50. The Hormone Disconnect Series - The Hormone Conversations Every Woman Needs to Hear (Episode 1)

So let's start with hormonal birth control.

If you go way back to episode one of the Healthy Buzz podcast, you know all about my story and my journey with hormonal birth control.

But if you're new here, let me do a quick little recap.

So for me, growing up, we never discussed hormones and our bodies in my house growing up.

I also was not allowed to attend sex ed in junior high, so my source of information had to be the YM and the Seventeen magazines.

Yes, I'm totally dating myself, but I don't care because that was what I had access to.

So when I went off to college, I started on the hormonal birth control pill, and nothing was really explained to me.

I remember going to Planned Parenthood and just being like, "I think I need to be on birth control.

I have really bad periods, and I don't quite understand what's going on with my body." So I started birth control at the age of 18, and I stayed on hormonal birth control of some form or fashion for a total of 17 years.

I never really felt like hormonal birth control fully worked.

Again, but I'm not quite for sure I knew what it meant to have it work either because nobody explained what it was actually doing to my body.

But I will tell you, I remember having mid-cycle spotting.

I remember feeling off a little bit, but I'm not quite for sure how or why.

It was just very confusing time for me.

And I would bounce between different pills because I'm like, "I don't think this is working." I'm not sure what I thought I needed for it to work, but I did know that, like, I didn't like spotting between my periods, and nobody ever told me either that that period that you have when you take the placebo pills is not a true period.

I had a lot of misinformation, or actually, I would say it was also a lack of knowledge when it came to hormonal birth control.

Then, probably for, like, the last four-ish years of my 17 years of hormonal birth control, I did switch to an IUD.

I switched because my friends were all having IUDs, and they were raving about how great they were.

And so I was like, "Okay, like, I don't really love taking this pill every day, and I'm not always very consistent with it, and sure, this sounds like an easier option, so why not?" So I remember I made an appointment with my OBGYN.

I showed up at their office, told them, "Hey, I wanna get an IUD." And they're like, "Okay, well, we have two options.

We have the Mirena IUD, and we have the copper IUD." And I was like, "What's the difference?" And basically, I remember the OBGYN telling me, "Well, with the Mirena IUD, you might not have your period.

Your period might stop altogether.

And with the copper IUD, you might have really heavy and long periods while your body's adjusting." And I was like, "Ugh, well, this is a no-fucking-brainer here," because I had really horrible periods before I started birth control.

So I was like, "I mean, sign me up for no periods.

This sounds lovely.