Lara Briden - The Period Revolutionary
Leading the change to better periods and hormones
Ovulation is the main event of the menstrual cycle.
Progesterone has been both ignored and mistakenly blamed for side effects it does not cause. How did that happen?
First, progesterone was discovered after estrogen, so, according to endocrinology professor Jerilynn Prior, missed being part of the tidy hormone dichotomy of “testosterone for men and estrogen for women.”
Some basic body literacy:
A proper period or menstrual bleed is a bleed at the end of a natural ovulatory cycle. Any other type of bleed is either a pill bleed (a withdrawal bleed from stopping contraceptive drugs) or an anovulatory cycle (a bleed when there has been no ovulation).
A menstrual cycle is, therefore, an “ovulatory cycle,” in which ovulation is the main event.
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With the news that women don’t need pill-bleeds came the headline “Women don’t need periods,” which is completely wrong.
It’s true that women don’t need pill-bleeds because pill-bleeds are not periods. But women do need natural menstrual cycles, and here’s why.
Ovarian hormones estrogen and progesterone are beneficial for health. 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.