In the Flo: Unlock Your Hormonal Advantage and Revolutionize Your Life

by Alisa Vitti

Roar: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life,

It’s clear that more and harder exercise isn’t the answer for women. In fact, doing less can be the key to getting the results you want.

Even worse, if you’re suffering from adrenal fatigue, exercising too hard or too long will cause your adrenal glands to become overstimulated. Going all out at the gym when you’re already dealing with the effects of chronic stress will leave you feeling even more depleted and further strains your adrenals. Eventually, adrenal fatigue can spiral to a point where you can barely crawl out of bed each morning, you struggle to get through your workouts, and you feel more exhausted than ever. It’s a no-win situation.

The first half of your cycle is the ideal time to focus on cardio and building lean muscle. In the second half of your cycle, you’ll benefit more from skipping intense cardio and shifting to resistance training, flexibility, and recovery.

You may even want to skip the gym altogether on some days—and that is not only okay, it’s recommended!

And if you want your fitness routine to honor your 24-hour clock, too, try exercising in the morning during the first half of your cycle and in the afternoon during the second half of your cycle—

if your hormones are imbalanced or you’re trying to lose weight or struggling with anxiety, fatigue, or depression, you must keep your workouts to no more than thirty minutes. Going beyond half an hour will overstress your body and push it into fat storage mode.

Don’t forget that deep, restful, uninterrupted sleep helps with weight loss, so focus on getting some good shut-eye.

Remember, the goal is to feel good after you exercise.

Instead, syncing with your cycle will make your period easier—you’ll have fewer cramps, less fatigue, and more energy—so you’ll have more “get up and go” to enjoy your favorite activities.

My goal went much deeper. I wanted to feel satisfied each day and not have to wait until I did or achieved something to feel successful.

For example, did you know that stress shrinks the brain? Researchers at Yale University found that stress reduces gray matter volume in key areas of the prefrontal cortex and limbic regions, areas involved in emotional stability, impulse control, and reward regulation. In a 2012 study in Biological Psychiatry, these researchers suggested that brain shrinkage in these areas may increase the risk of depression and addiction, among other mental health issues.

“There’s no greater beating than that of the fine lashing of woman’s tongue upon her own mind.”

If you’re constantly “doing,” you aren’t giving your brain and body the rest they need to restore your creative juices. We need to have fallow days to reenergize our minds, bodies, and creativity.

This is a sign that your estrogen levels are too high in proportion to progesterone, which can cause the uterine lining to be thicker than normal.

these disruptors can wreak havoc with our hormones and negatively impact our biological systems, setting us up for physical and mental health issues.

these infiltrators are everywhere. You come in contact with them in household cleaners, skincare products, cosmetics, personal care products, pharmaceuticals, plastics, and food. An independent research group, Women’s Voices for the Earth, discovered that twenty of the most popular household cleaning products contain reproductive toxins, such as toluene and phthalates, as well as a hormone-disrupting synthetic musk, among other toxins.

Exposure to endocrine disruptors has been linked to a laundry list of conditions, including estrogen dominance, early puberty, and infertility, as well as increased risk for breast and thyroid cancers.

switching your diet from conventionally produced foods to organic foods reduces urinary output of pesticides by nearly 90 percent—in just seven days!

When cramps hit, don’t automatically reach for the ibuprofen. Try a few almonds or hazelnuts instead—they’re good sources of vitamin E, which has been shown to reduce period pain. And eat leafy greens like collard greens for the magnesium, which reduces the prostaglandins that cause cramps. To

take vitamin E and magnesium for a few days before your period and for a few days after it starts.

Dairy and saturated animal fats increase PgE2, so limit them as much as possible, or ideally cut them out of your diet.

Drink it every day of the week before your luteal phase to prevent bloat and other PMS symptoms. Anti-Bloatini 2 beets, 2 carrots, 4 celery stalks, 1 lemon Juice everything, and serve immediately.

Worst foods for bloating: Caffeine, salty foods, and dairy. Cut them out, especially before your period.

