In my last post I talked about five basic areas that we all need to address to help with our periods/cycles: diet, awareness, movement, stress management and sleep. In this post I am going to be going into a bit more detail in regards to specific concerns as well as the many natural remedies for PMS we can use to help alleviate our symptoms. There are numerous issues out there when it comes to PMS and our monthly cycle, and thankfully, there are many natural remedies for PMS as well.
“When we have the optimal amount and quality of yang, we have sufficient qi to feel energized, confident, focused, and engaged. What we eat and drink are efficiently transformed into blood, tissue, and energy to live our lives. If we have insufficient yang, our qi becomes depleted and we may feel fatigued, scattered, off track, chilly, out of sync, out of sorts, or out of step with the world around us. Without enough yang, our body’s garbage-disposal system may go askew, ceasing to clean out what the body doesn’t need, leading to problems like masses. We may encounter any number of other uncomfortable symptoms that accompany insufficient yang. We can also have too much yang, which leads to excessively fast, hard, hot, or aggressive energy. When that happens, we might get migraines or ulcers, or feel manic, restless, or angry. When such expressions possess our bodies and minds, our qi becomes stagnant, increasing irritability, restlessness, or pain.We can also experience yin in healthy or unhealthy ways. If we have the optimal amount of yin, for example, we feel fulfilled, nourished, and content physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Menstrual flow is appropriate and sleep is sound and replenishing. If we have an excess of yin, we feel bloated, heavy, over-weight, lethargic, stuffed-up, and stuffed (as in overnourished). If we don’t have enough of yin’s cool, soft, moist, and tranquil properties, we may get hot flashes, feel emotionally isolated or fearful, or experience physical dryness orinsomnia. We may become anemic or weak, have scanty periods or experience dizziness. If both yin and yang are off, we may feel hot one minute and cold the next, and have weight fluctuations, bone loss, or mood swings.” Pg. 16-17
Another key to healing is to pray about what is going on in your body and to trust your own body-wisdom! Our bodies are much smarter than we tend to give them credit for. So read on to learn more about the variety of symptoms and the natural remedies for PMS we can use to help us heal. {Please note, while this post does cover a number of menstrual concerns, this is not an exhaustive list.}
For some women their periods are scanty, meaning they are minimal, restricted or even sparse, or it has ceased to exist altogether. Usually this indicates the woman is lacking good-quality nutrition as well as a blood deficiency. This can be due to:
- Lack of good quality foods
- Not consuming enough foods
- Burning through what you do consume quicker than you are replenishing it
- Too much hard exercise
- “Reducing” too much and not “building” enough
- Possible blood deficiency
- Being on certain birth control medications
Women who tend to do a lot of hard, excessive exercising, such as running, tend to have scanty periods, miss periods, or lose their period altogether. This tends to be because she is either not consuming enough and/or she is burning through what she does consume much faster than she is replenishing it. Therefore, the nourishment which would normally go to support her period is now being rerouted to other organs or functions in the body. Also, according to an article, “Diet May Disrupt Menstrual Cycle,” by Dan Lewerenz, in March 2002, the reduced estrogen (due to excessive exercise over a long period of time), can also negatively affect cardiovascular health as well as contribute to dangerously low bone density. Usually women who are excessive, high-cardio exercisers tend to be underweight (not always the case, but generally speaking), while it is not as common for women who are overweight to lose their cycle’s, it can also happen. This is usually due to some sort of blockage, meaning either a gland, vessel, channel or natural function is affected or blocked by a tumor or a mass. Treatments would include ensuring sufficient exercise engagement, possible herbs and other natural remedies for PMS. To naturally heal from scanty and/or absent periods it is important to:
- Start consuming a diet rich in whole, good quality, unrefined, freshly cooked foods
- Good examples include: baked yams, squash, carrots; warm milk (non-dairy, or if choosing diary making sure it is organic unhomogenized) with cinnamon, nutmeg or saffron in it one hour before bedtime; stews with ginger and onions; warm, naturally caffeine free beverages
- Increase your good, high quality, organic oils
- hemp seeds/oil, flax oil, real cold-pressed olive oil
- Begin taking a good quality Essential Fatty Acid (EFA) supplement
- Stop running/high cardio workouts – or at the very least, cut back
- Choose instead to go for walks, and do lots of stretching, and even light Pilates
- *Just a note, this wouldn’t be a “forever” thing, this would just be until one has helped heal her body and her period has returned to a normal state; then she could once increase her cardio, with just making sure to keep a good balance of both gentle exercises and strenuous exercises
- Get good quality sleep
- Choose to go to bed earlier, turn off your phone/Wi-Fi at night, start a good bedtime routine
- Consult a qualified practitioner to help deciding which nourishing herbs would be of benefit to you
Oftentimes, when a period is heavy or painful a medical diagnosis is given, such as uterine fibroids, dysfunctional uterine bleeding (DUB) or endometriosis, other times though, no cause shows up on the testing. While I won’t go into great detail about them here, they are critical to be aware of, for if indeed one does have them they can cause further and much more serious concerns if left untreated.
