The ease of taking a pill

I am finally reading Fertility, Cycles, and Nutrition by Marilyn Shannon. It is a book published by the Couple to Couple league and has information on how nutrition can improve fertility and overall health - lessen the affect of PMS. If you notice on the website, it is frequently bought together with Optivite PMT which is recommended in the book. Optivite is a multi-vitamin that is specially formulate with those who suffer from PMS. Multiple double-blind studies have shown effectiveness. So why haven't I read this book before? Because it is very technical and overwhelming. I'm reading it to prepare for the class I will teach but I don't think I would force myself to read it otherwise because it is information overload. Back to the PMS topic, I definitely have that issue and I have seen a holistic doctor as well as a NFP-only ob/gyn who know my complaints on the topic. Why have neither brought the vitamin to my attention? Enough about my rant...on to the purpose of this post

There is a non-hormonal vitamin that, when taken daily, lessens the severity of PMS. Irritability, cravings and cramps diminish just by taking this vitamin. As someone who has struggled to eat healthy and exercise with no luck and a surgery to boot, I wish they would replace some of those YAZ commercials with Optivite commercials. It almost seems too good to be true that there would be a vitamin supplement that can have the same beneficial results without the risk of stroke or miscarriage. What I found appealing about the option of the pill last summer was the relative ease - take a pill and you're done. Now I find out I could have switched multi-vitamins and potentially had the same results? wow!


Has anyone actually used this vitamin and if so does it really work?

A Healthy Diet

In the past couple years I have gotten a lot better at eating veggies and staying away from sweets (sometimes). I am by no means a nutritionist or dietitian but I have tried to make some of the easier changes - snack on fruits instead of chips and add veggies to the dinner menu. Hopefully all this means I am living a healthier life.

Another "healthy" aspect of my life that I mostly take for granted is my knowledge of my cycle. I have seen how some menu and supplement choices have increased the length of my luteal phase and generally balanced out my charts. I also know that this lifestyle choice helps prevent me from putting more chemicals or pills in my body that are unhealthy. I bring this up because I was just reading in a book today that the "pill depletes fertility and pregnancy nutrients, including folate, vitamins A, B6, and Zinc."

The short excerpt on the pill also confirms that yes - many women are ovulating within the first couple months of coming off the pill and 95% by the end of the first year. Many women can get pregnant right away. On the other hand, those nutrients are pretty important for mom and baby so it might be a good idea to wait a while before trying to conceive.

Hopefully reading books like this will help me with my first ever NFP class that I will teach starting next month. You never know what questions you will be asked so I'm trying to catch up on some reading before I start so I will know lots of good resources to turn to for help :-)

When the Truth Doesn't Help

I realized I haven't posted a lot of new stuff lately. Maybe it is because I had the proverbial log stuck in my eye when others only have some sawdust...

We all know people like this. You talk and they listen - that's the great part. The not so great part - they don't do anything about it. It would be very easy to dismiss them and not even bother - but is that the right thing to do? I talk a big talk and it's hard to live up to the movement all the time. Respect the sanctity of human life doesn't mean just babies. After all - who doesn't love to see little babies? To believe that human life is sacred is to believe all humans are sacred and deserving of kindness and respect.

I was torn about going back today to the assignment I thought was over. I hadn't thought about working in the same classroom for 5 weeks when I was originally signed up for 3. I also hadn't planned to try to change the classroom much because it's not mine to change. However, none of the workers are happy and I have been observing and thinking about things that might help. Instead of going the easy way and saying I'm respecting everyone by just doing what is told, I think I may stick my neck out tomorrow. To put it lightly, the room is quite tense. There are two sides and I tried to keep them connected while I was there. Some things worked, some didn't - but I think the teacher deserves to know what I think and given some loving encouragement to keep trying. Tomorrow is the last day I will work with him...

