Spotting may not sound like that big of a deal when you’re not dealing with it personally….but if you’ve ever dealt with 2-3 weeks out of the month either spotting BEFORE your period, HAVING your period, and spotting AFTER your period (although the latter is more rare), you’ll know it’s a HUGE DEAL.
Besides all the sucky life implications of constantly spotting (constantly having pads and tampons on hand, not feeling up for having sex, etc, etc!), spotting is a fairly serious problem when it comes to our overall female health.
Why Spotting Happens
Before we get into how we can improve our hormonal health to not have spotting, let’s first discuss why spotting happens in the first.
Like you probably already read in our 4 Phases of the Menstrual Cycle section, the feminine cycle has a predictable flow to it from month to month.
Spotting, it turns out, is most commonly a problem with the 3rd (Plateau) and 4th (Pause) phases.
We like to give names to each phase because what you do to support your body in each week is different enough that we felt it was helpful to break them up.
In the medical community, however, these Plateau and Pause phases are grouped together and known as the “luteal phase”.
It’s named this way because the corpus luteum–which is the tissue that is left after the egg was released from the ovary–is in charge of signaling and maintaining healthy hormonal levels.
Luteal Phase Defects
When we don’t ovulate (like with PCOS) or have issues that interfere with our hormonal cascade throughout the month (which includes things like chronic stress, poor detoxing, and nutritional deficiencies!), low progesterone levels or a low estrogen to progesterone ratio will often lead to spotting.
This is why it’s so common that women who struggle with constant spotting need to change their approach to their ENTIRE cycle, even though what they get diagnosed with is a “luteal phase defect”.
Each phase of the cycle sets us up for the next phase.
By ONLY addressing luteal phase defects by things you do in the second half of the cycle (like adding progesterone orally or vaginally), improvement in spotting tends to be more of a bandaid solution rather than a permanent one.
Addressing Spotting Naturally
Both of us have dealt with endless, enraging (!) spotting…but it wasn’t until we changed our approach by syncing with our cycles that we had long-term and constant improvements in our overall hormonal health.
Syncing with your cycles is a way to address each part of your period and hit upon ALL aspects of hormonal imbalances.
Trying to change your approach to food, stress management, your relationship with your body, and following a protocol after getting hormonal testing all at once is often too overwhelming for most of us.
Breaking up the overhaul into concrete, manageable steps increases overall success of balancing your hormones naturally by A LOT!
And we’re all looking for actual improvements in our symptoms, right? Not just trying to force changes for the fun of it.
Getting Started with Syncing with Your Cycle
If you’re new to living in sync with your cycle, you’ll want to get our free guide that has EVERYTHING you need to get started.
XOXO,
