This is Why Your Period Gets Weirder After You Start Eating Healthy

It’s a pretty common phenomenon. I start working with a client with the intent of balancing hormones. She decides to go all in. She cleans up her diet, she starts sleeping better, she integrates a new approach to managing stress, and she begins to feel a bit more balanced.

photo via Unsplash by Dovile Ramoskaite

But the first month of working together, her period is worse instead of better. She might have increased feelings of PMS. Her boobs might be more sore. She could have some breakthrough bleeding or a heavy flow, full of clots.

And she’s like, what the heck? I thought you were helping me balance my hormones!

shout out to my girl Becky

And I’m like, whoa there. Slow your roll, fella. But out loud, I am very soothing and compassionate because, hormones.

For a while, this phenomenon puzzled me. But we know that estrogen is bound in up fat tissue, and we also know that when women lose weight, they tend to experience reduced levels of steroid hormones. So it logically follows that when you are eating better, sleeping more, and your levels of stored toxic estrogen are dropping, you could have a flood of released estrogen in the bloodstream.

This extra estrogen can make your periods temporarily worse, especially if they were truly heinous to begin with. This will be a transient effect unless you are super constipated. Estrogens need to be conjugated with beta-glucaronidase (we can test for this with a GI Map). If not conjugated appropriately, estrogen can recirculate in the body and make you feel pretty hormonal.

But if you are working on all aspects of what we at FDN call the D.R.E.S.S. protocol (diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, and supplements), you’ll likely start excreting this excess estrogen and balance out your levels. It’s just that for 1 or 2 months, your period could be a little worse.

So that’s why. Interesting, right?

Here is a short video explaining the phenomenon a little more: