☘️☘️☘️Enter the March GIVEAWAY: https://www.christabiegler.com/giveaway

🚨Watch Christa's free training here: christabiegler.com/blueprint

View Christa's DUTCH Test Results: Click Here

In this episode, I’m sharing my hormone test results at 39 and how to interpret them through a root cause lens. I walk through why I chose a DUTCH test, what I hoped to learn, and why it’s easy to chase data while missing what your body is already telling you.

I break down what my results showed across hormones and adrenal function, what changed, and where I still have room to improve. It’s a reminder that supporting how your body functions matters more than chasing perfect lab numbers.

WHAT HELPED ME IMPROVE MY RESULTS:

• Supporting detox and drainage
• Reducing excess caffeine
• Prioritizing stress and adrenal support
• Paying attention to light exposure

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Why symptoms matter more than lab results
• What a DUTCH test can (and can’t) tell you
• How stress impacts hormone balance
• The role of detox and estrogen metabolism
• Why trends matter more than perfect numbers

Other Episodes🎙️ Mentioned:

• Ep 393 - Christa's Health Crisis Part 1: https://youtu.be/ssJa_QQODj4?si=USDhf6I_qiRSYdtW
• Ep 443 - Christa's Health Crisis Part 2: https://youtu.be/1WypKk7df18?si=kU89PPm2gEzhlXyl
• Ep 332 - How we're missing subclinical hypothyroidism: https://youtu.be/KFG2Xr5HzlA?si=U8CQMIA4HrdS0vHh

🗒️Functional Medicine Cliffnotes: https://www.christabiegler.com/protocolshop
✨Recharge Room Waitlist: https://www.christabiegler.com/rechargewaitlist
❓Questions: https://www.christabiegler.com/questions

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
More Links + Quizzes: https://www.christabiegler.com/links

SPONSOR:
🧡Thank you to Jigsaw Health for being such a great sponsor. 😎 Use code LESSSTRESSED10 anytime for 10% off!

TRANSCRIPT:

 [00:00:00] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common that we're both in pursuit of a less stressed life. On the show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high performing health savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want. So let's see what's out there together. 

It is March and it is the month of my favorite holiday. So we are going to celebrate here at the Less Stress Life in partnership with Jigsaw Health. We created the first giveaway I've done in years, and we made it really solid. So there's four winners you can enter throughout the month of March. Just go to christabiegler.com/giveaway.

That will also be in the show notes. We're giving away four prizes, two mega bundles from Jigsaw Health with prizes worth more than $200 of all of our favorite products like Mag soThe Mag, SRT, potassium Cocktail. Other electrolytes from Jigsaw and also a 30 minute one-on-one with me, which you cannot normally get.

And then also a mineral test with review. So if you're interested in any of those one prize per person to try to share the love a little bit throughout the entire month of March, you can enter, just go to christabiegler.com/giveaway. We've got a really cool software that makes it really easy. You just click some button, subscribe to the podcast.

You can end, have more entries. Really simple. And then you'll be set to go. We'll announce the winners after April 1st after the giveaway closes throughout the month of March. And happy month of St. Patrick's Day, my very favorite holiday. So go get entered, christabiegler.com/giveaway.

[00:02:03] Christa Biegler, RD: Alright. On this show I'm gonna share with you my hormone test result as a 39 and a half year old woman and why I did this test and how to interpret it. First of all, I will not share my screen on this one. Probably 75% of you are listening on an audio device, but what I am doing is I put a link in the show notes so you can just pull up these results side by side.

You don't have to opt in or anything. It's just like a publicly shared link. It took me a little bit of fan. Lean to get the results to sit side by side. So I actually included the 2020. I have some hormone test results from May, 2023 and some from this month, February, 2026, and this'll be publishing in March.

Now I am going over the Dutch test or dried urine test for comprehensive hormones. I'm about to tell you the pros and cons of this, but this is just one little segment of when people say, should you test your hormones? There's so many ways to do this, and there's pros and cons, so I'm gonna share a little bit specific to this particular test.

Alright. In the last year, I have recommended to all of my clients to have two filters, or I guess you could use the word rules before doing any testing for a long time. We have overemphasized testing and underemphasized symptoms and results and experiences. And I think all of these I don't think.

