What if its not pcos

People with PCOS may be at higher risk of developing eating disorders as a way to control their body and their condition. There are also a number of social challenges that can come with PCOS and may exacerbate some of the mental health challenges we discussed. You may feel pressure from friends and family members to have a baby, and you might be forced to choose between revealing your medical history and trying to deflect insensitive comments.

The irregular cycles that come with PCOS can also make life difficult. You may also deal with body image issues surrounding excess hair, more severe acne, or the male-pattern baldness that can result from PCOS.

If you suspect you have PCOS or if any of the symptoms in this article apply to you, you should make an appointment to make sure you are healthy and there are no underlying issues that need to be addressed.

Your doctor can run a variety of tests to determine if anything is wrong and may be able to give you advice so you can increase your chances of becoming pregnant. When you visit your doctor, there are several tests they can run to determine if you have PCOS. They may also want to do blood tests to see what your hormone levels are, especially what your testosterone levels look like. Your doctor may also want to get a better look at your ovaries and uterus. They will place a wand-like device in the vagina that will emit sound waves that can then be converted into images on a screen.

If you get diagnosed with PCOS, there are some lifestyle changes you can make to help manage your condition. Not only do crash diets not work, but they can be extremely unhealthy for you and cause you to hold onto weight.

Try to become more active, walking for thirty minutes five days a week or joining an exercise class. You may also want to focus on incorporating more fresh fruits and veggies and lean protein into your diet. Cutting back on carbohydrates can help you lose weight, feel better, and is especially beneficial in managing PCOS. In addition to the lifestyle changes your doctor may suggest, they can also prescribe you some medications to help regulate your cycles.

You can take progesterone for twelve to fourteen days every one or two months to help regulate your cycles. Your doctor might recommend you take a medication called letrozole , which initially was used for breast cancer treatment but can also stimulate your ovaries to allow the eggs to mature and to be released ovulation. I have many of the other symptoms acne, hirsuitism, weight gain, pre-diabetes , and actually had the diagnosis suggested to my by my regular doctor.

Should I insist on testing for it at m my next visit? This site is SUCH an eye opener! Are you able to tell me which of these symptoms is linked to PCOS? And these 2 I now question: Foggy brain, with an inability to focus as well as before consumption Complete and utter exhaustion with unshakable lethargy. And, of course, directly linked to PCOS would be the abdominal pain; which dogged me for 5 long years after puberty, and before my realization of dairy intolerance, and then for 10 more years while I sorted out just exactly what dairy intolerance meant to my body.

My husband and I also had difficulty conceiving. We now have one beautiful little 4 year old daughter, but it took a heart wrenching and confusing year and a half to finally conceive This was while still weeding out all my dairy issues.

Cysts and dairy were only vaguely connected in my mind at the time, because cheesy pizza was still sometimes too tempting to turn down. I get patches of whiskers, mostly on my chin, which is blotchy and scarred from nearly daily plucking. Unlike you, the prospect of getting diagnosed holds no fear for me. I can barely contain this elation! This was so helpfull. I was diagnosed with pcos in my early twenties but when trying to get pregnant, my fertility doctor said I did not have pcos.

I was so confused when the doctor said I did not have pcos, but I will keep this in mind and bring it up after I have my baby. I went through painful operations like 2 endometrial biopsies and colposcopies, ultrasounds, blood work, you name it.

All to have doctors say I was healthy. Then years later the acne kicked in, so I found myself running to a dermatologist to help me solve that issue.

Recently I got smart and went to an endocrinologist who did thorough blood tests. He checked all my hormone levels. Make sure you work with a good endocrinologist if you are having any of the problems that could be associated with PCOS or Hypothyroidism.

Now I can finally have a targeted approach to treating my symptoms. I was diagonosed with PCOS in my middle- late teen years. I have the same symptoms right now at age I used to have bad acne as a young teen — late teen years but have cleared. I live in a rural area amd seeing your GP is hard enough let alone getting an ultrasounds when the cysts are present.

Sometimes the waitlist for an ultra sound is up to months and 2 years to get seen in the Womens clic. After 7 years of trying to get diagnosed with PCOS and many Dr apt, wait lists and reschedule ultrasound Apts, I have basicly given up on getting my diagnosis.

