Getting Started

Some basic principles for your diet from WomanCode:

• Only complex carbs and natural sugars
• Avoid all carbs and sugars for dinner
• Make lunch the largest meal of the day
• Focus on protein for breakfast

There is a fantastic chart in the book that has a breakdown of each of the four phases of your cycle and what kinds of foods are best. It's divided by grains, fruits, meats, seafoods, etc. I have the Kindle version and the chart was hard to read for me. This may be a good reason to get the print version and copy the page for reference.

What I did to make meal planning easy for myself in the future is that I created a spreadsheet with a master meal plan list.

I have sections for each of my cycle's four phases and columns for breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner. Then I started picking ingredients from the book's list and looking up recipes for them on Pinterest and Google. When I found a recipe that sounded/looked delicious and matched the principles, I added it to my master spreadsheet.

So now when I need to meal plan for the week I can look at what phase I'm in and pick meals from that section of my master meal plan sheet.

There's just one little problem with my system...I don't know what phase of my cycle I'm in!

This is one of the challenges of PCOS. I have about three periods a year at most. My temperature doesn't tell me anything useful (I learned how to monitor my temperature for signs of ovulation from the classic Taking Charge of Your Fertility, which is a must read for every woman whether she wants children or not!)

So where do I start? I decided that I'm probably/possibly in the Luteal phase because I'm experiencing intense nesting urges and I'm doing more cleaning and organizing than I have all year! Although that could also be that the weather is finally turning spring-like after an intense winter.

It's all I have to go on unless I want to wait possibly six to nine months to get another period and know for certain I'm in the Menstrual phase. So I'll start there and see how it goes.

I've been on the diet plan for one week so far and next time I'll give you a summary of my meals for this past week!

What is FLO Living and Can It Cure PCOS?

Welcome! I'm Carolyn and I created this blog mainly to document my meal plans as I rework my diet to the principles found in the book WomanCode by Alisa Vitti.

WomanCode was recommended to me by a friend because we both have PCOS (polycystic overaian syndrome), a leading cause of infertility. While she was able to quickly conceive naturally and recently gave birth to a lovely girl, my husband and I have been trying to conceive for two years without luck.

PCOS has caused my cycles to be very unpredictable and at this point I may not be ovulating at all. The author of the book also has PCOS but got the symptoms under control and a regular cycle back by eating to support the endocrine system.

At first I was reluctant to buy the book but then I realized that I was looking at having to spend thousands of dollars on infertility treatments, so why not spend $10 first and give this diet a try?

Besides, it also helps regulate blood sugar and PCOS has links to diabetes. I'm dangerously close to pre-diabetes at this point and getting my blood sugar levels under control is important no matter what else is going on in my life.

Ms. Vitti calls her method FLO Living and has a website and a consultation service as well as the book.

She teaches us how to not only get our nutrition on track but also how we can support our body with different types of foods and nutrients at different points in our cycle to keep our hormones balanced.

I will be creating meal plans for myself each week based on where I am in my cycle and what foods Ms. Vitti recommends. I'll post pictures, recipes, and results for each meal.

Along with that I will also have posts about home improvement, DIY, and suburban homesteading. We just bought our house five months ago so we're just starting out on all these things but homesteading has been my dream since long before I knew the word for it!