If you’ve nosed around in the posts on my own experiments or read some of my many posts on nutrition and insulin resistance, you might have come across a reference to continuous glucose monitoring. This tool has been a game-changer for the refining I needed to address my last bits of hormonal dysregulation. If you’ve been diagnosed with PCOS, you’ve likely (and hopefully!) had a metabolic panel done that included fasting blood sugar and fasting insulin levels. These provide a basic snapshot of how you’re doing at one point in time. If you’re like me, and a relatively small percentage of women with PCOS, your numbers might have been fine, and you might think this post isn’t for you. You might be correct, but maybe read on just in case.
Tools for Stress for Women with PCOS (Or Really for Anyone!)
While everyone should be proactively managing stress in their lives, it is especially important if you have PCOS. I’ve found that I can “get away” with more in terms of poor diet and lack of sleep during times of either less sources of stress or more proactive management of stress.
I think a lot of us also underestimate how much stress is impacting our bodies because a baseline of high stress has become our normal. Our nervous systems are chronically pushed into their sympathetic state. It’s not until we go on a restful vacation or finally get some sort of a break from our stressors that we realize just how much our nervous system had been in overdrive.
How to Use Basal Body Temperature Tracking for PCOS
In September 2020, I decided to try to quit hormonal birth control for the second time. Part of my plan included tracking my basal body temperature to know whether or not I was ovulating. Tracking also allowed me to do a bit of detective work when my hormones were getting out of whack and delaying ovulation, and now it helps me to adjust my nutrition according to cycle phase to regulate my blood sugar. It’s such a simple, yet powerful tool.