Dr Natalie Crawford

They're not actually sex hormones.

You see two organs there, the ovary and the endometrial lining.

You're not seeing the muscle, the bone, the brain.

All of those organs are affected by these normal monthly fluctuations.

I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome in medical school.

And so like every medical student, of course, it was like gloom and doom.

And I thought I had the most extreme case ever known to mankind.

It was really just garden variety, PCOS.

And I had a very serious boyfriend, quickly engaged, looking forward to having a family with him, starting a family with him, and the terror around my infertility and what the impact was.

What was never taught to me and what I didn't understand until much later was the metabolic impact.

Like, PCOS is a symptom.

There's nothing wrong with my ovaries.

They're just responding to this high insulin level I was born with.

And no one really sat me down and talked to me about—my first research project was women with irregular periods and the risk of developing gestational diabetes.

And, you know, I didn't even know what insulin resistance was at the time.

And now we're coming to understand that when these young women are coming, I only do menopause now, but before I left that practice, when women were coming with irregular cycles and we were making these diagnoses, immediately I was launching into the discussion about her metabolic health long term.

And it's a gift to know this.

So now we can start making interventions, nutrition, diet, exercise, to give you a better system to deal with this thing that you were born with.

And her fertility, of course.

Diabetes in pregnancy.