Seven Menstrual Cycle Myths
This article is a guest post written by founder of N1 Fitness, Marcus Sidhu, CSEP-CPT, Pn1. You can find out more about Marcus at N1 Fitness or on Instagram at @n1fitness.
The majority of my clientele over the last 10+ years has been female, which means I’ve helped hundreds and hundreds of women lose fat and get healthy at this point and… There are a number of myths or beliefs in regards to menstrual cycle that I’ve seen SO many times that just don’t wanna go away and so I thought that this would be a worthwhile article.
Another reason I wanted to put this together is because it pains me to see women giving up their power to their cycle and believing that many of the symptoms that they experience aren’t changeable via lifestyle shifts…ladies often think that they just have to deal with them for the rest of their lives and that’s a truly daunting thought!
Also, many young women are being put on things like birth control at super early ages to dampen down undesirable symptoms (typically skin symptoms specifically), however these symptoms can be remedied via lifestyle and we don’t need to put these children on really powerful hormones in their developmental years…so I’m super passionate about this topic for a number of reasons!
I’m going to run through all the myths, explain the whys behind them and then also share with you exactly how to clear up the cycle related symptoms that you may be experiencing without the use of hormones or drugs like Advil, Ibuprofen etc…
Myth #1 is breakouts…
Many women believe that their cycle causes their skin to break out and fortunately, that’s not true! You have full control over the appearance of your skin whether it’s that time of the month or not.
The reason why women believe this, is due to a classic case of causation vs. correlation. Meaning, the amount of treat foods tends to increase before and during a women’s cycle for a number of reasons (which we’re going to cover soon) but when the amount of junk food goes up, the skin reacts as a result because the skin is an amazing reflection of what is going on in the gut or essentially digestive health.
The 2 most common offenders when it comes to flaring up the skin specifically are dairy and fried foods…chocolate (in North America at least) happens to be arguably the most common food that’s consumed around the cycle and chocolate has dairy in it (especially milk chocolate) and crushing a bunch of chocolate is just asking for a breakout for a lot of folks due to the fact that the vast majority of people are not lactose tolerant as adults.
So as these dietary changes occur around the cycle, women tend to think that it’s their cycle that is causing their skin to breakout, however it’s actually just the way that their eating habits shift during that time of the month, so it’s not causation, it’s correlation…this is really easy to mix up!
You can think about causation vs. correlation like house fires…every time you see a house fire you also see firemen and so someone could say, ‘well it seems to be that firemen cause house fires,’ but of course we know that not to be true…the same case applies here. Your cycle doesn’t flare up your skin, it’s not the cause of the fire, your food choices are and don’t just take my word for it…this is so easy to test because all you’ve gotta do is…
The next time that your cycle comes around, simply skip any foods that don’t agree with you digestion wise and your skin will remain clear i.e. skip the chocolate, skip the treats, eat solely single ingredient whole foods and you’ll see the results for yourself!
Myth #2 ties in with Myth #1 and it is bloating and digestion issues…
We’ve actually got the exact same causation vs. correlation case on our hands here. As food choices get funkier and funkier around the cycle…digestion, bloating and water retention increase, which totally makes sense because it doesn’t matter if it’s that time of the month or not, if you’re eating foods that don’t agree with you, they’re going to cause bloating and inflammation regardless of whether you have your cycle or not…men experience this too!
But again, don’t take my word for it, you can test this very easily…
For your next cycle, stick to single ingredient whole foods throughout the whole thing and you will see your digestion stay right on track and you’ll also see virtually no bloating and stomach distention. I’ve had so many clients experience literally zero bloating and digestion troubles on cycle and these same gals had a ton of trouble before we started working together and the only thing that we changed was their diet and lifestyle…also, feeling bloated just sucks, so this is amazing news!
Myth #3 is cravings…oh boy, I said it…cycle-related cravings are a myth…
Before you start cussing me out, this is backed up by research and it’s fascinating stuff. A study specifically looked at chocolate cravings around the cycle in women living in the US and they found that women born in the US experienced chocolate cravings around their cycle at a far higher rate than foreign born US women (meaning women that were born abroad and then moved to the US after) and it turns out that the longer a family had been living in the US, the stronger the likelihood of chocolate cravings there were, meaning…
Foreign born women experienced the fewest chocolate cravings if any at all, first generation women experienced more chocolate cravings comparatively, second generation women experienced chocolate cravings even more frequently and so on. Also, they found that even foreign born women who identified less with their native culture and more with US culture experienced higher rates of chocolate cravings than foreign born women who identified more with their native culture AKA the more that these women identified with US culture, the more likely that they were to experience chocolate cravings…so interesting right!?
Cycle related cravings are not physiological, they’re cultural and a classic example of this that we’re all familiar with is the concept of comfort food. Comfort food varies depending on where you are in the world. Also, comfort to me is my Mom’s homemade spaghetti with my Aunts homemade cheesecake for dessert…that’s not your idea of comfort food, your idea of comfort food is whatever you associate with comfort and it’s entirely individual.
