Training With Your Menstrual Cycle (Episode 447)

Full Transcript: Episode 447

Lisa: This is the Fertility Friday Podcast, episode number 447.

Welcome to the Fertility Friday Podcast, your source for information about the Fertility Awareness Method and All Things Fertility. I’m your host, Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. I’m the author of The Fifth Vital Sign and the Fertility Awareness Mastery Training Workbook. I’m a certified fertility awareness educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner with over 20 years of experience teaching women to connect to their fifth vital sign through menstrual cycle charting, balancing hormone health and optimizing the menstrual cycle without hormones. I have been consistently outspoken about hormonal birth control over the past two decades and its impact on fertility and overall health because you have the right to know how your body works and how artificial hormones disrupt that natural process. I teach women’s health professionals how to utilize the menstrual cycle.

I’m really excited to introduce you to Whitney, who has been an incredible addition to myself and the other members of the FAM practitioner program this year. After surviving quite a traumatic birth experience, Whitney continued to remain committed to the FAM program and has just been such a beacon of light for everybody in the group.

Before we jump into today’s episode, I’ll just share a little bit more about Whitney. Whitney Tucker is a diversely educated movement trainer and practitioner that utilizes yoga, Pilates, and various modalities of athletic training to support people in their physical journeys. She’s founder of Embodied Potential and creator of Sync to Thrive, which supports hormonal literacy for women. As an educator, she draws from experience as a professional dancer, certified life coach, public school teacher, and birth worker. Throughout her education, she has performed multiple cadaver dissections with Gil Hedley, publishing of articles in peer journals on training techniques and movement as a healing modality, and presented at Congress on Research in Dance on her movement work with prostituted women. As a volunteer, Ms. Tucker has focused on reproductive justice with the Doula Project, services for homeless women and children through Hearts of Gold. She lives in Mexico with her husband, has two dogs, and is the mother of her first amazing baby, Onyx. Without further ado, let’s go ahead and jump into today’s episode.

I’m really excited to be here today with Whitney. Whitney is a member of FAMM class of 2022. At the time of this recording we’ve been together for about nine months, but in the middle of class Whitney had a baby. I feel like that’s also a question I get a lot with the practitioners of the program — like, what do I do if I’m pregnant or I’m thinking about having a baby? But I’m really excited to be here with you, Whitney. Thanks for coming on the show.

Whitney: Oh, thank you so much, Lisa, for having me. Excited to be here as well.

Lisa: I’d love to give the audience an opportunity to get to know you a little bit. I’ll let you dive in, maybe let us know wherever part of your story you want to jump into. But the question I usually ask to lead it is, how old were you when you had your first period? What was that like? What were your cycles like? Did you use contraceptives? When did you decide to jump into fertility awareness? And at what point did you feel that it would be a good addition to your practice?

Whitney: I first got my period when I was — it was the first week of freshman year of high school. I’ll never forget that. I’m somebody who I realized now was pretty fortunate. I wasn’t ever really inconvenienced by my period. I was an athlete and I say that because it didn’t disrupt my athletic journey, like a lot of people that I now know. It was regular cycles, regular amount of days within the cycle, and what I’m realizing now was a pretty regulated hormonal pattern. I tried birth control when I was 14 and 15 and did not like them at all.

I was on the birth control pill and I didn’t like how it made me feel, so intuitively I just decided to get off of it. I later experienced the IUD, the Mirena hormonal IUD, and started to have really dysregulated periods. That was around the time — I took the Mirena out — and I say this because I’m now 40 years old and when I was around 28 is when I was experiencing all of that, and I had an unwanted pregnancy.

My cycle was pretty normal until I terminated the pregnancy and had essentially a septic infection. The abortion that I chose was a medicated abortion, so I didn’t have a surgical at that point. But after we did the medicated abortion, I realized that I had retained tissue, so I was in that small percentage of people that needs to go in and get basically a D&C as well. That was really traumatic. I was trying to avoid that off the bat by doing the medicated abortion.

After that, I started to have really dysregulated cycles and a bunch of other symptoms. The infection that I had, which was septic, landed me in the hospital. I was in the hospital for three days on IVs, and it was pretty sick. It’s hard to say what caused all of the symptoms, but I would say in combination to all of that — because then I got an IUD after that as part of that program in New York City, where I was living. You would go and get the termination and they would push really hard for you to get an IUD so as to not get pregnant again. While they were doing the abortion procedure, they were already within a surgical setting, so they could place the IUD pretty easily, and it seemed all really good to me.

