What if low libido, fatigue, brain fog, mood changes, or sexual dysfunction aren’t just “part of getting older”?
In this episode, Dan talks with family nurse practitioner Shelly Wilkinson about hormones, libido, insulin resistance, and the role whole-body health can play in sexual wellness. Shelly shares her personal story, what led her into hormone education, and why she believes many men and women are missing an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to energy, desire, and long-term health.
They talk about common signs of hormone imbalance, what questions to ask when seeking help, why libido issues are often more complex than we think, and how physical health and relational health can work together to improve intimacy.
If you’re in midlife and noticing changes in energy, mood, desire, or sexual function, this conversation (and the one just previous to this epsiode in this mini series) will help you navigate the next steps.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
- How physical wellness can support emotional and sexual intimacy
- Why low libido may not be only a relationship issue
- Common symptoms that can point to hormone concerns
- The connection between hormones, energy, and sexual health
- Questions to ask before working with a hormone provider
- Why both spouses may need to look at their health, not just one
Check out more about Shelly and her clinic here: http://wasatchmedicalspa.com
Resources and Events:
We invite you to explore our Get Your Marriage On coaching program. Get ready for our men’s and women’s groups starting up again in May!
We have one more spot available on our cruise! We’d love to have you join us!
Disclaimer: The opinions and values expressed by guests on the Get Your Marriage On! podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and values of the host. Appearance on the podcast does not imply an endorsement of the guest or their products by Get Your Marriage On or its host. While we work hard to bring you quality and valuable content, listeners are encouraged to use their own best judgment in applying the information or products discussed on this podcast.
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors or inaccuracies. For the most accurate and complete experience, we recommend listening to the full podcast episode.
Hormones and Libido for Women (and Men) with Shelly Wilkinson
Shelly: [00:00:00] I learned that I was taught wrong. In school that there was so much more research available than we were taught in our nurse practitioner program. And that hormones were put in our bodies for a reason. They are absolutely the best way to decrease insulin resistance and help prevent chronic disease.
Intro
Dan: Hi, friend. Welcome to the Get Your Marriage on Podcast. I’m so grateful to be able to talk to you today and, uh, thank you for listening. Last week we talked about sexual health. We talked about testosterone. We talked about natural ways to boost that with Dr. Jerry Dugger. Today is a different perspective.
On a very similar theme, we’re talking about hormones and libido. From a women’s perspective, but also men too with Shelly Wilkinson. I’ll introduce her later. Uh, in this episode, you’ll get to hear her credentials and where she comes from. But one thing that I’ve really appreciated about Shelly is her absolute passion for helping women and [00:01:00] men just to be at better health, better stronger health.
She looks at hormones like they’re vitamins. She gets really personal. She talks about her own sex life, nothing inappropriate, of course, but it just shows that she is a walking testament of how these, uh, medical interventions have really helped her and in her relationship.
So, I hope this information is helpful for you if you’re a midlife and feeling the differences in, uh, sex drive as your body changes. I hope this is a helpful resource for you to guide you in the right direction to help you on your journey so that you can have a, a fantastic and joyful and intimate sexual relationship in far into your second half of your life.
A few quick announcements. One is we have our men’s and women’s small group coaching cohorts. They’re starting in May, and the information is on our website. You go to get your marriage on.com, click on events, and you’ll see them there. This is ideal if you’re in a marriage where [00:02:00] if know you get along really well, you’re good friends, you’re quote unquote.
Good business partners, but you wish things were better when it came to sex and intimacy and the emotional intimacy. If you find yourself in a situation where you just can’t really talk about deep things very easily, or well, or the frequency of sex isn’t quite what you want to be, or the variety of sexual experiences that you’re having, you’re ready for something more.
Then this is a great opportunity for you. It’s 14 weeks long. You meet in a very small group, which is six to 10 men or women, and we go through the the Get Your Marriage on course as part of our Next Level program together. And you get a few opportunities for private coaching within that. Also, it’s affordable and fantastic for those that want that.
Secondly, we have our Get Your Marriage On Cruise coming up. We just have just a few spots left and I highly encourage you to come because this is gonna be a week long. Fantastic vacation. Super romantic. We’re in the [00:03:00] Caribbean and you get a vacation with me and my team, and we on the sea days. So the days we’re like at sea, we spend a few hours talking about, uh, going deeper in our sexual intimacy and what that really looks like.
I’m also bringing on a Bedor photographer . It’s optional, of course, to make this something a little memorable, something you probably normally don’t do that just as a way to celebrate you two as a couple and the beautiful, uh, intimate and, uh, joyful aspect of marriage that you get enjoy.
So doing a deep dive on that, it’s gonna be a very fun and exciting vacation. You’ll find those details also like@yourmarriageon.com. Uh, thank you. We’ll. All right. Now let’s get started and talk more about hormones. Okay.
Main Conversation
Dan – May 2025: [00:04:00] Shelly, welcome to the Get Your Marriage On Podcast. I’m really looking forward to the conversation we’re gonna have today about hormones and, sexual functioning sexual health. But I’m just really curious about you? How did this all start for you?
