Let's Talk Birth Control

Welcome to the SYNC Your Life podcast episode #4! On this podcast, we will be diving into all things women’s hormones to help you learn how to live in alignment with your female physiology. Too many women are living with their check engine lights flashing. You know you feel “off” but no matter what you do, you can’t seem to have the energy, or lose the weight, or feel your best. This podcast exists to shed light on the important topic of healthy hormones and cycle syncing, to help you gain maximum energy in your life. 

In today’s episode, I’m opening up the conversation about birth control and its impact on our hormones. I share my personal story with birth control, as well as common issues that arise from oral contraceptives. We dive deep into why birth control is so over-prescribed, and what alternatives exist for secondary health issues. 

If you feel like something is “off” with your hormones, check out the FREE hormone imbalance quiz at sync.jennyswisher.com. 

To learn more about the SYNC Digital Course, check out jennyswisher.com. 

Let’s be friends outside of the podcast! Send me a message or schedule a call so I can get to know you better. You can reach out at https://jennyswisher.com/contact-2/.

Enjoy the show!

Episode Webpage: jennyswisher.com/podcast 

0:05
Welcome to the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Swisher, certified personal trainer, nutritionist hormone health expert and girl mom. I believe all women should be able to understand how our bodies are designed to feel. And I teach you how to sync your lifestyle to your cycle to reach maximum energy. You deserve to feel your best and this podcast is going to teach you how. Let’s dive in!

0:34
This podcast is sponsored by the SYNC Digital Course, to take the free hormone imbalance quiz to see what your symptoms could mean about your health. Visit SYNC.jennyswisher.com. That’s sync s y n c dot Jenny swisher.com.

0:57
Welcome, welcome.

0:58
Welcome. Welcome to the show. My friends. I’m so excited to be with you today. On this amazing topic of oral contraceptives and the birth control pill, I’m gonna dive right in, because I know your time is of the essence. And I want to make sure that I can offer as much knowledge as I can about this world of birth control. And what’s really happening in society right now with the overprescribednesss of oral contraceptives. And so let me just start this by saying that I feel extremely primed and pumped and ready for this topic, because I just got off of a coaching call with a client who was telling me and it’s not the first time that I’ve heard this, but she was telling me all about her journey with hormone health and migraine headaches and various digestive issues. And we had a brief conversation about, about birth control and about oral contraceptives. And she said, Yeah, I think my doctor tried me on five, five different kinds. And I felt crazy with every one of them. And it’s funny, I have to laugh because I had the exact same experience. And I know a lot of the women who’ve taken my course have communicated the same, that for one reason or another, their OBGYN or their general practitioner, tried to put them on some form of birth control, or maybe even different brands and different types. And all with the same result of really just not feeling themselves not feeling good. Sometimes feeling crazy, having hot flashes, not sleeping, well, starting migraine headaches and weight gain and all kinds of things. And so it’s not the first time that I’ve heard this. And so like I said, I feel primed and ready to talk about this topic, after speaking to yet another woman who has been sort of in this predicament. So let me just start off by saying, you know, once again, that I am not a doctor, I do not diagnose or prescribe. But I am here to share my own personal story, my own journey, and what it’s like dealing with, and working with women who are really struggling with their hormone health. And we can’t really talk about hormone health and in modern day society without spending a little bit of our conversation talking about oral contraceptives, specifically how much they are prescribed, and for the various different reasons that they’re prescribed, from what I’ve heard from most of my clients is you know, as soon as they mentioned, even in their teenage years, as soon as they mentioned, you know, irregularity of their periods or painful periods, or migraine headache, or even acne, which was the case for me, the doctor is very quick to prescribe birth control. And it’s it’s sort of crazy, because knowing what I know now after my own personal history with birth control and hormone imbalance, I look around and I see how many teenage girls today and and even older, are using birth control pills and how they are really probably not understanding what exactly is happening in their body or more importantly, what’s not happening that could really be used to their own advantage.

