personal trainers, this is how keto impacts your female cyclical clients
In this lesson on hormones for personal trainers, we’re going to dive into how the keto diet affects your client’s hormones. We’ll dig into how the keto diet can impair hormone function starting with the brain. Then we’ll dig into 3 nutrient deficiencies that are common with the keto diet and how a deficiency in those micro-nutrients affect overall hormone balance.
My name is Omega, I’m the founder of the Confident Menstrual Cycle Coaching Academy where I empower female personal trainers to balance & optimize their hormones while gaining the confidence to do the same for their clients.
This is one of my students who says that having access to a legitimate certification course has been invaluable! If you also want to help your clients balance and optimize their hormones so they can be more in tune with their bodies…apply to be one of my students in the Confident Menstrual Cycle Coach Academy.
There has been a lot of research on the impact of a keto diet on men, post-menopausal women, obese people and people with PCOS. And there’s been research comparing the keto diet to other diets. But there isn’t too many published scholarly papers about how the keto diet impacts the menstrual cycle or even fertility in healthy women.
When we talk about female hormones and diet, we have to take these two hormones into account:
Leptin & Cortisol. Leptin tells us that we’re full while elevated cortisol beyond normal tells us that we are not safe. There is a connection between those two hormones and fertility. Leptin directly impacts the first step of your fertility. Low leptin from a low carbohydrate diet negatively impacts fertility by disrupting gonado-tropin releasing hormone (GnRh) in the brain.
This article described the leptin to GnRH beautifully - Leptin Regulation of Gonadotrope Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone Receptors As a Metabolic Checkpoint and Gateway to Reproductive Competence.
Our brain, is a checkpoint and a gateway to reproduction. If your client is of the reproductive age, her period / natural cycle is actually a sign of health. When she diets, particularly on the keto diet, her body isn’t healthy enough to reproduce. And this is really an evolutionary thing too - when our ancestors were hungry and didn’t have enough food to trigger leptin, their body would shut down reproduction because there wasn’t enough food for her or her baby.
In this scientific review, Author Udaya’s research showed that a carbohydrate deficient diet can lead to period loss. Now we’ll discuss how cortisol plays a role in the keto diet and your female clients…Enter the HPA axis - the hypothalamic pituitary axis goes from our brain to our uterus. That’s how our brain communicates with our ovaries to tell us to ovulate or turn off ovulation. GnRh comes out of the H, the hypothalamus of the HPA axis. Cortisol is produced near the bottom of that axis, the adrenals and endocrine glands on top of our kidneys.
When we are on any diet and have a desire for a food that is “outside of our food restrictions” the body produces cortisol. And Stacey Sims says in her book “ROAR” on female fitness physiology, cites a study showing that women on diets produce enough cortisol to actually make them gain weight. Cortisol also impacts hormones and if we have too much cortisol, it could also shut down our menstrual cycle! The main take-aways I want you to use to help educate your clients is:
1. The keto diet down regulates the first step in the reproductive cycle.
2. The cortisol produced by dieting is enough to make us gain weight.
Now let’s review 3 micronutrients that are often deficient that the keto diet and how deficiencies in these can impair your client’s menstrual cycle. We’ll be using this study.
#1. Potassium:
Potassium is the most predominant mineral within our cells. It is essential for your client’s:
Water balance
Kidney & adrenal function
Acid-base balance
Muscle and nerve cell function
Heart function
Potassium is frequently low in the keto diet because potassium is higher in fruits and veggies - both in the carb category which needs to be reduced in a keto diet. For menstruating people, potassium is important as a pre-period food to help control water-balance. Without potassium, we can actually retain more water. And if you’d like to watch a follow up video on that, you can find this video in the comments below after you complete this one.
#2. Magnesium
Magnesium is a micro-nutrient that governs hundreds of cell functions in the body, next to potassium it is the most predominant mineral within the cell. Similar to potassium, high concentrations of magnesium primarily comes from plant sources, which…carb…duh. Magnesium is incredibility important when talk about female hormone health because a lack of it can result in more intense PMS mood-related symptoms.
#3. Folate
Folate is another very important micronutrient for hormone balance. To me, it’s one of the most important, because folate is crucial for the detoxification of estrogen, which happens monthly for biologically female people. If we don’t have enough nutrition to detoxify estrogen, then we might have more PMS symptoms like cramps, mood changes, loose stool and headaches. Here is a video on how to reduce those PMS symptoms that I’ll link to in the description for you to watch later. Folate / Folic acid is derived from that latin word “folium”, which means foliage…which implies that folate comes from leafy greens!