Have you heard of seed cycling?
What if I told you there is a very simple way to regulate your hormones and your periods, simply by eating certain foods at different times of the month? Seed cycling has been shown to help with all kinds of period problems including cramping, heaviness, and PCOS symptoms of menstrual irregularity, acne, hirsutism, etc. You won’t believe how simple it is!
Here’s how it works:
On the first day of your period, begin eating 1 tablespoon each of ground flaxseed and pumpkin seeds per day. Do this each day for two weeks. These seeds help your body to naturally create estrogen, which rises during the first part of your cycle. The fiber in these seeds also helps with metabolizing that estrogen, preventing estrogen dominance.
Starting on day 15 of your cycle, switch to eating 1 tablespoon each of sesame seeds and sunflower seeds daily. Sesame seeds are high in zinc, which is essential in the production of progesterone, the hormone that is highest during the second half of your cycle. Both sesame and sunflower seeds are also high in lignans and essential fatty acids, which helps your body to produce progesterone. Proper progesterone production helps to ease the common PMS symptoms of cramping, heaviness, acne, and many others!
Where do you get all these seeds?
Don’t you think Amazon is just amazing? While you can find most of these seeds in the baking aisle of most grocery stores, nothing beats the variety and convenience of Amazon, and it shows up on the door in just 2 days! Here are some of my favorites. You especially need to try the activated sprouted pumpkin seeds, they are beyond delicious!
My favorite option for sunflower seeds is actually this sunflower seed butter. I like to eat it out of the jar with a spoon!
How do you easily make this a habit and incorporate it into your daily eating habits?
- The simplest, most obvious way to get the seeds in your diet is a daily smoothie. Get those seeds in early in the day so you won’t forget, and the blender does the grinding for you!
- Energy balls – These are yummy, quick, nutrition-packed snacks that are full of seedy goodness! Drop your email in the box below to get some yummy and easy energy ball recipes!
- Use them in your regular cooking. Sesame seeds are a classic part of Asian dishes and it’s easy to find recipes that already include them. Pumpkin or sunflower seeds can be added to a salad, or on top of lettuce cups for some yummy crunch. There are so many delicious ways to incorporate them into your regular cooking.
- By the spoon or handful. Hi, my name is Emily, and I’m a Sunbutter addict. We were introduced to sunflower seed butter back when struggling with my daughter’s life-threatening peanut allergy, but even now that she has had an amazing treatment called OIT (a very long story for another day), I still can be found eating it straight out of the jar. You should also never be surprised to see me with a handful of pumpkin seeds, because yum!
But what if your cycle isn’t regular?
Most of my clients don’t have a regular cycle, at least not at first. So what do you do?
The most important thing about seed cycling is simply to start! Don’t worry about perfection. Our bodies need certain vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients in order to correctly build and balance our hormones, so getting those into your body is the most important thing.
A very common way to begin this when you don’t have a cycle is to use the moon as your guide until your cycles regulate. Start with the pumpkin/flax combo on the day of the next new moon, then switch to sunflower/sesame 14 days later. Then back to pumpkin/flax the next new moon.
Eventually, your cycles will begin to regulate, especially if you are also cutting processed foods and balancing your blood sugar (which we will talk more about next week). When that happens, you will change seeds based on your actual cycles.
That’s it! What questions do you have?
Don’t hesitate to send questions my way! Most of all I want to encourage you to just start! This method works better the more consistent you are with it, so start today and make sure to get those seeds in every single day! I can’t wait to hear how it works for you!
Happy, Healthy Eating!
Emily
Emily,
This is so interesting; thank you for sharing it! I knew someone years ago who I think was doing something like this to ease her unbalanced hormonal symptoms.
Are there references to a “seed cycling,” idea for post menopausal issues that you know of? I’m curious to know if/how these foods could be implemented to help at this different hormonal/non-cycling time of life.
Shawn
Great question! There are benefits to eating cyclically even for postmenopausal women and men. The easiest way to do this is to consider the new moon to be day 1 as your cycle. Google can quickly tell you when the date of the next new moon will be, so on that day you start the pumpkin and flax seeds. Then two weeks later you switch to sesame/sunflower. Give it a try and let me know how it goes!