Hypothalamic Amenorrhea - GIRLS PLEASE READ THIS🫶🏼

Hypothalamic amenorrhea (HA) is when your periods stop because your body does not produce enough female hormones (oestrogen + progesterone) to have a cycle. The most common causes of HA are: 
⚠️Being underweight or low body fat
⚠️Losing a lot of body weight
⚠️Under eating or prolonged dieting
⚠️excessive exercise
⚠️high anxiety and stress
⚠️disordered/restrictive eating

❗️LETS DISCUSS WHY is it so important to have a period... 
👉🏼Lots of you might want abs > a period, but it’s not even just fertility implications you need to consider. HA “switches off” signals to the HPA axis which then stops your body producing the hormones needed to have a period. So your body is LITERALLY shutting down & refusing to function as it should when you stop having periods; to keep you alive!! Which can then. lead to premature osteoporosis, increased risk of heart + blood vessel disorders, increased anxiety/ depression... the list goes on..

I lost my period for 2 years... I used to be 48-49kg, I was nutrient deprived, under-eating, extremely low body fat, under a lot of stress, doing too much cardio... my body was barely functioning for my day to day activity let alone sitting at optimal reproductive health levels. ALSO: my LIGHTEST weight (on the left) was also a time when my insecurities were at an all time high! Let that sink in😔

I’m going to do another post with more evidence backed tips to regain your period & to delve into this in much more detail; but some of the things I had to do to get mine back were:
⬆️GAIN WEIGHT (I’m now 8kg heavier)
⏰Patience... it literally took me 2 years+
🏋🏼‍♀️Reduce overall training volume + reducing high intensity cardio (I used to do A LOT of this)
🥑Increasing my calorie intake, consuming more healthy fats AND CARBS!
🧘🏼‍♀️REDUCING STRESS & prioritising my sleep
💊& I took a number of supplements which were *supplementary* to the other nutrition, exercise + lifestyle interventions above ^ including Inositol, Magnesium, VitaminC

REMEMBER: everyone is different but this is just a little bit about my experience. Please seek professional advice if you think you have HA 💛 @emmafituk_