Listen to this week’s episode of EMBody Radio here:
Do you take or have you taken hormonal birth control? Do you understand your own menstrual cycle? Have you ever tried to go off birth control and had an awful time trying to regain your natural cycle?
Today I had the pleasure of interviewing Victoria Felkar once again. She was in some of the first episodes of EMBody Radio (episodes 5 & 6 to be exact), and she is a wealth of knowledge. Victoria is a researcher and she studies the things that other people don’t seem to want to touch – women and hormones, particularly exogenous ones like birth control and anabolic androgenic steroids.
As usual, we talked on and on, so this is part 1 of 2 episodes. In today’s show, we talk about:
-hormone history and where the gendering of hormones began (“male” hormones vs “female” hormones)
-the back story of hormones
-the back story of sports medicine/hormone manipulation
-the development of synthetic hormones (estrogen, testosterone, progesterone)
-how hormonal birth control pills and anabolic androgenic steroids are both “enhancement drugs” from a performance perspective/when used for sport
-hormonal birth control pills, why it’s prescribed, drug effects, different kinds of synthetic BC pills
-getting to know your cycle and how to track it (free Menstrual Cycle Tracker: Menstrual Cycle Diaries)
-why we need to stop demonizing estrogen
-castrating the HPO axis (hypothalamus-pituitary-ovarian axis) via synthetic estrogens, i.e. birth control
-the importance of ovulation
-does birth control make fat loss harder and why
-SO MUCH MORE!