1:01
So today, I want to talk about all those different things having to do with the overprescribedness of oral contraceptives. I really think it’s sort of like the elephant in the room. Like every woman out there, like when you talk to them privately knows and has this feeling of like, yeah, you know, everybody’s on it, right? Like this, this this client I was talking to was like, all my friends are on the birth control pill. Yeah, it’s so common for women to be on the birth control pill, or IUD or, or something like that. But I just want to start off by saying, you know, just on a basic level, want to make sure that we kind of cover what exactly the birth control pill is doing when you’re consuming it. So the idea of most birth control methods is to suppress ovulation. So obviously if we can suppress ovulation from happening, which is obviously when you drop your fertile egg from keeps it from being fertilized, right. So we’re essentially just keeping that from happening, which then means that as you procreate and have sex, most likely will be preventing pregnancy because we are suppressing through synthetic hormones, manmade chemicals hormones, we are suppressing your natural ovulation cycle and system. So that’s what’s happening. And no, it sounds like most women are understand that. But at the same time also don’t understand why something like ovulation could be beneficial to their physiology and just to their life and their energy. And so I want to make sure that we talk about both sides. Are there definitely cases where women should be on the birth control pill? Absolutely. And obviously, it’s up to each woman and her doctor to determine what’s best for her. But I also know that a lot of times birth controls being prescribed for things outside of just birth control, instead of getting to the root cause of what’s going on for any individual woman. And that’s where I have issue with it. That’s where I really get passionate and fired up on this topic.

5:46
So when I was 16 years old, let’s start with my story when I was 16 years old, I, oddly enough, my mom walked in the door after her annual OB GYN exam. And she brought me this little black package of birth control, birth control pills, and they were a low estrogen birth control pill. And she said, Well, I just met with my OB. And I told him that you were really struggling with some painful periods and some acne that we couldn’t get under control. And so he prescribed this for you. And I want you to start taking that today. And I really just was all of my friends were taking it. I mean, it was a very common thing at the age of 16. To know several people who were also taking the birth control pill. So I just did, as she said, and I started taking it. I didn’t know until probably close to my 20s and 30s. Sort of what havoc that would do to my hormonal system. I took that low estrogen pill all through high school. And then when I got to college, I was notified that the pill that I was on was being discontinued. And so I needed to switch brands. And so the campus doctor at my university switched me to four different brands and varieties of birth control pills. And every single one of them made me feel absolutely crazy. Like I would have hot flashes, sleeping at night in the cold dorm of my sorority house, which was like freezing cold, I would have hot flashes, I would have anxiety attacks. And I would have trouble sleeping and I was having the migraine headaches. And I was just not myself, I felt really depressed and down. And at the time, I didn’t really put two and two together as crazy as it sounds, I really just thought maybe I was going through some sort of dark period in college. And I was maybe I was just done with college. And I was sort of fed up. And I really just started to examine my environment as the problem instead of what was happening inside my body thanks to these pills. So it wasn’t until I sat down with a clinical psychologist and I was sort of in a little bit of a therapy session. And she said, You know, when did this start. And so when I really backtracked and started putting the pieces together, I realized, Oh, this is maybe connected to this sort of switching around of birth control pills, and it’s really messing with my emotions. And so I always tell people, you know, I felt like I was going nuts. Like, I felt like a true basket case, I felt like everybody thought I was crazy. Because here were all these women, happily and easily on the birth control pill saying no symptoms, or at least it didn’t seem like it at the time. And here I was really suffering. And so to me, it felt like I was a crazy person to think that the birth control pill was what was doing it to me.

8:21
So long story short, I ended up going off of the pills around age 2021, because I was just my body just couldn’t tolerate it. I was engaged to my high school sweetheart, we got married right out of college. And we just decided, okay, you know, if we get pregnant, we get pregnant. And I would rather be pregnant than suffering and feeling like I’m crazy. So I went off of it entirely. And that’s really shortly thereafter is when my migraine journey started. I’m not going to dive into that, because that is a different podcast, there’s a different episode all about my story if you want to tune into that. But of course, I ended up dealing with some infertility issues, and really just lots of migraine struggle over the course of my 20s. And I really when I look back, I think everything truly started with the birth control pill and the different issues that I had dealing with that. So I recently had a friend tell me, she has teenage daughters, and she was telling me that they are in the exact same position basically like when they go in to see their OBGYN if they mentioned that they’re dealing with irregular cycles, or cramping and painful periods or anything, it’s very quickly brought up by the OBGYN or general practitioner to consider birth control. And I just want to say, you know, on the record that it is my my personal opinion only, but my personal opinion is that, you know, why aren’t we looking at what could potentially be going on as a root cause here, perhaps diet and nutrition could be causing young teenage women to have painful periods. Perhaps the right supplementation could change that direction for them. Perhaps we could start looking at the root cause of what’s going As opposed to just prescribing the birth control pill, or an IUD.

