Cycle tracking through a titration

Something I did not expect was how much of my long-standing hunger pattern was not a character flaw. That took a while to sit with.

What I would say is bring the whole history to the appointment. Mine was treated as a new problem for years because nobody joined the dots backwards.

My cycles changed within about four months, which nobody had told me to expect and which turned out to be the thing I most wanted to talk about.

Fifteen years of being told to try harder, and then one appointment where somebody actually explained the insulin side of it. I was furious for a month and then relieved.

Somebody here pointed out that most of the general advice is written for people without this, and once I stopped trying to make it fit I did much better.

Holding this with you rather than answering it.

Lu — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

The dismissal is the part that lingers. The physical side has been manageable; being disbelieved for a decade is what I am still working through.

The hair side of things is its own subject and I found the general advice unhelpful because it did not account for the underlying picture at all.

I have been under a specialist throughout and I would say that made an enormous difference compared to being managed generally.

What worked for me practically was resistance work twice a week. Not for any aesthetic reason — the effect on how I felt was noticeable within two months.

I keep a very simple cycle note alongside everything else and the correlation is visible over a year in a way it never is over a month.

The question I wish I had asked earlier was what specifically we were aiming to change, because "improve" turned out to mean four different things to four clinicians.