Welcome to the Overy Club with me, Alisa Viti, your source for women's hormone truth from someone who's been pioneering this conversation for over 25 years. If you want to join the club, here's what you need to know. Your ovaries are a key driver of how you feel, function, and age. They track everything and it's time you start working with them. And no, your body doesn't operate like a man's, so your health strategy shouldn't either. That's why I'm here to help you deal with hormone symptoms naturally, slow hormonal aging, and biohack like a woman. Inside the Overy Club, we do things differently. This is gender-specific science designed to help optimize your health through every decade of life. So if you're ready to join the club, consider this your invitation to start living in sync with your hormones. If you're dealing with PMS, bloating, mood swings, or painful periods, and feel like you've just been told to deal with it, you're not alone. So many women are told their symptoms are normal, even when they're quietly affecting everything. Your energy, your focus, your relationships, and how you show up in your life. But it doesn't have to be that way. At Flow Living, we use cycle syncing and targeted supplements to address the root cause, so you can feel more balanced, more supported, and more like yourself again. You can get 25% off with code
[email protected]. Welcome to the very first episode of the Overy Club. I can't tell you how excited I am. It's been a dream of mine to launch this podcast for a long time, and I'm so appreciative that you've tuned in to listen today. It means everything that you've decided to press play, so thank you for that. My goal with the Overy Club is to give you a space where you can finally understand your body, where we really dig into what it means to be optimized at the time. And that's how we're optimized as a woman through the lens of our hormones and our ovaries without confusion, without shame, without gas lighting, so that you can take back your power in every stage of your life. And this is a podcast for women of every age, so welcome. And there's no better place than what we're going to start with today as our very first conversation on the Overy Club. And that is really answering the question that I've been seeing in my practice. I've been working with women for 25 years now, and I've really been seeing something unusual over the past decade, which is why are women aging hormonally faster than they have been aging chronologically. This is such a foundational issue, and it sets the stage for everything that we're going to be talking about in this podcast. If we don't understand how our hormonal systems are breaking down earlier, which they are for so many women now, we can't really fix the root causes and we can't reclaim this vitality that I so desperately want every woman to experience. So in this first episode, I'm going to unlock and unpack what's really happening, biologically, why it matters for your energy, your mood, your fertility, how you're going to go through parimenopause, the extent to which you're experiencing cycle symptoms in your 20s, and that how this knowledge, how it's going to impact your longevity, and how this knowledge about your aging process is really going to change the way you approach your self-care throughout your entire life. So let's dive in. I've been seeing some alarming statistics. You know, I have pediatrician friends who've been telling me that they have six and a half year old girls coming into their practice, showing up with breast buds. I have women who are under 30 who are having trouble conceiving, and then I see women in my practice who are in their 30s who are experiencing what I'll call, let's say, stage two parimenopause symptoms. So they're having night sweats and hot flashes way too soon. In other words, we're seeing women of every age, whether there are under 10 in their 20s, in their 30s, aging faster from a hormonal perspective, and their hormonal age is not matching their actual chronological age. The difference really chronological age is based on obviously your birth date, what's on your license if you have one, but your hormonal age like your biological age is based on how your ovaries and your hormones are functioning. So, you know, how would we determine that we'd look at your AMH levels, we'd look at your FSH levels, your LH levels, your estrogen, your progesterone. We'd also look at some other inflammatory markers like A1C and C-reactive protein, and that together tells a picture of how well or not well the inputs with your lifestyle have been affecting your hormonal health. So, why is this happening? Why are women aging faster, hormonally now, more than ever? This really is a new phenomenon. Again, I've been in practice for a long time, helping with their hormones, and I've not seen anything like it before. I want to share some new research that will really explain why this is taking place. So, this is actually the most exciting research that's come out in a hundred years of our study on the ovary itself. You know, we've really looked at the ovary in a way, almost like this inert sack of cells. I mean, obviously we know it produces hormones, but we kind of think of it like, okay, it's just the storage facility for our eggs, but it turns out it is an extremely sensitive and active organ in your body. In fact, it's the first organ in the female body to age. And really, it turns out that it's keeping score of everything that you're doing. How do we know this is what the new research was showing? So, the ovary has this ecosystem of cells either previously thought to be useless or not even previously known. I mean, this, this, when this came out a couple of months ago, I got really excited. I mean, you