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Today’s episode is a special one; we’re diving into all YOUR burning questions in our second endo Q&A session!
A huge thank you to everyone who submitted questions. Please keep them coming!
In This Episode:
-Understanding Dietary Restrictions: Explore why long-term super-restrictive diets aren’t just hard to maintain—they might also be robbing you of essential nutrients.
-Plant-Based Diets for Endo: We’ll go through the ups and downs of a plant-based diet for endo, and learn from my personal vegetarian journey and the pitfalls I faced.
-Supplements for Inflammation: Discover the role of proteolytic enzymes, such as serrapeptase, in managing endometriosis inflammation and pain.
-Castor Oil Packs for Endo: I’ll share my experience with castor oil packs—how to use them, their benefits, and where to find them (don’t miss the discount code for Queen of Thrones!).
-Hysterectomy and Endo: We’ll discuss why hysterectomy isn’t a one-stop solution for endometriosis and why diet remains crucial even after the surgery.
-Food Sensitivities and Elimination Diets: Strategies for identifying what foods work for you and the cautions against overly restrictive elimination diets.
-Balanced Blood Sugar: Explore why balanced blood sugar is important for hormone balance. Learn practical tips for keeping yours in balance.
There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to managing endometriosis, but every single question asked illuminates another piece of this vast puzzle.
Keep your questions coming and connect with us on Instagram @endobellygirl
Resources:
Ep. 1: Top 5 Things You Need to Know About Nutrition for Endometriosis
Ep. 3: What is Functional Nutrition and How Does It Help With Endo?
Ep. 13: What is a Root Cause Approach for Endometriosis?
Queen of Thrones Castor Oil Packs (use code ENDOBELLYGIRL for 10% off your order of $59 or more)
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Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only. This may not be the best fit for you and your personal situation. It shall not be construed as medical advice. The information and education provided here is not intended or implied to supplement or replace professional medical treatment, advice, and/or diagnosis. Always check with your own physician or medical professional before trying or implementing any information read here.
Full episode transcription:
Endo Q&A:
Hello and welcome back to the Endo Belly Girl Podcast. I have another endo Q&A episode for you all today because I have been receiving some listener questions that you all have, and so I have been slowly compiling those. And today I’m going to dig in and answer some of these questions because I’m sure if one person has a question that probably 20, 30, 50 other people have the same question. So I find these endo Q&A episodes to be super helpful. I’ve heard feedback that others of you do as well. If you ever have a question that you would like to submit, just find me on Instagram @endobellygirl. Send me a DM and you can submit a question, and I’m more than happy to include it in my next endo Q&A episode. Or if it’s a really great question that I have a lot to say about, sometimes I’ll end up just doing a full episode only on that topic, so that can really give you an in depth answer.
What foods am I actually supposed to be eating?
All right, well, I have a few questions to get through today, so let’s go ahead and dig in. First question I have today is what Foods am I actually supposed to be eating? There is so much information about foods to avoid, which I have to agree with that there’s so much information out there about foods that you should be avoiding. You shouldn’t eat gluten. You shouldn’t eat dairy. You shouldn’t have eggs. You shouldn’t have sugar. You shouldn’t have meat. There’s so much advice out there, and the biggest thing that I have to say about all of that is that it’s all bio individual.
There is not a one size fits all answer of what you should be eating for endometriosis. Because even though you may have the same or similar symptoms and have the same disease going on in your body, it doesn’t mean that you’re the same person. And each individual person has individual needs. There might be certain nutrients that you need more of or less of. There might be certain food intolerances that you have that somebody else doesn’t have. And that’s where trying to follow a game plan that somebody else did, that maybe you read about online somewhere or in a book or through a Facebook group or wherever you heard about this particular diet. That’s why it may not work for you, because you’re not them. You’re not the same person.