Shelly: Well, thank you for inviting me, Dan. I appreciate the opportunity to share. I love, my favorite thing is to share solutions I’ve found to common health problems. So I’m in a family nurse practitioner board certified for the last 23 years. My experience in nursing has been emergency room, internal medicine, and urgent care.
And then in back in 2014, I started my own. Business. It’s now an integrative medicine practice, but I started it out as a med spa just doing cosmetic injections within two months after that. My [00:05:00] son was five years old and he had severe food allergies and he had eczema all over his whole body. He had anxiety and his stomach hurt all the time.
He didn’t sleep through the night. Till he was about 18 months old, I had to sleep in the La-Z-Boy. With him, I wondered how anyone could ever have more than two children because I was
exhausted. And finally, when he was about five years old, we, we were teaching CPR with a nurse friend of mine and she gave my son a granola bar and I’m looking at the ingredient list to see if he, you know, if he could eat it.
’cause he was allergic to everything. And she suggested that I send him. To a nurse down in Utah County who did a Chinese medicine allergy elimination technique called NAET. So we went to this and I, I was open enough to try it, but I wasn’t sure whether it would help or not. But I was open enough to give it a try because we had [00:06:00] done a peanut challenge that my son passed before that, but he still felt like his throat was closing every day and they’d have me given him peanuts.
I had to give him every so often, but he still felt symptoms and he, I’d have to give him Benadryl every day for this throat closing feeling. So I took him to this woman down in Utah County for this treatment, and within two and a half months he was eating everything. his eczema was gone and his anxiety was so much better, and I was shocked.
I was just in shock because that’s impossible. In Western medicine, we saw his blood levels drop from like a level five allergy to a level two allergy, and it was crazy. He was drinking milk, which would’ve caused anaphylaxis before for him, and so that was fascinating to me. So. Within that next year, I started learning that NAET, it stands for Bure Pad’s Allergy Elimination Technique.
So I kind of pulled this Eastern medicine technique [00:07:00] into my practice because I could not believe how much it helped. So through that, I learned acupuncture and started practicing acupuncture as well. And then in 2023. In the middle of the night, I had an inspiration where I felt God just say, you need to learn hormones, and I had had women begging me for years to learn bioidentical hormones. I told them, I think it’s good. You go learn it. I don’t. I have way too much on my plate. I can’t learn that. It feels too big, but go do it with someone else. So that night when I got that inspiration, like, you need to learn this, I’m like, okay.
So I made a deal with God. I said, okay, this is what I need from you if I’m gonna do this. I need a research based course, like intensive. I want to learn this forward and backward and upside down, and I need it to be in person because I learned better that way than online. And so I’m gonna get on Google right now.
Tell me what to type into [00:08:00] Google. And I had actually been searching for something the day before. ’cause I wanted one of my other nurse practitioners to learn hormones and nothing popped up. But this night, in the middle of the night, this class pops up and I’m reading all the reviews. They’re all five star reviews and they’re from pharmacists and doctors from all different specialties, nurses, nutritionists.
They were all five star reviews. So I’m like, okay, this is the class I need to take. And I look up where it is. It’s in Canada. And there’s four
Dan – May 2025: uh.
Shelly: that you have to take in order. So I’m thinking, how much is this gonna cost me? I’ve gotta fly to Canada four times. And then at the very bottom of the page I saw in Little Red Letters US course also available.
So I emailed them and I said, is there actually a course in the US? And they said, yes, you’re looking on the wrong website. Same teacher, but it’s in the us. And so I look at it and of all places it’s taught in Salt Lake City.
Dan – May 2025: Which is your
Shelly: is [00:09:00] right where I live, and it started that Friday. This was a Monday. So part one started that Friday.
So I knew it was a sign I, and I just told my husband, okay, can you take care of all the kids stuff this weekend? I have to go to this training, and there’s four modules that you take. My staff has taken the modules several times over. We’re really focused on research-based education and finding natural solutions for our patients.
Dan – May 2025: So you started it as a strictly western medicine practitioner, right? As a nurse practitioner, and then you have this challenge with your son. Eastern approach helps that, and that opens your mind to weight. Maybe there’s maybe a combination of both can really
Shelly: For sure.
Dan – May 2025: Then you built this business off of like integrating like acupuncture and health and wellness in general.
And then in, in 2023 you had this strong impression, felt like inspiration from a [00:10:00] God, we’ve gotta study hormones now, which was very different from what you’ve been doing
Shelly: I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t even want to learn it. It felt so big and now I’m so passionate about it ’cause there’s so much research.
Dan – May 2025: That’s so cool. All right, so then you take this course and, what were some of the big ahas that you learned by starting to study hormones?
Shelly: I learned that I was taught wrong. In school that there was so much more research available than we were taught in our nurse practitioner program. And that hormones were put in our bodies for a reason. They are absolutely the best way to decrease insulin resistance and help prevent chronic disease.
