When Alisa Vitti started college at Johns Hopkins University, she didn’t just gain the “Freshman 15” — she put on 60 pounds. Her mild, teenage breakouts became full-blown cystic acne and she developed severe insomnia, anxiety, and depression. It wasn’t just the transition and stress that triggered these issues: there were serious hormonal issues at play (including PCOS), but she wouldn’t learn this for years. Ultimately, Vitti dove deep into the world of integrative health, discovered how to reverse PCOS naturally, and went on to build a career around hormonal health.
Today, Vitti is the founder of FLO Living and the MyFlo period tracking app, author of the bestselling books WomanCode and In the FLO, and a prominent voice encouraging women to take control of their hormones and menstrual cycles to live their best lives. Read on to hear her story.
*This is a short clip from Vitti’s full interview— click here to watch the whole thing.*
You can also listen to an audio version of our interview with Alisa Vitti on The WellBe Podcast.
PCOS Symptoms, But No Diagnosis
Vitti had been dealing with hormonal issues for most of her post-pubescent life, becoming amenorrheic (meaning she didn’t get her period) at age 12. “When everyone was lamenting getting their period every month, I got mine only six times for a whole decade,” Vitti says. And of those six times, some were chemically induced by synthetic progesterone. There were other symptoms, too, and she never felt truly healthy, but she was able to push them aside and continue to live her life.
By the time freshman year of college rolled around, though, she couldn’t ignore her health issues anymore. Her weight ballooned, cystic acne spread across her face and back, and she was suffering from severe insomnia, anxiety, and depression. Still, there were no answers. She’d go to the gynecologist and ask questions: why wasn’t she getting her period? Why was it so irregular? Why did she feel so off? But she was always told that there was nothing wrong with her, and no testing was done.
So, she decided to take her health into her own hands. She found a journal of obstetrics and gynecology in the Johns Hopkins library, and her jaw dropped when she read an article about a condition called Stein-Leventhal disease, which is now known as Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). The description perfectly matched how she felt; she had every single symptom listed.
The next day, she showed up at her gynecologist’s office without an appointment, carrying the journal article with her. She told her doctor, firmly, that they needed to do some different testing and look at her ovaries and see if there were cysts present. She needed clarity. “We did the test and my doctor said, ‘Oh, look at that. Your ovaries are covered in cysts. You do have PCOS,’” Vitti remembers.
Vitti then asked her doctor what came next, but the doctor’s answer was incredibly disheartening. Rather than discussing what could be done to reverse PCOS, she told Vitti that it was a condition she would live with for the rest of her life, and that it would get increasingly worse. She also said that there would likely be complications down the road, including obesity, diabetes, infertility, cancer, and heart disease. But still, the doctor said, there just wasn’t a way to reverse PCOS, or even mitigate the effects.
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Discovering How to Reverse PCOS on Her Own
For her whole life, Vitti had planned on becoming an ob-gyn, and had started college with that intention. But, as she puts it, “the experience of having such a major situation with my own hormones really opened my eyes to some of the limitations of traditional gynecology for chronic hormonal issues.” After all, she’d been undiagnosed for seven years, and was now being told that she had to resign herself to a life with this condition, that it was impossible to reverse PCOS and she’d just need to accept all the complications.
“I remember thinking, no, this is not my future. There’s got to be a better way,” Vitti says. Suddenly, she saw the faults in the way that conventional medicine treated chronic hormonal conditions: a hands-off approach that centered on women’s acceptance of disease and discomfort. “I just thought that that was unacceptable, because I knew we could do better,” Vitti says.
So she proceeded to do her own research on PCOS and what could be done to ease her symptoms and, ultimately, heal completely. Eventually, this research led her to develop the protocol that is now used at FLO Living to help women reverse PCOS and address other hormonal issues. When she applied the protocol to herself, she witnessed a massive transformation: her skin cleared up, her weight melted off, and her menstrual cycle was restored.
You can get more in-depth information about the protocol Vitti used to reverse her PCOS on the FLO Living website and in the WomanCode book, but it breaks down into three major steps:
- Treating the root cause rather than spot-treating symptoms
- Relying on food rather than pharmaceuticals. This means turning to functional nutrition in specific sequences that address the particular hormonal needs of each phase of a woman’s cycle.
- Adjusting lifestyle based on the 28-day clock of a woman’s biology
Building Flo Living Hormone Center
After Vitti’s experience reversing PCOS after being told it was impossible, she knew that she needed to shift course. Being a conventional ob-gyn within the conventional medicine system would not fulfill her goal of helping women everywhere balance their hormones and feel their best. That’s where the inspiration to build FLO Living came from.