So I did record a couple of full episodes just on nutrition for endometriosis. I had episode one, which was the top five things you need to know about nutrition for endometriosis and I also had episode two, which was, what is the best diet for endometriosis? So I am going to link to both of those episodes in the show notes. So if you want a super in depth answer to this question, you can refer back to those. But just to go through the very basics of that today, to kind of give you a rundown of where to even begin with what to actually eat. For endometriosis, the basic principle is that you just want to eat real food, just eat whole food. If it is a fruit or a vegetable or a whole food form of protein, it’s probably going to be okay. With the caveat of, again, we do all have unique food sensitivities, so there may be certain foods, even within those healthy categories that don’t work for you. And that’s something that you can certainly fine tune along the way.
I mean, that’s something that I work on with my clients every single day. I like to use a food sensitivity test, a blood test in particular, because those over the counter saliva tests just don’t catch all of the types of immune reactions that happen in your body. Whereas a blood test, like the MRT test that I do, actually can test various types of immune reactions, which is important, but also a whole other topic, maybe for another day. But if that’s not something that you’re able to do right now, even just starting with, okay, I’m only going to eat whole food, real food, or at least 80% to 90% of the time. So that means you’re avoiding processed foods. Anything that comes in a package of any kind, a bag or a box that has an ingredients label, that’s not going to be a whole food. And yes, there are healthier versions of that. I eat some of the healthier processed foods myself.
Like, there are some bars that I like that are made of only whole foods, ingredients that seem to do okay, there’s certain things like that. I look for that on the label. If you’re going to eat a processed food, look at the ingredients list and just see if you recognize them all. Are they real foods? Because more and more, I feel like there’s starting to be some food companies out there that are making some good products, but still, eating whole food is going to be your best bet, right? If it’s a choice between eating broccoli or eating that bar that I was talking about, broccoli is probably still going to be the better choice for my body. But it’s all a give and take, because sometimes I am not at home to sit there and cook up some broccoli and eat it. So anyway, avoiding processed foods most of the time. And when you are eating processed foods, the healthier versions of that. And processed foods, by the way, does also include things like processed meat.
So pepperoni and salami and a lot of sausages and things like that are very processed. Even most bacon. There are types of uncured bacon that have no sugar, no nitrites, no nitrates added. But there is also a lot of bacon out there that is highly processed, cured, full of sugar. Yes, they do add sugar to bacon. I know it’s crazy, but they do it something to be aware of. Okay. In addition to processed foods, the other foods that you definitely want to avoid as much as is humanly possible are vegetable oils.
Yeah, I know vegetable oils are everywhere. Again, go back to the processed foods, which this is a large part of why we try to avoid those, because they are full of vegetable oils and refined sugars, which are my next thing on the list. And so just avoiding most processed foods can help you reduce this dramatically. And then just don’t use vegetable oils when you’re cooking. If you have any canola oil or corn oil or soybean oil, anything like that at home, just throw it in the trash right now. Today, stop using that, especially if you’re heating it. You never want to heat those types of oils. They become highly unstable and can really lead to a lot of inflammation in your body, which we don’t need.
So avoid those vegetable oils. That does include even the quote unquote healthier vegetable oils, like sunflower and safflower oil, but definitely any of the vegetable oils. Canola oil. Oh, that’s one of the worst ones. Soybean oil. There’s so many that are in all of the processed foods. It’s crazy. And then, like I mentioned, refined sugars.
Those are everywhere. Once upon a time, humans ate very tiny amounts of sugar because it was just very hard to come by. Sugar was very expensive and rare. And nowadays, sugar is ridiculously common. It’s everywhere. In fact, it’s actually very challenging to avoid, because, like I said, it’s in bacon, for goodness sakes. It’s in ketchup, it’s in salad dressing. Again, pretty much in any processed packaged food that you can find, at least from the conventional side, likely has some sort of refined sugars in it.
Something to be aware of, something to be careful of. Definitely high on your list of foods to avoid as much as possible, because, again, it can contribute to that inflammation in your body that we’re trying to reduce. And then as far as individual foods, definitely gluten and dairy are high on the list as far as foods that can be irritating to people. But again, that doesn’t mean that it’s everybody. It doesn’t mean that every single person with endometriosis should avoid gluten and dairy. I do find that a high percentage of people end up having to avoid those foods. So if you haven’t before, it might be worth testing it out. Maybe remove gluten and dairy from your diet for, say, 30 days, and then you can try reintroducing and see how your body feels.