And so after that first class, I put myself and my husband on hormones and. Then within a few months, I started accepting patients even before I’d finished all the trainings, because I was just talking about it and sharing what I had noticed. And so many people wanted to join within the first, [00:11:00] probably nine months, no less than nine months, probably the first seven months we had 200 patients.
Dan – May 2025: Wow. That exploded pretty quick.
Gotcha. But you’re like, I’m gonna be my own Guinea pig here. Let’s try this on me and see what that’s like. Great.
Shelly: Yep.
Dan – May 2025: Great. So tell me about what were some of the things you’re hoping to experience when you started, you know, trying the hormones for yourself, like what problems were you looking to solve or what did it do for you?
What did you notice?
Shelly: I noticed increased energy. I noticed increased stamina, endurance, decreased brain fog, like my brain just was so much more clear. For sure increased libido, which is always nice when you struggle with those things. and Energy was my biggest one. I, I was just, I was low energy. I have PCOS, and one of the side effects that you can get with that is extreme afternoon drag.
I didn’t know I had PCOS till I did this training and learned how to actually [00:12:00] diagnose it, but getting my energy up was huge for me.
Dan – May 2025: That is so cool. Uh, let’s do a little sidebar on
Shelly: Okay.
Dan – May 2025: polycystic ovarian syndrome, I think is what it stands for and, I’ve had friends and, extended family members with it but you have a different take on it than what most people think, I think. Tell me what
Shelly: I learned so much through this training. There’s so much research on it. So PCOS stands for polycystic ovarian syndrome, like you said, but it’s a misnomer. It is not an ovarian problem. It’s a metabolic problem, and it should be called genetic insulin resistance. It’s a luteal phase defect where your FSH and LH are flipped.
The, the level, the ratio is flipped and it’s. Genetic, at least half of the women don’t have cysts in their ovaries. They don’t have the classic symptoms of acne, facial hair, infertility, cysts on their ovaries. They. At least half of the women who have this are thin, [00:13:00] they’re fertile. They have no acne, they have no facial hair.
So it’s like a spectrum where you have extreme on one side and then someone you might not even know who has it, but you can tell from the labs if they have it or not, if they’re pre menopause, , in that FSLH ratio. And and where those are sitting. Problem with PCOS is many women who have PCOS have low progesterone levels, and progesterone is extremely protective against breast cancer, uterine cancer, and ovarian cancer.
Contrary to what. We are sometimes taught in traditional medicine. It kills cancer cells in the breast, the ovaries, and the uterus, and it’s very different from the fake progesterone that’s in birth control pills, which also shrinks the uterine lining, but can increase your risk of breast cancer and blood clots.
So many women have this low progesterone level and, and in the first trimester of pregnancy. the progesterone that the mother [00:14:00] makes genetically is what keeps that pregnancy alive. It what keeps the pregnancy. And so if genetically you don’t make enough progesterone, some of these women just lose baby after baby, after baby, after baby.
And so giving that progesterone back to them can be. Extremely helpful Also, hormones are very helpful at shrinking plaque in the brain and in the blood vessels. So if you don’t have enough of certain hormones, then the plaque can grow in the brain and the blood vessels contributing to dementia, Alzheimer’s heart disease, also for your bones.
Hormones are so important. So when you have PCOS, your hormone levels are altered. Typically, your, your thyroid hormone levels aren’t high enough, even though they might read in the normal range. But with someone with that genetic predisposition, normal’s not good enough, you’ll be exhausted. And, um, the progesterone is also an issue with that.
So I had this. Extreme fatigue all through college, through graduate school. [00:15:00] I was so tired. Every afternoon in class I’d have to get up and, take my notes in the back of the room, pacing across the back of the room because I would fall asleep. I was.
So tired. I’d have to go to the gym and put my textbooks up on the treadmill and walk fast enough that I wouldn’t fall asleep and slow enough that I could read and read my textbooks that way.
’cause I was so tired. So it, it was revolutionary for me to just get my thyroid working, to get my progesterone levels working. It helped with my sleep, it helped with my mood. No PMS periods are no big deal now, so it’s been amazing.
Dan – May 2025: That’s cool. So I run a private Facebook group. It’s very active and oftentimes one person complains about their spouse’s, uh, low interest in sex. Comments start to fly and invariably. Many people, not just some, but lots of people say, oh, go, you know, go get your hormones checked. And, my practice and my experience with marriage coaching and [00:16:00] helping couples with their sex lives really is more on the psychological and the relational level.
So I’m not really qualified on the, the health level. and it’s easy for me to dismiss. Oh no, it’s not a hormone issue, it’s a relationship issue or whatever. ’cause that’s all I, I know, but I’m starting to open up more and understand there’s a lot more to this. So this is your world. So let’s say someone’s like, okay, maybe I do need to get my hormones checked, and they, they sit down with you.
What’s the very first thing that you work with, with them? What do you look for? you’ve ordered the, the blood test. What are you looking for specifically that others might miss?
Shelly: Okay, so. First of all, it’s important for both spouses to get their hormones checked because it might not be just one or the other. It might be a combination of the two where they both need something tweaked. And so typically I will,
um, so with men. Andropause is a real thing. It’s like menopause for men where [00:17:00] their androgen levels will drop.
