Why Reactions Suddenly Start

Dr Kirstey Holland 0:03

Why women develop food sensitivities. Hi, beautiful. I want to start with something I hear in my clinic almost every week, often said almost as a confession. A woman tells me she used to be able to eat anything, and now her body seems to react to foods she's eaten happily her whole life. Tomatoes leave her joints aching. Bread bloats her for two days. A glass of wine gives her a headache and a flushed, itchy chest. She started to feel like her own body has turned against her and she wonders what she's doing wrong. You're not doing anything wrong, and your body has not turned against you. What has happened is that your gut and your immune system have both changed during perimenopause, and the two of them together decide how you now respond to food. This week I want to explain why a food you tolerated for years can start to work against you now, because once you understand the mechanism, the reactions stop feeling random and start making a lot more sense. A food trigger is simply a food you are eating that fails to support your unique biochemistry and in fact works against it. In most cases, you're not even aware of it. The reason perimenopause brings these sensitivities on is that your gut barrier becomes more fragile, the security system inside your gut weakens, and your immune cells become more reactive as your progesterone falls and your estrogen rises and falls unpredictably. When those three things happen together, foods that once pass through you without a word begin to cause bloating, brain fog, joint pain, skin flares, and mood changes. This sits in the first phase of the hierarchy of healing, which is repair. We start here with the gut and the immune system, because you cannot rebalance your hormones or reclaim your metabolism on top of a gut that is inflamed and a barrier that is leaking. Repair comes first for a reason, and food sensitivities are one of the clearest signs that the gut needs attention before anything else. Before we begin, I want you to know that if food has become confusing and a little frightening, you're in good company, and there is a clear biological reason for it. You are not imagining the reactions and you are not becoming fragile. By the end of our time together, you will understand why this is happening and you will know the exact method I use in my clinic to work out which foods suit your body and which do not. You are in control of this more than you think.

What A Food Trigger Means

Dr Kirstey Holland 2:31

What a food trigger actually is. Let me begin with the simplest definition. A food trigger is a food you are eating that fails to support your unique biochemistry and in fact works against it. It is a food that is wrong for you right now, given the state of your gut and your immune system, even though it may be perfectly fine for the woman next to you. This is why one woman can eat tomatoes every day with no trouble, and another finds tomatoes leave her joints aching and her skin flaring. The food has not changed. The body reading the food has changed. The common triggers I see are gluten, dairy, sugar, alcohol, and heavily processed foods, and for some women, specific plant families. The point I want you to take away from this is that a trigger is personal. There is no single list that applies to every woman, which is exactly why I do not hand you a list. I teach you a method to find your own so that you can create your own individualized food protocol.

Gut Barrier, IgA, Mast Cells

Dr Kirstey Holland 3:32

The biology of why perimenopause increases sensitivities. Here is what's actually happening. Three changes come together during perimenopause, and each one makes you more reactive to food. The first is your gut barrier. The lining of your gut is meant to be selective, letting nutrients through and keeping everything else out. When that barrier becomes more permeable, larger food particles and bacterial fragments can cross into the tissue underneath, where your immune system meets them and reacts. Researchers use a marker called zonnulin, described by Alessio Fassano to measure this loss of barrier integrity. When the barrier is fragile, foods that should have passed through without a reaction instead provoke an immune response. The second is your secretory IGA, which I want you to think of as the security system of your gut. It is an antibody that captures harmful bacteria and toxins before they get through your gut lining and deeper into your body. Around 70% of your immune cells are associated with your gut, so this matters enormously. During perimenopause, chronic stress and hormonal change can lower your security IgA in some women. And when your security system is depleted, you become more vulnerable to food sensitivities, more frequent infections, and the low mood and anxiety that shows up when your gut is under strain. The third is your mast cells, and this is the one most women have never had explained to them. Mast cells are part of your immune system and they act like an alarm. When they sense a threat, they release histamine, which increases blood flow and triggers inflammation to help your body respond. In perimenopause, your falling progesterone removes the stabilizing effect it normally has on those mast cells, while your estrogen, rising and falling unpredictably, can trigger the mast cells to activate. The result is that your immune system starts overreacting to foods, to stress, and to things in your environment that you once tolerated with no trouble at all. This is what is behind those sudden mysterious sensitivities that seem to come from nowhere. There's even a name for it when it becomes pronounced, mast cell activation syndrome. And it is something I look for routinely in my patients because it is so often the root of symptoms that have been dismissed for years. Connecting your symptoms to the root cause. So when you notice that a food now bloats you, or gives you brain fog, or makes your joints ache, or brings on a headache behind the eyes, or flares your skin, you're not being dramatic and you're not imagining it. You are watching a fragile gut barrier, a depleted security system, and reactive mast cells respond to something they would have ignored a few years ago. The estrobilome sits underneath this too. That is the community of bacteria in your gut that helps metabolize estrogen. And when it falls out of balance, foods you used to tolerate can start to cause problems, and your estrogen picture can worsen at the same time. Your symptoms are definitely information. They are your body telling you which foods are working against your biochemistry.

