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!