Body Literacy 101

Do you remember how you learned about your period? Did you learn about it in school or like many of us did you have a box of tampons passed through the door and you were on your own?

In our culture, we don't have nearly enough education around menstrual cycle basics, and it does a huge disservice for our health and our fertility management.

It's almost like if they teach us, they might use it and that simply won't work in an abstinence only culture.

In this week's episode, we are pulling back the curtain and letting you in on the 411 about your menstrual cycle.

Want to learn more? Check out Body Basics in our online course offerings.

Transcript

0:03

Do you remember how you learned about your period? did you learn about it in school or like many of us did you have a box of tampons passed through the door and you were on your own? In our culture, we don't have nearly enough education around menstrual cycle basics, and it does a huge disservice for our health and our fertility management. It's almost like if they teach us, they might use. And that simply won't work in an abstinence only culture. In this week's episode, we are pulling back the curtain and letting you in on the four 11 about your menstrual cycle. Hi, I'm Adrian Irizari. I am an Eastern medicine practitioner who is passionate about women's health and helping women live their best lives. My goal is to put you in the driver's seat of your menstrual health offering period. For a symptom free life. Statements made in this program are for educational purposes only, and not intended as a substitution for medical consultation or advice. We do not claim to diagnose, treat, or cure any diseases. This podcast is inclusive and welcomes all gender identities. The focus of the program is on biological function and we will use the term women throughout, but it is referencing physiological and social challenges for biology, not identity. Come as you are. I am happy you're here and welcome all performances of identity. I hope you find something helpful in this show. Welcome back to another episode of the Reproductive Rebel Podcast. I'm very excited about this week's episode because we are. Taken it back to basics. This is going to be our menstruation 1 0 1 episode, and for some of you, this may be a little elementary, but for the vast majority of us, this is information that we should have been taught from the very beginning. and we aren't. I have women that come into my practice on a regular basis and say things like, why haven't I been taught that my first day of red blood is actually the beginning of my new cycle? Not all of the spotting that I get before it or, I thought I was supposed to have energy around ovulation. Why is it that I feel tired and kind of like my period is starting? So understanding what is happening in our body at each of the different stages of our month helps us to understand how it should be. and what may not be working optimally for us so that we can do some very specific work to support the system, to eliminate those symptoms and restore ease. So let's have that overview conversation that we all should have had as young women. I was very frustrated to find when I did a survey on. Book, maybe I did it on Instagram. I think I actually did it in both places, but I had kind of asked the audience to see how people learned about what was going on inside of their bodies. And I was finding that people were the vast majority anyway of people weren't saying that they learned. About their sexual health and their body wisdom through health class. I think I had one person respond that everything that she knew about her reproductive health came out of a health class. Let me just let that sink in for a second. One person, out of all of the people that I asked this question to actually learned this information in. most people said things like, between Google and my friends, I figured it out or my period started. I wasn't given any information, just had a box of tampons slid through the door and I was on my own to figure it out. That is a lot more common in terms of people's experience, not having someone sit down with them and actually explain what is going on, how to properly care for themselves. and that ends up translating into issues later on. I had a client a few years ago now who was struggling to conceive, well, lo and behold, we found out that, you know, while there were some things to work on that were cycle related for her, the reason that she wasn't getting pregnant was actually less to do with her. appearance of her cycle and the health of it, but actually the fact that she had been taught by a friend that her fertile window was the five days before her period, so she had spent years. Okay. It breaks my heart and I just wanted to hug her because she was so upset when she found out that the reason she wasn't conceiving is because they were trying in the wrong place during the month. Just that little change was the difference between somebody going through an infertility program and somebody being able to naturally conceive on their own without inter. So because of heartbreaking stories like that and others, I am bringing it back to basics and we are starting from the beginning. So there are four phases in your menstrual cycle. Now I wanna just