Dear friend,
Women can have pretty complicated feelings about their fertility, which can be all-too-easy to squelch and ignore… until you have a daughter (and especially a daughter who’s approaching puberty). This week, our favorite therapist/writer, Julia Hogan-Werner, LCPC, details for us the importance of working through any negative feelings we may have with our periods, fertility, and child-bearing experiences, to model for our daughters a healthy relationship with our bodies.
Giving our young daughters the gift of a holistic view of their bodies and fertility can help them make good health decisions later on, like the decision to use fertility awareness over hormonal birth control when they need a safe, effective family planning method. The evidence continues to mount concerning the deadly risks of hormonal birth control, and this week Kristen Curran reviews a recent study that found that obesity combined with combined oral contraceptive (COC) use resulted in a 12 to 24 times increase in the relative risk of developing blood clots compared to non-obese, non COC users. As more young women are struggling with overweight and obesity than ever before, we cannot continue to ignore the risks posed by birth control to the health and livelihood of our girls.
Of course, many women are still made to believe that birth control is the only option for dealing with debilitating periods, like those that accompany polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), which itself is correlated with weight issues. Episode 3 of Season 2 of The Natural Womanhood Podcast, which dropped this Friday, deals with this exact issue. Cassie and I were thrilled to talk with registered dietician and functional nutritionist Victoria Coglianese about the very real ways food can be medicine for women dealing with menstrual- and fertility-related issues, such as PCOS.
All the best,
Grace Emily Stark
Editor
Natural Womanhood
| Helping your daughter develop a healthy relationship with her fertility when you’ve had a negative experience Healing a negative relationship with your own body, especially your fertility, becomes even more challenging if you are a mother who is also trying to help her daughter develop a healthy relationship with her body, especially her fertility. In fact, you might feel even more pressure to help your daughter develop a healthy relationship because of your own difficult experiences. How exactly do you go about setting a healthy example for your daughter when you are just starting to, or still working through, your own experience? Click here to read the full article. |
| How inflammation might be at play in the connection between elevated weight and blood clot risk for hormonal birth control users Women with elevated BMI (BMI of 25-29 is considered overweight and greater than 30 is considered obese), who are independently at risk for cardiovascular problems, should be made aware that—although many doctors consider the risk of developing DVT as a result of using HBC to be relatively small and counsel their patients accordingly—the risk for COC users coupled with obesity is much greater, 12 to 24 times higher than in women without these risk factors. Click here to read the full article. |
| The Natural Womanhood Podcast S2 Ep. 3: PCOS and Nutrition In this episode, Grace and Cassie interview functional nutritionist and registered dietician Victoria Coglianese of Wonderfully Made Nutrition. We discuss not only what good nutrition looks like for women suffering from PCOS, but also how to be mindful of the ways we nourish our bodies as women. Women are not just small men, and our nutritional needs differ in some very important ways, which Victoria breaks down for us in the fascinating, highly-informative episode. We hope you learn as much as we did from listening to her! Listen on the NW website, Buzzsprout, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music / Audible, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts! |