How Our Minds Trick Us Into Feeling 'fat' When We're On Our Period

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We've all been there; our period strikes and with that comes emotional ups and downs, cramps, and a feeling of extra weight and bloatedness. But there might be good news where the latter is concerned, as new scientific research appears to claim that the 'fat feeling' that descends upon us during menstruation could all just be a figment of our imagination.

Well, not quite literally our imagination, but it is all to do with the mind. According to a new study, published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, the extra hormones created during our period leave us with a heightened sense of guilt about the food - and how much of it - we consume. Women experience what the study labels 'emotional eating', along with a preoccupation with their body image all because of hormones; frequently resulting in a sense of self-consciousness and self-loathing. Joy.

Giphy

The reason we experience a desire to eat more just before and during our period is predominantly biological; it's a time when the egg - if fertilized - would implant, and so your appetite increases regardless of whether you have conceived or not. But before this research, scientists couldn't be sure that the emotional obsession we experience with our weight during our menstruation was also a biological effect.

Kelly L. Klump, a psychology professor from Michigan State University who co-authored the study spoke to The Huffington Post about their findings. She said:

"In the long run, we know that it's not that women's weights are changing dramatically as a result of this food intake. The problem is, because there's this increased food intake and emotional eating in the moment, they feel really bad about themselves."

To carry out their research, the scientists gathered together a sample of 352 women aged between 15 and 25 for a period of 45 days - a full menstrual cycle. They monitored their daily weight preoccupation, levels of emotional eating, and feelings of negativity about themselves through ratings; and provided saliva samples every day as an assessment of levels of the estradiol and progesterone hormones.

It's long been established that hormones are the route cause of binging and emotional eating, but what the study really aimed to find out was whether such hormones caused the mental preoccupation with weight - a symptom in most eating disorder cases - that makes us so conscious of 'feeling fat'.

And it turns out that yes, it's all in the mind. Essentially, our bodies become one big vicious cycle throughout our period. Hormones cause us to emotionally (or binge) eat, and as a result of that, we then become preoccupied with our weight, which fuels the negativity, which probably feeds the desire to emotionally eat. What a trauma.

The main thing to take away from this is that the weight gain is not likely to be real. You may feel larger, but it is very unlikely that you have actually gained several pounds of unwanted weight following a couple of days extra eating. So go and get that ice cream back out of the freezer.

Catriona Harvey-JennerFeatures Editor

Cat is Cosmopolitan UK's features editor covering women's issues, health and current affairs. news, features and health. The route to her heart is a simple combination of pasta and cheese (somewhat ironic considering the whole health writing thing), and she finds it difficult to commit to TV series so currently has about 14 different ones on the go.

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