Cycle Syncing 101: The Science Behind a Symptom-Free Period with Alisa Vitti

Just here living the experiment of what happens when you support the female hormonal ecosystem for a long time.

the body and the in freedom rhythm. Yes, it gives us sort of the timing on our ovulation and menstruation, but it also impacts our metabolic system, our stress response system, our immune system, and our brain so it just was a very logical thing, just like we have a method of caring for our circadian rhythm. We don't think of it that way, but our sleep routine is our method

for circadian rhythm support, right. We needed a method to support this in Fredian rhythm because the fact that we didn't know we had one and we were not catering to it was creating a lot of dysregulation in these other systems of the body, which is the answer to why are so many women compared to men suffering with

hormonal imbalances because we're dysregulating this Infredian rhythm. So I looked at the four phases of the menstrual cycle, which each have their own unique hormone ratio, and I wanted to map out a diet, fitness, and lifestyle program that would really optimize each of those hormone ratios so that we could sort of experience a symptom free journey throughout the month, because that is really how we're designed to feel.

the body. And we're going to wake up when the sunrises, we're going to go to sleep when the moon comes out. And it must have been such an easy way because it was so in tune with nature to also be in tune with their own body. But somehow that kind of message has been lost the more and more things that were introduced into our lives.

with the rhythm of their bodies. But absolutely industrialization has sort of interrupted that the experience, and so many of us don't have a good visceral sense of which phase of the cycle we're in. We know when we're bleeding, but most women feel like surprised by well, you know, where am I, and like, oh, my period's coming. It feels always like an unknown always.

data formally right now, we're incredible. I mean, women in the first thirty days had an eighty percent reduction in their PMS symptom burden and severity, and that only improved over the three months that we were doing the intervention. It's really exciting because you know, we go to the doctor saying I don't feel right with my cycle, and usually we're prescribe birth control pills, which don't fix what

is wrong. In fact, they also shut off your Infredian rhythm and stop ovulation, which is a huge theft from your future self, your postmenopausal self, because every ovulation you have today puts let's say bucks in your health bank account postmenopausely for your brain, your bone, and your heart. Right, so every ovulation is cardio osteo and or protective today but also for those decades that you will be no longer ovulating postmenopausala. Yeah, so you want to be you

want to have a healthy cycle. It's it's your health insurance for the future, but it's also your current health insurance. And in twenty seventeen, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists decreed that your cycle should be considered a fifth vital sign, like the other things we take in the emergency room, like your temperature and your blood pressure. So we do have to look at things like PMS as a big red flag, like you have something the equivalent

of having a fever. You want to take action around that. You don't want to joke about it. You don't want to like downplay it. I am here to validate that if you're feeling like something is off, it's off, and to encourage you and give you hope that actually starting to align your self care with your cycle phases really does work.

But if I want to go through my day, do my work, get cook do all the things that I normally do, I can easily do it and I don't have crumps and I don't feel like the whole world is ending around me. And it stabilized my mood so much more. And it's You're right, It's such simple shifts, and I would love to get into.

it's about to carry. And I was like, well, that's a good we call that a good problem to have. Yeah. Actually, so that's what I want for every woman is to just where you feel like your experience, where you feel good every day of the cycle. There is no better cycle phase than I love them all, like it's like having four different children, Like you wouldn't love one more

than the other. They're all beautiful and they have different you know, energies and properties, and they're different and beautiful in each way.

anything yet. I may do those things in the future as needed, but I'm interested in playing the long game of how can I use basic biological systems support which cycle sinking really is a great example of that. How can I use that to extend the functionality of my ovaries. Remember, the ovaries are the first organ in the body to age, and we are aging our ovaries so much faster than we realize because we are not taking care of our

cycle phases. We're putting in too many toxins, We're creating a lot of inflammation, and it's absolutely messing with ovarian function. And so that's why you have girls at six and a half who are going through puberty at six and a half. You have girls in their twenties who are doubled over in cramps, with major menstrual problems. You have

women in their thirties who cannot get pregnant. And you have women in their late thirties early forties who are showing stage two perimenopause symptoms meaning irregular cycles, hot flashes, night sweats, major mood disruption, and really just advancing through this process of ovarian aging so much faster. And I'm just here living the experiment of what happens when you support the female hormonal ecosystem for a long time.

