Overcoming Menorrhagia and Painful Periods With Fertility Awareness (Episode 527)

Full Transcript: Episode 527

Lisa: In today’s episode, I’m sharing my interview with Michelle. She is a member of our current FAM program, actually just about ready to graduate. So at the time of this recording, we have been together for nearly nine months, and Michelle shares some of her personal challenges that she was able to overcome, particularly with issues of heavy bleeding and pain.

Before we jump into today’s episode, let me tell you a little bit about Michelle. Michelle Agudelo worked in the tech industry at firms like Bazaarvoice, LinkedIn, and Shopify for nearly a decade. In 2019, she started cycle syncing and immediately reaped the benefits of working in alignment with her cycle. Her productivity and results increased and her stress went down. It made her wonder why no one had ever talked about working in sync with her cycle before. Today, she teaches companies the benefits of incorporating cycle syncing in the workplace, and she works one-on-one with women to equip them with the knowledge to confidently come off hormonal birth control, address underlying symptoms, and actually enjoy their periods. Having lived in London, Munich, San Francisco, and Sydney, she brings a global perspective and knows that all women everywhere deserve to learn this basic body literacy so they can thrive. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and jump into today’s episode.

Lisa: Well, I’m really excited to be here today with Michelle Agudelo. We just spent like two seconds practicing how to say your last name correctly, so I really hope I got it.

Michelle: That was perfect.

Lisa: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. So Michelle, obviously you’re a member of the FAM program, and at the time that we’re recording, we do have nearly nine months together. So you’ve really experienced what it’s like in the program, and we’re now towards the end where you’re knee-deep into your practicum clients and everything. So as we jump into today’s episode, I’d love to give you an opportunity to introduce yourself to the audience. I love to start with the question of how old were you when you had your first period, and just kind of lead us through what that was like and what your experience was with your own menstrual cycle, and what inspired you at this stage in your career to start diving into the world of fertility awareness.

Michelle: Oh my gosh, how long do we have? I know, right? I’m delighted to be here. I’m so, so happy to be on the podcast. I am 33 now, and I had my first menstrual cycle, my first menses, at 14. So I am new to working in the women’s health space, but I like to think I have nearly 20 years of experience with menstrual cycles and fertility and all of that.

To answer your question of what was my experience like — I was 14 years old in junior high. I came home from school, saw blood, and I didn’t know what to do, because I come from a family with three older sisters. So four girls, we have my mom, we have my dad. The only person in the house who was home was my dad, and I was not about to ask him, like, hey dad, what do I do? So I fumbled with a pad and carried on and got on with it.

It was so interesting to think about what I did then versus what I would do now — what I would encourage any girl to do now, which is speak up and say, hey, I need help, or I have questions. But understandably things were different then. Even today I don’t think my dad really knows what I’m working on, because we just never brought up our periods or talked about them in that house at all, even though there were five women in the house. We would sneak, like, Mom, I need tampons — or sneak them into the shopping cart. It was just never discussed. And with our friends, we would ask each other for a tampon in class or at work, but that was about the extent of talking about it.

So I started my period when I was 14, went on birth control when I was 15, and remained on it until I was 26. Never gave a thought to my periods, to my cycles, to anything at all really — not until the last few years.

My background is actually in tech. I worked in the technology sector for nearly 10 years. I lived abroad, I sold technology, it was so much fun. And then one time in 2019, I was working for a company and they had a women’s employee resource group that had a speaker come and present on hormones and the menstrual cycle. And I remember she said, you’re not supposed to have cramps — like, it’s not normal to have cramps. I thought, what? What are you talking about? And she had a little printout with some tidbits and tips of what we can do to better support ourselves. I’d never read anything like that before.

Kind of put it aside, and then that following weekend I was with some girlfriends walking around Sydney — I was living in Australia at the time — and we walked into a bookshop and I saw a book called Period Power by Maisie Hill. It felt like that moment where something erupted in me to want to learn more. I bought that book, and all three of the friends I was with bought it too. I absolutely devoured it. It was the first time I learned anything about how our cycle works — how when you’re ovulating you feel like Beyoncé, how when you’re menstruating your energy is low. It was telling me how I feel, but I had never realized or thought about how I actually feel in my cycle. I wasn’t tuned in at all.

As a result of reading that book, I learned about cycle syncing. That was my first foray before fertility awareness even came into the arena. I started cycle syncing my work schedule with my menstrual cycles. I literally went into my Outlook calendar and put: this week is winter, this week is spring, summer, fall. And during my winter season — whenever I’m menstruating — I was working in sales at the time, and I literally stopped booking cross-sector or client calls during my menstruation. I moved one-to-ones with my manager and was like, hey, do you mind if we move this to Friday? And I stopped doing all of this high-intensity, face-to-face work when I was menstruating.

