E243: Surprising Hormonal Acne Triggers - Clean Skincare, Emotions, And Detox Pathways With Katie Stewart

Let’s talk about something most of us have struggled with at some point - acne that just won’t quit.

You’ve tried the skincare, the supplements, the “clean” eating, and still, your skin seems to have a mind of its own.

In this episode, I sat down with Katie Stewart, holistic nutritionist and host of The Clear Skin Chronicles, and we had the most down-to-earth conversation about acne, the kind you wish you’d heard years ago.

Together, we unpacked so much of what women are experiencing right now when it comes to breakouts and hormone changes, and why clear skin has way more to do with what’s happening inside your body than what you’re putting on it.

Here’s what we get into:

• How birth control, gut health, and detox pathways all connect to hormonal acne
• The five pillars Katie uses to help her clients heal their skin from within
• Why emotional health is the most overlooked piece in every healing journey

This is such a refreshing, honest chat about acne, hormones, confidence, and the things no one explained to us when we were teenagers, standing in a drugstore aisle, grabbing whatever promised fast results.

Pop in your earbuds and listen to this week’s episode of the Happily Hormonal Podcast. You’ll walk away with a whole new understanding of what your skin’s been trying to tell you.

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Don’t forget to subscribe, share this episode, and leave a review. Your support helps us reach more women looking for answers.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this podcast is to be taken as medical advice, please take informed accountability and speak to your provider before making changes to your health routine.

This podcast is for women and moms to learn how to balance hormones naturally in motherhood, to have pain-free periods, increased fertility, to decrease PMS mood swings, and to increase energy without restrictive diet plans. You'll learn how to balance blood sugar, increase progesterone naturally, understand the root cause of estrogen dominance, irregular periods, PCOS, insulin resistance, hormonal acne, post birth-control syndrome, and conceive naturally. We use a pro-metabolic, whole food, root cause approach to functional women's health and focus on truly holistic health and mind-body connection.

If you listen to any of the following shows, we're sure you'll like ours too!
Pursuit of Wellness with Mari Llewellyn, Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark, Found My Fitness with Rhonda Patrick, Just Ingredients Podcast, Wellness Mama, The Dr Josh Axe Show, Are You Menstrual Podcast, The Model Health Show, Grounded Wellness By Primally Pure, Be Well By Kelly Leveque, The Freely Rooted Podcast with Kori Meloy, Simple Farmhouse Life with Lisa Bass

Transcript

[00:00:00] If you would love to have clearer skin and less hormonal breakouts than today's episode is for you.

Leisha: [00:00:00] Hey friends, welcome back to the podcast. I have a conversation for you that is always popular. We are gonna talk about acne and hormonal acne and how to have clearer skin from a root cause perspective. I have Katie Stewart here. She is a holistic nutritionist, and I'm so excited to have you here.

Katie: Thank you. I actually love getting to go on different people's podcasts. Having one myself. It's so fun to actually be a guest on others.

Leisha: Yes. Yes. I love that too. So let's just start with a little personal touch from you. let's talk about, who you are, why you're doing what you're doing. I know. So for so many of us, it comes from our own story. So I'd love to hear that story.

Katie: Absolutely. So I actually had a former career in television my whole life. I wanted to be on tv. I worked for 14 years in hockey in Canada, and that's our version of Sunday Night Football. It's the one of the biggest national broadcasts. I also spent five years as an on-air videographer location host, so my face was on an HD camera every single day, and I never really cared [00:01:00] about nutrition.

I grew up eating, like my family called me carbo, Kate. I ate, nothing but bread and pasta and cheese, and tutino, Alfredo, and pierogis, I didn't eat vegetables, didn't drink water. The fact that I'm a nutritionist, shocks my family to this day. But when I was working my career in television in my early twenties, I came off the birth control pill.

So my previously beautiful clear skin, I get the odd pimple here and there in high school, but I'd taken the pill since I was 14. I didn't need to take it. I wasn't having sex, had fine periods, but all my girlfriends took it. So I was like, oh, this is just what you do. When you become a teenager. So I started taking it and then my early twenties, I actually wanted to go on the IUD.

My girlfriend's like, Hey, it's so great. You don't have to , remember to take a pill. It's amazing. So I switched to an IUD and within a month of doing that, my clear skin went crazy. I started getting burl, like acne all over my forehead, my cheeks, my chin, my temples. I started getting a couple like cystic spots pop up here and there, and I'm like, 

What is going on here? Why is my face doing this? So I went back to my doctor and [00:02:00] said, Hey, I think switching around my birth control is doing something in my skin. She's like, Nope, there's no way. That's what's happening. There's no way switching. Your birth control is messing with your skin. I was like, I'm pretty sure here.

