Undoctrinate Yourself - #16 - The Cycle Tracking Episode

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

In this lively Q&A-style episode, and perhaps the most important conversation to date on the show, I sat down with my lifelong best friend and Masters in applied nutrition Lindsay Huff to do a women's health deep dive. Specifically we discuss:-what is the menstrual cycle-what biological actions occur during each phase of the menstrual cycle-what markers can be used to determine where we are in our cycle-how these markers can be used to cycle track-how to use cycle tracking to prevent pregnancy or facilitate conception-each of our experiences with being on the pill for a decade and what the transition to cycle tracking looked like-the immense benefits of cycle tracking outside of pregnancy prevention-how birth control is anti-feminist...and more. Please share this episode with every woman in your life, especially the young ones who are not being properly educated on the female body. We deserve better, and that's why we are stepping up to do better on behalf of women.Support the podcast by becoming a patron www.patreon.com/undoctrinateyourselfpodcastFollow the podcast on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@undoctrinateyourselfpod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow Dr. Alexis on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@dralexisjazmyn⁠

Hello and welcome back to Undoctrinate Yourself. We have a really fun episode for you today and it's a little bit atypical. So I'm here with my longtime best friend, Lindsay Huff. She and I met in preschool and we've been Bessie since then. She's a master's in applied nutrition with a focus on disease prevention. And she's going to be helping to facilitate a conversation today about the menstrual cycle and cycle tracking, a topic that we're both very passionate about due to just our own life experiences. So do you want to just say hi real quick, Lindsay, before we get started. Hi, everyone. Great to meet you all. I mean, virtually. It's great to be here. Obviously, like Lexi said, we've been best friends for, gosh, 20 years now. More!

30 years? I don't even know. Giving my age away. Five years, something like that. Yeah, yeah. Too many years, but also not enough, right? Strangely, yes. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah, so we're really excited. What we're going to basically do is the first half of this conversation roughly is going to be kind of a question and answer style with regards to what is the menstrual cycle and how you as a woman or for the women in your life, how you can harness this information to be able to cycle track so that you don't have to rely on hormonal contraceptive or other contraceptive methods that mess with your natural innate biology and the way that your body's supposed to function. And instead you can get in alignment with the natural cycles of the body to be able to just be in harmony

with those and be able to leverage those cycles to either, you know, become pregnant or to avoid pregnancy depending on what your goals are. So I guess to kick off the bat, Lindsay's going to be asking the question. So I'll hand it over to her and then we'll get this conversation started. Yeah. So I think the first part that we want to start at is, you know, what is the menstrual cycle? Yeah, absolutely. And so I think this is a conversation that should be had in maybe middle school or like sixth grade when girls are first starting to go through this and get their periods. And it's a topic that most people don't understand. So let's just say broadly speaking, there are three phases to the menstrual cycle, the follicular phase, the ovulatory phase, and the ludial phase.

The follicular phase is roughly days 1 through 13, with the first four to seven days of this phase being marked by menstruation or leading. And then the ovulatory phase is roughly around day 14, and the Luteal phase is roughly days 15 to 28. This is going to vary from person to person. And it can also vary within the individual from month to month. And that's why learning about this cycle is important so that we can track our cycle from month to month. And then we don't have to guess because we can directly assess instead.

Yeah, absolutely. So do you want to give us a deeper dive on what each phase is? So like, let's start with a follicular phase. I'm going to fumble. Oh, my own many times. It's okay. I'm like tongue twister all the time. It's all good. So yeah, let's start with follicular phase. This is the first phase of the menstrual cycle. I have my notes here. I'm just going to be referencing. If you see me looking down and you're watching the video, I just want to make sure I don't miss anything. So the follicular phase begins with mencies or menstruation, which is the shedding of the uterine lining. This happens when there's no fertilized egg that's implanting within the endometrium. So that lining is shed and that results in the bleeding and the uterine lining. that you see when you're going through menstruation.

And after this phase, which is roughly the first four to seven days, depending on the person and depending on, you know, a woman's cycle, we then enter the proliferative phase, rather, and this is when the lining of the uterus is beginning to proliferate to form a new layer of endometrial tissue in the uterus so that if, you know, a fertilized egg comes along, that egg has a place to go and call home for the next nine months of pregnancy. Now, let's talk about the hormones within follicular phase because it's important that we understand some of the hormonal hallmarks of this part of the cycle so that we can know what to track and what our bodies are actually going through during this phase. So with regards to estrogen and progesterone, estrogen and progesterone are relatively low during this, at least the beginning portion of this phase. This starts to change as we enter the second half of the follicular phase.

estrogen levels begin to build up as the ovarian follicle forms. So it's called the follicular phase because the ovarian follicle begins forming, and that causes the egg to mature, which will ultimately facilitate the ovulation process so that egg is ready to be potentially fertilized. So as that follicle grows, estrogen levels start to rise. The follicle contains one egg usually. I mean, in the case of twins, there's always outliers

where this can be more than one egg, but typically is one egg, and that egg is released during ovulation. And so in the late follicular phase, the rising estrogen levels create a positive feedback loop that stimulates a surge in a hormone called lounizing hormone, or LH. And this is a really important hormone for stimulating ovulation. And another hormone, in addition to LH, kind of coming on the scene during this period of time, is follicle stimulating hormone or FSH, and both LH and FSH peak right before ovulation occurs. And so LH actually peaks about 12 hours before ovulation occurs, and FSAH roughly peaks

around the same timeline as that. And so you know when LH reaches its peak, that ovulation is going to roughly occur within 12 hours of that period of time. And so the beginning of that rise in LH can happen roughly 24 to 36 hours before the peak occurs. So generally speaking, if you're measuring LH, which is something that could be important, if you're trying to cycle track just so that you can understand exactly and pinpoint when ovulation is going to happen. Otherwise, we're going to talk about other ways that you can roughly estimate ovulation timing, but the LH really allows you to pin down exactly when that's happening, and it helps to reduce

uncertainty with regards to the ovulatory window, which helps if you're trying to, from a contraceptive standpoint, if you don't want to get pregnant, you want to basically make that window as narrow as possible so that you maximize your quote-unquote green days where you're non-fertile. And so estrogen reaches highest levels throughout the entire cycle in the late follicular phase, and it's corresponding to this rise in leutonizing hormone or LH. So with regards to like hormonal signatures, the main ones in the late follicular phase are estrogen rising, LH rising, and FSAH rising. I think we can. Let me see if there's anything else here.

