Today we are diving into the #1 Biohack for Women’s Wellness! It's a tool for optimizing your heath and hormones, reducing period discomforts, feeling more radiant in your body, vibrant in your mind, confident in yourself, magnetic in your work, turned on in your intimacy and connected in your relationships!
What you'll learn and key takeaways:
Resources & Links:
Thank you so much for listening. I’m so honored that you’re here and would be SO grateful if you could leave me a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify, that way we can inspire and educate even more people together.
I’d love to connect with you on IG: www.instagram.com/bindistables
Visit my website for more resources and ways to work with me: www.bindistables.com
Today we are diving into the #1 Biohack for Women’s Wellness! It's a tool for optimizing your heath and hormones, reducing period discomforts, feeling more radiant in your body, vibrant in your mind, confident in yourself, magnetic in your work, turned on in your intimacy and connected in your relationships!
What you'll learn and key takeaways:
Resources & Links:
Thank you so much for listening. I’m so honored that you’re here and would be SO grateful if you could leave me a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify, that way we can inspire and educate even more people together.
I’d love to connect with you on IG: www.instagram.com/bindistables
Visit my website for more resources and ways to work with me: www.bindistables.com
Intro
Hey and welcome back to another episode of Vibrant You. Today we are diving into the number one biohack for women's wellness, a tool for optimizing your health and your hormones, reducing period discomforts, finding more radiance in your body feeling more vibrant in your mind, confident in yourself. A way to find more magnetism in your work feeling more turned on in your intimacy and more connected in your relationships.
So if you are a woman, there is a universe of power that lives in you. And that power is your birthright. It's your very nature, and it's been within you all of this time waiting and hiding this untapped potential. And the key to unlocking this power that lies within you. It lives in your feminine essence, it lives in you as your hormones as a woman and as your unique innate advantage.
This power lives in you encoded in the different seasons and the phases of your menstrual cycle. And this power, I call it is your femme flow. So as a woman, you may or may not know, but you are a rhythmic and creative being everything in your body and in nature in the world around you lives and works in these cycles from the seasons to the moon to your own menstrual cycle.
And each of the four phases of your cycle, your body produces different levels of hormones, and naturally, you have varied energy levels and sleep patterns, you have different cravings and needs and strengths and desires, and even different thoughts during the different phases of your menstrual cycle.
So learning to live in your Femme FLOW, as I call it. This is a methodology that I've created that speaks to these four unique phases or seasons of your menstrual cycle, each with their own unique hormonal changes and physiological, emotional, and even spiritual advantages at the different stages.
And learning how to live in alignment with this innate feminine essence is a powerful way to optimize truly every area of your life, from your work to your relationships to your health to intimacy, motherhood, and beyond. So this Femme FLOW unveils how to tap into this unique rhythm to nourish your body at all four phases for optimal hormonal balance and start to flow through life with just more ease and more fulfillment.
So as women, we know that we are living out of alignment with our nature out of alignment with our feminine essence or our Femme FLOW, as we call it. And we know that that's happening when we start to feel depleted, we start to feel more anxious than maybe we need to we feel drained by life's experiences, and we feel overwhelmed and simply disconnected from our body and our own feminine energy. And of course, our creativity and our productive productivity. And our just felt sense of fulfillment and joy and pleasure in our lives and in our work starts to suffer.
But the magic is, and this is the biohack is that when we live in alignment with this Femme FLOW, the seasons of the four phases of our menstrual cycle, we live in alignment, and in service to our hormonal rhythms. Our relationships improve, and our work feels more fulfilling and we feel more connected to life we feel in touch with our bodies, we feel more creative and vibrant, and sensual. Our inspiration and our productivity start to flow, our health improves, we begin to experience pain-free periods and you know PMS is reduced, our energy levels rise and life just feels happier. Juicier and rich are somehow so fun flow and living in alignment with them.
Femme FLOW really works by syncing up our daily activities such as our eating habits and our work patterns and socializing, exercising, and how we exercise our self-care routines. Syncing these activities up with our menstrual cycle with our hormonal rhythms promotes optimal health and well-being on all levels.
