Lucky number thirteen periods… which is the average number most people have in a year!
Book news
Did you pre-order from Bookshop? Then you should already have a copy! Did you pre-order from Barnes and Noble? Those pre-orders will start to arrive Monday.
I’d love to hear how you are experiencing the book, what you think, what you are learning, what feedback you might have as I look towards book two. A huge number of my own book recommendations come from Instagram, Twitter, and a handful of book recommendation podcasts that I love. If you like the book I hope you’ll consider sharing on social media so more people know about it!The LibroFM audiobook giveaway has concluded, but there is ONE MORE GIVEAWAY. Even better, this giveaway is a two-fer – I’ve teamed up with Jaime Green, who also has a non-fiction debut release on April 18. Her book The Possibility of Life looks so good, I’ve just pre-ordered it myself. Even if you have already ordered either book consider sharing the giveaway to get the word out on two of the most highly-anticipated non-fiction releases of the spring!
A few links
I was a panelist for an American Anthropology Association webinar a few weeks ago and this piece by Judith Butler for The Guardian was brought to my attention again. For those of you who are not gender studies nerds I think this is some of Butler’s most accessible writing and gets at all the gender panic happening right now. As the parent of a trans kid and a queer lady myself, I am angry, frustrated, and frightened.
Related: this video made me cry, really hard. Every time I see someone standing up for trans people I see someone standing up for my child. Please, stand up for my child.Content warning: violence against children. The parents of two children who were murdered by AR-15s (one from Newtown, one from Parkland) consented to have their wounds recreated in a graphic in order to help people understand the damage of these weapons. They compare the wounds from a 21mm bullet and a 9mm bullet to show how much more devastating and deadly AR-15s are (not to mention how absolutely, fucking unnecessary).
I sometimes talk to colleagues raising children in other countries with actual gun control. “How do you stand it, letting your children go to school?” They ask. Or sometimes more judgmentally, “I would never let my child go to school in America.” I do wish I had another option – a place where I knew my kids would be safe. Most parents do not have that choice right now – because their children are Black, Indigenous or Latine; because they are disabled; because they are queer or trans; because all of the above and more. Because we are in a pandemic but most people have decided it is easier or more expedient to pretend like we are not. I’m tired, all.Now for something funny? This link list is a mess anyway, so let’s conclude with a McSweeney’s article, “Ron DeSantis Answers Questions About Your Period.”
Weird period fact slash another rant, this time with fewer wolves
Like Dr. Alyssa Olenick, whose Instagram is where I first saw this paper, I am not a fan of the current fitness trend around syncing physical activity to one’s menstrual cycle. The evidence does not really support it at this time.
Until there are more and more strongly powered studies on the topic, I think it does more harm than good to encourage people who menstruate to 1) pay attention to ANOTHER thing when just getting movement in is health-promoting and enjoyable, 2) reduce volume when, if it’s true that we expend more energy in certain parts of our cycle, we could instead EAT MORE.
In general we tend to make women, who make up the majority of people who menstruate, have to do A LOT of things in order to exist in the world: we need a ten step skin routine, a nightly tidying routine, the right supplements, even personally tailored shampoo. If they are also parents then they need to participate in increasingly ridiculous expectations for adorable lunches, the right tooth fairy experience, elf on the shelf and leprechaun bullshit, handmade Valentine’s cards, and pretending the American educational system is not inherently carceral and damaging to our childrens’ psyches.
What if, instead of endlessly performing both perfectionism and optimization, we just… existed? In our bodies? And did the things that nourished us, pleased us, connected us to those we love?
We have several papers in the pipeline in our lab that show that individual variation is typically far more meaningful than cycle variation when it comes to a number of health variables – my hope is they’ll all be published by the end of 2023. THAT SAID, there are a small number of individuals who, for whatever reason, tend to be significantly responsive to fluctuations in ovarian hormones. Maybe you are one of that small number! (In prospective studies of premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a condition very likely driven in part by this responsiveness, this number is at most 6%.) So maybe you will benefit from acknowledging the ways your bodymind adjusts to those fluctuations over the course of the cycle.
You know what that means, though, don’t you? If cycle responsiveness is not universal (and it’s not), then the fact that SOME people MAY benefit from it is… DUN DUN DUN! Individual variation! This means cycle syncing programs designed for everyone with a cycle are in fact wildly inaccurate both to the wide variation in ovarian hormone fluctuations between people, and to the wide variation in the extent to which people are more or less responsive to those fluctuations.
Here’s an example of four menstrual cycles from our lab – all from participants of proven fertility, and all of these cycles were demonstrably ovulatory.
Figure description: four different presentations of estrogen and progesterone metabolites through the menstrual cycle of four different research participants. Only one somewhat matches the typical image shared of the "normal menstrual cycle."
I’m being long-winded and lazy so let me try and restate more clearly: the way ovarian hormones (estradiol and progesterone) vary through the menstrual cycle is incredibly variable and, for most, does not follow the exact pattern you’ve seen in health textbooks. What’s more, most peoples’ other measures of health do not actually vary through the menstrual cycle, indicating only a small number, at most, are strongly responsive to ovarian hormone fluctuations.
Ok, so on to the exercise and menstrual cycles review that just came out this month. To address the question of whether exercise performance varies through the menstrual cycle, the authors found everything they could on it in the literature, concluding inconsistent findings across a handful of low-quality studies. The only thing that maaaaybe was a little cycle dependent was differential experiences of delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS (but even here the finding was with an indirect measure of DOMS). Would it be useful to have larger scale studies of this? Sure, maybe. But this evidence base is definitely not enough that it is ethical to develop cycle syncing exercise or lifestyle programs and it is not in scope for fitness professionals to encourage cycle-dependent exercise.
Oh, and as is often the case, I have a podcast episode about this – an interview with Dr. Meredith Reiches.
Sources: Colenso-Semple, L. M., D’Souza, A. C., Elliott-Sale, K. J., & Phillips, S. M. (2023). Current evidence shows no influence of women’s menstrual cycle phase on acute strength performance or adaptations to resistance exercise training. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 5. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fspor.2023.1054542
Eisenlohr-Moul, T. A., Kaiser, G., Weise, C., Schmalenberger, K. M., Kiesner, J., Ditzen, B., & Kleinstäuber, M. (2020). Are there temporal subtypes of premenstrual dysphoric disorder?: Using group-based trajectory modeling to identify individual differences in symptom change. Psychological Medicine, 50(6), 964–972. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291719000849
Rogers-LaVanne, M. P., & Clancy, K. B. H. (2021). Menstruation: Causes, Consequences, and Context. In S. Han & C. Tomori (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Reproduction.