81: Understanding Your Body: Hormone Coaching and Fertility Awareness with Bekah Yawn

Imagine unlocking the mysteries of God designed your body, understanding what every sign and symptom is trying to communicate to you.

That's the extraordinary journey Bekah Yawn, hormone coach and FEMM educator, has been on and she's here to share her invaluable insights with us. Bekah's personal experiences with the fertility awareness-based method and hormone coaching form the backbone of our enlightening conversation. We explore the need for birth control options free of detrimental side effects and abortifacient concerns.

In the latter half of our discussion, we dive deeper into the exploration of various resources Becca utilized to understand her body, such as the Marquette Method. We lay bare the multitude of root causes for hormonal imbalances and suggest ways to address them. We underscore the significance of hormone coaching in alleviating symptoms and restoring root causes. Ending on an empowering note, we focus on how Becca, through her personalized health coaching, equips women with practical solutions and teaches them how to trust their own bodies. So, tune in and ready yourself for a wealth of knowledge that is about to unfold.

Meet Bekah
Bekah Yawn, FEMM Educator & Hormone Coach at Fertility Set Free

Bekah Yawn has worked with dozens of women and couples nationwide to empower them in their fertility, cycle, and hormones. With a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, graduating top in her class with FEMM, and certified as a Hormone Coach through the Fiat Institute, she is well respected in the fertility education community. As a FEMM educator and Hormone Coach, she can help any woman learn magnitudes about her body and how to support it naturally through utilizing her FEMM Hormone Harmony program.

email fertilitysetfree@gmail.com
website www.fertilitysetfree.com
social @bekah.yawn

Gifts for you!
If you're ready to take charge of your fertility and hormones and needing a support sister in your journey, schedule your free 20 minute consultation with Bekah at https://fertilitysetfree.as.me/.

As a gift for the listeners of Kingdom MOMpreneurs podcast, listeners who book Bekah's FEMM Hormone Harmony program can get $50 off with coupon code 50OFF (applied after consult with purchase of program). This is not an affiliate link. I gain nothing if you work with Bekah. 

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:17

Today's episode of the Kingdom Mothers Rise Up podcast is part one of a two-part interview with Becca Yon. She's a hormone coach. We just got talking and I felt like it was all really good. So splitting it into two parts today kind of tells her story and how she got started in being a hormone coach and what that means. Part two will kind of transition into more of like what she's doing as a hormone coach and that just all, like I said, felt really relevant, so I hope you will enjoy. Make sure you come back next week for part two.

Speaker 1: 0:54

Becca Yon is my guest today and I'm really excited to hear her story and her expertise. Becca has worked with dozens of women and couples nationwide to empower them in their fertility cycle and hormones. With a bachelor's of art in psychology graduating the top of her class with FEMM which I don't even know what that means, I have to ask her and as the certified hormone coach through the Fiat Institute, she's well respected in the fertility education community. As a FEMM educator and hormone coach, she can help any woman learn magnitudes about her body and how to support it naturally through utilizing her FEMM hormone harmony program. That sounds amazing. Welcome, becca.

Speaker 2: 1:38

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Nicole. I'm very excited to be here, awesome.

Speaker 1: 1:44

So to start with, what is the FEMM?

Speaker 2: 1:46

Yeah, so FEMM stands for FEMM Fertility Education and Medical Management. It's one of I don't know, have you ever heard of fertility awareness based methods or yes, okay, awesome, so it's actually one of the newer ones. So they have a lot of you know, a lot of you know a lot of different ways to help them. They have updated technology, updated research and their goal is to make it applicable, more applicable to kind of the modern, younger, you know generation, to make charting your cycles easier on the go. You know we're such a busy, busy group, so yeah, so that's a little bit about it.

Speaker 1: 2:29

Okay, yeah, that's awesome. So I'm going to go through the awareness method with well, with all, all but the first one of mine, I guess Awesome and have passed that on to my daughter and daughter-in-laws. So it's good to know there's something updated and more modern, that this will be good for them too. High five, that's wonderful. So how did you get involved in all of this?

Speaker 2: 2:55

That's a great question. So I did not know about fertility awareness based methods or fertility awareness period. I was not aware. I was just kind of your average. I was, you know, in my eyes, the average girl who didn't really know anything about her body. It kind of my cycle journey started when I was really young. I was about 10 years old when I got my first period. Pretty quickly I was diagnosed with PMDD, I guess. I had crazy mood swings, intensely heavy periods, all of that.

Speaker 2: 3:32

So my mom took me to the doctor and they put me on the birth control pill at a really young age. And you know, we did the best that we knew at the time and so I was on the pill, off and on, for over 10 years, got married to my husband and stayed on it to prevent pregnancy and when we went off of it we were able to get pregnant pretty quickly, praise the Lord, because one of the side effects of the pill can be infertility. So I was extremely thankful. I didn't know that. Then we were just thankful like, oh, here we are, we have, we have, we're pregnant, cool. So that pregnancy went pretty well. The birth went pretty well, it got off of, you know. Well, we finished sorry, you can cut all that out but had.

Speaker 2: 4:25

The baby was in for the postpartum phase and breastfeeding and my doctor gave me the low dose progestogen pill to take for birth control. Because we're asking okay, we don't, we don't want another baby yet, what do we do? And so she said here's your option. So I took that for a week and it gave me some breakthrough, bleeding or a period or something, and I said nope, I am breastfeeding, I deserve a break, I am getting off of this stuff.

Speaker 2: 4:54

And the Lord was also just touching on my heart of no, I don't want you on this, you have something better out there for you. So I got off of it. But we didn't know anything about how to avoid what was going on. And I was just talking with a friend and she mentioned that she used a basal body temperature thermometer and so I said, okay, I'll get that. I again, I knew nothing. So I got the little thermometer with the app and I was just, you know, blindly being in this postpartum period, trusting whatever the app said, and that's how our second son was conceived at eight months postpartum.

Speaker 2: 5:32

And so we were like, okay, that wasn't in our plans, but beautiful, we'll take this gift that the Lord's given us. And, yeah, that pregnancy went pretty well and gave birth to him and kind of same thing. In that postpartum phase we had different doctors at this point, and every single doctor I ever asked every OB, it was three or four. At this point I was like, is there any other option for birth control other than the pill, other than the IUD, other than the stick, like anything? And you know that doesn't have the side effects, and it was the side effects we were concerned about was also the abortifacient concerns that we had. And just, you know, the Lord had set that uneasiness in our hearts but we just weren't given any options. They said, nope, these are your choices. They may have thrown out. Oh yeah, there's fertility awareness methods, there's the pill, there's IUD. It was just like a fluff thing that wasn't focused on, of like, here's a really great tool that you should look into. So we kept doing what we did, which was we just don't know. And whatever happens happens.

Speaker 2: 6:43

We conceived again at eight months postpartum, after our second, and it was at this point in our lives that things were crazy. We had moved from Oklahoma to Colorado with two kids, two and under. I was having really bad health issues. I didn't know it at the time, but I was actually having some postpartum anxiety really bad and I'd gone to the doctor for it. They told me I could have a anti-depressant. I said no, I don't want that. So I just walked out to continue to live in my misery, you know, for a long time, and I was having vertigo, getting mastitis, like I was just having all these health issues. We moved across the country with our kids and it was a crazy time. We bought a house here in Colorado and we were remodeling it. Everything was nuts. And then one day I was like something is just off and I took a pregnancy test in low alcohol. I was pregnant.

Speaker 2: 7:41

So this was a very stressful time in our lives, if nothing was normal, nothing was in sorts, and we just weren't in a space to honor that life that God had given us. But we were excited and we were thankful. And when I say we weren't in a space to honor that life, I was just eating horribly. I was eating horribly, I was sleeping well, I was busy, I was stressed, I was working so much and just not taking care of myself, just being like, oh, I've been pregnant before, it's been fine, so it'll be fine this time, just assuming.

Speaker 2: 8:16

And I also backtracking a little bit I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism in my first pregnancy, so that's something that had kind of been a thing In all the moving. I'd stopped taking that medication just because, I don't even know, my head wasn't there, just I wasn't educated on how important the thyroid is to our bodies and to, you know, pregnancy and all of that. And so we went to a 15 week ultrasound at one of those little boutique 40 ultrasounds to see what the gender was, because we were so excited. Or we've had two boys, are we gonna have a girl, is there gonna be another boy? And we went in there and the ultrasound tech was going and she said there's no heartbeat, you need to go to your doctor. And we were just shocked, just not believing in. I think we were trying to you know, wonder, maybe her technology is off or you know. But obviously we were just out of breath and we went straight to our doctor's office and they did another ultrasound and she was gone and it was the most heart wrenching, horrific experience. So that happened and turns out it was baby girl and I delivered her a couple days after we found out that she had passed and they just told me you know, these things happen, it's nothing you did, we can't know why, and like all the standard answers that come with miscarriage. And yet you Google all the things of what could cause a miscarriage, but when it happens it's like, oh no, you didn't do anything or you know, we just absolutely don't know why. We can never know why. And it was just absolutely horrific. And so I was.

Speaker 2: 10:06

We were trying to process through that and heal through that the shock of losing her, and we still did not have an option for birth control because we were like, okay, something's wrong, we need a time for healing, we need time to figure out what's going on. We're still not comfortable with getting on a birth control pill. Again, I had no education, but I just thought like something's wrong with my body, I don't want to add anything to it. That's about as much as I knew. And so we actually had two chemical pregnancies back to back, month, month after month, after that miscarriage. So a chemical pregnancy is when you miscarry like your. Your body conceives the baby, but you miscarry before it's able to implant healthfully into your uterine lining. And so I got a super fake positive pregnancy test. My belly popped out like I knew I was pregnant.

Speaker 2: 11:06

And for both those times, and by the third one, I had a friend who texted me because we had had an appointment with our doctor. Again, we said, what, what can we do? What is going on? And she said, I mean, there's some tests we can do. You know, your hormones may have not been quite ready, but we just, you know, most of the time we can't figure it out.

Speaker 2: 11:27

And I was like, well, okay, just accepting it. And my friend, I told her what my doctor had said. And my friend is like Becca, you deserve better answers than this, you deserve better. And that was like my moment of just waking up to question my doctor and to question the advice and to question if, like my doctor, was just not all knowing. Because I had just kind of grown up, you know, trusting whatever the doctor said and going with whatever they said and never having a question. And I have so much respect for doctors, but I just, I didn't have any. None of no part of my hands were ever on my own body or my own health. I just trusted them blindly, which is not responsible Looking back. So that's kind of the start to my story. I'll kind of pause there because I was talking a lot. Let's. Do you have any feedback?

Speaker 1: 12:15

Yeah, just, I can definitely relate to your story of not knowing anything about my body and being raised to trust the experts like they know, and thankfully God brought people into my life that showed me there was a different option and, like helped me to question some things. But yeah, I feel like that's so so many women that they just don't know. And so when I was introduced to the fertility awareness method like I was 26, 27 years old, reading this book, learning about how my body is supposed to work, I was just like this is crazy, it should not be this way.

Speaker 2: 14:24

Yeah, to not know how God designed our body is just a disservice to our creator.

Speaker 1: 14:31

Yeah, and the impact of the birth control pills, because I was on them for five years because that's easy, that's what you do, it's convenient and it was. But I didn't know so much about it until after my first one was born and thankfully I had some midwives. There was a midwife actually in my OB's office that was like that introduced us to I think she just called it natural family planning and it really didn't have the depth of information I needed. It would kind of be like you with the thermometer in the app of like, oh, I'm good now Not quite Right, but my sister-in-law had found. So you finally learned that there were options and learned that you could question the experts. So where did that take you? Yeah?

Speaker 2: 15:26

Thank you, um, yeah. So I started questioning and started praying and thinking, okay, and my husband and I discussed and I said, honey, it's time we text our Catholic friends. So we had this amazing couple friend from college that we love and adore and we knew that somehow they have planned out their children because they've been doing a great job at it. And we knew that they did not use birth control and they were using some kind of magic that we did not understand. That was really weird. But we were at our point where we're like we got to ask them, we got to figure out what they do and if it's legit, somehow, I think it is, I don't, I don't get it. But they, they are just the best family and they had us over for dinner After their kids went to bed. We had a babysitter and we're like, okay, what is this? And so they do what's called the symptom thermal method, so symptom thermal test. They do basal body temperature, they do a cervical exam and they do cervical mucus. So those are kind of the body signs that they learn to chart.

Speaker 2: 16:39

But the first time that they were explaining all this information to me, my mind was exploding. It was the first time I'd heard that birth control is actually a class one carcinogen, equivalent to smoking and tobacco, and it's hugely increases your chance of getting cancer. And I was just like what? What? I didn't know that no doctor had prescribed this to me, he had ever told me that I didn't know. This is crazy. I'm going to check everything you guys are saying. And then they kind of showed us how it worked and they showed us the charts, and she recommended a book for me to read. She recommended for me to check out the Marquette method. That's another method. Marquette, I think, was a little bit easier for us to immediately be able to avoid pregnancy, and so that's one that they were familiar with. So I was like, okay, okay, I will check out everything you guys are saying. This is crazy, but clearly it's working for you. So I'll check it out.

Speaker 2: 17:44

And I'm kind of a huge research guru, and so once I just had that little nugget of information, I just dove head over heels into this with the desire to figure out what was going on, the desire to understand how God created my body, what was happening to it, why am I losing these babies? Yeah, so started researching. We took a little online class from our cat. There's only so much you can absorb from, like you know, a two-hour class, so I think we only absorb 30% of anything we ever hear for the first time. So you know, we we got the tools we needed to avoid pregnancy Naturally for the first time in our marriage and that was phenomenal and it was so beautiful that we had that gift to be able to figure out what was going on with my body. So that was our first big aha was finding these different fertility awareness based methods and and all of that and starting to use that and being like, okay, this is cool and it's working. So, whoa, it was like we would talk with our in-laws and be like, yeah, we're, we're not getting pregnant naturally. Can you believe it? But I at that point I was starting to look into more help beyond my typical 15-minute appointment with my OB where I wasn't getting the answers, and so I found a hormone coach. So she's her name is Jamie Ratchie. She actually speaks on the hormone genies podcast and she is Wonderful. So all of you listeners, that's an amazing podcast to check out. And so she was my hormone coach, and hormone coaches basically dig deep with the woman into just natural lifestyle adjustments that they can mentally and emotionally tangibly take on that truly make an impact in how our hormones work, with education, with listening, with Addressing symptoms and working towards helping Resolve whatever root cause is going on. So I was working with her Alongside, finding a doctor who was certified in naprotechnology I'm not sure if you've ever heard of that before.

Speaker 2: 20:04

Okay, so naprotech naprotechnology is associated with the Cretan method.

Speaker 2: 20:11

You guys are hearing, like, all the methods there's a lot of them, um, I mean not not a lot, but you're hearing all of them.

Speaker 2: 20:18

So Cretan is only mucus. Like it's really really really in depth to teach you so much about your mucus. But there's a legion of doctors, obgyns, who have Certifications in this thing called naprotechnology, so they're actually trained to read Cretan charts and to be able to identify Gynecological issues based off of those charts and they use natural restorative technology To support those issues. So women who have really intense cases of a nemetriosis or PCOS, there's actually natural things that those doctors can do to help support those issues Versus like, well, the only option is IVF. Their goal is to work towards fixing and restoring that root cause issue. So I found her near me and so I was working with her alongside of working with my hormone coach and it took about five or six months of just making Like literally turning my life around, turning my family's life around of 180, of just healing until we could read our charts and feel confident with our charts and the Lord's guidance to Try for a baby again. So kind of pause there, but yeah.

Speaker 1: 21:42

So when you're talking about a hormone coach, how Does a woman know what issues she's dealing with are hormonal or if they're something different or like? Does working on the hormones Help, regardless of what the cause is?

