Beyond Organised

Cycle Syncing with Physician Assistant, Amy Dave

• Mel Schenker • Episode 32

Share episode

Send us a text

What if PMS isn’t inevitable but a signal you can decode? We sit down with physician assistant and women’s wellness coach, Amy Dave, to unpack cycle syncing: a practical way to align food, fitness, and your calendar with the four phases of your menstrual cycle. Amy shares how shifting her approach from “push harder” to “work with biology” transformed exhaustion into energy in just a few months. She saw a reduction in cramps, smoothing mood swings, and sharpening focus while working and raising three boys.

Across the conversation, we break down how hormones change week to week and what your body actually needs in each phase. You’ll hear why 15–30 minute workouts can outperform daily 45 minute grinds when they match your cycle, which foods to reduce to lower inflammation, and how small diet tweaks can ease symptoms without rigid rules. We also explore tracking fundamentals, what a healthy cycle length looks like, and how to spot patterns that suggest hormone imbalances. For those navigating fertility hurdles, Amy explains how lifestyle can support PCOS and fibroids, and where endometriosis may still require medical care, while lifestyle changes can still reduce pain and stress.

This is more than a health chat; it’s a life design framework. Learn to plan meetings, social events, and deep work around your natural energy peaks, and protect rest when your system asks for it. We talk candidly about normalising these conversations at home so partners understand and kids grow up informed and empathetic. You’ll walk away with clear starting steps. For tools and deeper dives, Amy shares her free guide on living without PMS, plus her podcast and YouTube resources to keep you supported.

Connect with Amy on Instagram @thewealthofwellness or through her website: https://thewealthofwellness.com/

Grab her free guide here: https://subscribepage.io/LifewithoutPMS 

If this episode helps you see your cycle as a roadmap, not a burden, share it with a friend, hit follow, and leave a quick review. Your feedback helps more women find practical, compassionate tools that actually fit real life.

Support the show

🎧 Loved this episode? Here’s how you can connect!

If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe and leave a review! It helps more people like you find the show. 💚

Remember, organising is a tool to live the purposeful life beyond it.

See you next time!

Mel:

Welcome to Beyond Organised, the podcast that helps you simplify your life and amplify your purpose. I'm Mel Schenker, life coach, speaker, founder of She's Organised, but, more importantly, a wife and mum of four little kids. If you've ever felt overwhelmed, like you're constantly juggling everything but never quite catching up, this is the place for you. Here we go beyond just the tidying up and creating systems. We're talking about real life strategies that bring order to your life, but also we talk about the things beyond the organising, the things that really matter, like your parenting relationships and so much more. So grab your coffee and let's dive in.

Mel:

Welcome back to another episode of Beyond Organised. Today I have Amy Dave with us, and I'm really excited to hear what she has to say today because I know I'm going to learn something new. So just to give you a bit of background on who Amy is, she has been a physician assistant for over 24 years. She's also a women's wellness coach, specializing in helping mums navigate through their crazy life by syncing their daily habits with their monthly cycles. A mum of three boys, Amy realized her passion while making changes to improve her own symptoms. Using lifestyle changes, Amy helps women overcome chronic fatigue, frustration, stress, and feelings of overwhelm, replacing them with increased energy, efficiency, and empowerment. Amy also helps women transition into menopause gracefully. Her podcast is called The Incredible Mum Life, where she shares stories of the wild things our kids do. Oh my goodness, you sound like my kind of woman. Welcome to the show, Amy. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Oh, you are so welcome. I feel like what we're going to be talking about today is something that has just always been pretty taboo. And people don't really like talking about being a woman, really, essentially. And I know I'm going to learn so much from you, even just from the little bits you gave me before the show. So, what inspired you to do what you do and tell us a bit more about it?

Amy:

Sure. So I'm a physician assistant. I don't know if you have those in uh where you are, but here in the US, it's it's like in between a nurse and a doctor. So we can do more than a nurse called. No. Yeah, a little bit less than a doctor. It's you know common here, but um and I when I became a PA, I was big on preventive medicine, you know, use diet and exercise to lower your blood pressure, lower your cholesterol. And I thought I was eating healthy. I thought I was exercising, um, you know, I was doing cardio 45 minutes most days of the week. And I wasn't feeling good. I was exhausted. I it just kind of felt like a zombie, is what I say. Like I was doing my daily tasks, running out of fears. I didn't really feel anything. Um, and then COVID hit. And while we were home, I had a couple years before that I had gone back to school and got my advanced certificate of nutrition and other things. And I had heard about this thing called cycle syncing back then, but I was a busy mom. I had three kids, I was in school, I and I was working. So I didn't have time to research it or anything. Uh and thankfully during our quarantine, I did have time. Right. And I I learned about this thing called cycle syncing, where basically for women who have their monthly bleed, you actually go through four different phases every month. And as the hormones rise and you know lower and fluctuate, um, your body needs different nutrients. So you need to be eating different foods, you need different kinds of exercises for peak performance and muscle tone and everything. So one week cardio might be better, and the next week strength training might be better, right? So it changes. So you can't do the same exercise every day. Yeah. Um it also works with your social calendar. So you you might notice during your month that there are some weeks where you're more social, more outgoing. So the week. Start talk to me. Yes. There's other weeks where you're like, nope, I'm staying in my pajamas, I'm staying home.

