Her Daughter Hasn’t Had a Real Cycle Since High School: How Do You Get It Back Naturally?

So why is a missing or irregular period never just a hormone problem? What is it telling us about the whole body? Women's cycles are determined fundamentally by their sex steroid hormones, estrogen, progesterone, DHEA, testosterone. You have to understand that hormones are, I always say that they're like light switches. And so people make the mistake of thinking that hormones cause things, but hormones really, they're signaling molecules. And you have to remember, right? What did I say earlier? Fertility is about the signals your body is receiving from the environment. Because your body is then interpreting those as, should we have a baby right now or should we not? Good morning, everyone. Dr. Stillman here, back for another public Q&A. We're doing these Wednesdays, 9:00 AM Central Time. I hope you'll join me. We have a chat feature here, which I love to see people entering chats and asking questions in live. And this is streaming to Facebook, YouTube, Rumble, and X. So wherever you prefer, you can tune in and I should get the chats when you enter them on those platforms. Today's episode, her daughter hasn't had a real cycle since high school. A mother asks how to help her get it back. Naturally. So this question comes to us from a 62-year-old kindergarten teacher's aide from New Jersey. And she's not writing about herself. She's asking about her daughter who's in her mid-20s, former high school and college athlete who didn't have her first cycle until the age of 20. Her daughter's tried lots of different things, changing her exercise, her diet first to bring her cycle back. But you know, things have changed and now her cycle's gone again. So Christian family, distrustful of doctors, looking for natural medicine. Here's what I tell moms who, you know, their daughters are dealing with this kind of thing. Cause we see this fairly often in our practice and, you know, for the record, my book, The End of Autoimmunity, is out now available on Amazon. What does this have to do with autoimmunity, which is really what we do in the practice? We see this story a lot in the stories of our patients with autoimmunity. And frequently what you'll find in these cases is that either an autoimmune disease, accompanies this, either irregular cycles or lack of cycles or inconsistent cycles or light cycles or heavy cycles, either it accompanies it and it has been diagnosed or it was missed and it's been there the whole time. So whenever I'm talking about or thinking about women's cycles, I always go back to God's design. So what is fertility? Fertility is the ability to conceive and carry offspring to term. And in nature, Really fertility is all about abundance of resources in the environment. So whenever I hear periods are irregular or periods are too light or periods are too heavy, or maybe there are anovulatory cycles, there's no egg being released and so on, or a woman's having trouble conceiving, even though everything seems to be right, or she's having trouble keeping pregnancies to term, I always go back to what is going on in this woman's diet, lifestyle, environment And sometimes her mind and her spirit, let's say, that could be contributing to this. Because when you look at human reproduction, it's actually incredibly robust and resilient. I mean, when you look at the kind of adversity that people can still conceive and carry children to term in, in the world and in history, it's really quite remarkable. And if you look at all the things that really determine favorable outcomes in pregnancy, let alone conception, They all come back to the environment, the diet, the lifestyle. What elements of these things do I look at specifically? So I want you to imagine that for a moment that you are the glands and organs in a woman's body that control conception and then bringing a child to term. So you have to understand that your organs, your glands, your cells, your tissues, they're doing their best to express themselves and maintain your life without being able to understand all the things you understand about the world. So you, for example, read the news or watch the news and all these fear chemicals get produced by your brain. And those fear chemicals, you know, your brain doesn't tell your body, oh, there's a war in the Middle East, or, oh, there's a famine in Yemen. Your brain just says fear. It says scarcity. It says lack. And your body responds by directing resources to its programs and its functions that will assist with survival. of the organism. Why is this so important? Because when we don't understand that it's these signals we're receiving from our environment that are then being translated to our cells and tissues that are determining what they're doing, we end up thinking, oh, well, I have X or Y disease or diagnosis. And it means I have to take this or that or the other thing in order to treat it. Think of it more in terms of if you want your body to flourish, what environment do you have to put it in? And I use the news as an example. I'm going to give you some more. So let's say that You have an excessive exposure to light at night. Well, what is that telling your brain? It's actually telling your brain because your brain doesn't know any better that we live in a high latitude and it's summer, you know, and there's 16 hours of daylight every day. Now, initially, like the first few months of that, your brain says, oh, it's summer. We should be awake. But as that gets carried on further and further and further, what you'll see is people develop a lot of the diseases that are associated with excess artificial light at night. And what's really interesting about this is if you look at seasonally breeding mammals, I'll use polar bears as an example. Polar bears actually develop diabetes and obesity in the summer