EPISODE #22
Hey there friend! Today I’m interviewing guest expert, Angel Hill. She is passionate about women’s health and her extensive education, expertise, and experience give her a wealth of knowledge in supporting her clients.
In our discussion, we get the chance to talk through a variety of topics including everything from her background as a teacher and her personal journey to motherhood to HTMA testing, and how important minerals are for our body. She also shares how she walks her clients through her signature Hormone Heaven Framework to optimize their health and restore their energy.
Angel Hill has a Doctor of Naturopathy degree, is a board-certified Doctor of Natural Medicine, and holds a certificate in perinatal issues. With more than a dozen years of experience in the field, her passion lies in optimizing women’s health, from preconception to menopause. She offers support to women at every stage of their journey through womanhood. Angel is married to her husband Dennis and has a college-aged daughter. She loves podcasts and cozy mysteries.
Listen to the Full Episode Here
From Teaching to Alternative Health
Before doing the work she does now, Angel used to be a middle school teacher. While she was teaching, she experienced a lot of hormonal issues, which propelled her into the world of health and nutrition. She has her Naturopathy Degree from Trinity College and Master’s in Holistic Nutrition. Now she’s been doing this for the past thirteen years in a clinical setting and loves what she does.
Through her experience in working with clients, she kept noticing that women were depleted after having their babies, or they were depleted and unable to conceive and have babies. Helping and supporting that population of women became her mission.
Her Personal Fertility & Pregnancy Journey
Despite being told she would never be able to have a baby, she has a daughter who is twenty-one years old now. All through her twenties she was told she had PCOS, but she never really thought it was an issue. She married in her thirties, and something inside her said that she should spend three months trying to get healthy. So she did just that—she tried to eat better and even worked with a doula before getting pregnant.
She went on to get pregnant, but unfortunately ended up with Hyperemesis Gravidarum, which essentially means she was throwing up all the time. It was really terrible and she even lost forty five pounds while pregnant. It was so severe that she even tore her placenta from throwing up so much, resulting in her being placed on bed rest for the majority of the pregnancy.
This led her to be completely depleted and even passed out in the classroom one day while teaching. When she went to the doctor they said nothing was wrong and sent her on her way. She didn’t accept that though and kept searching for answers. Later she found out she had issues with her adrenal glands and blood sugar and went on to fix those. Now she’s developed a process to help other women, so that they have a much easier time.
Conventional Medicine vs. Naturopathy
According to Angel, conventional medicine is trained to spot disease and treat it. Alternative medicine like Naturopathy and even Functional Medicine looks at the whole person to figure out how to optimize their health. It goes beyond just physical health and includes emotional health, and mental health as well.
An example would be how the thyroid is looked at and treated differently depending on the doctor. Thyroid health is another passion of Angel’s and it has a big impact on fertility. When her clients come to her, they bring the thyroid test their doctor ran and it said everything was normal. It will typically include one to two markers, when in reality there are seven different components to look at when it comes to thyroid.
Conventional medicine may be looking at the numbers as an indicator of disease whereas she looks at it with a completely different range of numbers focused on optimal health. It’s not just about treating the thyroid healthy, but also looking at how that affects their fertility, how to help them lose weight in a healthy way, and to get their hair back.
All in all, it’s just a different way of looking at things and they each have their place in the world. If you break your leg, you should go to the doctor. There’s room enough for everyone and all different types of medicine.
Signs of a Thyroid Imbalance
Angel is proud of the fact that when people come to her practice who have been put on thyroid medication, about 99% of the time, within three months, they can get to a point of no longer needing the medication. They go back to get tested and their levels have returned to normal.
We go on to discuss the potential signs and symptoms of potential thyroid dysfunction. One of the big ones is losing weight recently without trying, or gaining weight despite trying very hard to lose weight. Another one is hair loss, where you may see thinning eyebrows and hair, If it’s kind of advanced, you may even see heart palpitations.
After walking her clients through a series of questions, she’s usually able to tell what stage they are in without having to do a ton of testing. This process gives her an idea of where to start with the client and then they can get more testing if needed. The testing will help you to pick up on some autoimmune markers for Hashimoto’s, which comes into play a lot when it comes to fertility and women’s health.
HTMA Testing
Angel created something called the Hormone Heaven Framework. It starts with taking a look at minerals, using a hair tissue mineral analysis (HTMA). This is an amazing way to discover where your mineral levels are in your body. When you try to do this through blood testing, it can be really hard to tell where the minerals are because our blood keeps the minerals as tight as it can because it needs them.
As an example, it might lead to thinking your calcium levels are great when you get that blood work done, but it could be pulling calcium from your bones or other places to get what it needs to help us stay alive.
By using our hair to test instead, we can see what your mineral levels have been doing over the past three months. It shows the mineral ratios and even whether any heavy metals are present in the body. All of which could be causing problems for fertility and all kinds of other issues too.
Angel says minerals are like the spark plug to our hormones, so it’s important to get their mineral levels optimized.
Cortisol & Adrenals
After the mineral testing, she looks at cortisol next. Cortisol is considered a foundational hormone and has an effect on the adrenal glands. The adrenals are on top of the kidneys and they are basically our energy source in our body. Most people don’t really realize that the adrenals produce hormones, so anytime there are hormonal issues, it’s actually starting in the adrenals before it ever gets to our sex hormones.
