In 2018 I studied with Ellen Heed, as part of my Sexological Bodywork training. Ellen is an expert on women’s pelvic health and scar tissue remediation. Through her I learned that endometriosis has been linked to problems with liver function (amongst other things). For me, a person who had always struggled with my relationship to alcohol, this was an Aha! moment. If the liver is underperforming (not doing a good job of filtering the blood), the blood becomes agglutinated or thickened, and as a result is more ‘sluggish’ – it doesn’t flow as quickly in your body. When this thickened blood is sitting around in your liver, scar tissue and other kinds of granulation products begin to accumulate in the bile canaliculi (the tiny bile ducts that lead out of the liver and ultimately into the gall bladder). That means bile doesn’t flow out of the liver so easily, and the liver is basically sitting around in it’s own sewage, thus creating a self-perpetuating cycle of inflammation and agglutination, and issues such as endometriosis.

If this thickened menstrual blood then travels up and out through the fallopian tubes, through the fibrils of the fallopian tubes, and onto the outside of the uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries, it can implant there – causing what’s known as an endometrioma. This is a section of uterine lining growing elsewhere in the body and continuing to respond to the menstrual cycle each month. So that tissue swells, and it bleeds, just like a woman’s normal cycling inside her uterus. However, instead of the blood flowing out of the Os (the opening of the cervix) and out of the vagina, it is trapped inside of an intra-pelvic space where it can cause enormous pain.

A direct way to reduce the levels of inflammation in your body, helping to reverse the agglutination process and boost liver function, is through diet. My success in drastically reducing the impact of my endometriosis came initially from these vital shifts in diet:

• I stopped eating sugar, processed foods, and any kind of gluten or starch. This greatly reduced the inflammation in my body: you could see this visibly (I lost weight, I looked less ‘puffy’) and I could feel it tangibly and on an interoceptive level.
• To this day I maintain a diet that is extremely low in carbohydrate, I avoid sugar and I’ve now been sober from alcohol for 7 years. 

The impact on my menstrual health was phenomenal. When I do ‘cheat’ and eat these things, or when I’ve been through phases in the last 10 years where I’ve experimented and gone back to my carb-heavy diet, the effect is undeniable: the body doesn’t lie! I am not a nutritionist, but I can say from personal experience that choosing not to eat things that cause inflammation and irritation at a cellular level in my body, is a no-brainer!