know, given that I have been researching hormones for almost 30 years, something new like this was breathtaking for me. So, what did they discover? Research just found some new specialized immune cells that contribute directly to our rate of ovarian aging. So, this is brand new knowledge. There is a comprehensive now atlas of the ovary that maps the activity of genes in different cell types, including the ones that produce hormones. But here are the structures that I got excited about. So, there's this structure that was previously thought to be to do nothing, but really it actually helps maintain homeostasis in the ovary. It's called the rate a ovary. These are little microtubules. Think of them like antennae. They are picking up the information in all the fluids surrounding the ovaries as to what is happening in the rest of the body. And those rate a ovary are communicating that to the ovary and letting them know how this person who is housing these ovaries is doing in terms of taking care of her hormones. Right. So, basically if you're putting in a ton of processed foods, if you're consuming a lot of sugar, if you've been exposed to a lot of endocrine disruptive chemicals, your ovary actually knows the degree to which that is happening. This is ground breaking because it directly ties your lifestyle choices to the health of your ovary. This can be looked at as bad news, but it's also amazing news because it means whatever you do, if you change it, you can have improvements on the level of the ovary and slow down the rate of ovarian aging. These rate a ovary, they're still looking into them. They may have an endocrine function that is yet to be understood. So, we're just at the beginning of understanding how complex and sensitive this new structure in the ovary is. There's even a new set of glial cells that have been identified in the ovary that are picking up on stress signals. Now, stress can be major lifestyle stress. Stress can be, you know, just that you're skipping meals, you're not sleeping properly any type of stress. Now, we know impacts these glial cells and how they're telling the ovary whether or not your ecosystem, your hormonal ecosystem. Is let's say optimal to ovulate or to be fertile, right? When there's too much stress and too much, let's say inflammation, the rate of air I and these glial cells, they may throttle down your fertility and your ovulation because it's not an optimal time based on all of these inputs that you might be mismanaging. So, this is really important for us to understand as women, your ovaries are not just these little sacks that are housing your eggs. They are the key to our health, not to mention there's a third thing that you should know about. So, ovaries because of all the eggs that are contained there and the follicles contain a previously unknown multitude of mitochondria. These ovarian mitochondria produce a tremendous amount of energy and could directly contribute to your hormonal production. So, hormone levels are going to be impacted by the function and functionality of these mitochondria and those are definitely impacted by diet and lifestyle. So, the rate of air I, the glial cells, the ovarian mitochondria all working as this ovarian ecosystem keeping score as to how well you're managing your dietary and lifestyle inputs.
and how that's going to affect not only your ovarian age, your hormonal age, but this has a direct impact on your longevity. Because, again, the ovaries should not be viewed as just a clock that simply counts down the time until you start menopause. It's a scoreboard, right? If you're doing well with your inputs, the ovaries are going to function for you for longer. Here I am at almost 49. I still ovulate and menstruate regularly. I'm not yet on any HRT. I have no perimenopause symptoms. I'm just here reporting the truth. If and when that changes, I will let you know and we'll talk about how we manage that. But I had to start because of my PCOS journey. I had to start at such a young age, right? It's 19 and 20, making the kinds of lifestyle changes that I teach women to do in my practice and at flow living to do with their diet, with their lifestyle, with cycle syncing, with supplements, with at 35, I eliminated alcohol. I made a lot of key choices and I have been consistent decade over decade. So my ovaries are giving me a scorecard of a biological age from a hormonal perspective that's slightly younger than my chronological age, right? And that's available to all of us. But we do have to start being very intentional. Our ovaries are listening. They're not just sitting there waiting to run out of eggs, right? And they're responding directly to your habits. So why does this matter? What do I want you to think about now? Well, if I could just sum it up in one thought is, I'd really love for you to play the long game when it comes to your ovarian care, right? I don't want you to wait until there's a crisis. I see this far too often in my practice. And wait until they hit the hormonal fan, so to speak, right? They're unable to conceive or they have stayed on the pill for their 20s and 30s and then they go off of it and they feel like they're in hormonal chaos or they're in their early 40s. And they have kind of gone into like a premature ovarian failure, which I see way too often as well. It's not early menopause. It's like we should really be looking at differently now with this new understanding of the ovarian ecosystem. If you're 42 and you're flatlining with estrogen and progesterone and LH's sky high, yes, technically you're now in an advanced menopausal kind of journey. But that is really abnormal to be happening at 42. That's not what we were designed to see, right? From a biological aging perspective. Remember, nature wants to