approximating ovulation, if you're using that counting method. Although now in the world of you know, biometric devices, why guess, like use a device so that you know exactly when you're ovulating, whether that be basal body temperature tracking or your analysis that you can do at home, or a ring or a watch. I mean, there's just so many cool ways now, Like, there's no excuse not to know

when you're ovulating in which phase you're in. But I think from an energetic perspective, the way you relate to your cycle, I'd love for us to reevaluate what we consider the first phase, which is the follicular phase, the beginning when all the eggs are developing on the ovary and you're feeling like your estrogen's kind of coming back online and you're interested again in starting again. Just like your overy is starting again, you also are interested in

re engaging with life again in a fresh way. So then from a let's say metabolic perspective, we actually have a slowing down of our metabolism in this first half of the cycle, so we can we are more efficient calorically speaking, you can eat a little bit less, but you still going to feel really good from a blood sugar perspective, and our cortisol levels at rest are lower,

so that's what's happening. And ovulation, of course, we have sort of this wonderful ovulatory surge of estrogen and FSH and LH which stimulates the verbal and social centers of the brain, making us very social and all of that. And then we move into the second half of the cycle, the luteal phase and the menstrual phase. This is when metabolism speeds up and we need two hundred and seventy nine more calories per day, and this is when progestrone shows up to the party. The luteal phase is my

favorite phase. Oh okay, it's my favorite phase. It's the longest phase of the cycle, and when we think about just the concept of manifesting, it's also really beautifully baked into the menstrual cycle. This is the phase of the cycle where you do things right. You don't just idate and speak about it and talk about it with people.

You get to work right. And I love that it's the longest phase of the cycle because when you think about the arc of manifesting anything, right, you ideate it in the follicular phase, you speak it into existence in the ovulatory phase. Then you do things in alignment with that vision in the luteal phase, and then you evaluate and like you know, celebrate in the menstrual phase. Right.

So it's the longest phase, and it should be a phase where you feel calm and focused if you have adequate levels of progestrum resting CORESOL levels are a little higher at this time, so that's going to affect how we eat and how we exercise, which I'll go through in a second. Then menstruation is a beautiful phase as well, not to be discarded because we're bleeding. No. In fact, the right and left hemispheres of the brain are communicating

the most across the corpus colosum. So this is when you can really evaluate the facts and your feelings about any situation and just decide what you want to do right the next cycle. Right, because follicular phase is coming back up, you want to start planning, like what are you doing with your major life buckets? Right, So that's what's happening, let's say ten thousand foot view. How do

you care for each of these phases? In the first half of the cycle, we eat, you know, there's obviously the food chart from chapter four of the book is famous. Everybody's meming it, and there's so many Instagram posts. Everybody's done such a great job like putting their spin on it. I love it. But to get the correct one, please reference the book or the app, because there's now it's

like a game of telephone. I think a lot of people are excited about cycle sinking, and they're maybe misrepresenting it a little bit. So just make sure you get the right information. In the first half, you're going to be eating lighter foods, You're going to be focusing on gut health. You're going to be you know, you can do a little bit of extended fasting in the morning, not much past fourteen or fifteen hours, meaning from dinner

to breakfast. And then from an exercise perspective, you can go really aggressively with your cardio and your hit workouts in this phase second half of the cycle. As I said, since metabolism speeds up, why does it speed up because you're three D printing a little organ, the endometrium. Right, you're manufacturing this tissue out of the food that you're eating, and it takes more effort on your body's part to do that, so you need more calories. This is why

stabilizing your blood sugar is critical for progesterone production. We're very very tightly titrated to glucose and cortisol and progesterone, so you really do want to watch that in the luteal phase, which is why you'll see the food recommendations here are much more substantive. So if you're the smoothie salad girl, you're going to feel really comfortable in the

first half of the cycle. But in the second half, I want you to get more comfortable with your macro self, right, because you want to build like a nice bowl of grains, root vegetables, legomes, cook leafy greens and proteins and fats. A really well balanced macroplate is really going to be the thing that keeps you energized and keeping you away from any of that like PMS, you know, craving attack, hang the yeah, all that stuff that's your body trying

to save you from yourself. When you wake up at the bottom of a bag of crisps and you're like, oh, I'm back right after you've gone into a Grellin trance. That's all you are. You're in a neurotransmitter trance based on Grellin. Grellen has taken over. Your blood sugar has become so dysregulated that your brain is like, we got to help this person out. She doesn't know how to feed herself today, so we're going to give her an

overwhelming craving to get blood glucose levels up. And that's why we have this type of sort of irrational craving during a uteal phase. It's just because we're mismanaging blood sugger. How might you be mismanaging your blood sugar in this phase? Continuing to fast in the morning, right, you need to eat within thirty minutes upon waking, and substantial substantially in the luteal phase, so thirty grams of protein, about thirty to forty grams of carbohydrates, twelve to fifteen grams of fat.