All of these are part of the Venn diagram of evidence-based medicine. So with testing, we can become very attached to it. We want it to validate us, but then sometimes we realize that after we do testing, it doesn't really tell us all that much at all. So I have two filters. One is, what do you hope to learn?

It's good to know what you want to learn because it's not as easy as saying, I'd like to test my hormones. About to find that out. This could take months to do this particular test because of doing it, right? So what do you hope to learn is filter number one and two? The filter number two is can you be unattached to the results?

In other words, can you be neutral if the test shows you nothing? To be honest, a lot of people. Struggle with that part. And that's okay. And that's part of that narrative in our brain and what we attach to things attached to facts, the thoughts we attach to our facts. So that I was start of talking about a little bit, a couple of weeks ago when I did my part two health crisis story.

And I was talking about just the necessity of doing other types of emotional and energetic work and rewiring our brain. And the thoughts and the soundtracks that show up all the time. Okay. This will be mostly clinical. So the goals I had for doing this particular test is mostly I had a test laying around that I'd paid for a few years ago, and I had not used it.

So that may not be you. The other goal that might be more relevant is, am I trending toward perimenopause? Meaning are my sex hormones declining? AKA, what is my hormonal baseline? Now, for context, I did actually assess this back in, let's see, when was that? A handful of months ago, maybe five months ago, I did decide I was having.

A few symptoms and I just wanted to know. It wasn't anything too crazy. I'll one thing, and I think we should always know what our symptoms are. I was seeing an increase of heart rate and anxiety the week before my menstrual cycle, during the week of week before my menstrual cycle when I was drinking too much espresso.

Now I know this is just, so this is not shocking, and when I would support detoxification, it would not be a problem. So basically it was showing me that my toxic burden was building up because in general, around ovulation and around menstruation. That detoxification freeway can get a little bit jammed.

I think this, and what this all points to me 'cause I always like to attempt to oversimplify complex things, is that we've gotta go back to the basics of supporting and restoring function to systems. And I'm gonna go ahead and die on this hill for the rest of my practice. Yours is that when you restore function of systems, you don't have to get too fancy in other places.

'Cause. No matter what the conversation is, it goes back to how is this system or organ system functioning, I promise. Like even if I get into estrogen metabolism, I probably won't get into deep estrogen metabolism. But a little bit even that is related to how your gut function, immune function, and drainage and detoxification work, because it really goes back to that.

So for me, I don't usually recommend people do Dutch tests as a first line thing. I usually recommend we. Do interventions and restore functional systems and if we need to then do a DUTCH test. Okay. I actually have a pretty solid outline here, so let's keep going. So I had wanted to use up a Dutch test I had laying around.

I wanted to find out if I was trending toward perimenopause. I did do a hormone baseline with just blood labs a few months ago. The pros of doing the Dutch test is specifically, there are some additional things that you can find out specific to estrogen metabolism. And

a little bit about androgen metabolism. Some secondary questions I was happy to get answered are just, how are my sex hormones? How is my estrogen metabolism and methylation, how is my adrenal function looking? It looks like it's probably been a couple of years since I'd done any testing around adrenal function.

My last HTMA that I found was from 2023. I don't know if I have some more recent because I. Did not feel like looking through my hard drive any longer, and there's not a very nice testing portal that lists them all. Like most other testing companies from that particular company. I expect that will change with its new, amazing, youthful owners that just took over who are friends of mine.

And so how does this all compare to past results? Okay. The other thing is you can do blood labs for probably $50. They're not gonna show you the estrogen metabolism and some of these other information. Whereas I think taking a Dutch test is probably gonna cost around $600 by the time you. Buy the test and have someone interpret it.

That's just my opinion. If you wanna interpret, you could probably get it a little bit cheaper without interpretation, but I don't think an A test is very valuable without interpretation. So that's just me. So the pros of this particular test is that you can really see. Estrogen metabolism, and you're just gonna get estriol or es E two when you're estrogen two when you're doing blood work.

And so why does that matter? What the heck am I even talking about? Any woman with female cancer history? Breast cancer. Ovarian cancer. Cervical cancer, I think should probably do this test at some point because if you have estrogen going down the four oh H pathway, it's the cancerous pathway that is implicated in these particular female cancers.

