Do you poop? And other questions your gynaecologist won’t ask

I was always some sort of an outcast.

In school I was the only girl playing football with the boys. In my family I was the one who talked about the things nobody wanted to talk about. I looked for the unusual angle in everything. I pushed boundaries on people, on places, on ideas.

For a long time I thought something was wrong with me for that.

Now I understand it’s exactly why I find things other people miss.

When I started digging into menstrual health, everyone was talking about the same things. Eat more leafy greens, cut out sugar, seed cycle, take magnesium.

And look, none of that is wrong. But I kept thinking: if everyone is doing the same thing and most women are still suffering every month, what is everyone missing?

Because if you want different results and you keep doing the same thing, you already know how that ends.

So I went looking for something different. A connection in the body that the mainstream conversation keeps skipping over.

And I found a few levers that moved the needle for me and for the hundreds of women I’ve worked with.

None of them are food.

Why you can eat perfectly and still suffer every month

Here’s the thing about nutrition as the main lever for hormonal health.

It assumes the system processing everything you put in is working correctly. But what if it isn’t? What if you’re eating all the right things, taking all the right supplements, avoiding all the right foods, and the system responsible for actually using any of it is compromised?

Then you’re optimising inputs for “a broken pipeline”.

These 3 things I’ll tell you about address the pipeline.

The 3 levers

01. Protect the first 90 minutes of your day like your life depends on it

Because it kind of does.

Within the first 90 minutes of waking, your body runs the cortisol awakening response. This is one of the most important hormonal events of your entire day. Cortisol needs to rise naturally to a specific peak in this window. That peak dictates your energy, your focus, your mood, your immune function, and even how well you sleep that night.

Your body is doing something specific in that window and it needs the right conditions to do it properly.

• What disrupts it: screens immediately upon waking, stress, skipping breakfast, artificial light before natural light, and yes, caffeine too early.
• What supports it: natural light within the first few minutes of waking, food, movement, and protecting the window from cortisol-spiking inputs before your body has finished its own natural rise.

You can eat every hormone-supporting food on every list. But if your cortisol awakening response is dysregulated, you are building on an unstable foundation. Everything downstream, your sex hormones, your cycle, your mood, your sleep, depends on this morning window going correctly.

I got religious about this and it changed more than I expected.

02. Delay your caffeine by 90 minutes

I know. You’ve seen both sides of this argument.

Coffee is great for you.

Coffee is terrible for your hormones.

Everyone has a take.

Here is mine, based on the data.

Caffeine is not the problem.

Timing is.

When you have caffeine in the first 30-60 minutes of waking, you are artificially spiking cortisol at the exact moment your body is trying to run its own natural cortisol rise. Basically, you interrupt the process. Cortisol peaks too early, crashes too fast, and the rest of your day is spent trying to recover from a hormonal pattern that got disrupted before 8am.

The fix is not giving up coffee… it’s waiting.

Let cortisol rise naturally to where it needs to be. Once it hits its natural peak, around 90 minutes after waking, have as much coffee as you want. Enjoy it. It’s fine.

This one change, just the timing of caffeine, shifted my energy, my sleep, and my cycle more than I anticipated, and it costs nothing.

03. Do you poop?

I am completely serious.

This is the question nobody asks and the lever almost nobody addresses.

Every day, twice a day ideally and with a complete evacuation.

Here is why this is a hormonal issue.

Your liver processes used estrogen and packages it for elimination. That elimination happens through your bowel. When stool sits in the colon for too long, that processed estrogen gets reabsorbed back into circulation. Your body thinks it has more estrogen than it actually produced. The result is estrogen dominance, heavy periods, painful periods, irregular cycles, PMS, bloating, all the things women are told are just part of being a woman.

You can eat all the clean food in the world.

You can take every supplement.

But if old estrogen is being recycled back into your system because you’re not eliminating properly, you are fighting your own hormones every single month.

This has been one of the biggest levers in my own health and in the health of the women I work with.

I know it is unglamorous.

It is not the kind of thing that gets posted with a nice aesthetic.

But it works.

And if you’re not sure where you actually stand with your gut health, there’s a simple way to find out. It’s called the transit test (I’ll drop below a screenshot of a the work we do inside our communiy on Skool). This test tells you exactly how long food is taking to move through your system.

Different inputs get different results

Everyone in the wellness space is talking about what to eat.

So, I went looking for what everyone was skipping.

And what I found is these 3 powerful levers for hormonal health that have nothing to do with your plate.

They all have to do with 1 thing: the first 90 min of waking.

So much happens in that window.

I spent years suffering every month through PCOS symptoms and excruciating period pain thinking that this kind of pain was what the rest of my life was always going to look like.

It’s not.

Nobody asked me if I was pooping and nobody connected the dots between my morning and my cycle.

So here I am, telling you about the dots I connected. The ones nobody told me about. I hope they get you closer to what I found on the other side: actually enjoying being a woman, every day of the cycle.

And if you have a friend who eats clean, takes every supplement, does everything right and still suffers every month, send her this. That one piece of information might be the thing that finally changes something for her.

It changed everything for me.

Love, Teo

P.S. If you’re not in our 🔗Skool community yet, this is your sign. Inside I show you the exact drainage tools and methods that support bowel movement and start building hormonal health from the ground up. Not the optimization layer. We start with the foundation. Come find us

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