How I Got My Period Back After 16 Years Without One
For 16 years, I silently carried the unbearable pain of not having a period. I spent my entire adolescence feeling broken, confused, and ashamed. I never told anyone. I was scared of what it meant and scared something was deeply wrong with me.
Today, I want to share the story I kept hidden for so long — how I lost my period at 14 (a condition called amenorrhea), what those 16 years without it were really like, and how I finally healed and got my cycle back.
My hope is that by telling my story, I can offer hope to any woman out there who feels as lost and alone as I once did.
How It All Started
I’ve always loved food. Like, really loved it. As a kid and teenager, eating was one of my greatest joys. But it also meant I was on the chubbier side. I didn’t love how my body looked and constantly felt guilty about it, but I loved the comfort that food gave me and didn’t have the willpower to change anything.
That shifted one summer when my mom took my sister and me to Tel Aviv. We stayed in a nice hotel for a few weeks, swimming every day in the pool and at the beach. I remember watching all these beautiful women around me who were confident, radiant, and had bodies I could only dream of. I wanted to look like them.
When I got home, I decided I was going to make that happen. I cut out the junk food and snacks, stuck to just three meals a day, and started running for 20 minutes every day.
And it worked. Slowly but surely, the weight started coming off. Within two months, I had what I thought was my dream body. It felt too good to be true.
But Then I Took Things Too Far
I was so afraid of losing my dream body that I became deeply attached to it. That fear quickly turned into an intense fear of food. I believed that if I ate too much or ate the “wrong” things, I’d gain the weight back. I convinced myself that low-fat, low-calorie foods were the healthiest choice, and I exercised intensely every day even though I was barely eating enough.
Because of these disordered habits, my period stopped showing up altogether. After nine months without it, I finally got scared enough to tell my parents. They took me to an OBGYN, who prescribed birth control. I had no idea what it was or how it worked, but I took the pill as directed. Then 28 days later, my “period” came back. No one mentioned nutrition or lifestyle changes. I was able to keep my unhealthy habits and still bleed every month.
But over the next year, things got worse. I continued to lose weight until I looked like skin and bones, and I started developing random health issues even though I had always been healthy before. Eventually, I realized what I was doing was harming my body and needed to change. I started eating more intentionally to gain weight and return to a healthy range. Over several months, I gained about 20 pounds and felt better both physically and mentally.
I Didn’t Fully Heal Though
Even though I looked healthy on the outside, I knew deep down I wasn’t truly healed. The fact that I needed birth control just to have a period was a big clue that something was wrong. I was terrified to stop taking it because I didn’t want to face the reality of not bleeding at all… so I stayed on it.
After being on it for 13 years, I met my now-husband at my birthday party in LA. We connected instantly, and one of the first things that impressed me was how much he knew about health and hormones. He wrote some thought provoking tweets about birth control and it stopped me on my tracks. He never pressured me to stop, but he did open my eyes to its downsides and long-term ramifications. With his encouragement, I finally mustered the courage to stop taking it cold turkey.
Then I waited for my period to return. One month passed… then two, then six. A year later, still nothing. It was devastating.
Physically and mentally I felt fine, but I knew something was wrong. A healthy female body is designed to ovulate each month, and mine wasn’t doing that. I went to several OBGYNs, and every single one diagnosed me with PCOS and told me to go back on birth control. But I didn’t have any PCOS symptoms, and I knew the “period” you get on the pill isn’t a real period. It’s just withdrawal bleeding during the sugar-pill days. That wouldn’t fix the problem. It would only mask it.
After four doctors gave me the same advice, I gave up on conventional medicine. They were good at prescribing things to suppress symptoms, but not at identifying why those symptoms were happening in the first place. I wanted answers. I wanted to fix the root cause.
Then things got worse.
About a year and a half after quitting the pill, new symptoms started piling on: skin issues, mood swings, anxiety, depression, and fatigue. I later learned this was called “post-birth control syndrome”. This is what happens when your body has been hormonally suppressed for years and suddenly has to remember how to function on its own again. It takes time to recalibrate.
Despite how awful I felt, I stayed the course. I realized that healing is rarely a straight line. We want it to be a steady climb upward, but the truth is, there are peaks and valleys — and sometimes, things get worse before they get better.
My healing journey turned out to be a long and winding one. And as desperate as I was to feel better, I knew I had to keep going. Here’s what I did next.
My Healing Journey
Ayurveda
I started my healing journey with Ayurveda. I went to a well-known clinic in New Jersey, and the doctor prescribed a few herbal supplements and advised me to reduce stress. I followed the plan for two months, but I didn’t notice any significant change.
Gaining weight
I talked to my husband about how I was feeling, and he suggested that I eat more and gain weight. He was right. My body needed more calories and nutrients. I had been under-eating and over-exercising for so long that my body didn’t have enough energy to ovulate. It was prioritizing survival over reproduction. Creating new life is an energy-intensive process, and the body will only attempt it when it feels safe and well-nourished.
So, I listened. I increased both the amount and nutrient density of my meals and became more intentional with exercise to avoid adding unnecessary stress. I gained about fifteen pounds in the process. It was very, very uncomfortable. I was no longer the “skinny girl” I had loved to identify with for the last 15 years. I constantly felt “fat” and ashamed to look at my body. But deep down inside, I knew this was exactly what my body needed.