I’m happy to say that since 2019, I haven’t booked a single sales call or client call during my menstrual cycle, except for the odd time here and there. And during my summer season — my ovulatory season — I was able to book five or six calls in a day and rock them all. As a result, I felt my productivity go up, my results go up, and my stress level went down. So I did what anybody would do — I told no one — because we don’t talk about our cycles at work. But my managers never noticed. They were like, as long as you hit your numbers. And thankfully COVID happened, so the whole way that we work has completely shifted. I kept doing that from one company into another role, and nobody ever noticed. Michelle shows up, she’s always prepared. And I’m like, yeah, because I am choosing when to highlight myself to you.

So fast forward — I was moving from Australia back to the United States, and stopped at a yoga retreat off the coast of Thailand. One of the evenings, there was a women’s wisdom moon circle happening. I thought, I’ll go to that — why not? This lady was facilitating, her name is Jamie Lauren, and there were maybe 30 of us in the room sat around in a circle. She started opening up with questions: raise your hand if you know how many days of your cycle you can become pregnant. Raise your hand if you know the difference between the male’s hormone cycle versus the female’s — 24 hours versus 28-ish days. She asked all of these really basic questions and we all got all the answers wrong. Something clicked in my mind. I was like, here we are — all of these women, well-traveled, great jobs, well-educated — and we don’t know the basics of how our body works. How many billions of women don’t know this? We shouldn’t have to go to an island off the coast of Thailand to learn how our fertility and menstrual cycles work.

So I moved back to the US. I’m in San Francisco, the mecca for tech. And I thought, no way, I don’t want to do that anymore. What could be more important than this? It’s a wide-open landscape — we don’t even talk about it in society, not nearly as much as we could or should. And so that is what got me here today.

Lisa: So the cycle syncing piece — it seems in retrospect pretty simple and straightforward: I just changed when I do my client-facing activities. You mentioned it really increased your productivity. Did you want to talk a little bit more about that?

Michelle: So I learned through cycle syncing — I started just with my work. The whole essence of cycle syncing is how you can change how you’re eating, how you’re exercising, your social calendar, what you do and don’t do with your partner. I’ve got to say, sharing where I am in my cycle with my husband has removed probably a good 95% of our disagreements. He’s like, is it winter? I’m like, yeah. He’s like, okay, let’s save this conversation for next week.

But during corporate life, I learned it’s not so much about time management but more about energy management. Knowing that different tasks are best suited for different times, when you have various fluctuating energy levels. Whenever I was menstruating, that’s the time for solo work — going back over accounts, doing inner planning, reading through annual reports. I’m in the mood to sit still and do that right now. Versus in my spring or summer phase, I don’t really want to sit still. I feel more creative, I want to put that pitch deck together, go do it. And then in my summer season, now’s the time to action everything I planned — I can wake up early, smash out a hit workout, have six calls, rock all of them, and go to a networking event in the evening.

Whereas if I tried to do all of that when I’m menstruating, I would feel stressed. I’d be canceling those networking plans. And I think the biggest thing is: you don’t have to cancel plans anymore, because you know exactly where you are in your cycle. You can commit to what and where and when.

And then the last piece is autumn or fall — I found in myself that’s when I’m most direct. That’s the time for negotiation because you’re very clear, you want to get things done before the next season begins. It’s such a cool way to think about work, because usually we’re told: show up 9 to 5, smile and dial, a certain amount of calls every single day. Instead it’s like — why do we look at this from a daily perspective? Why not a seasonal perspective?

Lisa: I love that so much. The best part is you made it your own. You applied it exactly to what was going on in your work. And the concept of the infradian versus the circadian rhythm — Alisa Vitti was the first to say that exact term on this podcast — we’re trying to be small men by doing things on a daily routine when we live on a monthly system. From that perspective, even though you’re rearranging when you’re doing things, you can actually do more and be more efficient. And you allowed yourself to rest. My hypothesis would be that it wasn’t that you ended up doing less work — you probably ended up doing more.

Michelle: Yes. And none of this has to be stressful. You’re allowed to rest. Productivity literally looks like taking a nap sometimes, because when you get that nap in, you can do way more than if you just forwent it and tried to work with low energy.

Lisa: So there was another piece of your story I wanted to dive into. You mentioned growing up in a house with five women, and yet when the time came you didn’t necessarily have a clear roadmap. And you mentioned that even though you were in a house with all these women, it wasn’t really talked about.

Michelle: Yeah, it’s so funny because in one aspect I’m like, why didn’t you tell me? But the other aspect is, I also — up until 18 months ago — was not walking around saying, guess what, periods rock, even though I was deep into my cycle syncing. I had no real understanding or awareness until I started tracking and charting my cycle from the start of 2023. So there’s no blame game. It’s more just a blatant in-your-face advertisement for the fact that periods are not to be discussed, they’re an unknown, because they’re never discussed. In my house it was more of just: you don’t talk about uncomfortable things, and periods fall into one of those brackets.

