- Looking after my endocrine system
- Reducing my weight back to normal after gaining 3kg
- Completing four weeks of C25K
- Creating a balcony garden
I’ve been enjoying learning all about the endocrine/ hormones system in the last couple of weeks, I’ve always been fascinated by biology, but these days with our modern technologies we are quite out of touch with nature. I changed my goal in this area just to ‘looking after my endocrine system’ which is much more vague, but biology knows best and all I can do is live in a way which best supports my entire body-system. I’d love it if there was some way you could go to a doctor or naturopath and take a quick test and then the next day you get a print-out of how healthy you are in all the different systems of the body. It would be great! You could take the test every few weeks and have the data plotted on a chart so you could see if any specific system was out of balance.
Ladycomp
I’ve been using Basal Body Temperature (BBT) charting for two and a half months now, so I’m only new at it, but it is very interesting to see how your body reacts to different circumstances. Originally I bought my Ladycomp thermometer/fertility computer to be used as a natural contraception method, but I was curious as to what a cycle really looks like so I’ve been plotting it as a chart in excel.
Basically the way the Ladycomp works is that when your body is in its estrogen phase your temperatures will be lower than when you are in your progesterone phase. When your body goes from estrogen phase to progesterone phase that is when you have ovulated. In a perfect menstrual cycle aligned with the lunar cycle a woman should have 14 days in estrogen phase including menstruation and 14 days in progesterone phase with an ovulation occurring right in the middle. These days due to work and life stress, xenoestrogens in the environment, synthetic hormone medication (such as the birth control pill and HRT) and being out of touch with our bodies our cycles are not usually perfect. The Ladycomp learns your cycles so that you don’t need to plot them manually, but I’ve found it fun to plot it manually anyway so that I can see if my body is in good health or if there is something not quite right.
One thing I noticed that was quite dramatic is that one evening I ate some raw chocolate (only about 30-40g, but it still contains caffeine) and that night I was sleeping very restlessly. When I took my temperature upon waking my temperature was up very high. The next day something happened that made the whole day very stressful and I spent quite a bit of the day feeling upset. When I took my temperature the following morning my temperature had plummeted to lower than it had been before the rise, so I had a crazy-looking spike in the middle of my chart. So my current theory is that having a fair bit of ups and downs in the chart means the adrenals are being overworked.
Given its not good to overwork the adrenals my plan at the moment is to try to give my adrenal system a rest and see if the temperatures balance out without any spikes. Maca is an endocrine system adaptogen and so by consuming it every day with my food (as I have been doing) I expect that it will take some burden off the adrenals. I am still wondering about measurement – maybe I can measure adrenal activity by getting excel to plot the average square of the difference from the mean temperature and comparing the 30 days with maca to 30 days without maca. I’m sure its not that simple though 
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