This is a guest post that I wrote for Hannah Ransom’s blog: Holistic Hormonal Health. I interviewed Hannah on The Fertility Friday Podcast, and we talked all about Fertility Awareness and how it can be used in conjunction with barrier methods such as condoms, and we talk in depth about the withdrawal method for birth control, and why with perfect use it is up to 94% effective. Click here to tune into our interview!
I can honestly say that one of the greatest gifts I have had in my life is learning that I could use my own body as birth control, for free, and in a way that is more effective than the birth control pill. I consider myself to be extremely lucky to have discovered the fertility awareness method when I was 19. I really dodged a bullet, so to speak, because I have never actually used hormonal contraceptives for birth control. That doesn’t mean I’ve never taken the pill though.
Like many women, I was put on the pill around age 15 or 16 because my cycles were extremely painful and heavy from the very beginning. Without steady doses of drugs throughout my period (ibuprofen was my go-to) I wasn’t able to leave the house due to the crippling pain I experienced every time I bled. I know now that my diet of hormone laced meat and dairy products, highly unstable vegetable oils, and my excessive sugar intake significantly contributed to my problematic periods, but back then I didn’t even have a computer, let alone internet access so I was limited in my ability to gather information. I had no idea why my periods hurt so badly, I definitely didn’t know that they could be healed naturally, and neither did my doctor.
Even though more than a decade has passed since then doctors continue to prescribe the pill as the “cure-all” for every type of menstrual irregularity under the sun. I’d argue that on some level we all know that the pill doesn’t cure or fix anything because we know that the moment we stop taking it any issues we were having just come back worse than they were, to begin with.
I was fortunate to grow up in a household where taking pills every day was definitely not the norm. My parents were skeptical of the concept of taking pills every single day, especially when you’re not sick. So I always thought of the pill as a temporary solution for my pain problem. Looking back I had a great deal of wisdom because I knew that periods shouldn’t hurt and something was wrong, but I didn’t know how to fix it.
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