E193: Is Low Progesterone Causing Your PMS, Short Cycles and Painful Periods?

Are your hormones making you feel like you’re losing it? If your cycles are erratic, PMS has you feeling overwhelmed, or you’re exhausted despite your efforts, your progesterone might be the culprit.

In this episode, we'll explore why progesterone is crucial for your health—not just for pregnancy but also for mood, energy, and hormone balance. We'll discover how stress disrupts it and share simple ways to support your body without added stress. 

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• Why progesterone is more important than you think—it impacts mood, thyroid health, and energy
• How to spot progesterone imbalances with easy at-home checks, no fancy tests needed
• Tips to boost this “calm and cozy” hormone without complicating your life

If you're ready to end the hormonal rollercoaster and feel like yourself again, press play now! Your body (and mind) will thank you.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
My favorite cinnamon roll protein powder - use code LEISHA for 15% off your first order!
Previous episodes about basal body temperature: E145, E59, E2

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Disclaimer: Nothing in this podcast is to be taken as medical advice, please take informed accountability and speak to your provider before making changes to your health routine.

This podcast is for women and moms to learn how to balance hormones naturally in motherhood, to have pain-free periods, increased fertility, to decrease PMS mood swings, and to increase energy without restrictive diet plans. You'll learn how to balance blood sugar, increase progesterone naturally, understand the root cause of estrogen dominance, irregular periods, PCOS, insulin resistance, hormonal acne, post birth-control syndrome, and conceive naturally. We use a pro-metabolic, whole food, root cause approach to functional women's health and focus on truly holistic health and mind-body connection.

If you listen to any of the following shows, we're sure you'll like ours too!
Pursuit of Wellness with Mari Llewellyn, Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark, Found My Fitness with Rhonda Patrick, Just Ingredients Podcast, Wellness Mama, The Dr Josh Axe Show, Are You Menstrual Podcast, The Model Health Show, Grounded Wellness By Primally Pure, Be Well By Kelly Leveque, The Freely Rooted Podcast with Kori Meloy, Simple Farmhouse Life with Lisa Bass

Transcript

Leisha: Hey, friend. I thought it was time for a little bit of a foundational episode again because. When we get in the weeds a little bit with talking about the nervous system and talking about femininity and talking about all of these other things, I think it's so fun for those of you who have been here for a long time and are listening and looking for something different.

But if you've come in pretty recently and haven't gone back to some of the foundational episodes, I really want to talk about progesterone today and why progesterone is so important for us as women. And I promise this will be not super nerdy. It will be helpful Hey, friend. I thought it was time for a little bit of a foundational episode again because. When we get in the weeds a little bit with talking about the nervous system and talking about femininity and talking about all of these other things, I think it's so fun for those of you who have been here for a long time and are listening and looking for something different.

But if you've come in pretty recently and haven't gone back to some of the foundational episodes, I really want to talk about progesterone today and why progesterone is so important for us as women. And I promise this will be not super nerdy. It will be helpful even if you're not having tons of symptoms with your period.

Supporting progesterone is really important for us as women, especially women who are busy, potentially have a lot of things going on, a lot of stressors because progesterone directly is impacted. By our level of stress and activity in our lives. If you're here because you are having really painful periods, you're having PMS mood swings, maybe your cycles are short or irregular, then this is for you.

And also, if you're having pretty good symptoms and you've started to implement some of the things that I teach and you're starting to feel more balanced, but. You want to make sure that you're optimizing, then this is for you as well. I am excited to just get back into some of those basics, and that's what we'll do for the next few episodes.

We're gonna be talking about gut health next week and really some foundations there, and then we will go into some more support around estrogen and things like that as we go into the rest of March. I wanna tell you before I dive into progesterone, I'm sitting here. And recording and I made myself a really good drink this morning.

I usually will do my raw milk and equip protein powder for my protein hot chocolate in the morning. But I've gotten a little fancy lately, and this morning I decided to do half cinnamon roll protein from equip and half of their iced coffee protein and mixed that up. And it's a little like cinnamon latte and it's so good.

