220-SYNCPodcast_OvualtionVitalSign

[00:00:00] Jenny Swisher: Welcome friends to this episode of the Sync Your Life podcast. Today we’re diving into the topic of ovulation as our superpower, and why it should be considered a fifth vital sign for women. It turns out we need ovulation for reasons other than pregnancy. So we’re going to dive into all things ovulation today and why it matters.

[00:01:17] Jenny Swisher: Truth be told, when I was in my twenties, I just assumed that I was ovulating. I had a regular 28 day menstrual cycle, and I just thought I likely ovulated around day 14, just like the textbooks said. in middle school sex ed class. I never had a discussion about ovulation with my OBGYN, and even in middle school sex ed class, it was insinuated that every woman would follow a textbook menstrual cycle month to month.

[00:01:40] Jenny Swisher: I had friends with irregular cycles, and I figured that since mine was so predictable, it must be normal. There’s that word again normal Normal is not optimal every time I say that word out loud now I have to correct it to say optimal at that time though I just figured I didn’t know what I didn’t know and I thought everything was good to go Optimal health is what we’re after friends.

[00:02:02] Jenny Swisher: And so when we talk today That’s why we’re talking about ovulation because if we really want optimal sexual health if we want optimal hormone health We’ve got to be focused at least somewhat on our ovulation cycles When my husband and I finally wound up in a fertility clinic at the age of 29, I was told I would need to come in for pelvic ultrasounds to check for follicle production.

[00:02:23] Jenny Swisher: That was the first time that it ever crossed my mind that at the very basic foundation of conception was my own ovulation. And that was the first time I ever really thought that maybe it was missing. Maybe I wasn’t ovulating. Our fertility doctor said, and I quote, I often see women with low body fat percentage like you struggle with ovulation.

[00:02:42] Jenny Swisher: At the time, it didn’t make sense, but now knowing what I know about the body and its ultimate desire to stay safe in order to reproduce, it all makes sense. At the age of 29, when we were going to this fertility clinic, we owned a gym and I was teaching ample amounts of bootcamp classes, personal training.

[00:02:59] Jenny Swisher: I was definitely under fueling for my activity level. I was at a very low lean body fat percentage and I was making my body really feel unsafe. My cortisol was in the tank, as I’ve shared on previous podcast episodes. My adrenal fatigue was running strong. So it makes sense that my body was keeping ovulation from happening because it will always prioritize survival over reproduction.

[00:03:20] Jenny Swisher: Cortisol comes first. Adrenal glands come first. Then comes reproduction. So I would go in for a couple months, here and there, to check for ovulation at this fertility clinic and to see if I had follicles developing and I learned quickly that I wasn’t, in fact, ovulating. I was actually considered anovulatory.

[00:03:39] Jenny Swisher: If you want more details about what that means, I have another podcast episode that I’ll link up for you about anovulatory cycles. I also have one on PCOS. But it began then. It began this idea that I wasn’t ovulating, and therefore maybe I didn’t have good menstrual health. We started Ovidril injections to get my body to ovulate, and that is a whole other story for another podcast, but man, did it enlighten me to understand what my body wasn’t doing that it should be doing.

[00:04:05] Jenny Swisher: Fast forward to years later when I started learning more about hormone health, menstrual cycles, and I started to view hormone health through a functional lens. That’s when I heard the phrase, ovulation is our fifth vital sign. Huh? Why does ovulation matter if we aren’t looking to conceive?

[00:04:21] Jenny Swisher: It turns out it matters quite a bit. As women, it is the ultimate marker of healthy hormone production. Anovulation means that there’s an imbalance somewhere. Dr. Laura Bryden says, quote, Ovarian hormones, estrogen, and progesterone are beneficial for health.

[00:04:35] Jenny Swisher: That means natural ovulatory menstrual cycles are beneficial for health because ovulation is how women make hormones. Does that surprise you? Men make testosterone every day, so you might think women do something similar, but we don’t. Instead, women make hormones as a surge of estradiol leading up to ovulation and an even bigger surge of progesterone after ovulation.

[00:04:55] Jenny Swisher: It’s an elegant system that sometimes results in a baby. Even when ovulation does not result in a baby, it’s still worth doing because regular ovulation delivers the beneficial hormones that the body absolutely expects to have. But why does it matter to ovulate? What if you’re not looking to conceive?

[00:05:11] Jenny Swisher: Why should you care? Well, ovulation indicates a healthy surge in estradiol in the weeks leading up to ovulation, which means opportunity for muscle gain. Remember, muscle is the key to longevity, according to Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. Estrogen also benefits insulin sensitivity of the body like our brain and bones.

