Master Your Cycles and Optimize Your Fertility with Lisa of Fertility Friday – #41

0:27 Charlene Lincoln: Welcome to another episode of The Fertility Hour, I’m your host Charlene Lincoln. Today, we have a guest that we’ve had in the past. She was wonderful and we’ve invited her back because she’s releasing a book at the end of the month.

So, her name is Lisa Henderson-Jack, certified fertility awareness educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner, who teaches women to chart their menstrual cycles for natural birth control, conception, and monitoring of overall health. In her new book ‘The Fifth Vital Sign’, Lisa debunks the myth that regular ovulation is only important when you want children by recognizing the menstrual cycle as a vital sign. Drawing heavily from the current scientific literature, Lisa presents an evidence-based approach to fertility awareness and menstrual cycle optimization. She hosts the popular Fertility Friday Podcast, a weekly radio show devoted to helping women connect to their fifth vital sign and uncovering the connection between menstrual cycle health, fertility and overall health.

Hello Lisa, welcome back.    

Lisa Henderson-Jack: Hi, Charlene. Thank you for having me back.

1:51 CL: Yeah, you’re welcome. So yeah, you reached out to me and you wrote a book. Wow, I’m so impressed by that.

LJ: I did. It took about two years. It took like a year and a half longer than I thought it would to bring it to life. But it’s been an incredible process and really, it’s interesting, I think sometimes your first book especially if it’s in the career that you’re in, it kind of represents almost 20 years of experiences piled into one lovely book.

2:32 CL: Oh my gosh. So impressed that you thought it was going to take you six months to write.  

LJ: That just shows I’m kind of over ambitious.

2:34 CL: Optimism. Yeah, yeah.

LJ: Optimism is like a nice way to say it. I would say naivety.

2:42 CL: Well, I think that’s good. I try to go through life like that.

LJ: I guess you have to be a little… yeah, you kind of have to be a little bit optimistic and naïve though to kind of do big things.

2:53 CL: I think so, too. Absolutely. Okay, well, I love it because last time we spoke and we were talking about the menstrual cycle and then you said the menstrual cycle is a vital sign, I have borrowed that in other interviews, I love that. And as being a Chinese medicine practitioner, that’s what we are taught that the menstrual cycle, gosh, you always ask about it. All the nitty-gritty a little bit like TMI more than people would have ever really discussed with anybody about it. And it tells so much about the individual, the health of the person even before other signs and symptoms manifest, right?

LJ: Absolutely. I mean that’s essentially the message of the book because in our culture we’re taught that the menstrual cycle is only really important when you’re ready to have babies. And outside of making babies, it’s kind of irrelevant. However, the menstrual cycle is like a vital sign, meaning that if you do have a health challenge or if something is happening, something affecting endocrine function or something like that, then you will find that your cycle will respond and sometimes it will go outside of the normal parameters. And for many women, that can be the very first sign that there’s something wrong.

4:15 CL: Absolutely. So let’s talk about, well, I mean, tell me because you’ve dedicated your life to helping women track their cycles and you have tracked your cycle for the last 20 years or something, right? Is that accurate?

LJ: Yeah. I discovered it young. I was somewhere around 18 or 19 when I first started charting. I’m 36 turning 37 this year, so it’s been nearly two decades of cycle tracking. So I mean just to take it back, I like to give analogies and so even in the book, I kind of define what a vital sign is and I think we’re most familiar with the common vital signs like your blood pressure or your temperature or even your respiration rate. And in the same way that we all know that there’s a normal range for these things, so if you were to go in to your doctor’s office and they’re going to measure these vitals, if they’re outside of the norm, they’re going to know it because there’s an established set of normal parameters.

Also, they kind of know what it would indicate, not necessarily that they’re going to have a firm diagnosis if your temperature is high, but that’s going to signal to them, okay, we know that it could be these things. And so, in the very same way your menstrual cycle then has like a set of normal parameters. We often think of it in terms of length only, 28 days being the only acceptable version. But what the research tells us is that the cycle range like a normal cycle typically falls somewhere between about 24 and 35 days, and because your cycle is more than just your period, we could look at all the different aspects of the cycle. We could look at menstruation to see if it’s healthy and normal. Typically, menstruation would fall between 3 and 7 days, we would expect to have not too much bleeding or not too little bleeding and then we would expect you to, you know, approach ovulation. Within the first half of the cycle we would expect to see some cervical mucus as you approach ovulation. And we would expect you to ovulate.

Then in terms of like a 24- to 35-day cycle, ovulation would then take place somewhere between day 10 and day 23. You’ll notice I didn’t say day 14. But it’s helpful to know that there is a range of what would be considered to be normal with regards to when ovulation is taking place. Of course, getting to the 35-day range is getting a little bit high in terms of length. But at least we still have the sense of like there is a normal range and you could be kind of close to the edge in some of it.

And then once you ovulate, we would expect your period to come about 2 weeks later. So as you can see, I just kind of broke down all those parameters and so all of a sudden we have all this information and we realize, “okay, it’s not just my period, it’s not just the length of my cycle”, and I can kind of look at all these different factors and see where I fall. If you’re working with someone who’s trained at reading my menstrual cycles and can actually give them specific information as to where to look if there is a problem that you’re concerned about.

7:24 CL: Okay. So let’s talk about, I mean, you spoke about some parameters about the days and how ovulation doesn’t necessarily land on day 14. But do you talk about kind of like the quality of the menstrual blood? A common thing is clotting, like what can clotting indicate and what if you are missing ovulation. How would one know I guess if you are in ovulation unless you were tracking, right? That’s kind of how you really know. So let’s talk about in more detail what’s the healthy cycle looking like.

LJ: Well, yeah, I mean the healthy cycle is falling within those parameters. In terms of the period, we can go a little bit more in depth to the quality. We would expect the period to last somewhere between 3 to 7 days. So some women have like a very short period, meaning like 1 day or 2 days. And so if it’s really short and very light, then we would want to look into that. In terms of bleeding, an average menstrual bleed falls somewhere between 35 to 45 milliliters, but the range of what would be considered normal is somewhere between 25 and 80 milliliters.

To put it into perspective, if you were using pads or tampons, you would be filling like 3 to 4 pads or tampons for like 4 days or so type of thing. Or if you’re using a menstrual cup, you would fill it like on the lower end, you would fill the whole cup at least once if you were to look at all the days of your period. The reason that 80 milliliters is at the high end is because what the research shows this is but if you’re bleeding more than that like heavier than that, you’re more likely to have iron-deficiency anemia, more likely. And then also extremely heavy bleeding is associated with certain issues like fibroids or endometriosis or adenomyosis or things like that, so it’s helpful to know. I think for a lot of women who just bleed heavy, maybe they’ve always bled heavy. They may not know that, you know, it doesn’t mean that there’s automatically a problem but it’s helpful if it’s really far outside the range to kind of check that out.

In terms of the color, we would expect it to be some variant of red. I’ve spoken to a lot of women who might notice kind of like some brown tail-end bleeding or something really it looks really oxidized. I think as women, even though we’re not taught a lot about our periods, you have that sense of like “What is this? It shouldn’t look like this” and really clotty. It can indicate a lot of different things.