I don't want to mention. Oh, well, I guess one thing I'll just mention briefly before we move on is there's a couple different ways to measure LH. I personally use the Enito Fertility Monitor. That's marketed as a tool for women who want to get pregnant to be able to basically identify their fertile window more accurately. But personally, I use it as the opposite as a form of contraception so that I can narrow down my fertile window and understand exactly when it's happening. So the Enito Fertility Monitor measures LH, FSA, estrogen, and progesterone. So you're getting all of those, which is useful also if you're just interested in learning about your hormones in general and what they're doing from day to day

and also between cycles. So that's a useful tool, I think, just outside of just understanding ovulation, but just understanding your hormonal status in general. In addition to that, in drugstores, most drugstores will carry LH tests that people can use if they're trying to hone in on their ovulatory window, which only measures LH. And I think ends up being not as good of a value because each test, I'm not exactly sure how much they run, but I think that it's probably a better value to get the fertility monitor and get the strips. If you get it on like subscribe and save, I think it's like $40 for 15 strips. And each test strip you use essentially is like a single urine test in the morning. And we'll get into a little bit more about like how do you know when to use that test

strip and like when it makes the most sense. But for now, I think let's move on and that we can circle back to like the timing of testing. Yeah, so next is the ovulatory phase. Yes. So ovulation is the shortest phase of the cycle. It lasts a couple days. Obulation or the ovulatory phase is characterized by the emergence of an egg from the follicle, the matured follicle with that egg that's ready to be fertilized. And the egg leaves the follicle and moves down the fallopian tubes where it remains for 12 to 24 hours. And within that window, it can become fertilized. This is the most fertile time of the cycle.

Also worth mentioning that sperm can survive in the cervical mucus for up to five days. So just because the egg is there for, let's say, 12 to 24 hours doesn't mean that you can only get pregnant for 12 to 24 hours. If you have intercourse within the five days prior to ovulation, as well as the two days encompassing ovulation, then basically that seven-day-ish window, is the time where your fertility is, is kind of maximized and where you have the potential to get pregnant. So it's really just a six to seven day window per cycle that a woman can actually get pregnant from unprotected sex. So much different that I think what a lot of people think or a lot of

girls, young girls think. I feel like at least I had the idea that any unprotected sex I could get pregnant at any time. Yeah, definitely. It's definitely, you know, phrased that way when you're in, you know, sex education in middle school or whatever year you start it. And, you know, they try to put this fear into you that like if you do anything, which, you know, anything untoward, that all of a sudden you're just going to be a teen mom. Totally. It's just a terrible, you know, fear-based anecdote. It is.

It is. I actually even had somebody a message me on Instagram yesterday saying that a nurse told her that she could get pregnant any day of her cycle. Just like last week. I'm like, I don't know where this. Yet another nurse. I know, literally, like, biggest red flag. Get out of there.

Get out of there. Realistically, it's a five to seven day window of potential pregnancy. And outside of that, if you're tracking and you're tracking regularly and doing it in a way that is consistent and informed, then you're not going to have any risk of pregnancy outside of that. If you're identifying when ovulation is occurring and you're confirming that ovulation has occurred, which we're going to get into how you determine that. So, but before we move on, just worth mentioning here with regards to hormones,

hormones during the ovulatory phase after the egg is emerged, estrogen levels begin to drop precipitously. So that estrogen, the rise in estrogen and LH prior to ovulation is really what allows that egg to emerge. But once it's emerged, those hormone levels start dropping rapidly. And so estrogen levels kind of come down to a low immediately after ovulation. And if that egg does not become fertilized, once it's in the fallopian tube and mature and ready to be fertilized, if it's not, then the egg will essentially disintegrate over the course of about a day. So that egg is basically lost. And after that egg dissolves, let's say, then we kind of move into the last phase of the cycle.

So just one comment. I don't know if I'm speaking on behalf of all women here or if I'm the only one. But do you also feel like the ovulatory phase is like your most beautiful moment of the month? And then it's also the shortest. Because then you move in the same. to these other phases and your hormones are going all over the place. I just think that's just a lovely gift from nature, right? It is. It is. And it also makes sense that we would feel our most radiant, gorgeous and attractive selves when we're like at the height of mating capabilities.

Yeah. Yep. Look at her meat, right? Exactly. So that would be the time where you should be the most attractive to the opposite sex so that you have the ability to reproduce successfully. So definitely lines up there. And it's definitely a special treasure that only lasts a couple days, unfortunately, but at least we have that to look forward to you each month. Yes. So next would be the ludial phase. Yes. So last part of the menstrual cycle is the ludial phase. The ludial phase is characterized by the formation of a structure called the corpus luteum in ovaries. So basically what happens is the cells that formed the follicle during the follicular phase, when the egg has left the follicle, the corpus luteum

is essentially what forms within those cells that were comprising the follicle. And the corpus luteum releases progesterone, which ultimately its job is to prepare the uterus for pregnancy, but luteal phase is really characterized by the rise of progesterone. Having said that, estrogen levels also do rise during the luteal phase, so we get both a rise in progesterone and in estrogen. And importantly, the rise in progesterone leads to an increase in basal body temperature. by about a half to one degree Fahrenheit, and this is very reliable. So what that means is that if you successfully ovulated, if an egg was released from a follicle,

whether or not it was fertilized doesn't matter, but if an egg was released from a follicle, and your progester levels go up as a result, that means your basal body temperature is going to reliably increase by up to one degree Fahrenheit post-ovulation. And that's what technologies and platforms like natural cycles leverage. So natural cycles allows you to, track your basal body temperature. You basically take your temperature every morning, first thing in the morning over the course of just every day is a good practice to get in the habit of. And when ovulation is confirmed, essentially what happens is you see that bump in basal body temperature.