So it doesn't matter if you were a cycling. Or not cycling woman, you can still see a preference and how that estrogen, because just when you're not cycling doesn't mean you're making, you have no estrogen. You do have some, you just have a lot less. And so you can still see relative for your age how you are processing and metabolizing that estrogen overall.

Okay? So those are the pros. The cons for this is the timing. So if you're a cycling woman, you have to time this five to seven days after ovulation. I don't really believe in guessing for ovulation. I recommend that people do ovulation strips. I actually just had a client upload a Dutch test for me to review.

She had done it on her own. She's learning functional medicine on her own. And I looked at it and I said, it looks like you didn't ovulate. Do you know if you took this at the right time? And essentially she had not. And I think at least. How I know, like I try to just avoid this scenario if possible and I'll share like I even had to redo my Dutch test.

But if you accidentally don't do it at the right time around ovulation. I believe that they will allow you to do it again for half price, but you can see where this kind of gets strung out. And actually I had this Dutch test laying around and I was cleaning out my cabinet and I found it and I thought I should do this.

And I looked at my menstrual cycle dates and my ovulation dates and it was lining up. So I did the test. There's four up on four if you're doing the main one. You basically, you pee on four strips and then you let them air dry for 24 hours, then you pop them into a little plastic bags and send them off.

And I had let mine sit out too long, like there was too much of a, and they have also changed their shipping since then. So there was too much of a gap between when I took the test and when I actually mailed it and when it was received to the lab, it was actually they called and they said, Hey, what's up with this?

And I said, oh, I just didn't get it in the mail. And they said it's no good after a certain amount of time. So that was the first time I had that happen. So they actually sent me another one and I waited seven months before I did it again. Because you need to time it at the right time.

And am I, is it convenient for me to pee on this strip four times? Again, everyone's different. This may not be an issue for you at all, but even if you're a cycling woman, we wanna make sure you've got, if you're ovulating, and what we think we know about ovulations, we think that women ovulate outta one ovary and then ovulate outta the other.

However, some women may only ovulate out of one side, or they might miss their ovulation that month. There's many reasons for this, so we cannot assume that you ovulate. And so it's always smarter to do the ovulation strips. You buy ovulation strips for maybe 15, $20. Pee on those around the time where you think you are ovulating.

Confirm ovulation date and then take that test five to seven days later. So that is how you get the best results. Otherwise, it's going to be a little bit hard to interpret the results or they're not gonna be as useful if your cycle is irregular, like in the case of PCOS or something like that, usually you're gonna have to do a cycle map, which just means you pee on a strip every single day for the month, and they track it throughout the month, so it's more expensive.

I'm just on the cons because tests are awesome. And by the way, I actually love this test. It's one of the best testing companies out there in my opinion. They do a beautiful job of education. They just do a beautiful job in a lot of ways, but that doesn't negate the fact that it just takes time to actually collect this data.

And that your data, your. Your bio data changes throughout the month, so you just wanna catch it at the right time. And this is when we're doing blood testing. There is usually a reference range of like when, depending on when you took that test, what the results should be. So it looks a little bit different but this one goes along best with right after ovulation.

Okay. Anyway, there's one other negative that I find with this one. Because there's three sections to this. There's the sex hormones and the metabolism of the sex hormones, and then there's the adrenal hormones or the hypothalmic pituitary adrenal access, and then there's the organic acid. So there's three parts of it.

I'll go over two parts of it today. I'll lightly touch on the organic acids. I just they didn't really copy into my document very well that I'm sharing with you and. There's not a extreme amount of action there. But anyway, if you have a belly fat that can produce some cortisol and skew the metabolized cortisol pattern on the adrenal page, so where this is shows up in practice is I have had people who have.

They absolutely are a hot mess expressed. Their adrenals are totally fried and depleted and they, it will not appear that way on the metabolized cortisol because of either liver function or because of abdominal adiposity. It'll skew that data and I think there's nothing worse than a lab invalidating you, which is why I think that your lived experience is really valuable as well.