You really want to actually measure your macros to keep your blood sugar balance. And if you don't have a good handle on that, I would use a CGM a continuous glucose monitor for the first one cycle, just so you can see how your body is responding to all these different food changes. That was one of our fun findings in the study as well. We had everybody wear a CGM and they were most women were really shocked

at how, you know, there's resistance to eating. We as women have a lot of resistance to nourishing ourselves, and so there's fear about feeding our bodies. And I said, great, we're just going to put the dogma aside. You're going to eat these things and you're you're going to see the data in the CGM if your blood sugar is happy with this or not. And everybody was like, oh my god, I can't believe that this is what my

body needs and how good I feel. So that's really important too, to just help us break free of the

sort of conditioning we've received. Let's not under appreciate the fact that because we've been left out of all of this medical fitness and nutrition research, we've been fed a narrative for many, many decades that has been based on the assumption that we are just smaller versions of men that require maybe fewer calories and more cardio to compensate for our mysterious you know, female metabolism, which is just utter unscientific nonsense and so, but that has left a

lasting behavioral impression on our relationship with food and nourishing ourselves. The best thing I can tell you from all of this research that I've done is that actually, compared to men, women thrive when we eat more and more frequently from a hormonal perspective. So like you know, don't do too much fasting until you're closer to menopause. And really, I mean I eat every three hours. I'm closer to menopause.

I eat every three hours to keep my blood sugar stable and to keep my metabolism really as at its optimum place.

that's why you're eating differently throughout the cycle. Then, of course during menstruation you have all of this blood loss, and studies show that we lose specific minerals or more mineral envitamin deficient in specific measurable ways in the menstrual phase. So the foods that I selected for that phase really help re nourish those missing nutrients. So you're going to be having things that are a little bit more warming, stews, meat basting, seaweeds, things that are really rich in these

types of nutrients. And then when you're doing this consistent you know, phase over a phase, you just feel really good. Yeah, you know, And then you couple in the workout, so you do the cardio in the first half and then you do more zone to kind of cardio in the second half. Let me set the record straight because I know there's a lot of again people having conversations on social media. You can strength train in every phase of

the cycle, right I do? You should? You can. You may be recovering from a lot of hormonal imbalance where you feel a lot of fatigue in the second half of the cycle, where you don't feel like you have the energy to strength train until you get yourself back to a state of homeostasis from a hormonal perspective, and that's okay, So don't push yourself. But when you are in the flow with your cycle, you can strength train

every day of the cycle. And there's so much advantageous, you know, benefits to doing that from a blood sugar perspective and a mitochondrial ovarian perspective. So I would definitely encourage people to do that too.

just feeling flat out. And then it would affect the rest of the phases and I almost like it felt like I'd got into a deficit that I couldn't get back from. And so I would do my lower back would end up hurting more. I do the same ways that I would normally do, you know a couple of weeks before, but my lower back would go out, my body would feel weaker. I'd come back, I'd have my potein shake, I'd do all this stuff, and I'd be like, oh, I feel so like my head feels heavy. Don't feel

like I'm just not replenishing. And when I started realizing that I had to it wasn't that I stopped working out during that phase, but I had to go at a lower intensity during that time. And what a difference it made to actually then catching up with energy for the rest of the phases when the phase that I thought, you know, just off to my menstruation is what I usually would feel like the best, and I'd have so

much energy and it will be incredible. But it was like I was catching up because I put myself so flat out during the phase where I was supposed to be having a little bit more rest, and instead of doing that, I was pushing through. So I was kind of borrowing energy from the other phases.

our system. So we kind of are creating a big leaky bucket from a micronutrient perspective and energy perspective, and that puts us in deficit, not just with our blood sugar, our cortisol, our progesterone, our mood. And it's a vicious cycle. So I want you to get into like a delicious cycle where you are nourishing yourself properly and then you're

exercising in a way that is sustainable for you. I will say oftentimes in the luteal phase, just specifically to that your little practice, just to maybe tweak your practice. It oftentimes women work out in a fasted state I do,

which is a big no noe. So if you work out in a fasted state, especially in the luteal phase, when your metabolism is faster and resting cortisol is higher, now you are putting your body in a very vulnerable position because you're putting yourself into hypoglycemic reaction.