So this is what we're gonna get into today the number one biohack for women's health and how to optimize it to improve every area of your life by unlocking your hormonal advantage.
And stay tuned into the end because I have a really exciting opportunity that will help you to really unlock this unique hormonal advantage that lives in you by teaching you exactly how to live in alignment with your menstrual cycle and feminine flow.
But first, let's start to understand a little bit more deeply what our menstrual cycle really is. It's four unique phases, our hormones and our body, which as a woman is just really, really cool.
What is the Menstrual Cycle
So what is our menstrual cycle, our menstrual cycle is not just our period. So there are four phases to our menstrual cycle and your period or your bleeding days or your menstrual phase is really just one event one phase of your entire menstrual cycle.
Your menstrual cycle can last anywhere from 21 to 35 days with the average length of an average menstrual cycle from the first day of your bleed.
Usually, we measure our menstrual cycle from day one of our bleed to the next day one of our next bleed. That's one menstrual cycle, which includes a period which includes ovulation, which includes a few different events. So this can take anywhere from 21 to 35 days, with the average woman being about 28 days as the average menstrual cycle length.
Key Differences Between Male and Female Hormonal Systems
Now we have to understand some key differences between the female body and the male body and the female hormonal system and the male hormonal system. So all living creatures, men and women and all genders included, work on a 24-hour clock, which is called our circadian rhythm. So all of the cells and tissues and organs and body systems inside of our body operate on this 24-hour circadian rhythm, our cells, our sleep-wake cycle, and aspects of our neurotransmitter production such as serotonin and melatonin, the 24-hour clock.
Now men's hormonal cycle works predominantly on this 24-hour clock and a man in his hormonal state is really the same every single day. His energy is highest in the morning when his cortisol and testosterone levels are at their highest. He's at his peak energetically and his focus and his productivity are in the morning when his hormone concentrations are highest. And throughout the day, his hormones start to reduce until about six o'clock that's when the patriarchy told you to work, we've revolved around this nine-to-five clock which is not in service to women's bodies, and our hormonal advantage but actually to men's bodies.
The nine-to-five clock is not meant for women's bodies. And our hormonal advantage is designed to be in service to a man's hormonal advantage. The highest hormone productivity in the morning starts at 9 am and then lowest at five, then he might go out for social events or he might go home to his family and relax. That is the circadian rhythm. That's a man's hormonal cycle.
However, the female system our hormonal system works has this secondary hormonal rhythm to it called the infradian rhythm our infradian rhythm is a hormonal cycle that takes on average between 21 and 35 days most women being around the 27, 28, or 29-day cycle.
And inside our infradian rhythm, there are four phases with unique hormonal changes that affect everything in our body from our cognitive well-being to our moods to our creativity, our energy levels, our gut microbiome, our immune system, our metabolism, and just so much more.
Your Menstrual Cycle 101 (What You Didn't Learn in Sex Ed.)
So let's start to establish a little bit of just a common language to help us understand our female anatomy and the four phases of our menstrual cycle and the key hormones that we're experiencing on our infrared in rhythm or this 28-day cycle
And this is something that's so important because even when I remember back to hearing about this for the first time, you know, there was so much confusion, like I think, okay, where did I first learn about my menstrual cycle? There was maybe some like awkward, strange talk with my mom about a curse or, you know, you bleed and here's a tampon, or I'm remembering sex ed, which was not even really about women's bodies.
It was just, here's a banana, here's a condom, here's what to do, but had nothing to do with understanding not only our biology but really the unique advantage and like the hormonal superpowers that a woman goes through through the force eight phases of her cycle that when we use to our advantage can really unlock and optimize every area of our life.
4 Phases of the Menstrual Cycle (And Your Hormonal Shifts)
So what are the four phases of our menstrual cycle? What are our hormones?
1) Menstrual Phase
So the first phase of our menstrual cycle is called our menstrual phase. This is the most obvious most visible phase of our menstrual cycle where there's clearly an event a hormonal event going on. So our menstrual phases are bleeding days.