I mentioned this a couple weeks ago, but I have a little video where I go over Cliff notes to the last 10 years of functional medicine testing. It's 10 bucks or 11 bucks or something like that. So I'll put that in the show notes for you if you want my cliff notes version of here's the pros and cons of all these tests that I've used over time and when to take them, et cetera.

So hopefully maybe if you're a practitioner or a new practitioner, let's save you a lot of time. I think we learn through experience regardless. So sometimes you've just gotta, put in those reps no matter what, and that's okay. Alright, so I mentioned. With this test that I would do this if the context is right.

Again, if there's any of that female cancer history, I feel like for $600 you can reroute your estrogen metabolism, you can improve it and potentially prevent cancer. And I'm a huge fan of cancer prevention. In fact, like it would probably be up there in my top three priorities in life is cancer prevention.

Care about that a whole holy bunch. Okay, so there's three parts to this. Dutch test. I will not share my screen, but you can just go into the show notes and click on that document and you can pull up the tests and you can see them side by side. I just pulled in three pages. The rest of it's like the same data, not in a picture, but in a table and it's ugly.

So we've got, the first page is going to be sex hormones and estrogen metabolism. And I'll just mention if you happen to be looking at this, you'll see this on your own. But in the last year, Dutch test updated their. Test results. So it's a little prettier now, a little more modern looking, and I will say I, I like it.

It's an improvement. There's a little bit of there, the data's in a little bit different area. And one thing I did not include, I might include this yet actually, I probably should, is there you have some really good assessment data. So like of all the tests out there, it actually gives you some decent information on assessing the data.

But I don't know if you would be able to look at this and understand. And just know that, if you have 95% of your estrogen metabolism is going through the two oh H pathway, if you think that's good or not, essentially. So I will include that that one before I publish this. Okay. Let's jump in to these results.

So Paige, I'm grabbing it and I'm moving some things around as well on the backend. So on page one, we've got straight up sex hormones. I love to personify sex hormones because I think it makes it easier to understand. So I like to. Think about progesterone being the homecoming queen helps us have a good mood.

Everyone wants more progesterone, we need it for fertility, et cetera. We've got estrogen, which is Jekyll and Hyde. You need estrogen for bone health, et cetera. But having too much is associated with those period symptoms that people typically do not like cramping, heavy bleeding, et cetera, because it's a growth hormone.

And so the higher the estrogen or. The poorer we are clearing it. The stuff, the excess, the thicker that uterine lining will be, the heavier the period will be, the cramping and sometimes mood stuff, et cetera. And then finally testosterone for women. I'm gonna mostly speak to women. It's my main clientele.

And so testosterone is the maintenance man. So it helps with, you need some, you don't need, the maintenance man to live with you all the time. That's probably not the best analogy. You need some maintenance man. And he's there, the testosterone's there to repair tissue to help build muscle.

And to have libido. It's part of the androgens for libido as well. So on the top page, we're just seeing the totals overall, not really the metabolism. And something that I found really interesting, I didn't catch this the first time I looked through this 'cause I just looked through my new test results.

But I went ahead and put my 2023 and 2026 test results side by side. And again, what's my primary goal? Am I heading toward perimenopause? Which can happen anytime I'm 39 and a half. Usually, I don't know, I don't remember the average onset age for it, but I think a lot of things, and I don't know about your online news feeds.

I am just getting bombed with things about perimenopause. I think we use it as a great cop. I think we're blaming a lot on it, and I don't know if that's right or wrong yet, but it makes me think, oh, am I going to, are my hormones declining? Because in perimenopause, I don't need so many sex hormones because I'm not gonna be reproducing anymore in perimenopause.

I'm transitioning toward the, my non reproductive years. And so those hormones decline and my adrenals take more of the brunt of the burden of effort to produce additional hormones. But what I found was really interesting is there was not a massive change between 36-year-old Krista and 39 and a half year old Krista.

The estrogen was. Like normal to robust and it does change by age, and they give you age ranges as well. The progesterone was normal to robust and the testosterone was normal. Pretty average. would say, if anything, the testosterone is a little bit better and more robust. That can be a pro or a con, depending on how I'm metabolizing it, depending on my metabolism, there's a way it can lean that'll give you more chin hairs.

Which is another reason I was curious about perimenopause. I have found that as my drainage and detoxification is clear, that is not as much of an issue in general. Okay, so moving on to the next page.

