90. Why Skipping Ovulation Could Be Sabotaging Your Health (Not Just Your Fertility)

In this episode, Dr. Monica Minjeur dives deep into why ovulation is far more than just a fertility tool—it's a powerful monthly indicator of your overall health. You'll hear Gloria’s inspiring story of how restoring her ovulation transformed her energy, mood, and ultimately helped her conceive naturally after years of irregular cycles.

Dr. Minjeur explains:

• How ovulation acts as a “monthly report card” for hormonal, brain, bone, and heart health
• Why missing ovulation can signal deeper health issues like thyroid dysfunction, PCOS, or lifestyle imbalances
• The critical role of progesterone for emotional regulation, sleep, bone strength, and cardiovascular protection
• Why using birth control to “regulate cycles” often masks—not fixes—underlying issues
• How we at Radiant Clinic approach cycle restoration with charting, targeted lab work, nutrition, lifestyle support, and bioidentical hormones when needed

If your cycles are irregular or you’re unsure if you’re ovulating, don't wait for bigger problems to emerge. Ovulation is a vital sign—and you deserve real answers.

Transcript

Monica: 0:42

Welcome back to Cycle Wisdom, where we empower women to restore natural menstrual cycles, to improve health and promote fertility. I'm your host, Dr. Monica Minjeur, and I'm so glad you're listening today. Ovulation is often portrayed as just a tool for helping you to get pregnant, but what if I told you it's one of your body's most important monthly check-ins? Ovulation is a key sign of hormonal health, brain health, bone health, and even heart health. Whether you're trying to conceive or not, understanding ovulation can be a game changer, much like checking your blood pressure or your heart rate. We utilize ovulation as a vital sign to give us insight into what's going on beneath the surface. So let's take a moment today and listen to Gloria's story. Now Gloria came to see me and she was 28 years old, a middle school teacher. She was very energetic, but constantly battling with fatigue and unpredictable moods. Since her teenage years, Gloria's cycles had been irregular. She was told that it was just normal and she was put on birth control to help regulate her cycles. For years, she thought that things were under control until she came off the pill at age 27 because she was trying to get pregnant. What she realized is that she wasn't ovulating at all. Gloria struggled with feeling betrayed by the doctors head that had started her on the birth control pill. Her body wasn't doing what it was supposed to do, and she had covered up those symptoms for so many years. When she came to work with us, we started Gloria with charting instruction and found that she had the tools she needed to confidently identify if and when ovulation was actually occurring. By just starting with this charting instruction, we did additional blood work, which revealed low progesterone levels, and her charting showed what we had suspected with irregular cycles and possible signs of polycystic ovary syndrome. Over the next few months, we worked together targeting supplements and medications in addition to lifestyle changes and stress management. And eventually Gloria began ovulating again regularly on her own. Her energy levels improved, her skin cleared, and eventually she was able to get such regular cycles that she was able to conceive naturally. But even before that, she felt like herself again. Something she didn't realize that she had lost in the meantime. So why does ovulation matter? Beyond fertility? Ovulation is like a monthly report card of what's going on with your hormones. Ovulation doesn't just help you to get pregnant. It also lets you know that your hormones are working in sync with each other. So let's back things up a little bit and remember where ovulation occurs in your cycle. So the first part of your cycle, we typically identify as the menstrual bleed, and that's generally pretty obvious to identify after that point in time. Estrogen rises in the first half of the cycle to build the uterine lining, and then ovulation occurs. And ideally this happens around middle of your cycle. And then after ovulation, progesterone rises in the second half to help balance and sustain the cycle and to be able to support an early pregnancy if intercourse was had during the time of that ovulation event. Now, if ovulation isn't happening, any piece of that puzzle can go sideways. It typically is identifying a red flag that something is off. Now this can be anything from lifestyle issues, like too much stress or not enough sleep or dietary changes. It may be something underlying like thyroid dysfunction or adrenal insufficiency, or possibly something like his, in Gloria's case, polycystic ovary syndrome or insulin resistance. And it can also be from things like not eating enough or over exercising that hypothalamic amenorrhea that we talked about a few weeks ago on the podcast. When ovulation occurs, it confirms that your body has gone through this well orchestrated cascade of hormone events, which is so crucial, even if you're not trying to conceive, for example, when you ovulate, you make progesterone, and that's not just for fertility. Ovulation helps to support both brain and emotional health by triggering progesterone to happen. Now this progesterone surge has a calming and anti-anxiety effect on the brain. It helps to support sleep and emotional regulation, and it helps to balance the stimulating effects of estrogen. In fact, when we see the progesterone levels are inadequate or even absent, that's oftentimes when we will see PMS or premenstrual syndrome and mood swings occur because you don't have enough progesterone. Women who don't ovulate oftentimes struggle with anxiety, sleep troubles, and irritability, and may not realize that it's hormonal if they aren't sure if ovulation is happening or not. Ovulation also helps to protect