Because that can give you a better gauge than just how you feel on a day to day basis right now. But it is individual. It’s different for everybody, every other food. Guess what? It’s all individual. So there are ways that you can kind of pinpoint what your body might be sensitive to. Like agaiN, doing that MRT food sensitivity test that I talked about, or if you don’t have access to that, that’s not a possibility for you right now. You can also do some sort of an elimination diet, like the paleo AIP diet, for example, temporarily, and I can’t stress this enough, if you’re going to do a super restrictive elimination diet, it should be short term, 30 days tops, that you’re doing an elimination diet like that. And then you have to go back in and start to reintroduce foods to see what your body’s actually reacting to.
If you’re doing a super restrictive diet of any kind long term, it can actually end up leading to more health issues, nutrient deficiencies. It can make you feel worse in the long term. And that’s where I think people run into trouble, because they try a diet, they feel better, and then, okay, I’m just going to keep doing that then. And then next thing you know, over time, they feel worse and just don’t know what’s going on. Because they used to feel really good on that diet. Well, that’s why. Because you’ve been on it too long, you’ve developed food sensitivities. Maybe you’re not getting enough of certain nutrients, like protein, for example.
So now your body has kind of shut down the process of digesting protein because you’re not really eating much anyway. There’s all kinds of things that can go on, and that’s why those type of diets have to be temporary. And I also recommend at the same time, doing some gut healing work so that you are kind of healing and sealing your gut so you don’t continue to develop food sensitivities over time. Okay, I feel like that was a lot of information, but if you want even more than that, go back to episode one and two and those really dive deep into that topic.
Endo Q&A: I am vegan and gluten free. What else should I cut out of my diet to keep my flare up from getting worse?
All right, question number two. I am vegan and gluten free. What else should I cut out of my diet to keep my flare up from getting worse? Now, I totally get this question because I used to be in the same boat where I would just try cutting out more and more and more things and just think, oh, maybe this next food is my trigger and I’ll feel better after I cut that out. But I am here to challenge that question a little bit and say, what about what you’re including rather than what you’re removing from your diet? We tend to focus more on what foods we need to avoid, what things we need to take out of our diet.
And we just talked about this a lot in the last question, so I won’t dig too deeply into that again. But what are you actually eating? What are you consuming? Because that may be more important for you, especially if you’ve had a super restrictive diet and you might have some of those nutrient deficiencies and things that we talked about. And sometimes when we’re overly restricting our diet, it can leave you feeling worse. It can leave you developing food fears where you’re afraid to eat anything. Right? Sometimes even as far as disordered eating in severe cases. And that’s not a road that we want to go down. Now, when it comes to gluten free, is something that I find that a lot of people with endometriosis do well being gluten free. So if you feel good on that, I would say, great, keep doing it.
The vegan part, I have to say I’m going to challenge that a little bit. Now, I used to be a vegetarian myself. I never went full vegan, but I was pure vegetarian for about six years of my life, going from age 16 to about 22 years old. And of course, everybody’s different, so I’m not saying that this is going to be the case for everybody, although I have heard a lot of similar stories. But my health went really downhill when I was vegetarian. I had no energy. I was hungry all the time. I was hangry all the time.
I was struggling to keep on weight. I started to develop endometriosis, although that may have started even a little earlier than that. Who knows? Although I didn’t have symptoms prior to that. Now, I’m not saying that not eating meat was the cause of all of that, especially the endometriosis symptoms themselves. But it is very challenging to get enough nutrients when you’re on a very restrictive diet like that. We talked about restrictive diets in the sense of cutting out foods just in general, foods that you think you might be sensitive to. But being vegan or vegetarian does involve cutting out a lot of foods. It’s a very restrictive diet.
