Eating is hard enough, why complicate it to match your cycle?
Photo credit to Dr. Mark Hyman
As women, we have a superpower that people born without uteruses do not get to experience.
We have a menstrual cycle that usually starts in our teenage years and goes until our 40s or 50s. Our menstrual cycle can be indicative of our health.
Most people view menstrual cycles as a pain in the butt (both literally and figuratively), annoying, a disruption in their month. What if we viewed it as a superpower? A way that helps us know how to treat our bodies that day/week? An indication of our health?
In order to view our menstrual cycle as a positive experience, we need to help our hormones be in their optimal function. There are several aspects of your life that can effect hormones. Food is a key player in hormone health. While, I am not one to tell people to cut out certain foods or change diets, I do believe seed cycling can help. I like seed cycling because it is adding something into your diet rather than eliminating something. Seed cycling can have a beneficial impact on your hormones.
To be clear, most people who recommend seed cycling say that you need to grind the seeds and they need to be fresh for you to get all the benefits.
What is seed cycling? (1)
Seed cycling is when 4 different seeds are consumed at specific times throughout the month to help promote the appropriate hormones. The 4 seeds are:
Flax
Pumpkin
Sunflower
Sesame
There are 2 main times of your cycle. The Follicular and Luteal phases.
Follicular phase
This phase starts on the first day of your cycle. If you do not have a cycle then it would be the first day of a new moon. The follicular phase goes until you ovulate or until the full moon (usually 10-16 days(2)).
During the follicular phase, estrogen is on the rise and is the main hormone that is important. Consuming flax and pumpkin seeds during this phase in your cycle helps build the estrogen that is needed to bring you into the Luteal phase (1).
Luteal phase
This phase begins when you ovulate or on the day of a full moon. The Luteal phase goes until you bleed or until the next new moon. (This is consistently 14 days(2)).
The hormone that is prominent in the blood during the luteal phase is progesterone. Eating sunflower and sesame seeds during this phase helps build up progesterone to bring you back to the follicular phase (1).
Conclusion
Adding in raw flax and pumpkin seeds can be beneficial during the first half of your cycle to help with estrogen production while adding raw sunflower and sesame seeds during the second half of your cycle can be beneficial to progesterone production.