clarify some terminology, menstruation. Is your period, your menstrual cycle is actually the entire month from the first day of red blood until the first day of red blood the next month. That is your entire menstrual cycle. Sometimes when I talk with clients, I find that they think your menstrual cycle is only your bleeding days. So I just wanted to clarify that. So menstruation itself is the. of your month. Okay, so sometimes people think periods go at the end of the sentence, so your period must be the end of your month. But in fact, it is actually the beginning of your new menstrual cycle. and that menstrual cycle should be between 20 and 30 days on average. Then you have your follicular phase. Menstruation actually fits into the follicular phase because the follicular phase is comprised of menstruation and. Your egg developing for ovulation that month. And then ovulation is actually the early part of your LAL phase. And then after that really short ovulation window, you are well into the rest of the LAL phase, which continues until your period starts again. So it's kind of similar a way that Western terminology. with the way that the Eastern way looks at your period. So Chinese medicine says that the first half of your month menstruation and the follicular phase is the yin phase of your cycle. Yin is substance. And so at the beginning part, you were losing substance during menstruation. and then you are rebuilding substance, developing that follicle that is going to be the egg that is released for ovulation. So everything is about substance. Ovulation is an energetic event, and it is in the young phase of the cycle. So the young and the phase is comprised of the lal and ovulation. Both. They are more energetic. There is more. So this is a good way to kind of remember it. So we're gonna do a little bit of a deeper dive into each of these sections, and then I'm going to really simplify things and the next few episodes after this one. So make sure that you subscribe and set a reminder for the next few weeks, because each week we are going to do a very close look. Each of these four phases in your cycle so that you can really understand. What is going on and how it is affecting your day-to-day life. But for the sake of kind of laying down the overall roadmap this week, we're going to look at all four phases of the menstrual cycle in its entirety. So that first piece is menstruation. You are shedding the endometrial lining. So this should take place over a four to six day period. It is the beginning of your. That is the important part. The first day of fresh red blood that is committed enough that it is an actual flow. That is where you start counting your cycle for the month. Is where you begin the first day of fresh red blood that commits to an actual flow. It does not have to be heavy. And honestly, if it begins and it's like the floodgates of hell opened, that actually speaks to an issue that needs to be addressed. Your first day should not be your heaviest day, and I am gonna reiterate that a few times because this is a misconception I see quite often in my practice. but we also think that brown blood at the. is part of menstruation and actually it doesn't get counted, and it's important to know that it doesn't get counted because if you are counting those brown days, if you needed to go into an allopathic practitioner and have them do a hormone test, if you were doing that hormone test, when you know you count brown. You may think that you're on day three, but you may not have actually reached day three yet, so if they're testing your FSH level, you're not going to get a really accurate. Lab result from that blood test. So knowing how to properly count is very, very important in terms of understanding everything else that happens the rest of the month. And I know that I'm kind of emphasizing this part quite a bit, but I find that in my practice it is one of the missed steps that our culture. as a whole does not teach young women, and it affects every facet from our emotional health to our physical health. So day one, fresh red blood that commits to an actual flow is day one of your new menstrual cycle. And from that time, It should be like a soft bell curve. Day one will be light to medium. It will get heavier day two, three, start to cruise to the finish line day four, and it will finish between day four and day six. You may be really light by the time you reach day six, but if you are still having a steady, heavy bleed by day six, that is still red blood. We're not talking about brown. That's for another episode. If you are still having a very steady, heavy flow by day. This is something that we should look into because four to six days is where your period should be falling with an, like I said, a bell curve. It should be a little heavier in the middle and start to come down at and trail off at the end there. So the follicular phase is the longest phase of your menstrual cycle. The follicular phase because it encompasses both menstruation as well as that follicle development stage, which tends to begin on day three of your cycle. With the rise of your follicle stimulating hormone, it is the longest phase of your menstrual cycle. So follicles develop a dominant follicle steps forward. that is the one that will end up being released