Uterine fibroids are hard or soft masses of muscle tissue which can appear in any layer of the uterus and tend to benign. They are hormone sensitive, estrogen dependent and may exist with or without symptoms. Symptoms can include: back, abdomen or menstrual pain; frequent urination; constipation; a feeling of weight or heavy pressure in the bladder or lower abdomen; infertility; heavy or irregular bleeding during one’s period. More details about uterine fibroids can be found here in this article: http://natural-fertility-info.com/the-best-natural-remedies-for-fibroids.html
Dysfunctional uterine bleeding (DUB) is usually due to an estrogen dominance, meaning there is no balancing effect happening with progesterone.
Endometriosis occurs when cells belonging to the uterus lining migrate to the outside of the uterus, thus invading tissues and organs. Unfortunately, just like the rest of the uterine lining, each month these migrated cells slough off but don’t exit like the non-migrated cells do. Because they didn’t have a place to exit from, the internal bleeding can cause cramping, inflammation, and sometimes even incapacitating pain and scarring, which has the potential to lead to infertility.
For painful and/or heavy periods with no obvious cause, there still tends to be a cause, and really, there are several possible imbalances. While most women would either just take some pain medication or be prescribed some from their doctor, that truly isn’t the answer, the answer is to figure out what is really going on. If we’re resorting to taking pain med’s all the time, we’re doing ourselves a very large dis-service in many ways, including masking the root cause and killing our ever-so-important gut flora. And again, while most doctors will tell us it’s “normal” to have pain and it’s common, it isn’t actually a normal symptom and neither is it necessary. Some possible imbalances include the following:
- Painful usually indicates stagnation
- stagnation can occur due to stress, lack of movement, poor-quality nourishment
- Stress
- when we are stressed we are holding/clenching, well, everything: our bodies are tighter/tense, our minds are full and not as present, our spirits are discontent
- Lack of “motivation” and too much “building”
- our bodies were designed to move, plain and simple. If we’re not moving, in the way our own body needs to be moved, then stagnation can and does occur. Just like when a women who works her body too hard it affects her cycle, when a women doesn’t move enough it affects her cycle also.
- Food sensitivities, food allergies, and/or lack of good quality nourishing foods
Thankfully there are definite natural remedies for PMS symptoms that include painful and heavy bleeding:
- Clean up your diet
- If we’re eating lots of poor quality, processed, sugar-laden, junky faux-foods, I can guarantee this will be contributing to our painful, heavy period. Garbage in, garbage out. Eating a diet that’s full of the faux-foods, processed foods, and foods we’re either allergic to or sensitive to can lead to gut-dysbiosis (think leaky gut, candida, H. pylori infections, etc.) So it’s important to get rid of the processed junk and instead eat a diet rich in nourishing whole foods – but not too much, and not too little.
- Give acupuncture a try
- Acupuncture has actually been proven effective in helping women reduce their pain. One study found it “showed significant clinical improvements in all menstrual pain scores recorded;”
- Movement is necessary
- If you’re current movement regime is nil, just beginning walking daily can be a big help, or even walking up and down your stairs for 10 minutes, or just start by stretching, and stretching throughout the day and not just once in the morning. By including short bits of movement throughout our day our body begins to get into the habit of moving and then it will begin to crave it and we’ll be able to begin to include more movement as time goes on.
- Drink warm lemon water in the mornings
- This helps our bodies in so many ways, including cleansing out our liver, which is an important organ for detoxifying, which is something our body is doing during our monthly menses.
- Reduce your stress
- easier said than done, right? Well, the best way to do this is one step at a time, with ‘slight edge’ decisions. We can begin our mornings with prayer and our bible instead of our smartphone and checking the latest social media news. We can begin by going to bed earlier, and powering down our smartphone at night (it needs a break to ya’ know!). We can begin by choosing to take five really good deep breaths before we begin our latest rant at heaven knows what that won’t actually serve us much of a purpose anyway. We can begin by choosing to become aware and taking an assessment of our life: what are we truly spending our time doing? are we actually being productive, or just being busy? are we practicing proper self-care? are we truly listening to the voice of our Heavenly Father and obeying His commands? (He does say that we’ll be blessed when we obey His commands after all.) There are numerous ways we are able to begin to reduce our stress, and it truly all comes down to choice, because while it’s easy not to let our stress go, it’s just as easy to let our stress go…one step at a time, or rather, one slight edge decision at a time…
There can be many reasons as to why we are having irregular or missing periods, so again, it’s important to keep a diary of what’s going on and to take your findings to your trusted health-care professional. When we are experiencing irregular or missing periods we need to consider our rhythm: what is the current routine and rhythm of our life right now. Things to consider in this: do we have a routine? Has there been an illness? Travel? Stress? Hormonal imbalance? Once we’ve taken a look at our rhythm and hormonal state, we then need to consider if our periods are irregular and heavy, or irregular and light. Depending on which is happening can depend on which healing route to take. Here are some tips to help when addressing irregular periods:
- Your hormonal balance needs to be reset
- Doing a cleanse can help with this by reducing our toxic load and cutting our unnecessary junk.
- Check your stress levels
- Take a good inventory of what is happening in your life, and re-read the paragraph above about reducing stress: you can do it!
- Take a good look at your life rhythm; try to get onto a good routine
- Walk outdoors at the same time each day to support internal rhythms and natural cycles
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