Why does perimenopause sometimes feel like your entire body changed the rules without telling you?
In Part 2 of Carly’s conversation with Traci Potterf, PhD, founder of Inner Genius Health, the discussion gets much more personal.
Carly brings Traci the questions she has been trying to untangle in her own life: brain fog, ADHD, burnout, hormonal changes, weight gain, irregular bleeding, birth control, perimenopause, gut health, and conflicting advice about what she should test or do next.
Instead of looking at one symptom in isolation, Traci discusses a whole-body approach to understanding what may be contributing to how a woman feels.
The conversation explores nervous system regulation, hormones, lifestyle, nutrition, gut health, functional testing, environmental factors, and the emotional and social context women are living in.
Traci also brings in her background in medical anthropology to discuss how the experience of perimenopause and menopause may differ across cultures and why factors such as community, support, environment, food, and even the social value placed on aging women are worth examining.
In this episode:
• Perimenopause and hormonal changes
• Brain fog and feeling unlike yourself
• ADHD and changing capacity
• Carly’s real-life perimenopause questions
• Burnout and chronic overwhelm
• Nervous system regulation
• Why lifestyle changes feel harder when you are depleted
• Weight changes and whole-body health
• Gut health and functional testing
• Hormone and thyroid testing
• Minerals and individualized health information
• Why healing is not necessarily linear
• Building more physical and emotional capacity
• Small daily practices that support regulation
• Why Traci says we heal at the speed of life, not Amazon Prime
Traci explains that when the nervous system becomes more regulated, other lifestyle changes may begin to feel more manageable because you have more bandwidth to work with.
She also challenges the idea that weight loss should always be the primary target. In her approach, improving overall health comes first, with weight changes potentially occurring as part of that larger process.
If you have ever found yourself sitting in a doctor’s office thinking, “I know something has changed, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to ask for,” this conversation will probably feel very familiar.
ABOUT TRACI POTTERF, PhD
Traci Potterf, PhD is the founder of Inner Genius Health.
She specializes in Mind-Brain-Body Functional Health Consulting for High Performers, helping clients move from anxiety and invisible illness toward sustainable performance, vitality, and impact.
Traci is a:
Health Detective + Nervous System & Longevity Lifestyle Expert | Consultant, Coach & Speaker
Her philosophy through Inner Genius Health is:
Leading edge science meets the intelligence of nature.
Please follow, rate, subscribe, and share the show. Every interaction helps us reach more women with conversations, experts, and resources that can help them feel more supported.
We Got You, Mama. 💛
This episode is for educational purposes only and does not replace individualized medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
Transcripts
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One, two, three, four.
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Welcome back to the Week Out You Mama Show, part 2, with Tracy Potter.
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Wait, sorry, so I want to be a fearmonger, but where do you think cancer comes from? It's not just the BRCA gene. We can't just blame our genes for cancer.
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Yeah.
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We need to blame the molecules that cause genetic mutations, and then the stress, and all the chemicals and things that override our nervous systems, and even sometimes infections and things that override our nervous systems that suppress our immune system, so now the immune system can't stay on top of cancer cells. And I'm not saying this to blame people. Like, if you've been through cancer, like, it fucking sucks, and I'm really—can I cuss on here? I'm really sorry. Like, no, it really does. And we're part of an environment where we've been—we just have been taught, and we're exposed to things we sometimes can't even control. And so I don't want to blame—like, I've been really sick from living in a contaminated house that had peeling lead paint, it had toxic mold, I ended up with Lyme because my immune system was so messed up, and I was—and I, like, literally, my brain was telling me there was no hope and I should kill myself. It was a nightmare. I was so sick, and no one—I call it invisible illness because no one could look at me.
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Some days I looked awful, but, like, I just looked stressed out. But a lot of people, you can't look at someone and tell what their inner world is. Some people look so perfect on the outside, and they're really hurting on the inside. You know? And some people are in a larger body, but they actually take really good care of themselves, and they work out, and they may have some hormonal stuff that's making them have a bigger physique, but they're actually healthier and happier than some people who are really thin and look like models. So, like, it's—
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Yeah, it's true.
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It's like, everyone's different. And so I think it's really important to understand that even the—like, the biohacking movement has great things to it, it's brought some great things to light and made them trendy and culturally normal, but at the same time, it has a lot of—even just hacking is aggressive. Like, so much of how we look at how to treat illness is a warm-up. We're going to fight cancer, we're going to battle this disease, and we're going to fight and battle and battle. And this war metaphor: we heal through nurture. We do not heal through aggression. And sometimes we do have to kill infections, sometimes we have to kill things, but you have to protect the rest of you in the process, and you do it gently. And I would rather do, like, a slow, slow kill with, like, herbs rotating over 3 months, unless you're—again, there's a time and a place for aggression.
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Right.
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But not as just the default for everything.
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Right.
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And so everything you're talking about, I think—you know, I think you have a sense already for the scenario you put forth to me, which is you do need to get a hormonal baseline away from birth control to, like, just see what your body does. And this whole story that you're going to get all these other symptoms, the reason people have all these, like, cysts and fibroids, it's something in holistic medicine—it's called estrogen dominance, which is kind of a dumb name for it, but it's basically when your estrogen and progesterone are out of balance with each other, and it's also when—so they're giving you birth control pills to give you synthetic progestin, which isn't even a natural progesterone, which is actually very risky to try to counterbalance the estrogen, but really you can take bioidentical progesterone and counterbalance estrogen. You can also take supplements that are natural compounds that dump the bad estrogens out of your body, and most of that estrogen overload is from environmental plastics and petroleum products and things like that.
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It's not from your normal estrogen. Estrogen—I'm going to preach for a second—estrogen is not to blame for all these cancers. That's ridiculous, because if women who had high estrogen—if estrogen caused cancer, then women with high levels of estrogen who are very young, like 20-year-olds, would be the ones with cancer, not older women.
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Right, right.
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The problem is environmental estrogens, plastics, petrochemicals, pesticides, fertilizers, all that stuff that screw up our hormonal pathways, those are causing cancer, and then we're shutting down women's estrogen who've been through cancer, making them live without any estrogen and be miserable and suicidal because, like, because we've blamed this entire—
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Right.
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And there are kinds of estrogen. There's synthetic, there's bioidentical, there's three different kinds of estrogen. There are different estrogen pathways and metabolites that you can test through urine and see. You can look at your ratios and see if they're off, and you can correct them with supplements and bioidentical hormones. You can correct the whole thing without having to use these synthetic molecules that cause all these horrible mental health side effects and physical health side effects.
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Yeah.
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Can I get an.
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Do you see a path forward for people like myself that are on, you know, so like, I'm very open about, like, I take antidepressants, like, so I'm on, like, 50 milligrams of Zoloft, and I'm on Adderall, and we've gone through these phases of, like, oh, it's not available right now, or these shortages, or whatever, and there was a point where I was like, I don't want to become also just reliant.
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Right.
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On medication.
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And they're.
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That may not be available to me all the time, and then when it's not.
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Right.
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I get messed up, right?
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Yeah. And there are non-stimulant forms of ADHD meds, and they have their—there's a whole—that's a whole complex conversation to have with each person.
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Yeah.
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But the thing.
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But it's possible, is what you're saying.
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There are things you can do that don't take a lot of time. Like, there are supplements you can take. You know, most people will take pills because it doesn't take that long to swallow some pills, but the pills can't do all the heavy lifting. So when you.
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Right.
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Do the inner work with your emotions and thoughts, and it can be, you know, just like, you know, meeting with someone every other week for one session, you—and then doing a few minutes a day of practices. That can change your whole world. And then you have the bandwidth to maybe make better health choices with your food. So I work with a lot of people who already have nailed—they already have really good habits, but their nervous system is driving so much of their illness, or their medication side effects, or whatever. And so, you know, and then—and then, you know, the—I really encourage people to be willing to spend some money on functional labs, not because that's what I do and I'm trying to, like, make a sale or anything like that. It's like, it's just what fixes the problem. Like.
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Right.
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If you do end up.
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You just know. You know where you're at. How can you fix something if you don't know properly where you're at?
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It's like, it's like not ever checking your bank account, or not ever looking at the KPIs in your business, or not ever—you know what I'm saying? Like, it's like, we need to get the data. And when you know—when you work with someone who knows what data to look at and how to take the data and cross-reference it, it's like if you have, like, an image and you just have a few dots and you're like, okay, what is this a picture of? You're like, I can't see it. Like, there's like—it could be anything, you know? But the more you fill in the dots with, like, a high between symptoms, you know, doing intake assessments, symptoms, just background emotional patterning, habits, things like that, and then you map in some, you know, data about the person's gut, their hormones, the toxins they're carrying in their body, their metabolism, their thyroids, that kind of thing when you—the thyroid is hormones. When you get a fuller picture of someone's biology, then you start to see what's happening, and then you can reverse engineer what's happening and disentangle the person.
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It becomes an unwinding process. But I want people to know it takes—give it a year. It can—within a week or days, you can feel better.