I’ve talked on my podcast a lot about vaginal steaming. I’ve interviewed Dr. Rosita Arvigo who founded the techniques of Arvigo therapy. I’m sure I said the name wrong, but Arvigo therapy. And Kelly from Steamy Chic. So in some women, there’s like these ancient kind of teachings around it, there’s this idea that if your uterus is out of alignment and maybe even if your hormones are a bit out of balance, then you may not be fully kind of emptying your bleeding and your period and also, for instance, the way that your endometrium forms during like in order for you to have a period, what has to happen is before ovulation, as you approach ovulation you’re producing estrogen and so your estrogen level, your estrogen production is actually what causes the uterine lining to proliferate and grow. Estrogen is responsible for creating that functional layer of the endometrium inside of your uterus. So if your estrogen levels are optimal, where they’re supposed to be, it’s going to help to develop the uterine lining.

Then after ovulation, you produce progesterone in large amounts – significantly more progesterone than we produce estrogen, and progesterone has a separate role where it actually helps the lining to mature and prepares the lining for implantation.

So each of these hormones have a very specific role in developing the lining and, for instance, if your hormone balance was off, if your progesterone wasn’t where it needed to be, if your second half of the cycle, your luteal phase was really short, then you could have less bleeding or scant bleeding, you might have clotty bleeding, it can be related then to your hormonal balance. For many women, because we’re not really taught a lot about the cycle, we may not be differentiating between a true menstrual bleed and other types of uterine bleeding. So in order for you to have a period, you have to ovulate because a period, like I mentioned, it’s a result of this process, like your uterine lining has to fully develop because of these hormones. So if you’re not ovulating, you’re not producing progesterone, therefore your uterine lining is never fully developing.

So for instance women taking hormonal birth control, when you’re taking the synthetic hormones, it’s synthetic hormones. They basically interfere with your natural endocrine function and so then when you take the pill or I always call it ‘pill’ but it’s the sugar pills or you pull off the patch or take out the ring, then you have this bleeding but it’s not your period because you didn’t ovulate. Many women experience spotting, I’m sure as you know, like different types of bleeding that can happen and there’s even a situation where some women experience anovulatory bleeding. Meaning if they were tracking, so when I’m working with a woman who’s charting, so she’s taking her temperature and charting, there’s no shift, she didn’t ovulate but then she might have like a day or two of bleeding that’s kind of typically lighter than her actual period. Maybe if she wasn’t tracking, she wouldn’t no. She would just think it was a really light period.

This is kind of a long answer but just to give sense, I feel like it’s really helpful to have some context around the bleeding and just to have a sense of what it is because you ask like what could it be if the bleeding was abnormal, if it’s clotty, if it’s those types of things. So these are certain things that we would want to look at.

13:17 CL: Right. I want to kind of go back because I really don’t know, though I’ve heard about vaginal steaming very often but I’ve never really looked into it. What do women use vaginal steaming for? What is it really indicated for?

LJ: There’s a wide range of answers to that question. From a more traditional sense, the practices go back like thousands of years, in Mayan traditions and different places around the world. It was news to me that it’s actually this thing, like across the world women do this. So typically women are doing it postpartum. Often midwives are encouraging women to do the steaming postpartum to kind of help just to extrapolate any additional blood and tissue.

The way that I’ve seen it though in terms of the women that I’m working with, so if I’m working with somebody who is experiencing whether it’s premenstrual spotting or like postmenstrual spotting, so often having several days of like dark brownish, sometimes even blackish bleeding, like it just looks wrong, and it’s like here you would expect blood to be red than if you’re seeing this kind of oxidized. Or I’ve actually had a number of women have concerns, they’re using a menstrual cup and when they’re trying to pour the blood out, so TMI, whatever day this is being release on, it’s like molasses-y. It’s not really like you would expect the blood to be blood.

So in those types of situations, I’ve had clients who’ve opted to do steaming and so for anyone who’s never heard of it, I know it’s really controversial, a lot of people talk about it and I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding, if you’ve ever gone to like a sauna, it’s kind of like a bath for your vagina except it’s steam and it’s not painful, it doesn’t hurt, it’s nothing like that. It’s really comfortable and all of that kind of stuff. So it’s very like you’re just sitting over like a bowl of steam at a very comfortable temperature for like 30 minutes or something. So, noninvasive. But I’ve had a number of clients do this and because they’re charting, they know when they ovulate, they know when their periods are coming. So charting allows you to predict your period. So then they can time it so that they’re doing it maybe like 2-3 days before the period comes. This is women who aren’t actively trying to conceive doing it at that phase of their cycle.

Then when they do that a couple of cycles, what happens is that their bleeding changes over the course of like 1 to 3 cycles. They typically have their back to red bleeding. There’s no more of that molasses-y kind of stuff. So it just improves the blood flow. And it seems almost too simple to work, but I’ve had a number of clients experience just that where they’re concerned about the tail-end kind of brown bleeding and then after a few cycles it goes away.

16:10 CL: Okay. And there’s herbs in the steam?

LJ: You can. You can do it with saltwater but you could also add in, you know, if you want to add in some oregano or some thyme. That’s like very basic. So you could make it as complicated as you want. So if you were to say look into some of the practitioners to teach vaginal steaming, I mean they have formulations for different things. It’s not my specialty, it’s not my specialization, so I don’t know off the top of my head all the different herbs, but yeah, there’s a lot of different, more in-depth ways to target specific things.

16:44 CL: I think something, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think a big misconception and you talked about it is when women are put on a birth control pill, they do feel like they are getting their period, right? And it is a pale bleed, it’s not their period. So it’s interesting when women… like when you work with women, what’s the average time that they’ve been on a birth control pill? Because sometimes I’ve met with women who have been on it, gosh, 7 to 10 years and it seems like a really long time. I don’t think it was ever designed for a woman to be kept on that long, right? They’re kept on it to regulate their periods as young girls at like 15 and then they’re 25 they’re using it as birth control. It’s like 10 years have gone by. So tell me a little bit about kind of that misconception about that not really being a period and it’s getting back to a normal cycle after that. I mean, sometimes it’s difficult, right, to kind of regulate back.

LJ: Yes. Well, I’ll try to kind of break down, there’s so many. Like, this is a great topic. It’s one of my favorite things to talk about. One of your questions was like what’s the average time that my clients have been on hormonal birth control, and it really ranges. I do have a couple of clients like a small percentage who have never been on birth control. It’s always like, “Wow! How did you manage not to be on birth control? I’ve been on birth control. Like everyone’s been on birth control.” But for the most part, I mean it really depends. I have a lot of women who have been on birth control for, say 10 years. And I see a lot of women kind of mid-30’s, late 40’s who were taking for like 15-20.

