Knowing your monthly cycle and how to change the nutrients in those cycles is very beneficial to help keep hormones balanced.
We feel crazy at times, so learning more about what’s best at the beginning of your monthly cycle, compared to towards the end of your cycle, may help you get through those crazy cravings and mood swings.
Also learn what types of exercises helps in the different weeks as well to allow your body to respond best.
Follicular phase
The first two weeks of your menstrual cycle starting with week one being the week you bleed. The first week is important to help detox and release excess estrogen, and the second week of this phase is to increase protein to help support the body with increasing muscle in the body.
These two weeks would be where you wouldn’t have a lot of processed or starchy carbohydrates, and instead work on constructing meals with good protein, good quality fats and wholefood vegetables to nourish your body best.
Luteal phase
Last two weeks luteal phase where you are secreting progesterone (pro-pregnancy hormone) – this is a potent stimulator for your appetite, you are naturally going to feel hungrier, it is going to slow down your bowels (not as many bowel movements during the day) as you might in your follicular phase (first two weeks of cycle)..
It is important as a woman to understand where you are, and know that some of these changes may be coming because of the changing lens of hormones.
It’s not because there is something wrong with you (stop blaming), we need to be more flexible than like the genetic diets going on around us, created without hormone understanding or flexibility.
We instantly feel if we cannot stick to an eating plan, we must be broken or something is wrong with us.
When in reality a woman didn’t know how to shape shift whatever program, whatever diet or whatever she is trying to implement into her cycle.
Change it up
Don’t do the same thing all month long… hormones change, the laxative of your ligaments change, stiffness of your tendons change, the stability of our bodies change.
There are times of the month where it is not the best thing to do HIIT training (High Intensity Interval Training), burst or explosive movements. You are much more likely in the second week of your cycle because you can get injured if you are doing a lot of HIIT.
Week two would be a great time to increase the weights you lift, but not complete high repetitions.
Week one and three are a good time to work to 10-12 repetitions, leaving week four to be lower weights but higher repetitions along with plenty of rest days, yoga, nature walks that help give the body some nurturing.
Knowing where you are in your cycle helps you to know where you should be in your training cycle.
Nutrition cycle
Bleed week (week one) progesterone and estrogen are very low so follow a ‘Keto style’ (higher fats and protein) diet with carbs being non starchy vegetables only.
Broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy and turnips – this family of foods (brassica family) have important compounds (like sulforaphane that helps liver detoxification) that helps with estrogen clearance.
If you are a woman that gets PMS, that hot and achy joints, tender breasts, brain fog, sleep disturbances, mood change in those last two weeks of your cycle – it’s likely to be because your estrogen is not likely to be cleared out as sufficiently as it can.
When you take in compounds in the brassica family you are going to up regulate your liver’s ability to move those compounds through to excretion and this includes estrogen.
Estrogens golden rule is to use it and then lose it – you want to use estrogen to plump up your cheeks, grown your hair, give you curves, but then you don’t want it to hang around – because if it is reabsorbed you could have bowel issues and this is when you can have estrogen ‘reactivated’ and now you have too much estrogen in your system.
Towards the end of week one, and into the second week as estrogen makes a huge rise, and testosterone makes an appearance, in that second week stick with the brassica family style vegetables and increase protein, this helps to increase muscle in the body.
Lucien is an amino acid that helps with making new muscle proteins – you can do this through lifting weights and or increasing protein in the kitchen, ( you can bump up carbs as well if you feel you need).
In the luteal phase (2nd last week of cycle) move away from all ‘keto style’ diet, add in the starchy carbs to help with sleep and cravings.
By adding different portions of macronutrients – carbohydrates, protein and good fats at different weeks of your monthly cycle can be very supportive to your hormones, and keep your moods, energy and weight at a more even state.
With the stress that we have in our daily lives now compared to previously, we find this has been very damaging to our hormones. With eating more in line with our hormones, this is one way to eliminate stress that we could have been placing on the body, by not giving the body and hormones what it needed most.
If you’d like to work more in a hormone syncing and eating cycle, I have a program that may help what you are looking for : Adaptive metabolism
