I'm Too Big to Have Hypothalamic Amenorrhea

This blog post is an adaption from a recent podcast episode I made. Listen to the Hypothalamic Amenorrhea Podcast I Don't Look Like An HA'er.

YIKES gals, a big topic today.

But an interesting one. In fact, when I first shared my HA story, which you can listen to the podcast version of or watch on YouTube video, this was one of the things that resonated with so many girls about my story.

I did not think that I fit the description of someone with hypothalamic amenorrhea or “HA”.

I wasn’t super lean.

I wasn’t crazy working out, only once a day 6 days a week...but I mean, isn’t that what everyone does? As Paleolithic humans weren’t we always super active? Which I realize in retrospect probably not, we probably spent a lot of time hanging around like most animals do.

I wasn’t in a calorie deficit all the time.

The books and doctors and professionals say that a missing period is mostly only seen in super lean people. It’s unlikely to happen in someone with a normal BMI like me.

I do not look like an HA girl.

This means that I probably don’t need to eat more, right? And my exercise is probably fine.

This means that I can probably just supplement my way out of HA.

I share this with you today because I know I’m not alone. I’m not the only one who feels like they don’t fit the description of having hypothalamic amenorrhea. So, if you need a little encouragement and confirmation that you’re probably on the right track, I shall do that for you!

Why You Have Hypothalamic Amenorrhea Even If You’re Not Really Lean

1. Your body doesn’t care about the averages.
   Your body does NOT care about the studies and averages cited in research. You are not an average. Your body doesn’t care that the average woman of your height and lifestyle weighs X amount, although I fully understand why you might hold on to that for comfort and guidance.
   
   It actually doesn’t care. You are a special unique snowflake in the sense that you need to gain whatever your body determines it needs to – and that’s about the only thing that makes you special in the case of HA.
   
   I know this can be hard to take on sometimes especially if you’re someone who is basing a lot of their recovery from what the books and studies are telling you, but I assure you that there is more to your story and the intelligence and complexity of your body.
   

2. Do you resonate with what you hear around you?
   A quick question: do you resonate with a lot of what you hear around you? I know that not all women actually have ED’s, over training or body image issues and that some of you listening actually struggle more with autoimmune disease and gut health issues that got you here, but do you resonate with the theme of food restriction of some kind? With the idea of “good and bad” food, or “right and wrong” behaviours around food or exercise?
   
   If you’ve ever had any of those tendencies, you don’t need to look any particular way to be susceptible to getting HA because those behaviours are stressful to our bodies both physically and mentally, and allow us to feel unsafe.
   
   Think of it this way, your reproductive system starts in the brain. The hypothalamic sends a signal to the ovaries to begin the process of ovulation. It’s a message from the brain that the brain only sends when the coast is clear enough to do so. To discount your mental state and its role in your reproductive health, and determine that everything is 100% set on your being underweight is a gross misunderstanding of the complexity of your body.
   
   So, if you have a history of stressing a lot and putting your body through lots of rules and restrictions, you’d better believe that you look like an HA’er right now!
   
   Let’s use me as an example…
   
   I’m going to go back through my earlier statements about what held me back from feeling like I fit the bill as an HA’er and really committing to the work I needed to do.
   
   I wasn’t super lean.
   I thought I wasn’t lean enough to have HA – but now, as I look back on photos, I can see the reality. I had an unrealistic idea of what “lean enough” was, and my goals were set to become as lean as possible. This meant that no amount of lean for me was enough and the bar I had set for what a lean body was, was way too high.
   
   I also had gotten to that weight pretty quick, within a year. That means that a rapid change happened and that a lot of restrictions went down in a short period of time. How else can I expect my brain and body to perceive this situation?
   
   I wasn’t crazy working out, only once a day 6 days a week…
   
   Umm, 6 times a week is a LOT. And I had an active job on my feet in a cafe 7 days a week. Why was I working 7 days a week? Because I OWNED the cafe. Talk about stress on the mind and the body. In what world I thought I could get away with working 7 days a week, training 6 days and eating low calories is beyond comprehension for me now.
   
   I wasn’t in a calorie deficit all the time.
   
   As I just said, I was putting my body through a lot so I probably was in a decent deficit but mainly I felt that I wasn’t in a calorie deficit because every weekend or two, I would totally binge out. I was so so hungry.
   
   I would eat all of the chips and guac in my cafe, or I would go alone to a restaurant and order something HUGE and make myself sick. I might stop and the store on the way home when I was in total binge mode and buy a family block of chocolate and eat the whole thing.
   
   Each time I would break myself out of my diet and binge I felt like I was starting from scratch. Like I was never really in a deficit and I was losing weight slower now because I was always breaking the overall deficit for the week.
   
   The reality is I was constantly in a deficit and breaking out of it for only 1 day a week due to starvation. I was so obsessed with my ‘overall deficit’ because that's the science of losing weight, that I was totally ignoring the constant deficit I was in on a day to day basis.
   
   Apparently 1 day every week or two in a surplus is supposed to make everything go away...yeah...it made sense at the time.

So the moral of the story here is that we look a whole lot more like an HA’er than we often think we do.

We’re setting way too high a standard on what someone with a mission period should look like, when the reality is that it doesn't take a whole lot to bump our bodies out of homeostasis and to see a decline in our hormone production.

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