And that allows you to know that yes, ovulation happened, which means that you're no longer fertile. You're no longer able to fertilize that egg because ovulation's already occurred and the egg is already disintegrated and the corpusoleum is already forming, which is leading to that rise in progesterone, which is increasing the basal body temperature. And so this is a really important way, very simple also for anybody to be able to track their cycle, even if you don't have the resources to purchase an LH monitor, the Enidot fertility monitor,

you can easily just measure your basal body temperature. You just want to make sure you get a thermometer that measures out to the 100th degree, so like two decimal points. If you use natural cycles, which we both use and recommend, they basically will send you the thermometer that they recommend. It comes with their branding and you download their app. And I think it's $10 a month.

And essentially every morning, you just go into the app. You take your temperature with the thermometer under your tongue all the way in the back. And it will beep when the temperature is confirmed and you just input that temperature into the app. They ask you a couple other questions. If you want, it basically says if you feel ill or you slept poorly, you can check that box. And that kind of will indicate that that temperature data may not be perfect. accurate because if you're under sleeping, that can lead to a lower basal body temperature

than would have been otherwise. Or if you're sick, you could have a slightly higher temperature than you wouldn't typically as well. So that's just the way to kind of monitor for outliers. And in addition, in the Natural Cycles app, they also have a place for you to put LH positive or LH negative. Now, remember, in the follicular phase, we talked about LH being that really important hormonal signal to trigger ovulation. So one thing that you can do that's really helpful, the Natural Cycles app helps you to do this is there are specific days in the app that it will say LH on the calendar. And LH is referring to this lutinizing hormone. And what it's basically saying is if you want to increase the accuracy of the algorithm of the app,

you can measure LH on this day and it will help them to tailor their algorithm and build it around your personal cycle to confirm the data so that you know that it's the most accurate possible to kind of really narrow that ovulatory window so that you can maximize your non-fertile green days so that you can have more unprotected sex without having to worry about getting pregnant. And so those LH days, if you have the resources and the desire to do that, you can use the Anito fertility monitor or you can use the drugstore LH test and you can just basically input whether it's a positive, which would mean basically anything other than zero, like any positive value for LH, that would mean that's positive. and if there's no reading for LH, it's non-detectable,

then you would basically just put negative. And that tells the app, the Natural Cycles app, that that's the LH data for that given day. And together with the LH data and the basal body temperature, that creates a more accurate algorithm that can help you, again, to reduce your red days, quote-unquote, your potentially fertile days and maximize your green days. Let me see here.

If there's anything else I wanted to mention here, Oh, well, just worth mentioning in the case there is a fertilized egg, you're still going through luteal phase, but what happens is if the egg becomes fertilized, then the corpus luteum actually persists for 12 weeks into pregnancy, and that's actually responsible for producing the progesterone that the body needs to undergo pregnancy for the first trimester. And then after that, another structure takes over for the corpus luteum, the placenta starts to produce its own progesterone, so the corpus luteum at that point will dissolve. But and the pregnant in the pregnant body will the placenta will take over progesterone production,

but in the non-fertilized egg scenario, we're essentially just going to get dissolution of the corpus luteum in the latter half of the luteal phase. And ultimately what that means is that because the corpus luteum is responsible for making both the progesterone and the estrogen that rise during luteal phase, as the corpus luteum dissolves, those hormones start to decline. And once estrogen and progesterine levels, a threshold amount that triggers menstruation or bleeding. It triggers your period to come on, and that restarts the cycle and puts you back at the beginning of the follicular phase, with day one of the follicular phase, always being the first day of bleeding. I think that makes

a lot of sense. Just like culturally, if you're trying to keep track of any cycle, you want something that's a reliable marker. And despite women's cycles being a varying length, some people could have much longer ludial phases for whatever reason. They may have, instead of 14 days, they could have, let's say, a 16 or 17-day luteal phase, it would be hard to use any other day other than the first day of bleeding as the day one. So the day one is initiating the cycle. It's the first day of bleeding. And then the length of follicular and luteal phases can differ from person to person. But on average, they're about 14 days each with like a total of a 28 to 31-day cycle in most women. And I think the luteal phase, so most women,

in, you know, whether you're educated or not in this area, I think you're all well aware of it and you may not even realize it because this is where we get all of our symptoms of things, right? So we're getting PMS, we're getting food cravings, you might be getting acne, you might be holding water weight. So is there anything else you want to add, you know, to explain why you're feeling those symptoms? Yeah, sure. So there's a ton of research on this topic. And I would even say, despite the body of research, there's not a huge understanding of

what causes PMS specifically. I have some theories about the ratio of progesterone to estrogen, having some relationship to the way we feel. And we also know that in the modern day environment, that there's quite a bit of estrogen dominance that has become problematic in some women, especially in ludial phase. This is probably related to a mix of things could be like those PFS or the microplastics and things that basically aromatize testosterone into estrogen. it's also affecting men, like there's more estrogen dominance in men as well.

And I think we're supposed to have, ideally, a specific ratio of progesterone to estrogen. I think what that ratio exactly looks like could vary from person to person. I don't know if we have an idea of what a healthy baseline would be for that. But what I will say is that typically during ludial phase, this is a time period where people tend or women tend to feel like they put on a little bit of weight. Often that is water weight. there can be a relationship between progesterone or the ratio of progesterone to estrogen and holding excess water. In addition to that, which could partially explain that as well is the fact that energy expenditure goes up during luteal phase, but also calorie intake tends to also go up. So people, women tend to have more cravings or eat more calories, but also their energy expenditure is higher to kind of compensate for that.