Mel:

Yeah.

Amy:

Um, and if you learn to incorporate your monthly cycle into your home life, your business life, your relationship, you can eliminate your monthly symptoms. One. So things like cramping, bloating, acne, heavy bleeding, mood swings.

Mel:

Um, that's a big one for me.

Amy:

Yeah. Um, you know, and then just a whole lot of other things. So when I started doing this, within four months, all my symptoms went away. What? Wow. And then when I was feeling better, and then I was waking up, I had energy. Oh, you know, I had more mental clarity. And then I was like, oh, well, now let's work on my spirituality. And now let's work on mindset shifts, and now let's start a business and teaching the world of toilet stuff. Um, so yes, it and it's been evolving. I've been doing this about five years now. Yeah, and I actually I eat more than I used to. I used to eat a lot of salads and things, but I'm eating more and I'm exercising 15 to 30 minutes a day, max. Yeah. And I'm seeing more results now than I was doing 45 minutes of hard work. Where have you been all my life? That's what I that's what I ask. Um, I learned this in my 40s, so I wish I'd known this in my teens and twenties.

Mel:

Yeah, for sure. And look, we've got listeners of all ages here, from quite young in the early 20s and that through to retirement age and probably even past this season, to be honest. But wow, I oh, where have you been? So I I've got to ask, what is something that you feel holds women back in learning about this, in in moving forward, in managing their cycles and everything? What's something that kind of is a bit of a resistance for you? We don't even know about it.

Amy:

Yeah. So if you go to your doctor and you say, Oh, I have terrible cramps every month, I'm so irritable, I'm yelling at everybody, and then I'm bleeding heavy, you know, the doctor's gonna say, Well, I can put you on birth control pills.

Mel:

Yes.

Amy:

Or you can take pain medications and use a heating pad.

Mel:

Yeah.

Amy:

There's not many options. Yeah. As there are. So if you change your diet, you change your exercise, you eliminate inflammatory foods. So things like dairy, gluten, fried foods, right? Those are inflammatory and inflammation causes cramping. So if you eliminate those foods, you can eliminate cramping, right?

Mel:

So there's Is it just, you know, do we eliminate those foods for good, or is it just at that at certain times in the month?

Amy:

So I I didn't eliminate them all the way. I just cut them down by maybe about 50%, 70%. But I still have bread and I still have pasta. And yeah, just not as often as I used to. Um and I can tell. I mean, there are some months where I have no symptoms at all.

Mel:

Yeah.

Amy:

And there are some months, if we're on vacation or at a wedding or, you know, had a bunch of parties or whatever, holidays, then that next month, yes, I will have some symptoms. But one, they're much milder than they were. And two, I know exactly what caused the symptoms, and I know exactly which foods to counteract the system. So it's much better now than it used to be. It's not perfect.

Mel:

That's okay. Well, we still gotta live our life too. But the fact that you're aware, I mean, that you can manage it, that you know sort of what buttons to push, and this is incredible. This is like, this is mind-blowing to me. I'm so excited. So, what is one thing, and only one thing, that you wish women knew in regards to all of this?

Amy:

Um, the first thing is to track your cycle. So we know when we have our bleed, right? Um, but if you start tracking it either on a paper calendar or there's like tons of digital apps too, yeah, where you can track. Um, a normal cycle is about 28 to 32, 35 days. If you're bleeding less often than that, or if it's going longer than 35 days or so, that's an indicator that your hormones are out of balance. Um, if you're trying to conceive and you're tracking ovulation and you notice you're not ovulating, that's also a symptom of hormone imbalance. Yeah. And then if you're not feeling great, your body's trying to tell you something. Yeah. It's not a normal part of living. It's not, oh, you're just a woman, you have to deal with it. Which is how I grew up, right? I thought this until I was 40 or something. Yeah. Uh, it's just a woman, I'm a woman, I have to deal with it every month, there's nothing else I can do until I learned about this cycle sinking. And now there I know there are lots of things you can do.

Mel:

Wow. So if someone does have the hormone imbalance, do they need to go down a more medical type path to get things sorted out? Or it really diet and exercise and going with the cycles really can help them ovulate again and and all that kind of stuff.