And the thing that so many people don’t talk about is that there are a lot of health benefits to eating animal protein. If you’re not comfortable eating meat, if that is just something that you will never do, will never touch, or you have certain ethical or religious reasons behind not eating meat, I understand, trust me. I went into being a vegetarian in the first place for animal rights reasons as well as some health reasons, but it was more on the animal rights side of things. So I completely get it. But there’s also a very untalked about side of that story where eating plant based foods, purely plant based foods, actually creates a bit of an imbalance in our global ecosystem as well. There’s a book about this actually called the Sacred Cow, which I will link to in the show notes by Diana Rogers and Rob Wolfe. It’s a really great read if you’re interested in understanding the benefits of meat, because trust me, it’s something that took a long time for me to come around to actually come back into eating. Initially I just came back to eating fish and chicken, and later on ended up adding in red meat.
I now eat all the things, and honestly, I feel a lot better doing that now. I’m not telling you that you have to do that, of course, it’s your body, it’s your choice on what you want to do. But I would be aware of, a being overly restrictive in your diet, B are you actually getting enough protein? And it’s not just about the number of grams of protein in the plant sources that you’re eating, but how bioavailable they are and how well your body may actually be able to absorb it. And that’s the piece that a lot of people miss as well. And also the fact that most plant proteins are not complete proteins. They have some of the amino acids, but not all, whereas animal protein has complete protein in it. So if you’re going to be completely plant based, you actually have to be working on combining plant sources of protein so that you are basically creating a complete protein. By combining this plant with this plant, it gets very complicated and it’s just something to be aware of.
So I’ll link to that book in the show notes if you’d like to check that out and kind of see the other side of the story as to why plant based might not be the best thing for our bodies and also the health of, believe it or not, animals and the planet. I know some of you are going to fight me on this, but I do believe in this at this point in time, and I think it’s just good to see it from all angles. Even if you do make the choice to continue being vegan or vegetarian, I think it’s good to at least have an understanding of what you’re going into and what impacts it might have in the long run. So that’s my spiel on that. Those are my thoughts on vegan vegetarian diets, so I hope that helps.
How effective are proteolytic enzymes like serrapeptase for pain?
All right, next question. How effective are proteolytic enzymes like seraptase for pain? This is a great question, and it’s certainly something that’s talked about a lot in the world of endometriosis. Proteolytic enzymes, and seraptase in particular is the one that is often talked about.
Now, what do these enzymes actually do? What they do is they help to break down protein in your body, which doesn’t mean just dietary protein, that can also include proteins that are created in the inflammatory process in your body. So yes, these enzymes can help to reduce inflammation, which can help to reduce pain, because pain is a symptom of inflammation. So really, when we’re talking about reducing pain, we’re talking about reducing inflammation. And proteolytic enzymes have been shown to do that. Now this is another one of those things where proteolytic enzymes can be helpful. Absolutely. But I also wouldn’t recommend just completely leaning on those. And this goes for anything, by the way.
There’s never going to be just one supplement that will cure your endometriosis. Just take this and that’s all you need to do. I believe that’s a little bit of everything. And again, also that each body is unique and bio individual. So it is absolutely true that some people might find more relief from taking these enzymes than other people would. And that’s just life. That’s bio individuality right there. So it can be helpful.
I wouldn’t recommend completely leaning on those, but it can be something that can be helpful to try out alongside a well rounded, balanced healing protocol. So working on the nutrition piece and dialing in your supplement strategy as a whole and looking at your gut health and your blood sugar regulation and all the other things that I tend to work on with my clients in my practice to actually get to the root cause of what is causing inflammation in the first place, rather than addressing the inflammation that’s already there. So in other words, we’re addressing it from the root rather than simply addressing the symptoms and even inflammation. Guess what? It’s a symptom. We have to figure out what’s causing it so we can remove the stressors that are causing inflammation in the first place. I did an episode on this actually recently as well, on taking that root cause approach, episode 13, and I will also link to that one in the show notes.