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I bet.
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But.
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I mean, and we all know how fast time goes. Like, heck, like, I got a kid graduating ninth grade, a kid graduating sixth grade, my other one thinks she is a teenager already, and so, like, you think we're—we just live in a culture where we want things like the next day. Like you said, this is not Amazon Prime moment. This is like.
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Right.
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If I could be feeling—because I've been—I would say I've been on this roller coaster for the past year and a half, like, and I've just been dealing, right? It's like, and finally I'm like, enough of dealing. If I could be—you know, my birthday's next week, damn it, if I could be in a different place.
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Yeah.
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I'm 44, right? Man, I would just.
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Stop dealing and start healing.
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Right?
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I'll say that up.
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Stop dealing and start.
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Wait, wait, repeat it again. I said stop dealing and start healing. And also.
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Stop dealing.
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I got this from my friend, Jessica McCrae, Dr. Jessica McCrae. Like, she—she—I was talking about, I was using all these words to describe what I was like, I've just found this vibe where I'm just like, I'm just doing what I can in a day, and I'm just enjoying it, and it's just like, I'm like in—like in more flow, and I just feel way less stressed. And she's like, she said, yeah, pace don't push. And I'm like, yeah, that's brilliant. Pace don't push. So, yeah, it's just pacing ourselves.
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Heal don't deal.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Heal don't deal. Anyway, so yeah.
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Because we're too important. We're too important. And as I always mention, we get to put ourselves first because that's, you know, the trickle-down effect of that changes the world. We get to change, we get to help our kids become more emotionally regulated, right? And that starts, like, in our head, and the diet, and, and, and. And those kids go out in the world, and they're healthier human beings, and they're, you know, leaders in their own world. And then, man, when children are out in the world changing things or, you know, and we are helping each other, and we're building the village together, and we're healthier human beings inside, man, that is honestly how we change the world. I mean, even my ADHD coach talks a lot about, you know, you need to get emotionally regulated before we can work on all the executive functioning stuff, before we can do this. So this isn't just.
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Right.
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From Tracy from, like, we need to just make sure we—it's like, no. Like, a lot of professionals are saying that we have to get the emotional regulation under.
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Absolutely.
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Wrap.
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So I teach something called top-down and bottom-up. Top-down is how your consciousness, your mind, thoughts, beliefs, emotions shape your biology. So if that's dysregulated, you're going to create chaotic biology. But there's bottom-up, how your biology shapes your consciousness, your thoughts, emotions, all of that. And so if your body's out of whack, you're going to create negative—it's going to create the chemicals of negative emotion, of hopelessness, of overwhelm, of darkness, of just feeling like it's all too much and why am I here and all that stuff. And it's just like.
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Yeah.
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And it's all an inside job. And I am so sorry. I just want to say for all of us, I am so sorry that our medical system has strayed so far from our inner genius. I am so sorry for every one of you that's been through horrible mental health struggles, physical health, cancer, you know, undiagnosed brain patterning that society didn't understand, so you didn't get support, that in a society that is actually exacerbates all the symptoms. So you could have your exact same genetics, Carly, that do have some components of what we call ADHD, but it's also, like, you're freaking brilliant, and you're creative, and you see all these different connections, and, like, you have such amazing qualities. I feel like the ADHD is, like, really your essence is so, like, you're gifted, you know? And so.
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Yeah.
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But then your sweet little body is born into this world where you're just being bathed in all these toxic chemicals, fed processed food that didn't have, like, the nutrients your body really needed and was desperate for. I don't know if you were breastfed long enough. I was not. I don't know if you had, like, a vaginal or C-section birth, but that has, you know, that has an impact. And so, like, for all of us who. For what we didn't know, for what our moms didn't know. My mom, like, she understands all this stuff now. My mom would have done totally different things if she'd known. She just didn't. And my mom's amazing. And so just for all of us, if you're a mom and you learned something you didn't know that you could have done better for your kids, you knew what you knew. Like, there's so much guilt and shame and pressure. We're so afraid we're going to screw our kids up and that we're in so much distress that it's going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
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Right. It's true.
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The thing is that even though, like, everything on a primal level, everything is screaming in your head to, like, to just put everything to your kids and leave crumbs for yourself, you're teaching your children to do that too. Whether you have sons or daughters, it might be easier if you have a daughter, but would you want a hypothetical or a real daughter, even your son, to grow up and completely trash themselves to try to take care of everyone else because they learned it from you? So on one hand, I tell, you know, moms, like, you know, the guilt and the shame and the, you know, all the—I see a lot of defensiveness, and I see it in stand-up comedy a lot, and I see it on TV shows a lot, and I see it in social media a lot. It's like, you know, give me my chocolate, my wine, and my sugar, whatever the thing is, my guilty pleasures, my caffeine, my double latte, whatever. Like, give me those things and don't touch them. You know, like, these are the only pleasures I have in my life. Get away from me, you know?