Elimination And Reintroduction Method

Dr Kirstey Holland 6:46

The healing framework and the method. Now I want to give you the method because understanding it is only half of it. The way I work with the women in my clinic is to identify food triggers through a process of eliminating certain foods from the diet and then reintroducing them one at a time to see what each woman's body tolerates. We take out the common triggers for a period, we let the gut settle, and then we bring foods back carefully, one by one, watching how your body responds to each one. This is how you learn what works with your distinct biochemistry and what does not. It is detailed further in the repair phase of the hierarchy of healing, and it is the single most useful thing you can do to make sense of your reactions. I want to tell you about two women because their stories show how personal this is. First, Marianne. She came to me struggling with what she thought was irritable bowel syndrome along with chronic eczema and psoriasis. When we looked closer at her diet, we found she was very sensitive to the nightshade family, which includes tomatoes, eggplant, potatoes, peppers, and chilies, for example. In her case, we attributed it to the naturally occurring alkaloids in the nightshades, plant compounds that in a woman with a fragile gut barrier can irritate the system and trigger inflammation. Once Marianne removed nightshades, her skin condition improved and much of her digestive trouble resolved. The second is Carla. She came to me after following a hormone program she found online that was built around a very high fiber diet of cheer seeds, flaxseeds, lentils, and chickpeas. She followed it to the T and all she got was weight gain, joint pain, and constipation. Part of the picture was that this way of eating did not suit her metabolism. But the other part was that her diet of grains and legumes was very high in lectins, which are plant proteins that in some people can irritate the gut lining and drive inflammation, especially when the gut barrier is already fragile. Once we identified lectins as her trigger and removed the highest lectin foods, her gut finally had a chance to heal. Her joint pain went, her weight began to come down. Neither Mary Ann or Carla knew their triggers until we tested them properly. That is the whole point of the method. It's called the Heal Seal Repair Protocol.

Tracking Symptoms Without Panic

Dr Kirstey Holland 9:09

What you can do this week. I do not want you to eliminate anything drastic on your own. I want you to start noticing because good observation is what makes the elimination and reintroduction work when we do it properly. You already have the tools to notice inside the clinic. Use the perimenopausal symptom tracker first and alongside it the lifestyle, food, mood, and pain diaries. Write down what you eat and how you feel in the hours afterwards, and look for the foods that keep appearing before your worst symptoms. You are gathering evidence about your own body, and that evidence is what we build on in this method. I want to leave you with this. The reactions you have been having are not a sign that your body is failing. They are a sign that your gut and your immune system have changed and that they are asking for repair. When we repair the gut barrier, restore the security system, and bring your progesterone back to where it stabilizes your mast cells, foods that trouble you now can often become foods you tolerate again. This is especially important for patients who love something that they can't at the moment tolerate. Your microbiome has the ability to change. This is why we start with repair and why food sensitivities are the one one of the first things we address in the clinic. I have some beautiful reflection questions for you. Which foods have you started to react to that you used to tolerate without a thought? When you notice a reaction, where do you feel it first? In your gut, your skin, your joints, your head, or your mood? Have you been blaming yourself for these reactions rather than seeing them as information? What have you already suspected about a particular food without letting yourself say it out loud? How much of your stress in the last year could have been depleting your gut security system? What would it feel like to have a clearer method for working out which foods suit you instead of guessing? Which reactions frighten you enough that you've stopped eating out or eating with others? If your gut barrier could be repaired, which foods would you most want to be able to enjoy again? What have you been told about your symptoms that never quite fit? That this explanation now makes sense of. What is one food you will start paying closer attention to this week? And now some practical steps that you can begin with. Open the perimenopausal symptom tracker inside the Vitality Clinic, and beside it the lifestyle, food, mood, and pain diaries. You do not need to design your own, they are already there for you. For one week, write down what you eat and how you feel in the two to three hours afterwards. Note bloating, brain fog, joint aches, skin changes, headaches, and mood shifts. Look for the foods that keep appearing before your worst symptoms. Do not cut them yet, simply mark them as the ones to test properly. Notice whether your reactions cluster around specific plant families, such as nightshades or around grains and legumes, the way Marianne's and Clara's did. Support your gut security system by protecting your sleep and lowering your stress where you can, because chronic stress lowers your secretory IgA. Bring your notes to the live session so that we can talk through how a proper elimination and reintroduction could look for you.

Progesterone, Histamine, Last Insights

Dr Kirstey Holland 12:35

Some clinical insights. Food sensitivities in perimenopause are rarely a single food problem. They are a barrier immune problem that shows up through food, which is why the durable fix is gut repair, not an ever-growing list of foods to avoid. Women often arrive having already eliminated a great deal on their own out of fear, and part of the work is giving them a structured method so that eating does not become smaller and more frightening every month. Progesterone matters here more than most people expect, because progesterone stabilizes mast cells and estrogen can activate them. A woman deep in progesterone deficiency will often be more reactive to foods, and restoring progesterone to a physiological level can reduce that reactivity over time. This is also why I keep to the standing rule on the topic and never suggest fermented or aged foods as gut as a gut healing measure, because they are high in histamine. If a woman's whose mast cells are already reactive, high histamine foods add to the histamine load and worsen the picture.