Anybody who has ever suffered the "wrath" of periods will testify they are not quite the pleasant experience. In fact, they are never fun.
And while for some reason evolution decided nothing less than four days was justifiable to confirm that a woman is not pregnant, sometimes things get a little out of hand and a lot more unbearable. Nutritionist and hormone specialist Alisa Vitti claims this happens mostly in the month of January.
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"It's a pattern I've observed over the past two decades," Vitti, founder of hormone advice centre Flo Living, explained to Daily Mail Online. "Over the holidays, there are so many things which disrupt our endocrine system, leading up to that January period.
"Many of us are travelling, you have disrupted sleep because of all the parties and family events, you're also trying to finish things up at work which is stressful. On top of that you're eating a lot of sugar and carbs, which are endocrine-disruptive.
"All of that is depleting the levels of essential micronutrients you need in your body to balance your hormones. By the time you reach January, your hormone system is way more off-balance than usual, which means PMS and cramps are much worse."
And resonating with everyone's emotions, she mentioned: "This precisely the time that you want to start the year fresh and when you're feeling this way it's really hard. You shouldn't expect garden-variety PMS, expect it to be worse in January."
Vitti explained that the major reasons behind the exceedingly painful January periods are holiday stress and exhaustion and of course the change in diet around the festive season that just passes by.
"Ultimately, all of the activities and dinners over the holidays drain your micronutrient source and can make the deficiency much worse — so by the time you hit the January luteal phase, you're going to really feel it," she claimed.
Also, women with uterine conditions and those on birth-control pills experience it much worse.
Women suffering from conditions like endometriosis (when the womb lining breaks off and attaches to other organs), polycystic ovary sydrome (PCOS, which involves enlarged ovaries covered in small cysts), and fibroids (non-cancerous growths in the uterus) have it worse.
And "if you're on the pill or any other kind of synthetic birth control, all of these are already depleting your micronutrients," Vitti said. "Every single day that you take that medication depletes your micronutrients. That's why you need to take extra care to be getting extra micronutrients so that you're not consistently deficient."
But combating the January blues when it comes to a terrible period is not that hard either. Vitti has launched her own line of daily hormone-replenishing nutrients and suggests women to take five pills daily.
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Diet plays a huge role, too. "For you to live at your most vibrant level at any stage, you have to feed yourself the things that nurture and protect what makes you uniquely female — your hormones," she wrote on her website.
Yoga and light exercise are also recommended measures as they help crush cortisol levels to ease cramps and stress during the particularly insufferable January periods.