And just because of all of the endocrine disruptors in our world today, testosterone levels are lower in a lot of men than they used to be. And so that can really affect libido, it can affect weight gain, energy, and so many things. And so we need to check. Men and women. So we’re checking cholesterol, we’re checking glucose.
These are measures that kind of indicate how much insulin resistance do you have. We’re looking at, uh, fasting insulin levels. We’re looking at, waist circumference and all the hormone levels, and I typically will ask the patient first, what’s your goal? Like, what’s bothering you the most and what do you want to work on?
And if it’s libido, we, we kind of start there. If it’s, you know, I just am exhausted, then we start there. If they’re hot flashes or. Bloating or other symptoms, hair loss. Then we kind of start with whatever they are interested in [00:18:00] and whatever’s most important to them. But we do order the same lab panel for everyone.
It’s pretty comprehensive. So we’re looking at hormones, we’re looking at glucose, insulin, uh, we’re looking at thyroid function. We’re looking at vitamin and mineral levels. So there are lots of things that kind of create this big picture of how do I help you?
Dan – May 2025: Yeah. Oh, okay. Great. That’s good that you, take a more, uh, systemic approach. Like let’s look at them both together and see how. There might be an interplay with the two. Okay. maybe it’s the wife and she wants to have higher libido. what do you do next?
Shelly: So I’ll definitely look at their testosterone levels, and if they’re low, then depending on their situation, sometimes we have to. They have PCOS, they’re gonna be super sensitive to testosterone and so we have to make sure they’re ready for testosterone. Sometimes there, there’s another medication that we give to decrease the sensitivity, but we go very low, very [00:19:00] slowly with increasing that testosterone that can help.
other things that can help are just normal supplements, vitamin D. And, DHEA can be extremely helpful. And so we’ll kind of look at those levels as well and see where they’re at and start there. We also have some procedures that we do in our office. We’re up on like cutting edge technology here.
We’re all about education and what works and what is least invasive, so we have. Some women’s health treatments that are extremely helpful for libido and just, you know, improving satisfaction, helping with stress incontinence. I mean, that is extremely common and women don’t like to talk about it.
Just like men don’t like to talk about ed, women do not like to talk about the fact that, you know, they sneeze and they pee their pants, but if you’ve had. Yes. If you’ve had [00:20:00] babies, it’s very common. You’re, you’re in the norm if you do struggle with that. So we have some technologies that help with that.
We have a, machine called, form of e and it’s, it’s a wand it’s in this little package here. So
this is radio frequency heat, and so there’s this little wand that we use and there’s these three little metal plates. On the end of it, we put
some, just some gel on there, and this helps strengthen the tissue. Inside the vagina and outside of the vagina. As we age, the collagen kind of goes away.
Everything gets kind of saggy and wrinkly, and so this just is for. Tightening and rejuvenating the tissue, bringing more collagen in there, and it’s all just heat. It’s very comfortable and so this helps a lot with just tightening things up, which makes things so much easier with intercourse. The other one that we have is for strengthening [00:21:00] pelvic floor, and that one looks like this.
It’s like a big tampon with like two little electrodes, and this goes in the vagina and you put it in there and it’s EMS frequency that comes out, and so it causes those pelvic floor muscles to contract. So it’s like doing Kegel on steroids. It’s the only FDA cleared device for. In for strengthening pelvic floor in addition to Kegel exercises and it works so well.
So doing those treatments is also really helpful for improving that experience for both the husband and the wife.
Dan – May 2025: And you have a personal story about this too. Would you be willing to share that?
Shelly: Sure. It’s pretty personal, but I think women and men probably need to hear it because. If I had struggles, then probably other people have struggles too. So I’ll, I’ll share my story.
Dan – May 2025: Should we back up to your honeymoon?
Shelly: So on my honeymoon, you know, I mean, I was a virgin before I got [00:22:00] married, so I just didn’t know stuff, you know?
I didn’t know what was normal, what was not normal. And when we were on our honeymoon. I found it interesting that my husband didn’t wanna have sex every single day. And so I thought, oh gosh, is there something wrong with me? Like, are you not attracted to me? And so that kind of started things, started me feeling super insecure, from the get go.
And for him, he’s just like. You know what, there are more important things like, yes, sex is great, but like sleep is also really great too. And so,
and so,
Dan – May 2025: you’re college at
Shelly: um, we were, we were, I was graduated. He was just finishing up, but, Anyway, so I didn’t climax ever on my honeymoon. And I got home and I’m like, what is wrong with me?
Something’s wrong with me. I, I, I don’t know what to do. Anyway, I was talking to one of my best friends and she’s like, Shelly, you gotta figure this out. You have to figure this out. Or you’re going to [00:23:00] get really resentful if things are good for him and they’re not good for you. And so we figured some things out, but it would still take me like an hour.
And for a really long time, I felt really insecure. I felt really selfish, kind of making my husband continue to help me and, and then sometimes he’d fall asleep and then I, then it was even, it was all over like then there’s no emotional connection and so that, it just was really difficult. And so when we started hormone therapy, we both started testosterone after I took this first training and.