And why we bleed is that in simple terms, our body is designed to release our uterine lining if we don't fall pregnant, right, so of course, one of the features, or one of the reasons why we have a menstrual cycle, to begin with, is of course for procreation. That's how babies are made. And we need this menstrual cycle for humanity to continue. This is one aspect of why we have a period.
So with that, bleed, we're releasing our uterine lining that didn't, you know, receive a sperm and an egg and didn't start to create a baby. And during our menstrual phase, our hormone concentrations are at their lowest.
Two key hormones are progesterone and estrogen and they are at their lowest concentrations at that time. Now a cool thing about what's happening during our menstrual phase is that because of our hormonal sex hormones, our estrogen and progesterone are at their lowest.
So is our serotonin, which is a neurotransmitter that affects our mood and our energy levels, and our happiness, as well as our GABA production gets influenced due to the reduction in our estrogen. And GABA which is really our calming hormone, our, you know, feeling at ease feeling relaxed hormone.
So how interesting that our body goes through these cycles and how validating to know that during your menstrual phase, you might not feel the happiest, you might feel a little bit more reflective or inward or, you know, in a different emotional state. And that's not anything bad or wrong. And we're going to speak to in a moment, the hormonal advantages of our menstrual cycle, especially this menstrual phase, and how we can really set ourselves up for success in every area of our life by optimizing this menstrual phase.
2) Follicular Phase
So the second phase in our menstrual cycle is the follicular phase. And the follicular phase is all about preparing for ovulation.
So hormonally speaking a hormone called FSH follicle stimulating hormone, starts to build on the rise and starts to build up the follicles inside of our ovaries to build up that follicle to then release an egg in the next phase called ovulation. So there's FSH or follicle-stimulating hormone that is really designed to help mature these follicles. And it's through that maturation process of our follicles, we start to release the production of estrogen.
Estrogen is really our juicy, feminine, delicious, important hormone that helps build up the uterine lining for of course potential consumption during ovulation every phase. But also, there are so many health benefits of estrogen in terms of our mood, our gut microbiome and so many things. So naturally, during this follicular phase, our hormones are on the rise, and therefore so are our energy levels and our serotonin, and our happiness chemicals.
So naturally, we might notice in this phase, our neurotransmitters and our energy, our mood starting to increase, we might start to feel more vibrant, and our confidence starts to really increase during this phase.
3) Ovulatory Phase
Okay, the next phase in our menstrual cycle is ovulation. And ovulation is really the main event in our hormonal cycle.
So there are so many health benefits to ovulation beyond just getting pregnant, in terms of our cardiovascular health and our gut microbiome and our neurochemistry, and how we feel in terms of our mood and our energy levels.
There are so many benefits from this process of ovulation in our body that is so beyond just getting pregnant. So many people think you know, when you're on birth control, oh, I don't need to ovulate because I'm not interested in getting pregnant, or at least not at this time.
However, when we miss ovulation due to, for example, hormonal-based birth control, we're really missing out on so many of the health benefits that ovulation has and so many levels. So, during ovulation, our estrogen levels start to rise from these maturing follicles.
At its peak, this other hormone called luteinizing hormone or LH begins to make its debut and stimulate the ovary to then release an egg marking the event called ovulation. So some women, you might even feel this event happening, you know, somewhere around day 14 of your cycle, give or take each woman's a little different.
Some women will even start to feel a little twinge on either side of the lower belly towards the pelvis which one ovary will release one egg per ovulate Tory cycle, and some women can even tell if you're really attuned to your body by knowing the events of what's happening hormonally for you. You may actually feel a little twinge or a tenderness or almost a slight cramping on the day of ovulation. As soon as you feel the egg being released from the ovary into the fallopian tube, that's pretty freakin cool.