But specifically, carbohydrate cravings also go up. And the higher carbs that you eat, the more water weight you retain just through the synthesis of glycogen, which holds more water. And so you're just basically holding more water with the stored carbohydrates versus, like, gaining fat. It may not necessarily be fat. It could just be holding excess water weight in that way that could make the scale go up, but maybe not necessarily changing your body composition per se. Outside of that, there are some people do experience breakouts in response to shifting into ludial phase. We do know progesterine, of course, is rising during this.

time progesterone can signal or trigger sebum production or like the oils in the skin, which can cause issues with acne in some people, depending on their skin types and maybe other triggers in their environment or triggers in their diet. There can be a variety of things that can create this. I don't think everybody's just doomed to get acne during their ludial phase, as we were just talking about before this. Once you start just bringing awareness to your cycle and like understanding when you're getting breakouts or when you're feeling puffy, it starts to open up a bunch of doors for you to just do some investigating into like changing certain variables in your life, whether it's the way you're exercising or the way you're eating, the way you're sleeping or your stress levels, um,

to try to figure out like, okay, if I modulate this behavior, is it improving my, am I not getting acne anymore or am I feeling a little less puffy during my luteal phase? So it becomes a really fun way to like be detective in your own life and start to improve your symptoms and to feel more stable, let's say. Um, let's see. Outside of that, I think maybe we can just move into the take-homes. Did you have anything else you wanted to add for PMS and stuff? I guess we can get into it with the anecdotes. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, that's true. So after I'm going to give you guys the take-home messages for the cycle tracking and the female hormones portion. And then we're going to talk about our own experiences being on the birth control pill for a decade each. And our experience is coming off of them as well. also just for your guys' knowledge. I mean, we've now both seen both sides of the equation

and can really attest to the power of taking a cycle tracking approach and its impact on your health, not only physical health, but also mental health, and your connection to your body. So, but briefly first, just your major take-homes for this. The mental cycle has very specific characteristics of each portion of the cycle, each phase, that are trackable. So follicular phase, the main trackable component there would be lutenizing hormone

and follicle-stimulating hormone to a certain extent, though I would say LH is the more important tracker. In this case, you can track LH via either the pharmacy LH trackers that you can get there, also urine tests, or the Enidofertility Monitor, which measures LH, FSH, estrogen, and progesterone. That's what I personally use and recommend, but either way would be fine. If you don't want to measure LH or you don't have the resources to do so, you can simply use basal body temperature tracking to determine whether or not you're ovulating each month.

You can do that by using a company like Natural Cycles, which is about $10 a month for the app membership, and they send you the thermometer, and you just track your basal body temperature first thing in the morning, every morning, and that allows you to even independent of measuring any hormones directly. you can know for a fact whether or not you're ovulating if your temperature goes up, you know, in the days following ovulation. And the Natural Cycles app, I didn't mention this before, but it will give you, based on your previous month's data, it will give you a predicted ovulation day. And so that may or may not be accurate, and you can further verify the accuracy of that

predicted day by using a test like the Anito monitor or the LH test at the pharmacy. And once that temperature, basalbide temperature, goes up by that 0.5 to 1 degree, after the predicted ovulation day. That's when the app will turn all your day is green, which means that you're no longer, you have to worry about getting pregnant. You're now like, you can have unprotected sex. You're not going to get pregnant. So that would be the major take home there. And then just to reiterate the total fertile windows between five and seven days, and this is because that sperm can survive in the cervical mucus for up to five days. So you need to account for that in combination with the roughly two days that it takes for

ovulation to occur and the egg to dissolve. Just an additional plug on the Natural Cycles app. We're not sponsored by them at all, but they are wonderful. And there's just some other features that you can use the app for. So in addition to tracking your cycle, you can also track all of your symptoms. You can track if you're having excessive breakouts. You can track if you're feeling more fatigue. If you're experiencing illness, I don't know if I'm

forgetting some other examples that they have on there. But it's wonderful if you are someone that has a fluctuating type of period where maybe one month you're really stable and the next month you're all over the place very chaotic and moody or just not yourself. And then also, as Lexi said, you can get a prediction as well. So after you use the app more and more, you then will, it kind of understands your pattern. So if you are someone that has and more consistent period, it will predict for you so you can even look a couple months ahead and kind of know I'm going to be ovulating this time of the month or something of that sort. So it is really, really helpful.

And eventually, I don't recommend this, but I'm just saying you could stop using your temperature and logging it. And it would still track it for you. It would still know because you've been doing it for so long. So if you missed a couple days or whatever, it would still know where you're at. It would still be able to follow you along. Yeah, that's actually a really good point. It's also a way I've used the app where it's like if I'm trying to plan a vacation and I don't want to be in my period, I can kind of see ahead of time like, oh, this is my predicted period will be for two months from now.

Like maybe I want to plan the vacation on the weekend before that or something like that, which is a really helpful thing. And also worth noting that when you first use the app, you're going to have way more red days because the algorithm doesn't know your cycle yet. and also the more irregular your periods are or the less predictable like the length of your cycle is, the more red days you're going to have just because there's a level of uncertainty with regards to that ovulatory window. But if you use the LH testing, even if you have an irregular period, then that will further shorten the red window just because you're gaining a level of like accuracy and precision with that marker in addition to the basal body temperature markers. But it is really important to note that even if you have irregular periods, even if your hormones are all over the place, cycle tracking will work as a method of contraception or also as a method of conception, depending on what your goals are. You can use these technologies and these approaches for either goal and it's going to be very, very helpful.