reproduce for as long as possible, which means that you're designed to be fertile for the maximum amount of time. So I've seen women who've been managing their ovarian inputs properly for decades who still menstruate and ovulate and are not on an EHRT at 55, right? So you can still have your period. You can still be functioning normally. This doesn't have to be this aggressive journey, but it is becoming that because we're really getting these inputs wrong at younger and younger ages, right? What you experience for a paramanopausal point of view in your 40s is directly tied to your habits, your eating, from your teens, your 20s and your 30s. I mean, there's just, I want you to think about this. It's a long game and everything is connected and definitely don't wait until there's just a crisis of symptoms that you're now triaging because, yes, triage is good if you have something going on. But what's better now that we understand this new ecosystem of the ovary and how that contributes to hormonal aging is we've got to start thinking about this much, much earlier. So, and of course, this is just one other thing. This is going to impact your longevity, right? Because if the ovaries are the first organ in the body to age, you want to take care of them so that they age more slowly so that this impacts your health span in a positive way, right? Quality of life because as the ovaries stop producing hormones, you don't need me to tell you what you've seen. I'm sure all over other podcasts, women who are specifically talking about menopause, without hormones, a lot of things start to break down in terms of our health, whether it be cognitively or bone density wise or sleep and cardiovascularly. So estrogen, progesterone, these are really beneficial hormones and we want to do everything we can to take care of the organ that is responsible for producing them and that is our ovaries. Okay. So, what does this mean from a timeline perspective? How do we start to think about this in our teens, our 20s, our 30s? What can we be doing? You know, I have an 11 year old daughter and you better believe I have been reverse engineering like her hormonal journey because mine was so crazy. You know, I didn't get my first period until I was almost 16 and some of you who know my story from my first book, Woman Code, you know that I went through a tremendously difficult pubescence. Almost really I was in a perimenopausal pseudo menopausal state. I didn't ovulate. I only menstruated a few times. I was 200 pounds. I was covered face chest and back in cystic acne. I was depressed. I couldn't sleep. I mean, it was a mess. I was I have been very intentional about making sure that my daughter I have two daughters that this one who's the older one is able to go through puberty in a completely different experience than my own. And that started preconception, right? So what did I do a year before? I got pregnant with her. I stopped doing things like mayonnaise and patties because of the endocrine disruptive chemicals in nail polish. I stopped drinking all alcohol, which I have not picked back up. So now we're going on. I don't know. It's like 15 years without any alcohol, right? So making these choices. And then when I was pregnant with her, the things that I was eating, the supplements that I was taking, postpartum and her entire childhood has been one of like eating in a hormonally supportive way blood sugar stabilizing meals, lots of probiotic foods, teaching her how to like evaluate her body's biofeedback. So like looking at her poop, do we need a supplement? Do we need more vegetables? Do we need more water training her to be in a good relationship with her body? Building that foundation is really what childhood and the teens are for. And of course, she could come in here right now and teach you all about the infradient rhythm. And she's excited to get her period when that comes. She's looking like she's right on track for some time in the next year. So I'll be reporting back when that happens. I'm very excited for, of course, I have her whole. Period party planned out. You can imagine that I would. And so that's really what the teens and 20s are for. And I would also say that this is a really important time to stay off of synthetic birth control. If we're going to be thinking about ovarian, health and hormonal aging, we want the first of all this delicate time in puberty where the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland and the ovaries are establishing a conversation amongst themselves to regulate ovulation and start to produce this beautiful regular heartbeat cadence of estrogen production, progesterone production. We do not want to shut that down. That is exactly what synthetic birth control does. It will stop that conversation in the brain and the ovary from happening at all. There are no studies about the long term impact on suppressing this ovarian function and ovarian health long term. So I would like to see more research being done and I think it's really important for young girls to get a good healthy cycle established and self-care habits around their cycle established in their teens and 20s because then you'll build on that for the next couple of decades. If you've ever wanted to ask me your own hormone questions, the ovary club insiders is where you can do that. You'll get access to private episodes where I answer real member questions with clear science-backed guidance you can actually use. So you're not just improving your health, you're helping move the science forward. Join us at the link in the show notes. In the 30s, I would say, this is what I would call like the protection mode decade. You want to protect your fertility in your 30s. You want to really be thinking about stress management. The world will have us just overdoing, overgiving, spreading ourselves too thin and with careers with trying to date with starting families, with starting businesses. And we really can start to get a little crispy around the edges when it comes to stress. And now that we know the ovaries are listening, those glial cells, those frayte ovarian, this is absolutely going to have an impact on your fertility. And fertility, listen, I didn't have my first kid till I was 37. I had my second kid at 44 or 45. I can't remember. 