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What’s the greatest lesson a woman should learn? That since day one, she’s already had everything she needs within herself. It’s the world that convinced her she did not. —RUPI KAUR
I was spread as thin as I could be, and now, looking back, I can see the toll it was taking on my body. The pressure I felt to perform, create, achieve, and work only grew, however, as I continued on through college and into my career. All the while, my health issues became more problematic. My anxiety went from occasional to constant, my insomnia became a nightly problem, I was gaining weight despite being active daily, my skin was breaking out, my periods were missing, and I felt more and more overwhelmed by all that I had to do. Instead of being invigorated by the things I wanted to do, I
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From a young age, we’re taught to feel ashamed rather than empowered by our bodies. Something that is so fundamental to us—our biochemistry, our reproductive system, our menstrual cycle—is twisted into “the curse” that we must hide or “deal with” rather than celebrate and use. We’ve been conditioned to ignore our hormonal cycle until something goes wrong with it. Then we treat it like an adversary that needs to be tamed with medication or other interventions so we can go back to ignoring it. This treatment has created a dysfunctional relationship with our hormones, our bodies, and
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It takes years as a woman to unlearn what you have been taught to be sorry for. —AMY POEHLER
Girls are taught to view their bodies as unending projects to work on, whereas boys from a young age are taught to view their bodies as tools to master the environment. —GLORIA STEINEM
This mythology and lack of education keeps you from appropriate self-care. Our culture convinced us our bodies are projects to endlessly work on, while boys’ bodies are power tools that help them master their lives.
I have renamed PMS “prioritizing my self,”
YOU ARE A BIOLOGICAL POWERHOUSE Women are inherently abundant by design. We can make multiple babies, we bleed every month, we produce milk—heck, we even secrete vaginal bacteria that’s vital for a baby’s optimal gut health. Nearly every function of our body replenishes life.
The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning. —CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS
chronobiology. It’s the field within biology that seeks to understand the cyclical phenomena in organisms and their adaptation to physiological rhythms.
Timing is essential for many key biological processes: from sleeping to cellular regeneration and even bacterial activity, its impact on your well-being is enormous.
connection to the solar rhythm. Circadian is from the Latin words circa (around) and diem (day), describing the solar cycle of one day.
Your menstrual cycle is an infradian rhythm, a cycle longer than a day. There are also ultradian rhythms that refer to cycles shorter than a day, like REM cycles and growth hormone cycles. Lunar rhythms are actually a separate cycle, and, from a chronobiological standpoint, they typically refer to tidal activity.
A master timekeeper, which is composed of a cluster of about 20,000 neurons, is found in the brain’s hypothalamus and keeps all of these internal processes in sync. For science geeks, this structure is called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN.
Suzanne Koven, an internal medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, hit the nail on the head in a 2013 column in the Boston Globe when she declared that busy is the new sick. “In the past few years, I’ve observed an epidemic of sorts: patient after patient suffering from the same condition. The symptoms of this condition include fatigue, irritability, insomnia, anxiety, headaches, heartburn, bowel disturbances, back pain, and weight gain. There are no blood tests or X-rays diagnostic of this condition, and yet it’s easy to recognize. The condition is excessive busyness.”
In Buddhism, there’s a concept known as the hungry ghost. I think of the hungry ghost as a sort of black hole within that can never be filled. In our culture, people chase goal after goal or acquire shiny new thing after shiny new thing, but feel increasingly empty inside.
I know it can feel overwhelming to make changes on your own, so I’ve created free resources where you can get in the FLO with all the support you need at www.IntheFLObook.com/bonus.
When somebody asks you, “How are you?,” try answering with an emotional answer—“I’m feeling great today,” or even “I’m feeling energized today”—not the default setting, “I’m so busy.”
We must reject not only the stereotypes that others hold of us but also the stereotypes that we hold of ourselves. —SHIRLEY CHISHOLM
we don’t have the foundational knowledge to stand on to weather the avalanche of misinformation we’re fed about our biochemistry, which leads us to believe our bodies really are a liability.
www.FLOliving.com.
Dr. Aviva Romm, however, suggest adrenal fatigue could actually be something called allostatic load. Researchers say allostatic load is a biomarker measure of the “wear and tear” on the body and brain that affects overall health. In 2017, a paper in PLOS ONE concluded that the higher your allostatic load, the poorer your health.
When we give up dieting, we take back something we were often too young to know we had given away: our own voice. Our ability to make decisions about what to eat and when. Our belief in ourselves. Our right to decide what goes into our mouths. . . . Your body is reliable. . . . If you listen, it will speak. —GENEEN ROTH