In my 20s I had all 3 symptoms of criteria but now in my 30s my menstrual cycles have become more regular and only show 2 out of 3 symptoms for diagnosis. Finding this site has been such a relief and wealth of information. Dairy for example…I choose cereals for quick meals when work is crazy and boy is it crazy right now!

This week alone I have had a bowel of cereal twice a day every day, no wonder I feel like crap and had a flear up of symptoms!!! There are many changes in my near future. Thank you sooooo much for putting well researched information out there and also making it easy to understand. Because of this they never checked progesterone levels even though my cycle was wildly irregular.

I felt like I was making a fuss over nothing. This has been shown to negatively affect liver health Vos 42 ; Neuschwander-Tetri 43 , while studies on mice suggest alterations of the microbiome may also reduce cognitive capacity Magnusson et al. Making positive changes to our gut flora is one of the biggest reasons why a PCOS diet works so well. Rodent studies have even suggested that dysbiosis of the gut microbiome may play a causal role in PCOS and that improvements to the microbiome may be a potential treatment option Torres et al.

While this might sound exceptionally complicated, we also now know that if we want to make positive changes to the makeup of our microbiome, we need only change the foods we eat Prince et al. While quitting sugar can reduce the kinds of microbes that work against your health goals, eating both probiotic and prebiotic foods help support the good guys.

Probiotic foods contain live strains of healthy gut bacteria, while prebiotic foods contain a specific kind of soluble fiber that enables these microorganisms to thrive. I normally suggest starting with either coconut yogurt, pickles, kombucha, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, or tempeh. Prebiotics on the other hand are something that come fairly automatically when following the best diet for PCOS.

I say this because the best sources of these compounds are found in certain fruits and vegetables as I discuss in more detail below. Before I started the health transformation that eventually led to me falling pregnant naturally despite years of failed fertility treatments, vegetables were something I knew were good for me, but rarely featured as a high priority at mealtimes. While carbs, protein, and fats are the major components of any PCOS friendly meal, eating a wide range of non-starchy vegetables is also essential for good health.

Without wanting to bore you with an unnecessary rant about why vegetables are good for you, let me explain the three biggest reasons that motivated me to improve my delinquent vegetable habits. The first reason is phytonutrients. Phytonutrients are micronutrients that can only be found in plants and science is just beginning to understand some of their amazing health-promoting properties.

Let me use turmeric as an example. This leads many people to take turmeric supplements. But as I explain in my Beat PCOS Supplements Guide , the low bioavailability of curcumin means that most but not all commercially available turmeric supplements pass straight through you.

Tens of thousands of phytonutrients have been discovered so far, and if you wanted to get scientific about it you could find some of these in almost every vegetable you look at. Carrots, tomato, bell peppers, spinach, kale, and broccoli. The second big discovery which really changed my attitude towards vegetables was the knowledge that this is where many prebiotic foods come from see Step 9 above. Prebiotic foods are high in certain kinds of fiber or resistant starch which provide the energy and carbon source needed for our microbiome to flourish.

A diet low in these substances has been shown to reduce bacterial abundance Halmos et al. While this is far from an exhaustive list, some of the vegetables that are known to be high in prebiotics include Jerusalem artichokes, garlic, onion, leek, shallots, spring onion, asparagus, beetroot, fennel bulb, green peas, snow peas, sweet corn, and savoy cabbage Monash University The third good reason I decided to get my rabbit on, was the knowledge of how fiber affects our gut health. One of the risks of eating a low carb diet that includes plenty of fish, meat, and eggs is that you can become constipated from inadequate fiber intake.

When it comes to the question of how many vegetables is enough, all the recipes included in my free 3-Day PCOS Meal Plan and free Day PCOS Diet Challenge seek to include two cups of non-starchy vegetables with every meal, with a particular focus on leafy greens. This can be a lot more than what people are used to, but trust me when I say your body will thank you for it.

Found in just about anything made from wheat, gluten is a protein that for some reason is particularly problematic for women with PCOS. In terms of the priorities of my PCOS diet principles, I think eliminating as many sources of gluten in your diet as possible should be right near the top of the list.

Besides quitting sugar, going gluten-free is one of the fastest and most effective means to reduce the impacts of PCOS on your wellbeing. I get that this can be a difficult step for people from a practical perspective and I still encourage people to give themselves some grace when adapting to a gluten-free diet.

