Balancing Out Your Hormones by Seed Cycling

Seed cycling is well-known these days, but some have been practicing this approach to improving hormone health for years.  Also called seed rotation, seed cycling has its roots in naturopathic philosophy and Chinese Medicine. Picked up by the natural medicine community, it has become more and more popular in recent years and seed cycling advocates claim this approach is one of the best “food as medicine” tools. What is Seed Cycling? Seed cycling uses the powerful nutrients in specific seeds during different stages of your menstrual cycle.  Seeds contain beneficial nutrients for overall health that have been shown to help with blood sugar regulation, digestion challenges, hormonal balance, and PMS symptoms. Incorporating seed cycling into your daily routine can be beneficial at any stage of a woman’s life.  Seed cycling can help women who are coming off birth control as a way to get their menstrual cycle back. Postpartum and women suffering from amenorrhea (the absence of a period) can have menstruation stimulated. Those with PMS and PCOS symptoms can be supported by seed cycling. It can help boost fertility for those of child bearing age and balance hormones for perimenopausal, menopausal, and postmenopausal women. What Seeds are Included in Seed Cycling? Seed cycling uses pumpkin, flax, sesame, sunflower, and hemp seeds. There is a specific combination of these seeds that benefit you during your cycle. Pumpkin Seeds have a high zinc content and help boost progesterone. They can help restore hormone balance as you move towards progesterone rise in the second phase of the cycle. Pumpkin seeds can improve acne and weight gain while promoting more regular periods. Flax Seeds are rich in lignans which have been shown to be beneficial in preventing osteoporosis, improving estrogen and progesterone ratios, and heart disease in women. Eating flax seeds may also help soothe breast tenderness which is experienced by many women right before their period. Sesame Seeds and Sunflower Seeds contain omega-6 essential fatty acids, and lignans which support the hormones that carry you through the luteal phase, the second half of the menstrual cycle. Hemp Seeds are a good source of essential fatty acids and gamma-linolenic acid (GLA) which help balance hormones. Hemp seeds also aid in inflammation.  How to Seed Cycle Seed cycling is based on a 28-day cycle, but it is still possible to follow if you have a longer or shorter cycle. Day 1 (the first day of your period) through Day 14 is the Follicular Phase of the menstrual cycle. During this phase, your estrogen increases and an egg prepares for ovulation. Your uterine lining also thickens.  On days 1-14, eat 1-2 Tablespoons of freshly ground flaxseeds and raw pumpkin seeds as well as hemp seeds. These seeds will naturally increase estrogen. Ovulation usually occurs around Day 14 of a 28-day cycle and the egg is released. This ends the Follicular Phase. On Day 15, the second half of your cycle—the Luteal Phase—begins. Following ovulation, eat 1-2 Tablespoons of fresh ground sunflower and sesame seeds as well as hemp seeds. Progesterone levels rise and peak during this phase. Progesterone will ease unwanted PMS symptoms. When your period arrives, you are back to Day 1.  For postpartum, postmenopausal women, and those experiencing inconsistent periods or amenorrhea (lack of a period), seed cycling can be done following the moon cycle. Use the New Moon as Day 1 and then when the Full Moon arrives, that begins Phase 2. Pretty cool, right? Seed cycling can be fun and incorporated to enhance many types of foods. Sprinkle on yogurt or in a smoothie, on a tossed salad, or over a poached egg on avocado toast. Seeds can be used in place of granola, added to oatmeal, sprinkled on a sweet potato, and even added to a favorite cookie recipe. Options are endless. Seed cycling is a great tool to help you live your most nutritious life as it has so many hormonal health and wellness benefits. It is an inexpensive way to support your natural cycle. Give it time, at least 3 months to create balance. It is worth a try!  (Image: Shutterstock)

Syncing With My Cycle Changed My Life Forever. How It Can Change Yours, Too.

