Episode 16: Your Body Isn't Broken. Your PMS Is Trying to Talk to You.
"That's just PMS" might be the laziest sentence in women's health.
Cramps so bad you can't get through the day. Mood swings you can set a clock to. Bleeding heavy enough to plan your life around. And the answer most of us have been handed is some version of: normal, just deal with it, take some ibuprofen.
I never bought that answer, and neither does this week's guest.
Amy Dave has spent 25 years as a physician assistant. Her own doctors told her the same thing for years: PMS is normal, take your pain medicine, push through it. That's what she was trained to believe about her own body, until she didn't have a choice but to look closer.
Show Notes
Amy's own PMS sent her looking for answers her medical training never gave her. That's where she found menstrual cycle syncing, the idea that your body moves through four distinct hormonal phases each month, and each one calls for different food, different movement, and different expectations of your own energy and brain function. She was skeptical. She tried it anyway. Four months later her cramps were gone, her bleeding was lighter, her irritability had eased. A few months after that, her migraines disappeared too, along with brain fog she didn't even know she'd been carrying.
What was actually working against her
Amy thought she was doing everything right: eating salads, exercising most days of the week. What she was actually doing was under-eating and over-exercising, a combination that quietly raised her cortisol and showed up as belly weight and 3am wake-ups. Once she started eating more, real meals with enough protein, fiber, and fat, and cut her workouts down to 15 to 30 minutes a day with more strength training and more rest around her period, her body changed in ways she wasn't expecting. More muscle tone in her 40s than she had in her 20s or 30s.
What your cravings are actually telling you
If you're craving something salty, Amy says, you're probably not craving sodium, you're craving the minerals that come with it: magnesium, potassium. Your body has a language. Most of us were never taught how to listen to it.
Where to start, if you're not ready to change anything yet
Amy's advice for the first step is almost disarmingly simple: track. Your cycle, your symptoms, your food, your stress, your sleep. Just write it down for three or four months and patterns start to surface. For Amy, it was fried food and cramps. For her clients, it's different every time. You won't know your own pattern until you start looking for it.
In this episode: PMS and why it's not normal, menstrual cycle syncing, what your cravings mean, cortisol and over-exercising, hormone fatigue, tracking your cycle and symptoms, perimenopause and PMS in your 40s, protecting your bones, heart, muscle, and brain through the transition.
Amy Dave has been a Physician Assistant (PA) for 25 years. She is also a Women's Wellness Coach specializing in helping Moms navigate through this crazy life by syncing their daily habits with their monthly cycles. A mom of 3 boys, Amy realized her passion while making changes to improve her own symptoms. Using lifestyle changes, Amy helps women overcome their monthly PMS, chronic fatigue, frustration, stress, and feelings of overwhelm replacing them with increased energy, efficiency, and empowerment. Amy also helps women transition into menopause gracefully. Her podcast is called This Incredible Mom Life where she shares stories of the wild things our kids do.
Get her Free Guide Live a Life Without PMS: https://subscribepage.io/LifewithoutPMS
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