I was like, take this IUD out. Get me back on the pill. I go to do that, and of course my hormones are like Katie, what is going on? So it got even worse. My acne started getting very cystic. I was getting those deep cystic pimples on my cheeks, my jawline, my chin. Then I started getting them on my shoulders, my back, even the backs of my arms, some on my chest. So I was becoming very self-conscious. And when I'm working at Haw Night in Canada with NHL players, celebrities, television executives, I just wanted to be taken seriously for me. And I felt like they were just seeing my acne and not me. No one ever said anything, but I was feeling so self-conscious.

And then Monday to Friday, here I am on an HD camera every single day, then editing in this in a suite for eight hours on end. I was picking myself apart nonstop. , My normal confidence just completely shattered. I was embarrassed to go out. I always [00:03:00] had heavy television makeup on, even to go to hot yoga, which we know that's not good for the skin and I didn't wanna be intimate with.

My then boyfriend, who's not my husband, even though he's like, I don't care. I'm like, I care though. So I was seeing how it was trickling into every area of my life. And then I started working on a gluten-free cooking show. I never heard of gluten in my life. This is 20 10, 20 11, and when I removed gluten, I ended up finding out I was celiac.

My stomach pain started to go away. My lifelong, yeah, my lifelong migraines completely disappeared. And then someone's like, well, why don't you try and take out dairy? I'm like, why would I take out dairy? that's crazy. Now all of my stomach pains went away. So that's when I went back to school, descending nutrition.

And in my very first nutrition textbook, there was a blurb on the impacts of the birth control pill on your body and how it can cause acne. And up until that moment, I had been spending thousands and thousands of dollars on skincare and medications, facials, facials treatments. I had no idea that acne was just an [00:04:00] external symptom of an internal issue.

So that's when I obsessed over all things internal acne clearing.

Leisha: That makes so much sense, and I think so many of us can relate to that story of being on birth control, skin changes before and after, and then even just not understanding that nutrition really was honestly very important. I know when I was in my twenties and as a teen even, I've told this story several times on the podcast, but.

I went to the dermatologist, had really bad acne as a teenager, and my mom asked him, does anything she's eating affect acne, like chocolate french fries? She was asking like those, 

Katie: Generic. 

Leisha: obvious ones or whatever. And he was like, no, that's a myth. , And I just looked back at that.

I'm like, what? 

Katie: it's a lie. The food you eat has no difference on your health.

Leisha: yeah.

Katie: It's crazy to think that that was the advice that we were given for so many decades, and it was actually based on really poorly done studies from years before. But this is what ended up in the medical textbooks, and I don't think it's, a lack of common [00:05:00] knowledge that medical doctors don't receive a lot of nutrition education and training like I had just.

Spoken to, an OB and a doctor lately, and she's like, oh my gosh, it's so great you're a nutritionist. 'cause we literally learned nothing about that in medical school and that's still in 2025. So I think it's just crazy that for all these decades we were told the food wheat has no impact on our health when we know that it absolutely does.

Leisha: and I think that also just shows another layer of. The way that the medical system works, it is so segmented. So it's like, oh good, I'm a doctor. You're a nutritionist, you can help with nutrition and I'll do the medicine part. And it's like, yes, but also even how we just assign out, like we have a dermatologist and we have a cardiologist and we have a foot doctor, and it's like, but all of the body is one thing.

It's all together. Not to say that there shouldn't be like specialties, but if those specialties are not understanding. The basics of the body, we're not gonna be able to really focus in on the whole [00:06:00] body healing That I think is so important.

Katie: Yeah, the medical system, I'm so glad we have it. It has a great time. And a place like if I'm in a car accident, I'm about to lose a leg, send me to the er. Like I don't want kale. I wanna go see a medical doctor. So I just, I hope in the next five to 10 years we see this kind of crossover between the Medical Western society in that alternative holistic approach.

'cause I think those two together can really provide some incredible care to people.

Leisha: I agree with that for sure. So let's talk about root causes of acne.

Many people think it's a skin issue, and you've already mentioned it's not a skin issue. I think a lot of my listeners know that as well. Let's talk about what do people think the root causes are versus what are the actual root causes?