Excerpted from IN THE FLO by Alisa Vitti, reprinted with permission by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2020.  I know firsthand how stressful hormonal problems can be. I struggled with them for a decade, and my journey with a debilitating hormonal condition changed my career and my life.  My issues started in junior high school. I was a very late bloomer in the puberty department. Even though I was the president and founder of the Period Club, I was the last one in the club to actually start my period. I was almost sixteen when I got my first bleed, although it was brown and not healthy. I went to my gynecologist annually but was offered no diagnosis or explanation for the laundry list of issues I was having.  RELATED: The Best Period Underwear for Every Type of Flow Meanwhile, my symptoms worsened throughout high school and in college. At one point, I tipped the scales at 205 pounds; my face, chest, and back were covered in severe, painful cystic acne; and I hadn’t had my period more than a handful of times in a decade. Things got so bad for me, I couldn’t sleep, I binged on food to deal with fatigue and anxiety, I felt depressed, and I struggled to do basic things like be on time for appointments and stick with plans to go out with friends. I was a mess and felt trapped in my own body. One night when I was suffering with my usual insomnia, I headed to the library at Johns Hopkins, where I was a student, and I came across a brief article in an obstetrics journal about Stein-Leventhal disease, which is now called polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). As I scanned the symptoms associated with this condition, I recognized myself immediately.  RELATED: What Every Woman Needs to Know About PCOS “This is it,” I thought! In my book WomanCode, I described in detail how that discovery prompted me to demand that my gynecologist give me a test to diagnose PCOS—a transvaginal ultrasound along with bloodwork. When the test revealed the telltale signs of PCOS—multiple cysts on both of my ovaries—I finally knew what was causing all of my issues. It suddenly made sense to me that all the diets, exercise, and skin care treatments hadn’t worked for me. My symptoms weren’t caused by my not trying hard enough; my hormonal system was so severely out of tune that no ordinary diet or skin cream was going to help.  My prognosis was grim—a lifetime of cystic acne and an increased risk for obesity, diabetes, infertility, heart disease, and cancer. As I sat in stunned silence, the doc dispassionately informed me there was no cure, only a litany of prescriptions—birth control pills to artificially regulate my period, Accutane for acne, Glucophage for insulin problems, Aldactone for hirsutism issues, blood pressure medicine, Clomid when it came time to conceive, and on and on—that I would likely have to take for the rest of my life. The message was clear: go home and suffer quietly. As I was reeling from the notion of a lifetime of pills and problems, a voice welled up from deep inside, calmly reassuring me: “That’s not your path.” My body was sending me a strong message that there had to be a better way. I didn’t realize it in that moment, but looking back, my body was letting me know I had the power to do something, to change my hormonal situation and create a better future for myself. In that moment, I made the switch from having a passive relationship with my body to becoming a champion for my health and well-being. I was in a fight for my quality of life, literally, and if traditional medicine was going to leave me unsupported, I’d look elsewhere for a remedy. For the next two years, I embarked on an exploratory journey to learn as much as I could from experts in a variety of health specialties, including naturopaths, herbalists, and acupuncturists. I tried elimination diets, candida diets, herbs, and supplements, and nothing worked for me. Although these therapies can provide relief for many conditions, they didn’t heal my hormonal problems. In fact, my condition continued to worsen. Out of desperation, I went on the pill, but after just ten days I temporarily lost vision in one eye from an ocular migraine and suffered a cardiac episode of low blood pressure and heart palpitations. After medical evaluation, I was told to avoid synthetic birth control. Finally, after exhausting all of the existing treatments, I tapped into my inner strength as a researcher (I had studied biology and wanted to become an ob-gyn) and began looking into the endocrine system, epigenetics, circadian patterns of the body and hormones (chronobiology), and the five-phase theory from Chinese medicine.  My findings encouraged me to experiment and create a revolutionary new way of eating that ultimately put my symptoms and condition into remission naturally. This is the basis of the FLO protocol I described in WomanCode, which includes using food to stabilize your blood sugar levels and insulin, reduce cortisol levels, restore microbial balance in the gut, and improve the breakdown of estrogen in the liver. Within nine months of following this protocol, my period came back, I lost sixty pounds, my skin cleared up, and my mood and life were transformed. I was beyond thrilled with this transformation, but my journey wasn’t over. I needed to find a way to maintain the changes I had made, and I wanted to get in touch with my cyclical nature by reclaiming a female-centered way of living. The Cycle Syncing Method™ was born from these two fundamental needs. The method is based on the extraordinary blueprint for self-care, biohacking, and optimization on every level provided by our cyclical hormonal patterns. The method allows us to stay connected to our feminine energy despite the cultural conditioning that dictates a linear, repetitive way of living. I certainly wish