for ovulation that month. Vitamin D is an important mineral to have in this phase of your cycle. The other thing to keep in mind in this phase of your cycle is, To have blood building foods, so your dark leafy greens, apricots, cherries, anything that's red as well, red like pomegranates. All of those kinds of things are going to help in that blood building. So think blood red. I love the dark leafy greens for a lot of reasons, because not only do they help to build blood, but they help to move blood as well. Keeps us from feeling cranky as we walk into ovulation. So building blood after you've lost blood is a very important part of the process because you have to rebuild substance after you've lost it. so people can sometimes feel tired going into that few days after menstruation if they're not properly refueling their body or if they're trying to exercise too hard when you're rebuilding this part of your body. So the follicular phase is very important. Movement is. Nothing to an extreme because you're still building, developing the substance in your body. You're building blood rich, endometrial lining. There's a lot of activity in terms of creation of things, the development, the ripening. okay. All of these things are substance related. Then we have an energetic transition that moves us from the follicular phase into the lal phase. So just like the follicular phase is marked by menstruation being the first four to six days of the entire phase, ovulation marks the first. Three days maximum. Generally it's one to two days, but you know, it can happen anywhere between day 13 and day 15 on average. Okay. Again, I'm speaking all from averages. Each body is unique and so that can fluctuate a little bit, but the phase itself ovulation is the shortest. Of this cycle because it only lasts one to two days, although you can find it happening in roughly a three day window. So estrogen reaches its peak and testosterone surges. So there's a reason why ovulation, you feel like you are a rock star. You have a lot of the fluffing hormone, estrogen, so your skin glows. Your face as an evolutionary thing actually gets more symmetrical because your body is biologically trying to attract a ma. Interesting, right? So the start of your fertile window leading up to ovulation will be marked by a change in discharge. So you will go from having dry days, meaning that the only. discharge that you're going to have is lubricant, meaning slippery in your fingers when you are aroused. Outside of that, you don't have discharge like that when you walk into the fertile window. and you have a change in your acidity level. You become more alkaline in order to keep sperm alive until ovulation. That's part of why we have this change in our mucus and we start making more mucus as we get closer to ovulation. All of a sudden it starts to become stretchy and it looks like egg whites, and you'll be able to stretch it between your fingers, but it won't snap. There'll be like a string in between the. That's how you know when you reach that egg, white, stringy, slippery stuff, that's when you know you have an egg present. The egg survives 12 to 24 hours and at the end of that window it is a marked by a disappearance of that stretchy stuff. Okay? So you will have a very clear marker when. Disappearance happens and you will know that you are no longer fertile the lal phase. Starts at the first day of ovulation and continues until menstruation begins. So this is like menstruation being part of the follicular phase. Like I said before, an ovulation is part of the LAL phase. So your lal phase can be 11 to 17 days long. although I've seen the best pregnancy outcomes in my clients that have 13 to 15 day lal phases, the issues that I've seen with fertility in my practice generally are when the lal phase is shorter than 13 days, it can indicate that there's not enough young in the body. And obviously this is something that, you know, you would talk to your practitioner and look at, and I'm speaking about it in an Eastern medicine way, so you know, you would talk to an Eastern medicine practitioner because Western medicine does look at this a little bit differently when people have less than 10 day lal phase. They would have a lal phase deficit or defect from a Chinese medicine place. It means that there's not enough heat in that second part of the cycle to hold a pregnancy because the belief is like warm feet or fertile feet. Keeping the body warm is hospitable for fertility purposes. Okay? And if there's not enough heat in the second part of the cycle, miscarriage is. So contrary to popular belief, you cannot get pregnant all month. I'm gonna just leave that there for a second. You cannot get pregnant all month. I know that is a mind blowing concept for some of you. I know that it was for me because the way that I remember birth control being pitched outside of for medical purposes, that's one of the things I remember in school that it was like, you know, you need to be on birth control because you're super fertile and can get pregnant anytime. Well, that's not true. You have a seven day fertile window. you're taking medication all month for a seven day fertile window. Outside of that seven day fertile window. Your body is a sperm killing machine. You are simply too acidic for sperm to