in the Arctic, of course, where they live. And they do that because then in the winter, they take all of the fat that they've stored and the mild hyperglycemia that they develop, the high, high blood sugars actually act as a cryoprotectant. They protect their cells and tissues from cold damage. Fun fact. I learned that way back in comparative physiology in college. And I was shocked to kind of realize this is actually very relevant to what I do anyway. So they then reverse their diabetes and their obesity over the winter, and they lose something like half their body weight in fat as they hibernate. So polar bears are designed to deal with that. We're not, but what humans have done is we've created this environment where we have abundant light year round, 16 hours of bright blue light is what most people are being exposed to day in and day out in the modern world because of LED screens, LED phones, LED light bulbs, compact fluorescent light bulbs. All these bulbs are very bright. So what does this tell a woman's body? Well, at first it tells it, oh, it's summer. Great. We should be active. We should be out there. And because if you've ever lived in a high northern latitude like Sweden, Norway, Finland, Scandinavia, Russia, you know that during the summer you're very busy preparing for the winter, at least historically, because if you don't, you'll freeze to death and you'll starve. So you have to spend that 16-hour day that you get in the summer gathering food, chopping firewood, and preparing for winter. Now what's happened is we've created this artificially perpetual summer. And so what's happening now is that people are in this position where they're constantly telling their brain it's summer, but eventually the body runs out of resources. And the same thing would happen to the polar bears if instead of allowing them to hibernate through the Arctic winter, as they naturally do, you put them in a cubicle like many people work in and you expose them to artificial light for 16 hours a day and bake their faces in LED screens and so on and so forth. Right. They would also get the diabetes and obesity that they get. And they would also then develop a lot of diseases that humans develop. So I could go on, but I will, for the sake of brevity, make it as simple as this. You have to look at every single input to the human body and say, how can we signal to this body that we're in a state of safety, that we're in a state of abundance, that we're in a season where there's enough light and enough food. And here's something for you all to think about. Have you ever wondered why human gestation is 9 months? I have. If you look historically at Scandinavian birth rates, you'll find that there's a very slight peak in the spring, which is exactly 9 months after the summer, right? Well, what is the summer in Scandinavia? It's the period of most abundance and it's the most light. And if you've ever talked to them or you've ever lived in a place like I lived in Minnesota and Maine for years, in the summer, there's sort of this frenzy of activity. It's like, oh my gosh, it's warm out. We can all Go to the ballgame and not wear a parka. We can go to the ocean and not be freezing. You know, we can go swimming for 5 minutes and not get hypothermia. Unlike in the winter, when, if you go out into say the Gulf of Maine without, you know, a giant wetsuit feeling like the Michelin Man, which I used to do, I used to paddleboard in Maine in the winter, in December. We went surfing a couple of nights in the winter. It was crazy. Ice on your face, your board, the ocean has like the spray comes up and turns to ice in the air before it hits your Face. Lots of fun. Anyway, there's this frenzy of activity, right? So that's when people end up conceiving children. Imagine that. And a lot of them have these sort of like social rites, festivals. And like historically these were like pagan fertility rituals, right? Because it was like the sun was back, the food was good. Everyone had survived the winter. Everyone who was alive to celebrate had survived the winter, right? So then 9 months later, what happens? There's spring. Well, isn't it interesting that the baby is born and has the maximum amount of time in a warm environment or more warm climate? summer, early fall to fatten up and get bigger. As you get bigger, you become more and more resistant to freezing to death because you have a lower surface area to volume ratio. I don't know if I'm boring you all with this, but this is the stuff I think about all the time. And that I actually think is really important because if you just don't understand these basic physiological things about your body, you're going to get so confused and turned around, especially with all the marketing and the spin and the propaganda and the misinformation that just, I mean, it's torrential. I see it on social media. I hear it on the news. It's ridiculous. Anyway, so 9 months gestation gives babies in cold climates, northern latitudes or extreme southerly latitudes, the maximum amount of time to get nourished and ready for that winter that they're going to have to endure eventually when it comes back around. So anyway, back to my point. So you want to maximize the abundance that your body sees. And when I think about this, I think about, okay, we want to have the right macronutrient ratios. We want to have An abundance of protein. We want to have really high-quality, slow-released carbohydrates. I'm looking for root vegetables in the diet. I have this strong belief that women need to focus on folate-rich foods. And, you know, I don't think that's controversial, but what does get controversial, some people will say like, well, you should never eat beans. You should never eat lentils. They're full of lectins. They'll kill you. I beg to differ. I really believe that women benefit greatly from increasing