Dan – May 2025: So this is within the last few years we’re talking about Now. This is
Shelly: yes. And we got married a little older. We were almost 31. We got married, so probably for 17 years. It just took a long time, like an hour, and it was hard. And we wouldn’t talk about it because I didn’t have any solutions. And so I didn’t have any suggestions or I didn’t know what to [00:24:00] say or how to help, and so we just didn’t talk about it.
And then when we started hormones. My time cut in half to 30 minutes and I was like, whoa, this is the best. Like, like we’ve never had, we’ve never had a better intimate relationship. Like it would just, we could start talking about it, it opened up the conversation. He, he was more interested, more frequently and, and it was easier for me.
And so that was awesome. And so then. But I still thought a half hour is kind of a long time. That’s still kind of a long time. And so I was seriously considering. I’m like, maybe there’s something with my anatomy that is off and maybe it is just making things more difficult. And so I was seriously considering getting a labia PLAs.
Because I thought maybe the
Dan – May 2025: to
Shelly: that removes extra tissue, just exposing things a little bit more. So I was seriously considering that last spring and I told my husband, I think I’m [00:25:00] gonna do this. I, I think I’ll just do this. Our insurance will pay for it, and I think I’m just gonna do this. And he’s like, whatever you wanna do, that’s great.
And then I bought this. Machine. I was the first in Utah to purchase this machine. I, I learned about it at a training, and it’s called APEX rf. And it’s, the same treatment as this for women. The Form E,
Dan – May 2025: Now you’re holding it up. So those for listening,
Shelly: so this is, this is the women’s one, but the men’s one looks like this. Um, it’s like a little wand with some three little.
Metal plates on the end of it, that radio frequency heat comes out of. So I learned about this machine at a training and it helps improve collagen and blood flow for men. And so in about. 70% of cases of a man who’s struggling with erectile dysfunction, it has to do with blood flow or diabetes, and this [00:26:00] treatment helps with that.
And so it, it’s like a brand new solution that’s been available for women for a long time, but it just barely came out with the technology to do it for men. And so I was sitting there watching this. Conference and seeing the research on it, and I thought I have to have that because I treat a lot of men.
We have a ton of men, and I would say at least 50% struggle in one aspect or another with sexual dysfunction. And so. I thought this is a great solution. So I bought the machine and my husband had to be the Guinea pigs for me to learn how to use it. Neither of us thought he needed it, but I’m like, you have to come in.
I have to learn how to use this. And so we did his treatments. Typically, it’s one treatment a week apart for five or six treatments, and it improves the blood flow. And what I was surprised about is that it actually helped me and so.
Dan – May 2025: oh.
Shelly: After about four [00:27:00] treatments or so, I told my husband, I don’t need a labiaplasty if you do this treatment.
I don’t need a labiaplasty because, It just helped so much. And so the, the treatment improved size, girth sensation and duration and so, but it really helps for the WOM women as well. So my time went down to like 10 minutes and I’m like, this is amazing. I’m so glad I bought this machine. I need to tell everyone about this machine because it will help.
It’s, it’s kind of a combination of everything. Like once you can open up and talk about things. Once you’ve found at least one solution, it opens up that conversation and then the emotional piece is there. And then you find out, you know, the physical solutions and, and that can be just life changing. Like we’re happier than we’ve ever been in every aspect.
So.
Dan – May 2025: Yeah. And Shelly, do you find that too with those that you work with? As you help them improve their sexual functioning, other parts of their life and their [00:28:00] relationships tend to get a little richer,
Shelly: Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, I have people tell me all the time, Shelly, I don’t think you have any idea how many marriages you’re saving just with hormone therapy. And I’m like, well, it helped me. So I’m sure there are several people that it’s helping.
Dan – May 2025: That is so, so inspiring. That’s great. I have a friend who she tells me She feels awful often. hormones are, way off and that part of her menstrual cycle where she’s bleeding, it’s like going on for three weeks of bleeding instead of just, you know, five days that her old typical self was and no libido, no interest.
So someone like that. So they reach out to you. Is it a blood panel or a test? What other things besides just looking at as a holistic practitioner, do you look at, besides just what’s going on in, with levels of the hormones,
Shelly: So levels are really [00:29:00] helpful and so that, that is the primary thing we look at. But we also look at family history. That’s a big deal. there are so many things that that pass down and we can kind of tell how much insulin resistance there is based on. Family history or what’s coming for them based on their family history, their personal history, we, we really like to hear, okay, tell me what happened when you first started having periods.
Do you have PMS? How long are your cycles? Do you have a lot of bleeding? Do you feel pain when you ovulate? So we’re asking all of these questions to kind of paint a bigger picture, to personalize it for them and figure out what solution for them is going to be the best.
