Well I certainly am.
I have talked on this blog before about how I regularly track my period and it has helped me to really greatly understand what is and is not normal for my cycle. This is definitely a practice I think everyone should be in as it can really help to manage one’s health and wellbeing. For me, my cycle is relatively normal. About 31 days in length and 3 to 5 days of bleeding. Except this time. As I am sitting and writing this blog post by period is going on day 4 of being late (if we are counting the 31 day average length) and I won’t lie, it’s beginning to freak me out. Is this normal? Should I worry? When should I call my doctor? (And there is a 0% my asexual little booty is pregnant, so don’t even suggest such a thing).
So today, I want to talk about some of these things. Why are periods late? What should we do about it? When is it a late period and when is it a missed period? When should you call the doctor? Let’s really get into the nitty gritty stuff today, guys.
What is the length of a typical menstrual cycle?
The average menstrual cycle is 28 days, but this can vary greatly woman to woman. Typically, a cycle that lasts between 21 and 40 days is considered to be normal. Tracking the period month to month can be extremely helpful for women trying to learn more about their cycle including, length, flow, and symptoms such as cramps and irritability.
When is it a late period and when is it a missed period?
A late period is defined as a period that hasn’t started 5 or more days after you expect it to start, or your usual start for the cycle. So for me, technically my period won’t be late until day 36, so if it starts tomorrow it technically isn’t considered late. A missed period, on the other hand, is a lack of bleeding for 6 or more weeks after the last bleeding cycle.
I’ve read (not that I claim to be ANY kind of expert on the topic), when a period is seven days late, there is a chance that the individual is pregnant. If you have any doubt that you might be pregnant and your period is abnormally late, it might not be a bad idea to tack a pregnancy test to be sure.
Sans pregnancy, what else can cause a late or missed period
Even the most typical cycle can have variations, even unexpected ones, and they don’t always mean pregnancy. Since menstrual cycles are controlled by hormones, fluctuations in hormones can really change the way our body responds.
Things like stress, grief, weight fluctuations (especially rapid), low caloric intake, and intense exercise may be major culprits for changes in menstrual cycles. Some of these are things that we may not even consider, especially if we don’t think we are under more stress than usual or even if we think we are eating enough food.
For me, I think because I have been running every day for 40+ days, my change to the mileage or running I am doing along with a ton of stress from work has really played into my change. I did jump on the scale the other day just to make sure I am maintaining weight, which I am (I’m even up my usual amount surrounding the start of my period).
When should I be concerned?
One or two late period, or even one missed period may not be concerning, especially if things start up again and you begin back on a regular cycle. This might just be worth noting in your app, especially if you can guess what may be causing the change. However, if you cannot pinpoint the cause of your irregular cycle and it is eating away at you, a call to the doctor to have things checked up isn’t a bad idea.
Remember to keep up with your yearly PAP smears too and maybe at your next gyno visit you can mention that your period changed a little.
If things become sporatic, unpredictable, or if you period disappears for several months, it’s definitely time to see a professional. If your irregular periods become normal, it is definitely a time to go see the doctor, and if you don’t have a Gynocologist, it’s time to get recommended to one. Irregular cycles lasting more than six months can be a sign of underlying medical conditions such as endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS),
So am I probably freaking out over nothing? Definitely. Is this something I am going to be keeping note of? You bet.
Our menstrual cycle tells us a lot about our health and wellbeing and it is important to pay attention to the signs and symptoms of it just like we would our breathing and our heartbeats.
For me, I’m trying to eat a little bit more and slide back on the intensity of my workouts for a little bit to hope that things begin to calm down and regulate again. In the meantime, I’m also scheduling my gyno appointment because sometimes I don’t practice what I preach and it’s about time I bit the bullet on that one.
Anyway, it you are every concerned about your period, it’s not bad to reach out to your doctor and ask questions! They might take a day or two to get back to you, but having that peace of mind is always good!
Should I go into more details on athletes and the lack of periods in a future post? Let me know if this is something that would interest you in the comments below!