Your comment about how it was designed, so I have a whole section. I’m just a super curious person, so of course I looked into the research. It’s really interesting because when the pill was first designed, I mean, it’s kind of like a lot of different things in medicine. They kind of stumbled on to this thing like wow, progesterone and estrogen prevent ovulation. So what happened was they put the women on this pill, like the very first formulation, and the women just stopped getting their periods. The women actually, because this was in the ‘50s, there was no context. So these women, some of whom have been trying to conceive, which they were I think initially they were trying to use it for purposes of fertility, so you actually had women who were trying to conceive who were taking this pill and they stopped getting their periods and they thought that they were pregnant. And so because there was no context in the ‘50s, these women were absolutely devastated when they discovered that they weren’t pregnant. So then what happened was the makers of the pill ended up having to add the pill bleed that we know and love today, to the formulation because otherwise, these women were like devastated, couldn’t understand what was going on because there was no precedent for this. This was a totally new thing back then and so in order to go along with it, they had to create this pill bleed.

And of course, it’s arbitrary because when you’re on the pill, it’s stopping your cycle. It’s not giving you a cycle. It’s basically overriding your cycle and replacing it with a fake chemical cycle. So they could have chosen like 72 days, 36 days, like 100 days. But, of course, they chose 28 because they wanted women to believe that they were still menstruating. So from the very beginning of this journey 60 years when the pill first was put on the market in the ‘60s, the women were lied to and to this day, we still have this language around the pill. We use it to regulate. That does no such thing. You know what I mean? I think there are so many specific cases where it’s used where it’s problematic. So for example, women with polycystic ovary syndrome.

So women with polycystic ovary syndrome, the characteristic chart, the menstrual cycle chart of a woman with polycystic ovary syndrome is that she typically has delayed ovulation. So she’s still ovulating but she might go two months between periods, she might have like 4 or 5 periods a year just depending on how kind of significant her symptoms are. So then the doctor says, “Well, let’s regulate your cycle” and then puts you on the pill. So what the pill does then is it takes away the cycle, it takes away her information because her cycle being sporadic and irregular is actually giving her information because if you think of your cycle as a vital sign, it’s telling you, Hey! Your body can’t talk to you in words so it’s telling you that there’s something wrong that you need to look into. So the pill masks all of that and then you get your bleed every 28 days and then you can kind of go about your life thinking that everything is fine. Meanwhile, whatever was causing your cycles to be irregular is still happening in the background. So for example, like insulin resistance, characteristic of PCOS, like having an issue with sugar, increasing your cardiovascular risk factors to the level of a person with type 2 diabetes, increasing your lifetime risk of type 2. Like, there’s all of these actual serious medical risks that are associated with this condition. And instead, you put someone on the pill that actually increases insulin sensitivity so it actually makes it worse.

22:12 CL: When I was in school one of my professors was a gynecologist from China and she really told us about the dangers of the pill and it was a pretty small class of probably 25 of us, men and women, and everyone got off the pill and I think 3 women got pregnant that year because they didn’t plan accordingly, wasn’t just that. But we should have talked about before you do this, you need to learn family planning method or whatever. So that’s great. Because yeah, having a daughter who’s really young now, I’m so glad that I think by the time that she’s sexually active, there will be many more alternatives to a synthetic birth control pill as an option because I know that that is a convenient option and I know it’s problematic in so many ways. It kind of makes me sad, the example of the PCOS.

I could see why that’s such a seductive option. Your doctor tells you and it’s regulating your period, which you said is not true, and it’s masking all these things.

LJ: But it gives you a pill bleed every 28 days.

23:30 CL: Gives you pill bleed and it kind of masks a lot of the uncertainty of your health, especially if you’re a young woman and trying to kind of deal with all of that, but unfortunately then getting off of it. I mean this is a show about fertility and I know one of the things is… I know that Dr. Lara Briden wrote the foreword to your book and I had an opportunity to interview her, she’s wonderful. She wrote The Period Repair Manual. And it’s sad because then women get off the pill and because they were always misinformed in the first place, they aren’t really taught that it’s going to take maybe quite a bit of time to regulate the endocrine system and the hormonal system, then they feel like they’re having fertility issues and then they get assessed by and IVF clinic and they feel like the only way is to go and go the IVF route versus regulating the cycle back. Right? Which could take some time and patience. Are you working with women who have been on the pill for a while and are trying to regain their reproductive health after being on synthetic birth control?

LJ: Yes, absolutely. You’ve touched on one of the areas that I am just so passionate about. Because I see it as being very problematic and harmful for women not to be fully informed about the side effects of hormonal birth control and also the way that birth control affects fertility. So, you know, of course being the nerd that I am, I really took some time to see what the research has to say about it and it’s really helpful to do that because it kind of quashes some of your preconceived notions about it.

But basically, what the research tells us, and the reason why women aren’t really fully counseled about the side effects, is because hormonal birth control is a “reversible” method of birth control. So what the research tells us is that there is a temporary delay in the return of a woman’s normal fertility post pill. And so because, eventually, I’ll leave that for emphasis, your fertility returns to normal, like there’s no focus and no benefit to the drug companies to tell women about this delay.

So even as I was reading the research papers, what’s interesting is that even though the researchers, they’ll do the study and they’ll show that women have either a delay in how long it takes for them to resume fertility, a delay in how long it takes them to get pregnant, at the end the conclusion is always like well, this is a perfectly safe and reversible option. But we know how this plays out into women’s lives, so let’s paint the picture, right? You have a woman who was told from a very young age that she could get pregnant at any time so she was terrified of getting pregnant. Basically, if she’s anything like me, I thought that if I ever had sex ever once, I would get pregnant full stop. Like, that was what the information was. So I was terrified and I’m sure that I wasn’t the only one. We’re all terrified that we’re going to have an unplanned pregnancy from every act of sex ever.

So then you really diligently prevent pregnancy over the course of your teens and your twenties, still under this impression that for, like, pregnancy is a given, an automatic every time you have sex. So then, you know, 10 years go by, and we live in a culture that is really not into young women getting pregnant. We live in a culture where in order to support your family, you do have to get your act together. You got to get a job, you need a place to live. You probably need to have a partner, maybe not. But either way, this is the story, right? And so, we’re all trying so hard as women to get our stuff together so that we can have a baby and be secure so that we can be financially supported in a relationship, all of these things. So finally, you know, all the things align, you finally find the partner, you have the job, you’ve got all the things lined up. Maybe you’re now 35. You go off… even I’ve spoken to so many women who have even gone to their doctors and it’s like, “Okay, I’m getting married in the fall. Should I come off the pill?” “No, absolutely not. You know, you’ll probably get pregnant right away.” Like this is what they’re told and like I’ve heard this same story from actual women all the time. I’m trying to suppress my rage.

Okay. And then what happens, as we know, you go off the pill and some women do get pregnant right away but some women do not. What the research tells us is that… So there was a couple of different studies that I looked at. One, where they actually looked at the cycle parameters, so it’s a really interesting study because it wasn’t like a time-to-pregnancy study, it was cycle parameters. So they basically had a group of women that had never been on hormonal birth control and then they had the women who had just come off. If you look at the data side by side, it took an average of 9 to 12 cycles before the women who just came off birth control looked pretty much like the women who had never been on it. Nine to 12 cycles. Now, off birth control it’s very typical for the first couple of cycles to be long for ovulation to be delayed and also for the luteal phase to be short. And so that could be, you know, 12 to 18 months. So then what the time to pregnancy studies show us, so that’s a different thing, so that’s taking women who are like using condoms and women who are using hormones and then getting them to stop and seeing how long it takes and they get pregnant.

So when a woman is on non-hormonal methods, the average time to pregnancy is four months in this particular study and that’s generally like 25% chance of pregnancy per cycle type of thing. But women who are on hormonal, like the pill, so the combined oral contraceptive pill or the patch, the ring, or the progestin-estrogen combo, an average of 8 months, so twice as long for a woman who is coming off of the pill. Women who use the shunt, it was 18 months. But I think that’s more well-known that it takes a lot longer for the fertility to return.

29:38 CL: Is it? I didn’t know that. Okay.

LJ: Well, I’m going to stop making assumptions then. Like for instance, like Depo, it’s well known that it suppresses fertility for longer, so meaning an average, when I say average it means some women took even longer and some women got pregnant earlier. And so think about that for a minute. So if you’re taking hormonal birth control, it would take on average twice as long to get pregnant when you come off of it. So then going back to your women and my mythical example there who’s 35, finally has everything together, goes off the pill just before she gets married, you know, even though people play it cool, I think you and I both know that given this history of being taught that we could get pregnant every day, after like two months of trying, most women are in straight-up freak out territory. So by the time 4 or 5 months comes around, they’re already in the fertility clinic. And they’re already getting IVF by month 9 or IUIs and possibly IUF by month 9, 10, 11, 12.

What the research tells us about that, you know, 9, 10, 11, 12-month mark afterwards, that’s when our cycles are really starting to normalize. One really kind of scary fact that I discovered, the research for my book, is that hormonal birth control actually shrinks the ovaries and reduces the ovarian reserve parameters. And so like literally, not figuratively. So I found a study where women were coming off of hormonal birth control, their average ovarian volume, so the actual size of their ovaries was anywhere from 50 to 60 percent smaller. Then the ovarian reserve parameters, that’s like your AMH (anti-mullerian hormone), antral follicle count in addition to the ovarian volume and just in general we’re reduced for a minimum period of about 6 or 7 months post.

Now, I had to go where the money is to find this research. So this was actually a research about fertility preservation. So this is for women who are, you know, trying to freeze their eggs at a younger age, so that’s where the money is, that’s where the research is. So what they were doing basically was they discovered that if a woman just comes off the pill to get her eggs frozen, she typically has like lower ovarian reserve parameters, therefore they get less eggs. Because the AMH and the antral follicle count, they are not necessarily predictive of a woman’s natural ability to conceive in her bed. They’re predictive of how effective it’s going to be extract eggs from her ovaries for IVF purposes, specifically. So what they find is that if she comes right off the pill and then does her stimulation, she gets less eggs. But if she waits 6 to 7 months, she gets more eggs and then the ovarian reserve parameters normalize.

Then as I’m reading this, I’m like, “Well, why is this any different than for women who are trying to get pregnant?” Why shouldn’t all women know this so that we can like… because if you tell all women that your fertility is reduced for a period of time, that’s a good idea to get off the pill ahead of time so that you can let your body normalize, let your cycles regulate naturally, figure out if there’s any issues, like give yourselves some insurance in that respect and also, of course, plan some preconception nutrition, etc. etc. If you actually do those things, if you told women about that, we’d all be on board. We plan our weddings, we’re good, we’re smart, like you can tell us. We can do it. But by not telling us this, it increases our chances of getting IVF and all kinds of procedures before our bodies have even normalized.

33:22 CL: Yes! It’s a little bit of craziness. When you were saying the scenario of the 35-year-old woman then trying for a couple of months and kind of freaking out, I was like, “Well, hopefully she doesn’t freak out that quickly,” but I think the age thing, because then when you’re 35, you’re suddenly broaching what they call like, what is it…

LJ: Advanced maternal age.

33:54 CL: Yeah, exactly.

LJ: Then if you get pregnant after 35, it’s a geriatric.

33:57 CL: Yeah, geriatric pregnancy. So I think like you start hearing those labels or a doctor mentions that, and you’re like, “Oh my god, a couple of months have gone by,” and yeah, you freak out a little bit then you get assessed and do that whole thing without knowing about this aspect of it that’s crazy. I mean, I hope that someone watching who gets a shot, you know, I hope someone listens to that and knows because I didn’t know about the shot being an average of, what, you said 18 months.

LJ: That’s for long-term, 2 years or more. So short-term use was closer to 9 months, like 8 ½ or 9 months. But the shot, generally speaking, like if you ever know anybody in your life who’s used the shot or just like in general, typically it takes a long time for a lot of women who get the shot to have their period come back at all. So the shot is like the worst offender in terms of the delay, specifically, and the research supports it also. I mean, I’ve been in this field so I know a lot of women who have used the shot, and the research plus their lived experiences informs that.

35:14 CL: I’m just always impressed and now that I’m much more educated about kind of the preconception phase when the egg is going through the maturation cycle and how you really need to have your endocrine hormone balance, adrenal, all that. I’m always kind of surprised that a woman can get pregnant after taking the birth control pill for an extended amount of time even within the 8-month period or shorter and then also I guess I would feel personally that I would definitely take that time to make sure that the body is regulated again. The charting is one aspect of it and I guess working with a practitioner and doing some type of gentle fertility cleanse because you’ve been taking synthetic hormones for, you know, several years now and that needs to be detoxed out. Your liver is impacted by it, right, and many aspects of it. So instead of, “Okay I’m in a rush and trying to get pregnant,” I mean if you can really look at it as “I want to balance my body so that when I get pregnant I can have a healthy pregnancy and obviously a healthy baby,” and maintain your own health.

I mean that’s a whole other topic but I wonder how many women have gone through birth control pill, gotten pregnant and then have like postpartum-type issues. Because think about just how many hormones, and the synthetic hormones never really regulating your… because I was talking to another practitioner, he deals with a lot of thyroid issues. He said the thyroid goes out of balance and that’s kind of one of the main things that causes postpartum. So how does synthetic birth control pills and then getting pregnant really impact the thyroid? I think it would extremely impact it.

LJ: There’s a lot of moving parts. The first thing to say is that, yes, although some women do get pregnant right off of the pill, it doesn’t mean that they carry those pregnancies to term. So immediately post pill, you are more likely to miscarry. And as we get older, there’s a whole separate issue. What I discovered kind of in my research around it is that there’s two factors that come into play when it comes to like, you know, as we get older we’re more and more aware that it’s harder to get pregnant as we get older. But why is that?

So on the one hand, we have the increased issue with regards to like the aging of the egg and mitochondrial abnormalities and things of that nature. But we also have the increased risk of miscarriage. So for a woman in her 20s, she may have maybe like 8 percent of pregnancies result in miscarriage or something like that. But a woman in her mid-30s, it’s more like 25 percent. By the time a woman hits her 40s, about at least 1 out of every 2 pregnancies, so by the time we reach 40, like half of the time you miscarry when you get pregnant. By the time you reach 45, 75% (3 out of 4 pregnancies results in miscarriage).

