A Beginner's Guide to Cycle Syncing & Recipes

Kahlee York used what she learned from her own experience as a Kinesiology major, Integrative Nutrition Coach, and collegiate and professional beach volleyball player to develop a first of its kind course that empowers female athletes to work with their cycle to optimize their performance and life. In this episode of What I Meant to Say with Wendy Jones, produced by Be Better Media, Kahlee and Wendy do a deep dive on all you can learn from taking her new Be Better produced course, Go With the Flow: A Beginner's Guide to Cycle Syncing & Recipes. Come learn about the best ways to train and fuel your body for the four different phases of your reproductive hormone cycle so you can feel and perform at your best on and off the court.

This course is designed to teach female athletes about their infradian rhythm, the hormone cycle that often is ONLY associated with one's period. However, despite only being on your period for 3-7 days, women experience hormonal fluctuations over the course of around a 28-day span. These fluctuations are our hormone cycle and are split up into four phases: menstrual, follicular, ovulation, and luteal. In each phase, due to these hormonal fluctuations, one's body has different requirements to feel their best and ultimately, as an athlete, perform their best.

Go with the Flow is a wholistic and nonrestrictive approach that athletics is often missing. Hormonal health, nutrition, and lifestyle are all interrelated and play a large role in not only a women's athletic performance but in her daily life as well. This approach allows women to combine an intuitive outlook to trusting their bodies along with the education of understanding their bodies to find a flow that honors her individual body and goals.

*Please note that nothing I am sharing is medical advice and should not be regarded as such. I am sharing information I have gathered through my education and experiences as a collegiate to professional athlete. While everything I’m sharing is natural, one should consult with a doctor before making any dramatic changes. Take what fits for you and leave the rest!

Course Expectations

• The only expectation is open and honest communication with yourself! This course was designed to help you on your journey to become the best version of yourself, but you will only get out of it what you put into it.

• Goal Setting: SMART - Print out the worksheet below and write your SMART goals for this Go with the Flow Course. Keep in mind that this course is a 16-week course! It is designed for you to take your time, learn about your body, and enjoy the process!

I'm excited that you are here to learn about your menstrual cycle, hormones, and how we can use targeted nutrition to help balance the hormones you experience during each phase of your cycle. During Week One's Circle of Life - Check in, I want to give you an outline of the structure, the lingo we will use, the expectations throughout this course, and lastly, we’ll dive right into our first topic!

• There are a variety of worksheets provided to you throughout this course. Most of these worksheets are online fillable forms that you can edit and save straight to your computer or you can also print them out and write directly on them. Whatever you decide, make the choice that is right for you and have fun with it!

• Some worksheets are designed for you to print and have as references or reminders of the important takeaways throughout this course.

• Each week will begin with the Circle of Life - Check In worksheet to see where you are physically, mentally, and emotionally coming into the week. This is also where you will reflect on the Action Step from the previous week.

• Next, you are introduced to the topic of the week. We will alternate between hormones and nutrition because we will set a baseline knowledge about our hormones, then we will learn how to use nutrition to help balance our hormones during the four phases of our cycle in order to maximize performance on the court AND in life.

• Explore and reflect using the Discussion worksheet after learning the topic of the week.

• At the conclusion of each week, you will create and/or complete the provided Action Step for the upcoming week. So, at the beginning of your next week, you will reflect on how those went.

  • Some of these Action Steps have been created for you, however, there is no pressure for these to look a certain way. Keep it simple, honor how you feel, and listen to your gut!

Let's Talk Lingo

• Two distinct aspects of Food that we will talk about consistently throughout this course are Primary and Secondary Food.

• Primary Food: these are the aspects of our life that don’t include food, but provide nourishment to our body, mind, and spirit. This includes what we call the Circle of Life attached here.

• Secondary Food is the actual food we eat and is relatively simple once we have the information and use it to best serve our individual needs. However, our ability to apply the information is directly impacted by our relationship with Primary Food.

The first step to making any sort of change in your life is becoming aware of the habits and patterns that are already happening. By using the worksheets provided throughout this course, you will begin to develop a greater understanding of patterns relating to your physical, mental, and emotional well-being. I would recommend creating a new file folder where you can save all your completed worksheets for this course.

There are four main worksheets/assignments used throughout this course that will help teach you how to track:

1. Circle of Life - Check In: identify how satisfied you are with each Primary Food by putting a dot near the center for dissatisfied and toward the outer ring for extremely satisfied.

   • Record your highlight and hardship for the week in the space provided:

     • Highlight - a primary food that you feel happy with that week.

     • Hardship - a primary food that you may be struggling with that week.

   • Hormone Cycle - record where you think you are in your hormone cycle and use this space to reflect how you integrated the previous week's Action Step into your daily life.

   • Reminder: this worksheet is going to look completely different week to week, and that's OK!

2. Hormone Calendar: utilize these calendars to mark down the days that you are on your period.

   • There are four calendars provided in this course. The first one provided is the Menstrual Calendar seen below. This calendar is intended for you to print and use to help you start to track your hormone cycle during this entire four month course.

     • Use Menstrual Calendar provided below for Weeks 1-4.

     • Mark down the days that you're on your period.

       • this is done to track how long your period is and the duration between each period to determine if your period is regular or irregular

     • On the days you don't have your period, explore how your mind and body feel and note it on your calendar. Does what you are currently feeling align with anything you are learning as you go through this course?

   • While there are a variety of ways to track each phase, the purpose of this particular course is to cover the foundational aspect of tracking your period.

   • However, it is important to start paying attention to how your body feels and changes week to week.

3. Discussion Assignments: digest and consider what you've learned each week using the questions provided.

4. Action Step: implement an action or change into your routine. For the first three weeks, these Action Steps require daily attention, then your Action Steps become more of a once a week activity.

5. Recipes: 16 sample recipes to help jumpstart your personal cooking journey!

Using the Session 1 Day 1 worksheet here, answer the questions in the space provided. This is the beginning of the Action Step for this week! You can choose to fill in the worksheet online and save it straight to your computer, or if you'd prefer to print it and write out your answers, do that!