bone and heart health. Now both estrogen and progesterone work together to preserve bone density, and this is so critical even during your twenties and thirties because this is the time that we're building that long-term bone strength. These hormones also help to reduce inflammation, which can protect against heart disease by supporting good blood vessel function and metabolism of your cholesterol. Studies show that women that chronically don't ovulate are at higher risk for osteoporosis and cardiovascular issues even in their thirties and forties. And so this is why it plays such a huge role is that if we don't have enough estrogen and progesterone happening in sync with when our body naturals should be producing these things, we do not get the benefits. Of being able to prevent against these longer term conditions that may or may not be able to be reversed later in life. And finally, ovulation is a diagnostic clue. If you're not ovulating, it tells us that there is a root cause issue that needs attention. It may be a warning sign for future health concerns, and you deserve more than just a bandaid fix like birth control that aims to mask those symptoms. Treating ovulation as a vital sign allows us to spot those imbalances early and intervene before symptoms escalate. If you just resort to being put on a birth control pill, that typically does not help you to ovulate. In fact, most birth control pills, as well as other types of hormonal contraception are designed to prevent ovulation, so it's not helping to improve that underlying estrogen and progesterone function. Instead at our clinic, our focus is on helping women to understand what's going on with their cycles, and so we always start with making sure that you are charting your cycles. Using a fertility awareness based method, we typically utilize tools like the Chart NEO app in order to identify biomarkers like cervical mucus observations or basal body temperature, or urinary LH metabolite, surge testing. All of these things looked at in the big picture will help you to identify not only your fertile window, but if ovulation is happening to help identify that overall good cycle and hormonal health. Okay. We also will order labs typically in the second part of your cycle to confirm that ovulation has happened and to identify optimal progesterone levels. Now, this is why the charting piece becomes so important because women can ovulate on many different days, and that can be normal. But we need to identify when that ovulation is happening in order to appropriately time the lab draw to know if your levels are optimal. If needed, we help to support ovulation with targeted supplements or food changes. We talk through nutrition and lifestyle changes, making sure to optimize getting enough exercise but not too much exercise. It can be a really hard to balance that and can be a fine line for some people who are struggling with ovulation. We also utilize bioidentical hormones when needed, specifically utilizing bioidentical progesterone and sometimes estrogen. If we find that your levels are low and maybe the cause of you're not ovulating on a regular basis. And then most importantly, we help you to identify patterns of what's going on with your cycle so that we see that cycle after cycle that ovulation is continuing to happen, and we can order monthly labs as needed in order to assess for that optimal ovulation. Overall, we work on treating the whole picture, not just the symptom. And again, as in Gloria's case, we dig to the very root cause in order to be able to determine what is causing you not to ovulate in the first place. Ideally, we work to reverse that in order to restore your normal ovulation and get you back on track with your overall health. If no one has ever told you this before, let me be the first. Your ovulation matters. It's not just about if you are able to get pregnant. Ovulation is your body's way of telling you that it's working the way it was designed to, that all of the hormones are working in sync and everything is on track. When ovulation is missing or irregular, it's your body's way of raising a red flag and saying, help me out. Something is going wrong. At our clinic, we help women just like you to discover what's really going on, and we walk with you every step of the way towards healing. And just a final plug that oftentimes women will tell us, well, I don't mind that I'm not having my cycles on a regular basis. I'm okay that they happen over every couple of months. And oftentimes this can also be a sign that you're not ovulating consistently, which again, long term can lead to some of these other higher risk factors like increased heart disease, increased risk of stroke, osteoporosis, and brain health issues. And so I would urge you that if you are not ovulating regularly or think that you aren't because your cycles are not regular, I would love the opportunity to be able to work with you, to educate you, and to help you to learn how to track that healthy ovulation. Imagine if your cycles were predictable, your mood was steady, and your hormones finally made sense. Imagine getting real answers without bandaids or being brushed off. Head over to our website, radiant clinic.com to book a free discovery call today. You deserve a care plan that honors your whole body, not just your fertility. We are currently able to see people for in-person appointments in our Cedar Rapids, Iowa Clinic, or can arrange for a telehealth visit if you live in many different states across the country. Please check out our website to see the states that we are currently serving and know that we are always continuing to advance our services in multiple states. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please share this podcast with someone in your life who would benefit from our services. Remember to subscribe to this podcast for more empowering content that I look forward to sharing with you on our next episode of Cycle Wisdom.