44. And, you know, I get that sometimes there's a need or a situation in which you would have your children later. But you want to prepare yourself for that possibility or need a decade before. You don't want to be trying to optimize your fertility in real time when you're trying to get pregnant. You want to be thinking about that. And why am I so focused on fertility when we're talking about hormonal aging because it's all connected, right? So the degree to which you, let's say, whether or not you're trying to conceive, just do the things that are good for the ovary and good for your fertility in your 30s, it's going to set you up for a beautiful next decade of your 40s, right? Which is what the decade that I'm in. And I'm here to report from the front lines that it can be a completely symptom-free decade, right? Where you can have babies, you can breastfeed, you can lose baby weight, you can have energy, you can have a great sex drive, you can have clear skin.
Yes, I have a little more gray hair than I did before, but aside from that, it can be a pretty easy decade, but that all comes down to what you did in your 30s. So what is the 40s? How would I consider that decade? What do you want to be doing? I would really call that the preparation decade, right? This is where you want to really be doing everything you can to prepare yourself for slowing down perimenopause, right? I'm still in stage one of perimenopause because I'm still cycling regularly and menstruating regularly. And I want to do things like preserve my muscle mass. In fact, I've been building my muscle mass. I've been in a lean build for the past couple of months, so I'm very proud of that. Growing muscle mass and seeing that in a dexascant and seeing how you can actually do things to enhance a longevity from the perspective of metabolic flexibility and muscle growth and all of those things have positive impact on your internal state of inflammation, right? You're reducing inflammation, you're reducing glucose spikes because you're dialing in your diet, you're working on getting your movement every day. You're really being mindful of your circadian clock. All of these things in your 40s really pay big dividends because as the ovaries, even though I'm not experiencing symptoms yet, certainly my ovaries are producing less estrogen, less progesterone, as is normal at this stage of life. And that has an impact on levels of inflammation, on glucose response, and other things that we can offset with changes in our diet and lifestyle. So it's really a preparation phase that new habits that you put in in your 40s will pay dividends after menopause has taken place and you're moving on beyond the menopausal years. So then what do we do once we've crossed that threshold and menopause is your last bleed, of course, and then 12 months later you know your postmenopausal. So this is what I would call the optimization phase, right? You're in a new stage where it's all new systems and habits that are required. You could do a little bit more intermittent fasting. You can really preserve, you know work on cardiovascular health, bone density, muscle preservation, reigned health, like all of these things, different forms of biohacking that are required in this new post-cycle normal, right? So I love for you to be thinking about this. I wanted to break down each decade just so that you can understand again, I want you to play the long game. I want you to think about this for life. You know, if you're born with ovaries, you got to start taking care of them at birth. And that means your mom has to be the one who's helping you from birth to let's say you're in college. But I look at it like it's my job to train my daughters on what that means and how to do it so that when I send them out of my house, which you know, I'm not looking forward to, but when that happens, then they know what to do. They know how to feed themselves. They know how to care for their cycle. They know how to protect their hormonal longevity because that's a gift that pays dividends forever. So what, what can you do? What are some takeaways that you can start doing right now because you may be listening to this and saying, oh my goodness, I'm having so many symptoms. I think I'm aging hormonally faster than my chronological age. Why would you think that? Well, maybe you're having paramanopause symptoms at a young age. I mean, I've heard women at 38 talking about night, sweats, and hot flashes. This is not normal. Okay. Just because it happens to many women does not mean it is normal. It just means that it's common. It's not what your body is designed to do if your hormones are functioning optimally. I'm not a unicorn. I had a whole bunch of hormonal problems at the beginning, and I've learned how to work with my hormones for many decades, and that's why I'm having the experience that I'm having today. That's available to a lot of us. So what can you do if you're stressed to the max, if you're starting to see signs of, you know, infertile your cycles getting shorter, less bleeding days, you know, if you feel inflamed, like you can't lose a certain amount of weight, it's just stuck, you know, there's sort of inflammation there, dysregulated sleep, you're having night wakings. All of this