Even though there were decades of experience of periods within that house before me, we never brought them up. And I remember going to the doctor with my sister Heidi to get on birth control at the same time. I told my mom I was having heavy periods. She said, okay, you can come to the doctor when Heidi and I go. But looking back now — did I even have a heavy period? What was heavy? I was within my first year of menstruation. Nothing was normal or regulated yet. But none of us knew that. My mom didn’t know. My sisters didn’t know. I’m pretty sure the doctors still don’t know. And then I went on the pill, thinking I was still having a period — which I now know wasn’t a true bleed. I wasn’t actually cycling for nearly 11 years of my life.

Even to this day — I only found out four months ago that my oldest sister also had really heavy periods. And I have no idea what my other sister’s experience is like. We talk all the time, but I’ve never asked. It’s a big mirror to culture and society — we don’t talk about it within our families, our friends, our schools, our healthcare system. It’s just this last little void of the unknown.

Lisa: So let’s talk about heavy periods. You mentioned that even though we may not know the normal parameters, we know if it’s interfering with our daily lives. Maybe share what that experience was like and where you’re at now.

Michelle: When I very first started, I don’t remember how heavy they were at 14. Then obviously I went on the pill and everything was muted until I was about 26. I came off the pill and for the first three months or so, I don’t know if I even had a period. I don’t recall how quickly my cycles came back, how regular anything was. But I do recall — I came off the pill and for a few months afterwards I started losing hair in the shower. I remember calling my mom, freaking out. She said, maybe call a dermatologist. But now I know — oh, that’s probably a sign from coming off hormones for the past decade.

My periods did start to come somewhat regularly within a year or so, and then they started becoming very heavy — significantly heavy. I started using a cup, and I would have to change it probably every two hours throughout the day, and definitely overnight. So significantly heavy. But at the time, for the first year or so, I just thought: these are just heavy periods. I had no baseline for what constitutes severe bleeding versus just heavy bleeding.

Until COVID happened. And for me, that happened to be about cycles, because I thought: now I’m working from home, I can just wear my period underwear every day. I don’t have to worry about wearing something that looks nice at work. And then I realized how frequently I was starting to change — almost every hour to 90 minutes. If you just pause and think about that for a second — how many times you would even go to the bathroom just on a given day? Probably not every 90 minutes. But then to have to go every 90 minutes and change your tampon, empty your cup, get new period underwear — it’s a lot. Never mind the fact that you feel pretty exhausted. You’re losing a lot of blood, you’re pretty fatigued.

And then I had at that time recently started cycle syncing. So I was like, I don’t have to go work right now, I know my body needs rest. But it wasn’t like I could rest and then do much inner work. It was like I was literally in bed and it would knock me out for a couple of days.

And then a few months after that — it was a time in my life when I was also drinking quite a bit. Not just a glass of wine after dinner. This was coming out of COVID, where everybody’s tolerance was much higher. I would have on average like three glasses of wine a night. I’m five foot two, about 125 to 130 pounds. If I’m having three glasses of wine on average — but likely more, especially if I’m out with friends or on the weekend — obviously that impacts your body. But also: what impact does that have on your cycles? They were consistently heavy, consistently haywired. And I had all of the symptoms starting to come back — cramps again, being knocked out, not even wanting to talk to my husband when I was bleeding. And it went on like that for a good year or so. I thought, this is just it. These are heavy periods. That’s it.

The crazy thing is that this was towards the end of 2022 or so. And then in 2023, I started charting my cycle. I learned from a FAM practitioner how to chart, which was fabulous — I really knew when it was coming. But I wasn’t given any guidance on how to calculate how much blood I was losing, what normal blood loss looks like, and what I could actually do about it. Let’s look at your lifestyle, some of those foundational factors, and see what’s going on. And that was one of the reasons why I felt so called to come across the FAM program — because you were the only program I could find globally that actually teaches every single thing we need to know. Because it’s all good and well to teach people how to chart and track, but how many people have a perfect ideal cycle? And so I felt like it’s really important to have that comprehensive, holistic ability to work with somebody — to say, we can teach you, and now that you are charting, let’s look at what we can do to make everything optimal, so that you can actually enjoy your periods. Fancy that, right?

So we started the program late last year, and I remember in our very first few sessions I was telling you I was still having these really heavy periods. I hadn’t been drinking as much as I had in 2022, but I definitely still was. And we started uncovering — what’s normal, what’s not? And understandably, you were like, why don’t you get tested for fibroids? It could potentially be that, or Von Willebrand’s disease — for the excessive bleeding. I found so much solace there. Finally there’s an answer. Finally there’s something I can go get tested for. Finally, somebody else is seeing that this amount of bleeding isn’t normal.