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Yeah.
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And we've collectively normalized relying on stimulants, sugar, and alcohol to self-soothe when there's something I teach. I call it healthy hedonism. Healthy hedonism. Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure. But if we pursue pleasures that are healthy, that build us up instead of tear us down, if you—the more you just fill your life with these uplifting pleasures, the more you will just start to naturally displace the things that hurt you. And I'm not saying you can never eat chocolate or never have a coffee or never drink alcohol. But.
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No, I mean, I just read an article recently from Moms First, and it is all about this, about how, like, oh, we rely on, you know, the stimulants to wake us up, the gummies or CBD or whatever to calm us down, and this, and then another inner drink midday, and the da da da, and then.
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Yeah.
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And then the wine at night to—because we need to unwrap, right?
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Yeah.
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And our unwind from the day. And it's like.
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But you do unwrap them.
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There's some problem, right? Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Because it's a creating chemical problem.
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Yeah.
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We're just allowing this to happen.
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We're not.
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And we're not building systems to support us. Yeah.
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Yeah. The thing is, if I—it's like, I'm giving a presentation of mine. Like, hi, I'm Dr. Tracy, blah, blah, blah, PhD, I'm an expert. And then, you know, I tell you about, oh, I'm an anthropologist and I studied this culture where there was this molecule that came from something they were ingesting, and it actually damaged their brain, their cells, their liver, and made them older, it made them depressed. But they all thought it was wonderful and used it to celebrate, and they used it every time they felt sad. Would you think, God, those people are dumb? Like, why would they do that? But that's what alcohol is.
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Yeah.
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And, you know, and, you know, I'm not saying I'll never have a little bit of alcohol, but I will never have alcohol if I'm sad or to celebrate or because I don't want to teach my brain that. Because I don't want to teach my brain that. So if I'm, you know, like, I have a friend in Mexico who has a biodynamic vineyard, and, you know, if I go there, then I will have little tea—I'll sample the wine, you know, or maybe a really good mezcal if I'm in Mexico or whatever. But—or if I'm in Europe, I might have a little bit. But I have reprogrammed my brain where I see it through such different eyes. And I just—and I'm not trying to be judgmental or superior or anything. It's just like, what has happened in me after going through all the anxiety I've been through, after the weight loss I've been through, after everything I've worked to give myself.
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Yeah.
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I—when I started learning about cell biology and I started understanding that our cells, like a cell by itself in a Petri dish, will behave one way, but when it's in a community of cells, it'll behave to protect the community. When it's part of an organ, it's part of a whole system connected to a central nervous system, like a brain, it will work tirelessly to do anything it can to try to protect the whole.
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Yeah.
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Our cells are fighting so hard every day to take care of us, to save us, to protect us. Even sometimes they get confused and our immune system overreacts inappropriately or our nervous system overreacts, and then our nervous system's triggering our immune system and our immune system's triggering our nervous system in a loop, which leads to autoimmunity and food allergies and hypersensitivities and chronic fatigue and chronic pain and all these things. These creatures, like the human cells and the microbe cells—we have more microbe cells than human cells, more DNA is coming from the microbes than our human cells. They're all over, not just in our gut. If all these living beings, this whole cellular community is working so hard for us and we're treating them like such crap.
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Yeah.
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That's really mean.
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You're not giving them a fighting chance really either. You know what I mean? It's like, and it's the basic concept of, like, when we feed our babies the whole natural, organic, all this, you know, and then we're eating leftover, you know, crusts of whatever.
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Yeah.
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And it's like, but you're the one in charge of taking care of them for a good chunk of their life. Like, let's start taking care of ourselves.
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It's not a badge of honor.
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No.
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It's not to destroy yourself.
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No.
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There's nothing honorable, noble, or heroic, or admirable about you hurting yourself so you can take care of other people.
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Yeah.
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You turn on Do Not Disturb. Anyway, and so.
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No, I love that. And I think it's key, right?
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We have to reprogram ourselves.
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We do. We have to reprogram ourselves. And we get to, and there's ways to, and I think the information can be very overwhelming that's out there, right? And.
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That's the thing.
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That's why we get people like you.
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Yeah, because it's like.
