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Calm Your Titties: Introduction (or, Rottendog’s Guide to Not Being a Bitch)
Hello Internet, Dani Mouser of Ev Dogg For Mayor here. Welcome to the introductory video for my first series on a theme, where we’ll talk about all kinds of lady stuff, like... titties and vaginas. Okay, not just titties and vaginas. I plan to cover various topics relating to the menstrual cycle and hormone balancing.
Men and women are born with different challenges to face in life. Women are blessed with a beautifully intricate monthly hormonal cycle designed to bring us full circle from ovulation to menstruation, every 28 days. This monthly cycle doesn’t come with an instruction manual, and if you’re not careful, the ups and downs can quickly turn into a roller coaster of emotions for ourselves and everybody around us. In many ways, modern society has allowed us to lose touch with our body’s natural rhythms. This ignorance has become acceptable. There’s a reason the mentality of “I’m PMSing… deal with it!” is a common stereotype. Guess what, ladies: you CAN get your hormonal cycle under control and you DON’T have to be bitches! I’m here to help shed some light into the deep mysterious abyss of our society’s vaginal conundrum.
On a personal level, I’ve had what I believe to be a particularly challenging struggle with hormone balancing over the past four years. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, and far from it, but I’ve learned a thing or two during my journey and have done a great deal of research on the subject. I plan to continue my research over the next number of years, and it would be my pleasure to share my findings with you. My hope is that this will pique your curiosity, encourage you to start doing your own research, motivate you to stop making excuses, and take your hormones into your own hands.
Before I begin, I’d like to answer your inevitable question: Why should you listen to what I have to say? I’m happy to report that, today, I have a pretty consistent cycle of 28 days, and I have confirmed that my ovulation is on the correct day each month, give or take a day now and then. I have successfully eliminated many of my painful PMS side effects. Also, my cycle is now consistent enough that Evan and I use my tracking as our only form of birth control, and will easily be able to switch to conception planning when the time comes.
This first video will simply introduce you to my story, then subsequent videos will cover certain topics in greater detail.
Let’s start at the beginning. At the age of fifteen, I learned that the county health department provided free or low-cost birth control, and decided to get on the pill. I made an excuse to not take the school bus home and discreetly visited the clinic. The ladies in the office were very friendly and assured me that my appointments and services would be kept confidential from my parents. In order to receive a years’ worth of completely free birth control pills, for free, I would have to get an annual pelvic exam, pap smear, and STD test, also for free. Did I mention it was free?
I had no idea it was supposedly difficult for girls to get birth control, because at fifteen, I received pills, without going to a Planned Parenthood, and I didn’t pay a dime. I would return each year and the same smiling ladies in the office would greet me. Eventually, my income increased to the point that I did have to pay, but it was on a sliding scale, and the cost was minimal. I took my birth control like clockwork, only missing pills a handful of times, and my periods were short and light and relatively cramp-free. I continued to visit the clinic for fourteen years.
At the age of twenty-nine, as the vegan non-GMO vote-with-your-dollar-no-chemical-anything-not-even-hair-dye hippie lady that I had become, I decided birth control needed to go. By getting off the pill, I would be ingesting one less unnatural substance, and give my body a chance to be more natural. So I bought a cool gadget called the Lady Comp, which monitors your fertility or infertility by tracking your daily basal body temperature. (I’ll have another video on birth control alternatives later in this series). I stopped taking the pill… and waited… and waited. But my period didn’t come back.
Spoiler alert: It did eventually come back, almost a year to the day later. But during the course of that year, I tried everything to figure out what was wrong with me. Turns out, my period hadn’t returned because I had incredibly low amounts of hormones in my body, and an almost untraceable amount of oestrogen. Test after test and even an MRI led to the conclusion that I was “healthy as a horse” but no medical professional could figure out why my body was not producing oestrogen. The last doctor I went to insisted that I start taking synthetic hormones IMMEDIATELY. As in, THAT DAY. On the way home! She only casually mentioned that once I start taking them, I would have to take them for the rest of my life. Her reasoning for this was because I was a relatively young and physically fit but I had the oestrogen levels of a postmenopausal woman and a uterine lining that was almost non-existent.
Now, there were a number of factors in my life that most likely contributed to this, which doctors and blood tests simply couldn’t find: prolonged high levels of stress and anxiety, a lifetime of deeply suppressed depression, and perhaps a disorder called sympathetic dominance, which essentially causes the body to constantly be in fight-or-flight mode. If you are of the belief that the mind has an affect on a person’s physical body, then you could also take into consideration that I spent my life with a fear of my own body, disgust with my period, and a gut-level rejection of all things I thought were “womanly”.
I’m gonna go off on a little tangent here. Looking back now, the biggest contributing reason my period was missing was probably my addiction to exercise. I know that term gets thrown around, but I don’t mean that lightly; this was a serious addiction. I would wake up at 5:00 in the morning and spend multiple hours in the gym six days a week, doing incredibly rigorous routines to work towards incredibly challenging goals. I weighed and tracked every tiny piece of food that went into my mouth, and only ate carefully designed meals at carefully planned times of day, to coincide with what I needed to fuel or recover from my workouts. Over the course of two years, I dropped from 199 pounds to 109 pounds. Then once I thought I was skinny enough, I reconfigured my routine and proceeded to continue to lose fat while gaining nearly twenty pounds of muscle. I know a lot of meatheads say that’s impossible, but I have the meticulously detailed logs of my weight and professionally measured body fat tests every six weeks to prove it. In the end, I found myself pretty beefy at 124 pounds and 10% body fat.