Especially if you are trying to get pregnant and you've had trouble conceiving, then it's really helpful to look at something like the Enito monitor because you can see like, what are my hormones actually do? doing? Like, am I getting a spike in LH at all? Am I getting a spike in LH? But then, you know, there's no egg that's being produced. So I never get the rise in progesterone. Because if your basal body temperature never goes up post-ovulation, that means there was no egg that was actually released. And so that's something that you would want to know if you're trying to pinpoint what's going wrong in your your approach to actually conceiving. So if you're not ovulating, the approach might be different than, let's say you are ovulating, but maybe you're just missing the window, the timing window, for example. So those are just some notes there, but I think this is an approach that should be taught to every

girl starting in middle school. And it's absolutely criminal, in my opinion, that we're not educated on our bodies as women. You know, we kind of have to seek this information for ourselves. We should be, all girls should have their own health class in middle school and they should be just taught this from day one. So there's no sort of mystery or fearmongering around getting pregnant or sex so that you can just have the facts and that just gives you control and consciousness in your life so that you can optimize for whatever goal that you may have. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of crazy to think about. I don't think I heard about tracking my cycle until I was in my 20s. Literally. And so I'm already, what, close to 15 years on my period at that point or 10 years or 12 years.

And then you don't have all the facts. You don't have all the information. And this is truly, in my opinion, in yours, that it's the best way to track if you want to get pregnant or if you don't. Exactly. And it just gives you such like an in-depth awareness into the cyclical nature of the woman's body, like your own body. It's just, it's much different than men. As much as we want to equate men and women in modern society, we aren't the same and we shouldn't be the same. We each have unique strengths and differences that should be highlighted instead of trying to like negate them. And that also means that maybe we can't like work at the same. the same intensity around like the entire month. Maybe we have periods of time where we need to be

slower and just like take it easy a little bit or just work at a different pace and that's okay. And that should be socially acceptable as well, I think. And just to like honor that in yourself. If you feel like you don't have the energy to go, go, go, maybe that's your body asking you to slow down a little bit and just like be more aware of what's going on internally or maybe just focus on something else or maybe, you know, go for a walk instead of doing hit workout, for example. Like maybe I think there's room. That's not to say this will be for every case, but there's certainly room to just like give yourself grace and listen to the signals of your body's telling you with regards to your workouts and your dietary patterns too. So it's not like

always just about restricting yourself and forcing yourself to, you know, do the hard workout or eat perfectly clean. And I think, I mean, that's not an excuse to just like eat whatever either, but just at least honoring the signals that are coming and maybe instead of having the ice cream, you could just have some fruit or something else sweet that your body might desire that can kind of scratch that itch. So I think just reconnecting with our bodies, it can be such a powerful practice with regards to our health in general, but in particular with regards to cycle tracking and understanding our menstrual cycle and whether or not, you know, you want to get pregnant now or later, it's really good to develop this relationship earlier so that you have that wisdom and awareness

moving forward when you do potentially want to have children, for example. That's true. It's really crucial. And I can say for myself, like, I've, over the last maybe, what, seven or eight years, I think, you know, you and I have kind of reached this, like, enlightened phase of our lives where we've just not all at once, but we've slowly, like, just, like, made these decisions to now be more in tune with our bodies, give ourselves more grace, you know, be more aware of our mental health, make decisions to make our mental health better. And, you know, for me, maybe it's saying no to going out or saying no to plans. I'm more introverted. So me staying home is perfect. It's my go-to. I mean, I love seeing people.

I love seeing my friends and family, but, you know, it's always hard when you have that extra pressure from maybe it's external or maybe you have the internal pressure from yourself that you have to force yourself to go do things that maybe you're just physically not able to do and you don't understand why you don't have the energy and half of it could be just exactly what we're talking about here and you don't you don't realize that it's just your biology and you know your external factors and your lifestyle is so so so so important to how your body will function and I think most people don't really realize that. They hear a lot of like rhetoric about, you know, diet and exercise, diet and exercise, which are absolutely essential. But there's so much more that goes into it.

And I don't know that everybody gets enough information about everything else that can impact you. Like you were saying, your sleep cycle, crucial. If your sleep is off, everything in your life is off, right? You know, it could be the things that you use in your house. I mean, if you use, like hormone disruptors, right? I don't know if you want to dive into anything about that. Cleaning products and stuff. Yeah. There's so many things just in the home and you think you're helping yourself and your family and lo and behold, there's evidence now that they're not doing the best thing for us, right? So there's so much that can just be said about all of this that is just totally maybe throwing you out of whack and you don't even know it. Yeah, absolutely.

And it really starts with like there's the phrase test don't guess. Well, that's, it can be really helpful or like assessing, not guessing and trying to, you know, you can automatically already feel there's something not right. Well, once you can figure out what exactly isn't right, then it becomes an easier, more straightforward strategy of actually approaching it. Another thing that I was thinking of with regards to the sleep and like other factors that are influencing the way that you're feeling, especially as a woman going through your cycles, is also like the circadian health. And I'll probably, we should probably maybe do another episode on like what to do if your hormones are out of whack, because I think that's going to be a popular topic.

A little bit out of the scope of this one, just because it could probably be a two-hour conversation in itself. But there's this pathway called the leptin melanocortin pathway. Leptin is this hormone secreted by fat that's like a fat thermostat. It tells your brain how much body fat you have. And when it drops to a certain level, it triggers appetite hormones so that you can eat more and that you can basically bump your fat reserves back up to maintain some sort of stable set point.

But this leptin-melanacortin pathway, the melanocortin portion is related to, melanin production and the Palm C story. If you followed me and listen to any of my other podcast, we've talked about Palm C quite a bit. It's related to UV light exposure and in the light from light in your eyes and on your skin. POMC is produced that creates factors including alpha and beta MSH, which are the melanocytes stimulating hormones. Very tightly regulated with this, but most people don't know, and I've learned this from Dr. Jack Cruz is that leptin is also a major regulator of fertility and sex hormones in both men and women.

