Happy Periods

Hey Gorgeous! Welcome to your awesome info-session all about natural ways to create happy periods.

I’m going to kick this off with a few AMAZING foods to eat to balance hormones, because hormonal imbalance generally has a role in *most* period issues. And generally, for most women, just because of what’s in our environment, sprayed on our food, eaten and concentrated by the animals lots of people eat, hanging out in our extra weight, and hangin’ around in our household cleaners, makeup products and hairpsrays (PLUS most of our canned goods and plastics – eek!), we’re looking at the best ways to help our bodies get excess estrogen and dangerous xenoestrogens OUT – on the double.

Why’s that important?

Quite simply, there are a lot of symptoms associated with too much estrogen in the body. So these tips may be really helpful for you if you:

• have acne
• have low iron levels
• uterine fibroids
• ovarian cysts
• endometriosis
• fibrocystic breasts
• weight gain, even despite your best efforts to the contrary
• irregular, long, short or heavy periods

The body RE-acts. It’s never doin’ anything TO you or AGAINST you. Keep that in mind while you find out the different things you can start putting in your bod to get a different set of reactions FROM your love-bod.

Three Tips for Wild-Beautiful Hormone Balance:

1. Start Eating More Cruciferous Veggies!

These hormone-loving foods help you out because of a few different nutrients/plant compounds:

1. Sulfurophane is one of those awesome plant compounds because it’s been shown to pump up the body’s ability to produce estrogen-detoxifying enzymes
2. Indole-3-Carbinol is another, and it helps break down harmful estrogens into non-toxic versions, AND gets rid of estrogen mimickers.
3. D-Glucarate helps you out by detoxifying estrogens and protecting the bod by binding with dangerous estrogens so they can make their exit from your GORGEOUS bod

And those are just a FEW we know of so far! So what foods are most concentrated in these nutrients (in no particular order)?

• brussels sprouts
• cauliflower
• kale
• cabbage (or sauerkraut!)
• broccoli
• and broccoli sprouts (super-concentrated)

So to help your hormones out, start eating WAY more of these foods each day.

2. Consider Adding Maca Into Your Life.

Maca powder is one of my favourite hormone-darlings. At the same time that it raises progesterone levels naturally, it helps to lower estrogen levels. Which is wicked-awesome for you and your period.

I like to get it in via smoothies, usually using 1 tsp of gelatinized (this has nothing to do with gelatin, just if, like me, you saw the word and got worried!) or raw, organic maca powder. For some women I’d suggest more, based on their specific complaints/symptoms. If you’ve been looking for 1 on 1 help and you just want a totally specific plan to help you with all of your health complaints, definitely keep reading because I’ve got an incredibly helpful offer at the end. But keep reading for now, because this could TOTALLY help!

3. Add More Fiber Into Your Diet.

This is HUGE because your overall health is SO tied into how often you poop. When you have great regularity, you’re making sure your liver is less burdened, which means it can rock out at getting excess estrogen out of your system. Of course, that means that you pick and choose what you’d want your liver to do, based on what you put in your bod each day, because if it’s gotta detoxify medication, alcohol, caffeine, tobacco, any other drugs or chemicals from your surroundings and food, it’ll choose to get the more harmful things out first (because seriously, your body ADORES you and wants you around for WAY long).

Here are my favourite ways to get extra fiber in:

• swap out regular crackers for Mary’s crackers or brown rice crackers
• swap out snacks for apples, pears and/or a home-made trail mix of your favourite nuts, with a few dark chocolate treats in there!
• add 1 tbsp. ground up flax seeds to your smoothies
• add hemp seeds to your salads
• add a cup of spinach to your smoothies

Those are some TRULY amazing and WILDLY helpful tips to get you started on your hormone-loving journey. Next I wanted to jump into a few things I know now about specific period complaints.

AND, I wanted to take a second now to say, that until you have your FOOD under control, random herbs generally aren’t feisty within the body. Once your food is awesome and completely supportive of your goals, THEN you add in really targeted herbs, you’re off to the races, Girl, and nobody’s keepin’ up with you. 

Cramps:

Acckkkkk! I used to have brutal, debilitating cramps for YEARS. And what’s worse, I thought that was totally normal!

I’d been surrounded by friends who were used to dealing with cramps, so I thought mine were the same and they were handling the pain better, or that it was just something to medicate out of my life. But when I changed my health and over-the-counters didn’t really fit in with those changes any more, I began a mission to end my cramps forever. And I actually stumbled onto the most effective thing I ever laid hands on.

Flax Oil. Seriously. I’d tried EVERYTHING once I found out that while cramps are super common, they’re (like anything) just your body crying out that it needs something, or something is out of balance.

I’d read every blog out there with natural remedies and drowned my bod in chamomile tea, raspberry leaf tea, hot compresses, baths, essential oils, all to no noticeable improvement (with the exception of ginger essential oil diluted in coconut oil rubbed onto my lower back and abdomen, which mostly burned so nice it made me focus on that rather than the cramp pain. So I wouldn’t say it took it away but it was a damn good distraction I used for a while).

And then I was aiming for increased energy and started pumping in flax oil every day, completely un-related to my period complaints or cycle.

And what do you think happened my VERY next period? My previously squinting, “10” cramps (on the of course, very technical out of 10 pain counter) had turned into “2” cramps. Wiiiicccccckkkkkeeeeddddd. This was something I could live with and thrive through!

And still now, if I take flax oil every day, little to no cramps at all. And if I don’t, pretty wicked-bad ones. Like magic. Flax magic. 🙂

Heavy Bleeding:

Any time I hear about a woman with a really heavy flow, I want her to know that:

1. It doesn’t have to be that way, even if it always has been for you, and
2. You’d probably thrive from getting help from a Holistic Nutritionist because I’d bet you fall into a sadly HUGE category of women with loads of thyroid symptoms, but whom fall within the normal blood test TSH range. (Cold hands and feet all the time? SUPER hard to lose weight? Cracks on the bottom of your heels, hair loss from the outer third of your eyebrows, exhaustion? And those are just a few.)

This is such a huge topic that it would be a serious disservice to just give you a few tips; each woman got to where she is because of specific things she’s doing, and in cases where I’ve helped with thyroid issues, it’s been a different plan for each person based on what they were doing that their thyroids weren’t loving up.

Mad-Chocolate Cravings:

My best advice here would be to eat more greens, so you re-fill your magnesium stores (real chocolate contains loads of magnesium, so one of the theories on chocolate cravings is your body going for a super easy way it knows of to get more magnesium in).

AND to eat complex carbs (like beans and whole supergrains like quinoa, amaranth, brown rice, wild rice) a heck of a lot more often, so that you’re not crashing your blood sugar levels and reaching for the fastest thing to spike ’em again (chocolate).

Third, I’d HIGHLY suggest finding an AWESOME, organic, real chocolate bar to snack on when you are crave-y, so you’re ACTUALLY getting the insane goodness that chocolate is, instead of some fake and flavoured garbage. I love Giddy Yoyo as my chocolate go-to’s. They’re amazing and their quality standards are the bomb. And yes, I DID just say that.

So those are my BEST ever tips for you for hormone balance, and a few period troubleshoots.

If you’re dedicated to ending your period troubles NOW and moving forward with love and ease through your next period, get in touch with me for a live, complimentary appointment here, and let’s chat about working together.

Thanks for being here and rocking out! I wish you the happiest of ALL periods, ever. And as always, you CAN do it.

Xo,

Nathalie from Glow