Has no coffee in it, no caffeine, really nourishing 20 plus grams of protein. Completely real food. I just wanna recommend that. So good, so warm, so cozy. If you want to get some of the equipped protein, you can just go to equipped foods.com/alicia or use Code Lecia at checkout, and you'll get 15 to 20% off of your first order.

One of the reasons that I do this drink every single morning almost, is that sometimes I wake up in the morning and I'm not ready to just jump into eating right away, but I wanna get something. That is going to be number one, quick and easy, but number two, nourishing. Let's reverse those numbers. I want it to be nourishing, and if it can be quick and easy, praise the Lord.

With that being said, that is because I wanna be supporting my stress levels and my progesterone on a daily basis, and getting breakfast right away is one of the best ways to do that. So I'm gonna go into more of the how tos at the end of this episode, but I am gonna talk about progesterone first and why it is so important.

Little refresher for those of you who have been here and heard me talk about this before, but progesterone is the hormone that our bodies make. When we ovulate. We can only really make an adequate amount of progesterone with ovulation and how that works in our bodies is in the first half of your cycle.

Estrogen is building and rising, and it triggers the other hormones that are needed for ovulation. Then when you ovulate. The little capsule or follicle around the egg that was ovulated turns into a temporary organ and makes progesterone for the rest of your cycle. It's really important, even if you are not looking to get pregnant now or ever again, it's really important that you make progesterone because progesterone is a pro fertility hormone, of course, but it also is pro thyroid.

It's really good for your heart health. It's really good for your mental health. And getting synthetic progesterone in any form is not going to do the same things for your body. It's really incredibly important that your body makes progesterone, even bioidentical progesterone is not as good if we're looking at one thing that we wanna focus on to have happier hormones, better way, better energy, better mood, like all the things we want as women.

Making enough progesterone is that thing now. What you need to know is that progesterone does respond really specifically to stress in your body. If you are stressed and your body knows that you are, I always use the example of you're running from a bear or from a tiger or something like that. When you are in high stress mode all the time, your body really thinks that you are in danger.

A lot of the time, and the last thing that you need if you are in danger is to get pregnant and then be having a baby in the woods running from a tiger right now. With that being said, everyone is totally different in their bodies. Some women can get pregnant no problem while they're having a lot of stress.

Some women, not so much, but over time, all of us will struggle with progesterone production if we're under a lot of stress. The reason for that is your body is going to prioritize what makes the most sense to your brain. If your brain says, Hey, things are okay. You're getting enough food, you're getting enough sleep, you're getting some sunshine, the basic things are under control and there's not a ton of extra inflammation or stressors in the body, then it's going to say, we have the energy to make progesterone, and we're going to focus on making enough progesterone and ovulating on good egg quality and all of those things.

That need to come into place to make enough progesterone. But if you are constantly under stress, if you're constantly undereating, over exercising, under nourishing, even if you're not undereating, then we're gonna have some issues with making progesterone. And even if you make enough, if you're under a lot of stress, your body can borrow progesterone and make it into more cortisol, which is really helpful as an emergency mechanism, but it's not really helpful as a hormone balance mechanism.

So just being aware. That the level of stress and nourishment and rest and all of those things in your body is going to affect your progesterone. Let's talk about how to know if you are actually making enough progesterone. Number one favorite way to know this is by tracking your basal body temperatures.

We will link in the show notes a couple of episodes. That I have on tracking those. They're a little scroll back, but we'll link those in the show notes for you. If you're not exactly sure how to track, why you would want to track. I've gone over that in detail several times and I would love for you to listen to that because basal body temperatures are one of my favorite ways to really understand what's happening with your hormones, and it's a almost free tool that you can learn to understand on your own and start to get an idea of if you're making enough progesterone or not.

On a basic level though, we want to see. After ovulation, we wanna see minimum 12 to 14 days of progesterone production before you get your next period. That would tell me that you are making enough to last until your next period, which is a really good sign. And then the other thing that we're looking for is we wanna see that your temperatures are rising enough, that it looks like your metabolism is stimulated, your thyroid is stimulated from that progesterone production.

For those 12 to 14 days. On a really basic level, when we're looking at basal body temperatures, which is just taking your temperature in the morning, first thing when you wake up before you do anything else is we should see a pattern of lower temperatures at the first half of your cycle to a pattern of higher temperatures at the second half of your cycle.