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Don't stop when the symptoms stop. Just keep going to replete it even further in any of these cases. I love jigsaw's mag, SRT because it allows you to take a higher, more effective dose without any laxative effects because it's got an eight hour time release. That's what the SRT stands for. It stands for sustained release technology.

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Essentially, all of these are like little dials, and so it'll show you, if you're in the perimenopausal page, which I'm nowhere near, I'm just not.

I'm making a decent amount of sex hormone. And remember that the backbone, like how your body makes sex hormones, it needs nutrients including cholesterol. So if all of your hormones were low, I would generally point to undereating actually high stress undereating under nourishment, all of that would be stress to the body as well.

But you wouldn't have the, essentially if every single hormone was low, you would say. Gosh, you appear to not even have resources to make hormones essentially. And major undereating stuff, which you could see with specialty diets, car, like any of those you could potentially see that you may not.

The carnivore diet at least has a good amount of cholesterol. Cholesterol as metabolized through the liver. All plants would not have cholesterol in them. Alright. I think I added some comments to this document as well, so you'll be able to see those if you open it up. But my favorite page is this second page.

It used to be page three. Now it's page two on the new layout, and this particular page is all about estrogen metabolism. It's actually about all sex hormone metabolism. It's just that estrogen metabolism is more interesting to me because it's more about if you're going down that. Cancerous pathway, the four Ohh, or the red pathway.

You're going to have more predisposition to having some of those cancerous pathways or cancer, female cancers. And so I just think that is the most amazing thing we can look at. So it's looking at detoxification through phase one. And then through phase two detoxification, that may mean nothing to you.

If you don't know much about drainage detoxification. It's something I go over and teach clients. You add different support things depending on where your drainage is getting backed up or stuck. And something that's very common popular people talk about a lot is methylation.

Methylation is one of the conveyor belts out of six that things would be taken out of when you're taking out the trash, phase two detoxification and three years ago, my methylation looked pretty low. This time it looks on the lower end, but it's actually registering normal.

And their explanation, they've changed the way they explain it. They say essentially, your methylation activity is. Higher than 34% of the population, which is within the optimal range. This indicates optimal estrogen methylation, which is beneficial for efficient estrogen detoxification.

So ultimately it's not really, and not that I would take their assessment for face value, but even when I looked at this, I was like, oh, it's normal, but it's low normal. But before it was low. So that's an improvement. That's one little change and it could still get better. And all of that's okay.

Like it's not the end of the world. It's not a big deal. But remember, I think I was just telling you a few months ago, I was seeing kind of routine symptoms every month where I would have increased anxiety, like heart rate if I was drinking a lot of coffee the week before my menstrual cycle. Now that could be from drinking moldy coffee, by the way, et cetera.

And as I would improve my drainage and detoxification burden, it would improve. Like I saw very immediate results within a day or two. And so where I wasn't getting those symptoms, and this persisted for a few months, so I did some additional cleanup work. My body was also like, Hey. It is time to do some cleanup work.

It was clearly letting me know that in other ways as well. Strong body bo I started to break out a little bit. So all of that was there and I took this test after I had done a couple of months of improvement. If I had taken this test before I did a couple of months of improvement, I may show worse result.

I may show worse methylation, worse clearance of things. Because as I look at this, everything is looking pretty okay. Not major issues with testosterone, metabolism, et cetera, progesterone I'm just not seeing major issues around this until I go to my biggest areas of opportunity. And I hope you can hear the way I'm talking about myself.

I am just saying this is fine, and these are areas of opportunity. I am actually fairly detached because I feel like. This is just a journey. It's not like a, oh, I accomplished it and I like reached a hill and then I'm done. It just, it's not really like that. The third, and generally, I think the final page we'll talk about on this Dutch test is that Hypothalmic pituitary adrenal access.

Now, one of my favorite things about this test. If you pull up this chart, or if you pull up these results again just to click on it and it'll pop right open for you in the show notes, is, I love this image where it shows like stress impacts the hypothalamus that communicates to the pituitary gland, which by the way, really impacts the, we don't see too much of this.

