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I criticized myself for procrastination, for inefficient time management, and for not having my body and my life perfectly together.
and we find we have less and less energy left to create our best work, nurture our relationships, and access our joy for life in general.
Chronic stress takes a toll on our bodies, our abilities to pursue our dreams, and our bonds with the people we love. At our deepest levels, we feel we’re not good enough, not smart enough, not organized enough to achieve what we desire in our lives.
Being out of sync with our female chemistry weakens our thyroid, our ovaries, our livers, our adrenals, our immunity, and our digestion.
Times are changing—we’re in the midst of a long overdue, much-needed shift in our perceptions of our bodies and in our expectations regarding our health care.
Hormones affect everything beyond our periods—our moods, creativity, energy, and more.
Quite simply, acknowledging the power of the female reproductive process would shift the power dynamics in our global culture.
When we do not know what is really going on with our bodies—when our biology is our blind spot—we don’t have our own legs to stand on. We don’t know who we are.
Science shows us that PMS symptoms arise only when there is an imbalance of estrogen and progesterone during the luteal phase.
When women live in tune with their cycle, eating the right foods and nurturing their feminine energy, PMS symptoms disappear.
The good news is that when you consume the right foods for your cycle, you provide the building blocks your body needs to promote the production of the good prostaglandins that ease period pain.
synthetic birth control does not correct hormonal imbalances; it merely suppresses your own hormonal function and allows you to go years or decades without addressing the root causes of symptoms, which makes your overall health worsen.
the pill depletes nutrients, disrupts your microbiome, and increases depression.
Ovulation, and therefore menstruation, plays an important role in safeguarding our health for decades to come and protecting us from osteoporosis, heart disease, breast disease, and dementia.
But women’s bodies don’t work that way. Our energy is not static day to day and week to week. Our productivity could be completely different depending on where we are in our 28-day cycle.
health care professionals were more likely to dismiss women’s complaints of pain as “emotional, psychogenic, hysterical, or oversensitive.”
Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick, author Maya Dusenbery
Things got so bad for me, I couldn’t sleep, I binged on food to deal with fatigue and anxiety, I felt depressed, and I struggled to do basic things like be on time for appointments and stick with plans to go out with friends.
Stein-Leventhal disease, which is now called polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).
My symptoms weren’t caused by my not trying hard enough; my hormonal system was so severely out of tune that no ordinary diet or skin cream was going to help.
My prognosis was grim—a lifetime of cystic acne and an increased risk for obesity, diabetes, infertility, heart disease, and cancer.
Our modern-day lifestyle, however, is increasingly at odds with our inner clock.
It’s common knowledge now that the blue light from all our devices is messing with our sleep. But many of us don’t know that blue light diminishes the pineal gland’s ability to make melatonin, which can disrupt ovulation and decrease fertility.
More than 75 percent of all people diagnosed with autoimmune diseases are women.
Women are twice as likely as men to have chronic fatigue syndrome.
Women in their childbearing years are more than twice as likely as men to develop an anxiety disorder.
For optimal health and performance, you need to learn as much as you can about your second clock and then nurture it with phase-specific self-care.
When you’re dealing with painful periods, headaches, and PMS, it’s so much harder to succeed in the male-patterned world where productivity is king.
Our entire concept of time is predicated on the male-patterned 24-hour cycle—a straight shot to an end point.
They’ve found that replacing energy-depleting behaviors with self-care practices that recharge and reenergize is the key to sustainable high performance without burnout.
We’ve been conditioned to believe that the more tasks and activities we have jam-packed into each day, the more valuable we are.
www.IntheFLObook.com/bonus.
On an even deeper level, you’ll be protecting your biological systems in the long run to preserve fertility and possibly prevent major diseases later in life,
This hormone, which is associated with sex drive, gets a slight surge during and immediately after ovulation—making you feel more sexual at the time you’re most likely to get pregnant.
When insulin levels are off balance, it can lead to blood sugar imbalance, which is associated with menstrual irregularities and reduced fertility.
But if you aren’t supporting your reproductive clock by eating, exercising, and living in a cyclical fashion, your hormones may be out of whack, making you more susceptible to immune system stress.
While men waste nutrients by flushing them out of their systems quickly, women conserve nutrients longer and extract more benefit from the foods we eat to provide a more nutrient-rich environment for the childbearing process.
All you have to do is focus on eating specific foods that burn fuel more efficiently—you’ll
balanced hormones are the key to optimal function.
Estrogen dominance is tied to nearly every hormonal imbalance symptom—infertility, PMS, low libido, cramps, heavy bleeding, and PCOS.
Exposure to chronic stress can deplete your body’s resources, make you feel tired all the time, and lead to burnout.
women whose diets included foods with higher amounts of calcium and vitamin D had less of a risk for PMS than women who got less of these micronutrients from their foods.
The fertility diet included the following eating habits:
Think pressed salads (kimchi and sauerkraut): plenty of veggies (string beans, zucchini, carrots); lean proteins (chicken, trout); sprouted beans and seeds; and nutrient-dense, energy-sustaining grains like oats.
Fill up on veggies (red bell pepper, spinach, tomato, leafy greens) and fruit (raspberries, strawberries) for their cooling effect and fiber. These foods also provide high levels of glutathione, a powerful antioxidant that will help your liver metabolize excess estrogen from your body more efficiently.
so you can feel satisfied with lighter grains, such as quinoa and corn.
To curb cravings, you need to proactively eat slow-burning carbohydrates (like brown rice or sweet potato) throughout the day, and shift your diet to emphasize foods rich in B vitamins, calcium, magnesium, and fiber. Eat cooked leafy greens such as collards, mustard greens, and watercress, which are high in calcium and magnesium to reduce fluid retention, something that affects many women in this phase. Consuming high-fiber foods like chickpeas, pears, apples, and walnuts will help your liver and large intestine flush out estrogen more effectively, reducing the effects of estrogen dominance.
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