what can make your 50s like the best Right
Betty Murray: it is that is true because I truly do feel significantly better, you know, I have cardiovascular fitness is equal to if not better than when I was in my late 30s, you know, my strength isn't quite what it was, but I was powerlifting in my early 30s, but pretty significant strength for my age.
Betty Murray: You know, I I sleep better. My mood is [00:34:00] better. All of those things are better. And a lot of it means that you have to do that lifestyle groundwork. And again, it's lifestyle. You don't get to do it and then you're done with it,
Julie Michelson: Right.
Betty Murray: you know, which is where the challenge really comes in. Because most people that's not how we're wired as a human to work,
Julie Michelson: We, it's the checklist mentality. I did that.
Betty Murray: Yeah, it's like we have to keep sort of reiterating that and sort of putting the, you know, putting the effort in because, um, but if we do that, we get a better life on the other side, which I think is important for people to understand wherever they are in that timeline, you
Julie Michelson: Absolutely. Absolutely. And to circle all the way back to the beginning of the conversation of we're living longer. Um, you know, it's not about being alive. It's about living well, right. And it's the back to that health span. Um, I have no interest. I watched my grandmother pretty much lay in her bed for like a decade.
Julie Michelson: Just and her body was healthy. Her brain was gone and it was [00:35:00] hard. I like who want, I don't want to do that. No, to live like this until I'm done. And then I'm done.
Betty Murray: Exactly. Exactly. I would say that risk for dementia, Alzheimer's is a primary driver for most of the people that my team and I see, you know, they're like, that scares me probably more than anything else. You know?
Julie Michelson: Well, and I say, use it as a motivator. Um, because all of these lifestyle areas. Again, it's for what you're doing to prevent dementia and or reverse dementia is the same as what you're going to be doing to prevent or reverse autoimmune symptoms and, and live that healthy life. Um, I, you know, that's one of the things that I think is so exciting and empowering.
Julie Michelson: You know, it's, it's a total opposite from like diagnosis. pill, right? Like let's find this diagnosis and this is what you need to do. If we're addressing those lifestyle areas where, you know, you [00:36:00] mentioned, you know, cardiovascular fitness, all the things, um, wellness is wellness,
Betty Murray: Yeah,
Julie Michelson: what it comes down to.
Betty Murray: absolutely. Yeah. And it's, yeah. And those are diseases of lifestyle. And so, yeah, we have to just look at it that way and take proactive steps for sure.
Julie Michelson: Yeah. I love it. Which is again, where we do have power. Even if you've seen a doctor like Betty has seen, or like I have seen, um, You know, they, they don't know everything and, um, you need to just keep moving until you find the right support.
Betty Murray: Yeah, and it is, you know, I always think kind of like duly noted, right? Everybody's, you know, everybody has the opportunity to share their knowledge, right? And I by no means know everything. And I have changed my tunes on things when I've learned something new that challenges my bias. Um, but it does take kind of a team.
Betty Murray: So I think that's the other thing is because our medical [00:37:00] system is designed as, you know, the patient really isn't driving it. The Actuary in the insurance company that's telling you how you're going to get treated and what's going to get done. Um, when we removed that relationship, it really left, you know, people really not understanding that they have control and you probably need a team of individuals to really help you that, you know, we don't have a Swiss army knife.
Betty Murray: We don't have a Swiss army night practitioner. That's the king of everything. So, and so you, you have to proactively look for that in your life because the Western medical system is not going to find that for you.
Julie Michelson: I love that and we all deserve a team and, and the healing and the support that we can get when we create a team and find the correct team is, is amazing and nobody has all the answers, you know, for sure. And, and so I love, you know, I work in conjunction with my partner a lot. He's a physician. He's a fantastic functional medicine physician, [00:38:00] but I, some of his patients need support.
Julie Michelson: Right. So he's not coaching them. He's not, you know, we work in different ways to support people in different ways. And I say, you know, find what resonates and then build your team. I love that. And find practitioners who want to be part of a team. Right. I think that's a great indicator when you are meeting with somebody or going for a consult and if they're like, they have all the answers, I would maybe move on and try to find somebody else that wants to be part of your team.
Julie Michelson: For sure.
Betty Murray: Yeah. Yeah. I always tell people it's like if you had to rewire your house electrically, you're not going to go hire a handyman, right? Because a handyman just like, he'll put a doorknob on, might put a new faceplate on, but you're going to hire a master electrician, you know? So your, your, your medical team or your healthcare team needs some master electricians and a master plumber and that kind [00:39:00] of thing.
Betty Murray: And, but you also need that person that is helping. bridge the gap because the truth is you could have all the fancy tests in the world and I, I tell all of our patients this, you can have all that stuff done, you could get to and understand the root cause, but it's in the day to day execution of what you need to do to repair and, and improve all those things and then keep it is where the rubber hits the road.
Betty Murray: Knowledge doesn't
Julie Michelson: I have a job.
Betty Murray: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: Right. This
Betty Murray: have, you have to have action.
Julie Michelson: Right, right. It's not a lack of if we could all just read a book, like I would have never gotten sick or I would have healed quicker. Right. Yeah. Um, and so I love that, that, you know, we have this amazing community of, of people to, to give the support and, and be that, that team member that people need, you know, it's the, I always say it's the how to in your life that is, you're not finding that in the book, right?
Julie Michelson: It's like, Oh, I read, I should do this [00:40:00] thing. I don't know how to get that done. So I love that. That's the perfect segue into our final question, which is according to Betty, what is one step that listeners can take today to start to improve their health?
Betty Murray: Oh my gosh, there's so many things I would
Julie Michelson: I know it's such a hard question.