And so your leptin pathway is related not only to your body fat, but also to your light environment, your UV light exposure, aka your sun exposure. So if you have issues with your hormones, I'll just say briefly here that the first thing I would do is to dial in your circadian health. And if you want more information on that, I have a free lesson on light biology. interactions. If you go on my Instagram and my link in bio, there's a link there that you can enroll in the free lesson. And that comes with a free protocol on circadian health optimization. So if you don't know where to start and you know you have issues, not only in hormonal health, but if you just, you know,

you feel like you're not recovering well, you feel like you're kind of not being able to exercise to your capacity. Maybe you have a dysregulated appetite. Maybe you feel hungry all the time. Maybe you feel very moody or very anxious or depressed. This is the area that I would start by just really dialing in the light environment because it's relatively inexpensive. It's very straightforward and you can feel results almost immediately. So that's why I just wanted to share really quickly. If you do have issues of your hormones, check out that lesson. Dive in at the very least, even if it doesn't help your hormones directly, it's going to indirectly support your physiology so that you may have the chance to regulate your issues

without having to seek out other interventions. But sometimes it could be, let's say, a toxic carpet or mattress that you bought and it's off-gassing like these forever chemicals that are estrogenic and it's pushing your estrogen levels up too high or it could be your cleaning products or it could be gosh just a whole number of environmental hazards that we have today that we just never experience in the evolutionary environment so it can get kind of crazy trying to like think about every variable and every exposure that we have but we can only just do what we can to try to make good decisions in the moment invest our money into high quality products that we, that they're made by companies that have shared values and ultimately, you know, that's

the best we can do other than just like, you know, just trying to build awareness where you can, not to get super anxious about it or obsessed, but just doing what we can where we come. Absolutely. Yes. So maybe now it would make sense for us to pivot into our stories, our respective stories on the birth control pill, how we ended up on it, what was the context within which that happened and also getting off of it. You want to start? Yes. Okay, sure. So I started on the birth control pill when I was 18 and I was just having very, very heavy periods and they told me, take this and it'll fix all your problems. And being none the wiser, I said, okay, this is what a medical professional is telling me to do. So you think that they're giving you good information. And, you know, my memory is not the best, but I don't really recall any type of,

of discussion or conversation with the doctor at the time where they were like giving me the informed information that I needed to make the decision. It was more like you don't have any other option and this is going to fix you and just take it. And I had just started college so I was out kind of out of the house and it just was kind of like at the time I just kind of wanted to listen to, I guess, the information given to me by someone that had authority, so to speak, or had more knowledge than me. And I didn't really have the personality to push back or say, no, this is bad. And up until that point, I hadn't heard any real negative information about birth control. It was more just kind of like, you might get a

blood clot, keep an eye out. And that was really all I had known. So being generally healthy, and not having any issues with any previous medications, I wasn't too worried about it, and I didn't have a fear of it. So I was on it, and I mean, to say that I was in this, like, cloudy spiral, like, of dismay is probably the best way I could describe it. Just all of my years in college seemed to have been, like, a blur. everything seemed to kind of have a fog around it. I remember it being kind of depressing and just anxious all the time. But given that I was in a new environment to begin with, I don't know if I, it's more like, you know, hindsight is 2020, right? So at the time, I was like, oh, this is just because I'm under stress in school and I'm just, this is how it's going to be for until I graduate

and then I'll be fine. So I never even made a single connection that it could have been related to this pill that I was on. And so I went through school and even though there were ups and downs, you know, whatever that most college kids would go through, I didn't think much of it. And then I graduated and started my professional career and still, you know, it seemed like a little lighter because the stress was a little bit alleviated. It was different stress, but it was. wasn't it wasn't gone, but it wasn't the same. And I still just had like this constant tightening around my chest. I think that's the best way I can describe it. I just always felt like overly anxious about everything. I think Lexi can attest to it. Like every decision I had to make,

I had to check with her. Every, every, you know, interaction I had with a person. I would relay it to her and ask her if I did the right thing or, you know, what does this mean? Why did this person say this? I would just overthink every single thing that happened to me. And it's so weird to think about it now because at the time, like, I never attributed it to a pill. I just thought that's how I was. I thought that this was like what I was going to be my whole life. I just thought that I was always going to overthink. I was always going to be completely anxious. I was going to have these up and down moods where I was going to be super happy one day and then just like feel very doom and gloom the next. And it wouldn't necessarily correlate to a period or tracking or my cycle in any way.

It was more just, you know, kind of like life events, like as things would happen. I think naturally, obviously, you're going to have an emotional reaction to things, you know, boys or jobs or, you know, things with family. but the reaction that I felt was always, I think, more exacerbated or just over the top. Not that I was screaming or, you know, doing anything chaotic, but I just felt like more dismal about it than I think I should have. And I guess I had a terrible dating track for a period of time. know, very, very questionable dating choices for a little while. And I think this is something we

touched on before we started recording. But something that I think most women don't realize about the pill is that it actually alters your body's way of registering pheromones. So when you encounter somebody, it attracts you to people that actually do not coincide with you. Attraction is a very biological thing, and people don't always know that, but your interest in a person is actually mostly based on how your body responds to their pheromones. So if you encounter the wrong person in this cloudy, whatever state you want to call it, you know, on birth control, you think that they're like the perfect person. You think this guy is going to be my husband. And then your friends are like, what? Why? I don't understand. And then, you know, a couple years later after things blow over and you're past them, you realize, yeah, I don't understand why I like them at all. And I think I can say I know why. It was birth control. I don't know if you've had any experiences like that, too.

I mean, so it was odd for me because like obviously I'm with Keith and we've been together since I was on the pill. We've been together for over 10 years now. And so I mean, what I will say is that I feel like our relationship dynamic changed a lot when I got off the pill in a really good way. Yeah. Like I was able to establish boundaries in my life in a way that I never had before and like feel really good about it. And not like constantly just worrying about what other people were going to think. and just instead like having some conviction in my life? Yeah.

Yeah. I can completely agree with that because, I mean, I met my fiancé before we, before I got on the, off the pill. Yeah. But we weren't really dating yet. But, you know, the way that I would like interact with him is completely different than how I interact now. And completely agreed about the conviction. Like, you just have like this additional like sense of self. You just have this like empowerment.

