I started a new job this week. It’s been a wonderful experience so far, and has been living up to all my hopes and excitement from the interview process. As luck would have it, my body chose Sunday — the day before my first day and the actual first day of Power 11 — to come down with a head cold.

It chose today to start my period.

Last year, before June, I had exactly two periods. That’s it. For 5 months. They were long, heavy, painful, and obviously irregular.
Starting in (and including) June, I had 7. The first 3 were still irregularly timed and chaotic, but I’ve had one every month since October now, with only one of them being debilitatingly heavy.

This is a very big deal.

I have never had naturally regular periods, even as a teen or young adult. In college, I was diagnosed with PCOS, which — cruelly — both exacerbates and is exacerbated by obesity. For unrelated medical reasons, I’ve been off the pill for several years and can never again take hormonal birth control, so my body and I have been trying to navigate my erratic cycle on our own since then.

It has not gone well.
Until now…?

With my age (fertility-old), size (still big), and health (PCOS doesn’t magically go away), I never imagined that my periods would one day regulate themselves. I almost added the phrase “without intervention” to that sentence, but in fact, there has been an intervention: I broke up with sugar.

Sugar is a known hormone disruptor, and I’ve been poisoning myself with it for my entire life. Just 7 months into a drastic sugar redulction, and my grateful physiology was like “THANK YOU, I will now immediately repair decades of damage in a shockingly small fraction of that time!” I’m on a whole deep dive with this right now that I will spare anyone reading this from spiraling into with me, but suffice it to say this is a rich topic. The superstitious part of me hesitates to pronounce anything actually “healed” when it comes to my reproductive health, but something has been mended. Even if that’s not the case, all the symptoms of improvement are there, and the only thing that’s changed has been how I care for my physical health. Exercise has certainly been a positive factor contributing to this development, but I’m convinced it has a majority to do with nutrition.

Whether or not the return of my regular, naturally occurring periods is a fluke, I am happy and relieved about it. But I’d call 6+ months a pretty long probation. I hope my normal cycle still going strong by the time I’m no longer “new” in my job — and well beyond then.

Welcome back from probation, period. Most women won’t understand this, but… I missed you.