Until next time,
Kat
The color and consistency of your flow can tell you a lot about what’s going on with your cycle. Light pink, bright red, and thin blood means it’s fresh blood that isn’t spend a lot of time in your uterus and is flowing relatively quickly. Dark red or brown blood is blood that has spent more time in the uterus and is considered older. This type of blood is most common at the beginning of the cycle, when remnants of the past cycle are being expelled, or at the end of your bleeding cycle.
If you have concerns or this is new to you, you may want to consider how you are collecting your blood and determine if there is a better way to evaluate the consistency of your flow. Whereas pads and tampons are the most common form or collection, they soak up most of the period blood and make it difficult to determine the consistency of blood flow. Menstrual cups, which collect the blood however, will make it easy to determine if blood flow is thick, thin, and the color of the blood.
Clue is a cleverly named tool that lets you clue in on your period. It tracks your flow’s length, amount, and symptoms easily for you in one little app! You can customize it to track the things you want to track such as flow, cravings, pain, emotions, sleep, and a lot of other things!
I love how easy clue is to use! As soon as I open the app the first thing that pops up is the icon to enter today’s data. I don’t have to scroll through a calendar or through any complicated pages to enter data. I just hit the big “Today” button and I have all my tracking options right there! It also makes tracking how heavy my flow is super easy giving me “light” “normal” “heavy” and of course “Spotting” options. It also makes seeing my period overview very easy. It’s all viewable from the homepage, I can see how long my period is going to last, where I am on that cycle, and what comes next so I always know what to expect. And if I don’t want to read it there, I just have to switch over to the Calendar view, which is also very easy to read and use.
I love that I can so easily see my fertility window and can track all the same things throughout the entire month. Seeing when I am spotting during this time has become extremely important to me and that’s very easy to read whether from the homepage or from the calendar. Learning this about my period has been detrimental to me learning about my flow and my body!
The biggest downfall I find with clue is that although you can track a lot of different things, I find that the more you track, the harder it is to keep track of WHAT actually happened easily. For example all the ailments, i.e. bloating, cramping, fatigue etc. go under the blue category. So when you track them, they simply come up with a blue square on your calendar. So if you are tracking more than one ailment, you have to many little blue squares and can’t tell which is which until you click each individual day. It’s certainly not the end of the world and usually I only track my cramps since that’s my biggest ailment. I like to just be able to look at my period on a calendar and know exactly what happened on what day very easily.
Similarly, I find the analyzer on this app a little useless. It takes a lot of getting used to in order to understand how to read it and what it all means. It’s not in graphs or anything like that, so it’s an adjustment from what other apps offer. That being said, it’s not the worst thing in the world, and I personally find I use the calendar to asses more than anything else, but I would personally prefer graphs or charts!
You’ve probably heard it from your doctor every time you’ve gone it for a checkup: “When was your last period?” And some of us have had to scour the backs of our minds trying to remember exactly what day our last period actually was, only to result in a lecture from the doc about how we should be tracking our period every, single month.
This one has a lot of controversy surrounding it. I’m keeping it on the list because it sounds interesting but there are a lot of differing opinions on this product and even some companies are pulling their endorsement for calling a period product. I really just wanted to talk about it briefly and mention that it’s something some people are doing and that some kind of alternative similar to it may someday pop up. In the meantime, you maybe might NOT want to try this one out, but instead check out the stories of some people who did try it out.
Period panties are a pretty cool alternative to menstrual pads. They claim to be a type of underwear that you can wear as an alternative to pads. So they’ll absorb the period blood without needing a pad at all. They come in a lot of different sizes and styles including boxers, briefs, thongs, etc. Each style collects a different amount of blood, so you might have to change up what you use each day depending on your flow. The hiphuggers and boxer hold up to 2 regular tampons worth of blood, the sports style hold up to 1 ½ regular tampon amounts, and the thongs hold up ½ a tampon.
The cloth menstrual pad almost speaks for itself. It’s a reusable pad that goes on your underwear, absorbs blood, and is reusable. They come in a large variety like panty liners, day pads for normal flows, or night pads for heavy flows.
What was interesting about the conversation with my mother was when she told me that when she was my age she used to experience cold and flu symptoms every time she was on her period. I had never heard anything like that before. None of my friends had ever mentioned anything like this before when we talked about our periods, so it seemed very odd to me.
Kat Classics 