– why do women’s bodies fluctuate weight depending on their menstrual cycle?
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A body prepping itself for pregnancy is a very stressful thing, the body has to build energy reserves in addition to making accommodations for hosting another life inside themselves, this is a rather large commitment of not just energy but also time and actual biomaterial. Many animals will do so only seasonally, and many others only if certain thresholds are met, too low of body fat and the body might decide “nah, too much to ask when we have too little, we’re skipping it” or if certain weather or temperature conditions are correct, and they might not enter heat at all if the body senses everything isn’t perfect.
The *human* body however does not care, we are relatively unique in that we are *always* in heat, the human female body is constantly building then purging the uterine lining, basically every single month the body tills the whole field just in case a single seed falls from the sky *somewhere* and decides to sprout. If that seed doesn’t come, the body throws out all that soil and stars anew. This process of continually building and shedding biomass, in *addition* to the hormone fluctuations that come with “are we pregnant, can we get pregnant, we’re not damnit throw everything out, alright build it again” have an effect on the entire organism. The body might say “hey we might have a baby in 3-7 days so get those fuel reserves up” then “nevermind we’re throwing all this shit out false alarm” makes it so the body is much more sensitive to weight fluctuations than say a house pet that enters into heat once or twice a year.
Basically it’s very stressful on the body to constantly go through that change, and one it seems our mammalian ancestors were doing *once in a while* rather than *every single month*. So the body, while able to accommodate those changes, also has to deal with the larger impact it has on the organism as a whole, in our case not just the biological changes that hormones cause the body to go through but also the psychological changes those hormones are causing, if not intentionally.
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Besides the whole body preparation for pregnancy explained in Dafuzz’s excellent comment, another reason for weight fluctuation is that some parts of the cycle have high level of hormones that make you retain water.
Basically:
* Period: estrogen and progesterone at their lowest, uterine lining is shed.
* After period and before ovulation: estrogen rises, making uterine lining grow and signaling the brain to produce luteinizing hormone (responsible for releasing the egg). **Estrogen also suppresses your appetite.**
* Right after ovulation: estrogen drops.
* After ovulation: progesterone rises, stopping the lining growth and helping support pregnancy. **It also stimulates your appetite AND makes the body retain water.** If no fertilization happens, progesterone eventually drops, triggering a period.
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