The ovarian hormones estrogen and progesterone are beneficial for health. That means a natural ovulatory menstrual cycle is 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 produce hormones as a surge of estradiol leading up to ovulation and a larger surge of progesterone after ovulation.
It’s an elegant system that sometimes results in a baby. Even if ovulation does not result in a baby, it’s still worth doing because regular ovulation delivers beneficial hormones that the body really expects to have.
Benefits of ovulation
Each monthly dose of estradiol promotes muscle gain, insulin sensitivity, and the long-term health of bones, brain, and cardiovascular system.
Each monthly dose of progesterone reduces inflammation, regulates immune function, and supports thyroid, brain, bone, and breast tissue.
The benefits of ovarian hormones are both short-term through female empowerment and long-term through erection metabolic reserve and health.
According to the Canadian endocrinology professor Jerilynn Prior, “Women benefit from 35 to 40 year ovulatory cycles, not only for fertility but also to prevent osteoporosis, stroke, dementia, heart disease, and breast cancer.” In that sense, each ovulation is like a monthly deposit in the bank account of long-term health.
For Professor Prior, ovulatory cycles are a “creator of good health.” They are also an “indicator of good health” because when we are healthy, ovulation comes smoothly and regularly. When we are unhealthy in some way, the lack of ovulation can tell the story.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) agrees. In December 2015, along with the American Academy of Pediatrics, they quietly released a groundbreaking statement called Menstruation in Women and Adolescents: Using the Menstrual Cycle as a Vital Sign. In it, they say doctors should always ask patients about menstruation and advise girls to chart their cycles. By doing so, they say, “doctors will show patients that menstruation is an important reflection of their overall health.”
Learning to observe, chart, and interpret an ovulatory cycle is called body literacya term coined by menstrual activist Laura Wershler.
I invite you to think of ovulation as an important health-giving event. I would go so far as to say that if you’re not thinking about ovulation, you’re not thinking about health.
Obstacles to ovulation
Hormonal birth control
Hormonal birth control stops ovulation, which is, of course, its purpose. It kills ovarian hormones and replaces them with contraceptive drugs such as ethinylestradiol and levonorgestrel that can cause hair loss and other side effects.
👉Tip: No progesterone in any type of birth control.
The physiological difference between our actual hormones and the contraceptive drugs of birth control affects every system in the body. Compared to women who cycle, women who take contraceptive drugs have the structure of the brain is changed and a greater risk of depression and autoimmune disease.
Undereating and undereating carbs
Loss of ovulation and menstruation due to lack of food is called hypothalamic amenorrhea. This is not a disorder, but rather a smart, adaptive decision by the brain to pause reproduction when there is not enough food to safely produce a baby. Read Is your diet enough to get your period?
Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS)
A hormonal state of excess androgens or testosterone can cause anovulatory cycles (cycles without ovulation) and is often associated with insulin resistance. Reversing insulin resistance with diet, exercise, and natural supplements such as inositol can help restore ovulation.
👉Tip: Before you start any kind of calorie-restricted or carb-restricted diet for PCOS, be aware that your diagnosis is not based solely on an ultrasound or an AMH blood test. Those tests are unreliable and may have resulted in you being told you have PCOS when you have hypothalamic amenorrhea. Read PCOS cannot be detected by ultrasound.
In conclusion, regular ovulation is important for women. And not just to make a baby.
Gloria Steinem said that if men could have periods, menstruation “would be an enviable, worthy, masculine event: Men would brag about how long and how many.” I’ll take it a step further and say that if men had to ovulate to produce testosterone, they wouldn’t stop talking about it.
