A male friend asked me the familiar Lenten question recently: “What are you giving up?” I replied, half joking but half serious, “Complaining.”
What followed was an unexpectedly thoughtful conversation about fasting, and about how rarely we acknowledge that women’s bodies do not operate on the same physiological rhythms as men’s.
For women, practices like fasting or intermittent fasting can land very differently depending on where we are in our cycle. “Does it matter if you’re single, though?” this same man prodded. I argued that yes, it matters immensely.
Every single month, women are given a built-in assessment of our wellbeing. From the length of our cycle, to pain or discomfort (or the absence of it), to subtle changes in energy, mood or physical symptoms, our cycle becomes a snapshot diary of the month that came before. Have we been under more stress? Have we been travelling? Have we been sleeping enough? Have we been nourishing ourselves well? Our menses answer those questions with remarkable clarity. And every single month, we are given the opportunity to respond: to adjust, to learn, to do better. To be good stewards of the bodies God has entrusted to us.
Our periods are not only significant indicators of pre-conception health. They tell us how we are doing both internally and externally: physically, hormonally, emotionally and spiritually.
Much has been written about how modern life runs roughshod over our natural rhythms, causing burnout and sleep deprivation. Yet one of the most striking mismatches between human nature and modern expectations remains oddly underexamined: women are living in a world built almost entirely around male biological rhythms.
Unlike men, whose hormonal cycle roughly resets every twenty-four hours, women live according to a longer rhythm that unfolds over approximately twenty-eight days. This monthly cycle, shaped by fluctuating hormones, affects not only fertility but energy levels, cognition, mood, creativity and physical capacity.
The female cycle moves through four distinct phases:
- The menstrual phase, when hormone levels are at their lowest, is marked by fatigue and inwardness and is met with an innate desire for rest, reflection and recovery.
- The follicular phase follows as oestrogen begins to rise, often bringing renewed clarity, motivation and focus. In this phase, when oestrogen is rising and insulin sensitivity is higher, the body often tolerates fasting more easily.
- Around ovulation, many women experience their peak energy: greater social skills, confidence, verbal fluency and physical stamina.
- Finally, the luteal phase ushers in a gradual slowing with increased sensitivity and an innate need for order, boundaries and the completion of projects or tasks before the cycle begins again. In this phase, when progesterone dominates and metabolic demands increase, the same fasting practices could lead to nausea, fatigue, dizziness or hormonal disruption. This is not a failure of discipline, but biology.
Historically, women lived far closer to these patterns. Their lives were more seasonal, their work more varied, their communities more responsive to bodily realities. Even the language of time reflected this attentiveness: the word month shares its root with moon, and for centuries women observed how their cycles mirrored the lunar rhythm more than the solar one.
Modern life, however, is structured almost exclusively around the sun, and by extension, around male biology. The standard working week assumes consistent energy, linear productivity and uninterrupted availability. Women are expected to perform as though our bodies reset each morning in the same way men’s do, rather than acknowledging that our capacity ebbs and flows across a month.
The result is not empowerment, but exhaustion.
Unable to live according to our natural rhythms, many women outsource awareness of our own bodies to technology. Apps now tell us when we are fertile, when to expect our period, when we might feel irritable or tired. While these tools can be helpful (I used one for years), they also reveal something quietly tragic: we increasingly rely on algorithms to interpret signals our bodies were designed to communicate to us.
This loss of embodied knowledge has had consequences far beyond productivity. One of them is our collective ignorance about fertility itself. A woman attuned to her cycle, to changes in temperature, cervical mucus, energy and desire, naturally knows when she is fertile. This intuitive awareness is not mystical or imprecise; it is God-given. And modern fertility awareness methods confirm what women long observed through experience.
Natural family planning, when properly taught and lived, is a recovery of this wisdom. It works with the body rather than suppressing it. It encourages conception during ovulation, when life is most likely to begin, and fosters communication, responsibility and mutual respect within marriage.
Contraception, by contrast, was presented as a solution to a problem women were said to have: fertility. Yet fertility is not a pathology; it is a sign of health.
In separating sex from procreation, contraception also separated women from our own rhythms. The hormonal pill flattens the natural cycle, replacing it with an artificial one designed for predictability and convenience. Love, marriage and sex were recast as autonomous pleasures, detached from fruitfulness, timing and consequence.
The Church’s objection to contraception has often been caricatured as moralistic or restrictive. In reality, it is profoundly anthropological. It insists that bodies mean something, and that love is meant to be incarnate, not engineered.
Living in harmony with the female cycle does not mean retreating from modern life or reducing women to biology. It means designing life, work, relationships, rest and intimacy, with the body rather than against it. It means recognising that a woman’s capacity to conceive, to nurture and to intuit is not incidental to her identity, but integral to it.
The theological implications are striking. Scripture tells us that God created the lights of the heavens “for signs and for seasons” (Genesis 1:14). Time itself is not random but ordered, and to reject the rhythms of creation is not liberation, but a quiet rebellion.
When women are invited to live as though they were men with slightly different organs, everyone suffers. Women burn out, relationships strain, fertility declines and intimacy becomes disconnected from responsibility.
Part of the exhaustion so many women feel today is not because we are failing to keep up, but because we were never meant to.
To recover the wisdom of the female cycle is to remember something we have forgotten: that flourishing comes not from overriding nature, but from cooperating with it.
