E212: 3 Things You Need to Know to Make Your Next Period Better

Do you dread your period every month, only to be met with the same painful cramps and mood swings that never seem to let up? What if you’re missing three foundational pieces that could change …well, all of it?

If you’ve been trying to balance your hormones naturally but still feel like you’re guessing, or throwing money at supplements hoping something will finally work, this one’s for you. 

Here's what you’ll learn:

• How to figure out what your main hormone imbalance is (hint: painful periods don’t always mean estrogen dominance)
• The hidden contributors that can make PMS worse
• What to track (and how) to understand your cycle, and make long-lasting changes 

If you're ready to stop guessing and finally feel in control of your hormones, hit play and start feeling less confused and more confident in the next 15 minutes.

Book a FREE Hormone Strategy Call with me

More about cycle tracking: Ep. 59, Ep. 61

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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

E212 - 3 things you need to know to make your next period better

[00:00:00] Hey friend, in the next 15 minutes, I am gonna tell you the three things you need to know to make your next period better.

[00:00:00] 

if you're here because your periods are making your life miserable, which is probably the case, this includes painful periods, but also PMS mood swings, then I'm gonna walk you through three things that you need to know to make your next period better. And I'm gonna make it really short and sweet and honor your time.

But these are going to be. Really game changer for understanding what is actually happening in your body during your period so that you're not chasing rabbit trails trying to fix your period with random things that don't even apply to you. Number one thing you need to know to make your next period better is what is your main hormone imbalance .

 is really important, okay? Because it's so common for women to. Think that they know what's going on with their hormones and specifically think that they have estrogen dominance if they have painful periods. That can absolutely be the case. And that is honestly my first suspicion a lot of times because I [00:01:00] do see that a lot.

But there are other things that can be happening. That can cause those painful periods too. So estrogen dominance in and of itself can be that your body is making too much estrogen, or it can be that your body is not detoxing estrogen well, and or it can be that you're not making the right amount of estrogen in conjunction or like in relation to your progesterone because.

That is still going to be textbook estrogen dominance. So even within that realm of estrogen dominance, there are different factors that can apply. For example, if you think I have painful periods, I have estrogen dominance, so I need to do something to make less estrogen you could be going down essentially the wrong path because you may actually have more of a detox issue.

And same thing can be in reverse if you are just trying to detox more estrogen. But the problem is not that your detox pathways [00:02:00] have a problem, but you are actually making too much estrogen Essentially like you're sailing on the wrong ship. So it's really important to know what your main hormone imbalance is, and there are all kinds of different ways you can do this.

But my favorite way is that you actually take this really quick quiz that I made for you that only has eight questions that will tell you which of the top three hormone imbalances you are more likely to have without having to take a test. And I will give you specifics of what you should do. Based on that with a few emails, so that is easy and free.

It is just leishadrews.com/quiz. We will put that in the show notes as well to make it easy for you to come back to a little later if you're driving. But I highly recommend you do that because we'll walk you through. What essentially is the most common hormone imbalance based on your symptoms? Are you actually just not making enough progesterone?

Are you even ovulating? If your cycles are irregular, we will answer those questions for you. Or is it more of [00:03:00] an issue of stress hormones that are causing your sex hormones to be imbalanced because there is not enough safety in your body to be able to make and detox hormones well. Those questions can be answered with the quiz and that would be my recommendation for a place to start.

And when you do that quiz, when you get that first email with your result, reply to me, I would love to hear if that feels on point for you. If that answers any questions for you truly would love to hear from you on that and help you know what next steps are. So that is number one. You really do need to know what's actually going on with your hormones to be able to make them better.

Because you know, even a, what a broken clock is, Twice a day, right? So you could be, shooting in the dark and figure it out and do something that helps your hormones feel better, on accident without really knowing what you're doing, but you're much more likely to hit the target if you can see where you're going.

So I just wanna save you a lot of time and [00:04:00] money and frustration by helping you steer in the right direction. So go take that quiz, leishadrews.com/quiz. Number two is you need to know what the contributing factors are as well. , Let's talk about PMS first. For your example.

When you know that you're having PMS, you need to know. What makes it worse and what makes it better. Now this can start to get murky pretty quickly, which is why I'd love to help women with this when we're coaching and , I can take that step back, that 30,000 foot view and be like, here it is, X, Y, Z, I can see it because I can see the big picture, right?

And that's harder to do with yourself, but it's not impossible to be able to figure some of those things out for yourself. So contributing factors would be things like. Other symptoms that can show up around the same time. maybe you notice that your PMS mood swings you have three or four days of heightened irritability or heightened anxiety prior to your [00:05:00] period, but you also notice that you feel really fatigued or your appetite is off, or you have a really big appetite and you're craving so many sweets and you're eating a lot more junk food during that time.

What are those contributing factors? Also, let's use the example, like you're irritable and you have a lot of cravings and you're eating more junk food during that time, and then you notice that your gut is off because you're eating things that you don't normally eat. Or you're staying up later to try to do something that feels good because you've been irritable day.

What are those contributing factors that come along with the symptoms? Because those can be clues as well into how we can make changes. It may be something obvious like, oh, , I'm eating a lot of inflammatory food and this is making me feel worse, but it also could be less obvious, and you have to peel back the curtain a little bit more to see that.

Same thing with painful periods, there are oftentimes months that you have a little bit better period, and months that you have a little bit worse period. It's really helpful to see, what else is contributing in the big picture. [00:06:00] Does it only happen when you have been exercising really hard the week before?