disrupts melatonin production. And melatonin is so connected to our ovulation potential, and when we don't make enough of that, we age the ovary really quickly, so we can really put an end to ovulation much sooner than we should. So those three things alone, so I mean, I would say,

eat your breakfast within an hour of waking. Wait until in fact, study just came out about that if you believe the idea that having that cup of coffee or green tea or something on an empty stomach first thing in the morning is what's giving you that jolt, it's

actually not that. It's that within that first thirty minutes, your body is offloading melatonin and so what you're you're like coming out of the sleep mode, right, So you're naturally and your cortisol's onboarding, so you're naturally kind of waking up. It has nothing to do with the caffeine. The caffeine. Putting it in too early can actually prevent that process from happening properly, keeping you more groggy and

then messing with your blood sugar and cortisol. Right, So it's best if you're going to do it, to wait one hour. So I always say eat your breakfast within that first hour to boost your energy from a blood sugar perspective, and then have your caffeine after the meal, which is how every other culture has caffeine. Yeah, after a meal, So we should just adopt that logic. It's

good for us. And then from the perspective of the evening routine, you know, make sure you put your phones your screens on, like red light, you know, whatever, the anti blue light, there's always like an app you can download or wear blue light blocking glasses after a certain hour, you know, at least by eight o'clock.

Definitely not keep it to twelve and you will see the impact and the benefits of doing that there's more harm in delaying replenishing your glucose levels in the luteal phase than there is any benefit from fasting. And then obviously the research that's been done on intermittent fasting has been done on men and postmenopausal women, which shows huge benefits. When I am postmenopausal, I will be intermittent fasting. I

will be extending my fasting. I think we'll see. I have actually taken up a very serious strength training practice over the past fourteen months, so I am bodybuilding five days a week, and I actually don't think that there's a place for the fasting in my current routine because I have to prefuel my muscles with adequate levels of glucose before I train, and I'm training very heavy. I mean, my hip thrust is two hundred pounds. Yeah, squat is a grid pound squad, you know, like my bench press

is seventy pounds. I'm lifting really heavy and so you need to fuel for that. So again, you know, we shouldn't be so afraid of nourishment. Now, fasting has a place, especially when you're recovering from let's say some sort of intense infection like limes disease or there's a lot of reasons where fasting can be a very big help to the body because the constant introduction of food can be

a drain when immune system is overburdened. But for the everyday woman who is just dealing with PMS, if we really are talking about getting a handled on that, we have to approach and support our master regulating hormones. In order for you to change your sex hormone output estrogen progesterone, you have to work on the master regulating hormone support of glucose, insulin, and cortisol. Right. So that's why we change diet and exercise, because then we change those inputs,

we get better sex hormone outputs. That's the key.

long time. But there is some emerging research that shows that for women with pcos, there's some value in doing some extended fasting to help at least get them started where they could get to a place where they have better metabolic flexibility. Because women with pcos have a lot of insulin resistance on the level of the cell, overburdening the body with glucose is the problem. So intermittent fasting

isn't the thing there. It's just a mechanism that reduces overall daily glucose load and that benefits the cell from a woman who has this insulin resistance. For women who are trying to lose weight, in fact, delaying nutrition and going long periods of time without eating, let's say we do that the most between lunch and dinner. It slows

down your metabolism. So, for example, in the past fourteen months, and I didn't think I had any weight to lose, I've lost twenty five pounds strength training and eating more, more free and more. You know, I was already nourishing myself a lot, but I started, you know, at midlife. I thought, let me just see what other new experiments I can do. And that's really been the thing. So I think again, we have this whole like narrative that is not based on actual data that we feel really

comfortable with, Like, yes, we feel, we feel now. Listen, a calorie deficit if you're going to lose weight is important. It's an important part of weight loss. But that does not eat. That does not have to involve going many, many hours of the day without eating. You can be in a calorie deficit and eat every three hours because the goal is even in a calorie deficit, you still have to stabilize your blood sugar Otherwise you're going to

be hypoglycemic. You're going to be craving things, You're going to be throwing off your lept in response. It's going to just it's a vicious cycle.

progesterone metabolites every single day. Oh wow, so you can every single day of your cycle know how many how much estrogen progester on your body has made that day, and then you can get that picture for a whole month. That is much more valuable information to have. You understand, are you in general having the right flow of these hormonal ratios in each phase of the cycle as opposed to just a blood draw Now, the other thing that I think is valuable too about having more consistent testing

if you're concerned, is that you're absolutely right. You can go and get a blood test and you can be in normal range for that minute of that day of your cycle, and then you have this frustrating conversation with your provider where you're like, there's nothing wrong with your labs.