So, I will talk and he will listen. Of that I am sure. Will my comments be respecting his life and worth? I hope so. Will I take enough time to organize them in a way that will be understandable and compassionate to his struggles with this issue? I hope so. Hopefully with a peaceful meeting I will get the log out of my eye tomorrow. Anyone else have an "ah-ha" moment lately?

Friday Reflection v. 1 n. 3

After this week I am left with two main thoughts

1. I am truly blessed with a privileged life. I don't have a lot of job responsibilities and I am surrounded by people who greatly appreciate the little things I actually do.

2. Everyone is important.

I guess I already know everyone is important. Many people as well as the Bible and other religious books from many religions will teach that in one way or another. It is one thing to read it but it is entirely different to be hit over the head with it. For the past 4 weeks I have worked in an Autism classroom. At any given time, there are about 8 students in the room with a few others in regular classes. Each student is different and each student had a lesson to teach me in my four weeks (today is my last scheduled day although I could get extended).

One student came in with a smile and a goofy personality every day. He helped me take time to relax and play make believe for just a couple minutes before getting back to work. Always there was hope in his eyes that he would have a great day with lots of fun.

Another student was more like Eeyore. Talks slow and keeps his head down. He helped teach me the importance of speaking to everyone kindly. If you lost your patience and demanded he answer - he would shut down. If you worked with him he spoke loud and clear.

There are so many other beautiful and insightful lessons my students gave me. They were a joy to be around and a huge pro-life statement. Even the low-functioning can have truly joyful moments and can be proud of the progress in something as simple as standing unsupported for 20 minutes. If you pay attention, they will teach you the important things in life. Even though I wouldn't wish a disability on anyone, I respect and appreciate what they bring to the world. I'm glad there is no pre-natal test to get rid of them like with down-syndrome and sad to know how many babies we are missing because of that fact.

Loving Others

Right now I am reading a book on Mother Teresa. The book is insightful and straightforward - just my kind of reading, yet I'm having a problem finishing it. The dense reading may be giving me too much to ponder.

One of the biggest themes of the book, along with many other spiritual books, is about how to be God's love for others. What I like about this one is all the great analogies and real life examples. I don't need to go to Africa and become a missionary to be God's light to others. I can start right where I am with who I meet and talk to on a daily basis. I can't think of a better pro-life stance than that. Part of the way to do that is...


Tough Love
I have always believed in tough love. One of the few bible verses that comes to my mind often is Proverbs 27:17. To paraphrase - iron sharpens iron, so man should sharpen man. I don't feel sharper if I have sugar-coated conversations all the time. Mother Teresa was a shining example of loving others with true compassion no matter who they were or what they had done, but she didn't stop there. Tough issues were addressed and in her 1979 Nobel Lecture she noted:

The poor people are very great people. They can teach us so many beautiful things. The other day one of them came to thank me, and said, "You people who have evolved chastity, you are the best people to teach us Family Planning. Because it is nothing more than self-control out of love for each other."

I love the way she started that statement with compliments. It is easier to hear a hard truth if you can first feel the love and acceptance of God - no matter where you are at in your life. She also spoke about the dangers of abortion and I encourage you to use the link above to read more of what this amazing woman said. Like her lecture, I can be tough and, hopefully, loving at the same time. I am learning through the example of those who went before me, but it is a long process. So, for today, I will let the loving words of Mother Teresa be the main focus of the post. NFP was accepted and appreciated by the poor. Again, I don't know any better pro-life stance or argument than that.

Changes in Society

I was reading a blog and comments that talked about conforming law to things that happen in society. Many people want to do "x" so we should push to legalize it. Sometimes that is a good thing and sometimes it takes a long time - Women's suffrage took decades. There are a number of items like that in the news right now: legalizing marijuana, same-sex unions/marriages, universal health care....

Now that I have become broadly controversial in this post I think I'll narrow it down and get more controversial. A popular argument against teaching NFP in the Catholic Church is that most couples don't use it anyway; therefore, let us conform religion to society. Religion should be more binding than laws anyway. Religion is defined as pertaining to the supernatural. That does not change because society changes. I don't think it is possible that all the ancient religions and all the contemporary religions are 100% true. It just does not seem logical that the way the world was created and how it works changes when people's ideas change. So it is interesting that the stance on contraception has changed in that way. Most Christian denominations used to be against it quite recently, well after the modern dating practices started in this country.

