Lara Briden - The Period Revolutionary
Leading the change to better periods and hormones
Progesterone is the hormone women make after ovulation and is important not just for fertility but also to help to prevent osteoporosis, stroke, dementia, heart disease, and breast cancer. Regular ovulatory cycles are beneficial for general health. Progesterone can also be taken in the form of micronized progesterone to relieve heavy periods and the symptoms of perimenopause.
This is my open letter to every clinician, personal trainer, and blogger who offers health advice without thinking about the importance of ovulation and natural ovulatory menstrual cycles.
Dear Sir,
Your restrictive dietary advice may cause young women to stop ovulating which is a problem because ovulation is how women make hormones.
That makes ovulation an essential part of human physiology and not just for making babies. Ovulation is not optional. Thank you.
If you’re going to take hormone therapy, it’s safer to take hormones that are identical to human hormones. In other words, hormones that are body-identical or bioidentical. The concept of bioidentical used to be controversial but is now conventional and mainstream.
In episode five of my podcast/YouTube video, I discuss hormone therapy, including why the concept of bioidentical was controversial when it didn’t need to be; oral micronized progesterone for heavy periods, mood, sleep, and perimenopausal migraines; and some quick facts about body-identical estrogen.
In a normal period, you should not lose more than about 80 mL of menstrual fluid over all the days of the bleed. That’s equivalent to about five tablespoons spread over all the days of the bleed.
In episode two of my podcast/YouTube video, I discuss heavy periods including the role of hormone imbalance, mast cell activation, and insulin resistance; simple period-lightening strategies such as iron, zinc, and a dairy-free diet; and using body-identical progesterone to lighten periods.
According to a 2017 study, pain is the most frequently reported symptom of PCOS. Even though pain is not a symptom of PCOS!
The solution to this paradox is that both PCOS and period pain are common, so it’s easy to have both a PCOS diagnosis and period pain (including pain due to endometriosis).
That’s true whether the PCOS diagnosis is valid (i.e., there are symptoms of androgen excess) or invalid (i.e., the diagnosis was mistakenly based on an ultrasound finding).