their natural folate intake. And it turns out that unless you eat like a rabbit, I mean, you have to eat an almost mind-bending amount of greenery to get the same amount of folate as you do if you just have 1 cup of lentils. And so lentils and beans, I strongly recommend them for women who are trying to conceive so long as they can tolerate them in terms of their gut health. Because a lot of women will notice the lectins, the fiber, the fructooligosaccharides, things like that will make it harder for them to tolerate Beans and lentils. And when you think about it too, right, when beans and lentils and legumes and fruits and greens are available in the environment, what is also abundant? The sun, right? And so the female body interprets these nutrients, which are only present in with long periods of light and warmth. It interprets the bright sunlight that it's seeing in your day-to-day outside. It interprets all of that as, ah, it's warm out. And so it makes sense for me to make a baby because we have an abundance of resources. If you look at what happens, say an ice age or a Maunder Minimum, resources become more scarce. And physiologically, it makes the most sense to have fewer children in times of scarcity, lack. That means cold, lack of light, et cetera. Okay. So I look at the light. Is the woman getting sunlight? Is she getting enough bright light during the day? We know this affects hormones and neurotransmitters. That's Fritz Hallwitz's work from, you know, a century ago now. Is she eating an abundance of the right foods? Is she eating them frequently enough? Like one signal of scarcity you can give your body is to only eat one meal a day. I have never seen that work well long-term for women of childbearing age. I'm not saying it couldn't be right for a season. You know, you want to really activate autophagy and access intermittent fasting. You do one meal a day for a period of time. You're losing weight. You're reversing insulin resistance, all these good things. Sure. Okay. Fair. But it's not a signal of abundance. When you really look at the totality of all of the different signals that you're giving your body, the light, the electromagnetic radiations in your environment, EMF, For short, the food you're eating, your daily routine, even the media you're consuming. You know, I mean, does it serve you to be inundated with negativity? You know, say news stories about war, natural disasters, horrible crimes against humanity. I mean, this is not necessarily going to trigger the brain to make the chemicals that are going to result in or optimize conception. And I'm not saying the news is going to cause infertility or irregular cycles. I'm just saying this could be a contributing factor in terms of the neurochemistry of the body that I think is sadly underestimated and underappreciated. So, okay, that's my opening rant on this topic. That's kind of how I think about this big picture. So important questions for us to cover within this question. So why is a missing or irregular period never just a hormone problem? What is it telling us about the whole body? So people get the wrong idea about hormones, and I talk about this a lot. Read about it in my book in chapter 1, write about it arguably in chapter 6, where I talk about bioidentical hormones. So You have to understand hormones, right? And so women's cycles are determined fundamentally by their sex steroid hormones, estrogen, progesterone, DHEA, testosterone. Estrogen and progesterone are primarily responsible, but they're always working in concert with the other 2, DHEA, testosterone, the androgens, as well as many metabolites of each of these. You have to understand that hormones are— I always say that they're like light switches. And so people make the mistake of thinking that hormones cause things, but hormones really They're signaling molecules. And you have to remember, right? What did I say earlier? Fertility is about the signals your body is receiving from the environment because your body is then interpreting those as, should we have a baby right now or should we not? The stakes for having a baby are very high. If you have a baby in the wrong season, season of scarcity, the baby could starve to death. The mother could die. The pregnancy could, you know, for example, end in a miscarriage because if the body doesn't have enough resources and it's trying to grow a baby, what it will eventually do is make the difficult decision of, are we going to keep this baby or are we going to have a miscarriage? Right. It's very devastating for women and their men and their families in general. So hormones are signaling molecules. You flip a switch on the wall, it turns on the light. It's not just because you flipped a switch. There was power in the grid. There's an electrical substation down the street. There's a high-tension power line carrying power from the power plant. There's, you know, wiring in the ground to your house from the street. There's a circuit breaker that's in the right position. There's a light bulb in the socket with a filament or a, lighting, you know, element like a diode that is functional, right? All of these things have to be in place, right? And this is why when I see in the practice, what we see in our patients is a lot of women will notice that their cycles come back to normal without us ever touching a hormone. We also don't tend to get into some of the stuff that people really get into, like seed cycling or carrot salad or all these things. Not saying they're bad. No. I have no problem with these things, but we'll often see women resolve the issue without having to resort to that. Now, what do I think makes the difference here? When we look fundamentally at physiology in our practice, what we see is that the right ratios of minerals, vitamins, and then macronutrients are the foundation of everything that we do. In