What is Body Literacy? What every woman needs to know about her female body.
Here's the hard truth:
Most women in are kept illiterate of their bodies.
Body Literacy is not commonly taught in schools. Often, these topics are not discussed in families, treated as taboo. And most women's health providers don't have the time to devote to helping a woman develop a deeper understanding of her body. What are the consequences? What's at stake when women do not understand their bodies?
Women who don't understand how their bodies work, are at a serious disadvantage - trying to resolve female health issues in the dark. Truly, Body Literacy is the essential foundation of informed consent. Ensuring women have it, is a matter of reproductive justice.
What is Body Literacy?
Literacy is the ability to read – to decode signs and symbols and understand their meaning, then Body Literacy is simply the ability to understand and interpret the signs and symbols our female bodies offer us every day – to understand what they mean.
These are the basic points we think every woman should know about her female body:
Four Phases of the Menstrual Cycle
Biomarkers and how to read them
How to track your cycle for health
Seeing Ovulation as the main event of the cycle and a 5th vital sign for women
How hormonal health affects overall health
How women can expect to feel during the different phases of their cycle
What’s common, but not normal in a menstrual cycle (and when to seek help)
Evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of symptom management with hormonal contraceptives vs. root-cause healing for period problems.
Why does this matter?
Because if you do not know how your body works in a state of health, you lack the foundational knowledge you need to make an informed choice about any healthcare decision you may face.
The truth is, most women do not know what they do not know about their female bodies. They are making decisions, blind at times to the consequences, and they are often not aware that this is the case.
At Luminous we believe in empowering your informed consent through Body Literacy
Using Cycle Charting to Become Body Literate and Resolve Reproductive Health Problems
- Periods are a part of a healthy cycle. The human race would not exist without them!
- They shouldn’t be “a curse.” Here are the parameters of a healthy period:
- 3 - 7 days
- Follows a “crescendo/decrescendo” pattern
- At least one day of heavy to moderate flow (confirms healthy endometrium)
- Expect to release 10 to 35 ml of blood (a pad holds about 5 ml of blood for reference)
- Periods should not hurt (pain greater than 2 out of 10 is sign body is asking for more support)
- Some women have problems with their cycle that are unrelated to their period
- Irregular/unpredictable periods
- No period at all (amenorrhea)
- Overall cycle length is consistently too short or too long
- Length of the luteal phase is too short
- White flow (cervical fluid) irregularities (not consistent, too short, too long, or not present at all)
- Your cycle chart is a powerful diagnostic tool, pointing a trained medical consultant toward identifying an underlying condition.
Using Cycle Charting to Resolve Fertility-Related Problems
It turns out that a cycle chart not only tells us loads about your overall health, but it also can assist women in identifying their window of fertility. It turns out that naturally-cycling women are only fertile 5 to 7 days out of any cycle. Our cycle chart can help us confidently identify when we may be fertile (and when we are not). With this knowledge, a couple simply modifies their behavior in order to achieve their family planning goals. At Luminous our methods of family planning:
- Are the only true methods of family planning
- Help couples avoid pregnancy (perfect use effectiveness rates comparable to the pll/IUD)
- Help couples achieve pregnancy when the time is right.
You Can Be Healed
If you suffer from painful periods, many women believe they have one of two options: They can manage on their own as best they can, or they can suppress their symptoms by using hormonal contraception.
For the same reason that contraceptives work to prevent pregnancy, they also can work to alleviate difficult period symptoms. Hormonal contraceptives thin the lining of the uterus. When this happens, when it is time to bleed, there is less to release. For women with heavy, painful bleeds, in the short run this improves their quality of life.
But what about the long term?
Many women are not aware that it is possible to discover what is causing their painful symptoms, and pursue treatment of the root cause. This third path seeks to restore natural function, optimize women's health, and protect future fertility. Let's talk more in-depth about these different paths.
Again, what about the long term?
Many women are told that hormonal contraceptives will "treat" their symptoms. But treatment implies that we're addressing the cause of the symptoms itself, and it’s important to note that it is not medically accurate. It is more accurate to say that hormonal contraceptives are a form of symptom management.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of choosing symptom management through hormonal contraception?
Advantages
First, hormonal contraceptives tend to provide relief, and rather quickly for many women. Especially for women with extreme symptoms, their quality of life improves dramatically and in short order. They can return to normal life. Aside from taking a pill every day, there's nothing else generally required from a behavioral health perspective. And HCs are easily accessible.
Disadvantages
Let's take a look at the disadvantages: First of all, because hormonal contraceptives do not treat the underlying condition, the symptom relief is only temporary. There is a significant secondary affect of ovarian suppression. But arguably the greatest disadvantage is the fact that a woman's time to treatment for her underlying condition is delayed.
Think about this analogy: imagine there is a fire in a room. The smoke detector goes off, and it is loud and annoying! Tired of listening to the racket, a well-meaning individual disables the fire alarm. While it’s certainly quieter in the room, the fire has not been addressed. It will continue to burn and cause damage in spite of that annoying alarm no longer sounding.
In this analogy, our symptoms are like the alarm. Our smart, intelligent bodies give us symptoms - like cramps or heavy bleeding, to alert us that something is wrong and we need more support. Using hormonal contraceptives to manage symptoms does effectively “turn off the alarm” of our symptoms, but it leaves the underlying disease process to continue to evolve and do damage. These underlying conditions remain untreated, and can affect our health span, our life span, and our future fertility if not addressed at their root.
So what are the advantages and disadvantages of root-cause treatment for period problems?
Advantages
The most obvious benefit is that we are healed! We've put our symptoms to rest for good. Our body is prepared and healthy and ready to conceive when the time is right, and most of all, we've really become the expert of our body through the process of cycle charting and choosing a restorative approach.
Disadvantages
First of all, the treatment plan for root-cause healing can take time to implement, sometimes more than a year. Often, there are significant behavioral health shifts involved the healing process. Depending on the cause of your symptoms, surgery may be indicated. Finally, there are simply not enough doctors trained in root-cause healing to go around, and the high demand for this approach to women's health can sometimes mean we're waiting awhile to be seen.
If you have period problems, it's important to take the full landscape into account as you decide what is right for you.