Cycle syncing may sound quite like the latest buzzword of the “wellness-focused” (notice how I put it in quotation…) society we live in.

You may have seen your favorite health and wellness influencer on TikTok talking about going on a cycle syncing journey to “balance her hormones”, “improve clarity” or other things like it, without really explaining to her audience what cycle syncing is and why it’s important for you. Or if it even is important for you!

Social media is the perfect place to be infested with new diet trends, like a load of cow manure during a summer evening is pestered with flies, but this “health media plague” has been going on for ages: nowadays it’s TikTok influencers, but before them it was magazines, the TV, or the radio.

Well, I am here personally to explain why cycle syncing is something that you should pay attention to: why it’s not a fad diet or a new TikTok trend, but a way to regain control over our bodies and take the place in society that we deserve to occupy.

What is Cycle Syncing

The idea behind cycle syncing in reality is quite simple. Women go through the menstrual cycle, which has four different phases where hormonal changes happen cyclically. We women can adapt our lifestyles to help our bodies complete these hormonal patterns, which in turn will help us live a more fulfilling and healthy life.

There is a biological difference between men and women that, as a collective, we’re not taking into consideration. How our human society is structured follows the circadian rhythm, which is the body’s natural 24-hour clock. We wake up in the morning, have breakfast, and work for the majority of the day starting in the morning, and during the late afternoon and evening we relax and wind down until we’re ready for bed, we go to sleep and the cycle begins again.

This is all fun and games until you realize that this is how we’re supposed to be every single day. We’re supposed to have the same amount of energy that then slowly fades towards the evening.

And guess what?

This is a structure that benefits men and men only!

Men’s hormonal cycle lasts 24 hours and fully aligns with the circadian rhythm. In contrast, women experience an additional biological rhythm known as the infradian rhythm, which corresponds to their menstrual cycle. In simpler terms, while men have one biological clock, women operate with two.

The Four Phases of Our Cycle

Now that we’ve explained the difference between the infradian rhythm and the circadian rhythm, it’s time to explain the phases of the menstrual cycle in detail. Here’s a helpful infographic that I prepared for you:

As you can see, we have these four phases, - follicular, ovulatory, luteal and menstrual - that cyclically repeat every month in the same exact order.

Every phase, as stated in the infographic, has its hormonal patterns: different hormones are at play depending on the phase of the cycle that you’re in, therefore you can adapt your lifestyle to support those natural changes.

It’s a way to work with your body, not against it.

For the sake of simplicity I won’t go into details about the exact lifestyle changes you can make, but if you want to learn more about the individual phases, you can click on the links below to find the articles dedicated to each specific phase:

Follicular Phase 101 (coming soon)
Ovulatory Phase 101 (coming soon)
Luteal Phase 101 (coming soon)
Menstrual Phase 101 (coming soon)

Why is Cycle Syncing so important?

For too long women have been seen and treated like “smaller men”: from new drug tests (ah by the way: did you know that women have been almost entirely excluded from medical research until 1993? Let that sink in.), to productivity hacks, to wellness plans and so much more. This has to stop.

We’re working and living against our bodies, and then we’re surprised we’re having health issues: maybe you’re eating super healthy and clean, exercising well, and following every “textbook health advice”, but you’re still experiencing excruciating pains during every single menstruation, or your periods are irregular or even missing, PMS is your worst enemy, or you may experience ovulation pains. And what do you do about it? You swallow ibuprofen because you can’t do otherwise. After all, the world won’t stop for you.

And this makes me so enraged (maybe you can tell! I’m not editing anything, I want you to feel all the rage that I felt when I found out about cycle syncing for the first time): healthy young women suffering for years because despite eating perfectly, working out, getting 8 hours of sleep, they haven’t had a period in three years or so, women struggling with PCOS or hormonal imbalance and being told that they simply need to “eat less and exercise more”.

If you’re angry, I agree. It’s so unfair.

We’re embarrassingly ignorant about women’s bodies.

Now, mine does NOT want to be an attack on doctors and traditional Western medicine in itself: so many heroes every day work in hospitals and try to find cures to awful illnesses with so much care and love for others. Without medical advancement we would still be dealing with terrible diseases, our life expectancy would be a lot lower, we wouldn’t have prosthetic limbs and so much more. Rather, I want to point out that there’s still so much work to do, especially when it comes to understanding the female body, how it works, and how to care for it.

On top of it, so many industries are afloat and thriving on women’s hatred towards themselves and their bodies.

Our body is the vessel that we use to live our lives: it’s the point of contact where our internal world meets the external world. It’s the only way we have to live outside of our mind, and the more we mine the relationship with our bodies, the more distanced we’ll be from it, and the more confused and unsafe we will feel.

If you knew that you couldn’t trust your vehicle to get you home safely, would you drive confidently? If you knew that your apartment isn’t habitable anymore, would you feel alright being in it, or inviting other people in it?

I don’t think so.

But it’s the same thing. How can you advocate for yourself, your beliefs, and what is important to you, when the vessel you use to do so is one you don’t feel safe in? How can you stand up, keep your head up, and not let society step on you when your own body is your first enemy?

I want you to start living with your body and not against it.

I want you to actually find a lifestyle that you can carry on for life, instead of following new fabricated trends with zero scientific evidence in the hopes that you’ll achieve self-love.

I want you to feel free from toxic beauty and behavior standards because you feel confident in your body and in your ability to live in it.

This is what this blog is about. I want to talk about the oppression that we face, starting from the smallest pimple or enlarged pore on our face, and ending with a large-scale misogynistic culture that we’re working hard to dismantle.

If you want to get into cycle syncing and join the revolution, well… keep following for weekly recipes and new articles!

Cycle Syncing 101: What it is and why it’s important