Endo Q&A: I have PCOS as well as endometriosis. Is there anything I can do with diet to help me manage blood sugar?
Okay, next question. Here I have PCOS as well as endometriosis.
Is there anything I can do with diet to help me manage blood sugar? Yes. Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar, because this is a podcast primarily about endometriosis, but there can certainly be crossover where people have both PCOS and endometriosis. So PCOS is polycystic ovarian syndrome, and I’m not going to go into the full details of what PCOS is today. We’ll do an episode on that coming up in the future, because there is some crossover. But at its root, PCOS is a metabolic disease first and foremost. So managing blood sugar can absolutely have huge impacts on your overall health. And diet is a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to blood sugar management. Now, why does this matter? Because when we think of PCOS, or at least for me, when I first heard of PCOS, what I initially thought of was the polycystic ovaries, meaning, basically, your ovaries are developing multiple follicles at one time, rather than developing just one primary follicle for ovulation.
But primarily, PCOS is in excess in androgen hormones like testosterone. And that can cause females to present with some male like symptoms, like growing facial hair and losing their hair on their head, male pattern baldness, it can lead to acne, is another common symptom and just very irregular or very long menstrual cycles. So what in the world does that have to do with your metabolic health and blood sugar? Well, this is another one of those things that I could definitely do a whole episode just on this, and I’m sure I will in the future. But basically, you can’t effectively balance your sex hormones, like testosterone and estrogen and progesterone, without balancing your blood sugar. So that’s going to be true both with the elevated androgens that come with PCOS or the estrogen dominance that is very common with endometriosis, you can’t balance those hormones without addressing blood sugar because blood sugar actually has a very close connection. It’s very intertwined with your hormone health. Nothing really works independently in your body. Everything’s connected, everything is linked together.
So when blood sugar is dysregulated, which means it’s going up too high and down too low, and it’s not staying within that sweet spot, which can happen because we’re maybe over consuming sugars and starches or we’re not spacing out our meals correctly. We’ll talk about all of that in a moment. Your organs that handle blood sugar, which includes your pancreas, your adrenals, and your liver, can become stressed. And when those organs become stressed, it absolutely impacts your hormones because your liver, for example, helps to detoxify the extra hormones in your body. So if your liver is stressed because it’s constantly having to help out with these blood sugar emergencies, it may not be as capable of, say, eliminating excess estrogen from your body or excess androgens from your body. And then when we have an overload of hormones in our body, well, that becomes a problem. Sex hormones are also tightly linked with insulin sensitivity and insulin resistance, which is becoming more and more of a concern these days. I mean, the number of people with diabetes has just shot out the roof, or even prediabetic blood sugar levels are getting quite high.
And insulin sensitivity basically refers to your cell’s ability to take in insulin and be able to regulate blood sugar along the way. And that can become a problem if your cells are no longer responding to insulin when they are signaled. And your sex hormones are very tightly linked with that, because basically everything from your blood sugar regulation, your adrenal function, like cortisol and your sex hormones, it all links back to your brain. It all has feedback loops from your body back to your brain. And when things are out of balance, it ends up impacting the other systems as well. So balancing your blood sugar through diet and other way, other means of balancing your blood sugar can definitely have a huge impact on both your blood sugar itself as well as your sex hormones. So how do you balance your blood sugar just through diet alone? There’s a lot that you can do. Number one, you want to eat three balanced meals per day, breakfast, lunch, dinner.
And by balanced, I mean having a good amount of protein, fat and carbs as well, in the form of whole fruits and vegetables, more even on the vegetable side of things, but definitely having plenty of protein and fat because that helps to keep your blood sugar stable. One of the cardinal rules that I follow when it comes to blood sugar management is no naked carbs, meaning don’t eat carbs without also consuming protein and or fat. Because carbs, even if they are the best quality carbs that you could possibly put into your body. Again, maybe you’re eating that piece of broccoli, much less if you’re eating something like a banana or a piece of bread, something like that. It can really spike your blood sugar because basically those carbohydrates break down to simple sugars in your body and it ends up spiking your blood sugar. However, when you are combining carbs with protein and fat, it actually helps to balance out your blood sugar so you don’t have so much of a spike. Super interesting stuff. There’s actually an account on Instagram you can look at or website or I believe she even has a book these days, glucose goddess.