Okay, so if within the next few days, you don't fall pregnant as then there's no presence of sperm that meets the egg and does the whole thing called conception. And one interesting thing we need to know is that ovulation itself only actually lasts for 12 to 24 hours. So really, the event of ovulation is such a short window. Most of you know, sex ed programs like I'm remembering when I was a teenager, I thought that you could just get pregnant at any time, I had no idea that ovulation was like a one to a two-day event. And that was it.
However, the caveat to that is that sperm can live up to six days inside of the body. So let's say for example, you had sex and sperm entered into the body, you know, six days before ovulation, and those sperm survived for six days, and then you ovulated then the presence of those sperm can still create the event of conception and you can fall pregnant. However, there really are only six days of the month that your body can get pregnant in a normal healthy menstrual cycle. So that's pretty cool. This is something that I'm so passionate about.
One day I'll create an entire program just on natural birth control and natural conception and understanding this more deeply as there are just so many misconceptions and confusion and even so much fear, like when I'm remembering back to my sex ed days, and, you know, back as a teenager, and yeah, there's just so much more to it than that. So keep your eyes peeled one day, I'm going to do it whole program on natural birth control and how to come off the pill, or how to, yeah, practice natural birth control in a different way. Okay, so during ovulation, there are a few key markers that you might notice.
There's gonna be a few days of your cycle where you may notice more presence of cervical fluid. And how do you know that I mean, one you can feel if you're in a session of just self-pleasure, you'll notice that there's more juiciness to your vulva area. And this is cervical mucus.
During ovulation, there's an increase of the cervical mucus which there's of course, a biological advantage in terms of helping the sperm to reach the egg in terms of the conception journey. However, you might also notice, even when you go to the bathroom and you go to wipe some days of your cycle, you might just notice, Whoa, it's really slippery down there.
And so this is that increase of cervical mucus. However, the only telltale sign that you have ovulated is actually an increase in basal body temperature.
Through the event of ovulation, your body temperature will typically increase by not very much about point three degrees Celsius when you ovulate. So you know that you've ovulated when you track your cycle, and you track your temperature each morning, this is a form of part of natural birth control or fertility awareness method that will increase to a slightly higher temperature and then remain at that increased temperature until you bleed. So that's really that other than lab testing or peeing on a stick and understanding luteinizing hormone that's a big part of our obvious Satori experience. That's really the only way that we can tell for sure if we're ovulating and therefore getting all the juicy benefits of ovulation and the hormonal advantages that get unlocked through that process for us.
4) Luteal Phase
Okay, finally, the fourth phase of our menstrual cycle is the luteal phase. So the luteal phase is our pre-menstrual phase and can last seven to 10 days after ovulation, our luteinizing hormone and estrogen levels drop, and that follicle that was growing and building and releasing the egg now turns into its own little organ, the fastest-producing your body creates it creates this corpus luteum. It's called corpus luteum which is its own organ that only lasts for a few days. And this corpus luteum this new organ that your body produced and will dissolve if you don't get pregnant, secretes this delicious hormone called progesterone. And oh my gosh, we love progesterone.
Progesterone is a wonderful thing. And when we have adequate levels of it, we feel really calm and our mood feels really stable. A lot of women that experience PMS-based symptoms and a lot of moods, you know irritation and feeling on edge and feeling really sensitive or weepy or crying before your period often have a deficiency in this progesterone and progesterone. The way I remember is our pregnancy hormone. So it is what gets secreted in order to create the pregnancy and to maintain pregnancy. So progesterone is the dominant hormone in this phase of our cycle and the luteal phase, which basically prepares our uterus for the possible presence of a fertilized egg to maintain pregnancy.
Estrogen will also make a second debut at this stage to help build up the uterine lining to make a nice cozy little home for a possible pregnancy. So how the menstrual cycle is often taught is predominantly around pregnancy. But there's so much more to these hormonal events and so many superpowers and hormonal advantages that are unlocked for us in each phase of the menstrual cycle. And this is something that I'm so passionate about empowering women with this knowledge to know how to unlock the superpower in the psychological and emotional and even spiritual advantages that we go through these different phases, which all start with understanding our bodies, and our FEMME flows, our feminine essence more deeply.