[00:05:29] Jenny Swisher: Estrogen rising is necessary to produce FSH and LH to cause ovulation to happen, and once ovulation happens, remember will drop, that follicle will produce what’s known as a corpus luteum. The corpus luteum then produces progesterone, and progesterone, my friends, is a superpower hormone.

[00:05:48] Jenny Swisher: I’ll link up an episode that I did on progesterone in the show notes, but progesterone is our calming hormone. It is catabolic in nature, meaning that it helps us to burn fat. It’s also anti inflammatory. It regulates our immune system, and it even supports our thyroid. According to Dr. Bryden, she says, quote, The benefits of ovarian hormones are both short term by making women stronger and long term by building metabolic reserve and health.

[00:06:13] Jenny Swisher: Endocrinology professor Jerilyn Pryor says, quote, Women benefit from 35 to 40 years of ovulatory cycles, not just for fertility, but also to prevent osteoporosis, stroke, dementia, heart disease, and breast cancer. This means, then, that ovulation is an overall indicator of good health. Why then is ovulation as a fifth vital sign not being taught in health class?

[00:06:35] Jenny Swisher: And why isn’t menstrual cycle tracking, or ovulation tracking, not just period tracking, something that doctors are not teaching us as women? We should be learning this as young as our teen years. I am asked on a weekly basis about birth control and ovulation, so I’ll make it clear here. If you’re using birth control, the entire purpose of that birth control is to prevent ovulation from occurring, thus preventing pregnancy.

[00:06:57] Jenny Swisher: By not ovulating, you’re not able to engage in the superpowers of the ebbs and flows of estrogen and progesterone over the course of your cycle. Your period then is really a pill bleed. I have a podcast on this. It’s called Period vs. Pill Bleed. I’ll link it up for you. But ovulation is not happening for you when you’re on oral contraceptives.

[00:07:15] Jenny Swisher: So I won’t go into all the reasons why women don’t ovulate regularly because I’ve covered that on previous episodes, but some of the main reasons include underfueling and or overtraining, otherwise known as LEA, low energy availability, specifically under eating carbs and PCOS.

[00:07:33] Jenny Swisher: I’m telling you, once you understand the role of each hormone in our body and when it’s performing for you, estrogen in the first half of your cycle, progesterone in the second half, you can tap into the energies of your cycle in an all new way. This will increase your fitness performance. But it will also help you become knowledgeable as it pertains to your own body and hormone health.

[00:07:52] Jenny Swisher: It starts with hormone health education. And hormone health is bio individual. Health is individual. We can’t learn from a textbook what we should know about our own bodies. As mothers, we help our daughters by learning first for ourselves. We chart our cycles. We track ovulation. We tap into these superpowers, and then we pay it forward and teach them.

[00:08:13] Jenny Swisher: I will also make sure that I link up for you my sync scope in the show notes because this is a pivotal tool that you can use to track your saliva patterns each month, especially around the midpoint of your cycle to see if and when you’re ovulating. Nature is truly a beautiful thing and actually your saliva pattern will change when you are approaching ovulation.

[00:08:30] Jenny Swisher: It will go from a bubbles on a windowpane to more of a snowflake pattern or jungle ferns as some women say. So watching your saliva pattern change and transition over the month is just evidence that our hormones are ever changing and ebbing and flowing. As always, my friends, this is here for you to learn more about your body and to become more hormone literate.

[00:08:49] Jenny Swisher: We all should have the goal of ovulation each month. I have a friend who is a cycle syncing girl. She’s actually in my course and I just saw recently in her Instagram stories where she was doing all the things at the midpoint of her cycle to make sure that she ovulated. She had noticed that she hadn’t had an increase in basal body temperature, she had noticed there wasn’t any cervical mucus changes, so she started to really focus on how she could make her body feel safe.

[00:09:12] Jenny Swisher: Breath work, meditation, scaling back to high intensity workouts, making sure she was fueling enough and getting enough sleep, were some of the things that she was doing to make sure that her body would hit that pivotal moment of her cycle, so that she was having good menstrual health. The more we can tune into this, the more we can know.

[00:09:28] Jenny Swisher: And the more we know about our own bodies, the more we can self advocate for that maximum energy. So as always, my friends, thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you learned something today. Share this out if you did. Ovulation is your superpower. We’ve got to harness it. We’ve got to aim for longevity.

[00:09:44] Jenny Swisher: Until next time, my friends. We’ll talk soon. Bye bye.