So I think in terms of coming off of birth control, I think it’s important to remember like yes, women get pregnant but it doesn’t mean that all of those pregnancies go to term because your body may or may not be ready for the pregnancy right away. And I think you hit on a really important point which is that, I mean, I like the giving the example of we plan our weddings, a lot of women take all this time and saw all the taped TV shows and whatever. But when it comes to getting pregnant, even if you do get pregnant immediately after coming off the pill, hormonal birth control especially like it kind of creeps up the longer you’re on it, is associated with a variety of nutrient deficiencies and the specific nutrients that are depleted on the pill are very important for pregnancy, normal fetal development.

So folate being the most obvious one, long-term pill use is associated with nutrient deficiencies and it’s because the pill changes how we organize and use these nutrients, and it’s well documented. It’s there in the literature. In addition to folate, also vitamin B12, vitamin B6, and there’s a lot of minerals that are put off balance. So, zinc deficiency, magnesium, coenzyme Q10 which is really interesting because we know that that’s super important for egg quality. But there’s a lot of very specific nutrients that are depleted on the pill and as you mentioned it suppresses thyroid function.

I mean, if you think about it from that perspective, ideally, even if you come of the pill, it’s not the best thing to like come off the pill on Thursday and then get pregnant the following week. It would actually be more ideal to give yourself and I suggest, I take it a little bit far because I would suggest that if you have the ability to give yourself 18 months to two years, because I like insurance, I like having an insurance policy, especially for women who were put on the pill for an issue, if you were actually put on the pill because you didn’t know when your periods were coming and your cycles were really irregular, you’re more likely to experience post-pill amenorrhea or a delayed return in the actual period itself. What’s interesting about the research is that a lot of the researches done about the pill, they’ll fully exclude women who did have prior cycle issues because they know, because like there’s research that shows that when women do have cycle irregularities or those types of things, the pill doesn’t cause it or make it worse but it masks it so then whenever the issue was, it just keeps going on, so by the time they come off, it’s worse.

I think these are all factors where I think what you said is really important which is as women, this is something that we need to be more aware of because at the end of the day, we have the right to not only prevent pregnancy but be able to get pregnant when we want to and we all want to do the best we possibly can for our children. And without that information and knowledge, we’re not really put in the best situations to really optimize our baby’s health. And as a mom I have two children, like you’ll never regret taking the time to prepare your body for pregnancy and knowing that you kind of did everything that you could just to optimize.

Then the last thing I’ll say about that is that a lot of the focus is on the baby but it’s what you said, if your body is nutrient deficient, you got a thyroid issue that’s unaddressed, all kinds of stuff going on and then you get pregnant on top of it, by the time you have that baby, you have to be that baby’s mom, we want you to be in a really good, healthy state. Right? This is really serious stuff and we’re just not being given the information.

42:21 CL: Oh my gosh. I feel like it’s like a life-long mission. Here’s a couple of things that are not common knowledge that you touched upon the nutrient deficiency but happened by being on the birth control pill. I mean, that is real and it’s not remedied from taking a prenatal vitamin for a couple months. It really isn’t and it’s stereotype. Like you said, it’s well documented though it’s not common knowledge. And I could kind of feel the pervasive panic of women when you say like a couple years.

LJ: I get “Oh! I don’t know!”

43:00 CL: I was kind of hoping it was going to happen in the next few months or whatever, but like I was interviewing Dr. Christiane Northrup and she said the same thing. She goes, “I recommend women have two years.” And it’s like, I know that’s so hard to hear because we are putting it off longer and longer, having children and there is the biological clock and in some ways it is real, so you feel. But if you push a pregnancy on a body that’s not prepared, it can cause a lot of issues. There are so many kids. I don’t know. It just feels like more and more, there’s a lot of kids that are being born that have subpar health and it’s just people aren’t taught that actually it’s not just the in utero period but it’s that four months a year prior of preparing your body. That’s what’s really going to make a difference, though we can’t guarantee anything. Right? Like we can’t guarantee perfect health for our children, but we know that…

LJ: I really like that insurance analogy. I think that’s why the education piece is important. So there’s a very real transition period that your body goes through post hormonal birth control of all types. So whether you’re aware of it or not, whether you plan for it or not, your body still has to go through this transition period. That’s the bottom line. That’s where my recommendation of 18 months comes from. Eighteen months to two years. The reason I say that is because some women come off the pill and get their period lickety-split. But other women, it takes them two months to four months or six months, and then there’s a small percentage of women for whom likely did have some issues maybe that they did know about or they didn’t know about. Maybe those were why they were put on the pill in the first place. But there’s a small percentage of women for whom their period does…

I interviewed a couple of ladies on my podcast who came off the pill and the period didn’t come back for like four years. Now that’s really outside of the norm. The pill doesn’t cause that. Again, these women had, in that case, that’s hypothalamic amenorrhea, like they actually had to work on themselves and replete their energy stores, make sure they’re eating enough. Hypothalamic amenorrhea is its own beast. But the pill was masking that for them. The issue was there. the pill didn’t cause them to have that but it definitely masked it. Like if you’re not on the pill and you don’t get your period, then you know. But if you’re on the pill, then you don’t know.

So I suppose the purpose for that, it’s like you plan for the worst and hope for the best. It’s by law that I have to have insurance on my car. I don’t plan to get into an accident ever but I have to have insurance. So this is kind of like the reality check that we all know it’s not convenient. No one wants to hear that you should take that alone. The important part of the conversation and then, I mean, everything that we’re talking about today, I mean just to put it out there, like I am super science nerd, and over a thousand citations in the book, like I really believe in sharing the information and I don’t want people to be like “Lisa said…” really, you can check this stuff out for yourself. Because it’s important as women for us to feel confident. We go to the doctor’s office, we ask for support. Many women are laughed at if they say they want to come off birth control or manage their fertility in a different way.

A big part of this conversation about coming off, so what I’m saying is, when you are still actively avoiding pregnancy, come off the pill. But you need to have a strategy and a plan so that you don’t end up like your classmates who had these unplanned pregnancies. Right? You have to have a strategy and a plan in place so that you can continue to avoid pregnancy naturally while cycling and preserving your fertility. So having a menstrual cycle that is free of hormones is a way to preserve your fertility. Because when you’re ready to get pregnant, you just start having sex on the days. Your body doesn’t go through a transition phase.

So fertility awareness, I’m obviously as a fertility awareness instructor, but a lot of people aren’t that familiar with it, it’s not the only way to go but it certainly is helpful in the general sense. When you learn about your cycle and you learn that there’s only a small window of time that you can get pregnant and you learn how to interpret that, regardless of whether or not you want to use it as birth control, it demystifies everything so you no longer have to be afraid. Like you now know pregnancy isn’t just a given and you actually have the ability to make these decisions and to control what’s going to happen.