Our Hormonal Advantage - Our FEMME Flow
Let's get into now what are our hormonal advantages in each phase of the cycle. What are these hormonal superpowers? So in our menstrual phase, this is so cool. During our menstrual phase, during our period, the left and right hemispheres of our brain are most in sync, they're in best and easiest communication with each other, our left brain governing logic and facts and rational parts of our brain and the right side of our brain government governing how we feel about things our emotional, our artistic brain.
Our FEMME Flow - Menstrual Phase
The superpower of our menstrual phase on a cognitive or psychological level is that we tend to be most honest about how we really feel about something in our lives, we have this capacity to weigh the facts and logic of our left brain with the emotional, you know, abstract part of our brain, so that we can weigh our options and create the best course of action. So this becomes a time to like plant seeds of intention and to really be honest with ourselves about how we feel. It's also the time that in, you know, so many feminine wisdom lineages are saying that we are at our most intuitive, whether we call it that our left and right brains our most insane, or that we're just deeply in tune with ourselves with the world around us, we feel more sensitive, as well to the experiences of others, our empathy is really increased at that time, which can contribute to us feeling more sensitive.
But knowing the superpower in that, we can start to live in our FEMME Flow, and we can start to unlock the magic of that phase, by doing things like rest. By doing things that nourish us more deeply. This is an excellent time, because of this balance in the communication between the two hemispheres of our brain, this is a time for reflection for inwardness, for analysis for reflection on our life and our work. It's also a great time for self-care. This is the time that I personally use to recharge myself for the entire month. And yeah, to start my month with a really balanced, refreshed state.
Our FEMME Flow - Follicular Phase
What are the hormonal advantages of the follicular phase? So after our period moves towards ovulation, this is our follicular phase. So during this phase, the centers of our brain associated with you know our social centers of our brain and our verbal centers, our creativity, are most active at that time. Or they're increasingly towards ovulation. Ovulation is actually our peak of that. But during the follicular phase, we're biologically and physiologically more open to new things. This is a time for more novelty. You know, for new beginnings for fresh starts, this increase in estrogen enhances the release of our serotonin. So we generally feel a bit happier and more outgoing.
So how we can live in the FEMME Flow during this time is that this is a great time to embrace doing new things, starting new projects, and things with novelty, whether that's trying new things with friends, or doing something new in the bedroom or going to a new place a new restaurant. I know for me that when I'm in my menstrual phase, I like being familiar, and I don't want to do anything outside of my comfort zone. I don't really want to see anyone I'm feeling very inward, very sensitive, very tender. And I use that time to nourish myself from deep within.
As soon as my period is on and I move into follicular, I'm like, Yeah, I want to do new things. Yeah, I want to go here, I want to go there. And of course, my partner knows me so well. And he knows he's so familiar with the menstrual cycle, but we laugh together because truly from one week to the next. I'm a brand new person and if he invites me to do something in my menstrual phase, I'm closed and I'm like, No, I just want to be in my nest and like I want to just be home and resting and nourishing myself and more inward. And then the follicular phase. I'm like, Yeah, sure. Let's go paragliding. Yeah, let's travel. Let's go camping. Let's do all of the things. So this is the follicular phase. It's a great time to you know, do gatherings with friends and start to add more movement into your life as well as your energy levels increase. As your hormone levels start to increase. We start to build up our physical strength, and our energy levels, so think more activity or physical exercise is good at this time as well.
Our FEMME Flow - Ovulation
Okay, what is the hormonal advantage during ovulation is such a juicy time. And there's sometimes there's a lot of emphasis on ovulation being the best time. And I know for me, as I've learned this like cycle thinking and how to live in your femme flow and how to align your menstrual cycle to your daily activities to optimize the different areas of your life, I used to think like, I've got to do everything in ovulation. Because that's when my communication centers or of my brain are most active and my social centers for connection with one another, you know, I have this more outward focus your confidence, increase your confidence doubles, you know, from your ovulation story for phase, you know, from your menstrual phase where we feel very inward and maybe more sensitive, more tender, more skeptical or more, maybe even judgmental or critical of ourselves.