survive. So it's really important to know these things because it changes the way that we make decision. So I know for me, when I found out that I couldn't get pregnant all month long, it became incredibly important to me to figure out where that fertile window was because I had a heart attack on birth control. I didn't want to be reliant upon hormonal birth control anymore, and my mind was totally blown by the fact that you could manage your fertility without needing hormone. So for me it looked like a chia diaphragm. If I was in that seven day window, I would either abstain or use a barrier and I was able to manage my fertility very well. So knowing the basics about how your body works or the foundation of literally everything, you will know what it needs when you know what phase you. you'll have a better understanding of your energy levels and you know, this is why ovulation for most women. Now, I know that there are exceptions to every rule, and there are women that I work with in my practice that. Have a low and PMs symptoms and cramping, and it feels like their period is starting, but they're only in ovulation and there's reasons for that. And you know, we'll look at that as we go forward. But knowing that you should be having the highest of energy of the entire month during ovulation. Then tells you that there's an area that needs a little more love and support in your body, right? So understanding what your body's supposed to be doing, understanding what your energy is supposed to look like, totally changes. Your understanding of your body and realize that it is lovingly trying to communicate with you. But we just haven't been taught how to read the language. So, you know, knowing these foundational concepts, you know how to plan for fertility. So if you're trying to get pregnant, you know when the optimal time. Or if you don't wanna get pregnant, you know how and when to take precautions. This is huge. When you think about that little inner critic in our head that says to us all the time, we aren't doing enough. You know, why are you sitting? We make ourselves feel guilty about the fact that, you know, there's dishes in the sink and there's laundry that needs to go through the machine and all of these things, and all you wanna do is sit and take a 20 minute. so understanding that it's normal. in your menstrual phase and the end part of your LAL phase leading up to menstruation, to feel more tired, to be more introverted, and that in the middle of the month, this is where you're going to have the most energy and the clearest mind. And all of these things really changes our perception of our body, the stories that we tell ourselves because we are locked into our head with that. We hear that voice telling us all the time, like, just get up off the couch, Adrian. I don't understand why you can't move, or you didn't get this done today. Or, you know, fill in the blank. Does this sound like a voice you've heard in your own head? I know that most of my clients will shame themselves when they can't keep up. During certain parts of their cycle, and it's so important to understand that we cannot live in spring and summer energy all the time. If you look outside the window, the seasons outside the window aren't in spring and summer all the time. So why is it that we are held to that unachievable standard? So if you wanna have fewer symptoms throughout the month than learning about what you need in each phase of your cycle now sets you up for success and changes your experience with your period tomorrow. This is how you improve your overall health, because when you're not trying to swim upstream against the tide and you flow with it, you're using a lot less energy and you're capitalizing on all the strengths and gifts that every phase gives us. So all you have to do, Is keep following the upcoming episodes. Okay? This is the initial roadmap. We just covered it. You have four phases in your cycle. Here's the basics. Next few episodes, we are doing a deeper dive into each of these phases so that you have a really clear understanding of what is going on in your body. We're gonna pull back the curtain so you understand what is happening inside your system and how you can support yourself. if you wanna connect with others who are looking to transform their period problems as well, join us in the Reproductive Rebel Listeners Facebook group. It's a free group. Join us for the conversation, share your experience, and we can talk about ways that we can help you live your best life, because that's our goal, period. Solutions for a symptom free. Thank you for joining me for another episode of Reproductive Rebel Reproductive. Rebel is recorded by certified peri steam hydrotherapist, herbalist, sound healer, and Chinese nutritional therapist, Adrian IRI of Moon Essence L L c. If you are interested in setting up an appointment with Adrian for one-on-one support, ordering from our store or checking out our course offerings, visit our website at Moon essence dot. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to get insider information on upcoming events and offerings. Join the conversation like us and follow Moon Essence me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Your voices make this program possible. Thank you all for your continued support.