Dan – May 2025: You’ve said several times in this conversation, I’m, I’m just picking up on this, about insulin resistance and diabetes. This somehow has a link with hormones. Can we do a little deeper dive on what you mean by that and what, what can people learn from that? What can they do at home to improve their functioning in that
Shelly: So as [00:30:00] hormone levels start to drop off, insulin resistance goes. So, because hormones are the easiest way to get insulin resistance down, in addition to lifestyle changes, exercise and eating right? And so when we are doing things or when, when we have a genetic predisposition to have higher glucose or spiking glucose, that continues to go up and down, then.
We’re at higher risk for chronic disease. So when you have high glucose or spiking glucose throughout the day, then your insulin levels are gonna go up. And insulin is what pushes glucose into the cell and out of the bloodstream. But they, the cells can become resistant to insulin. Insulin’s a hormone cells can become resistant to all hormones.
And so. In a diabetic type one diabetic, we’re going to give insulin to drive that glucose into the cell to [00:31:00] decrease the circulating glucose levels when you have high circulating glucose and high circulating insulin, because the ins there’s insulin resistance and it can’t push it into the cell, then you’re going to have.
Higher plaque levels, you’re gonna have higher belly fat, you’re going to have fatigue. And so it’s going to increase your risk for diabetes, it’s gonna increase your risk for heart disease, it’s gonna increase your risk for brain disease. It’s gonna increase your risk for cancer, it’s gonna increase your risk for osteoporosis.
And when we give the body the level of hormones that it needs, it will. It will decrease that insulin resistance and it helps decrease your risk for all of those chronic diseases. Does that make sense?
Dan – May 2025: Gotcha. Yeah. And so is the reverse also helpful if you work on lifestyle changes? Uh, to improve my health diet, more exercise. So I decrease my [00:32:00] insulin
Shelly: Mm-hmm.
Dan – May 2025: do hormones that are already my body’s creating a more effective
Shelly: Exactly. Exactly. So, and. For sure. So diet. You’re going to want to make sure that you’re trying to keep your glucose as stable as possible, and that will keep your insulin stable. And so like wearing a glucose monitor would be a really good idea to see like, which foods tend to spike me, what activities tend to spike me, what does stress do to my glucose level?
And so that’s another lifestyle thing that can be extremely helpful for stabilizing glucose. When insulin resistance is down, your libido is gonna go up.
Dan – May 2025: Hmm. I wore a monitor on my arm for a month to learn about my diet and what it did to my body. It was fascinating. It was great. Now you talk about more than, it’s more than just. You know, injections and people start feeling better quickly with that. But don’t you also help with mindfulness and meditation also?
Can you talk on that
Shelly: Yes, for [00:33:00] sure. So it’s a whole big picture. So when we have a hormone patient come in, they’ll meet with one of our nurse practitioners and then to go over all their labs and make a plan. Then they meet with our holistic health nurse who does the NAET allergy elimination and making sure that they’re not reacting or sensitive to anything we’ve given them.
And, and in there we talk about. Mindfulness and just kind of like the whole picture of health in every aspect of health. And she’ll have you fill out a survey and ask, answer a bunch of questions about sleep and about spirituality, and about your mental health and all of these things because it’s all part of the picture of health and everything plays a part together to make you feel well.
Then we have a strength and stability assessment with one of our fitness instructors. And so they’ll meet with her a couple of times just to kind [00:34:00] of see, okay, where are you at strength wise, and do you have the functional strength you need as you age to push yourself up off the ground or to pull yourself up out of a chair?
And so she’ll, she’ll kind of assess where you’re at with that strength because. We want you to have a lot of lean muscle mass. Not only will that bring your glucose down, but it will help you live healthy longer. So we, we talk about that and kind of set up a plan of, okay, these are the exercises you need.
’cause this is where I can see that, that you’re lacking as far as muscle. So we put that piece into it as well. But we need someone like you. We don’t have a sex therapist. We don’t have somebody working on that emotional piece with the couple, which is really important.
Dan – May 2025: We’re all part of like a bigger system. I like that approach. So if they don’t live anywhere near where your clinic is, what are some specific questions that a person should ask their doctor if they want help with [00:35:00] their hormone treatment? Like what things are other people miss?
So you gotta make sure you’re asking these questions.
Shelly: So I think it’s really important to know what training they have, where they were trained, and where they get where they got their hormone information. If it’s just traditional medical school, it’s not gonna be enough. It is just not, like if they haven’t done outside training on bioidentical hormones and how they help with insulin resistance and preventing cancer and such, then they’re not going to know enough to help decrease your insulin resistance.
So there’s a lot of people who call themselves hormone specialists, but some of them. Are just trying to make you feel good through menopause. Andropause, they don’t, they’re not really looking to decrease your insulin resistance, and so they won’t get you to the levels you need to be in order to do that according to the studies.
So knowing where their training is is really important. we do the World Link Medical Training. It’s. [00:36:00] Intensive research based 80 hours of going over study after study after study to learn all of the things about the synthetic drug company hormones, as well as the bioidentical hormones and what actions those have.
So training for sure is going to be very important. And what kind of hormones do they use?