Despite gaining the weight and reducing exercise, my period still didn’t return. At that point, it had been more than two years since I stopped birth control. I truly believed that eating more, exercising less, and gaining weight would solve it. But it didn’t. I was starting to feel like all the work I was doing was pointless. What was the point of gaining all that weight and feeling uglier if I still don’t have a period?
Seeing a functional fertility specialist
This was the turning point. Sometimes when it feels like you’ve hit rock bottom, you are already on your way back up without even realizing it.
I started researching about how to heal my body naturally and came across functional medicine. I became fascinated and knew this was exactly the type of healing my body needed. I immediately started to look for functional doctors who specialized in female fertility. I eventually found one with excellent reviews. I booked a consultation right away. Meeting her was truly a godsend. After several in-depth conversations and comprehensive lab work, she identified what was going on almost immediately: hypothalamic amenorrhea.
Hypothalamic amenorrhea is a condition where your period stops because your hypothalamus, the command center of your brain, stops producing the hormones needed for ovulation. The hypothalamus communicates with the rest of your endocrine system by releasing a hormone called GnRH, which tells your body to produce FSH and LH. These two hormones are essential for triggering ovulation each month.
But if your body is under too much stress from under-eating, over-exercising, emotional strain, or all three, the hypothalamus senses that survival is the priority. It shuts down reproductive signaling and stops secreting GnRH. Without GnRH, FSH and LH levels drop, ovulation stops, and your period disappears.
Looking back, this was exactly what had happened to me. After years of undereating and overtraining, my body simply didn’t feel safe enough to reproduce. Birth control had only compounded the problem by further suppressing my natural hormone production.
The doctor’s advice was both simple and difficult: keep doing what I was already trying to do! Eat enough, stop over-exercising, and reduce stress. She also recommended a few key supplements to support my recovery.
Learn, learn, learn
Meanwhile, I was devouring everything I could find about hypothalamic amenorrhea so I could understand how my body actually worked and how to heal it. I read countless books and took several courses from experts in female fertility. The most influential ones for me were:
I also started listening to podcasts and learning deeply about the female body, how hormones interact, how the menstrual cycle works, and how nutrition impacts everything.
As I learned, I made small but meaningful changes to my lifestyle to continue lowering stress. One of the biggest shifts was repairing my relationship with exercise. I swapped intense cardio for strength training and walking. I started moving in ways that felt enjoyable rather than dreadful. Movement stopped being a punishment and started feeling like nourishment. That mindset shift was incredibly liberating.
Self-care also became an important part of my healing. I committed to weekly acupuncture, bi-weekly massages, and monthly chiropractic sessions. None of these were magic solutions on their own, but together they became powerful tools to lower stress and support my body’s recovery.
Still No period To Be Seen
Despite all the progress I was making and everything I was learning, my period still hadn’t returned. At that point, it had been nearly three years without one. There were many days when I broke down crying because I felt like I had tried everything and nothing was working. I truly believed I was doing everything right, so why wasn’t my body responding?
It was hard to stay hopeful, but I prayed, kept learning, and kept searching for answers. Some days it felt like my period would never come back. I even considered taking Clomid, a medication that triggers ovulation, but something in me wanted to stay the course and give the natural approach a little more time.
Then one night, I had a dream about blood. The next morning, I woke up and there it was!! My period. It arrived five days before my birthday, and I was completely shocked. My birthday wish had come true.
I can’t fully describe what that moment felt like. It was relief, joy, disbelief, and gratitude all at once. I knew I still had more healing ahead, but this was a powerful sign that something I was doing was finally working.
I was nervous about whether my cycles would stay consistent, but I kept doing what I was doing and they did. A couple of months later, I conceived naturally, and nine months after that, I gave birth to a healthy baby.
If I Could Do It, So Can You
If I could do it, so can you. No matter where you are in your healing journey, it is possible to heal. Your body is not designed to be diseased. It WANTS to be healthy. It is constantly striving to reach a state of balance. All it needs is the right environment and the right inputs to bring itself back into balance.
Sometimes, the hardest part of healing is getting out of your own way and allowing your body to do what it was built to do. Learning how to tune into your body and listen to the signals it gives you is one of the most powerful ways to support it. When you give your body what it needs, it knows how to heal.
Here are some of the most important lessons I learned through this long and difficult journey:
Key lessons learned
- Birth control is harmful in the long run because it suppresses your body’s natural hormone production cycle. Suppressing the body’s natural processes means you have no idea what is happening underneath the facade.
- Women should be mindful of intense workouts. It is fine to work out hard, but you have to ensure that you are eating enough calories (most women do not!) and rest so that the body has time to recover. If needed, count macros and make sure you are eating enough each day to fuel your workouts.
- Fasting is not a good idea for a healthy-weight woman in her reproductive years. Fasting is a stressor on the body, and the female body is more sensitive to stress than a man’s body. Reproduction requires a state of abundance, not a state of starvation.
- Natural contraceptives are not as scary as they seem. It is a beautiful opportunity to learn about your cycle and how to live in tune with it.
- Food is fun and enjoyable! It is not something that should stress you out. Having a healthy relationship with food will go a long way.
- We all need a support network that we can fall back on when things get rough. Healing is hard, and having people you can lean on makes all the difference.
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