Rather than messing around with costly and potentially inaccurate immunoglobulin blood tests, the best way to find out how gluten affects your health is to do your own experiment. The reality is that the majority of women with PCOS do better without gluten, but sometimes we need to see this for ourselves before making the long-term commitment. I still see a lot of women get great results just by reducing their gluten intake as much as is reasonably practical.

Nellsy Martinez is a perfect example of what can be achieved when going gluten-free as part of a PCOS friendly diet. While taking part in my free Day PCOS Diet Challenge , Nellsy eliminated both gluten and dairy from her diet as well as following the rest of the principles laid out in this article. Not only did she start feeling great, but she lost weight and started getting her periods again for the first time in years.

After about 8 months, Nellsy managed to fall pregnant naturally with her beautiful baby, Vivianna. The key to success is finding alternatives to bread, pasta, breakfast cereals, and other gluten-containing food products, which is not as hard as it sounds with the right information and support. This amount is hardly worth worrying about given how healthy milk fat is see Step 7 if this sounds like crazy-talk. Again, I recommend a little self-experimentation here to discover your personal sensitivity to dairy as finding this out for yourself is always the best way to make an informed decision about your food choices.

It sure beats the heck out of following a diet rule that someone else created for you. Many women use my free Day PCOS Diet Challenge as a starting point for this process as all the recipes I provide are completely gluten and dairy-free apart from butter of course. Common culprits include eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, and shellfish. FODMAPS are small carbohydrates found in many common foods including some fruit and vegetables that are otherwise perfectly healthy.

I think caffeine is best avoided because it increases your stress hormones which in turn increases your insulin levels. Regular consumption can also decrease your insulin sensitivity making it more difficult to regulate your blood sugar levels across the day. Caffeine can disrupt sleep and promote anxiety while the acidity of coffee in particular can cause digestive discomfort, indigestion, heartburn and imbalances in our gut microbiome. Alcohol on the other hand has been shown to be a particularly problematic substance for women with PCOS.

We have higher rates of liver disease because of this disorder Vassilatou 37 ; Kelley et al. Moving away from caffeine and alcohol also makes it easier to avoid sugar and empty carbohydrates, which are often found in these drinks. Ground roasted cocoa in particular can totally transform your belief that you must have coffee in the mornings. The goal of this free program is to make it both fun and easy for people like you to put these 13 food principles into practice. This page free ebook includes a collection of some of my most popular PCOS recipes with an accompanying shopping list and further information about how to use food to beat PCOS.

Given my previously terrible relationship with food, I can assure you there was ample cognitive dissonance as I went about implementing a PCOS friendly diet. Be honest about your weaknesses, leaving your negative self-judgment at the door. Focus on your health goals, and set yourself up for success.

Learn and experiment until you find what works for you, and when you slip-up, shake it off, and keep on going. Kym combines rigorous scientific analysis with the advice from leading clinicians to disseminate the most helpful PCOS patient-centric information you can find online.

You can read more about Kym and her team here. This blog post has been critically reviewed to ensure accurate interpretation and presentation of the scientific literature by Dr.

Jessica A McCoy, Ph. These medications also have certain risks. They can increase the chance for a multiple birth twins or more. And they can cause ovarian hyperstimulation. This is when the ovaries release too many hormones. It can cause symptoms such as abdominal bloating and pelvic pain. Birth control pills. These help to control menstrual cycles, lower androgen levels, and reduce acne. Diabetes medication. This is often used to lower insulin resistance in PCOS.

It may also help reduce androgen levels, slow hair growth, and help you ovulate more regularly. Medications to treat other symptoms. Some medications can help reduce hair growth or acne.

Women with PCOS are more likely to develop certain serious health problems. These include type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, problems with the heart and blood vessels, and uterine cancer. Women with PCOS often have problems with their ability to get pregnant fertility. Some women struggle with the physical symptoms of PCOS, such as weight gain, hair growth, and acne. Cosmetic treatments, such as electrolysis and laser hair removal, may help you feel better about your appearance.

Talk with your health care provider about the best ways to treat the symptoms that bother you. If you have missed or irregular periods, excess hair growth, acne, and weight gain, call your doctor for an evaluation.

Women with PCOS may not ovulate, have high levels of androgens, and have many small cysts on the ovaries.