Episode 14: Insights from My First Regular Cycle in 2 Years
Episode Summary
In this podcast episode, I delve into my experience with menstrual cycles and the impact movement has had on my usual (irregular) cycle. I also chat about importance of finding enjoyable and accessible forms of movement, the challenges marginalised bodies face in society, and how consistent self-care can help manage stress and support the nervous system. I hope this episode encourages you to find ways to care for your body and mind in a way that feels good to you!
What to Expect from the Podcast
This episode challenges you to separate movement from weight-loss goals, fostering a healthier, more joyful connection with their bodies while prioritizing self-compassion and mental well-being.
Highlights:
The Connection Between Movement and Menstrual Cycles
The Importance of Supporting the Nervous System
Movement Without Pressure or Weight-Loss Goals
Links and Resources
Nicola’s book, Fat and Fertile
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Hey, my lovely Welcome to fat and fertile the podcast. I'm Nicola salmon, fat positive fertility coach and author of the book fat and fertile. I'm obsessed with helping folks navigate getting pregnant in an anti fat world on this podcast, we'll explore the complexities that fat folks face when you want to grow your family. If you want to support this podcast, I would love for you to share it on social media or leave me a review on your podcast app. Are you ready? Let's dive in. You.
Hey, loves so I'm not in my usual podcasting spot at my desk. It's Friday. I normally take Fridays to catch up on House staff. But instead, it is day one of my cycle. So I'm sat on the sofa with Huckleberry, the sprocket spaniel. He's given me a cuddle, and I thought it might be interesting to have a chat about menstrual cycles, because I, like I said, I'm day one, and something quite unusual has happened in this menstrual cycle for me, and that is that it was 29 days, and it's really unusual for me to have a cycle that is anywhere near what folks would tend to call normal. Let me see if I can see the app on my phone. So I don't tend to record much about my menstrual cycle these days, but I do like to record when my bleeds are just so I get a sense of what my cycle is doing. So to give it some perspective, the last vaguely normal cycle that I had, which was 32 days, was in December of 2022, and since then, my cycles have been 5498 80 920, 83 and then this month is 29 so it is, let's say, unusual for me to have regular cycles like that, and I have been an irregular cycle person for as long as I've been menstruating. So I started menstruating when I was about 13. I think I had my first menstrual cycle, and they've been a regular since then, I was diagnosed finally with polycystic ovarian syndrome at 16, I've had spates of being on the pill, which obviously masks the symptoms, but yeah, never had lots and lots of regularity with My cycle. It's very common for me to go three months without a menstrual cycle, so when I started running three or four weeks ago now, I had an inkling that it would have a positive impact on my menstrual cycle. There's been a couple of times in my life, where I've exercised consistently, multiple times a week, and I've noticed a positive impact on my menstrual cycle. So I was hopeful, but I wasn't like. I didn't have a lot of pressure on myself. I wasn't putting a lot of pressure on myself to do this to support my menstrual cycle. I just fancied it, I'll be honest. That's what all this was like. I wanted to improve my fitness levels a little bit. Obviously. I hope you know me well enough by now to know that it was nothing to do with weight loss. There's nothing to do with changing my body. And just because I'm doing it, that does not mean that you have an obligation to do it at all. There is no moral superiority in any form of movement. But I just thought it would be really interesting to talk about this experience that I've had over the past month, why I think it's happened. And yeah, it might offer some ideas, some help, some support for you if you're navigating irregular cycles too. So for me, there's been a couple of times, like I said, that I've noticed that movement has made a positive impact on my menstrual cycle. Running definitely, if I ever take it up, which I've had, you know, maybe three or four times in my life where I've done it for a little bit maybe like done it to train for a 10k or something. I tend to work better if I have something that I'm working towards. And I've noticed a positive impact on my menstrual cycle. I've also noticed it actually with cold water swimming. So I took up cold water swimming in lockdown, one of many people. Cool, and that actually had a really positive impact when I was going more consistently. So I still do outdoor swimming. I absolutely love it, but at the moment, I'm tending to only go once a week, and I think frequency plays a big role for me in how it impacts my hormones and my menstrual cycle. So when I was doing it, like three or four times a week, it definitely had more of an impact. But what the thing I think that I want you to take away most from the experience that I've had, of like these movements having a positive impact on my menstrual cycle, is that my weight hasn't changed. I have run. I think I've done three four weeks, so that's maybe like, what nine or 10 runs I've done over the course of the last month, and my weight hasn't changed. My clothes don't feel different, nothing. My weight has not changed. But the behavior did change, right like so you cannot control your weight, but you absolutely can, to a certain degree, control some of the behaviors. And for me, and that I am, you know, one person, this doesn't apply to everybody, but for me, changing that behavior impacted my hormones and impacted my menstrual cycle. And I think noticing that difference and noticing that that it was the behavior and not the weight, is really, really helpful for your mental health to separate out. Now I'm not saying that I believe everybody should go away and start doing the couch to 5k or I'm doing something called non to run, which I'm enjoying. That's not what I'm trying to say at all. But I think that it can be really helpful to separate movement from weight loss, because I think so many of us have that experience of equating exercise with losing weight, and also there's so I've spoken about this on my Instagram stories. There's so much difficulty with being able to access movement in the first place, both in terms of feeling safe in those spaces, in terms of accessing clothes that feel comfortable like the biggest change for me this time, when I've done running, is finding a bra that worked for me, that was able to run in measuring myself my partner to help me measure myself at home, finding a bra and bentet that looked Like it was going to do the job. So not spending, like, a fortune on a bra, because it's I didn't want to put pressure on myself. I didn't want to spend hundreds of pounds on stuff that was going to make me feel good in the running because, you know, like my sometimes I do things for a couple of weeks, and then I get bored and I want to do it anymore, so I'm not going to do it anymore, and then I feel guilty if I've spent lots of money trying to make it like, trying to accommodate it for myself. So that was really a big thing for me. It was having clothes that not only were functional and, you know, I could use in my movement, but what I wasn't constantly having to adjust, like, that's something that I've experienced so often. Like not having clothes that fit with movement meant that it's really hard to concentrate on what you're trying to do when you're always trying to pull stuff down or yank stuff up, or, you know, try and make it feel comfortable, because that could be a sense of me nightmare, but yeah, for me, I am excited when something that I change has I can see the positive impact of it like that is really exciting and engaging for me, and I think that I uh, anytime when you can make a change that you can then see, like an impact on your body, whether that's like increased energy that you sleep better at night, all of those tiny things, like when you want to get pregnant, being able to measure things is really useful, because you can't measure how close you are to getting pregnant. Like, that's something a, you have no control over. And B, there's no, like, halfway house with it. There's no way you can halfway measure how close you are to that goal. So being able to look at a thing was like, how long your cycles are, or how your like digestive system is feeling, or, you know, the million other ways that your body is talking to you in any given day can be really helpful. So what do I think is going on like for me? It is, I think, to do with i. Uh, nourishing my body in ways that feel good for me. So that is, you know, sometimes movement that's sometimes cold or swimming, like but all of these things for me, I think, have, like, a stress element to it. I'm not saying that, you know, I'm a very stressful person, but like for me, like movement, rest, doing things that feel good for my body, like finding those things and doing them regularly. So doing them, like, three or four times a week, it takes my body from like being in a chronic stress state, like it brings my nervous system back down into a more like safe space, like a relaxed state. And I think that feels really good for my nervous system, because it is so used to being
hyper aware, hyper alert, on guard. And I think part of that is being neurodivergent, but I think a huge piece of that is also being fat. And when you're in a fat body, when you exist in a marginalized body, whether that's fatness, queerness, transness, blackness, brownness, you you learn how to you know, just keep yourself as safe as you possibly can in a world that either doesn't like your existence or actively hates your existence, wants to erase you. So that is exhausting for your nervous system. Like I think it's really important to recognize that that can be so tiring. And if your nervous system is always on alert, then that can feel really hard. And you know, it's about how you're navigating those spaces, and you know, sometimes there's not a lot in our control when it comes to