After that, however, I started to experience hair loss where I wanted hair, hair gain where I did not want hair, and a lot of signs of androgenic hormones — weight gain, weight loss. My cycle, which had all of a sudden gone from being a 28-29 day cycle my whole life, would just not show up, or there would be a lot of blood all at once for three weeks.

After that — this is in 2015 — I got really interested in hormonal healing. No one had ever talked to me about that, but an acupuncturist said, “You might want to start with your gut. That’s sort of what’s dysregulated right now.” I started to look into that and it catapulted me into whatever “healing my hormones” would look like.

Knowing now what I know, I had been an excessive exerciser. I was a professional dancer. I was in fitness. I was doing intermittent fasting, not even calling it that, but I was like, “Oh sweet, I don’t have to eat breakfast. This fits in with my lifestyle.” I started to eat breakfast. I started to sleep more. I started to not exercise as heavily. I started to do a lot less steady state cardio. I found out who Dr. Stacy Sims was and did her program.

There was a lot of interest that I had. Then I started to work with my clients on hormonal healing, and that sort of started my work with women and hormones. Then I discovered Lisa down that rabbit hole and was like, “Wow, this woman is a complete wealth of information.” Instead of just saying, “Okay, eat breakfast, don’t do intermittent fasting,” there’s actual testing that can be done, there’s actual protocols to follow, there’s research that people are doing in a pretty under-researched field. Lisa became a really important resource for me.

When I found out that there was a mentorship and there was further training that I could get that could help my clients, I jumped on it. I remember I got on the call and I was like, “I’m pregnant and I’d like to do this program.” I have a lot to say about how amazing the program is — even within the most crazy, hectic year of my life, I was able to still be involved. I’m still working on things, but I appreciate the flexibility of that.

Lisa: Thank you for taking us through all of that. I won’t dive into the IUD stories — I always kind of do just to find that detail — but maybe just for consistency’s sake, you can let us know if the insertion or retrieval was an issue for you.

I know when you had shared in class about your termination and what happened and the retained tissue — although rare, it does happen. I feel like that’s one of the things where having some cycle awareness and knowledge is helpful, because I think not just because of the actual data you can get from it, but it trains you to trust your body and to know what’s normal for you so that if your experience is something that’s outside of that normal, even if a doctor says that’s fine, you kind of learn to trust your body more than what someone else says about it.

I know that was a traumatic experience for you. And then knowing what you know, I think you kind of went through it a little bit, because you mentioned that your cycles had been normal and then at this point they weren’t normal anymore. But then you talked a little bit about how that was related to your exercise routines and all that. I guess I’m kind of just thinking about all of the different pieces of your story, because there’s a lot there.

Whitney: Yes. Well, I would say coming from the fitness industry, which I’ve been in for about 15 years now — there’s been a lot of trends in the fitness industry. It’s been very recent that I feel like women have even started to consider their cycle and the whole infradian rhythm versus training with men, like the male physiological model.

For me, that was really profound because in that world, it’s all results driven. The idea that you could get similar or better results and respect that rhythm — for many people, and for me — was mind-blowing. I had never heard that. I was training with male powerlifters, coached by men. Even when I was around other women and female physical trainers and coaches, nobody was talking about that.

If you look at what women can do and what we’re capable of — just even taking childbirth and pregnancy off of the table — just physiologically on a monthly basis, and that ovulation itself is a sign of health, we’re amazing. And fitness is not framed that way. It’s often like, “All right, you are 60% of this man’s body weight, which means you should be able to…” But pound for pound, we’re actually superior in certain ways, especially during certain times of our cycle.

That was all really attractive. When I was really sick and brought to my knees by hormonal dysregulation, I was like, “Wow, the solutions are really unsexy. This is not about some intricate intermittent fasting pattern.”

My friend, Kimberly Johnson, who is a trauma specialist — we were actually doing ice bathing together, and I was explaining that I want to have a baby but I’m really concerned. I’m in my mid-30s and I’m concerned. She said something that was just profound. She was like, “Act like you’re already pregnant. Basically get more sleep, eat as if you’re trying to build a body inside of yours, reduce environmental toxins.” But those two things — it’s like sleep, stress, and sugar. I was like, “Oh wow, it’s way less complicated.”