47:46 CL: Absolutely. I think people are still really intimidated about tracking their basal body temperature and the cervical mucus. It seemed really complicated on the outside, right, and it doesn’t have to be.

LJ: Did you brush your teeth this morning?

48:02 CL: Yes.

LJ: I mean of course it sounds like a lot but this is how I break it down. And this is TMI, like I’m always vaginas and stuff, so you’d have to bear with me. But like when you went to the bathroom today, whenever you did, you wiped yourself, no one had to tell you that. So when you’re talking fertility awareness, you’re literally like wiping like you would already but you’re paying attention. When you’re tracking your basal body temperature, like there’s all these different ways now, there’s all these different tools that allow you to do that. But essentially, just like you would brush your teeth and it takes 5 minutes or whatever, you put the thermometer. At the end of the day, there’s a lot of weird science, medical misogyny going on where it’s like women are too stupid to figure this stuff out, so let me just pat her on the head and give her a pill because she is too dumb. No, that’s enough. Right? So I feel like it insults the intelligence of women all over the world to say that we couldn’t figure this out.

Now, it’s not for everyone. Every woman doesn’t feel gravitated to do it this way. There’s lots of different ways to avoid hormones. Like some women will just use condoms, some women will use withdrawal like the dirty little secret that no one talks about. Some women will use like the cup or IUD which has its own challenges but they’re non-hormonal challenges. There’s lots of different ways to manage your fertility depending on your specific thing. But the idea that fertility awareness is too complicated.

My experience as an educator because I get to teach women, it’s like the greatest job ever, but my experience as an educator is that yeah, it’s like learning to drive. There’s road signs and all kinds of stuff going on there, but once I take a woman through one cycle, and we discuss all the road maps and signs and figure all this stuff out, women get it, they get it quickly and they get it within 1 to 3 cycles. With instruction, of course, because that’s my experience as a teacher. When you are teaching yourself, you need a minimum of three cycles before you start trying to rely on it for birth control and also you’re also going to need some sort of support group. So there’s a lot of women who find other women online and join groups and things like that to learn and buy books and resources. Either way, there’s no women on earth who’s ever done it completely alone. Well, I shouldn’t say that. There are. But these days, and for the most part, we have to kind of do this together. So either you find an instructor or you need to find people who do it.

But at the end of the day, it’s your body and it’s a cycle. You have a cycle, it’s not always the same every time. But you have a regular kind of pattern, like when you approach ovulation you start to see mucus. Maybe in your cycle you see clear stretchy mucus for a couple of days before you ovulate. Once you start to see that that’s what happens when you ovulate, even if it doesn’t always happen at the exact time or date of your cycle, you start to get a sense of it. Like we’re not dummies. We can figure this out.

50:50 CL: I agree. I have to admit I don’t track it anymore but when I was trying to get pregnant, I just felt like this is the greatest thing ever. It just gave me so much information on what was going on and I felt I guess just being older for a fertility woman, oh my gosh, I’m ovulating and this and working with a practitioner who is helping me with different herbs. “Oh your temperatures are a little bit low. Let me support your adrenals” and things like that. It was really helpful for the practitioner as well. But a thing that I just want you to talk about cervical mucus for a minute because like you go on YouTube or whatever and you see the egg white analogy and a lot of us don’t have copious amounts of cervical mucus and then women feel like, “Maybe I don’t even have cervical mucus. Which sometimes they don’t, right, and that could be an indicator of certain things as well.

LJ: It’s a big topic. I love talking about cervical mucus and it’s a huge chapter on it with all these pictures of the cervix and all those kinds of stuff. I think that there’s a couple of things that can be helpful to know. So with the extensive pill use, with so many women on the pill for long periods of time, hormonal contraceptives are associated with a reduction in cervical mucus production. So when you’re on the pill, you typically aren’t seeing any mucus, and that’s because one of the modes of action with the pill is actually to fill your cervix with a thick mucus plug. That is something that our bodies naturally do. Outside of our fertile windows, our cervices are actually closed and we’re not making mucus. But when you’re on the pill, it’s like this kind of all the time type of thing, obviously, because it needs to work to prevent you from getting pregnant.

So what happens is with long-term pill use, you end up with more of the cervical crypts that produces plug and less of the cervical crypts. Because it’s like the cervix is fascinating. It has different crypts that produce different types of mucus. It’s just fascinating. But anyways, you end up with fewer of the crypts that produce the egg white. So it’s not uncommon. I’ve seen it many times. There’s a certain percentage of women who come off hormonal birth control and for several cycles, even if they’re ovulating, nothing. No mucus. I’ve seen it many times. You can still get pregnant as long as there’s an ovulation happening. There’s a lot of factors that have to happen for pregnancy. Sperm quality, healthy bodies. So it’s not one thing. Timing.

But just so you know, whenever there is an egg, there is a possibility of pregnancy. But with that being said, I think you see my point. There’s a lot of different reasons why we may not see it. So some women do see like egg white in larger quantities. Some women see a little bit. Some women see like lotion type of mucus and it looks like hand lotion. And all of those would be considered fertile as you approach ovulation because really what makes cervical mucus fertile is that sperm can survive in it for up to 5 days.

I’ve supported a number of women who for instance have come off from a hormonal birth control. There’s a certain percentage of clients who come off of it and they never have mucus that they can pick up and stretch between their fingers. Ever. Pre-pregnancy, post pill. For these women though, they still show signs of fertility. One of the signs of fertility is that when they’re wiping themselves, so that’s a big part of cervical checking and the way that I teach fertility awareness is through the wiping method. When you’re wiping, like you’ll feel slippery. For some women, they don’t have a lot of mucus but they actually feel that lubricative, and that’s it. Then when they track it, they actually reliably see that it coincides with their ovulation. It’s complicated but at the same time, like it’s helpful in those situations and kind of know why it’s happening. If you’ve been on the pill for 20 years, some women, again, come off it, they got all the mucus, but others don’t.

55:01 CL: I like that, the white method. I mean, honestly, that was the part I felt like “Ooh, that’s kind of the most complicated.” It’s just that egg white or whatever, you see the big like spindle… I mean, and a lot of women don’t have that copious amount.

We’re approaching the end but I want to talk about like say if there was a group of 20 women in this room and you went around and you asked them like “What do you feel about your period? Do you like it?” Women can feel really quite hostile about their menses. I know that probably, I mean it could be up to like 70 percent of women out of this group of 20 who goes “I can’t wait to my period. I never had my period again.”  Which is sad. I want mine to kind of go on forever because now I know. I’ve treated it. It used to be a thing where I have PMS literally for half the month and I was like, “God, this is horrible!” But once I knew that I could effectively treat that with herbs and supplements and things like that, now I’m like, “Oh, my period” and what’s it telling me, and “Oh, I didn’t even have any PMS.” I could see if it was just wreaking havoc on your life then yeah, do away with it. So let’s talk about like you can have a healthy period that doesn’t screw up half your month and something like that.