There's so much goodness and ovulation. And it's not to say that the other phases are bad or wrong. In fact, nature is so intelligent. And in a woman's body, we are designed to have half of our cycle, outwardly focused, focused on others focused on social, you know, community taking care of others, giving, serving, speaking, teaching, leading as women. And then the other half of our cycle is self-focused, to nourish, to rejuvenate, to rest, to be inward, to reflect, to plant seeds of intention, to be honest, and clear with ourselves to listen to our intuition. And how beautiful that nature designed us to be so balanced if only we would listen. Which all starts with empowering ourselves with this knowledge and knowing how to optimize the different areas of our life, to live in alignment with this femme flow.
So ovulation, superpowers communication, and the social centers of our brain are most active. Our creativity is at its peak, we feel magnetic, we feel sexy, we feel confident, we feel radiant, and you'll even notice there's like a glow to a woman during ovulation. And she feels good about herself. Our spatial awareness centers in our brain associated with movement and our spatial awareness is at its peak. So it's a great time to really embody our physical strength to have the hardest exercise the strongest movement practice, as well as it's the time of the month when physiologically our libido is highest.
Our sex drive is at its highest at this time, which is such an intelligent thing of nature in terms of procreation, that of course, our libido would be highest when we're primed to procreate. And yet we can channel that sexual energy that libido that sex drive into creation beyond just getting pregnant creation in our projects and our work and giving a presentation giving a talk, you know, going on dates, you know, exercising in a stronger way. There are so many benefits to living in the FEMME Flow during ovulation.
Our FEMME Flow - Luteal Phase
Okay, and then finally, the fourth phase of our cycle, what are the hormonal advantages of the luteal phase? So the luteal phase, our brain chemistry is optimized for tasks and detail-oriented things. So it's a great time for bringing projects to completion, for details, things that require the very left brain analytical, you know, detail-oriented things. So things like finishing projects or reviewing finances or, you know, reviewing spreadsheets or all these detail-oriented things.
The funny thing about the luteal phase as well, because of this rise in progesterone, which is the pregnancy preparation hormone, women tend to go into nesting, and you'd like, a pregnant woman before she has her baby. You know, she kind of goes into this nesting mode the last few weeks before she might deliver her baby where, you know, they might be creating the nursery or like creating, organizing things in the home and packing the bag and, you know, doing all of these different things. And we go through the same phase in our menstrual cycle in the luteal phase, where that progesterone that very motherly hormone inside of us, you know, brings us into nesting.
So we may feel more inward, we may desire more rest, right, we might find ourselves randomly, like organizing our closets or taking care of detail-oriented things that don't require a lot of physical effort or social effort or communicative effort. It's just data and organization and inwardness. So that nesting is a very sweet and very cute part of her menstrual cycle and very natural so it's very validating to know that if you are feeling a bit more inward during that luteal phase before your bleed use this time to your advantage, use it to recharge use it to go through the tasks in your life that require your attention and focus and that peace versus a lot of like physical strength or a lot of social or communicative needs.
How to live in YOUR FEMME Flow
These are the four phases of our menstrual cycle. These are how to live in our FEMME flow, understanding the superpowers and the hormonal advantages at each phase of our menstrual cycle. And this is so important, especially for women to understand their bodies more deeply to learn how to love their bodies and appreciate their menstrual cycle, and live in alignment with it to unlock their advantage as a woman in every area of their life.
So with that, I'm so excited to share with you and introduce you to a program that I have coming up called femme flow, which is a six-week menstrual and hormonal Wellness Portal for women ready to reconnect to their natural feminine essence, to understand your cycles and to flow in that femme flow so that you can really optimize your health and your hormones. Reduce period discomforts and feel more radiant in your body and more vibrant in your mind. So you can feel confident and your whole self feels magnetic and your work feels turned on and your intimacy and connected in your relationships. And we achieve all of that by understanding and unlocking the power behind our hormonal and menstrual cycle.