Everything is normal, and you're like, but I feel bad, and then there's this sort of opportunity for gas lighting to happen, and this sort of again, this cultural narrative of like it's in your head because it's not on the labs is perpetuated. And I think it's because the tool of this blood test does not match the thirty twenty eight to thirty two to day experience of a dynamic hormone pattern that is changing in real time day over day. How can a blood test be sufficient to

really get a full picture of what could be going on? Right? So, I think if you have concerns, do something that's a little bit more comprehensive, so that you can see more data and you can see that it's not in your head because it's not.

biohacking devices that have been evolved. Even simple things like having an access to a continuous glucose monitor, what a powerful tool in managing your hormonal reality because if you're not you know, and I wrote about this in my first book, Woman Code, it's the first step of the flow protocol that I used in my practice for years before I opened, before I started the first femtech company in the US in twenty twelve, which is flow living.

That you know, if you are not managing your blood sugar, you have no shot in helping yourself from a hormonal perspective. It's so germane to your endocrine function. It's table stakes. You can't. You can't out supplement or out biohack. Having a poor diet, yeah, you just cannot. And eighty percent of what gets you well is dietary.

share with women. This is not about what do we think it should be. We can know we can track our hormones, we can measure our macros, we can measure our blood sugar. We can measure these things and we can actually see things change. It's so excited. I mean, this has not ever been possible before. It's very exciting. Every woman should feel so empowered to take her cycle management into her own hands and feel like she can

be successful because that is absolutely possible. So protein is the first one.

processed seed oils and eat more good, healthy fats. But the third one is definitely one I don't think you've heard before, and one that I just think is utterly fascinating. So orange foods are really valuable for the ovaries because it turns out that the ovaries have fourteen different beta

carotene receptor sites. Oh wow, So root vegetables, organ meats all contain high levels of beta carotene vitamin A that the ovaries need to store in there in their tissue to function, just like we we know right, Oh yes, my thyroid needs to store iodine and selenium, so we know to consume those things to give our thyroid the things it needs to do to have to make hormones. But your ovaries need beta carotene. So that's why, especially in the luteal phase, you want to be eating your

root vegetables because your ovaries love that. So that's another food that I think. I eat sweet potatoes every day, depending on what carrots in the first half of my cycle, sweet potatoes at the second half, for sure.

And also I noticed too that stevia's sweetness is so intense that it can generate more of a salt craving that then kicks off another sugar craving. So in Chinese medicine, when we look at the yin and young principles of food, yin foods are very sweet things, and young foods are more salty things, right, heavier, oily, fatty or saltier things.

So if you're having something that's very very yin, even if it's just the taste of like something extremely sweet, you're going to naturally crave something more salty to get back to a sense of balance. And so you can really be like sea sawing all day, like you have your super stevia sweetened tea, and then you're like, I need salty crackers, and then you just don't feel like you're in control. Whereas monk fruit. I don't feel like we have that same reaction.

have more painful cramps. Oh no, So you want to just really avoid those types of things, and you want to you know, choose your healthier fats, avocado, allive oil, those things that actually increases the production of PG one and three, which causes more uterine relaxation, so you can expel the endometrium with less effort, which is how it's designed. You're not designed to be in any pain during the month. So that's the second one. That's an unusual one of a third one because you qualify it.

this super cool prop made for me. We dissected a soybean and we looked at the good parts of the soy and then the parts that were problematic, and it was very fun. So I've been talking about this for a long time. For women, it's quantity and quality. There is protective aspects to soy. Phytoestrogens act as a selective estrogen receptor modulator. So that's great because instead of you having the dirty estrogen that your body produces impacting your cells,

the phytoestrogens from the soy. This is also true of flax can adhere to those serm receptor sites on the cell and prevent that interaction between the cell and those dirty estrogens. Now you have to eat whole soy products, so like nato etemamee right hempe fermented soy really really good. But then when we get into like the more processed

soy products, TOFU is kind of neutral. Then we get into like the soy milks and the soy protein powders and all the sort of like hydrolyzed soy proteins, that's when it becomes too much and problematic. So you definitely want to use there's absolutely a place for soy products if you're sensitive to them. Listen to that. You may