If you’re not familiar with body fat percentages, that number is super dangerously low for a woman to maintain for any length of time. Amenorrhea is the condition where a woman loses her period, common among female athletes. Basically, one of the roles of body fat is to store hormones (notably estrogen and progesterone) and if there is not enough fat to store a sufficient amount of these hormones, the levels drop to the point where the body can no longer sustain the menstrual cycle.
In a fucked up way, I find myself still proud of the fact that I was able to accomplish what I did, with such precision, while learning so much about the science of exercise, strength training, and sports nutrition. But it came with a serious detrimental cost. At the time, I would’ve denied this furiously, but I can see now that I clearly had all the telltale signs of three mental disorders: Anorexia Athletica (also referred to as Sports Anorexia or Hypergymnasia, characterized by excessive and compulsive exercise), Orthorexia Nervosa (characterized by obsessing over eating only healthy food), and Body Dysmorphic Disorder (characterized by an obsessive preoccupation with perceived flaws in one’s body or appearance).
Another interesting angle to view this from is our body’s genetics. When a woman allows her fat stores to drop dangerously low, her body gets worried on a cellular level. Her cells begin to wonder: Are fat deposits so low that this body is starving? Is this body running for hours every day, because it is being chased by tigers? Are food supplies so scarce that this body cannot find enough sustenance? Then the last thing this woman needs is another mouth to feed. Her body decides to reserve the energy expenditure necessary to perform certain tasks (such as ovulating, building and shedding the uterus lining each month, and even maintaining a healthy libido) and instead puts that energy into simply staying alive… so she can outrun those tigers!
Okay, thanks for going off on that tangent with me; let’s return to my story. After months of tests and no medical conclusion, I found myself thirty years old and at a turning point in my life. I mentioned that I had been suppressing depression most of my life, and my thick shell of denial was starting to crack. I had been lying to myself for so long that I did not know what was wrong… I could not put into words what was wrong… I just felt that something was terribly wrong. I couldn’t deny it anymore and I abruptly changed everything about my life, packed my bags, got a divorce, cut ties, quit my job, and moved to Portland. After a few months in a new city, it became painfully clear that a change of scenery was not doing the trick. I fell into the same old habits and made bad and worse decisions.
While I was continuing to spiral downwards, my period returned, with a vengeance. The weeks leading up to, and the weeks after, I experienced what can only be described as a second puberty. Plug your ears, boys. I had super painful heavy bleeding with lots of dark clots and crippling cramps. My whole face broke out big time with junior high-style acne. My PMS symptoms were out of control, my boobs were super sore, and I was even more of an emotional train wreck than usual. The following months of periods continued to be irregular and terrible. I immediately started tracking my cycle and researching hormone balancing.
Fortunately, also at this same time, my friendship was rekindled with my old friend Ev Dogg. We spent many late nights having deep conversations, and I found myself comfortable enough to start opening up to him about things I had never spoken about in my life. Our friendship blossomed into our relationship, and today I’m happy to call him my fiance. But in those early months, it quickly became apparent that I was lacking an understanding of my true self, and instead was overflowing with denial and fears from my traumatic experiences. There was a lot of hard work ahead of me, and if I’m honest, still is. I had been considering seeking professional guidance, and Evan encouraged me to do so. I started counseling and began the exhausting task of sorting through my baggage. That was just over three years ago, and wraps up where my hormone balancing journey actually began, in tandem with my mental health journey.
As a note, there are two things I wish I could tell my fifteen year old self before getting on the pill: It is documented that young girls using hormonal birth control, and the prolonged use of birth control, have potential long-term side effects. My experience falls under both of those categories. Turns out, a young woman’s body has to learn how to make hormones and cannot do so well without practice. Many girls have issues during puberty because they still have their training wheels on. Our bodies are lazy, and when they’re fed synthetic pseudo-hormone alternatives, they’ll eventually become reliant on outside sources for what they should be producing on their own. The periods women experience while on hormonal birth control are not “real” periods, but rather a forced bleed induced by withdrawal from the drug blocking your ovulation. A full real cycle requires the necessary step of ovulation, and will culminate in menstruation. The friendly doctor who gave me my pills every year for fourteen years, never mentioned this, and I blindly trusted her.
As I said, this has been an introduction to what will be my first video series. In the upcoming episodes, I’ll cover topics relating to the menstrual hormone cycle. Some topics I have planned are: an overview of our 28-day cycles and the science behind what is actually happening in our bodies, a variety of ways to track your cycle, how to achieve regularity and consistency with the use of seed cycling, how to reduce or eliminate your PMS symptoms, the possible link between our menstruation and the moon, other factors that may contribute to hormone imbalance, suggestions to identify and diffuse emotional outbursts, and how to CHILL THE FUCK OUT, including my personal favorite, how the scent of male sweat makes women relax. Ahhhhh.
If you are currently experiencing difficult period issues or PMS symptoms, please don’t lose hope, give up, or turn to synthetic hormones for an answer. I hope you’ve found some comfort in learning my story, and seeing how far I’ve progressed. If I can do it, you can do it too. Hang in there. It’s important that we women take our hormones into our own hands. When we allow our hormones to spiral out of control, it puts the burden of processing our emotions onto the shoulders of those around us, particularly the ones we love. Take responsibility for yourself, your body, and your actions. Stop being a bitch and become a master of your emotions and your vagina. This has been Dani Mouser of Ev Dogg for Mayor. Until next time, calm your titties.
Thanks for reading,
Dani a.k.a. Dani Dogg a.k.a.
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