For a long time I thought a missing period was a sign of discipline. I quite literally thought that. I thought that if I put any fat on my body, I would start swimming slower. I would produce more lactic acid. I wouldn’t have my 12 pack anymore. I wouldn’t be trying as hard. It would be a reflection of me getting soft, couldn’t have that, I was THE best.

I was swimming full time. Collegiately and professionally. A lot. I was eating "clean," which is the polite word for eating less and less. And when my cycle was absent for a decade, I literally thought “good, that makes it easy”. The water made it easy to see — we were basically naked all the time, you could see I had no body fat. But I was praised for being so “FIT”. You can call exhaustion "dedication," and you can tell yourself that an athlete's body simply works differently.

It does not work differently. It works less, because it's trying to keep you alive. It shuts things down.

What was actually happening (the part no one explained to me):

Your cycle isn't a luxury feature. It's a report card on whether your body currently feels safe enough to do something as expensive as ovulate. When you under-eat and over-train, your body reads the situation the way it would read a famine or a flight: not the season to make a baby, not the season to spend energy. Ovulation gets turned completely off. And here's the piece that connects to everything else I now teach—no ovulation means almost no progesterone. Which in and of itself cascades into more issues. Not a good cycle to start.

Progesterone is the calm one. It's the hormone that rises in the back half of a healthy cycle and talks directly to your nervous system; its main metabolite acts on the same calming receptors that anti-anxiety medication targets. So when my cycle vanished, I didn't just lose a period. I lost the monthly tide of the hormone that was supposed to make me feel settled, warm, and held. No wonder I was anxious, freezing all the time, and sleeping badly. I'd turned off my own calm.

Why the old systems saw me clearly:

What finally moved me was an old framework that described my exact state in language a body could feel. I had seen tons of western doctors who prescribed me estrogen pills, blah blah blah. “You just need to take hormones and have a withdrawal bleed” my father told me. Right.

In Ayurveda, what I was doing read as a massive Vata derangement. Vata is the principle of air and movement—cold, dry, light, fast, irregular. Now picture what I was actually doing: long cold swims, restricting food (less substance, less "earth"), constant motion, an absent cycle. I was pouring fuel on the very quality that was already out of balance. Ayurveda would say of course your artava (loosely, the reproductive/menstrual tissue, the most refined product of nourishment) ran dry—it's the last thing the body builds, and only when everything upstream is well-fed. You don't get a healthy cycle out of a depleted, wind-blown system. The traditional answer to too much cold, dry, and fast is almost comically simple: warm, grounding, oily, nourishing, rhythmic. Warm cooked food instead of raw and cold. Oil on the skin. Regular hours. Less frantic movement. Rest as medicine, not as failure.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the picture rhymed. TCM would have looked at my missing cycle as a deep depletion of Blood and Jing—the deep reserve, the constitutional savings account you're not supposed to overdraw. Cold, in TCM, isn't poetic; it's pathological. Cold contracts and congeals, and the uterus is meant to be a warm place. I was a person voluntarily living in cold water and a cold, empty diet, asking my warmest organ to keep functioning. TCM also maps each phase of the cycle to a movement of Blood and Qi; with the tank empty, there was simply nothing to move. The prescription there, too, was warmth, building Blood through nourishing food, protecting the reserve, and stopping the bleed of energy outward.

Two systems, an ocean and a few thousand years apart, told me the same thing the terrain itself was telling me: you cannot extract a thriving body from a starved one. Build the soil first.

What healing actually looked like

I went to Naturopathic medical school. I started learning about the old ways of herbal medicine, homeopathy, food, elements….and I realized there was so much more. I was unaware of the beautiful electromagnetic being that I was. How powerful I could be as a woman if I let myself be nourished and rest. I had to do the opposite of everything I was doing before. Stop all the cardio, do simple movement. Feed myself a variety of nourishing animal foods (and fats) CONSISTENTLY. DAILY. It had to be an honor, a ritual for myself. I formed a connection with Mother Earth, with God. I found my spirituality. I stopped chasing a false image. I started living on raw milk (like actually). Yes, it was uncomfortable to see myself gain 25 pounds, but my goodness was it worth it. I became warm, a deep sleeper, my skin glows, my hands and feet weren’t white and frigid, I got tan, I put my feet on the ground, I paid attention to minerals, I widened my tastes (raw oysters are a staple now), I started hiking. It was a slow process. But it worked.

Am I perfect? No. I still have thinner hair and my body certainly does not have a six pack. But I have a regular bleed and lots of energy. I’m curious and energetic. That’s what matters.

Why I am building my Skool

When my cycle came back, I realized I'd had to assemble this from a dozen places…an Ayurvedic idea here, a TCM concept there, a piece on progesterone somewhere else, and a lot of unlearning in between. Nobody had laid it out as one coherent path: how the cycle, nourishment, warmth, movement, and the deep traditions actually fit together.

So I built the thing I needed.

Inside the community, I go deep on all of it .The full progesterone series (we're just getting started), how to read your own cycle as a feedback system, the Ayurvedic and TCM lenses applied to real cycles and real seasons of life, the warming and nourishing practices that rebuilt my terrain, and a circle of women asking the same questions.

If any part of this felt like reading your own diary—come in!!