And we should see that those temperatures rise, hopefully about half a degree or more from the previous temperatures in the first half of your cycle. And then they stay there. And then we don't have a lot of big dips. And we don't have a lot of dropping off before your cycle starts for three or four days.

Another way that you can tell is if you're having long enough cycles to be making enough progesterone or you're ovulating around middle of your cycle, day 14, 15, 16, something like that, and then you have 12 to 14 days after that before you start your period. The best way to know if you're ovulating is to do those basal body temperatures.

You can also do ovulation strips, you can track cervical fluid, you can do a combination of all of those things. But if you are having short cycles, say your cycle is 22 days, 24 days, even, 25, 26 days, that's kind of a short cycle. And we want to know when you're ovulating in that cycle to know if you're making enough progesterone.

If you're ovulating early and still making enough progesterone, then that's an estrogen issue, and that's another podcast that we can talk about. But if you're having short cycles or you're having a lot of spotting towards the end of your cycle before your next period, you're likely not making enough progesterone and that could be causing a lot of symptoms.

Symptoms of low progesterone can be those short cycles, can be, the spotting, can be trouble getting pregnant. It can be energy and mood symptoms around your period. It can be, uh, painful periods because the other thing to know about progesterone is that progesterone is meant to. Be dominant in that second half of your cycle.

And what that does, in addition to all of the good things I've already said, is it helps push estrogen out because estrogen is dominant in that first half and then it needs to be detoxified well, and if you make enough progesterone, that's one of the ways that you help push estrogen out so that it is at a an optimal level, and then it can start over the next cycle.

And you can have estrogen dominant symptoms just from having not enough progesterone, even if your estrogen is at normal levels. Knowing what is happening with your progesterone is one of the top ways to just understand better what's happening in your body and why you're having the symptoms that you're having.

I just want to again say that I don't believe the best case scenario. If you figure out you're having, you do have low progesterone. I don't believe the best case scenario is just to supplement with bioidentical progesterone, because when you do that, it's telling your brain, you have enough progesterone, you don't need to make more, and you just keep yourself in this cycle.

Of not having enough real progesterone that's going to actually benefit your body, even if the other progesterone can just mute your symptoms a little bit or like mimic natural progesterone. It's not going to be the same. And what I always would rather know is why are you not making enough? Is it your food?

Is it your sleep? Is it. Underlying pathogens in the body. That's why we do gut testing and things like that with my clients. If you understand that you are supposed to be making enough progesterone, you're not making enough progesterone, then this is exactly why I do coaching and why we investigate together and when you come into nurse hormones coaching, we are invested with you.

We're not just looking at hopping on a call with you here and there and see you later. We are looking at your charts with you. We're looking at your tracking with your food. We're really getting in there and pinpointing what is going on in your body so that we can help you make those changes a lot more quickly, and you can see the results that you wanna see within a couple months versus rabbit trailing here and there and trying to figure things out and doing all the different supplements.

I just see over and over again that having that outside perspective can be so incredibly important. And when you're inertia, hormones, step one is making hormones. Well, and this is exactly what we're talking about today, is making enough estrogen and enough progesterone in the right balance and getting the right ingredients in your body to do that.

And so this is not six months down the road, we're gonna work on your progesterone. It's like it's day one, it's step one. Progesterone is so important to be able to have hormone balance. That's actually the, the definition of balanced hormones would be enough estrogen, enough progesterone, not too much. So progesterone is super, super important.

If you're curious and you're like, how do I know? Is it estrogen dominance? Is it progesterone imbalance or not enough progesterone? Then we can do Dutch testing as well. Sometimes that's helpful because we can see how your body is breaking down those hormones too, and how much you're making, but really you can figure a lot out.

With basal body temperatures, and you may see that you're actually, you have a luteal phase, it's 12 to 14 days. You're making a good amount of progesterone. You're not having those symptoms, but maybe you are making too much estrogen and you're not detoxing your estrogen well. And then that's step two is making sure that you're detoxing your hormones well when we work together.

So I just wanna clarify. It could be either one. It's not always low progesterone, but that is one that I see most often in women who have a really busy schedule are always going. Always have someone needing them. Always have too many things to do. Not enough rest, not enough nourishment, like it's just hard to keep up with everything.

Usually progesterone is the first thing to go in those situations. If that's you. I know you. I hear you. I am you. It's really hard to not be really busy as a mom, especially if you're also working or you also have a business or you're also homeschooling. Or just trying to live your life, right? So how do we make realistic changes to make more progesterone without having to blow up your life and shut everything down and go to the spa every day instead of your regular life?

I have a couple tips. Number one is you need to know is progesterone a problem for you? So I want you to start charting your basal body temperatures. I like the Kandara app because when we work together. When you work with me as a client, then I can see those charts for you and we can look at them together.

I can see history, so starting to chart in Kandara is really great. They also have a really great knowledge base that if you're just starting to chart and you want to understand what's going on in your cycles better, there's a lot of support in there. And that's a free app. So number one, would we just know if progesterone's actually your problem or not?

Don't just assume that it is. Number two, I would really encourage you not to supplement with bioidentical progesterone unless you have done worked with a practitioner who thinks that's really what you need. Not just throw that in there as a trial and error kind of thing. Because anytime you're taking hormones, whether they're natural, whether they're bioidentical or not, you are messing with your hormones.

And the more you mess with your hormones, the more they have a hard time recovering. I would really encourage you instead. To ask yourself, what are the stressors that are causing me to have progesterone issues in the first place? If you find out that you are, sometimes these are things that you can just figure out on your own.

If you just sit down, ask for an hour where you're not interrupted, an hour is a really long time. If you're used to being interrupted every five minutes or three minutes, an hour's, a long time, just start writing down like, what is stressing me out? That's a great question to journal on. Why am I stressed?

What is stressing me out? Write down the things that are stressing you out and start to look through that. I think a lot can usually come out when we start to ask ourselves a simple question like that, but if you're journaling and you're looking at what is stressing me out? Is it my schedule? Is it finances?

Is it my marriage? Is it my kids? Is it X, y, Z? Is it that I don't have kids yet? Is it that I'm not married yet? There are so many layers of what could be stressing us. Some of those things are really in our control. Like what we choose to put in our schedules. There's a lot that's in our control. I'm preaching to the choir here because I always have to assess this for myself.

I have to be really careful with my commitments because I love to overcommit, to be honest. It's my favorite to overcommit. Everything sounds really fun when I sign up for it, and then six months down the road, two months down the road, three days down the road, I'm like, what did I do? So really just assessing like what is on your schedule and is it serving you in this season?

Is it something that you're called to do in this season? Not to say we never do anything hard. Of course, we're gonna do hard things. We're gonna take care of our families, we're gonna take care of ourselves, we're gonna work, we're going to serve, we're going to do the things. And are you doing it just to keep yourself busy because your body doesn't know how to slow down?

Or are you doing it because it really is a yes in this season? I think that's a huge question. So if it's you're writing down what's stressing you out and it's something that's in your control, like a really busy schedule and you know in your heart that you need more rest, then what things can come off your plate?

Is it soccer? Is it the extra thing you're volunteering for? Is it, I don't know, what is it for you? Looking at things as seasonal, I find to be really helpful, and I know you've heard me say this before, but looking at things as seasonal. Can I make it feel like less of a huge decision when you're like, okay, no, we're not doing soccer this season, or, no, we're not going to do this other activity, or I'm not gonna focus on whatever it is.

I don't even know. I don't know what it is for you, but looking at it this season, let's say for the next three months, like what feels aligned for you and for your family and what would help bring your stress level down a couple notches? Another question to just ask yourself in journal. Is, what number is your stress?

One to 10 right now on a daily basis. Where do you live? I love asking that question. It always takes a couple minutes to think about it and figure it out, but a lot of times it's higher than we know it should be. And a lot of times we're, we're at a six or a seven, we're at a seven or an eight. Just living, just doing like on a good day, everything's fine, but you're busy and you're taking the kids places and you're doing the things and you're running late and the house isn't clean and the laundry is behind, and you also have work to still do.

That's real stress, that's emotional stress. It's physical stress on our bodies and there are ways around it where we don't have to live like that all the time. And hear me say it doesn't mean you have to get everything off of your schedule and just have hours planned to just rest and sit on the couch.

