349: How Victoria Restored Her Period and Rebuilt Her Relationship with Food
The Hypothalamic Amenorrhea PodcastShow Notes
In this powerful episode of The Hypothalamic Amenorrhea Podcast, Victoria opens up about her deeply personal journey through eating disorders, body image struggles, and the long road to restoring her menstrual health. From developing restrictive habits as a teenager to receiving a potential PCOS diagnosis after coming off birth control, Victoria’s story offers a raw and honest look at what recovery from hypothalamic amenorrhea (HA) can really look like. Victoria shares how her struggles with overexercising, calorie restriction, dieting culture, and external pressures escalated during COVID-19 and followed her from Singapore to London. She discusses how traditional therapy often fell short and how working with a coach helped her shift her identity away from “being anorexic” and toward building a life centered on nourishment, joy, and well-being.
Inside this episode, you’ll hear: Victoria’s experience with HA, birth control, and losing her period for six months How her medical team suspected PCOS and how she navigated the confusion The moment that sparked her mindset shift—from fear of weight gain to wanting to actually live her life Her experience in the HA Society’s Restore Program and working with coach Abby What helped her finally ovulate and get regular periods again How she balanced reduced exercise, increased food intake, and stress management Her decision to prioritize comfortable clothing and body respect over sizing pressures Why having the right community and guidance made all the difference
Now actively enrolled in the HHAP certification track, Victoria is working toward becoming a women’s health and recovery coach herself, transforming her lived experience into a new mission to help others. If you’re struggling with hypothalamic amenorrhea, disordered eating, overtraining, or the pressure to shrink your body, this episode is a must-listen. Victoria’s story is relatable, encouraging, and a true reminder that full recovery is possible with the right support.
Join Restore Your Fertility (Enrollment open now-1/23/26) https://www.thehasociety.com/restore-live
Join The HA Society http://thehasociety.com/join
Work 1:1 with us to get your period back http://thehasociety.com/coaching
Become a Certified Holistic HA Practitioner https://www.holistichapractitioner.com/
Visit us on YouTube https://youtube.com/c/danisheriff
Follow us on IG http://instagram.com/thehasociety http://instagram.com/danisheriff
The Content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician.
More from The Hypothalamic Amenorrhea Podcast
In this episode we answer listener questions that range from: - I used to menstruate at X weight, why not now? - Cycling going backward when REDUCING coffee, is this possible?! - How does BC affect lab work & more - and we address a listener comment from a past episode, explaining that honestly, having HA probably isn’t very feminist either.
If you’ve ever thought, “I’ll do what it takes to get my period back…I just really don’t want to gain THAT much weight,” you’re going to relate to Ali. Ali spent years in and out of recovery, sometimes bleeding, sometimes not, but never really letting go of the food control or trusting her body. And when she finally decided she wanted to become a mom, she had to face the thing she’d been afraid of since childhood...allowing her body to change without knowing exactly where it would land. We talk about her years of “quasi-recovery,” trying to find a way to recover while staying thin, the very real fear of weight gain, and what changed when she finally said, essentially, screw it, I’m doing this. Once Ali went all-in, she got her first period in about 50 days, ovulated, and eventually got pregnant on her third ovulation. If you’re currently trying to figure out how to recover without having to fully surrender to recovery…this episode is for you.
Mady thought she’d go all-in on HA recovery, get her period back in 3 months and move on with her life. Instead, recovery took about a year and forced her to completely rethink health, her identity as the “healthy girl,” weight gain and her need for control. Ironically, it wasn’t until she stopped making recovery the center of her life and started actually LIVING again that her period finally came back.
You've lost your period, you know you're not pregnant... the good news is it's probably just something called hypothalamic amenorrhea. Easy to understand and simple to resolve but surprisingly difficult to actually execute. In this episode we walk you through why you should be relieved that it's not something else like polycystic ovaries, premature ovarian insufficiency or early menopause and how to approach it!
You've gained weight, you've been eating more food consistently, you've even reduced or stopped working out. This isn't making SENSE! I get it and as a coach who works with many women with amenorrhea all of the time, this isn't an uncommon concern.