Katie: I think a lot of people nowadays, especially if you are into the health and wellness world, just the average person even, I think you start to understand that there is a root cause to pretty much every symptom. And I think that's one thing we can really thank social media and the internet for, because I think even when I first started doing this just shy of a decade ago, people didn't understand that yet, and that was only. nine, 10 years ago. So I think in the beginning [00:07:00] people truly thought my acne is just a skin issue. I don't have the right cleanser, I don't have the right serum. I need to get a medication and that's all that needs to be done. But over, the last few years I've seen this emergent trend where the clients that come into us in our audience are starting to be very well educated and they're like, Hey, I know this isn't a skin issue.

I know something else is happening. I just can't figure out what. So I think one of the biggest misconceptions about what is causing their acne is they think it's just food. They're like, I think I just have to remove gluten, dairy, eggs, sugar, and all my acne issues will go away. But what we don't realize is that food sensitivities are just a symptom of poor gut health.

Just like acne is a symptom of poor gut health. It's not that the food is causing their acne. Sure it can be triggering it, but it's not the real root cause. So when we're working with our clients, we see that those really big root causes are gonna stem from poor gut health, poor detoxification, and hormonal imbalances. But I think each one of these phrases are such, trendy terms. It's like, oh, I just need to detox. I just need to work on my gut [00:08:00] health. But when you look at these as almost umbrellas, so let's just say the gut health umbrella. People think, oh, I'm just gonna take a probiotic and I'm working on my gut health.

that's, I need to eat fermented food. Take a probiotic, we're good. And when I explain to them that, sure, gut health is this umbrella, but we need to look at those individual raindrops underneath. And for our acne sufferers, we're looking at low stomach acid. So do you have enough stomach acid to be breaking your food down? 'cause if you aren't breaking your food down, you aren't digestion digesting. You can be in the best eye in the world, but if you're not breaking it down, you're not getting all of those wonderful nutrients that your liver needs to function. Your skin needs to repair, your hormones need to be produced. And again, if we don't have enough stomach acid, what's keeping the bad bacteria in yeast in your gut at bay?

Not much. And if again, we're not breaking it down, we're gonna start leading to things like diarrhea and constipation. And we know that if we aren't having healthy bowel movements every single day, we're not pooping out the excess toxins, waste and hormones like estrogen that need to be released. And when we're not doing that, they're gonna reabsorb back in the body.

They're gonna. End up [00:09:00] increasing inflammation, toxicity, and hormonal imbalances, all because we don't have proper digestion. And then under that gut health, it's do you have a candida overgrowth, which is a yeast? Do you have a bacterial overgrowth like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth? Do you have leaky gut, which is the slang term for intestinal permeability? All of these different gut issues is what needs to be fixed, and it's not as easy as taking a probiotic. Each one of those have very specific ways to address them, and for our acne clients, it's never just one gut issue. They're dealing with multiple. Gut issues like leaky gut and candida. And then under that detox umbrella, it's not just your liver.

How's your lymphatics working? How's your colon working? How's your kidneys working? How are your lungs functioning? And then as hormones, I know that's what you do day in and day out. Acne sufferers. Think I just have hormonal acne. You just need to fix my estrogen or my, and my testosterone when we have dozens of hormones that need to be looked at. And so we really heavily look at insulin and blood sugar, dysregulation for acne sufferers, cortisol [00:10:00] imbalances, because the increase in cortisol is gonna be leading to an increase of se production in the skin, clogging pores leading to breakouts. So we have to be looking at this from an overarching combination of what are your individual root causes.

Leisha: I love that. I think that, root cause medicine has been such a buzz term for years now, and I think that when we first started using this term, just saying like root cause, it makes you think that there's one, right? It makes you think oh, it's just my. When everything you said also plays into the hormonal picture, it's like each of these things is affecting your body as a whole.

But what I find is that actually so many of the steps to take to repair one body system are similar to the steps to take to repair another body system. So even though we're talking about multiple root causes, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's all these separate protocols or lists of [00:11:00] steps or something like that, because.

Our body is one being and it does work together. So I think that's really helpful. And I totally agree with gut health. I think that it's so common to, to exactly what you said, have someone say they're working on their gut health and they're just taking a probiotic, but sometimes a probiotic can make things worse if you do have bacterial overgrowth, or maybe that's not even the probiotic that you need.

I was going over a gut test today that someone was like, oh yeah, I've been taking a probiotic for the last two years. And it's like, we don't have any good bacteria. So something's not working. Either that's not the right probiotic for you. You're not feeding those good bacteria like a probiotic is just seeding the bacteria.