find that it's also stage of life. I find that women in their forties and fifties really love incorporating soy products as it has an estrogenic support to it, and women who are suffering with a lot of symptoms in their twenties and thirties might not find it as useful for them. But you have to feel out your reaction to food. Everyone's bioindividual, so there is no blanket statement about which foods are the right foods, like there's no perfect daily diet, which is why the cycle sinking method

is a and not a diet, right. It's about you have to take the what is universally true about our cycle health and our hormone ratios and our endocrine system functions, and then you have to apply the method to your unique female ecosystem and you have to feel intuitively, how does this feel to me? Because we're all a little bit different, and that's exactly what I want every woman to be doing. Don't get stuck into a dogmatic relationship

with cycle thinking. This is not the point of that either, make it your own.

Magnesium is so critical for every aspect of our health, so I prefer magnesium glyconate. We need omega three fatty acids. Why because it reduces inflammation on the level of the ovary, promoting ovulation. It helps with mitochondrial health, which protects ovary health. So I think omega threes are really really critical. Vitamin D three, I mean D three is we call it a vitamin, but it functions like a hormone in the body. So that's just so essential for us to be having.

K one and K two are really good as well, because it helps your body absorb more calcium from the foods that you're eating. Studies show that taking supplemental calcium is kind of not very helpful, but taking on the cofactors that help your body make calcium from your dietary sources, more bioavailable D three, K one, and K two really

really a good thing. Plus K one and K two are helpful with reduce using cramps and probiotics because if your gut is not functioning, your estrobolom is not able to metabolize estrogen inside the intestinal tract, which is then a problem because then you'll recirculate that estrogen. So those

are like the basics. Then if you get into some more specific things like if you have PCOS, or if you have heavy bleeding or fibroids, or if your perimenopausal you're trying to conceive, then there are specific supplements that I recommend, which I formulated as well, that you can go and look on the site and you can even take a little evaluation and see which supplements are right for you as far as in each phase of the cycle. That is also something that you can use supplementally strategically,

different supplements through each phase. So things that I like are Let's the way that I formulated the cycle sinking supplements was looking at what are the kind of core vulnerabilities of each phase. So in the filicular phase, our core vulnerability if we aren't you know, managing it from a cycle sinking perspective exactly perfectly. You could be a little more fatigued, right, you just come off your bleed.

You could be a little low energy. So I like to use coenzyme Q ten in this phase to naturally boost cellular vitality, right, which are going to boost mitochondrial energy in this phase. In the ovulatory phase, the vulnerability

is xtrogen overload. So if you have any breakouts during ovulation breast tenderness during ovulation, this is a sign that you're not metabolizing estrogen efficiently during ovulation, So you want to use a couple of things like sulforaphane dim These types of things really help the body metabolize estrogen better.

In the luteal phase, the core vulnerability is blood sugar lows hypoglycemia, So I like using some simple things like cinnamon chromium procolinate that really help keep our blood sugar more stable. And then the menstrual phase, I would say is the sort of histamine and cramping, and I really love nettle extract for that nice so that you'll find in the cycle sinking supplements. Also on flow living dot Com.

it's reduce inflammaging and like oversaturate yourself. From a nutrient perspective, you want to when your when your body gets this, when your brain and your ovaries kind of communicate like okay, uterus, you're free to go. You're free to proceed with an implantation, right, all systems are go. The way that that happens is that you are energetically macronutrient micronutrient. From a micronutrient perspective, ripe like a juicy peach. That's the visual I always

give my clients. Yes, I still see private clients of ripe like a juice peach, right, ripe with nutrients. So you have to be eating robustly. In fact, I would say motherhood, the journey of motherhood really begins with the moment you desire to become a mother, because you must make a lot of changes to optimize your fertile ecosystem.

The same way you would make those changes when you're pregnant, you would prioritize eating your best to have the healthiest baby, and the same if you were breastfeeding, you would be making those choices. So it's the same thing. You're starting your motherhood journey the moment you decide to be a mother, and so yes, you want to be eating really robustly whole foods, lots of plants, lots of protein, fats, all the things we talked about cycle sinking for your cycle phases.

