u/cold_chromatogram

Hormonal variation across the cycle affects appetite, fluid retention and subjective symptom intensity independently of anything else, which is why an unannotated log can look mysterious.

record the dose, the day and one number, that is enough

Which province?

Those criteria were revised at renewal, so the version quoted upthread is out of date.

annotate the weeks where something else changed

Formulary criteria are revised, and plan renewal is a natural point at which a previously refused request may succeed without anything about the applicant changing.

iron and ferritin questions come up here more than anywhere else on the site

a log is not a plan and it is not advice for anybody else

Are you logging the cycle alongside the dose?

Started logging the cycle in the same sheet as the dose. Three months later the pattern was obvious and it had been invisible before.

Perimenopause and all of this at once, and there is essentially nothing written about the combination anywhere.

Are the missed weeks in there as blanks or dropped entirely?

formulary decisions are provincial, so the province is the first fact

Resistance training, and at what frequency?

That is a trial average in a supervised population and you are comparing your own scan to it.

Adding the free proxy — track a few lifts monthly. It costs nothing and it is longitudinal.

strength retention is a decent proxy and it is free

National regulatory approval establishes that a product may be sold. Whether any plan pays for it is a separate decision, and public drug plans are administered provincially.

a rejected claim is not the same as a denied authorization

the appetite effect makes eating enough protein a logistics problem

How long have you been logging?

Agreed — protein and resistance training. Everything else in these threads is a rounding error on those two.

waist monthly, weight weekly, notes whenever

Small fix — that is a reconstructed entry rather than a contemporaneous one, and the post presents it as the latter.

This is the whole intervention.

Disagreeing with this line: rate alone does not preserve lean mass. The training does.

PCOS is a diagnosis, not a description, and it matters which you mean

Is the concentration recorded anywhere in the log?

The questions that leave this board, and where they go.

Anything about pregnancy, planning a pregnancy, or contraception efficacy goes to a clinician. Absorption questions about a specific oral product go to a pharmacist, who can look it up in minutes. Fertility changes with weight loss are well described and worth raising with whoever prescribes, in advance rather than afterwards.

What stays here usefully: experience, cycle-annotated patterns, the vocabulary, and the collective knowledge that a research gap exists. That is a genuinely valuable set of things and it is a smaller set than people arriving here expect. Nothing on this board is medical advice and on this board that is not a formality.

a missed week is data, write it down

Fertility can change with weight loss and improved insulin sensitivity. That is a well-described phenomenon and worth knowing about in advance rather than discovering.

Disagree — slower loss does not automatically preserve lean mass. Protein and training do the work, not the rate on its own.

Missing entries recorded as blanks preserve the shape of the series. Dropping them silently makes the remaining points look more regular than they were.

Yes — hair shedding tracks the rate of loss and it is temporary. That reassurance is worth repeating.

DEXA has a meaningful coefficient of variation, and it differs between machines and protocols. Comparing scans from different clinics adds a systematic offset that is invisible on the report.

Push back: strength dropping in a deficit is not the same as lean mass loss. Related, not identical.