We, there's some inferences for thyroid. It doesn't really directly show you thyroid stuff, but the pituitary is really producing also that TSH. Which is commonly the blood test for thyroid. It's a pituitary hormone, not a thyroid hormone. But this is why, and I say this all the time, so my clients get this.

It's if you want to have a good thyroid function, you've got to have your body wants these other systems to be restored first. It's like it's second in line. So then you got the pituitary gland, and then you got the adrenal gland. Then it also shows like the penal and it just shows these like inside of a little brain image, which I just think is nice.

It shows a penal gland, which makes melatonin. The melatonin to me looks about the same, which actually is pretty funny. I feel lucky about this. I must be clearing caffeine. So one thing I did wrong on this test is by the time I decided to take it, I had already decided to drink coffee at 3:30 PM that day.

Which you're not really supposed to do now. It's not the end of the world, which is why I just proceeded, like why was I gonna wait? I'm like, I'm not waiting another month to remember to take this test. Because I drank coffee and had avocado, which can impact some of the organic acids, which I forgot about until I was just said it out loud.

I forgot about that particular part. So if you take like bananas and avocados and whatnot, it may skew some, but I don't find these particularly important markers anyway on the organic acids. I was curious to see if I would see a little bit of a spike in cortisol at all from taking that coffee in the mid-afternoon, but I really don't, and I don't see a real negative impact of the melatonin.

The melatonin's quite robust. Three years ago it was at 60. This time it was at 55. Almost the darn same. And if anything, on a positive note. So last time I did this, my metabolized cortisol or basically like as close as we can get to maybe assuming a month. I think it's like a month maybe. We don't really know how long it is.

I can't remember. Maybe it's just considered a longer term cortisol picture. We have a 24 hour free cortisol picture. So what is. You're supposed to have a spike in cortisol about two hours, like zero to 30 minutes after you wake up, and then just generally two hours later, it should be at that highest point.

So you wake up, you should have a spike and then it should go down and then it should bottom out right before bed that would help you go to sleep. There's all kinds of different things that can happen. People can be wired and tired and you'll see that cortisol show up. You can pretty much look at this cortisol pattern and say, Hey, are you like crashing in the afternoon?

If it's really low and. In general, my cortisol patterns look very similar though, slightly better on this one. Before it was actually more bottomed out, it was actually showing up underneath the graph. And what this means is like my adrenals were tapped out, they were running on reserve tank.

In fact I love to talk about cortisol from a perspective of the gas pedal in the car. When you're pressing on that gas pedal, you're using a lot of cortisol, you're burning through a lot of energy or gas, so similar in the body. And then as you run out of gas you will go into the reserve tank because your body always has to produce cortisol.

It's an essential hormone. You will die without it. It is a survival hormone, so you must be able to run from the tiger. Your body will take away resources and prioritize making cortisol over everything else. It does not care about making sex hormones. It does not care about making DHEA. Which is regulates your blood sugar and lipids, et cetera, does not care about making the thyroid hormone if it does not have the resources to make cortisol.

That's probably the most important thing of this episode, by the way. Anyway, so mine generally shows and I could be bummed about this, right? It's oh, it still shows. It's like there's a lot of improvement to do here, but it's slightly better than it was three years ago, and I'll take it like I feel.

Okay. I don't feel terrible. And this is actually lifelong work, taking care of your adrenals and taking care of your stress hormones. So whatever. It's okay. And there's more, and I'm not surprised and there's more opportunities. So it's not that I haven't done work, I feel ultimately better, et cetera.

Like I have less symptoms around this area. I talked about some of those symptoms a couple of weeks ago on that. Part two, healing crisis stress, hormone healing crisis episode. But less symptoms generally slightly better. Like the metabolized cortisol is a little bit better. The free cortisol is a little bit better.

I'm not actually like underneath the graph, like I'm not, three years ago I was like not even really on the graph. Overall, and the other thing about this is, especially with the daily free cortisol pattern, is that sunlight will impact it massively. So my takeaway is I need more sun. As I reach over and put my artificial sun lamp on.

Reminding myself and what I do think I remember about taking, and this is so good to take notes the day you take the test because what happens that day does impact it. I remembered that I had the coffee the day before, so I wondered if it would skew it, it really didn't for me. I still, I didn't spike my cortisol, which is pretty much on track of how I feel about coffee.