that external environment or wherever, and we're just trying to protect ourselves as best we can. So yeah, I think it is inherently more stressful being a fat person anything in this world, it definitely does have an impact on our nervous systems. So any way that we can proactively manage our nervous systems and, like, support them, in any which way we can, I think, is really, can be really helpful if we have the capacity for that, and again, like that is such a personal thing, like some people will have the time and the motivation and the energy and the capacity and the financial means to partake in movement, and also have the mental health space to do that, because, like I said before, the mental piece can be really tricky to navigate, and I have been working On my relationship with movement for many, many years now, so a good five plus years. So the stuff that takes time, it's tough that you know, that you work through, and even now, as I'm, you know, wanting to build up my fitness levels and build up my cardio levels, I'm not gonna lie, there's like thoughts that come into my brain, they well trodden thoughts of, oh, maybe, maybe this will make me a little bit thinner. Maybe I will use a little bit of weight, and I'm only human. Those thoughts exist like, of course, they exist. We've all been conditioned in a world where thin bodies are valued and fat bodies are not. And I think that I wouldn't, you know like it's a very, very human thing to to think those thoughts, even if you are doing this work every single goddamn day. And you know, this is part of my job. This is what I talk about day in, day out, and I still have those thoughts, like those thoughts don't make you a bad person. That doesn't mean that you are somehow broken, or that you know that you are going back to like the the diet space or the diet head space. It just means that you were human being. And it's not not that those thoughts exist, it's like what you do with them. So my diet has not changed. I have not done anything in terms of eating differently. I'm still eating in exactly the same way. I'm still honoring my hunger and my fullness cues. I'm still eating things that make me feel good, but also things that make me feel good mentally, and that involves all the foods, like there is no such thing as a bad food in our house. And, yeah, I think it can be quite easy to fall back into that trap of, oh, well, now I'm doing something different. Maybe I need to change how I eat, and I'm not falling for that trap. I'm not falling for that diet, culture trap. But yeah, those thoughts absolutely do cross my mind sometimes, and it's a reality that we live in, that it is easier to function in the world. In a thinner body, and having that thin privilege that is just the reality that we live in. It makes access infertility treatment easier. You get treated more kindly by society as a whole, but by doctors, by your friends, by your family. Like for sure, it's easier to exist in this world, and so I guess as I come to the end of my day, one ramblings, I hope this has been useful. I hope it has been interesting to listen to. But I just Yeah, I think I just want to say that it's complicated, like, Absolutely, it's not about your way. Absolutely, there are things that you're you can control that can make some small changes to or even big changes to your hormones, to your nervous system, to bringing safety to your body. But it's not going to look the same for everybody. It's not going to look like, oh, Mike got a regular cycle. Nicholas did a run, so I'm gonna go and do a run like it's about what works for you. It's about what's gonna bring safety to your body. And that could look like resting, that could look like sitting down and just giving yourself time to decompress. It could look like having hobbies or giving gifting yourself time to be creative. It could look like running. It could look like finding a way and moving your body that you really love and that you enjoy doing. Could look like spending more time with loved ones or partners. There are so many different ways that you can support your nervous system and you can care for yourself. But I think the biggest thing for me is, like the regularity of it, so doing it at least, like every two to three days, really prioritizing yourself and giving yourself that time for you, and finding what works. So I'd love to know what you think. I'd love to know if any of that resonates, or if any of that's useful. Who knows? I may not even publish this, but yeah, it's felt good to really talk it out. Sending you lots of love. I hope that you're doing right, and I'll see you next time.
Thanks so much for joining me today. For fat and fertile. If you want to learn more about how to have a fat positive facility journey, then I'd love for you to check out my book, fat and fertile, how to get pregnant in a bigger body. It's available everywhere, via Amazon, so just search in your Amazon store for fat and fertile, or click in the link in the show notes, see you next time you.
Apologies for any typos - transcribed by https://otter.ai - it can make mistakes! If you need clarification on anything - please get in touch!