Speaker 2: 22:03

I guess oh my gosh, that's such a good question.

Speaker 2: 22:06

So First of all, start with a stat Over 80% of women experience some type of hormone imbalance.

Speaker 2: 22:16

So most of the time when women complain about headaches or they're just tired or the brain fog, low sex drive, um vaginal dryness, if you're having spotting breast tenderness, mood swings, acne, those are all kind of symptoms of Hormone imbalance, and so the symptoms are Kind of like it's like the voice of your body saying like hey, hey, hey, something's wrong deep down inside. And as a hormone coach, we're trained in Pointing to what could be the root cause. So a quick overview of what we're looking for as root causes is we're looking is this a gut issue, inflammation, liver, adrenals or sex hormones? So we call that gillus, so we work through that acronym and we do a hormone assessment to kind of point us in the direction of what is the biggest root issue. Sometimes there's two, and Typically when we work towards that root issue, that's when we start seeing the symptoms alleviate and start to feel better. I don't know if that answers your question or if you have a question on top of that.

Speaker 1: 23:32

No, I think it answers my question because I think, like those symptoms cover what plagues most women. It seems like you know, when you talk about low energy, brain fog, you said a couple others that it was like yeah, relate to those. So, rather than like I think those are symptoms that so many women deal with and there's so many voices out there saying you need to change your diet or you need to take medication or you just need to deal with it, or it's an autoimmune issue and you're just stuck with it kind of thing where it sounds like, coming at it from figuring out why the hormones are off, Like, yes, you may need to change your diet or whatever, but at least it's in a framework of this is why and this is what should change Right, when you do this, you're supposed to just all these voices of conflicting things, of what you need to do to be better.

Speaker 2: 24:48

I love like talking to the woman of like just stop Googling things, because you're going to find seven and a half different answers that are very conflicting and it's frustrating. I love it when a lot of times most times women come to me when they're just like I'm just tired of trying to figure this out. Like I hear this is good for you, this is good for you, this is good for you, but I just want to know what is good for me. Like I'm tired of reading blog articles addressed to all women and I mean sometimes we really just need that. We need that support sister to guide us through, figure us out and help us with what is my next right step, that the Lord is calling me into a healthier lifestyle, because we could go to any like really expensive doctor or get all of these tests, all of this lab work done and the doctor could be like okay, here's what you need to do for the rest of your life to fix all your stuff, and you're going to be like no, I'm not so and that didn't do anything for you, and so kind of the goal and hormone coaching that we're trained with in the Fiat Institute I would love to talk about like what is the Fiat Institute?

Speaker 2: 25:58

Yeah, but what we're trained in is just looking at the woman and listening to her and being like here's some things that I think would help you. This is why I think this would help you. So you have the education, because if we're just not educated, why do we believe that this is actually going to help? And then giving those solutions and then asking what do you think? Like, do you think that's something you could do Of those things? What is something of those that you could do? Okay, like, let's talk about that on WhatsApp, you know, and check in, and so it's. You really actually get change, like tangible change that happens. That's the whole point of coaching.

Speaker 2: 26:41

You know you're like I need someone to do that, but it's in such a loving Christ centered way, not in a barking way.

Speaker 1: 26:49

Yeah, and I love that you're saying it's not here's the formula and I'm going to stick you in the box with the formula, but I'm going to get to know you and I'm going to find out what your body is telling you and then from that we're going to figure out what you need to do and like, yeah, that's such a good model of coaching, you know, because, like I'm dealing with the emotional, mental side of stuff.

Speaker 1: 27:14

But that's exactly like I don't have somebody come to me and be like here's the first three things you need to do, because, just because that was what the first three things I needed to do, or my last client needed to do, like I need to hear from them what is going on, what they have already tried, what their perspective of things is and part of that, like you said, to asking what do you think? What are you? And so many women don't trust themselves. So it's helping to build that of like, no, listen, listen to your body, listen to you. Have the Holy Spirit. He's speaking to your spirit. What's he telling you? Learn to trust that. So I love that you bring that into.