Amy:

Yeah, they can boost fertility. If you have PCOS, it can reduce the number of like cysts on the ovaries. What about endometriosis? It can help. Endometriosis is a little tricky, but it can help um make fibroids smaller. Yeah.

Mel:

Yeah.

Amy:

So it can it can definitely help. Just endometriosis is a little tricky because it it can travel outside the uterus too.

Mel:

Yeah, yeah.

Amy:

Um generally needs medical intervention. It definitely helped here's a quick tip. If you go to Pinterest and you just search cycle syncing, you'll get a whole bunch of charts and graphics and um you know, circular graphics and square graphics about different foods you should be eating, different exercises you should be doing. Yeah. Um there's that out. Yeah, there's tons of information out there. There's books you can read. Um, you know, there's coaches like me out, they're called hormon coaches, fertility coaches, um, cycle syncing coaches. Great. It's it's definitely up and coming.

Mel:

Look, I think especially in today's day and age, when you're seeing the increase in fertility issues just going down that path, and how many people um ending up using IUI or IEVF and the astronomical costs involved with that, not just financially, but emotionally, mentally, just the whole works, physically. It's it's very taxing. So the thought that for some women, and I get that ever there's a lot of different fertility reasons, but if this can give hope to just some women to be able to help their bodies naturally heal and get into I mean, this is gold.

Amy:

This is gold. And I went through all the infertility treatments and the AIs and the IVF and everything. So I know I God, I wish I had known this when I had gone through all that, right? Or even when my kids were young, and you know, I was feeling awful every day. And if I had known this, I could have been so much more present. So much of a better mom.

Mel:

Well, that's even what I'm thinking about because there are just that those certain moments that I I noticed leading up to, you know, that time and and all that kind of stuff that I just like I know that it's gonna be like a hot button for me. So it's like I try not to even plan events or just family things, you know, even birthdays or whatever, I'll try and push it out a few days or whatever it is because I just kind of know that I'm not gonna be in a great mood. Mood is a really big thing for me. And I I don't want to be that mum that snaps at my kids or I'm so wiped out that I'm like practically falling asleep while they're talking to me. Like I don't want to be like that. And so I just it's funny because I think we're so busy as women, and a lot of what I do is helping with restoring some balance and taking things off the plate, simplifying. That's a lot of what I do. But it's funny how even for me, I I'm still quite busy overall. And you can put those exhaustion and and all those feelings down to what you're doing rather than what's going on internally. And that I've got to say, a few months ago, I ended up in hospital because my body was screaming at me that something wasn't right. But I just thought, well, I've got a newborn, I'm running a business, got three other kids, I've I'm doing everything, right? And I just thought it was because I was busy, but my body was screaming at me to the point where I manually died. Like it was, it was bad. I mean, it was fixable, and a part a big part of it was my iron was down to like three. So it was bad, and there was a number of things, but it was fixable. So I got on top of it. But even the doctors were like, you can't leave this hospital until this is sorted because you might not wake up tomorrow. It was bad. And I think as women, particularly high-achieving women, I see it's that mentality of, I'll deal with myself later. I've got to worry about everyone else, I've got to deal with everything else. But before you realize you are in your 30s, 40s, 50s, and you still haven't even taken a second to look at you, and your body, all these years, have been screaming at you. And particularly when it comes to hormones with what you're saying, especially if it's always been that way since you were a teenager and you just expect that you're going to experience a bit of pain every month, you're gonna be a bit moody every month, and that's just normal, especially with the way the world paints things too, to hear that there is a different way to live that isn't going to cost you all your money and all your health and all your, you know, just that it's just simple, that it just works with it. I just think that is so exciting and I need to.

Amy:

Yeah. Um, I have lots of resources. So I have a YouTube channel. Uh, I talk about this on my podcast. I actually did uh a YouTube video, I think last year, around Halloween, where my kids call me Monster Mom sometimes if I get a little angry. And so my video is about, you know, is your monster mom present year round? Not just during Halloween. Yeah, I can I'm sure that relates to many moms out there. So feel free to check out my YouTube channel. It's called The Wealth of Wellness, which is my business. Business is the same. So thewealth of Wellness.com, and I'll I'll give you that link so you can put it in the show notes. Um, but yeah, I talk about this on my podcast. I've had some relationship coaches on, so we talk about how it affects your relationship. I had a business coach.

Mel:

Okay.

Amy:

So we talk about how to run your business differently. Awesome. Uh in different weeks. So yeah.