If someone has cortisol issues, they’re likely very tired, particularly in the mid morning or mid afternoon. Once she works with someone to get their mineral levels balanced, they typically get their energy back within one week.
From there she will start working with them on balancing their blood sugar, because most people are on a blood sugar rollercoaster all day. This affects the health of our body, but more specifically our brain and our reproductive organs. To balance blood sugar it’s very important to have adequate protein at breakfast, and to not skip breakfast altogether.
The Importance of Minerals in the Body
Angel goes on to explain the four foundational minerals — calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium. Our body doesn’t make those minerals, so we have to get them from food. Unfortunately many of these naturally occurring minerals have been farmed out of the soil, so we don’t get those nutrients in our food like we used to. In fact, she shares that from 1970 to now, our food contains 50% less minerals than it used to.
The World Health Organization has actually come out and said this is an emergency situation all over the whole world, particularly for magnesium. People aren’t getting enough of it and magnesium is needed for over two hundred different nervous system processes in our body.
Many people are eating lots of sodium, but it’s in the form of packaged foods, or even takeout and fast food. Instead, we should be consuming pure high quality sodium. A great way to add this to your routine is when you first wake up, by drinking a glass of water with a squeeze of lemon and about a quarter teaspoon of salt. Try real salt like celtic salt or himalayan salt, not the traditional processed salt.
This is helpful for our bodies, because we usually wake up very dehydrated in the morning and we need that boost. Our adrenals use the most sodium compared to any other organ in the body, so giving them support first thing in the morning is really important. That will help them to produce a high amount of cortisol in the morning, so that you have enough energy to start the day.
To continue optimizing your hydration throughout the day, Angel recommends adding electrolytes to your water. This will also ensure that you’re getting in those four base minerals to give our bodies what it needs to function properly. She recommends either Paleo Valley Essential Electrolytes or LMNT, because they don’t have any added sugar or colorings.
The Impact of Stress on Fertility
Angel goes on to explain that when it comes to our adrenals, they are supposed to produce a lot of cortisol in the mornings and then that supply will taper out throughout the day and reach its lowest point at night while we sleep. If you’re unable to sleep at night, it may mean that your cortisol levels are too high.
Stress is the number one thing that causes adrenal imbalance and adrenal fatigue. When we’re in a state of chronic stress, our adrenals just keep pushing, pushing, pushing, leading to cortisol spikes all day long. This puts us into a state of fight or flight and our body can’t focus on healing or other necessary functions because it has to divert resources elsewhere to deal with the perceived stress.
If not addressed early, our adrenals end up getting fatigued and they eventually flatline, almost like they have nothing left to give, and they stop producing cortisol. To avoid getting to this point, it’s important to manage stress as best as you can. Angel shares a tip to use in times of stress, where you simply take a few seconds and take 3 big deep breaths. In through your nose and out through your mouth. This tells your adrenals to stop pumping out cortisol, because physiologically when you are taking a big breath in, your body cannot physically put out cortisol. You can even set reminders on your phone to do this throughout the day.
Stress is becoming more and more common in our busy lives today. Angel mentions that some people even become addicted to the feeling of being stressed and they crave that feeling without realizing it. These days we wear “busyness” like a badge of honor, but this internal stress is really harmful for our bodies and we can’t live long like this.
Blood Sugar Balance
Our blood sugar levels have a big effect on our organs, so it’s important to monitor it for overall health. One of the best things you can do to support your blood sugar is to start your day with a breakfast composed of protein and healthy fats. A good example would be some eggs with avocado.
She recommends following the Glucose Goddess, because she shares so many helpful tips to manage your blood sugar. For example things like, going for a quick 10 minute walk after eating a meal, or even drinking a quick shot of vinegar before the meal. Angel even shared that she likes to put a dash of apple cider vinegar on her eggs after they’re done cooking.
Learn More About Angel and Her Work
When supporting clients who are trying to conceive, Angel likes to work with both the husband and the wife when possible. Sometimes, the fertility challenges could be male factor, but even so, it’s important for the partner to get his health optimized as well before the baby comes.
The first step she takes is to get a sense of their background and figure out what has been happening in terms of their health. Her program is 5 months long, but ultimately she approaches each client differently to ensure it’s individualized to them and the support they need. In addition to supporting them with mineral balance, she also helps them to improve their gut health as well.
Although she does support a wide range of clients with everything from preconception to menopause, so they can achieve hormone heaven. The result of that is they are able to get pregnant if that was something they were wanting.
If you’re interested in working with Angel for hormonal health support, be sure to click here where you’ll find special discounts and free add ons just for you, as a listener of the Fertility Friend podcast. This includes a FREE HTMA test for your partner as well as the option to add on her Grow Baby DNA add on at a discounted price. This additional testing is especially helpful if you’ve experienced multiple miscarriages, so you can see exactly what nutrients you are need based on your DNA.
You can also connect with Angel on her Instagram and on her website to learn more about her current services.
If you’re looking for additional support on your fertility journey, be sure to download the Fertility Affirmations Meditation I created just for you. It’s completely FREE and will provide you with a sense of comfort all while helping to reignite your belief in your ability to get pregnant naturally.
