Ask a Doctor: Is Exercise Allowed in Period Recovery?

“Do I have to stop strength training?” “Am I allowed to exercise while my period is missing?” “How much do I have to eat to get my period back?” These questions reach me almost daily, and for two podcast episodes I brought in professional reinforcement.

Dr. Melanie Maurer is a doctor and psychiatrist and has already been a guest expert in my Food Freedom Academy. Together we answered your most frequent questions: she from a medical and psychotherapeutic perspective, I from the perspective of nutrition counselling and my own recovery.

In this article you’ll find the most important answers from both episodes on whether exercise is allowed in period recovery and how you can get your period back despite exercise. What helps when hunger and fullness are missing, and where evening cravings come from, you can read in the article Cravings and a disrupted sense of hunger and fullness.

How much do I have to eat to get my period back?

Melanie and I agree: There is no one-size-fits-all answer. If you lost your period through being underweight or undernourished, you first need to get back into a healthy range. A few days of bigger portions aren’t enough for that.

Behind the missing period lies a protective mechanism: the hypothalamus, the hormonal control centre in the brain, registers that not enough energy is available and turns down the signals to the ovaries. Even at a normal weight it can therefore take a while until the body trusts the new supply. How much “more” you need depends entirely on your starting point.

What we both recommend: increase step by step, without counting calories. One more slice of bread at breakfast, an extra spoon of oats in your porridge, a bit more nut butter, a larger side dish at lunch. As simple as that sounds, the real work often happens in your head.

If you are meant to weigh yourself for medical reasons: a single value says little, much like a still frame that reveals hardly anything about the plot of a film. I regularly get worried messages about one extra kilo that has disappeared again by the next weigh-in. What matters is the trend over weeks, not a single morning.

Getting your period back despite exercise: do I have to stop strength training?

Melanie and I agree here too: if you train every morning and evening or complete tens of thousands of steps as a duty, you can honestly ask yourself: am I doing this because it’s healthy for me and my goals, or am I doing it because I feel I have to?

Stress builds up unnoticed on countless levels. Too few calories, missing nutrients, an unhealthy body weight, psychological strain and intense exercise all land in the same account, and a missing period shows that this account is overdrawn. The aim is to lower the total load enough for the body to feel safe enough to be fertile again. Complete inactivity isn’t healthy either, though.

I never forbid the women I support to exercise. What matters is the intention: am I running to punish myself, or am I doing strength training two or three times a week because it’s good for my bones? Especially when your period is missing, strength training for bone health can make sense, while intense endurance training should rather be reduced. That’s exactly what I look at individually with the women I support.

Movement itself isn’t the problem, but the imbalance of too little energy, too little recovery and permanently empty stores. That’s why you shouldn’t cut back on food on rest days, and with pronounced underweight, exercise isn’t advisable for now; that should be clarified with a doctor. How it was for me, you can read in Period missing because of exercise.

Fear shows you the way

In every Cycle Clarity Call and every coaching I come across a lot of fear. Behind many questions there is really the fear of fear: What happens if …? And so people keep themselves trapped: no meeting friends, no travel, hardly any lovely experiences, because the food problem has become their identity.

Melanie has a thought about this that I value a lot: fear always means interest too. If something were indifferent to you, you wouldn’t be afraid of it. So your fear shows you what matters to you and in which direction your path leads.

Your current state isn’t making you happy. That’s why, if you go through the fear, you can only win: either it gets better, or you know this path isn’t yours and try the next one. From my own experience I can say: every time I went through the fear, I grew.

Our shared final advice: routines, habits and structure. At first, try not to eat alone, give yourself unconditional permission, don’t run away or compensate, and honour every step, however small. Your body only wants the best for you. Work with it, not against it.