Skip breakfast, push your first meal to noon, let your body "reset." It's some of the most repeated wellness advice out there, and for a lot of men, the research holds up. What almost never gets said is that a good chunk of that research was done in men, or in rodents, and when scientists look specifically at what fasting does to a female body first thing in the morning, the picture gets a lot less tidy.

Dr. Kelley Reis breaks down why the cortisol awakening response makes mornings the worst possible time to add a fasting stressor, the reproductive axis mechanism that makes women's hormones more sensitive to energy scarcity than men's, and who should think twice before structuring their eating around any kind of fast, postpartum women, perimenopausal women, women with PCOS whose HPG axis is already disrupted, and anyone with a history of disordered eating or HPA axis dysfunction.

She's also fair to the research that does support fasting in certain populations, and lays out what actually has more evidence behind it than skipping breakfast: an earlier eating window instead of a later one.

You, Restored is hosted by Dr. Kelley Reis, Naturopathic Physician and founder of Liberty Natural Wellness — a fully virtual direct-care practice rooted in nervous system regulation, gut health, and hormones.

Learn more at libertynaturalwellness.com

"Take it out, and you'll feel better." That's the sentence almost everyone hears before gallbladder surgery. Here's the one that usually doesn't come with it: depending on the study, somewhere between one in five and nearly one in two people still have symptoms afterward, some new, some the exact same pain they went in to fix.

Dr. Kelley Reis breaks down why "just take it out" became the default answer, what actual gallbladder pain looks like versus what gets mistaken for it, and the mechanism almost nobody explains beforehand: how removing the gallbladder trades a timed, concentrated bile release for a continuous drip that some bodies handle fine and others don't.

She also digs into the more sophisticated research most consults skip entirely, the bile acid–microbiome connection and why "post-cholecystectomy syndrome" isn't one disease but several distinct mechanisms that all get lumped under the same label. If you're weighing a surgery date, or you've already had it removed and you're still not being taken seriously, this episode is the fuller picture nobody handed you.

You, Restored is hosted by Dr. Kelley Reis, Naturopathic Physician and founder of Liberty Natural Wellness — a fully virtual direct-care practice rooted in nervous system regulation, gut health, and hormones.

Learn more at libertynaturalwellness.com

This week Dr. Kelley Reis turns the case notes on herself.

The homestead was supposed to look like the Pinterest picture. Instead it became sick horses, a garden that dries out and dies no matter what she does, and a to-do list that never has enough hours attached to it. She walks through what nobody posts: the droughts she cannot control, the exhaustion of trying to control them anyway, and the moment she had to stop treating her own stress response like an inconvenience and start treating it like clinical data.

She breaks down what actually changed her overwhelm, not more effort, but narrower focus. Sleep. Diet. Only spending stress on what she can actually change. Putting herself and her family first, even when the land and the animals are asking for more than there is to give. None of it came easily, and she is honest about the trial and error it took to get there, including the parts that did not work.

If you have ever built the version of your life that was supposed to fix everything and found it came with its own kind of overwhelm, this episode is the unfiltered version of that experience, from someone who treats her own nervous system the same way she treats a patient's.

You, Restored is hosted by Dr. Kelley Reis, Naturopathic Physician and founder of Liberty Natural Wellness — a fully virtual direct-care practice rooted in nervous system regulation, gut health, and hormones.

Learn more at libertynaturalwellness.com