So I went to go get tested, had the trans-vaginal ultrasound — the magic wand, as you call it — done. And of course the results came back, and they were like, everything’s fine. If you want, you can go back on the pill. And I’m like, oh my God, have you heard nothing of what I’m doing?

And then I realized: oh gosh, I never told Lisa about all the drinking. There’s a bit of shame around it, you know? And I think that’s important for any client to hear — there’s no shame. We’re all humans. But your practitioners need to know the full story so they can best help you. I shared that with Lisa, and I had also been noting how much I was drinking on my chart. And I was like, gosh, maybe I actually should address these foundational factors. Alcohol is disruptive to your body in general, and to your cycle. Maybe it gives you a hangover for a day, but it can cause insane heavy bleeding for multiple days for months on end.

So that was a huge focus for the last few months — just eating normally again, barely drinking anymore, sleeping phenomenally as a result. I’ve been ticking off all of the foundational factors just to look after myself and get my body back to good. And as a result, I feel really fabulous. My periods just show up now. I’ll have like one day of heavy bleeding. I don’t really have to take any painkiller anymore. It’s been a lot of work over the last six months or so to get to this level. But we were never told what constitutes heavy bleeding, what is normal, how all these external factors can impact how we’re going to experience our cycles. And it truly is, for the vast majority of people, these simple basic changes that can make a huge significant difference.

Lisa: Thanks for sharing all of that. These are all interesting things, because what I always say is I don’t want to jump into someone’s life and be like, give up everything you love. What we talk about in the FAM program is connecting whatever is happening with the goals of our clients. And it kind of comes down to — when you’ve tried everything else, and there’s just that one thing — it just so happens that what’s defined in the literature as binge drinking is even like two to three alcoholic drinks a day. Not what we would think of as binge drinking. And there was an interesting stat in The Fifth Vital Sign — that when you drink alcohol, it can raise your estrogen levels by like 50% on the day you drink. So if you have excessive bleeding that can be associated with estrogen dominance — because what builds that uterine lining is estrogen relative to progesterone. Any substance that raises your estrogen by that much, we have to look at when we’re looking at something like heavy bleeding.

There is also a difference between learning to teach your clients to chart versus what we do in FAMM, which is really diving into supporting women with their hormonal health. We’ve had a number of practitioners from different programs jump into FAMM even though they have fertility awareness training in other areas, because often those training programs are not going into the weeds. Most of your clients don’t have textbook cycles — that’s typically why they’re coming to you for support.

Michelle: That’s so true. And I remember our very first call, before the program started, I was also doing my FAM certification — so you were like, okay, she knows the mechanics. Because I wanted to not only be certified to teach, but I knew that certification alone was not going to give me everything I needed to actually serve clients well. If I want to show up for clients and serve them to the best of my ability, without doing a two-year training program or just learning as I go — if I want what I would consider the elite training for a practitioner in the fertility awareness space, and in the general hormonal and menstrual health space, it is the FAM practitioner program. I can’t recommend it enough.

The practicum component — having to work with practice clients through completely different experiences, completely different lifestyles — and teaching the same material but then also working with them through whatever cycle questions or issues they’re currently having — I think FAM is a fabulous foundation, and I know the resources provided are things I’ll be using for years to come.

Lisa: Michelle, thank you so much. That is just such a wonderful, glowing — I’m very humbled. We are absolutely obsessed. We’re always in the background creating new resources and handouts. And it really comes from this place of wanting women to have better healthcare. That’s what it’s all about.

So as we wrap up today, Michelle, I would love for you to share where people can find you.

Michelle: I have my business — it’s called Haus of Flow, H-A-U-S, a little homage to my German background. Haus of Flow. Really focused on finishing up working with my practice clients, and pretty soon I’ll be working with real clients to do everything that we’ve talked about on this podcast — educate you about your cycle, help you to chart and track, give you the confidence to come off hormonal birth control, and actually address any underlying issues. If the pill works for you, fabulous. But if you want an alternative option, there are ways. And I’m so keen to teach and help as many people as possible.

If you’re wondering how you can start cycle syncing, I’m happy to teach. And for organizations, I’m really keen to start working with companies so that their employees can have this knowledge — because that’s all it is. It’s just sharing knowledge of how to be more productive, work with your body in a natural way, that’s free to implement. And you can find me on LinkedIn — I’m Michelle Agudelo. And on Instagram at house_of_flow. I’m so happy to connect with anybody who wants to learn more.

Lisa: Amazing. Thank you so much. This has been really great. And for anyone who’s on the go, we’ll make sure to share all of the links in the show notes page.

Michelle: Amazing. Thank you, Lisa.

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/527.