Lean In to Your Hormones

Our own biology has its own code, rules and regulations. From our lives to work and home and everywhere in between, our bodies lead us to making choices. The challenge before us now is to learn how to work with what our bodies have to say.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

Listen up, women: If you've ever felt like there's a widening gap between the increasing success of your professional life and the decline of your physical body, you are not alone. In fact, more than 40 million women struggle with hormonal issues and infertility in the U.S. based on my own research, which to me seems like a red flag that something is off. In my roles as a woman's functional nutritionist, business owner, and manager of my personal health for decades, it's been my life's work to help women's bodies catch up with our rising success. Not only that, but to use the very nature of our bodies to help us get there even more powerfully. I explore this and more in my book, WomanCode: Perfect your Cycle, Amplify Your Fertility, Supercharge your Sex Drive, and Become a Powersource.

There are epigenetic structures that control disease expression and have been shown to be exclusively affected by a combination of diet and lifestyle. In order to be healthy vibrant women, first we must look at our declining food quality as the one of the reasons we women are experiencing health issues at increasing rates. We then also have to look at the way we expect our bodies to perform exactly the same way, day after day, week after week, despite the biological fact that we have a dynamic cycle of hormones that influence the way we interact with our life. The only way I have seen women "have it all" not at the expense of their health is by way of hormonal partnership and cyclical living.

Our own biology has its own code, rules and regulations. Whether we admit to it or not, our bodies always lead us. From our lives to work and home and everywhere in between, our bodies lead us to making choices. The challenge before us now is to learn how to work with what our bodies have to say.

The BioCycle Study, conducted by the National Institutes of Health in 2005-2007, followed 250 women across their menstrual cycle and examined the effect of dietary choices on everything from fiber intake to sugary drinks and hormone levels. This study has shown us that our cycles and hormonal balance are clear markers of our vulnerability for major diseases. The fluctuating hormones many women wish were disposable when they approach their time of the month are actually trying to help us live healthy lives. There is no better litmus test than our hormones for how our bodies will function in the future.

Our body and endocrine system kicks out useable data every day. This useable data always comes in a particular form. On my segment with Dr. Oz last week, I shared with women details about one of their most powerful messaging systems: their periods. I taught them to look before they flush to gather valuable data about how their bodies are functioning.

But although it's one of the most useful for women, looking before you flush is just one of many ways we can gather information about what their bodies are trying to tell us. The more we learn about structure and function, the more we can participate in choices being made. If you don't have a way to translate the data you're receiving, it's like traveling through a foreign country without speaking the language.

My desire is for women to have access to the language they need to learn how to interact with the information their bodies are communicating, because being able to leverage that means being more effective not simply at work management, but in ways women conduct themselves in all other areas of their lives. You can use your shifting hormonal patterns to improve your career, save your marriage, make more money, have better dates and have better sex. And those are just some of the benefits.

Can you imagine a world where women wouldn't feel their bodies were a mystery but instead would know how to use them as tools to master their environment in corporate life or at home? Once we learn to work in harmony with our bodies, all the work we do, whether at home or at work, becomes more efficient, and we can engage our cyclical biochemistry to empower us to be influential change agents in our sphere of influence.

To get access to the book and more information about hormones, your health, and your power: http://floliving.com/womancode.html.

For more by Alisa Vitti, click here.

For more on women's health, click here.

Popular in the Community

Close

HuffPost Shopping’s Best Finds

MORE IN LIFE