“FLO Living was something that I needed a long time ago when I was dealing with my own hormonal health issues,” says Vitti. “I really wished there was a place where I could’ve gone when my period started becoming problematic, where I could talk to someone about the issues that I was struggling with, where I could test my hormones as much as I wanted, get effective, natural treatment, and track my progress and symptoms.”
That place didn’t exist, and so Vitti created it. FLO Living is a virtual online health center (or “global menstrual healthcare concierge platform,” as Vitti describes it) to help women reverse PCOS, like she did, but also solve any other hormonal symptoms and better understand their cycles to live their best lives. It uses holistic, personalized, and scientifically-backed programs that help women better meet their nutritional and energetic needs throughout their cycle. By doing this, they can derive power, not problems, from their hormones, allowing them to feel great all month long as well as improve fertility and libido.
“A lot of the messaging that we’re given as women about our reproductive health is lacking in enough science and practical wisdom, so we just avoid it,,” Vitti says. “Then it ends up causing us to make the choice in our own healthcare of doing nothing, which we know is really dangerous from great research that’s long been out there.”
As an example, she cites a study that determined that if you have untreated PMS — which is a serious hormonal imbalance resulting from too much estrogen and insufficient progesterone — in your 20s and 30s, it increases your likelihood of developing the four big diseases of inflammation after menopause: heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and dementia. In other words, PMS isn’t something we should be joking about, but something we should be taking very seriously. With FLO Living, Vitti hopes to change the conversation around PMS, hormonal conditions, and female health in general.
“It’s really important for us to understand how our bodies work,” Vitti says. “It is not mysterious, and your body is so responsive to the right inputs. My experience of watching my body transform is not unique.” Since her journey to reverse PCOS, Vitti has spent over two decades working with tens of thousands of women around the globe, providing them with the knowledge, resources, and guidance they need beyond their annual gynecologist exam. “When you really need to take action around your cycle, there needs to be a place to do that,” she says. “That’s why I created FLO LIVING, because I needed it and we all need it.”
The WellBe Takeaway on Alisa Vitti’s Journey to Reverse PCOS
Alisa Vitti’s journey to reverse PCOS tells us a lot about not only the complexity of the female endocrine system, but also the lack of awareness, science, and advocacy for female health in conventional medicine. Her story highlights how crucial it is for women to be their own advocates at the doctor’s office and refuse to accept it when a healthcare professional tells them that certain hormonal issues and symptoms are something they just need to deal with indefinitely. It also sheds light on the importance of hormonal balance for long-term health and disease prevention.
Since we filmed our interview with Vitti, she wrote her second book, In the Flo, in which she shines a light on the root causes of why so many women are struggling with managing both their health and all that they have to do in their lives. Vitti believes the reason is that women are ignoring their infradian biological rhythm (which is a fancy way of referring to any cycle that lasts longer than 24 hours, so women’s monthly menstrual cycle). She asserts in the book that caring for that rhythm is equally, if not more important, than caring for women’s circadian clock, and that the impact of this rhythm is felt in 6 major systems of the body: reproductive, brain, metabolism, immune, microbiome, and stress response systems. The book also lays out a plan for women to support their infradian biological rhythm with diet, fitness, and a time management program.
Watch our full interview with Alisa Vitti to hear her discuss a wide range of topics related to women’s health, including why your period while taking the pill really isn’t a period, how hormonal birth control affects future fertility, how being on the pill covers up pre-existing conditions, the alarming rise of precocious puberty, the importance of addressing hormonal issues when you’re young, how meal timing affects the endocrine system, what your period blood can tell you about your health, her wellness non-negotiables, what to do for each phase of your cycle, and more.
You can also listen to an audio version of our interview with Alisa Vitti on The WellBe Podcast.
Have you dealt with any hormonal imbalances or issues like PCOS, endometriosis, or fibroids? How did you reverse it? Tell us in the comments!
References:
- Kurzrock, Razelle, and Philip R Cohen. “Polycystic ovary syndrome in men: Stein-Leventhal syndrome revisited.” Medical hypotheses vol. 68,3 (2007): 480-3. doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2006.03.057
- Wactawski-Wende, Jean et al. “BioCycle study: design of the longitudinal study of the oxidative stress and hormone variation during the menstrual cycle.” Paediatric and perinatal epidemiology vol. 23,2 (2009): 171-84. doi:10.1111/j.1365-3016.2008.00985.x
The recovery story above is anecdotal and specific to this particular individual. Please note that this is not medical advice, and that not all treatments and approaches mentioned will work for everyone.
The information contained in this article comes from our interview with Alisa Vitti, a holistic health coach. Her qualifications and training include graduating from Johns Hopkins University and the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Alissa is also a speaker and the author of several bestselling books. You can read more of Alissa Vitti’s story here.
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