10:05
So I really think you know, in the grand scheme of things, this is really what modern medicine is. It’s a true representation of a lot of modern medicine. Now, I’m not against modern medicine. I mean, trust me, modern medicine saved my father’s life. I am a huge fan of modern medicine, as it pertains to a lot of things. But I just think that in this, this decade that we live in, doctors are so quick to prescribe treatments and drugs and pharmaceuticals, instead of getting to the root cause of what’s really going on. And so let me just be real, I’m saying this with love. I mean, I love all of my doctors, but functional medicine is the route I’m going to take for the rest of my life. Because I want to know what’s going on underneath the surface that’s causing me to feel a certain way. And so if you’re listening to this, maybe you have a teenage daughter, or maybe you’re suffering yourself. And you’re someone who’s been on the birth control pill, or your daughter has been on the birth control pill, let me just tell you that, as daunting as it may seem, the journey of coming off of it and understanding your hormones and tracking your cycles and taking other you know, methods is not completely out of the question. If you’re somebody that’s taking it for reasons other than birth control, primarily, I think I’d really, I really want to challenge you to really step up to the plate and say, Is this something that I need to be taking? Is this something that I need to be doing? Or am I sort of just band-aiding an issue? Oh, gosh, how common is it for us to band-aid issues when it comes to our health. So like I said, I’m not here to shame doctors, I’m not here to really get into that space. But I really just want to shed light on the fact that in our society, this is something that is becoming way too over prescribed. And I really think that, you know, we are also seeing large surges and spikes in infertility. If I had $1, for every woman who tells me she deals with migraine headaches, you know, and I can’t help but think maybe there’s some there’s a hormonal connection there, there’s so much going on that we need to listen to, we need to listen to our bodies, we need to listen to what’s working, and what’s working in reality is living in sync with your cycle is living in alignment with your female physiology.

12:09
Obviously, you guys know that what I teach is how to sync with your cycle, you know that this is a passion project of mine, to really help women understand what their cycle is doing on a week to week basis, so that they can eat according to that so that they can exercise according to that so that they can sleep better so that they can supplement their body in the ways that it needs. And in my experience, like if I if I knew then what I know, now, I would be so much more in tune with my body. If I had known that I could really zero in my ovulation each month with a saliva microscope, I probably would have maybe avoided those birth control methods when I was looking for them to be birth control methods. If I knew that I could get to the root cause of my acne and my irregularity with nutrition boy, I would have much rather tweaked my nutrition, then go through the crazies, that was my early 20s. So I really just think that there are a lot of women who just don’t know what they don’t know. And I’m just here to do this podcast to shed light on the fact that there are other ways there are other root cause ways to get to the bottom of what’s going on with you or your daughter. So thanks so much for taking time to listen to this. I think it’s it’s obviously a little bit of a controversial topic. And like I said before, there is definitely a time and place for birth control. I know there are women out there who require it and need it and are looking for it to be a birth control method. But for everyone that’s using it for other things, just know that band-aiding the issue is not always going to help you in the long run. And at some point you’re going to have to come to grips with and understand your own female health, your own hormone health. So I’m here for you guys. As always, I’m always here to answer questions or, you know, cover topics that you find interesting. This is one that I know will come back to. I know that I’m not done talking about birth control. I have a few people in the works to do interviews on this exact topic. So stay tuned for those but in the meantime, keep tracking your sleep cycle. Keep living in alignment with your life. And I’ll talk to you soon

14:17
Thanks for listening to this episode of the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I hope you found value from today’s episode. If you did, please share it out to your friends or leave a review. Remember your cycles are your superpower and by aligning with them you can live your life with all the energy needs to be a mom, Wife, Daughter and friend to those you love. Until next time.