And she has some great information on that. I actually follow her Instagram account and she uses a continuous glucose monitor to kind of check on her blood sugar throughout the day. And she’ll show the difference between if you are eating these foods together compared to just eating this by itself, or if you eat this food before that food and the difference in the blood sugar levels. It’s super interesting. So if you want a visual on what that looks like, I will link that in the show notes as well. A couple of other little rules to live by when it comes to keeping your blood sugar balanced is to avoid drinking coffee and other caffeine packed stimulants like that on an empty stomach. Not saying you can’t drink coffee. Coffee actually can have a lot of benefits.
Some people don’t handle the caffeine super well. Like, I know I don’t do super well with a lot of caffeine, so I am not a coffee drinker myself. But if you are going to drink coffee, just don’t do it on an empty stomach. Have a meal. Have breakfast before you have your coffee, eat something with protein before you have your coffee, and that can help to keep your blood sugar much more stable. And then my other recommendation is just to space your meals well, meaning you don’t want to have your meal super close together, but you also want to go too long without having a meal. So I actually don’t recommend hardcore intermittent fasting between meals because going too long can actually have negative impacts on your blood sugar. Intermittent fasting can have wonderful benefits for certain reasons for certain people.
It’s actually been shown, though, that men do better on intermittent fasting than women. Again, I could talk about this all day, but I’ll try to keep this as succinct as possible here. But you do want to ideally have about four to 5 hours between meals, and I’m talking between breakfast and lunch. Lunch and dinner. Of course, overnight, it’s going to be longer than that. Typically, the recommended window is about 12 hours overnight, so it’s still a fast overnight. But when you think about it, if you ate dinner at, say, 06:00 p.m. 12 hours later is 06:00 a.m..
Right. And even if you eat a little snack after dinner or something, even if you’re done eating by 08:00 p.m. Then you can get up and have breakfast the next morning at 08:00 a.m.. Great, you’re good to go. So that’s really it. Well, that’s it for now, anyway. When it comes to managing your blood sugar, again, more likely than not, I’ll do a full episode on Blood sugar and its impacts on hormones and endometriosis and even PCOS and things like that coming up very soon. All right, next question for today.
Are castor oil packs helpful for endometriosis? How do you use them?
Are castor oil packs helpful for endometriosis? How do you use them? Great question. The answer is yes. Castor Oil packs absolutely help with endometriosis. They’ve been shown to help support circulation, inflammation, detoxification, wonderful impacts. They promote hormone health, they promote liver function, which, like we talked about, the liver helps to eliminate excess hormones in your body. They help to promote healthy bowel movements and digestive health. So, yes, I definitely do recommend, I actually do castor oil packs myself once or twice a week, and I have found it to be beneficial for my body. If you’ve never heard of this before, basically a castor oil pack, you’re using castor oil, which is a very thick oil, and rubbing that onto your belly, and then you place a pack over top of that, which you can certainly make those at home.
Or there are types of castor oil packs that kind of come all ready to go that you can order, and typically you apply heat along with that and allow that to kind of soak in through your skin. Your skin is very absorbent. Now, exactly how to use that, I feel like is a little bit challenging to describe over a podcast because you can’t see me at the moment. But what I am going to do is refer you to a company that I really am a big fan of called Queen of Thrones. They are an amazing company, and they have Castor Oil packs that you can purchase that are awesome. Of course you can buy the Castor oil. You can buy the full pack. I recommend just getting yourself a Castor oil pack that’s reusable.