Betty Murray: You know, so, so here's the thing that I, I really think is like we identified toxins are, you know, they're ubiquitous. You know, I wrote a book 12 years ago about detoxifying, but the truth is, is you go through, like, let's say you do a big detox thing.
Betty Murray: You're going to retox as soon as
Julie Michelson: Yep. Oh, I love that. Yeah.
Betty Murray: Right, so you're going to retox. There's no way to get 100 percent away, but that is the area across the board and all the big health concerns that if we look at it just slowly and incrementally, you know, we start with maybe the easy stuff. So maybe I go, okay, I'm going to look at my home cleaning products and I'm going to start replacing them with [00:41:00] natural and organic.
Betty Murray: You know, cleaners that aren't toxic and that you just sort of look at it. It's like I'm peeling back the layer of an onion. So I start with the outside and I do the first thing, right? And then I stopped buying my water and plastic water bottles because I want microplastics and all that stuff. And then I'm going to go.
Betty Murray: Okay, the next thing I'm going to do is look at my body care products. And if we just slowly peel back the layer of that onion, you're still going to get exposures. That's that you're going to walk outside. You're going to walk in your house, which is actually more toxic than the air outside. Okay. Okay.
Betty Murray: Okay. Okay. But if we can do the things that we have some agency over, we're going to start taking the load away and it becomes something that becomes sustainable. And also, if you're a, if you're a mom or a grandma or something like that, you're also going to teach your example to your family. Our children don't do what we tell them to do.
Betty Murray: They do what we, they see. So you also help implement healthier things in the next generation, which will actually help change the planet. You know, we caused most of the problem, our generation before us and us. Right. So we need future generations to recognize that we can actually clean [00:42:00] it up. And I think that I think looking at it because it's empowering, not overwhelming is really important.
Betty Murray: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: that. And to, to highlight what you had said before, it's the reducing that total burden, right? We're never the, we're a, we're never done cleaning up toxins. We're, you know, you should never be done reading labels, . Um, but when we just manage step by step, and I love that, you know, you highlighted, look at how much you got in there, in that one step, you know?
Julie Michelson: But by starting in our home, which is. It's typically more toxic than out and about in the world and we don't think of it that way. Um, we really can empower ourselves and, and do it in a way that's not overwhelming. And I love that you, you know, there is no, the right first step is the step that you can successfully take.
Julie Michelson: So start somewhere painless and you know, I always had, and again, it's not about perfection. I had one client she did [00:43:00] every single everything cleaned up all the things and then I said what kind of shampoo are you using and she said, I'm not telling you because that's non negotiable. I was like, that's fine, because you have literally cleaned up every other exposure in your home.
Julie Michelson: So it's, it's not about perfection. And I think so many of us ended up in this. Pickle that we're in because we're perfectionists. And so giving ourselves a little grace of, again, that better is better, um, is, is a good thing. And it's just like the rest of the lifestyle stuff. We're never done. I love the, I'm going to quote you, I love that you're going to retox because we are.
Betty Murray: Yeah. As soon as you walk out of your house and perfectionism in itself has its own level of toxicity.
Julie Michelson: toxin. Yeah.
Betty Murray: It's another toxin. It's just it's a different kind of burden. But yeah. So the less we see it that way and the more we just see I'm doing something incremental every day, just [00:44:00] like learning math. I hated math.
Betty Murray: Right. But. You know, it all compounds on each other and you get better at it, you know, and it was always every time I went to college, it was always the last class I took, I'd leave like all the other ones. I mean, like, okay, now I got to do statistics, like PhD program last class was like
Julie Michelson: Gotta do it.
Betty Murray: statistics. And that was the only one I was like, because I, you know, but I understood it was incremental, you know, and so they compound.
Betty Murray: So everything that we do compounds and that's the way to look at it.
Julie Michelson: I love it. I love it. So for people that are listening on the go, which is how I tend to listen to podcasts, where's the very best place to find you?
Betty Murray: Yeah. Thank you. So I have menopause mastery podcast and I put one out every week and you can always find me at bettymurray. com and the last, I'll spell it B E T T Y M U R R A Y. com. And so either one of those places, but I'm obviously podcasting once a week too. So
Julie Michelson: And I say, check out her podcast. It's, it's amazing. And you'll learn, [00:45:00] continue to learn a lot, which is fantastic. Betty, thank you so much. You really gave us a lot to think about today and a lot of gold
Betty Murray: Good. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Julie. I'm excited to be here.
Julie Michelson: for everyone listening. Remember you can get the transcripts and show notes by visiting inspiredliving. show. Hope you had a great time and enjoyed this episode as much as I did. I'll see you next week. [00:46:00]
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Betty Murray
Betty Murray is a nutrition expert, Ph.D. researcher, certified functional medicine practitioner, and speaker. Betty helps women over 40 harness their hormones to lose weight, optimize sleep, restore energy, and thrive. During her research for her PhD, Betty made several key discoveries that lead to hormone & metabolic imbalances that plague women over 40. Restoring balance to these key metabolic and hormone pathways is the basis of her Hormone Reset Program. This program has helped her, and hundreds of women lose weight easily, improve hormone balance, reduce hot flashes, restore sleep, and turn up their energy without living on a diet of deprivation. She is the host of the Menopause Mastery Podcast and the founder and CEO of Living Well Dallas Functional Medicine Center and the Coming Into Our Own Project. She is a featured writer for Brainz Magazine and has been featured in Grazia Magazine. She is a frequently featured nutrition expert on Fox News Broadcasting, CW33, NBC, and CBS.
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