I think when people realize they want something — that was my whole drive to get healthy. I wanted to have a baby. Luckily, the practice of getting healthy enough to have a baby aligned with a lot of other things that I was learning at the same time. I was like, “Well, even if I don’t get pregnant or I’m not blessed by that situation, I’ll still be on the path to wellness.”

Actually, it’s annoying to me that so much of the conversation around cycle tracking, cycle syncing, and cycle awareness is framed within a reproductive framework, because I think it alienates a lot of people who are otherwise interested just in health and well-being. They’re turned off by, “I don’t want to have a baby, I don’t want to think about having one.” And I’m like, “Well, at some point you might want to.” It does get to a point where it’s harder.

When I was in my mid-30s, I was like, “Okay, I need to pull all the stops out here.” Not make myself crazy by improving egg quality and this and that, but I’ve got to put in some effort because I had been treating my body basically like a male athlete for 20 years. My period was getting really light — two days at most, two and a half days, really light, like pink blood, spotting in between cycles. I was like, “Something’s shifting. I need to actually handle sleep, stress, and blood sugar.”

Lisa: I think something you said about people who are not necessarily trying to conceive — there’s a reason that I’m always on about this whole fifth vital sign thing. It’s because yeah, you might not want to have a baby, but you probably don’t want to have early onset osteoporosis, and you probably don’t want to have total hormonal imbalance. You probably don’t want to have out of control PMS. Even if you don’t want to have a baby, if we can get in our heads that the menstrual cycle is a reflection of health, it means that if we focus on balancing all of those things, we can feel better.

Ironically, when you are really healthy and you have a really great cycle and you’re really fertile with really great cervical fluid, it’s actually easier to chart your cycles. I’m always good to say that you can effectively chart and track regardless if your cycles are regular. But for what it’s worth, it does make it more straightforward in certain ways.

Something that I thought I might give you an opportunity to touch on — because you had mentioned the infradian rhythm concept with regards to exercise and fitness. Maybe just deepen into that a little bit. I know that I had a really fantastic conversation with Elisa Beatty and she was on the podcast and talked about it. Essentially, an infradian rhythm is just a rhythm that is not 24 hours — it’s a rhythm that is happening monthly. I find it so fascinating how in some ways it’s hard for many women to shift to that mindset that it’s okay to take days off and it doesn’t have to be like every week we have to get in this many workouts. Maybe share a little bit about what you’ve learned and how you work with clients with respect to that.

Whitney: Sure. That’s actually the first way that I worked with clients in terms of hormonal tracking, because I already had a lot of fitness clients. My background is in fitness. I had a lot of male and female clients, and they were wondering — and I was wondering — “Wow, sometimes I’m able to almost blow my records out of the water, and other days it’s like I don’t recognize myself.” It can be really psychologically challenging.

There is something about paying attention to the infradian rhythm. It’s sort of like, instead of paying attention to an external schedule, you’re paying attention to your internal state. But it’s not just intuition. It’s not just your feelings — it’s actually what’s physically going on.

Stacy Sims, who I would say has done the most research in this that I know of, because a lot of female research isn’t done because it’s “too complicated” — like the controls and variables can’t be isolated as easily. But we’re over half the population, so we need to adjust to something.

For me, the idea that you’re going to pay attention to a rhythm that is changing on a monthly basis and not go in a linear fashion and not have something constantly climb upward was intriguing. First of all, that’s more interesting. Second of all, it explains what I’m actually feeling. My results are not going against what I’m actually feeling. It is a psychological change.

Similarly to what I’m experiencing right now through breastfeeding, I do not have the hormonal makeup right now to build a lot of lean muscle mass. I just don’t. Most of the calories I’m consuming are going out in breast milk. The rest is probably in my basal metabolic system. My brain is literally undergoing a remodeling process — that’s happening neurobiologically. To ask myself to gain lean muscle mass is really unfair to what else is happening. I could probably force it to happen, and like a lot of women experience, then my milk supply would go down. There are lots of other impacts that I don’t want at this point in my life.

This is an acute example, but even prior to being a mom and breastfeeding, when I started to train in this infradian rhythm and realize — okay, in the luteal phase, a few days before my period, why do I feel like I need to do two or three workouts? I have so much energy. Then when I realized that’s explained by a burst of testosterone at that point, it’s all explained hormonally. I got very curious: what is my body supposed to be doing when it feels like it doesn’t want to work out? I started to play with that and would see much better results. Results for me at that point were, “I want to spend less time in the gym but I still want lean muscle mass.”