means that it's time for a change with your inputs. Okay. That's when I say inputs, I mean diet, lifestyle. Those are the inputs that we can control. And by the way, according to the research that was done on the epigenome, which is the ghost protein structure that wraps around your DNA, right? This is the most important thing that came out of the human genome project. Diet and lifestyle are the key levers that drive epigenetic switches turning on and off, which means you have so much control over what happens genetically. Your genes are just there, right? But if you manipulate these dietary and lifestyle levers, that's really going to control how those genes express, whether they express positively or negatively, it's really up to you. So what are the basics of protecting our hormonal aging process? It's pretty simple. It's not fancy biohacking. It's just doing the right things for a long period of time. You know, I use this analogy too. Wealth is not money. Wealth is money over time, right? The wealthiest people have money for long periods of time in the bank, right? So health, it's the same thing. It's not just this like one moment where you're optimized. It's that you're healthy over a long period of time. So let's be thinking about these simple levers, but for decades, right? So eliminate unnecessary chemical exposure. I cannot stress enough how EDCs are totally dysregulating your ovarian health. They're listening. They're feeling that inflammation, that stress, and it's causing them to downregulate their function and their hormonal production. So, you know, don't wear perfume. Anything that has the word fragrance, that's an EDC. Swap out all your makeup and hair care products and cleaning products. You know, there's a great company called Credo Beauty that has a great website. You can just kind of put in the makeup that you're currently using and get an equivalent swap. All the stuff there is pretty much EWG certified. You can also go to ewg.org and type in any chemical that you're not sure of and see if it's safe or not. There's even an app. I think it's called Carrot, where you can just take a picture of the product and see how it scores in terms of endocrine disruptive chemical exposure. So be intentional. Make your, you can't control the world outside, you know, what's in the air, what's in the water, but you can make your home environment a sanctuary for your ovaries and for your hormones, right? So make sure, you know, you're just really being intentional about that. Second thing, really regulate sugar exposure. Anytime you have too much sugar exposure in the body, you're going to have a negative impact on your mitochondrial health. Your mitochondria use oxygen. They do use glucose, but when there's too much glucose, it actually negatively impacts their ability to go through this whole redox process and it ends up making your, you're, you less energized. So really minimize that, but also sugar and glucose consumption directly impacts one of the master regulating hormones in slim. So if we have lots of wild swings during the day of too much sugar highs and then sugar crashes, you're going to start recruiting lots of cortisol. You're going to start storing more fat. You're going to start having more inflammation in the body. You're going to downregulate the production of progesterone and you're going to be sending signals to the ovaries that this is not an optimized ecosystem. This is putting stress on the ovaries. We might not be ovulating regularly. You may be throttling down your fertility and you may be, may be entering parimenopause earlier than you would want. So sugar consumption is something you need to manage. Okay. Third, minimize stress. What does that mean? I'm not talking about you have a deadline at work and, you know, all of that. I'm talking about dehydration, which I wrote about in one of my newsletters. It's hugely stressful on the body, right? You got to get a couple of liters of water in a day. I'm talking about sleep hygiene. So are you doom scrolling on social media at night and you're looking at the blue light on your phone. If you're, if you're doing that at night after about eight o'clock, you prevent your body from making a hormone called melatonin, which is directly important for ovulation purposes and has a direct impact on this rate of ovarian aging. So you've got to really do things that reduce unnecessary internal stress that are sending the wrong signals to the ovaries. Okay. So things like that and skipping meals. This is another big thing that happens to women, especially young women in their twenties who are thinking about weight loss or whatever extreme dieting extreme exercise. If you're skipping meals, skipping breakfast, going too long between meals, exercising at these classes for, you know, like spin classes and hit classes and boot camp classes for an hour. We're putting too much stress on our bodies. We don't need to do as much because our systems are so efficient. I'll do a whole another episode on workouts for sure. The fourth thing that you can do, again, playing a long game is when you have a cycle, you need to be cycle syncing. In fact, we just concluded our first ever IRB approved clinical trial on the cycle syncing method. And I will be doing a whole episode on that. But just so that you know, it has now been clinically shown to absolutely, is 92% of the participants had a major reduction in both this PMS symptom number of symptoms and the severity of those symptoms. So we know that syncing your diet, your exercise and your lifestyle with your cycle phases really supports our hormonal ecosystem and could potentially have this beneficial impact on our ovarian rate of aging. And I would say the last thing would just be protect that circadian.