What is my response to the argument? I love being Catholic - the church stands up for its beliefs against controversy and has been around long enough with enough theologians to research the topics just a bit. Some may see it as oppressive - I see it as an informed, conscientious decision that has withstood the test of time and opposition. If you look closely, the reasoning behind the position is at the very least respectable and in my eyes awe-inspiring.

Truth and Consequences

Recently I was a substitute in one of my former teacher's classrooms. When I walked into his classroom I was flooded with dreadful memories of my teen health class. Thankfully, I was only teaching English that day. Even so, it was quite an interesting experience for many reasons.

I don't remember much about my teen health class. I remember that the standard - don't do drugs, sleep is good for you, first aid - messages were present, but I have no idea how they were taught or any specifics. I do remember some specifics of the reproductive section. I remember some girls walking around the class with the pregnancy belly, though that did not deter one of the girls who became pregnant before finishing high school. I also remember the serious warning that a girl can become pregnant at any time in her cycle and that there is no way to know what time that is going to be. Was this a scare tactic or an actual fact? We went over statistical success rates of different methods. We also were taught multiple times that just because the Trojan brand is "most trusted" does not mean it is the "most trustworthy" - obviously this wasn't an abstinence only program.

Why do I still have issue with this 8 years later? Because it was a lie and there are consequences to lies. If one oddball teacher said this, no big deal - most people listened to him just enough to pass the class. The problem is, most of society says the same thing and it hurts me to know women I care about are being misinformed throughout their whole lives, starting with teen health class. My previous post on "Who is man for woman..." talks about lying with our bodies when using contraception. Lying is bad and can result in consequences. 13% of women face fertility issues and studies show that artificial contraception and abortion increase those rates. NFP charts back this up with infertile patterns seen when stopping hormonal contraceptives.

Quick story to put my anger and passion on this topic into perspective. I know someone who has been married for a couple years. She started the pill in high school for abdominal pain. She stayed on it for 8 years until she wanted to conceive. Since that time she has been unsuccessful, been diagnosed with PCOS, gone through major surgery, and had to change her diet and start taking Clomid. She is the one that brought this up and how she was upset her doctors didn't take the time to diagnose PCOS in the first place to treat her symptoms instead of just covering them up. When are doctors going to stop lying and saying this is a miracle pill and start taking a genuine interest in helping/treating their patient's individual needs?

Holistic Living

The term holistic seems to be most used in the medical field these days. I go to a holistic doctor and my primary care physician and I love that massage therapy is part of holistic treatments. Who else has a doctor that has prescribed massage therapy? I think that is pretty neat and was the only excuse needed to schedule one regularly (as in every couple of months).

However, the term has so much more depth to it. It simply means to emphasize the whole instead of its parts and is a philosophy I was taught while going to Hope College and getting a liberal arts degree. I had to take everything from health to music to philosophy to statistics in order to graduate. This made getting out in 4 years difficult but worth it. Health dynamics was the class that really changed my thinking. Since then I have worked out on a fairly consistent basis but, beyond that, it was the class that really converted me to be a liberal arts, holistic learner. I realized how connected body, mind and spirit are and I think that comes out in my posts now.

So often in the past I have gotten tunnel vision - I need to focus on this test, this project, this upcoming event...one at a time! Now everything is connected. It is not enough to fight for the unborn if I don't help their caretakers with resources and information or appreciate the life once it is here - that goes for every life, including mine. So I blame/credit my college for making me think in a way that connects everything to respecting the sanctity of life. From dancing to pregnancy centers, special education to the death penalty - everything deals with life. If I don't value what is there in front of me - am I setting a good example? Probably not. So thank you to Hope College - I guess I'm still using many of the skills I have learned even if I do not have a full time job.