You feel in control. even if you were someone that's had anxiety or depression or any of those types of nervous system dysregulation, you know, I can't even put it into words how it really feels when you go from one to the other. All I can say is that the difference is significant. And you just feel more confident. I think you just have this presence. about you. I don't know if others really pick up on it or not. Maybe close friends and family would. But I mean, I think between you and I, we can say that like the change between the two of us on and off the pill is drastic, right? Absolutely dramatic. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, so I ended up staying

on the pill until 2019, I think we discussed, right? That was around the time. I think it was January. Yeah. And what led me to. decide that I was done with it, I was, so initially, in addition to having like heavy bleeding and everything, I also was having, you know, breakouts. So I was really interested in staying on it at the time, you know, when I first got on it because, you know, no girl wants acne or anything like that. And it seemed to be doing the trick. But then something about whatever brand I was on, I think they changed it to a different generic of some sort. And then my skin started to get worse.

And I was like, what the heck is happening? The whole point of this was to, you know, keep my skin under control and also, you know, keep this bleeding under control. The bleeding was fine. And I think I would text Lexi maybe every other day and just say what's wrong with my face. You know, my skin was horrendous. I was following the pill that I thought I had been taking for the last decade and, under

to me, I think something in the formulation changed or something of that sort. And it basically just made me fed up with it. I was sick of it. I was like, you know what? I want to really try to do something different. I didn't have, I didn't think that I had a need for it anymore. I mean, I think the best advice would be to do it in coordination maybe with a doctor or a medical professional. I did not. I chose for myself to just stop taking it. I don't know if there's any other, I don't know what the risks are to just stop doing it, but I can just tell you that I did. And I never look back. I just never look back. My skin still was going kind of up and down for a little while after. I think it takes a couple months for your body to regulate and to kind of get back

into its, because think about it if you're not producing all of those hormones endogenously for 10 years and you're only getting this exogenous dose of everything, it's going to take a little while for it to kick back in and get back into its rhythm. So I felt pretty confident that my body would do that. And, you know, I was already into nutrition at the time. I was always working out. So I felt pretty good about it. And I just kind of stuck with it and was patient. and Lexi was the one that had showed me the natural cycles app so that kind of got me really focused in on the actual cycle of it instead of just kind of being like, is it going to show up? Is it going to be like a full seven-day period or six-day?

Is it going to just be spotting? And so that was really, really helpful, especially in those first few months because you definitely will have like a little bit of a leeway period or transition period between normal producing periods and then maybe a little bit of spotting. Maybe you won't get it at all. And then it should, it should, assuming that you're following proper nutrition and everything, you should have a generally consistent cycle after that. Yeah, I was going to ask, did you get a period like the next cycle after you got off the pill or was there a delay at all for you? I think there was a delay in when it arrived so it wasn't my typical 28 day or 29 days that it would normally show up. But I think it

came around six weeks after. But I did still get one, yes. It just kind of shifted. That's great. Do you remember how long it felt until you felt like less anxious and like relieved? It was almost immediate or was there some delay there too? I would say maybe within like a month, again, probably something to do with just your body trying to catch up and understand that it has to actually produce these hormones again and just just the non you know heavy feeling um i think that it takes a little while for your brain to catch up to that as well um but yeah i think it was about a month yeah i mean it makes sense honestly it's incredible that in within a month or two you can like feel great after being in this state for 10 years. Like that's remarkable how flexible the body is and how

like malleable it is. Because I mean, think about it just from like the brain perspective, if you're constantly running these anxiety pathways, like they're getting really like hardwired in. And so getting a new input going and making that the new like norm or the like the new foundation is it's pretty remarkable that can happen pretty quickly. And I mean, maybe should you want to share anything else or I'll pivot into my story? Please go ahead. Okay, yeah. So I started the pill when I was 17 and it was for hormonal acne. I was getting terrible cystic acne from middle school through high school. And it was terrible. Like I would get these huge cystic pimples on my cheeks. And I swear like when I pop them, it would be like an eighth of a teaspoon of pus would come out. It was horrific. Also oddly satisfying, but horrific. And it was just relentless all over my face. And I went to the doctor. They suggested birth control that. I don't remember getting any sort of indication that there were harms other than, like, oh, maybe blood clots in a very, you know, scarce number of people.

And I started the pill, and I was on it from when I was 17 until 2018 of October. So, gosh, how old was I then? I think I was like, I must have been, it was like five years ago, maybe 26 years old when I got off of it. So from like 17 to 26, so about a decade. and during that time, so my acne did improve. Worth mentioning, though, and I think we kind of alluded to this earlier, but when you're on the pill, you don't have a cycle anymore. There is no cycle.

Your inner cycles are all shut off because your menstrual cycle requires fluctuations in progesterone, estrogen, LH, and FSAH for those cycles to actually occur. So what the birth control pill is doing is it's going in synthetic estrogen and synthetic progesterone, and it's shutting down your body's natural production of those hormones, and it's keeping everything else suppressed, too, like the LH and the FSA, so you're not getting any peaks in LH, which are triggering ovulation. So you're not ovulating, you're not having cyclical variation in your hormones. It's just like this flat state, and then you get like a withdrawal bleed on the placebo week, but that's not an actual period. It's not a real period.

and something I noticed a lot and maybe just to kind of compare and contrast between being on the pill and off the pill is when I was on the pill, every time I would have like the withdrawal bleed, the blood would be like brownish, like black. Like it would be dark and it would be like muddy looking. And from the moment I stopped taking the pill. So when I stopped taking it, I was also using some herbs from bear blends. They make one called Moon Lodge. It's supposed to help with regulating period because I thought maybe I would have some issues, you know, after being on it for so long. to have like a normal period again. So I was using some of those herbals in like a T form. And my first period that I had off the pill, it was like this bright red color. Like it looks so healthy. And there was,

there was none of like the, you know, I can see like clots sometimes. And like there was none of that. It was just like bright red. It only lasted like three days, four days. And then there was nothing. And there were minimal cramps. It just felt much cleaner. And it just looked much healthier too compared to on the pill. it just seemed like this old stagnant blood that was coming out that just felt very unhealthy to look at. Though, I mean, honestly, I didn't really know much else because I will say when I went on the pill, I had very irregular periods prior to that because it also coincided with my extreme weight loss. So when I was obese, I was getting very irregular periods and I think my hormones were just all messed up. And so, like, I would sometimes not get a period or just like they would be long and heavy or sometimes barely at all.