Worst foods for hormonal acne: Dairy, soy, peanuts, vegetable oils (canola, sunflower, and safflower), caffeine, and gluten.

Load up on foods that are high in vitamin E, including almonds, sunflower seeds, spinach, chard, kale, avocado, mango, and kiwis. Vitamin E is a powerful antioxidant that calms the inflammation that causes breast tenderness. Consider taking an essential fatty acid called evening primrose oil, which acts as an anti-inflammatory agent. Worst foods for breast tenderness: Kick all forms of caffeine to the curb—including coffee, black tea, and green tea—and dump dairy.

Cappuccinos, chai lattes, and energy drinks—which many women rely on to power through their day—deplete micronutrients.

This is one reason some people refer to B5 as the “anti-stress vitamin.”

Magnesium encourages relaxation, calms the nervous system, and promotes better sleep. Magnesium also helps regulate your body’s stress-response system and prevents excess cortisol production.

Magnesium helps keep insulin production in check, which reduces sugar cravings. Fewer cravings means less consumption of things like cookies and cupcakes, which translates to fewer blood sugar spikes and crashes. Keeping blood sugar stable is absolutely vital when it comes to healing hormonal issues, such as PCOS.

People who don’t get enough magnesium are more likely to have elevated levels of inflammation, which is associated with endometriosis and the painful cramps that come with it, breast tenderness, and acne.

Omega-3 goes a long way in reducing perceived stress levels, and many studies have shown that supplementation with omega-3 may help ease depression.

Bringing D3 levels up into the normal range can change your fertility story.

Vitamin D3 disruptors: A lack of sunshine, a strict vegan diet, or avoiding dairy products may contribute to an insufficiency of vitamin D3.

higher levels of feminine thinking and behavior also have higher per-capita GDP and higher reported quality of life.”

The top five happiest countries, according to the report, are Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Switzerland.

Estrogen acts as a social lubricant and makes you more willing to overlook problems. If there’s something that isn’t working, you can bet it will bubble up to the surface during this phase. You simply won’t be able to ignore the truth the way you can in the first half of your cycle, when you’re bathed in high levels of estrogen and can let things slide.

the easiest time for you to break up with someone would be during the second half of the luteal phase or during the menstrual phase.

Keeping your sex life alive during this phase is critical to the success of your relationship. Sexual activity and orgasm cause the release of the “cuddle hormone” oxytocin, which strengthens feelings of intimacy, bonding, trust, and affection.

As I explained in the Biohacking Tool Kit section, the pill can cause you to fall for the wrong partner. It can also diminish your sex drive, shrink your clitoris, and make it harder to achieve orgasm.

You’re taking a medication that’s hijacking your hormones and negatively impacting your sex life.

mental health consequences could result from continually elevated SHBG levels.

Having more orgasmic sexual encounters also improves your fertility. It isn’t simply because there are more opportunities for sperm to fertilize an egg. Regular weekly orgasmic sexual encounters have a positive impact on basal body temperature (BBT), which promotes fertility.

Women having sex three times per week look ten years younger compared with those engaging in sexual activity only twice a week,

A 2010 study found that men who had sex at least twice a week were at a 50 percent reduced risk for cardiovascular disease.

You can use your orgasms to biohack your sleep and relaxation throughout your cycle.

The differences were so clear that the researchers could easily distinguish which women had given birth based solely on the brain images.

The fetal heart cells help heal the maternal heart after it doubles in size during pregnancy, and they undoubtedly facilitate emotional resonance between mother and child. The fetal brain cells give you that psychic link to your child so you can understand them before they are verbal and/or when they’re not communicating as they get older—truly it’s biology at its most poetic.

Stem cell treatment is truly a next-level health innovation that can reverse the wear and tear we put on our bodies and prevent debilitating disease and injury from escalating further.

the way you’ve been eating, exercising, and scheduling your life for the decade leading up to giving birth either helps protect you from developing postpartum mood issues or makes you more vulnerable to them.