Do Periods = Pig-Outs?
TV and movies show angry, premenstrual women with cravings for chocolate, pizza and more chocolate – but is PMS really a gateway to overeating?
There’s a secret we women share. About a week before our menstrual cycle begins, we’re no longer discriminating, calorie counting, picky eaters. We become ravenous – shoveling in anything in sight, from chocolate and chips to macaroni and cheese. Nothing is too gross to stand between a premenstrual woman and her hunger. Right?
Maybe not.
Despite images portrayed on TV sitcoms and movies, women do not necessarily overeat, binge on chocolate and starches, or gain weight during the premenstrual phase of their menstrual cycles, says former Pennsylvania State University researcher Christine Pelkman. However, the jury is still out among other women’s health experts, in spite of the intriguing nature of this new information from Pelkman’s small-scale study.
Pelkman’s research shows that we only eat about 100 calories more per day, and, wonder of wonders, we also burn more calories, which keeps our weight fairly stable.
“Women do gain and lose weight over a year,” Pelkman, currently the assistant professor in the department of exercise sciences at the University of Buffalo (NY), says. “We like to blame it on hormones. [But] if you do a controlled study, you’ll see it’s not the case.”
For her experiments, Pelkman recruited 20 healthy women ages 20 to 35. They were screened for premenstrual syndrome (PMS) symptoms, and she only chose women with mild premenstrual discomfort. True PMS is uncommon, Pelkman says, but it could affect eating habits.
For three days, Pelkman fed her subjects all their meals and snacks on Penn State’s campus during two different phases – near the beginning and end of two consecutive menstrual cycles. The women also took food-sensory tests.
Pelkman offered them regular meals and put out a generous spread with all the supposed premenstrual favorites, such as potato chips, pretzels, peanuts, Oreo cookies, chocolate pudding and “really sweet sugar candies.”
No one went wild.
“There was no dramatic shift in their taste for sweet foods,” Pelkman says. “No shift in carbohydrate preferences.”
The women did consume 4 percent more calories during the premenstrual phase, but they also burned about 4 percent more, which meant they didn’t gain weight. It’s enough to leave the average premenstrual woman incredulous.
Women’s health experts often follow the traditional belief that periods equal pig-outs. Monthly pre-period hormonal changes may trigger food indulgences or at least more food fantasies, according to Anne Stoline, a psychiatrist and director of the Women’s Mental Health Program at Mercy Medical Center, Baltimore.
Stoline had not seen the study at the time this story was written but isn’t willing to give up on food as a response to premenstrual signals. “Eating is such a complex thing,” Stoline says. “Eating could be a premenstrual response, and there could be other times when women eat less.”
Harvard’s Dr. Nancy Rigotti suggests that the volunteers in Pelkman’s study might have eaten differently from how they would if they were at home. “With the stresses of real life, women eat differently than they would in a lab,” says Rigotti, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and associate editor of the Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide (Simon & Schuster, 1999).
Still, Pelkman insists she got it right.
What might confuse women is the difference between cravings and actually eating foods. “Craving and intake are two separate things,” Pelkman says. “You can crave foods but actually might not eat them. To me, what’s of interest is what women actually eat. I measured what women actually eat, and they’re not out of control.”
And get this: Women don’t even eat more chocolate, which we all know is the essential food of the premenstrual week, Pelkman insists. She proved this by providing a chocolate taste test for her volunteers. Women sniffed and sampled their way through several brands of chocolate without coming unglued.
“If you ask, 298 of 300 women will say they crave chocolate before menstruation,” Pelkman says. “But if you give a taste test, you won’t find any greater craving for chocolate. Sometimes women ate chocolate for two or three days in a row, but it was random. It wasn’t tied to their cycles,”
The premenstrual phase brings on that insignificant 100-calorie increase but no chocoholic fever. But does this mean you won’t notice any weight fluctuations the week before your cycle begins? No. To the contrary, you probably will notice a weight gain the week before your period begins. Then you’ll notice a comparable drop when your period ends.
Those few added pounds and the snug fit of your jeans are most likely a sign that you’re retaining water, not building fat on your thighs. If you don’t jump on the scale daily, you won’t be as aware of, and upset by, the fluctuations, says Pelkman, who weighs herself once a year.
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