Lisa Hendrickson-Jack talks about vaginas a lot! She’s a certified Fertility Awareness Educator and Holistic Reproductive Health Practitioner who teaches women to chart their menstrual cycles for natural birth control, conception, and monitoring overall health. In her new book The Fifth Vital Sign, Lisa debunks the myth that regular ovulation is only important when you want children, by recognizing the menstrual cycle as a vital sign. Drawing heavily from the current scientific literature, Lisa presents an evidence-based approach to fertility awareness and menstrual cycle optimization.
She hosts the Fertility Friday Podcast, a weekly radio show devoted to helping women connect to their fifth vital sign by uncovering the connection between menstrual cycle health, fertility, and overall health. With well over a million downloads, Fertility Friday is the #1 source for information about fertility awareness, and menstrual cycle health, connecting women around the world with their cycles and their fertility — something our education systems have consistently failed to do. When she’s not researching, writing, and interviewing health professionals, you’ll find her spending time with her husband and her two sons.
In this episode we explore:
How hormonal contraceptives (HC) are contributing to and worsening menstrual and fertility challenges many women are facing today
Why HC-users should be coming off the pill long before trying to conceive
The Fertility Awareness Method (FAM) and how to use your body’s signals to understand your fertility
How male fertility standards have changed through the years and why men need to be focusing on building their fertilty
To learn more, visit fertilityfriday.com.
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Favorite Quotes from the interview:
“To be clear, from the beginning when the pill was first developed, the pill bleed was an added feature so that it would seem as though it was natural."
“It’s almost like they think we’re just baby-making machines and so if we’re not making babies then those parts don’t have a funciton which is really reductionistic and ignorant to reduce us to that.”
“We have receptors for estrogen and progesterone everywhere throughout our entire bodies: in our brains, our bones, our breasts. So whether or not you want to have babies, when it comes to the menstrual cycle, your reproductive system is not separate from the rest of your body.”
"When you look at research that examines all of the menstrual cycle health parameters on average its taking about a year before those cycles fully normalize but that doesn’t mean you can’t get pregnant because pregnancy is possible in any cycle with ovulation.”
“Women who used condoms [prior to TTC] took about 4 months on average to conceive and women who were on the pill, the patch, the ring, etc. took on average 8 months to conceive, so fully twice as long to conceive!”
“If you had problems with your period before going on hormonal contraceptives then you’re at a greater risk of having a delay in the return of your period and your fertility.”
“The cervical fluid has these channels, it’s like a highway, that rapidly transports the sperm in, and if that isn’t enough, it also screens out abnormal sperm… the cervical mucus is dense enough so that if the sperm did have poor motility, they can’t really swim through and they get trapped.And the cervical fluid has these structures that attach to sperm with abnormal morphology and prevent them from moving forward.”
“Your average man in the 1940s had 113 mil sperm per mL and the average man today has an average of say 50 mil sperm/mL… suffice it to say, we have a huge problem because within a generation or two, we might not have men who can impregnate their spouses. Fortunately there are many things you can do to improve sperm quality!”
Nutrients for sperm quality: vitamin A, CoQ10, Fish oil (no smoking or marijuana)
The research minimizes the fact that there is a temporary delay in the return of fertility and… when you come off the pill and you’re not pregnant the day after, you start freaking out and so many of these women by month 6 or month 12 are already doing fertility treatments and they have no idea that there is a temporary delay in the return of normal fertility after the pill… these women are so stressed because they are going through what they didn’t know was a transition period post-pill. If someone had told you that your body needs a minimum of 6 months to a year to recover, this experience could be totally different for you."