Does it only happen when you've been really sedentary? Does it only happen when you've had a lot less sleep? Being able to check in with those things and realize that there are some contributing factors can be incredibly helpful in being able to uncover what some of the solutions are for you. And then when I'm looking at contributing factors for you, I'm looking at, you are having these symptoms that show me that there really is an issue with estrogen detox. And so is that just an issue with estrogen detox in and of itself? Or is it that your body your liver is struggling because your blood sugar is so imbalanced? And that would be likely for me if there's also anxiety, if there's also energy crashes, if there's also these like ups and downs and fluctuations.

And how you're feeling throughout the day or week. Then I'm gonna be looking at those contributing factors as well, like blood sugar imbalance or gut imbalance. If you're having gut symptoms [00:07:00] along with your period, or you're having gut symptoms throughout the month, and maybe you don't even know that it's not normal to have diarrhea with your period, or constipation or bloating or gas around PMS time, a lot of women think that's totally normal, but I'm gonna look at that as a contributing factor so that we can get.

To the root cause, and we can realize that your estrogen dominance is actually because you are reabsorbing, estrogen in your gut due to other bacterial imbalances and leaky gut, right? That is something that it's easier to uncover when you can scale back and pull back and really see that full picture.

 the contributing factors are so helpful. To be able to know what to do to make your next period better. And then number three, you need to actually ideally be tracking symptoms during your cycle and understand what's happening during that time of your cycle with hormones to be able to really uncover what some of those root causes are as well.[00:08:00] 

And this is something that we also do when we do that 30,000 foot view is we can see throughout your cycle when symptoms are showing up and. How we can change what we're doing to support your body based on that. Because when we are seeing those shifts in different parts of your cycle, we can really correlate what that looks like.

But you can do this too. I have two episodes. If you are not really familiar with tracking your cycle, I have two episodes that I would love for you to listen to, and those would be. Episode 59 and episode 61, and I really walk you through how to track your cycle and what is happening with estrogen and progesterone in your cycle.

That is a great place to start to track your cycle. But when you are tracking your cycle consistently, you can really see what. Is happening , in a much bigger picture, essentially. what I mean by that is actually taking your temperature every single morning and being able to see what those temperature patterns are telling us.

And what we're typically looking for is just like a pattern of lower [00:09:00] temperatures to a pattern of higher temperatures. But when you have a trained eye looking at it, or you learn to do that yourself, you can actually see some really helpful information about. How long your luteal phase is, how long are you making progesterone after ovulation?

That can tell us a lot about your cycle and if it is a progesterone issue or if it's an estrogen issue. Are you ovulating early? That's often an estrogen issue. Are you having long cycles? Are you having short cycles? Are you having some dips in temperature after ovulation that would indicate that your estrogen is not detoxing very well?

There's all kinds of things we can see when you're actually tracking your cycle, but even. More simple than that. If you are just tracking even in just a basic tracking app, but you're putting in on day 14 when you're like, dang, I had this anxiety that came out of nowhere and I got a headache, and then you notice the next month like, oh, that was day 14 again.

Or it was day 15. There's a pattern that you can start to see. Same thing with PMS symptoms in your luteal phase or gut [00:10:00] symptoms that show up that seem like cyclical, but it's a little bit hard to tell. Those things are really easy to track and easy to see patterns, when you're actually tracking them throughout your cycle.

I really love cycle tracking for more information to make your next period better when I'm going through all of this, my goal is really to empower you that you can start investigating what's going on in your own body because it makes such a difference that you can understand that.

And then whether you work on things on your own or you partner with someone who can take that bigger view with you, you have so much more information. To go on instead of just like, well, my periods are bad and every month when it's day one through three, I know it's gonna be terrible. Or like, I have two weeks outta the month that my PMS is flaring up and I'm just so grumpy.

Those type of things are helpful to know, but often there's a lot more to the picture that we don't even [00:11:00] pay attention to and we don't even know isn't normal until we start tracking. I would highly recommend that you not only take the quiz and find out what your main hormone imbalance is, but that you also start to pay attention and start to track maybe what are some of those contributing factors?

What are some of the other symptoms that are showing up? What are some of the things that you notice that are a pattern with stress in your body, even if you have a really stressful day. What shows up in your body? Is it a headache? Is it shoulder tension? Is it gut pain? Is it exhaustion? Is it blood sugar crashes?

Is it irritability? Those type of things are so helpful because once you have that baseline knowledge, you can start to understand better what might be happening at a root cause in your body so that you can make the changes that are actually going to work for you and actually going to stick instead of.

More of the rabbit trails, and more of the supplements and more of the, x, y, z [00:12:00] hormone balance, lifestyle thing that you don't even know is working for you. Because what I see most often really contributing to women getting burnt out and frustrated when they're balancing their hormones is that they don't know why the thing that they're doing would work for them or not.

And they're just throwing spaghetti at the wall. Sometimes that spaghetti is going to stick, but it would be so much more fun to be honest, and so much easier if you just had. That not only information, but it builds confidence to understand your body better.

I just wanna encourage you that you can do this, that you can understand it, and that it doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to be overwhelming. It really just takes some intentional observation of your own patterns to be able to correlate a lot better what is happening in your body so that .

The things that you seek out for treatment or to help you make progress are going to work [00:13:00] so much better.

 Now, like I mentioned, we can help you with this and we would love to help you with this. So if that feels like your next step, if you're tired of getting stuck in this cycle where you have PMS symptoms, you have had periods, and every month you show up at your period again and just wonder like, what the heck?

Is going on here. How do I make it better? I don't know, feel discouraged. Then come join us in nourish your hormones, coaching we will hold your hand. We will help you really understand what's happening in your body, and we will do it in the most simple and straightforward way possible because we know that having better periods, less pm s and more energy is not only possible, but very probable for our.

Clients and our students, and when we see those changes happen, it truly makes such a difference in our lives as moms and as women, where we can increase the capacity to do the things that we love, and that is why we are here to help.