Dan – May 2025: What is bioidentical? What, what is meant by
Shelly: Bioidentical means that they’re hormones that match the, they’re the exact same chemistry as the hormones that your body makes. They are made in a lab, usually from a sweet potato, like the cholesterol rain of a sweet potato or something like that, but They all come from cholesterol and they are chemically identical to what your body makes, so your body knows what to do with those.
If it’s a synthetic drug company hormone that doesn’t match our chemistry like fake progesterone, like in birth control pills, our body does not know what to do with that. And that’s why some [00:37:00] women feel terrible on those things because it will knock out all of your natural progesterone because it binds more strongly to those progesterone receptors than real progesterone does Kicking out your natural protective progesterone and it can increase your risk for breast cancer.
Dan – May 2025: Gotcha. So it’s really about a quality, quality of
Shelly: Yeah. And does your body know what to do with it or not? Does it match what your body makes?
Dan – May 2025: Oh, got it. Great. Okay. Anything else, you’d like to share with us about hormones and what to consider if you think this might be something you need to help you with your sex life? Mm-hmm.
Shelly: just love. When I can give patients a solution, even if it’s just testosterone or even if it’s just progesterone for the wife to help stabilize the mood. I mean, sometimes, especially in perimenopause, the ovaries are just. Erratically spurting out estrogen, [00:38:00] and it can make you feel so cranky and angry and tearful.
And then it can cause breast tenderness and bloating and and acne. And here you are like in your fifties and you’re getting acne when you shouldn’t have acne anymore. So it’s just really nice helping couples with this, whether it’s libido, whether it’s just. Feeling good or their, their brain state.
So hormones for sure are where I would start. And then these other, these other solutions, it’s very individual based on what your needs are.
Dan – May 2025: That’s good.
Dan: So Shelly, tell me more about men on testosterone long term.
Shelly: So when we start testosterone therapy for men, we have to be sure that they are done having children because there is a small chance that it will make them infertile. And typically while you’re taking testosterone, you’re typically infertile because there’s a feedback [00:39:00] mechanism. If you’re giving testosterone, the testicles aren’t going to be making.
Testosterone because it doesn’t wanna make too much, and so it kind of shuts down the
Dan: Hmm.
Shelly: production from the testicles themselves. But if they’re not making enough, we don’t care if we shut it down because we’re just giving the body what it needs to have protective levels. So for sure, we don’t give testosterone to men if they’re still interested in childbearing.
But beyond that, if they, if they’re done. Then they don’t care if they’re in that small percentage who becomes sterile from it, but just make sure you’re done childbearing before you start.
Dan: And once you take it, you’re kind of on it for life. That’s my understanding.
Shelly: you can stop it and the testicles typically will start producing it again. But if your natural production isn’t high enough, then I don’t know why you would want to stop it, because we want it to be high enough that it becomes protective. You can stop it, and your body goes back to doing what it was doing before.
For the most part, [00:40:00] there’s a very small percentage that it shuts it down permanently, but for the majority of men, they’ll continue to produce testosterone if they stop it. But then they also lose the benefit of taking it.
Dan: Yeah, I had a friend, uh, at lunch, a little while ago. I know he’s on testosterone replacement therapy, and I asked him what his experience is like. He’s like, well, I give myself a shot once a week or every other week or whatever, my shoulders are bigger. I can lift more weight.
I am growing hair on my back. I never used to have back hair, but now I do. My sex drive is back. I feel better about myself. he’s like, oh, and my nuts are smaller. That says testicles
Shelly: They do shrink.
Dan: But it’s like, I don’t think my wife would’ve ever noticed, but I, I know my
Shelly: Women don’t care about that, but that does happen because they’re not, you know, the testicles aren’t active making testosterone. Testosterone has more benefits than any other hormone. [00:41:00] It is like if you could pick one drug to take to help with everything, it would be testosterone. Testosterone shrinks plaque in the brain and in the blood vessels, so it helps prevent dementia, Alzheimer’s heart disease.
It also kills breast cancer cells. It kills. Colon cancer cells, and when testosterone breaks down, it breaks down 50 to 50, 50%. DHT, 50% estradiol. That estradiol component also kills prostate cancer cells. So the higher the level, the higher the benefit with testosterone, as long as you’re not having side effects of too much.
So side effects would be for men, irritability. Acne, too much hair growth. We do laser hair removal here, so that kind of helps if men are having a lot of hair growth. But, those would be the, the main side effects of going too high, too quickly on testosterone. But the higher the level, the higher the benefit for the most part.
Dan: And isn’t being [00:42:00] overweight. We’re talking about obesity, actually, uh, is also an issue because don’t we have enzymes in those types of fat cells that convert testosterone into estrogen.
Shelly: So fat cells are going to produce estro, which will convert upstream into estradiol. And so estradiol gets blamed for. Causing breast cancer and things like that when it’s really an innocent bystander, the visceral fat is actually the problem. And the higher the visceral fat, that’s an indication of insulin resistance, the higher your risk for chronic disease.
So you’re going to be at higher risk for cancers and such from the visceral fat. If you actually gave estradiol. To men or women in menopause, it actually shrinks visceral fat and decreases the insulin resistance. Testosterone also shrinks visceral fat.