Taking good quality supplements is important. Yes, you know, you really want to reduce that inflammation. So I really love ncetyl cysteine for that. I love our alphaalapoic acid. These things are supplements that are known to help with ovarian function and lowering that inflammation. And you know, just again taking away some of the toxins that create that sort of stress response in the body that might make it a problem from a conception point of view.

from an endocrine system perspective to be maximally fertile. So there we do need to at least appreciate that there's got to be some sort of recovery period where you have to take some supplementation, improve your diet to kind of recover from being exposed to that medication for a period of time so that you can give yourself the best chance. And that conversation is not really being had like, well, no, it's just wait till get your period back and everything

should work. But then we have all of this idiopathic, no known cause infertility, which is not necessarily being caused

by birth control. But I do think that the overloading of the female body with endocrine system disruptive toxins, the mismanagement of our blood shirt, it's like a conflagration of many things that are going wrong for women's hormones puts us at this position where it's harder for us to get pregnant, and it shouldn't be so hard, No, So I think that the pill is just one piece of that puzzle that can be you know, just something that's adding to that internal dysregulation when it does come time

for you to be thinking about conception.

so humiliating to walk out of that. So I totally totally empathize with the situation that being said, how I cleared my skin was not with pharmaceuticals. Even topicals did not work. It really was only until I started healing my hormones that that things got better. But yes, absolutely, I think the reason why that is sort of the prevailing recommendation, like oh, just go on the pill, is because there's an assumption that we won't do the things

that are needed. Yeah, right, you know, especially young teenage girls like, oh, well, they're just not going to do that.

It wasn't like the blood and the pads and that's like I didn't ever that talk when she was but I said things like, you know, cause she would come in the bathroom and she'd be like, mom, what's going on? Yeah, Like you have no privacy as a mom. Just FYI Like people just walk in. It's like starts when you're in labor, Like forget it. At some point I thought to myself, Okay, how am I going to do this?

You know, because there's no modeling for any of us as moms, Like how do we empower our daughters to have a different trajectory than we had where like we weren't really given the right information. Said Okay, if she happens to stumble upon me changing a pad, should I try to hide that or should I just let her sort of see it and not make a big deal lot of it, and like, baby, we can have a discussion. So I obviously I went with plan B being the

period queen. I thought maybe I should do that, and so we started having this conversation at eight, she's like, what is that. It's like, that's the nest, the nest that the baby could grow and cut, you know, an analogy that would be age appropriate. And then that turned into a well how does that happen? I was like, oh, you get you have this special biological clock that started at like nine. I started talking to her about her

in Fredian rhythms, so I got her excited. Yeah, at nine years old, I said, you're going to go from feeling the same way every day to feeling a little different each week of a month. And that's a superpower. So still we're not talking about, you know, the bleeding and the pads and the tampons, And we still haven't

had that conversation. And she's eleven. She's just starting her first signs of puberty, so right on time, and according to this, she should be getting her she should be getting her first bleed around the time I turned fifty, so it'll be like kind of a monumental celebration. And she knows that we're talking about going to be like this surprise, and I'm just really empowering her to be excited about it, about this big change that's going to happen as a source of empowerment and power for her.

So there's nothing she could come in here and teach you about the Infredian rhythm, the four cycle phases, and what you need to do in each race. She is fully versed. She's not practicing it yet, but she knows that that's coming. Just prepared. And then the other thing that I do is I prepare her in the circadian ways to practice. You can't start at it like cold. So we do things like she looks at her bowel movements, not just what they look like, but what time is

she having them? Should she be eating more vegetables, Should she be taking some more magnesium? Does she need more water? What's going on? She eats every three hours at school. I don't make her wait. I mean they have lunch at eleven thirty in the morning, and then she has field hockey practice after school. So I pack her a snack,

that's two thirty she's eating. Yeah, and then she comes home and she eats, and you know, so I'm like, she's already learning about stabilizing her blood shirt and I use that language, you eat to keep your blood sugar stable. So I don't dumb down the science. And I would say, as a mom of a young girl, we could definitely lean way into giving them a lot more education and more scientific realities about how their bodies work. They can

handle it beautifully. And what would it be like if an entire generation of young girls knew how to balance their blood sugar, knew how to eat for their cycle phases, had no period problems in their twenties. What would be unleashed onto this planet a lot of feminine power. I am here for that, So, you know, I do think we have to start earlier so that when we do get to the place where people are having these sort of hormonal crises and they go to the gynecologist and

the and they will, you know, offer the pill. That's what you should expect. Is not nothing wrong with offering it. That a young girl who's been educated in this different way might say, I'm going to take some time and do something.

isn't going to be great. Of course, your mind is telling your body how it wants to feel. You're saying you're gonna dread it, So, yeah, you'll dread it. And so I think having that shift of mindset as well, where you are just as we say to talk lovingly to our body, it's like, feel lovingly towards every process that happens in your body, and I think that will completely shift the way that it's your own interaction with yourself.

