How do I get my missing period back?

A missing period (amenorrhea) or irregular cycles can be caused by a number of factors. The contraceptive pill, stress, low body weight, certain medications, excessive exercise, hormonal imbalances and emotional trauma can all be reasons why your period is missing.

This can be very frustrating, especially when you’re trying to conceive or considering pregnancy in the future, because there might be a number of factors affecting your cycle and you may be unsure where to even start.

Personally I believe that our fertility and having a regular healthy menstrual cycle is a sign of overall health and wellbeing; physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

What I mean by this is – don’t get caught up just thinking about your reproductive organs when you’re trying to repair a missing period. Our reproductive system isn’t essential for our survival. Therefore when something is off (not enough nutrition, too much exercise, stress, etc), our body will divert the energy away from our reproductive system to our other systems that are essential for survival.

Instead, I think we should focus on building optimum health, because fertility is the natural result of this. It also helps to keep us from becoming obsessed with ‘getting our missing period back’ and instead helps us focus on the bigger picture of creating a happy, healthy body.

How do you create optimum health to get your missing period back?

Eat real food

Optimum health involves eating foods that are high in nutrients. Forget about trying to find ‘fertility superfoods’ and the best ‘fertility diet’ and instead just eat real food. What is real food? Anything that isn’t overly processed and doesn’t need an ingredients list. Try to focus on what you can have, rather than what you can’t have. If you eat a packet of processed something, don’t stress. Just make a better choice at your next meal.

Throw out your scales

We know that optimum health, a healthy menstrual cycle (and therefore fertility) relies on being at your body’s ideal weight. (This by the way is likely very different to society’s ideal weight for a woman’s body, but that’s a story for another day).

I often see women who are trying to lose or gain weight to conceive. But I think putting your focus on the weight is missing the mark. If you’re eating real, nutrient dense food your body will naturally find its ideal weight. Too often, when we focus on losing or gaining weight we just create additional stress, and become hyper focused on hating our body. This doesn’t create health or fertility.

Instead, focus on looking after your body to feel good, rather than being a certain size and trust that your body will settle at its healthy size on its own.

Move your body to feel good

Instead of thinking about exercise as something you do to lose weight, or be fit, or to make up for something you ate; try to think about movement as something you do to feel good. Changing the way you think about exercise will do a number of things. It will help you choose exercise that you actually enjoy doing and you’ll be more likely to do it regularly (because it doesn’t feel like punishment).

This way you’ll also get the stress-relieving benefits of exercise rather than feeling like it’s something you ‘have to do’ and creating internal stress about something you don’t really want to do.

Try this fertility yoga class below to help with amenorrhea. But remember, if it feels good – keep going. If not, perhaps yoga isn’t the right type of movement for you.

Create a life that you love

How does a ‘life you love’ relate to your missing period? I’m so glad you asked. When you’re living a life full of things you don’t enjoy, people who make you feel bad and work you hate – how do you feel?

Stressed? Anxious? Depressed? Unsettled? And what do you do with those feelings?

If you’re like most of us, you’ll find a way to numb them in some way. Eating foods that you probably shouldn’t be eating. Drinking too much. Maybe smoking. Numbing out with Netflix or social media.

All of these things draw us further away from optimum health (and therefore optimum fertility).

What most of us do then is we try to fix the symptoms (the weight, the drinking, the sloth life) instead of the root problem. IE. Not liking the life that we’re currently living.

On the other hand, how do you feel when you love your life?

Energised. Calm. Settled.

And you’re more likely to be making better choices – with food, with movement, with your relationships.

When you draw back from a narrow focus on just your reproductive organs and their role in your missing period, we can start to see that actually our entire system (and life) is involved when it comes to our fertility.

Manage your stress

Despite the fact that there is nothing worse than being told to ‘just relax’ when you’re trying to conceive, stress does impact your menstrual cycle and might be the reason for your missing period. Let’s get something straight before we talk about stress though.

Life will always involve stressors. It is literally impossible to get rid of all of your stress entirely. I often see women who’ve got themselves stressed out trying to get rid of all the stress in their lives! Please stop!

Instead, work on finding how YOU can manage your stress. What makes YOU feel calm and relaxed? Then find a way to make sure that you’re doing these things regularly.

Some ideas that have worked for me and the women that I see in private sessions are yoga, meditation, going out dancing, reading, chatting with your girlfriends, going to the beach, nature walks, playing music, a bath, turning off social media, etc.

If you’d like help coming down from this stress, have a look at my fertility yoga course. I step you through how to actually manage your stress when you’re trying to conceive.

Sleep!

Many of the women I see for fertility are so similar to me. Driven. Ambitious. Planners. We’re often too busy doing all the things to be making the time to get enough sleep. Sound familiar?

While it might be good for your career goals, not getting enough sleep is not helping your body get its cycle back. Our circadian rhythm (the daily rhythm of wakefulness and sleep) is closely linked to our monthly rhythm. Get yourself a regular sleep cycle and help your body heal from a missing period. (PS. Getting to bed before 10pm is ideal due to the cortisol that is released after that time).

Other treatments to consider for a missing period

Acupuncture and Chinese doctor

What I love about both of these modalities is that they treat the whole body, not just the reproductive system. They also both treat the individual – there is no ‘one size fits all’ treatment when it comes to amenorrhea. Instead they will look at what is going on in YOUR body and work to bring it back into balance (IE. optimum health).

Naturopath

A naturopath can be helpful to identify what nutritional deficits your body may have and help to fill those gaps with supplements.

Counsellor / Somatic healer / Fertility massage

As I’ve already mentioned, sometimes fertility issues are caused by emotional traumas like miscarriage and stillbirth, sexual assault, childhood trauma, etc.

If you’ve addressed your physical health and still aren’t seeing any changes, you might need address the emotional body with one of these modalities.