addition to light, sound, electromagnetic, the electromagnetic force or electromagnetic frequencies, all of these things are going to then have an impact on the body and how it responds to hormones and how it makes hormones and so on and so forth. So that's why it's never just a hormone problem. It's always downstream from these other determining factors. Why can an intense athletic background set the stage for cycle problems that don't show up sometimes fully until years later? This is a really interesting question and it gets into the challenge of interviewing and whether or not people have the right perspective and context on their actual athletic performance. So intense athletes, and also I would mention too, people who've been involved in any kind of really physically vigorous occupation. So I'll look for this in police, former law enforcement. I'll look for this in veterans, military veterans. They're coming out of a background where a lot of people that they're just habituated to these extreme, intense physical exertions and their sort of normal for what is an intense physical exertion is completely different from the general population. You know, the average person who might huff and puff going up a few flights of stairs You know, they say I went to the gym and I did a heavy workout. They might mean 20 to 40 minutes of lifting weights. Some of these people you talk to, they've got these backgrounds of intense athlete or, you know, say special forces operator or whatever. And their workout, if you actually ask them how many sets, how many reps, what weight, how much time are you in the gym? How many laps in the pool? How many miles on the treadmill? How many, you know, minutes do you row? What tempo? What's your heart rate? All these different things. If you talk to them about that, it will come out that they are extremely— what's the right word? Their idea of a heavy workout is way more intense than the average person. Now, what does this tend to show up as? If you don't take the history properly and understand what their workout currently is, you can't really coach them through it. In extreme scenarios, like where I have, you know, a high-level athlete, or I've got someone who really wants to get into their physical routine and their exercise, I will actually refer out to someone who specializes in that. Our friend Jim Laird, we often send people to. Hello, Jim. Hope you're well. And, you know, working with the right person who's going to train you week to week can be, I think, life-changing. Certainly was for me when I worked with Jim personally. And some of these folks are not being realistic about their exercise and they're in denial. And sometimes this is just an outright exercise addiction. Sometimes they've just never had anyone tell them like, hey, yeah, I know that when you were 25 and you were competing for whatever top of the podium event, you know, medal unit, whatever. I know it was normal for you to do this kind of workout then, but you're 30, 35, 40, you know, and you've been doing this for a long time. Your body's depleted and you need to scale this back or you are just going to keep burning it out. So you'll see this a lot and you have to take a careful history with these folks because if you don't, you'll miss it. And then what ends up happening is you're throwing supplements at these people. You're giving them more food, more calories. They're not responding the way that they should be. And then what will happen is they're eating so much food in order to keep up with their caloric demands to try and restore normal fertility and normal function and feel well, that they'll end up with GI issues that are masquerading as a primary GI issue like irritable bowel syndrome, or maybe something worse like say ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease, which are true GI pathologies. I'm not saying they're not diseases, but the real culprit is the exercise. My podcasts with Jim Laird on this are required listening for people who You know, really want to understand how exercise affects their wellbeing. There's links to those at stillmanmd.com/autoimmunity. And there's more information on that in the book in chapter 3, which people should read. All right. Why does forcing a cycle back with a drastic short-term change to diet or exercise often fail to fix what's actually going on underneath? So we'll see this a lot. An extreme diet and extreme lifestyle change will result in a positive result for a patient. And, but it will only work for a certain period of time. When you really look at people's dietary patterns, what you'll find is that let's say they go carnivore. Well, one of the side effects or the effects of going carnivore is you tend to have a very high zinc to copper ratio, unless you go wild with beef liver, in which case your zinc to copper ratio can actually go the other way. Well, what will happen if that person has long-term had a zinc deficit and say overabundance of copper is they can solve their copper excess and fix their zinc deficiency. Well, wait 3, 6, 9 months. Now you've got an excess of zinc and maybe you've run into a copper deficiency. I know that might sound weird, but we will quite literally see this in the practice. And, you know, we see a lot of things happening with minerals that are hard to explain. But as we normalize the inputs, water, diet, et cetera, and we normalize the rest of the lifestyle, which is the demand for these things, stress, sleep, exercise, then what we'll see is balance is restored by the body's natural homeostatic mechanisms. So when you force the body to do things with extreme diets, extreme lifestyle changes, extreme whatever, you'll often wind up correcting an imbalance, but you'll end up going too far in the opposite direction. And that's when having coaching, having labs to guide you can become invaluable