It's not going to grow if the right other things aren't in place. So I think that's really important to note because there are even, probiotics that are marketed for acne, which potentially maybe could be helpful if it's like the cherry on top of the things that need to be done, I would assume 

Katie: I think people are always just looking for that magic bullet, right? We live in this like Amazon Prime, Uber Eats Instant Delivery [00:12:00] Society, so we always think, oh, I just need this one supplement, this one product, this one food in order to heal my entire body. When that's not the case, it's never just one thing, and it's an accumulation of tools in the toolbox that repair your.

Leisha: Absolutely. Okay, so let's talk about one more. Go-to. Potential, people might think it's a root cause is just like skincare. That, skincare is the way to fix acne. So let's talk about skincare a little bit and then we'll go into what the five pillars really are. To change everything with 

Katie: I get this question quite a bit. It's like, Katie, if I'm working internally to prepare my skin, do I give up my skincare routine? Absolutely not. We want you to still have a proper skincare routine that's nourishing and gentle because I think the issue, again, for decades, we've been to told by marketing and.

Corporations and beauty conglomerates and dermatologists, that you just need more products for your skin. So we automatically think that we need to solve our acne through skincare. So I'm happy that's starting to be unraveled in the last kind of five years, but we don't wanna [00:13:00] forego skincare altogether.

The issue is a lot of acne sufferers are overdoing it. They have this more is more mortality. They're using acids like an A HA or BHA in their cleanser, in their spot treatment, in the serums they're putting on in their moisturizer. They're literally overdoing it or they're using heavy amounts of benzo peroxide and alcohols and medicated topicals.

And all of this is actually just destroying your skin barrier. And your skin barrier is this protective barrier, as it's called, that helps you keep your skin hydrated, keep irritants out, and keep your skin really healthy. But when you are slathering it with all of these acids and harsh products over exfoliating as well as a really big thing that we see. Not only are you wrecking your skin barrier, but you're also wrecking your skin's microbiome. So we have our guts microbiome, but we also have a skin microbiome. And when we have wrecked our barrier skin barrier and microbiome, we are now gonna be seeing an increase in redness, irritation, sensitized skin, and an increase in breakouts. So we wanna be using nourishing, gentle skincare, like a gentle cleanser. Maybe it's just one serum that you're using with hyaluronic acid or [00:14:00] niacinamide. ceramides, there's so many great ingredients. And then using a,a nice hydrating moisturizer depending on the type of your skin and then protecting it with an SPF.

So I think when we like pull it back and really focus on nourishing, and also we need to be avoiding those harmful endocrine disrupting or hormone disrupting. Chemicals that are in so many acne products, in so many skincare products. 'cause if we're working on our hormones, but we're not looking at the things we're slathering onto our body every single day, you're really just pouring fuel on the fire.

So we also wanna be cautious that we're using cleaner beauty options.

Leisha: And I wanna ask you too, I know, one of our last conversations on acne on the podcast, we talked about skincare and. Sometimes when people are going from toxic skincare to non-toxic, then they get into a lot of pore clogging ingredients. I'm sure you see that.

Katie: Yeah, all the time. I think we have this idea that it has to be a hundred percent natural, a hundred percent organic. It basically needs to be me spreading like pressed fruit on my face. [00:15:00] And while there are some really great all natural brands out there for a lot of acne sufferers, they just aren't gonna cut it because they have those.

Comedogenic ingredients, which are gonna be clogging our pores. So this is where you need to take it a step further and looking at the ingredients that are in there, checking it with a pore clogging checking list, or really reading to make sure these products are labeled non-comedogenic.

Leisha: Okay. I think that's so important to note. so then let's talk about what the five pillars really are to having clear skin, because I know that's where you specialize. And getting that big picture I think will be really helpful.

Katie: you mentioned that you run, functional labs and we love running functional labs with our clients. We run a hair trace analysis for every client that comes in. They have upgrades for GI maps and Dutch tests, whatever they need. So when we get our lab, their lab results in, we run them through our five acne clearing pillars, and we've touched on most of them.

Which is gut health, detoxification, hormonal balance, emotional wellbeing, and nourishing skincare. So out of the five, we really only haven't touched on emotional wellbeing, and this I think is such an underrated. Area of healing, [00:16:00] not just for acne, but for literally any health journey. Looking at our emotional wellbeing, where do we have past emotional traumas that are stored in our body in creating that dis-ease, creating that increased inflammation that we haven't processed? Do we have chronic stress that we're not dealing with? Do? Are we really bad at setting boundaries? Do we have a lot of negative self-talk?