Dan: Gotcha. Well, good, good to know.
APEX RX for men
Shelly: I think every man should use [00:43:00] Apex It. Even if you don’t feel like you have an issue, it can help you and it can help your spouse. For sure. And so we, when I first bought this machine. The husbands of the women that work at my office were our Guinea pigs. I told them, you all have to do this because I need the feedback of what you notice and how well this works.
And so all of the husbands came in, their wives treated them, and I mean, one of them’s only in his thirties, and every single person noticed improvement, and none of them thought they needed it. So I feel like. It’s something that every man needs and every man should try, not just for himself, but for his wife.
Dan – May 2025: So it, do you put the wand, um, behind the testicles on the perineum is, or does it, does the device surround the entire penis? How, how does [00:44:00] that
Shelly: So it just like, it’s just heat. And if this is the wand, it is just going up and down.
It’s just heating up it’s bulk heating of the penile tissue all the way down to the base, and so,
Dan – May 2025: Gotcha. So you run it up and down the length of the penis to just
Shelly: Yep. And we have very professional nurses. You know, some men are a little embarrassed to talk about this, but once they come in here, I mean, they keep conversation going so they’re not even thinking about it.
Dan – May 2025: Uh,
Shelly: it’s very clinical, very professional, so it’s just heat and that improves the blood flow. So, I don’t know if you know this, but 40% of the penis lives inside the pelvis. And so when you do this treatment and it, it creates new blood, um, blood capillaries and so there’s new blood flow going on and that actually pulls things out.
And so that’s how it improves. Size is, it is [00:45:00] just kind of pulling it out of the pelvis.
Dan – May 2025: Gotcha. Cool. How is this different than, I don’t know, just a heating pad or, just heat
Shelly: the type of heat is important. So the radio frequency heat is important because it’s that type of heat that’s going to improve collagen growth and. Improved the blood flow. And so it’s the type of heat, it’s, it’s very controlled in this machine, so it’s not too hot. It’s very regulated, but it’s hot enough to be effective.
So the machine will let us know, like when it’s at the effective heat, then it, it, it just lets us know that we’re there. And then if we’re not at the effective heat, it makes a weird noise so that we get to the effective heat. So it’s very controlled heating and. And the depth of the heat, the temperature of the heat makes a difference.
Dan – May 2025: So the concept is, collagen growth is important and you can stimulate [00:46:00] that growth with a very specific, heat type application that you deliver through rf.
Shelly: Yes. And blood flow. Blood flow is the biggest part of it, but the collagen is nice too.
Dan – May 2025: Got it. Oh, blood flow’s important too. Absolutely important, yes. Great. Let’s say someone works with you. They start feeling a whole lot better. Their libido increases, they’re feeling energetic again. Now they’re ready to take their sex life to the next level. What would you say is a black belt sex tip for couples that wanna, they have now they’re at baseline, right?
They’re healthy now. They want to go to their next level sexually. What
Shelly: Uh, that’s kind of a loaded question. it depends on what their goal is with their sex life. Are they looking for like, speeding things up? Are they looking for greater sensation? Uh, those types of things. For sure. Some of these devices, the heat therapy devices. [00:47:00] Really make a huge difference in that.
I would say for sure start with hormones, because that, that’s kind of like the basis to get you to a good baseline. And then yeah, for, for us, for sure, the devices have been very helpful. Like just the, the tissue changes and things like that.
Dan – May 2025: That is so good. Great. Where can people go to find you and your work and, learn about what you do?
Shelly: So they can go to our website@wasatchmedicalspa.com. They can call us on our phone number three eight five three three three 6,000. Easiest is through the website, wasatch medical spa.com, and scheduling a free hormone education phone call is the best. We’re licensed in several states, so we can practice in any state that we’re licensed in.
If we’re not licensed in a certain state, then you would travel to come and see us a couple times a year. typically we do visits four times a [00:48:00] year until, until you’re optimized and at protective levels of hormones, and then we take it down to. Twice a year, once you’re pretty stable and steady.
So yes, Wasatch medical spa.com. Schedule a free hormone education call where you’ll learn about our process, and then if you want to continue and move forward with us, then we’ll go ahead and get your labs ordered during that phone call and get you scheduled with one of our amazing nurse practitioners.
Dan – May 2025: That’s great. Awesome. Thank you.
Shelly: hope that was helpful and gave you a little bit of information.
Segment about Men on Testosterone – to splice in earlier in the convo
Dan – May 2025: I.
outro
Dan: Thank you for listening. Please share this podcast with all your friends, uh, your married friends. That is, they’ll thank you, I promise. And, uh, if you would like a little more extra help in your own relationship to go a little bit deeper, to have more joy, a little more freedom, a little more happiness in your intimate and sexual [00:49:00] relationship with your spouse.
Please reach out to us, check out our program. You can work with me and my team and take things to the next level. You’ll find all those details on our website at Get Your Marriage on.com. Meanwhile, it’s your turn. Go get your marriage on.