Mel:

Yeah. Oh, that is so good. We want the women out there to connect with you. So I'll make sure that all the links are in the notes. They're ready to go so they can find you, maybe even, yeah, be coached by you all the way through to listening to your podcast and that, which I'm so excited to binge, honestly. Like, I feel like I really need this. You'll get a good laugh for sure. Oh, good, good, good. I I mean, I'm always laughing on my show, but there's not really a lot of funny stuff happening. I just laugh. So I'm sure people are laughing at me, going, Oh, what a silly girl. But anyway, is there anything else that you would like people to be aware of?

Amy:

I do have a free guide. Yeah. It's called Start Living a Life Without PMS. And it's a very brief introduction to both the 24-hour clock and the monthly clock. So it goes through what the four phases are and it gives you some simple tips that you can try for each colour.

Mel:

Great. Awesome. Well, the link will be there too, and I'm definitely gonna grab that and I'll be on your email list. I want to learn more. That sounds so good. I'm just so glad that you reached out to be on the show because I did have quite a number of people reach out, but going through your pages through threads and Instagram and that, it's just what you're doing is so needed. It's empowering for women to have the knowledge to be able to do something about it. But I love that you've stepped into something that can be uncomfortable for a lot of people. Yes. And it can be really challenging. And no doubt our male counterparts probably just don't understand a lot of it. But even they can learn so much from this about their wives and their partners and all of that. And I just I think if we can make this conversation normal, then our sons are also going to be able to relate to their girlfriends and wives and all of that in the future. They're going to be better partners and be able to understand and just go, okay, I know when to speak up. I know when to let it go. I know when to just do what I need to. So as much as it's invaluable for us women and for our daughters and that, it's so important for our sons to learn and be the next generation that is inclusive of all of this and understanding.

Amy:

Yeah, that's my goal. That is my mission to just teach everybody and give them awareness. Because I have three boys, so I have four men in the house.

Mel:

I got three boys, but they're quite they're quite young still, and I've got a daughter as well. But yeah, it's um it I'm always thinking about ways to make things just normal for them. Because I I gotta say, a lot of the males in in my family and and the males that I've grown up with and that, it was like, no, no, no, no, no. Like it you do not talk about, you go to your mother for that, you don't, you know, whatever it is. Um, and I just think it's just it's how we are. It's it's how we're created, it's our biology, and we shouldn't be made to feel ashamed or to be kept in the dark about it. I think for me included, I didn't really understand cycles or how any of it worked really until I was probably even pregnant with my second, it probably wasn't even my first, just understanding like how it works because it's almost like, no, don't go there, don't think about it. It's almost shameful in some ways to understand how our body works. And I just think that's wrong, blood out. I think it's wrong. I think we should be able to comfortably talk about it and try and learn and understand without the shame, without feeling like we're doing something wrong or talking about something we shouldn't be talking about, and just going, well, I'm trying to understand myself better, but also to be the role model for my kids so they can understand better and not feel the shame that I did growing up. So anyway, I've kind of hijacked a lot of what That's okay.

Amy:

This is um it's a topic that needs to be talked about. You are right.

Mel:

It really is. It really is. Well, I mean, we are getting to the end of it, but is there anything else that you would love the listeners to know about you, about the cycles, about anything before we wrap up?

Amy:

No, it's a it's still a work in progress for me too, even though I've been doing this for five years. But like I said, now I know if I have a month with more symptoms, I know why. I can backtrack and say, oh yeah, I went to this party and that party and this food and that food. So I know how to I know why I'm having the symptoms, I know how to fix them, and I know it's okay to have a mozzarella steak or ice cream once in a while, like with my kids. And it's not gonna live life. Be yeah, you gotta live. So, you know, it's it's a learning process every day.

Mel:

Yeah, well, that's it. And a lot of the time, especially this season of of our lives and our motherhood and everything, it really is just taking it one day at a time and giving ourselves grace for the areas where we might fall short a bit. And that's okay.

Amy:

Yes, and you will, yeah, you will fall short, you will have mistakes. It it's it's there.

Mel:

There's no right or wrong either. You just yeah, pick yourself up and carry on another day. That's right. That's so good. Well, thank you so much, Amy, for coming and sharing all of this and for creating the awareness that is really needed around this topic and for enlightening me. So thank you so much.

Amy:

You're welcome, and thank you for having me. Um, thank you. Want to help all the women feel better.

Mel:

Yeah, well, I'm sure you did. I'm sure by creating this awareness today you've even just helped one woman out there, then job done. So thank you so much, Amy. Thank you.

Mel:

If you like this episode, don't forget to hit subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you want to continue the conversation, you can connect with me on Instagram @shes.organised or for some free resources, head over to beyondorganised.com/ toolkit. Remember, organising is a tool to live the purposeful life of beyond it. See you next time.

Head Shot

Mel Schenker

Host
Head Shot

Amy Dave

Guest