All of these things need to be looked at in order to create that truly healthy body because we have to remember our emotions and our brain are not. Separate from the rest of our body. And I really like to give the analogy of, if you ran across a, like a kindergartner grade four or five struggling learning how to read, they're like, I don't know how to read that word.

And you're like, Kat, you can't read Kat. Are you kidding me? That's the easiest word. How dumb are you? I can't believe you can't figure this out. How difficult would it be for that child to learn to read? It would be very hard, and I know people listening are like, oh my God. I would never speak to a child like that.

Of course you wouldn't. So why are you speaking to yourself like that? Because when you speak to yourself like you're not worthy, you're ugly, you're never gonna figure this out, whatever those awful things you say to [00:17:00] yourself day in and day out, how much difficult are you making the health journey for you by speaking that way?

Leisha: Yeah, that's so true. And I know struggling with acne that like it is easy to be Discouraged and so self-conscious about it that it really does affect so much of your confidence like you were sharing in your story. And so I know that negative self-talk can come in really easily 

Katie: And it's not a hard, it's not an easy thing to do. I think out of all the pillars, the emotional wellbeing is the most challenging to work through because you, it's simple to eat a food, to take a supplement, to apply skincare, but to work through your mindset, how you speak to yourself, traumas you've had as a child that you just don't wanna deal with. That's not fun, that's not sexy. Who wants to deal with that? I don't wanna dig up garbage, but it's some of the most important work that we can do.

Leisha: I agree with that. So I heard you say something about HTMA testing and that that is the one thing you do every time For sure. And then you add on other tests as needed. I would love to hear your perspective on that. what do you see on an HTMA test [00:18:00] that helps you understand someone's acne triggers?

Katie: It is such an incredible test that I know from the outside perspective you're like, how can I figure out what's going on with my acne based on. My minerals in my body. And I think if you aren't , trained or educated in an H, TM A, which is short for hair trace mineral analysis, it's easy to take it as face value of like, oh, I'm just low in zinc and low in calcium.

I just need to take those two minerals. And that's my issue. But that is of that is not the way we wanna be looking at it. We wanna be looking at how are these minerals interplaying with each other, like our calcium, magnesium, what are they looking at? Or adrenals by looking at our potassium and sodium.

So actually how the minerals are behaving in the body. Tell us a picture on how your organs are functioning. So again, is based on your minerals, it can be showing is your digestion off because you're not breaking certain things down. Are we dealing with possible yeast interference? Are we dealing with 

adrenal issues. While it's not gonna be showing you the specific bacteria and species like a GI map would, it can be showing that there is a gut microbiome [00:19:00] imbalance going on. So we love running these because it provides, a really solid baseline to be looking at all of the body systems as a whole.

Whole. And when it comes to acne, that's what we wanna be looking at. very rare do we have clients come in and we say, Hey, I think right away you need a GI map, or right away you need a Dutch. We generally reuse those a little bit later on in their process because we love them.

But we can get so much information for acne sufferers from their minerals alone that gives us like six to nine months of protocols.

Leisha: I love that. And I think that's really helpful to understand, especially for someone who maybe has even had an HTMA test 

before. I think that there's a lot of nuance in how it can be interpreted, and it depends on what you're looking for, but it is so much about patterns in the body, and so sometimes being able to see.

How your minerals are behaving. You're right. it can show us things about different body systems where you have so much information to go on that you don't need the specifics of the gut yet, or you don't need the specifics of the hormones. I appreciate that approach too, and like to do that sometimes as well, where we [00:20:00] start with one thing and we work on that first.

Because if we have all of the information at once, sometimes it's not even.

As helpful, right? Because yeah, it can be too much to process, but also you can work on multiple body systems at a time, but not necessarily always effectively. I like that approach and I think that it's helpful to understand that even something like minerals can give insight into acne versus, it's, I think what I see people talk about when we talk about a root cause approach is that it is.

Always the gut, always the liver, and that's it, but the gut and the liver, again, like they're connected to the rest of your body. So it's really helpful to, to know that,

Katie: Yeah, like we love a good Dutch test and we love running them closer to the end of the journey. 'cause so many homes for acne sufferers, they run a Dutch and what comes back is your guts inflamed. So I'm like, why are we running a Dutch test when it's just showing as gut inflammation? Let's work on our minerals, let's rebalance these body systems, and then maybe in a few months, let's run a Dutch to get a better read on your hormones.