in finding your way back to good health. Why do standard hormone panels so often come back normal in women who clearly aren't cycling the way that they should? So hormone panels and hormone testing is one of my Pet peeves, because it's just so misunderstood. So let's start with some basics. Checking hormones in blood, saliva, and urine with a small sample. So I'm talking about your, you know, you put a little urine on a piece of paper and send it to a lab, not naming any lab names. You spit in a little vial with your saliva. You do a blood draw. You can get accurate readings and you can get useful information That will help you. Not saying that all these are not worth doing, but great practitioners know that there is a huge error range for these tests. Some of this has to do with a woman's natural cycle. If she's off a couple days in what she reports to you about her last cycle, and if her cycles are irregular, I mean, it's just, it's going to be all over the place. You will see these massive fluctuations in these numbers. I don't routinely test female hormones, which is actually pretty unusual in my space of integrative functional natural medicine. But I just have to tell you, I am a great believer In a woman's physical symptoms telling us what her hormone status truly is. I think if you're going to do any of those tests, you should absolutely do a blood test. And I think it is imperative that if you're going to track your blood hormones, you need to have that draw done at the same time, quarter to quarter or month to month or year to year. Because if you walk in there at noon and you're comparing that to a lab panel done the year prior at 7:00 AM. This is not apples to apples. This is apples and oranges. I know this seems like too much detail. I really have to worry about that. Yes, you do. Book your lab draw, book it at the same time, get there on time. Hopefully there won't be a line. Hopefully they'll be running on time. If lab draws are off by an hour or 2, I'm not going to sweat that. I do want to know though, because it may actually affect how we interpret them. For my peace of mind, I treat women's symptoms first with different things in order to normalize the hormones, balance the hormones, and what I find frequently is that we don't need to touch the hormones in young women. We just need to fix the minerals and the vitamins and the diet and the lifestyle, and the hormones come back into balance. There's plenty of exceptions to that. Tough cases, difficult diseases where, you know, the disease is very deeply rooted in the system and it just takes a lot to get out. But by and large, that's been my experience. As women get older and their ovarian reserve, it's what we call it, let alone their adrenal reserve and their hormones start to decline in menopause, That's when symptoms respond best to bioidentical hormones, which I'm a huge believer in. And I've just seen them to have such life-changing effects on women. Plenty of younger women benefit from bioidentical hormones as well. That's a whole nother story, which we can talk about, but you have to have obviously a, a long conversation with women about using hormones when they're young, because you need to really not just be prescribing them ad nauseam, but you need to have a conversation about why are we using this? How long are we gonna use it? And how are we gonna hopefully get you off of it? Because in a perfect world, women would not need hormonal support prior to menopause. Now, we don't live in a perfect I don't know if you knew that or not, but turns out it's not perfect. And so there are scenarios in which I find that women younger than, you know, menopausal age really benefit from, and, you know, to achieve their goals and maintain their lifestyle as they will, they do best with bioidentical hormones replacement earlier than, you know, normal or what was, what is typically expected in many menopausal age. So I cover a lot more about lab testing and hormones in the book, chapters 5 and 6. Strongly recommend that you pick up a copy available again on Amazon. Ask me anything. Q&A link below. I may cover it on a future Q&A episode like this. If you would like our help reclaiming your health, you're tired, you're foggy, you're inflamed, you have an autoimmune disorder, or you're worried you might, book an eval with a member of my team. For a limited time, I don't know how long we're going to do this, so I don't know how limited it will be. We are shipping everyone who books an eval a copy of my book, which is almost, you know, the cost of the evaluation. So it's a really great opportunity to get a copy of the book and also get an evaluation with a member of my team. We're also piloting something that I'm really excited about. Which is a 90-day plan, which is a document that we create for you based on our set of criteria for the risk factors for autoimmunity. And so what I really like about this is the starting point for working with us is we walk you through in this plan exactly what we see as the primary drivers of your issue, whatever that may be, based on our understanding of what causes autoimmunity and more generally people to feel tired, foggy, and inflamed, no matter what their diagnosis is. So book an eval. It's an amazing value. Last, if you're a practitioner, would like to become one, or you're just a regular person who wants to learn how we do what we do to help people get well, we train people every weekend, Saturday, 8 to 10. I have a 2-hour call with people who want to learn what we do. I teach everything from how to put out social media that really helps edify people and serve them well, to how to talk to people about what you do and the products you may represent, and then how to take care of people the way we do in our practice to get great results. Thanks for watching everyone. Take care. Have a great week.