How to Get a Period With PCOS

If you’ve made your way to this blog, I’m assuming you or someone you care about has PMOS and isn’t having a period.

So, let’s pretend we’re sitting together in a coffee shop and I’m going to tell you everything you need to know about how to get a period with PCOS, recently rebranded to PMOS, or polyendocrine metabolic syndrome.

We’ll talk about why women often don’t have a period with PMOS and what to do about it.

Why PCOS Can Cause Irregular or Missing Periods

PCOS, or PMOS, is an endocrine, ovarian, and metabolic syndrome that can present differently and in a variety of ways.

Often, women with PCOS are not ovulating and therefore have really long cycles and/or don’t have periods altogether.

Here’s what I want you to know: ovulation calls the shots in your menstrual cycle.

Most people believe that your period sets the tone for your menstrual cycle, but really, it’s the other way around. Ovulation calls the shots, and then your period follows ovulation.

So, if you’re not ovulating, your cycles are typically longer than normal, which would mean longer than 35 days.

What a Period Means With PCOS

Once you ovulate, the corpus luteum is formed as a product of ovulation, and it can only live for about 14 to 16 days.

If an egg is fertilized, then pregnancy follows. If pregnancy does not occur, the corpus luteum eventually breaks down. Once that happens, your period starts.

This is why I say ovulation calls the shots. Your period follows ovulation. So, if you’re not ovulating regularly with PCOS/PMOS, you’re not going to have a regular period following ovulation either.

Supporting Ovulation and a Regular Cycle

There are a lot of lifestyle interventions that can be beneficial for supporting true ovulation. A few of these include regular exercise, nourishing your body in a way that helps stabilize your blood sugar and reduce glucose spikes, supplementation, and managing inflammation.

Let’s dive a little bit deeper into each of those.

Nutrition and Lifestyle Factors

When it comes to moving your body, strength training is what I recommend. With strength training, you’re building muscle, and skeletal muscle is the biggest uptake of glucose. The more muscle you have, the more glucose is being metabolized by that muscle, which is going to help stabilize your blood sugar.

Walking, especially after meals, can also be extremely beneficial for utilizing the glucose in your bloodstream and helping blunt a blood sugar spike.

As far as nutrition goes, I don’t recommend overhauling your entire diet. That’s not realistic, and it’s not really a long-term plan.

Instead, the name of the game is managing glucose spikes first.

One of the simplest places to start is changing the order in which you eat your food. Try eating your fiber first, protein and fat second, and carbohydrates last. Instead of changing everything you eat, start there. This can help blunt the blood sugar spike as well.

And then we have supplements. There is a laundry list of supplements that can be beneficial for PCOS/PMOS, but if I could recommend one supplement for cycle regularity, it would be Ovasitol.

Ovasitol contains myo-inositol and D-chiro-inositol. With PCOS/PMOS, impaired inositol metabolism can contribute to insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia, which can then increase LH pulses and androgens and contribute to anovulation.

Myo-inositol acts as a second messenger for FSH and supports follicular development, while D-chiro-inositol acts as an aromatase modulator, helping decrease androgens and increase estradiol.

And one of the things I really like about it is that it may help restore ovulation even in women who don’t have insulin resistance.

You can read more about supplements to help manage PCOS here.

When to Seek Additional Support

If you have an irregular cycle with PMOS, I believe now is the time to seek additional support. I’m a big believer that early intervention is better.

Your menstrual cycle is really a report card of your overall health, so managing irregular cycles sooner rather than later is better.

Next Steps:

If you have an irregular cycle with PCOS, we would love to work with you. Our support is completely virtual, and you can find more information about what it’s like to work with us and how to sign up HERE. But I’ll give you the SparkNotes version.

When you sign up, you’ll automatically receive an intake form. We review your intake form and send your recommendations back to you via email. Then, you have two weeks to review and start implementing your plan with access to us through Voxer, which is essentially a walkie-talkie voice messaging app.

This is honestly my favorite part of the offer because you don’t have to worry about walking out of a doctor’s office, remembering a question you wanted to ask, and then having to wait weeks or months to go back and ask it.

You have access to us for two weeks so we can help you implement the strategies we recommend.

We would love to work with you. If you’re interested, you can sign up below.