When I was coaching clients in this way, I would say, the hard part about the infradian rhythm and using this for exercise is you have to know where you are in your cycle. That’s number one. It’s hard to talk about or track anything or gauge behavior if you don’t even know how long your luteal phase is or when you’re in it. It requires some work on the client’s part to be curious enough and interested enough to really look at the data. Not just think, “Okay, this is when I’m ovulating, that’s ideal for this kind of activity.” It’s like, first off, check if you are. Then if you are, how do you actually feel? What do you feel like doing?

In the framework of exercise, so many people want results — even if it’s just peace of mind, even if it’s just, “I feel calmer if I exercise.” Then you’ll have people that are like, “I have to exercise or I don’t feel calm.” Those are some of the hardest, right? Where it’s like, “I have to do my spin class or get on the Peloton bike or I don’t feel right mentally.” Having a conversation with that person and explaining — let’s find something that’s comparable where you still get that result, but here’s maybe why you don’t want to do steady state cardio for an hour at this point in your cycle.

For me it was the best of all worlds. I had to adjust a lot of behaviors, like eating breakfast every day as a non-negotiable. Then when I heard that not being hungry for breakfast is a sign of hormonal dysregulation, that was another wake-up call.

To answer that question about the infradian rhythm — Alisa Vitti, I think she was the first person who I heard say that phrase. What I love about hormonal work is anything is a niche. There’s a ton of information about people that have been on birth control and have dysregulated cycles, and there’s the science and research backing how to get that person back. There are people specializing in pregnancy loss and all that involves. In my case, there are people — and this is a super under-researched area — studying postpartum depression and anxiety. A lot of physicians don’t want to touch it because it’s really complicated and it isn’t like any other kind of depression. You have a very dynamic hormonal makeup depending on if you’re breastfeeding or not, depending on how old the baby is, all the things.

Lisa: It does. I feel like you gave us a good intro overview picture of how the dynamics of your cycle — where you are hormonally — can affect not only how you feel and your desire to exercise, but also your results. That’s really interesting. For a lot of women, what charting offers them is an opportunity to see that there’s a pattern here, that it’s not just that you’re crazy. Also, I think what I often focus on is that permission to not exercise or to not do a routine every week.

I feel like that’s what comes out of it a lot for me because obviously I’m not a fitness guru person. I’m the permission giver. I see women who are maybe doing a 40-day challenge and doing all of this work on their period, and yeah, you can do that, but you can also not. You can test these things out and see how you feel.

In terms of what you shared, you also pulled it back a little bit more, even to say when would be the optimal time for you to work towards particular goals — like you were mentioning lean muscle mass and how some of that may not be compatible when you’re breastfeeding postpartum. But it doesn’t mean you don’t do anything. It means you can do what would be best for your body, your hormones, your health, your emotional health during those times. I think that’s ultimately what it’s about in terms of shifting from that 24-hour, male-dominated, constant achievement type exercise strategy.

Whitney: It’s incredible to me that we can mentally override through our will what is actually innately good for us based on our aims. I feel like that is the male-dominated success model. It’s like, “If you’re tired today, it doesn’t matter, hit that floor.” There are positives to that mentality to some degree — obviously there are positives to not being lazy and to doing it anyways.

But when you introduce the cycle into that conversation, we get a reality check. There’s a certain benefit to pushing yourself, obviously, in a variety of situations. But when you have the seven-day bleed, four days of spotting, whatever you’re dealing with, your body is showing you that yes, you’re capable of pushing yourself, but why? You don’t want to push yourself off a cliff. Let’s balance this out.

Lisa: That leads really well into just the question about — I suppose there’s two parts. The one part is, in general, how has or how do you anticipate all the things we focused on in the FAMM program and using the menstrual cycle as a fifth vital sign — how has that affected your practice? The second part of that question is, I know that we had mentioned you had a baby in the middle of the program. When that happened, especially in your situation, you did have to take a step back for a period of time. It’s a bit more of a modified schedule, but maybe just speak to that — either how it’s already started to help or how you’re anticipating it will, and maybe touch on how it all went down.

Whitney: Well, something keeps coming into my mind these days as a mom. I have this saying that’s running through my head: “How do you know that you’re important to a mom? She’s spending any time at all with you.”

What I would say is becoming a mom sort of put everything into perspective. Especially birth — there’s no way it’s not going to change a mom. Ours was a pretty traumatic entrance, and it’s not what I expected at all. I needed to take more than twice the amount of time off that I thought I needed, to gather resources that I had no idea where to gather them from.

