J.B.

If you’re like me, you love a good night’s sleep.  It’s refreshing and rejuvenating.  But, for many women, it’s often elusive.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, “More than half of American women (60%) say they only get a good night’s sleep a few nights per week or less and 67% say they frequently experience a sleep problem.”

Sleep deprivation is not just a matter of feeling tired.  Sleeplessness can affect your ability to think clearly, it can make you irritable (as if bloating and cramps weren’t enough to make you cranky), and it can affect your health too.  Sufferers of chronic sleep deprivation risk high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.

J.B

Image via Brook Lark

Do you suffer from the typical menstrual symptoms?  The bloating, the mood swings, the muscle aches, the fatigue, the cramps (and sometimes severe menstrual cramps)?  Are you convinced that whoever wrote the song “I Enjoy Being a Girl” must have been a man?

You’re not alone. 

But there are some natural, non-pharmaceutical things you can do to ease the symptoms and one of these is diet.   Of course, everyone is different, but there are foods that are generally regarded as being helpful in reducing menstrual symptoms and some foods that can make your symptoms worse.

Kaitlyn Luckow

Image source: Charles Deluvio

It’s always surprising to think about everything that we don’t know about our own bodies. We literally live in them every single day, but let’s be honest, we don’t know the ins and outs about how they work.

Honestly, when I was researching about ovaries for this post, I was so embarrassed about what I didn’t know. I had gone through the entirety of my life not knowing what was going on inside of my own body. And I know I’m not the only one.

I wanted to make sure that you weren’t left in the dark like I was for so long simply because I didn’t seek out the facts.

Here are some things that you may or may not have known about ovaries:

Kaitlyn Luckow

Image @rawpixel

You walk into your gynecologist appointment and they ask you how you’ve been feeling and immediately you say, “fine.”

However, in your head, you might be thinking, “What about telling them about how debilitating your cramps have been?; What about that weird discharge you’ve been having?; What about talking about how painful sex has been for you?”

But how many of us actually talk about these things?

Today is National Women’s Health Day and it’s the perfect time to remind you to take care of yourself. Honest care of yourself. So many of us go to the gynecologist and don’t actually share what we’re experiencing on a daily basis. Or even worse, some of us don’t schedule an appointment at all because we get too anxious even thinking about it.

Not only do we not get the help we need because of that, but we also could be putting ourselves in danger.

Your reproductive health should be your priority and you should not let embarrassment get in the way. Here are some ways that you can prepare to speak up during your next trip to the gynecologist:

By Kaitlyn Luckow

You might remember that day in school where the boys and the girls were separated and your recess time was infringed upon because you needed to have “that talk”. I’m going to go out on a limb here and probably guess that you don’t have fond memories about that day.

I would be surprised if you did. If you were in the girl group, you were told that you were going to bleed out every month forever and that you would have to do all of these things to keep yourself clean and you were probably going to be in pain. Joy.

And if you were a boy, well…chances are you didn’t hear about menstruation at all. Just whispers on the playground about something horrifying that women do every month.

This lack of education, almost solely relied on by rumors, has led to a detrimental misguidance when it comes to menstruation. There are many myths revolving around menstruation and these myths are exactly that—they’re not true.

Regardless, many people go into adolescence holding these myths as true, and many of these myths are held well-on into adulthood.

I talked to many individuals of all genders and asked them about period myths that they have believed in the past. Here are the most common answers and why these myths are in fact just that: