Balancing Hormones Through Seed Cycling

Seed cycling is especially beneficial to women who experience any or all of the following:

• Irregular periods
• Painful periods
• PMS (includes mood swings, bloat, headaches)
• Heavy flow
• Menopause symptoms such as hot flashes and insomnia
• Symptoms of PCOS, Endometriosis and Fibroids
• Balancing hormones post pill

Women who are pregnant.

In order to do seed cycling you must track your cycle. Ideally you would begin seed cycling on day one of your cycle, that is the first day of your period.

Seed cycling can be particularly effective at helping you to get your period back and regulating your cycle but first we must define irregular.

Your cycle is considered irregular if it CONSISTENTLY varies by more than 8 days from cycle to cycle. Anywhere from 24-35 days is considered a healthy cycle of which 28 days is simply an average.

Scenario A:
So let’s say your cycle length is usually 31 days but this month you had a death in the family which brought on sudden stress around the time of ovulation. You can expect that your cycle may be longer than usual if the stress delayed ovulation. This is NOT an irregular cycle.

Scenario B:
If however one month your cycle is 40 days then the next 49 then 27 etc. etc., you can consider that this IS an irregular cycle.

There are so many reasons why your cycle can be irregular and without knowing your FULL health history it’s impossible for me to determine but irregular cycles can be due to:

• elevated stress levels from a sub-optimal diet and other negative stress triggers
• over exercise and under eating
• PCOS
• if you’re just coming off hormonal birth control
• peri- menopause
• thyroid irregularities

Also if you’re a teen who has just started her menstrual cycle it’s pretty common to have irregular cycles as your body gets into the rhythm of things.

If your menstrual cycle is truly irregular meaning as described above it does not fall into the cycle length of 24-35 days AND varies by more than 8 days from cycle to cycle then you would generally ‘disregard’ your own cycle length and follow the moon cycle of 28 days in hopes of coaxing your own cycle to fall into place. Check a moon calendar and start seed cycling with either the full or new moon whichever is closest.

• Phase 1 seeds – New Moon
• Phase 2 seeds – Full Moon

If your cycle started off as irregular and since seed cycling has ‘normalised’ you can choose to stop using the moon calendar and follow your own cycle. The choice is yours!

I have given you all the information I know on seed cycling now the decision is yours to make. You know what’s best for your body.

You may eat other nuts and seeds but if you are to see the benefits of seed cycling it’s best not to eat the seeds from one phase in another. So you could eat say chia seeds throughout your cycle but you wouldn’t want to eat flax seeds during the second half of your cycle for example.

I have personally seen the benefits of seed cycling so I can confidently say that yes it does work!

Most women in my practice have seen massive improvement in their symptoms when following seed cycling for at least 3 cycles. That said seed cycling is not a magic bullet. A healthy diet and lifestyle are needed if you are to see an improvement in your symptoms. Don’t go sprinkling these seeds on your Mcdonald’s and expect it to work.

If you are estrogen dominant that does not mean that you need to completely eliminate plant based estrogens such as flax. The issue with estrogen dominance is not that you have too much estrogen but that there is an inability to effectively break down and excrete estrogen. Women need estrogen for healthy menses, breasts, skin and hair. Flaxseeds are pretty remarkable in that they can increase estrogen or block estrogen depending on the needs of your body. That said there are women who don’t do well on flaxseeds. My advice would be to give seed cycling a try and keep a journal of your symptoms. That’s the only way to know if its for you or not.

Seed cycling is a gentle a noninvasive food as medicine therapy. The only potential side effect is that whole seeds can cause digestive discomfort for some. (This is why we grind the seeds) By consuming the seeds ground you will GREATLY minimize any chances of digestive upset, which is really nothing compared to the long-term risk factors involved in taking the pill or other artificial hormonal therapies. If you decide to give it a try, make sure you keep track of your symptoms in a journal so you can exactly determine if seed cycling works for your body.

Flax seeds and sesame seeds MUST be ground as they are just too tiny to be broken down completely by your teeth. You can get away with not grinding pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds if you’re good at chewing but if you’re going to be grinding the other two seeds anyways you might as well. Of course, if you’re adding your seeds to a smoothie then the blender will break them down and you don’t need to grind them beforehand.

I understand that remembering to eat your daily dose of seeds might be challenging at first so
here are some ideas to get you started.

What’s important to remember is that in order to see the real benefits of seed cycling your seeds should be taken RAW and GROUND. So, any seed cycling recipe where the seeds are cooked, baked etc isn’t truly seed cycling.