Optimize Hormones & Fertility Naturally with Expert Nutrition Tips for Women

Overview

In this episode, I sit down with Kaylee McDevitt, registered dietitian and founder of a virtual private practice specializing in Women’s Health nutrition, who discovered the gap between conventional dietary advice and actual female physiology the hard way: by following everything she was taught in school and feeling worse every year. Kaylee now helps women reclaim their energy, restore healthy cycles, optimize fertility, and step into what she calls the Maiden to Mother transition through personalized nutrition, mineral testing, and a return to body wisdom. She is also currently in her third trimester, which made this conversation especially timely and personal.

You’ll Learn

• Why the conventional dietary advice Kaylee was taught in school including low fat, calorie counting, and high processed carbohydrates was actively working against her hormones, and why the mainstream nutrition research is almost never conducted on women and rarely accounts for cyclical hormone physiology
• How the two halves of the menstrual cycle create genuinely different nutritional and exercise needs, including why the follicular phase with higher estrogen allows for better carbohydrate tolerance and higher intensity training while the luteal phase with higher progesterone calls for more fat, fewer carbohydrates, more food overall, and more restorative movement
• Why women who have chronically undereaten or followed strict elimination diets lose contact with hunger and fullness signals, how this downregulates metabolism, and why the recovery process involves establishing meal structure every three to four hours before hunger cues return naturally
• Three specific nutritional interventions for painful periods including switching to heat-stable cooking fats like butter, ghee, tallow, and coconut oil to reduce the inflammatory baseline, adding ginger in the second half of the cycle because it blocks prostaglandins similarly to ibuprofen, and supporting estrogen clearance through fiber-rich foods, raw carrots, beets, citrus, and liver-supporting herbs like milk thistle
• Why a 90-day minimum is required before judging whether any dietary change is working for cycle symptoms, and why most women give up too soon because they expect faster feedback
• Why the preconception window of 6 to 12 months before trying to conceive is critically important for both partners, why fertility demands more energy than almost any other biological function, and why low progesterone combined with poor thyroid function and nutrient depletion explains the majority of infertility and recurrent miscarriage cases Kaylee sees
• What HTMA mineral testing reveals that standard blood work cannot, including the four lows or fast metabolic pattern that indicates years of stress hormone depletion, why magnesium can make some women feel worse when sodium and potassium are also low, and how the cellular hypothyroid pattern shows up on minerals before it ever appears on a thyroid panel
• The Maiden to Mother framework as a developmental arc from looking outside yourself for answers toward becoming self-sourced and grounded in intuition, and why this shift extends far beyond food into sleep, boundaries, community with other women, joy, and time in nature

Resources

Connect with Kaely:

Free 6-Part Pregnancy Prep Email Series: https://kaelyrd.kartra.com/page/foptin

Your belief that you can live a healthier and happier life is the most important piece of the whole puzzle. That is your birthright and it is available to you. Work on the mindset first and the rest will follow.