They actually just came out with a new roll on version of Castor Oil, which I saw that and I was like, well, that’s genius. Then you don’t get that gooey gunky oil all over your hands and it can certainly be less messy. I haven’t tried it yet, but I plan on it soon. And I actually have a code for you all that I can share that will get you 10% off your order with Queen of Thrones. So if you go to shop queenofthrones.com EndobellyGirl and use code EnDOBelLyGirl at checkout, you can get 10% off your order of $59 or more. So I will also link that in the show notes so that you can find that and try out Castor Oil packs for yourself. They do also have a lot of educational videos on their website, which was why I was going to talk about it in the first place, so that you can kind of see what it’s all about. They have some videos on YouTube as well, so you can get a tutorial on how to actually use the Castor oil pack.
But absolutely, they have huge benefits for endometriosis. The one caveat that I often hear is to not use them while you’re on your period. I’ve heard a little bit of conflicting advice on this, but I have found for myself that I’m generally just a little too sensitive during my period anyway. So I typically do it throughout the rest of my cycle and just Skip it when I’m on my period. Again, I know different people have different opinions on that, but that’s what I have heard.
Endo Q&A: If I am having a hysterectomy do I still need to follow the endometriosis diet?
Okay, and our last question for today, if I am having a hysterectomy, do I still need to follow the endometriosis diet? Okay, I have a few thoughts to unpack on this one. For starters, I can’t decide, of course, if a hysterectomy is right for you or not. But I do feel like it’s important to make an informed decision on this because a hysterectomy is a big deal.
You are removing at least one organ, if not multiple organs, from your body. If you’re removing your. So hysterectomy is when you’re removing your uterus from your body, that would be a partial hysterectomy. If you’re doing a full hysterectomy that means you’re removing your uterus as well as your ovaries, and that’s a big deal. I’m not saying do it or don’t do it, because again, every situation is unique. But it is important to know that a hysterectomy does not resolve endometriosis. It may seem like it because oftentimes one of the primary symptoms of endometriosis is period pain. So if you don’t have a uterus, you are not going to have a period anymore.
But it doesn’t actually get rid of the endometriosis itself, nor does it prevent the endometriosis from continuing to progress, even if you don’t have ovaries that are producing the hormones anymore. Now, hysterectomy can resolve adenomyosis, which is a similar condition to endometriosis, except for that the endometrial like tissue is growing within the wall of your uterus rather than outside of your uterus. And it is very common for people to have both. If adenomyiosis is a concern, and maybe even your primary concern, then a hysterectomy can resolve that. But if you don’t have adenomyosis and endometriosis is really the primary concern, I think it’s just important to know that hysterectomy will not completely resolve your endometriosis. Now, if you’re having excision surgery at the same time as the hysterectomy, that may be more helpful. I am not a surgical expert, so I certainly can’t or definitely won’t tell you what to do from a surgical perspective. But I do want to share this information with you, so at least you can go into it with your doctor, making an informed decision.
Now, coming back to the question at hand, which was, do I still need to follow the Endo diet if I have a hysterectomy? The answer is yes. But number one, refer back to the earlier questions about what that actually means, because I hear a lot of people refer to the Endo diet as if it’s one thing and it’s not. There is not one Endo diet that everybody should follow. So I come back to that bio individuality piece again, but also, just a surgery of any kind doesn’t address the root cause of what was causing that disease to progress in the first place, what’s contributing to that inflammation? What’s stressing out your body? Again, go back to Episode 13 that I’m linking in the show notes about what actually is a root cause of endometriosis. So short answer, yes. Long answer, yes. But do more stuff as well to support addressing the root cause. And then, yeah, just know that there are many, many stories out there about endometriosis still recurring even after a hysterectomy.
So supporting yourself with good nutrition and supplement strategy and all the other things is absolutely a must. Yes. Okay, my friends, that is all of the questions that I have for today. I hope that that was helpful for you all. Maybe you heard a question that you have had as well. Now, again, if you have a question that you would like to submit for a future Q A episode, or for maybe even having a full episode on that at some point in time, find me on Instagram at Endobelly Girl and send me a DM with your questions. I am always collecting those, and I’m happy to talk about them on a future episode, and I hope that’s helpful for you all. All right, you all have a wonderful rest of your day, and we will talk soon.