LJ: It’s where my heart is, like that’s part of the reason even just in doing the work that I do and spreading the message about it. I remember I heard it referred to a movie like a post-adolescent idealistic phase, I remember. I think it was in the movie ‘Clueless’ because I watched that movie so many times. But when I was fresh out of high school, in university, it was like, “Whoa! This is so cool.” I was going to all these feminist talks and it was like the first time in my life that I really learned about sex positivity and I was learning about fertility awareness and the menstrual cycle.

I had a tumultuous relationship with mine because my periods were so painful. I always say like when I actually did go into labor with my first son, I was literally in labor all day and I didn’t know because I was like, “This can’t be labor. This must be Braxton-Hicks.” Because when I would get period cramps, I would be on the floor. I remember I had this boyfriend in university and he was trying to help me and I’m on the floor on all fours screaming and he was just like “I don’t know what to do for you.” I’m like, “I’m just go out.” It was like that, super ridiculous and crazy.  So if anyone should hate their period, it should be me.

But what’s interesting is that even when your period is causing you that type of an anguish, it’s still telling you something. Obviously, a lot of things were out of alignment like I was way too inflamed. All of the things that I do know, now my pain is at a level of 0, sometimes 0.5. So when you have the knowledge and information, I mean even when you have PMS all month or half the month, that is telling you something. So again, if we take it to the vital sign concept, that is a sign your body is talking to you, something is wrong. And the medication and the hormonal birth control doesn’t fix the fact that something is wrong, something is going on.

So in terms of looking at your cycle in a positive way, it’s not easy. There’s a lot of layers to it. We don’t really live in a world where periods are embraced or supported. But one of the things I think to keep in mind is how important our periods are. So when you are having a regular healthy normal cycle, that is a requirement for optimal health in your reproductive years. If you stopped having a period like if you actually go and get hypothalamic amenorrhea like you stop menstruating, what is associated with that is significant bone loss and an increased risk of osteoporosis. Like our cycles are a part of us, they’re an integral part of who we are. Similarly to your pulse and your blood pressure, if those things are off, your health is off. That’s kind of like the first step but the way I look at it is that our world is upside down and really backwards. As women, we’re the ones who carry the next generation. So without menstruation, there’s no next generation.

So, like, enough already. I remember one time I had an interview with one of my mentors, Geraldine Mattis, and I asked her… I don’t remember exactly what I asked her because it’s been a while but basically we’re having a conversation similar to this one and feeling really frustrated about the state of women and it’s like why is it like this, why aren’t women taught about our bodies. I remember she was like, “Misogyny.” I was like, isn’t that kind of harsh? Like, misogyny?

After all these years thinking about it, like what is it? Why are we suppressing the feminine so hard? Like why is it that as a woman, I come of age and I’m not even allowed to have sex unmedicated. Hormonal birth control suppresses your libido. That’s a whole other topic. The whole way that our whole culture addresses our fertility, first of all, it treats it like a disease. The pill was the first medication ever designed to shut down a perfectly healthy and normal function in the body. So our fertility is being treated like a disease, it needs to be cured. Then our fertility is suppressed and our sexuality is suppressed. It’s well known that the pill suppresses libido because it reduces our testosterone by like 75%. So you have a lot of young women. Also in addition to shrink the ovaries, the pill has been shown to shrink the clitoris by an average of 20% and also thin out the vaginal tissues, making it more likely for you to have painful sex. So this is a really big problem. it’s not easy to overcome that kind of hatred of your period. I believe it starts with education. Then that allows us the opportunity to try to reclaim our cycles, our sexuality and our womanhood, our femininity, and just live. That’s all we want to do, right? We just want to live free to just be female including our menstrual cycles.

61:38 CL: Hallelujah! I absolutely agree and not take some stuff that down the road just kind of like the whole hormone replacement therapy, “Oh by the way, we kind of made a mistake and what we misinformed about.”

LJ: Whoops.

61:50 CL: It’s actually causing what we’re trying to be cautious from.

LJ: We didn’t mean to cause breast cancer. Whoopsies!

62:00 CL: Yeah. Gosh. Now I feel a little depressed. Now, it’s nothing new but yeah, when you put all in that language, it’s true. All we can do is educate ourselves. I feel like the future generations, hopefully they’ll be so much more informed than us. Right?

LJ: That’s why you have your podcast and that’s why you’re sharing.

62:25 CL: Yeah, and you do too and you wrote the book. I know, absolutely. I mean there’s so much. I know there’s practitioners on Instagram and they always talk about the birth control pill and all the deficiencies and they have quite a large following. I was like, okay, that’s cool, they’re getting the message out there. Because it’s true we’re kind of one of the last generations that goes into a doctor’s office and just goes “Oh, whatever you say is fact.” We’re like, no, actually we have the same access to information as you and we’re probably on it. I mean, most of us, if you really want to go in and look at research articles and stuff, I mean we have all the same access to material as doctors do. Doctors are so busy, they can’t even really keep up-to-date unless they go to a conference or something. I mean, no fault to them. Sometimes they don’t even know.

LJ: That’s something I look at and I mentioned I’m a really curious person and so for me, I took the opportunity with my podcast to interview several doctors and I always want to know, I’m like, “Okay, so? What did they teach you in med school? I never went to med school so why don’t you tell me what they taught you?” And it’s fascinating because [AUDIO CUT]

63:50 CL: Sorry, you froze on me.

LJ: Yeah, I saw the internet connection thing. But you basically have like illness and drug. So in medical school, one of the doctors that I interviewed, she mentioned that. Basically they were taught that for every irregular issue or every issue that could happen with the menstrual cycle, it was always the pill for everything. Which makes perfect sense because that’s women’s lived experiences. So myself, all of my clients, women who listen to the podcast, I’m sure all of the women who listen to your podcast, for any women who has had an issue with her cycle and she goes to the doctor, painful periods, irregular, what-have-you, fibroids, you name it. It’s always like painkillers or the pill, that’s it. But that is how they’re taught. I think that it’s really helpful especially because I’ve had a lot of time to come and chew on this. So if someone is listening to this and this is their very first time hearing all this information, it’s really overwhelming and it can be just a little bit insane, right? But I’ve had nearly 20 years to kind of chew on this and to really channel my feelings of anger and frustration into something hopefully more positive.

But if you think about it, then you wouldn’t go to McDonald’s for an oil change. I wouldn’t go to Chuck E. Cheese and order steak. That’s not what they serve there. I think we’re really clear on like okay, if I got an issue with my teeth, I go to the dentist. If I’ve got an issue with my eyes, I go to my ophthalmologist. But we’re still not clear on like if I have an issue with my menstrual cycle, maybe my medical doctor isn’t like the only person that can help me. So I think we have to get to that as women especially, we want to know what’s wrong, we want to get to the bottom of it. We want to know why I’m not ovulating regularly, we want to know why I’ve got the painful periods. The doctor doesn’t necessarily have that answer, so we really have to start understanding that and understanding that there’s other practitioners like medical doctors who have a functional medicine perspective, naturopathic doctors who specialize in fertility. Again, the key is that they specialize in that. But really, we have to open our eyes and recognize that we all need doctors but when you have an issue with your menstrual cycle, it’s really important to not just stop at the doctor especially if the doctor tells you there’s nothing you could do, just go on the pill, or you just need Clomid to trigger ovulation, you’re fine. Or like we just have to take it into our hands.