We’ve got the same deal here with chocolate cravings around the cycle, they’re cultural, they’re not biological. Now there have been people that have tried to connect biological dots and I always find this funny because I remember specifically someone saying to me that women crave chocolate around their cycle because of the magnesium content in chocolate and if that were the case, women would crave pumpkin seeds because they are the densest food form of magnesium, they contain 300% more magnesium than chocolate!
It’s sort of like when folks try to say that red wine is healthy because it contains resveratrol…alcohol is poison…but we love drinking it and so people do these studies with the intention of cherry picking a single nutrient in something that we just enjoy consuming and then try to fit that into some sort of belief or narrative that they just want to believe to be true.
Women crave chocolate around their cycle because
A) the old folk lore is ‘women crave chocolate around their cycle’ and
B) it’s just delicious and that’s why folks want it.
The only actual physiological craving that hypothetically makes sense is craving red meat around the cycle due to blood loss. Red meat is the most bioavailable form of iron for the human body and so when women are losing blood, they’re losing iron and so if anyone was going to make an argument for a legit physiological cycle related craving, it would be that!
Also, we all generate routines and association and we can establish routine very very quickly, for example…
If you go to the airport and you’re waiting for your flight and you grab Starbucks and it’s delicious, it perks you up, ya get that glorious caffeine kick and now you’re even more excited for your trip. The next time you go to the airport, you grab Starbucks again and the same increased alertness and excitability happens via the caffeine and all of a sudden your routine every time you go to the airport is that you grab a Starbucks.
Now it also helps that Starbucks is available in virtually every single airport, but this pre-flight Starbucks becomes your travel routine/association and the same idea is often applied to the cycle. Women develop these routines of say, curling up on the couch with their favourite bar of chocolate, a warm blanket, a heating pad and a movie...
This routine becomes just what they do and I’m not saying that this is necessarily bad, I’m just saying that it has no physiological basis. You aren’t controlled by your chocolate cravings around your cycle, you’ve simply been conditioned to think that it’s par for the course, but it’s just not…it’s a belief, it’s culture, it’s made up.
Having said that, if you just like or want to eat chocolate or whatever you happen to want to eat around your cycle, go for it, but just know that these cravings don’t have control over you, you choose them!
Myth #4 is back pain…
A fair number of women experience back pain around their cycle and this one is super straightforward, it’s simply because of a lack of movement. More time sedentary and on the couch equates to back pain and this applies to men as well by the way and the remedy is so simple…hit 10,000 steps per day all month long, done. I’d give the same advice to virtually anyone experiencing back pain, in 99.9% of cases it’s the result of lack of movement as opposed to physical damage of any sort.
Myth #5 is interrupted sleep…
When we look at some of our other myths and the behaviour associated with them like eating more treats, digestion and bloating issues and not moving enough, these are all going to impair your sleep quality, for example…
Eating more funky foods is going to dysregulate your blood sugar and therefore lead to more nighttime wake ups.
Digestion and bloating issues via treats are going to impair sleep quality as well.
Not moving enough means that you likely didn’t spend enough time outside getting daylight exposure and therefore your circadian rhythm gets messed up. Also, the lack of movement i.e. low energy expenditure leads to restlessness and lower quality sleep…the easiest way to think about this one is how well you sleep after a really high activity day…
Let’s say that you go for a 4 hour hike one day, you sleep like a baby…on the other hand, let’s say that you don’t see the light of day because you were curled up watching movie after movie…it’s often hard to sleep that night right!?
So, fortunately it’s the habits that are associated with the menstrual cycle vs. the menstrual cycle itself that is impairing sleep.
Myth #6 is low energy and moodiness…
You’re probably putting all of these pieces together at this point and seeing the big picture lifestyle ‘recipe’ that is behaviors around the cycle that are creating this stuff…
More treat foods leads to bloating and digestion issues, which leads to less movement and less movement leads to poor sleep and poor sleep equates to a higher likelihood of low energy and moodiness and low energy leads to more funky food decisions and the cycle repeats itself endlessly.
All of these things are essentially lending themselves to one another and so that’s why we see these clusters of PMS symptoms and believe that it’s the cycle itself because it’s become so common…it’s not normal, but common and it makes perfect sense because if you just take out the menstrual cycle itself, you’re still going to experience all of these symptoms no matter what time of the month it is if you engage in these behaviors…even if you’re a man…it’s not even a female thing, it’s a human thing!
Myth #7 is sort of a myth and sort of not and it is cramps…
Menstrual cramps are real, women aren’t making them up, however what I see in my female clients is that the healthier and healthier that they get, the fewer and fewer cramps show up cycle after cycle meaning, the better and better your lifestyle choices become, the fewer and fewer cramps you will experience, for example…
When a woman starts working with me, her first cycle is far better on the symptom front than usual, her second cycle is better yet and so on, the symptoms just continue to improve month after month and often ultimately disappear.