No, that's not realistic for most of us. But we do need breaks in the busyness. If you're listening to this and you're like, oh my gosh, this is me, right? I'm over committed right now, I need a break. And ask yourself what needs to change. This really is so key. I will talk about food here in a minute. I'll talk about some other tangible tips, but don't skip this because so much of the time we can.

Wear ourselves out by adding more things in. When it's okay, I need to eat differently, I need to exercise differently, I need to do those things. That may be true and it probably is true, and if it's just adding more and more to your plate is not gonna help your progesterone very much. So checking in with like, how full is your plate?

Is there anything that can come off even for a season or anything that can change or you can ask for more help or change how you're running things. If that's you, great. Figure that out. Take a little time and figure it out. And don't make it too big of a thing where it lets everything that's stressing me out and I can't change everything.

So I can't change anything. Just change one thing, just one thing that really makes a huge difference. Number four, I think we're on for who knows at this point. Number four is food. Food is huge. We need to have nourishing food coming in irregularly to make enough progesterone. We need to have enough protein.

We need to have enough carbs. We need to have enough healthy fats, and we need to be intentional about the timing where we're getting that. Within 60 minutes of waking up in the morning, we're getting that three to four hour intervals during the day, and we're listening to our bodies for hunger cues. But we're also not just going without food because we're too busy to notice our hunger cues.

There is a balance there of actually listening to your body, actually tuning in a little bit and making sure that you're not just. Ignoring hunger cues and you're not using that as a power move. I'm like, oh, I don't have to eat very much. Because if you notice that you're having energy crashes, if you notice that you're hangry, if you notice that your moods are a hot mess when you're in PMM S week, those are all signs to me that you do not have what you need when it comes to nourishment and that your body is telling you that.

And a lot of times we just think our bodies hate us and they're working against us. But the truth is that's not the case. Your body is telling you things because it wants you to make changes. It want you to be able to feel better. Being able to nourish, well nourish consistently is huge in being able to make enough progesterone.

If you're really not sure what that means, if you're frustrated and struggling with that, I have a mini course. It's the restored mini course for a blood sugar balance. That's a great place to start and just understand blood sugar balance a little bit better. That we will link in the show notes two, it's only $37.

It's something you can listen to. It's a podcast, so makes it really easy. And then when you're ready for full support, when you want my eyes on your hormones, on your charts, on your nutrition, and just let's put some fire on this machine and make it go. That's when you're ready for nourish hormones and for coaching.

And we have all of the resources for that for you. You can reach out to us, we can talk, make sure it's right for you. But when you're struggling with overwhelm, fatigue, low progesterone, PMS symptoms, it is so valuable to have someone come along and hold your hand. It's also really valuable to do that for yourself, to be able to just take a minute to take care of yourself, to ask yourself what you need.

It's huge. It's so foundational. It's so easy to be honest when we actually just do it, but it's so easy to forget as well. I just want to remind you that hormones are not as complicated as you think they are, and if you look at yourself as a toddler and say, Hey, if I were a toddler and I was throwing this fit that I'm throwing right now because I'm PMSE and because I don't feel good and because I'm not getting what I want, what do I do for that toddler?

You know what you would do. You give them a snack, maybe they need a nap. Maybe you need to reassess their schedule. If they're overstressed and overstimulated, of course they're gonna be a hot mess. And honestly, we're a lot more resilient than toddlers in some ways, but in some ways we're not. So taking that minute to just be like, okay, if I were a toddler, what would I need?

I would say that's probably the number one question that could fix your hormones without any help at all. I just wanna encourage you in that, and I hope this was helpful. I hope you hear my heart that. This is real life balancing hormones is not going to be a one stop shop. It's not gonna be a quick fix because we keep piling on whatever our triggers are for our body.

They're there because we have patterns that we've established, and because we need to be able to work on those in a cyclical manner, and we're going to work on them and do better for a while. And then sometimes when you're feeling better, you forget that you ever felt bad, and then you keep doing the things that you know you shouldn't be doing.

And that is totally normal, and just coming back around, focusing in again, making those changes. It really is amazing how fast your body will respond and how good you can feel. All right, ladies. I'll see you next time.