66:15 CL: But Lisa, when you gave that example, you go to the eye doctor, you go to the whatever, but then I was thinking well if you use that scenario, then you go to your gynecologist.

LJ: The gyno is one of the people. So I have this like the way I talk about it as a team. I have a whole chapter on it. Because it’s that important. But it’s like I’ve talked about it as a team, it’s a team sport. As women, medicine wasn’t made for us. Remember that all the scientific research was done on males, male animals, male people. The medical profession, again, they don’t know what to do with it. Honestly, if you’ve ever gone to your doctor with a menstrual problem and you ask your doctor “What can I do to fix it?” the doctor tells you to go on the pill. That means that they don’t really have an answer for you because they never studied what you have.

67:01 CL: Even gynecologists, right? And gynecologists, there are some really great gynecologists though I’m not dismissing –

LJ: I’m not saying that you don’t need a gyno. I’m saying that because we all need doctors and you do, like a gynecologist –

67:17 CL: You can’t give yourself a pap smear. Not yet.

LJ: No. Like this is not to say one or the other, and that’s exactly my point. We kind of have this weird tunnel vision way of looking at medical support when it comes to our bodies and it’s like, “Well no, I need my gyno,” or “No, I need my doctor.” Well, like, yeah, the gyno, you have to know… it’s like, again, the McDonald’s and Chuck E. Cheese. You need to know what your practitioner specializes in, what services they’re able to provide for you so that you know what you’re getting. You can’t go to your gyno and ask for a nutritional supplement plan to support your period health because the gyno didn’t study nutrition in their medical training. That’s not part of medical training.

Talk to any medical doctor and they will tell you that their nutrition was like 30 minutes ones. I didn’t make that up. That’s what the doctors say. So again, like you kind of have to have that understanding that it’s not just one practitioner that has all the answers. That’s not even fair to that practitioner to expect them to specialize in a field that they didn’t specialize in.

68:29 CL: Exactly. And someone who’s seeing 50 or 60 people a day, I mean it’s just not going to… I know I was offered Prozac back in the day for PMS.

LJ: Great.

68:43 CL: I’m so glad that I have the wherewithal and the foresight to say, Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to go that route. Then just applied for Chinese medicine, it worked great for PMS. I remember just being like, Oh, okay I should have done this in the beginning.

LJ: There’s even studies on it, right?

69:00 CL: So many years of feeling horrible and really that pre-monster syndrome and really changing the personality and clotting and things like that, and you’re like, “Oh, I don’t really know it could be this easy.” I don’t know if it always is but I know it has a good track record for really helping because in Chinese medicine they have a great understanding that goes back thousands of years of the menstrual cycle and they’ve always looked at it as a vital sign. So it does work well.

Okay, well, I loved this interview. It was so great, I’m so proud of you for writing this book. It just seemed like oh my gosh, I’m so impressed at this body of work. And I love what you do. I think it’s so important. I mean, it’s your legacy, right? This is a really, really important message. Whether you’re trying to get pregnant or you’re going to have a daughter and then you protect her, I mean it’s gosh, it’s the most important information for women today as far as just being more in control of our own health and being empowered in that way. Yeah. So I thank you so much.

LJ: Well, thank you so much. I love that you said that. I couldn’t agree more. So thank you so much for having me. This was a super fun conversation. It got like all heated, we went through all kinds of different topics, so this is fantastic. Thank you so much.

70:27 CL: It is for me. I love this stuff. I think, you know, let’s not be squeamish about our bodily fluids and things.

LJ: Fifty percent of the population, right? We don’t need to hide it anymore, I believe.

70:42 CL: I know. That’s where it all started like yeah, they hide it, and oh my God, I don’t want to see through the pad in my purse. And I’m on Aunt Flow or whatever it’s called, you got to call it all these code words, they’re so embarrassing and that’s where it all started.

LJ: Men are embarrassed when they have a… that’s like a whole other tangent. I believe that menstrual products should be. Like you know how when you go to the bathroom, there’s always toilet paper.

71:09 CL: Yeah.

LJ: I think there should always be menstrual products and if the world was upside down and men were women, there would be. There would be menstrual products in every bathroom.

71:16 CL: Okay. The only thing that I think with that is I think those menstrual products are so toxic that they probably release…

LJ: True. And that’s a start.

71:28 CL: That’s way better than going and going “Oh my gosh, I started my period and I have nothing on me.” But I wouldn’t use most commercial menstrual products and that’s a whole… gosh.

LJ: That’s a whole other topic. But I still stand by the statement. Like I recognize that it may not be like I know there’s issues but at the same time, it should just be in the bathroom.

I just want to share with your listeners that they can get the first chapter for free.

71:57 CL: Oh thank you so much. I haven’t been doing this podcast as often.

LJ: No, it’s okay. I just want to mention it.

72:02 CL: Thank you. Please take over. You’re more versed at this than me.

LJ: I just want to mention it because…

72:08 CL: Tell us about your book and how to find you. Oh my gosh.

LJ: I just want to make sure they know that they can get the first chapter for free because I thought it would be kind of cool to give that away. So, thefifthvitalsignbook.com because the first chapter is all about the menstrual cycle as a vital sign and I go into some really neat research about why the menstrual cycle is important for health like beyond just having babies. I know a lot of women get excited and also kind of pissed off after learning about this. So yeah, it’s like a little gift for your audience. Thank you.

72:43 CL: Thank you. How do they find out about your podcast and then FertilityFriday.com?

LJ: Yeah. So the podcast is Fertility Friday. Whatever your favorite podcast app, if you were to put in Fertility Friday, it’ll be the first thing that comes up. Then website is the same like the big website FertilityFriday.com. Then the book is available on Amazon and your favorite online retailer where books are sold. My goal is to have all three formats up simultaneously when it’s released, we’ll see. But either way, meaning it will be available on audio, it will be available on paperback, it will be available in e-book. But we’ll see how that works out because it’s been an interesting journey to get the book here.

73:34 CL: Are you the narrator of the audio?

LJ: I am the narrator.

73:40 CL: Oh, cool.

LJ: I mean I’m a podcaster so I feel like my audience would be like, “Are you kidding me?”

73:46 CL: Yeah, of course. So it’s available on like Audible or…

LJ: Yeah.

73:53 CL: Oh good. Because that’s how I kind of read books these days.

LJ: Me too.

73:56 CL: Yeah, it’s nice that way. Very cool. Alright, thank you so much. I’ll contact you in the next couple of weeks when this comes out. And your book comes out, once again, January 21. Is that the launch date?

LJ: That’s the launch date, yes.

74:11 CL: Okay, that’s in 11 days. Congratulations.

LJ: Thank you.

74:17 CL: Thanks so much, Lisa. Bye-bye!

LJ: Bye.