It's like, how are you going to keep telling your body you don't want a process that is so natural to you? And then it just feels so different.

very restorative and healing. I'm actually someone who's been studying this for the past twenty five years, and you know, really looking at the molecular and biochemical basis of feminine energy in the body. It's not this like woo woo thing you have to dress in robes and like follow the lunar cycles. That's really fun. You can do that too, I'm totally down with that. But for most of us who are more type A women, right, we want things to be feeling like they're have some grounding, and feminine

energy is a real thing inside of your body. We can look at it through the lens of our cycle phases, right, the ebbing and flowing of when we are nurturing others versus nurturing ourselves. That the fact that your cycle actually codifies a space and time for each of those activities should give us some role modeling of what it looks

like to engage in feminine energy. Right, That there's a restoration period baked into our cycle as essential to fully expressing our feminine right is important that there is creative output but also restorative input. And this is important because you will not be cycling forever. Cycling is a finite, beautiful phase of your life, which is why every cycle

should be celebrated. I every time I get my bleed, I put on a pretty robe, like a long like either a beautiful robe or like a long maxi dress. I have like a special period tea cup that I use. It does have the lunar phases on it, and I make certain herbal tea and I like really celebrate. I

welcome it that day. But when we practice engaging from our feminine more, it really helps set us up for a much easier, eased perimenopausal transition because instead of going through your reproductive years burning yourself out, yeah, draining like we talked about earlier, that leaky bucket, constantly draining your micronutrients, your energy, your blood sugar, your progesterone. You by the time you hit forty five, you are crispy from an ovarian perspective.

this next chapter of your life. So I just want to encourage younger women to be looking at it not just as a biohacking practice for you as a female, which of course it is, but also because it's a very psychological healing process of reclaiming feminine energy in your life.

than something that they actually should be dreading. What are some of the tips or recommendations that you give to someone going to perimenopoolse and then in menopoolse as well, what's something you want them to know?

So you just need to kind of adjust for that instead of saying, well, I used to be able to do this, I wish I could go back to that. Yeah, yeah, sure, great, But reality is, here's where you're at, So make the adjustment in dosing of your carbohydrate macros. Sleep is a priority that melot protect your melatonin at all costs. I also recommend women starting to take melatonin after the age

of thirty five. And there are numerous studies that talk about the importance of melatonin for women in terms of bone density protection, ovulation regulation, breast cancer protection. It's an essential In fact, it's the first hormone in the brain to downregulate. That's really what kicks off perimenopause is the lowering of melatonin production.

obviously has nothing to do with women. So there are many many I also publish a weekly newsletter on women's biohacking that you can subscribe to on my Instagram channel, and I did a whole expose on this whole topic because I was just so frustrated women are terrified of taking melatonin because of these conversations that are just again when women are left out of research, We get these top these little things like oh this is bad, Well, if you have testicles, it's bad. If you have overaries,

it's a different conversation. And there are studies actually looking at the impact of melatonin supplementation on ovariant function.

perimenopause and postmenopause. And this is a topic that we don't get to talk a lot about, but really is so important because again, as our cycle hormones go away, we go back to a life of just our master regulating hormones. So insulin, cortisol, all those things you want to be managing melatonin, but oxytocin and nitric oxide are really important. These are the hormones that we make when we are in community, but also when we are in pleasure.

So upping your self pleasuring practice is a really important thing to be doing in perimenopause. It actually promotes more regular ovulation, can extend your ovulation, slows down the rate of ovarian aging. I think getting very committed to a self pleasuring practice that you're using specifically to generate more oxytocin.

It's like the inverse. You know, all the male biohackers are talking about retention, and that is valuable for them from a testosterone perspective, but for women it's the opposite. The longer you can stay in orgasmic plateau, not climax climax as the finish, but that phase before, the longer you can stay in that phase, the more oxytocin and nitric oxides you make. I've written about this in both

of my books. I talk about it as often as I can, because, again, if people ask me what is the one biohack, I would take it into deserted island. I would say you just some loop, because that alone would help protect many of your body systems and really is a very important part of sailing through perimenopause and menopause that I don't think is getting enough discussion.