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Yeah, we get people like you to, like, help us and help us break it down and get the labs and get answers and guide us through. Because what are we doing here? We can't do it by ourselves, right?
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Yeah, nor should we.
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We shouldn't have to. We weren't born and bred, and you know this, being in anthropology and all the studies, we weren't born and bred to exist in these communities that are not built to support each other. We're meant to—our humans are meant to thrive in villages and communities that all help each other. And so if we're not born into that, we get to build that, right? We get to insert, you know, Dr. Tracy into our life, right? We get to insert proper education and coaching. We get to insert the friends that actually serve us and that, you know, you know. We don't need 20 good friends. We just need a couple. We just need a couple to get us.
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Yeah.
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And that makes the world a difference.
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Yeah. And the cool thing is, like, you know, I love—I work with people all over, you know. It's interesting because I get to work with people, thanks to technology. I have people from Hawaii to the East Coast and in some other countries, and people are all over, and I see so many commonalities of what's going on with people, no matter what socioeconomic background they come from, no matter what, you know, men, women, you know, whatever. Like, you know, if they have kids, don't have kids, whatever. So many humans, so many of us are struggling with so many of the same things, and we really need each other. And just the way, like, a cell isn't meant to just exist by itself in a Petri dish. We're not supposed to do everything by ourselves. You're not supposed to be the donkey pulling the cart all the time. You know, that's not humane. That's like factory farm mumming.
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Right. No factory farm mumming. We're living in the world with the most access, and yet people are saying that they've never been more lonely. And so I think we get to change that. And so, Tracy, thank you so much.
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I hope this was helpful. Yeah.
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Yes.
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I hope I'm not creating, like, oh my God, I have so much to do, there's so much wrong with me. That's not the point. What the message I want you to take away is, is we have normalized this toxic culture that tries to override nature instead of working with the intelligence of nature, which is what we are, which is our inner genius. I want you to know you have an inner genius that can heal when you give it what it needs. I want you to know that your maxed out bandwidth is just because you need more nurture. And for every little bit of nurture you give yourself, your cells, your microbe and human cells are going to work really hard. They're going to take it and run with it to make you feel better and better. And sometimes people just try one change and they're like, well, that didn't fix everything. And that's not how it works. So it's like a combination lock. If you want to unlock the lock, you have to get the right numbers in the right order, and then it unlocks. So it's going to be a process. It's going to be layered.
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But every change you make for the better, you're going to notice an improvement. It may not fix everything, but it'll give you a little bandwidth for the next layer and the next layer. And you just do this a step at a time, a little bit over time, and give it some, you know, don't kick the can down the road forever, but also give yourself time and just find a balance there. And you can do this because we got you, mama.
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You can do it. You can do it. We got you, mama. Tracy's got you. We can do it. We're not going to do it all at once. We're going to do it step by step, just like we tell our children. Like, you're not going to do it all at once. Step by step. And so we get to lead on that way by healing ourselves. Don't just deal, heal. Hashtag. We're going to create our own, like, all sorts of hashtags around this.
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Very much.
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Because there's so much, so much good information. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. We are going to probably split this into two episodes, so.
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Yeah, I see how long this is now.
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I mean, I couldn't stop. I couldn't. We couldn't stop her. She was just, she was getting after all the things. And so you will not only get all this, but you will also get all the show notes. You will get how to get in touch with Dr. Tracy Potter. You will get little.
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Oh, get a meditation. It's only 15 minutes. It helps you with sleep. It calms down your nervous system, helps with physical pain, and helps with sleep in 15 minutes. Even if you think your second meditation is completely guided and anyone can do it. And so check that out too.
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Okay. We'll include that in the show notes too, your little freebie, to help you sleep and live more pain-free, which we all need.
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Less pain and more sleep.
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And we're going to get that. We're going to get all the things. Thank you again. I really, really appreciate you taking so much time to be with us and to really empower us. I really felt empowered to take, like, finally, like, really take charge of my health and really what I want my life to be, you know?
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And if not getting better, get different practitioners. Like, give it time. Like, don't give up on someone who's good because you're being impatient. But if someone, you've really worked with someone and you can feel in your bones, like, this isn't the right path, rerouting.
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Reroute. We get to reroute. Again, just don't deal. You get to heal and you get to find those to partner up with, partner up with those who will help you heal. So, all right, Tracy's got you. We got you. Don't forget to like and subscribe. And if these episodes resonated with you, please, please, please share. If you find that this would help some other mama, some other parent, some other friend, please share. I think the more we share about all these things, we're only going to get healthier and be more whole, which I think we all deserve. All right, until next time.