I’ve seen some stuff associated between consuming a lot of seed oils and PMS cramps specifically and a lot of folks are pointing the figure at seed oils for causing just about every single health issue on the planet right now and while I see where they’re coming from, they’re so hyper-focused on seed oils themselves that they’re missing the forest for the trees.
Seed oils are things like soybean oil, cottonseed oil, rapeseed oil etc. and…
The VAST majority of seed oils that folks consume are in heavily processed foods and the reason they’re in so many heavily processed foods is because they’re cheap and they’re shelf stable aka they’re profitable.
So, it’s not so much the seed oils in and of themselves that are inflammatory and causing all sorts of health issues, it’s that ‘package’ that they’re wrapped in, which are heavily processed hyper palatable foods that are very easy to over eat and often contain substances that irritate digestion and therefore the immune system.
The less heavily processed food that you eat, the healthier you are going to become and the healthier that you become, the fewer and fewer cramps you’re going to experience.
The underlying message of this blog is, keep your healthy habits on track throughout your cycle (the whole month) and you’re going to be blown away by how much better you feel. Also, the healthier and healthier that you get, the less and less you’re going to even notice your cycle!
I have women that have had the smoothest months of their lives after we dial in their nutrition, movement and sleep habits and they feel so liberated because they thought that they were going to have to deal with these symptoms for the rest of their lives and they don’t, you don’t, you can take your power back and feel great all month long.
Now a tricky little psychological factor at play that I absolutely think is worth mentioning is…
Some people on some level actually like their PMS symptoms…I know that sounds strange, but I’ll give you an example…
Let’s say that Becky is a real hard charging lawyer that has a tough time winding down and giving herself the rest that she needs and the only time that she gives herself permission to take a break is during her cycle and so I come along and say ‘ya don’t have to feel low energy, crampy etc. etc. etc.’ and Becky might actually feel threatened by that message because if she were to take the rest that she needs when she was feeling great, she’d feel guilty, she’d feel lazy, she’d feel unproductive and the list goes on…
Meaning, her cycle let’s her off the hook…it gives her permission to chill.
This is just one example, but it’s actually an example that I’ve shared with you guys about myself personally in regards to alcohol. I haven’t had a drink in 9 months and I found that the only time where I really gave myself permission in the past to have a lazy day on the couch was when I was hungover and so when I eliminated alcohol from my life, I found myself working every single day and straight through the weekend because I felt great and I didn’t give myself permission to take a break.
This is something that I’ve had to be really aware of since becoming sober meaning, I have to go out of my way to say, ‘hey Marcus, take a breather dude, you’re not working this afternoon.’
There are all sorts of sneaky payoffs in life…
I had a client a while back that had MS (Multiple Sclerosis) and MS is an autoimmune condition where the immune system attacks the nerves essentially and we figured out that she was completely gluten intolerant and so whenever she had gluten, she would get exhausted and it felt like the blood was boiling in her legs and feet (her words not mine).
Now the most interesting thing about this client of mine was that if she skipped gluten, she felt amazing and life was dandy however, she still ate gluten on a regular basis…and you might be wondering, why!?
As our work progressed together she acknowledged that when she had an autoimmune flare up, that was the only time that her family noticed and acknowledged all of her contributions around the home. The cooking wasn’t done, the cleaning wasn’t done, the house was a mess and so her family would be like ‘oh shit, Mom’s on the couch and now I’ve gotta do all of this stuff on my own,’ they didn’t realize just how much she contributed until she was ill.
She wanted that acknowledgment from her family so much that she was willing to make herself sick in order to get it because she knew what she could and couldn’t eat in order to stay healthy and thriving, but that need for recognition was just too powerful to pass up and she didn’t know how to get it any other way.
So, if you’re wondering why you’re engaging in behaviours that just don’t seem to make any sense to you, there are payoffs at play that you’re unaware of!
Another quick example, my grandma was sick for about 35-40 years with too many autoimmune conditions to count, she’s passed now but when someone is sick for that long yet doesn’t pass away you’ve gotta wonder like…why, because that’s a lot of suffering!
Well, my Grandma was lonely and she didn’t have a whole lot of human interaction on a day to day basis other than with her husband (my Grandpa) and whenever a certain health issue popped up for my Grandma, she would get a lot more family visits from her kids, her grandchildren as well as her friends and so associations began to build…
She thought, ‘I’m lonely and when I’m extra sick, I don’t feel as lonely’ because the people that she loved came to see her and so I believe that she essentially started to make herself sick on a certain conscious or subconscious level because she didn’t know how to get the love that she knew that she needed any other way.
I know that I’ve strayed a little bit from the menstrual cycle topic, but I think that stories like this are really powerful because hidden payoffs can actually run our lives when we’re not truly aware of what’s going on just slightly under the surface.
We have the power to create our lives and ideally we find more constructive ways to give ourselves what we need, instead of having to resort to suffering or making ourselves ill in order to get them. When you change your lifestyle for the better, your PMS symptoms will reflect that perfectly.
Eat single ingredient whole foods that you digest really well, hit your 10k steps per day and sleep 7-9 hours per night all month long and your quality of life is going to skyrocket, I promise!!