I should say that I’m a birth worker. Birth was not new to me — I’ve been a doula for about 15 years. But our birth and the NICU and emergency C-section and navigating some of that stuff was brand new to me. When that happened, a lot of parts of me felt like I was failing. There was just a lot of failure as a theme that I navigated through.

Part of me had really wanted to do the FAMM program because it fits so well into who I want to serve. I used fertility awareness to get pregnant and have a healthy pregnancy at 40 years old. I used it to regulate my cycle after, as I mentioned, a septic abortion. There was a lot of it around, and I had a lot of clients that were coming to me — they either wanted to get pregnant, didn’t want to get pregnant, or wanted to use their cycle as a fifth vital sign. I was like, “Well, this fits into this perfectly.”

But when I became a mother and I had to really decide, “These are the things that are important to me,” the program still fit into that, but I was so far behind. I had missed many weeks of the program. I’m a perfectionist, I’m type A. One of my least favorite qualities about myself is that I don’t take risks — if I don’t think I’m going to succeed at something, I don’t do it. Part of me would not have signed up for the program had I known I was going to have such a hard time.

When I spoke with you, Lisa, about that, you said something that was so important to hear. You were like, “Just come.” I think you could tell I really wanted to be here. I wanted to learn. Being in the program and hearing where everybody was coming from — sometimes it felt like the only thing we had in common was that we were all… because some people weren’t having a cycle, some people weren’t doing this with clients, some people weren’t moms, some people were moms. There were a lot of different perspectives coming in and I was like, “This is a big hoop to jump through, but I belong here. It’s fine.”

What I hope to do for people now, as I go through my postpartum — I do not want to get pregnant, but I do not want to be on hormonal birth control ever again. I don’t have a very regulated cycle, but it’s starting to come back. I’m a person who really needs fertility awareness to meet the goals I have right now, which is to grow my baby, keep her healthy, not get pregnant, and get back to myself to a certain degree.

I suffer badly from postpartum depression. Part of that is chemical. I can get really stuck in the story of how I’m failing, how it’s not working, how I already failed at being a mom because of A, B, and C. But when we go back to this data — I remember when I first got my period back, which was month three, the baby was just three months. Looking at fertility awareness, a lot has to be going right for me to ovulate and get my period back.

That’s a very different story than, “Oh my god, now I can get pregnant again and I have a three-month-old, this is terrible.” It’s like, let’s frame it back into reality, get back into tracking, which is beautiful. Every day you check in with yourself and you might have feelings about it, you might not. It may say to you that you are or are not on track with your goals.

For me, it was really something very much like breastfeeding. It was like, I could have had a really horrendous birth, all these things. If I’m healthy enough to be producing milk, maybe something is going right. My body is doing its job. There’s some grace in that.

That’s what I would say about the program. It is a big hoop to jump through — it invites in a lot of different kinds of people and backgrounds — but it does take a lot of work. I’m still catching up.

Lisa: In your case — this is a question I get a lot. I think in every class, there have been women who are pregnant, including me. I was also pregnant.

Whitney: Yes!

Lisa: In every class I’ve done, women have either conceived in the program when they’re trying to, and also come into the program pregnant and have a baby mid-year. It can go different ways. I’ve had a lot of women in the program who have a baby and are still able to come to certain meetings. Obviously they can watch the recordings in their own time. I had one of my ladies last year have a baby in the middle and she submitted all her assignments on time. It can go either way.

What I, as a woman and a mother myself, supported me to create was flexibility in the program so that we can support you. Whitney, with the challenges that you had with your birth — you mentioned it was traumatic, and that’s a story that we won’t be going into today. But suffice it to say, there are aspects of the program to support you to complete when you’re ready to do so, and we’ve talked about a lot of those options.

I really appreciate you sharing that. You said some really nice things, which is really sweet. In terms of bringing the program into your work, I’m excited to see what you’re able to do with it, given the background that you have already, the depth of knowledge that you have, and your personal experience of utilizing your cycle to support you through a lot of different things.

Whitney: Me too. I’m excited to see what it presents. I will say, it’s interesting presenting people with the option of fertility awareness as a tool. I think people are attracted to the information they might gain, but we’re also in a world where people want a quick fix. They want a quick answer. They want to be able to pay for something formulaic, and it’s not like that. It’s a mentorship and a guiding.

That’s been an education for me — how to actually talk about it with people. It’s like, “Yeah, I can give you the tools, I can give you the information, I can give you the support and accountability, but at the end of the day, you’re the person who has to get up, take your temperature. No one else should be checking in for your cervical mucus tracking. That is you.”

I’m realizing now it is shifting that, because a lot of who I attracted before were people who were like, “Oh yeah, if I can do something quick and do my cycle syncing.” And I’m like, “Well, to do cycle syncing, you’ve got to cycle track.” And they’re like, “But how do you do that?” And I’m like, “Well, temperature is one way, but really cervical mucus is sort of like…” We’ve got to get in there. For people, that leap — “Oh wait, I have to do this? How? It’s so complicated.” It brings me back to: anything that you want, anything that’s worthwhile, it takes effort.

Everybody wants the result. Lots of people look at my life and they’re like, “Oh, I’d like to live in Mexico. That’s a paradise.” And I’m like, “Well, prepare yourself — a third of the time we don’t have power, a fourth of the time we don’t have internet.” There are a lot of things you can’t do here. I’m shifting in my work to align with people that are willing to go that extra bit to get much better information.

Maybe your insurance company and your doctor don’t supply that testing easily. Here’s three ways around that. But it takes that person to be like, “Okay, what is a DUTCH test? Where do I get that? Okay, let me go to EverlyWell. What is that?” Fortune does favor the bold and the perseverant.

I’m in the middle of trying to figure out what cycle tracking looks like now. There are days where it’s really frustrating because I am not getting more than six hours of sleep. But like we talked about earlier, that’s a choice that I made. It’s a priority of mine that she be breastfeeding. I’m not saying anything about people that don’t — there are lots of reasons that breastfeeding is not appropriate for certain moms. But for me, it was very important, at least for these first six months. As we talked about earlier, it’s a phase.

It’s trying to stay light enough about it. And you’re also so good at that because sometimes you’re talking to people who aren’t getting the thing that they want most in the world, or they had really bad luck with something like we did with our birth. I’m grateful for the simplicity and straightforwardness of the program. As complicated as it can be to get the data, the format is there, the answers are there.

Lisa: It really has been such a pleasure this year to get to know you. A word that comes to mind when I think of you is tenacity. When life throws stuff at you, you just jump on and find your way through it, and that has been quite clear throughout the program. It’s been certainly a lot, an interesting year, but I really do look forward to seeing how you incorporate all of these tenets into your work.

With that in mind, I’d love to give you an opportunity to share a little bit about your work and what you do. Feel free to share your website, a brief description of your work, all the socials, all the places, and we’ll make sure to put those all in the show notes.

Whitney: Sure. Where I am most active, I would say, is at Whitney Tucker on Instagram. Also, my website is embodiedpotential.com. I have a program this fall that’s a 12-week program for postpartum. It’s actually talking about some of the underserved parts of postpartum, I would say, in regards to new disorders. I’m working with specialists that were very hard to find — doctors, specialists, psychologists — to kind of support that population.

I still teach because I deeply believe in it — HIIT and breathwork, high-intensity interval training and breathwork, twice weekly. My friend Kelly Kane, I’ll just mention her — she’s a mentor of mine. She has a menopause transition program for women that are transitioning into menopause and some of the work around that.

Lisa: I’ll be sure to link all of those places in the show notes page, so for anyone who’s on the go, you can go ahead and find those links even just in your podcast player. Whitney, I just want to thank you so much for being here today, and I’m really excited to share this episode with all of you.

Whitney: Thank you. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Lisa, for all your work.

Lisa: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it with a friend. You’ll find the show notes page for today’s episode over at fertilityfriday.com/447.

I hope that you enjoyed today’s episode with Whitney. I feel like our conversation is such a testament to the incredible role that fertility awareness and charting your cycles and being attuned to what’s happening in your body can play in your general health and your life and also in your healing process — to help you stay grounded and to appreciate your body for everything that it does.

I really love the way that Whitney, who would have potentially initially looked at her rapid return to cycling as a negative thing — how charting her cycle and being in tune with her body helped her to reframe that and look at it as a positive sign that her body is healing, healthy, and strong, especially in the midst of some of the challenges that she has faced in the past.

There are so many important takeaways from today’s episode and I just really appreciate Whitney for coming on the show and sharing her experience and just being so candid with everything that she has been through. As always, until next time, be well and happy charting!