I don't really drink it for to wake up. I just drink it. For fun 'cause I like the taste and so anyway, there's that. But what spikes that cortisol awakening response, what allows it to increase is full spectrum light exposure and being under artificial lights. Negatively impact it. And I have gotten to in my life where I think I have the capacity now to maybe reconsider some of the lighting choices in my home and how I wanna maybe retrofit my life.

And I would, I just share that. And I share it carefully because it's like sometimes we have all these healthy things we can do, and it's but do you have any capacity? I have been reclaiming my capacity like crazy in the last year, and so it's okay, what do I want to do about this? And what I believe happened the day of this test was I believe that it was quite cloudy out and I do not believe I got any full spectrum light that day.

So it would be cool. It'd be a fun experiment for me sometime to just pay for the adrenal part of this. Test only if I like, had been super cognizant about light and I just wanted to, if I had a couple hundred extra bucks laying around and I was just so curious if I wanted to. If I wanted to only do that part of the test and I just wanted to see, hey, can I improve my 24 hour free cortisol?

And there's probably a few ways you can do it as well. For sure there is, and there might even be a cheaper option, but, that's an opportunity for me. So the bottom line for my results was I could still continue to improve my detoxification methylation a little, but where it's at right now is not so bad.

I have the opportunity to get more full spectrum light, especially in the morning, but throughout the day, and I can continue to love on my adrenals. I can also thank my body for being able to produce melatonin for not destroying melatonin. Now blue light does destroy melatonin and more of that at night, Ken.

But right now I'm still producing melatonin, so I'm. Very lucky that way. My husband probably does not so much. He has a little bit of a growth on his penal gland and has had some intermittent sleep stuff since I've met him, but I've never done this test on him. Maybe I should have given this test to him that I had laid down around.

So that's the bottom line for my results. Not huge different things. Continue to love on those adrenals, which is, in my opinion, a lifelong thing. Continue to support that drainage, a lifelong thing. I do not have crazy. I mo most of my estrogen detoxification's going down the most preferential, the best pathway, the two oh H pathway, not down the four oh H pathway.

So that's really good. I don't think I have female cancer history in my family. Nothing comes to mind. I have plenty of cancer history in my family is not female cancer history. Definitely believe that all the drainage detox work is very cancer preventative, supporting that immune system, very cancer, preventative, et cetera.

But this. Particular piece doesn't look like a big stressor. And then the other part is how do these results compare to my symptoms? I already told you about how I was getting those symptoms around menstrual cycle, so I already knew from those symptoms I could give myself some support. And that has improved anyway in the last couple months because I added that support.

So that might be resulting in these better results. Okay, I don't know if that was fun for you or not. I thought it could be a little bit fun if anyone wanted to submit their own testing specifically preferentially functional medicine testing if they wanted me to do a little review on the podcast.

I'll remove any identifying information. If you want to do that, you can sure do that. I'm going to update the form about that. So it'll be I've got this link in the show notes, it's krista bigler.com/questions. If you wanna submit a link to your test results and give me access to that and give me some identifying information if you want.

My 10 years of functional medicine testing cliff notes, that'll be in the show notes as well. And also. The recharge room, it's a new project I'm working on related to helping you be able to show up and improve your stress chemistry through a combination of inner healing work. Somatics a. And thought like renewal of the mind, thought work retraining and rewire in your brain.

So if you have any inkling of interest around that, it's something I'm stepping toward as life work. And so you can get. To that wait list in the show notes. The more people on the wait list, the sooner that will open. And I'm also starting to do, I've been just wanting to pay it forward and give back.

And so I'm doing these little tiny protocols. So if you have specific protocol requests, I'm really considering, after recording this, giving you access to have a whole four, three or four part workshop, like on a deep dive on how to test and interpret your own hormone data. I'm thinking about putting that out there.

If I do have that'll be in the show notes, but if not, there might be a, a really simple tiny little protocol on how to at least order your own hormone tests results. So anyway, if you have protocol requests, I'd love to hear about it in the questions. So you can find all of that in the show notes.

Just navigate out of this section and you should be able to scroll down and find the show notes. And until next week. You have an amazing week and I will see you then. Thank you so much for being here, and I appreciate you.