Endometriosis and lipedema keep showing up together

I started noticing it before I had a name for it…

Usually a woman comes to me for her cycle: painful periods, PMS, maybe a PCOS or endo diagnosis she has been carrying for years.

And somewhere in the conversation, she mentions the other thing: her legs feel heavy, they swell by the afternoon, the skin on her thighs bruises easily and hurts when you press it. And the swelling stops at her ankles, like a cuff. Her feet stay normal.

I kept seeing the same 2 stories in the same woman.

Then I read the numbers.

A study out of Brazil this year, 637 women, the largest lipedema sample the country has ever looked at.

58.8% of the women on hormonal contraceptives said the pill made their lipedema worse. A third of them said severe. Only 0.9% got better. 1

The reproductive symptom and the swelling were not 2 separate things!

They were the same system.

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Here is how medicine files these.

Period pain goes to gynaecology.

Endometriosis, gynaecology.

PMOS, endocrinology.

Fibroids and adenomyosis, back to gynaecology.

Lipedema, if it gets named at all, gets sent to vascular or dermatology or a weight loss clinic that tells her to eat less.

Every specialist sees their slice and none of them see the woman.

You have probably lived this. Passed from one waiting room to the next, handed a different label each time, quietly wondering if you are the only one who thinks all of this might be connected.

You are not imagining it…

This year a study pulled together 25 studies across 10 countries on lipedema and its overlap with endometriosis and other gynaecologic conditions. 2

What it found is that lipedema does not travel alone.

It shows up at the same “reproductive milestones”: puberty, pregnancy, the pill, menopause.

So what is the thread connecting all of it?

Your hormones don’t just get made.

They have to move.

Estrogen gets produced, does its job, and then has to be cleared out of the body.

If it cannot clear, it gets recirculated. It builds up.

And the system that clears it is not your ovaries and it is not your plate.

It is your lymphatic system and the fascia it runs through.

That is the “transport layer”.

Anti-inflammatory food is what you put in. It says nothing about whether your body can move anything out.

This is the whole reason I keep saying that you can still feel bloated, inflamed and puffy even if you eat clean all the time.

The Brazil study pointed at a mechanism.

Estrogen amplifies mast cell activation.

It slows lymphatic flow.

Which means the hormone is not the villain here.

The hormone is the thing that tips over the edge the system that was already stuck, already inflamed, already poorly draining.

The women whose drainage was already struggling got the swelling, the pain, the worsening.

So here is why drainage comes first.

Everyone starts with food because food is the thing you can shop for.

But if your lymph is stagnant, the cleanest anti-inflammatory diet in the world lands in a body that cannot process it.

You know the signs of stuck:

• Not sweating in a sauna

• Legs swelling after thirty minutes sitting

• Constipation for days at a time

I lived every one of those and thought they were random… for years!

Tell me in comments, do you have any of these signs pointing you to “sluggish lymph“?

Your lymphatic system has no heart. Nothing pumps it but you. Your muscles are the pump. So this is dry brushing toward the heart, it is legs up the wall, it is walking treated as drainage and not as exercise, it is the specific moves that squeeze lymph through tissue that will not move on its own. This is something we do regularly in our 🔗community on Skool.

Now food is going to be even more efficient, because now the system can actually use it. Fibre to bind and carry estrogen out through the gut. Protein to hold your blood sugar steady so you are not pouring more insulin onto the fire.

Food supports a system that can clear. It cannot rescue one that cannot.

You cannot manage what you cannot see. I have a PCOS history, (now renamed PMOS), and I am in a genuinely stressful period of life right now. So I keep a close look at my hormones.

I have been using Mira, a hormone tracker that reads my actual hormone levels at home instead of guessing from symptoms. I’m not tracking my hormones because I am trying to get pregnant. I simply want to watch what my hormones are doing. (You can 🔗check it out here; + use code THESYNCWAY for 25% off)

So… drainage comes first! Before anything else…

This is the method that has taken 500+ women I've coached to the other side, where they actually feel at home in their body again.

We run it together inside my community week by week.

If your cycle symptoms and your swelling and your fatigue have always been treated as separate problems by separate people, the Hormone Reset is where we stop doing that and treat the whole body as one system.

Come inside, we’re waiting for you!

The endo and the lipedema were never 2 conditions…

Your body was never a “set of departments”.

It’s one whole system, so let’s treat it like that.

Love, Teo