So it was kind of all over the place. So I didn't really know what like normal healthy looked like. But when I went on the pill, that was coinciding with my like total health transformation with regards to the weight loss and like getting my fitness in check and like working out religiously. So I changed a lot of things at once. So I will say in that way, I didn't notice necessarily the negatives of the birth control because I noticed so much of the positives of the other things that I was getting in check in my life, like improving in my life. but the main change that I noticed when I got off of the pill and it was immediate was that it felt like somebody just turned the volume all the way up on my intuition and like I've always had a very strong gut feeling like an intuition around whether or not

you know a person was good or bad for me or a situation was good or bad for me but it was like the volume was times 100 when I stopped taking the pill and I just felt so like grounded and centered and Lindsay mentioned like confidence earlier. It's like the sense of confidence and just like assuredness that like you can trust yourself. You got yourself because that voice, that inner voice is actually online, able to communicate with you again. Compared to on the pill, it's like, yeah, you don't feel secure in yourself. You don't feel confident.

You don't feel like you got yourself because you literally don't because that connection is severed. You're very disconnected from your core nature. And so the reconnection of those pathways was just totally life changing in an instant. And like I mentioned earlier, it improved my relationship drastically. Like I was always somebody before who was like in a constant fawn state that was just like trying to avoid conflict, afraid to set boundaries because I didn't want to make anybody angry, very conflict avoidant and just like not standing up for my true beliefs and my integrity. And that completely changed almost overnight. Like I literally, it became unthinkable to not actually like speak my truth and like have strong boundaries when like the alternative would be to literally feel like I'm lying to myself.

like that feeling of like dissonance you get inside when you're lying. And so that feeling, that internal feeling became so strong that it was like impossible to not follow that guidance. And that was something that was just so remarkable. And I remember feeling shocked because it's like, wow, I never really thought it had that big of an effect on my body. Like being on the pill, it just seemed so normalized. Like everybody was doing it.

Exactly. And then meanwhile, like everybody is doing it. And it's really harming people. It's really harming women. and our ability to actually like live a life that we want to live and live in integrity with ourselves and and live integrity with our natural rhythms and our natural cycles. I think it's such a beautiful process that if we can connect to that, it gives us such immense opportunity to just grow and evolve and find the relationship of our dreams

and live the life of our dreams. But we have to give it a chance and actually turn that voice back on in order to get that guidance. Completely agree. it's life-changing. That's the best way I can describe it. It really is. And the best part is, with this information on cycle tracking and the technologies available today, you literally don't need the pill. Just if you don't want to get pregnant, you don't have to get pregnant. And I'm also certain, even though we don't get taught about this, but I would be willing to bet that all of the ancient cultures, women in those cultures probably knew exactly how to track their cycles based on how they were feeling.

They probably looked at the moon or the sun or the star or something and, yeah, 100%. Exactly. Exactly. So the whole idea that is like kind of indoctrinated into young girls that like you're just going to get pregnant and it's totally out of your control and just like fear mongering about it is I think completely baseless. And if we connect to that inner wisdom and also just the information and tools available, we have total sovereignty and control over whether or not we get pregnant and you know when we should use protection versus not and just like what part of our cycle that we're in and using that information to kind of. guide the way that we're living our life from day to day. I think it's a really beautiful way to live life allowing your body to kind of guide that and your inner knowing to kind of shape the way that you're approaching your life instead of just trying to be a man, which I think this is a whole another part of the conversation is like, I feel like the birth control pill is the most anti-feminist thing that ever came because it's literally turning women into men who like can have meaningless sex, who can work the nine to five and be the cog in the in the wheel of society and have

no cycles that are dictating energy levels or motivation or anything like that. You're just flatlining and just becoming this like, I don't know, like a workhorse or just another number. It's, we're not supposed to be like men. We're very unique. And I mentioned this earlier too. We're unique. We're different. We have important differences. And I think another thing that like the feminist movement right now is getting wrong potentially is that like women shouldn't be protected because we're fragile, we should be protected because we're valuable. Like we, without women, there is no continuation of the species. Like, obviously, men contribute to that process as well, but without the women's bodies, wisdom, you can't actually build

more human life. So there's an immense wisdom and, and guidance to be had there, but we're kind of suppressing it as a society by downplaying the differences between the sexes and also just totally shutting off the extremely magical and intuitive line of information that women get from their own bodies. Yeah. I couldn't have said it better. Yeah. So let's see.

Is there anything else do you think we should cover? I think we did a pretty damn good job. I liked your suggestion of maybe doing a separate conversation about how to repair some of these hormonal imbalances, maybe some of the steps you could take. I'm sure there might be some questions about some of the environmental disruptors that we mentioned earlier. Yeah, I think it would be good. I mean, if everybody wants to hear more, if you liked our conversation, I assume. You made it this far? Yeah, I assume if you're still listening, then you want to hear more. So maybe we'll schedule something else. Yes, let's do that. We'll plan on a part two and three and more. I would love to do more of this

with you. I think it's just the most fun doing it together and yeah, and we'll keep the conversations going. But if you liked it, share it far and wide, all the women in your life. You, if you're a woman, just listen to the podcast, listen to it again, take notes, share it with as many women as you can. We just really need to kind of get back to our roots and get back to our inner knowing and just allow us to like turn this sinking ship away from the freaking iceberg it's going towards. I think just we've got so much wrong, society. We need to turn it around and it all comes back to personal responsibility and individuals making decisions about their own life. We have to stop deferring to authority figures and telling us what to do and get back in touch with the inner authority figure that we all have.

As Dr. Jack said, the inner guru, we all have one. We just have to reconnect with it and it will guide us to what is good for us. So on that note, I just want to leave you with that. And I hope you enjoy the podcast and thank you so much lindsay for joining us this was so fun thanks for having me