#196 — What do you really know about your menstrual cycle—and where did that information come from?

Young girls and women are often taught about menstrual cycles in relationship to two things: periods and pregnancy.

That is, don't get pregnant! And also, periods are gross. 

This is such limited and almost useless information that doesn't support overall health and wellbeing. Plus, pills are often prescribed as a blanket solution to fix irregular cycles, alter heavy periods, or manage symptoms. 

Then, many women are flummoxed when they come off the pill after years or decades of use to find the old problems return immediately. The symptoms are only hidden by the regulating power of the pill, not resolved.

In this episode, we look back at our conversation from Episode #108 with Lisa Hendrickson-Jack where we talk about fertility, menstruation, and the vital signs of our bodies.

Lisa is the author of The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility. She is a certified fertility awareness educator and a holistic reproductive health practitioner. She teaches women how to chart their menstrual cycles for natural birth control, for conception and for monitoring your overall health. Her book, The Fifth Vital Sign is all about why your cycle is one of your vital signs in your body if you are a woman and how it can play a powerful tool in diagnosing and healing our bodies.

In this episode we talk about: 

• Optimizing your fertility as the gateway to healing your body.
• Being a medical advocate for yourself: why it’s extremely difficult and also crucial to your long-term well-being. 
• The idea that in any examining room there are two experts: the doctor, who is the expert in a field of medicine, and the patient, who is the expert in their body and their experience. 
• How a family history of painful periods, fibroids, and hysterectomies led her to seek out cycle charting from an early age.
• Lisa debunks the myth that regular ovulation is only important when you want children, because we need to recognize that the menstrual cycle is part of our entire biology and physiology. She presents an evidence-based approach to fertility awareness and menstrual cycle optimization. 
• How the body is seen as low—base, even!—and unpredictable. That means that men and women have been culturally conditioned not to experience life through our bodies. This becomes a bigger problem for birthing and postpartum women, who can experience the trauma of birth itself and then can compound that damage by feeling like they can’t or shouldn’t listen to their bodies reaction to trauma in the wake of birth. 

By only revisiting our cycles when we decide to try to conceive, we miss out on the opportunity to come into deep understanding with our bodies and to heal ourselves rather than mask symptoms. Today, we get to talk to Lisa Hendrickson-Jack about how in taking the time to chart, learn about and understand our cycles, we can not only optimize our fertility but gain crucial information about our bodies. Join us as we talk about the menstrual cycle, fertility, and the opportunities we all have to learn more about our bodies simply by paying closer attention to them.

FULL SHOW NOTES: https://startupparent.com/108

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THE WISE WOMEN'S COUNCIL: https://startupparent.com/wwc