Canadian rhythm too, make sure you're having consistent, weak, and sleep times because there's nothing like that interaction between our circadian clock and our infranian clock and our hormones. It's so important. In fact, scientists in Israel just discovered the link between our circadian rhythm and the production of our sex hormones. So we really do want to protect that. So make sure you're really thinking about light exposure in the morning and light exposure at night, really protecting it. So again, it's not that it's complicated. It's just that you have to be consistent for decades, right? Don't wait till there's a problem. Think about how you are now the guardian of your ovaries and their health and that your job is to give them inputs so that they are picking up the right signals that you are not inflamed, not stressed, full of nutrients to help them do their job. And they will respond in kind by giving you us like a report card that saying like you're doing great, we're going to keep doing our job. You enjoy your life symptom-free, get pregnant when you want, slow down, hormonal aging, go through parimenopause later. That's what they can do for you. We have to move away from like this broken system of of waiting until there's a crisis. I think, you know, if I had any message and when I think about my work over the past almost 30 years, it's really about becoming very proactive about our hormonal health. That is the thing that I always want you to be thinking about. And taking care of your hormones every day is your gift. It is your opportunity. It is something that you are responsible for. It's not a burden. It's not a curse. It's like a pleasure to be able to do that. And, you know, let me just bring this all together with a quick recap of why I think women are aging, hormonally, faster than chronologically and what that really means for you. Women are experiencing hormonal decline faster than I've seen before. Years before their chronological age would suggest. And this is why you're seeing your symptoms show up earlier and earlier and you might see them in your daughters, your daughters, friends, your teens. You might see them with your own friends depending on what age you're at. Again, second part of the recap is stress, poor lifestyle alignment with the infradian rhythm, with the circadian rhythm, environmental toxins, blood sugar mismanagement. These are some of the biggest drivers of accelerated hormonal aging. So you really want to become aware and intentional of what you are doing with that. How your ovaries are functioning impacts every aspect of your hormonal journey, whether that's in your teens, how you experience puberty, your 20s, you know, how bad your PMS is, your 30s, how fertile you are, your 40s, how you're going to go through paramedics and how you are going to experience aging postmenopausally. So this has impacts beyond just the ovary itself. And finally, the solution really starts with awareness with pulling the right levers consistently over time with cycle syncing and fundamentally just living in alignment with our unique biology and biochemistry as women. Don't try to squeeze yourself into a pattern that's male oriented. You have a whole ecosystem and ovarian ecosystem, a hormonal ecosystem that is totally distinct and requires a distinct way of living. And so we've just got to take that on ourselves. So that's it for episode one of the ovary club. I hope this gave you some clarity on what it really means to age hormonally and why so many women are struggling with symptoms, why you might be struggling with symptoms, why taking care of our hormonal health from a young age matters so much for your energy, for your mood, for your fertility and for your long term health. This conversation is really foundational for everything we're going to be exploring on this podcast. If you found this episode valuable, please hit follow on Apple podcast or Spotify. So you never miss an episode. And if you're feeling generous, I would love it. If you left a review, it helps other women find the show and start reclaiming their hormonal health as well. Thank you so much for being here at the very beginning of the ovary club. I can't wait to keep building this conversation with you and show you how powerful it can be to live fully in the flow and in alignment with your hormones.
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