Leisha: [00:21:00] And. As we see those changes too, it can be even more helpful to have that more specific information because you may get so far, and then that's where testing can come in. And I think that's

something that has changed in my approach too, is when I first started, like maybe I was leaning a lot more heavily on those tests because it's I need to know what the tests say.

But so much of the time now when I'm running, I run those same three tests as my primary ones. And.

So much of the time, when we get them back, even if we do 'em at the beginning, it's like a month at least before we get everything in. And what it tells me now is, 85% of the steps that we're already doing, we're on the right track and then we can tweak this little balance.

And so I think that's also important to note that sometimes we really need to make sure those foundations are in place before we need the fancier things. And you're so right about, working on emotions and mindset. It feels not as tangible when it's something like acne or it's something like hormone imbalances or PMS or something like that, [00:22:00] because there's gotta be physical things going on.

Well, yes there are, but the physical is tied to the emotional and we really have to look at both. I don't think it's helpful to just do you know, one or the other. I think it really has to be both.

Katie: It has to be both. And you're so right that we can run all of these labs, which is great. They give us so much information, but if you're missing over foundational lifestyle elements, we're not gonna be able to like out test crappy lifestyle habits. So we really loved when our clients first come in while we're waiting for those test results, it's like, okay, let's get you digesting your food and while we're on it, let's get you actually just. Eating food in a day, because I don't know if you see this with your clients, I'm like, Hey, you're not eating enough food in the day to sustain like a human

being. Let's increase our protein intake. Let's get some fiber in there. let's not skip meals 'cause coffee is not a meal. We can't just be eating or drinking coffee till 2:00 PM Let's maybe sleep in a day instead of.

Doom scrolling and getting four hours of sleep. Let's aim for seven to nine hours of sleep. Let's do some stress reduction. Maybe let's get a little walking in our day, like [00:23:00] foundational things that we all

know are good for us, but we're like, no, no, I just need a supplement.

Leisha: it's so prevalent. It's exactly what I see too. And , we want. It to be easy. Also it feels good to buy things that you think are gonna fix your problems versus

doing something about it or like having to actually change your habits. And it really comes back to that exactly, you have to have those foundations in place before you can see results from what I would call the fancy things, like the supplements and the testing and things like that.

Okay, so last question for you. I tell my clients when they come to me with PMS, bad periods . It's going to take about three months for your hormones to make big changes because how long it takes an egg to develop, and to mature. And that's what we see. It's three, around three to four months.

We really see big changes with acne. if you're doing the right things, if you're actually doing the right things, long does it take to know if that's working for you?

Katie: Yeah, again at a bare minimum three months. 'cause [00:24:00] that's exactly right. That's how long it's gonna take follicular ESIS to go for that true hormonal reset. Even a lot of gut things like we want 12 weeks of consistent work. So when we tell our clients. For the ones that we've worked with and it's well over 3000 now we find that about 65% of our clients start to see really great results in the four to six month range because we have so many body systems to work through and your skin is always going to be the last, right?

Your digestions, your body wants to bud digest. Your body wants more energy, your body wants to be able to sleep. Your body's like, I'll care about the skin later. Let's clean all of this stuff up first. So we find the skin's one of the last to clear up. So we see really great results between four to six months. And then there might be maybe another 10% of clients that they need about six to nine months, maybe they have some underlying issues. Then there's gonna be a much smaller percentage that maybe only nine to 12. And then I think it's, for us, we've really only had about a maybe a dozen clients out of the few thousand that have needed longer than a year to clear up their skin.

But again, it's based on the individual in their complete health history.

Leisha: Absolutely. and that's what I was thinking that [00:25:00] you were gonna say is like we can't tell if, even if it is skincare or a supplement.

we can't tell if that's working in a week or two. it's really going to, especially if it's hormonal acne, it's gonna take cycles to go through. And so I think that's really helpful context for anyone who's listening.

And it's like, I've tried so many things and then they're now, they're like, oh, I tried to shift them for a month. It's okay, so let's

create those foundations. And then you do have to really give it time to see if it's working, which can be hard

but necessary for that long term. Glowing skin and health that we have, Awesome. thank you so much. This has been so great. So tell us the name of your podcast and then where else we can find you.

Katie: you can hang out with us over at the Clear Skin Chronicles, myself and my cohost Chris Brown, and then you can find me on Instagram. YouTube, our website at Katie Stewart Wellness.

Leisha: Okay, awesome. Thank you so much, Katie.