A FEMALE boxer has told of how she endured a ‘phantom pregnancy’ and gained one-and-a-half stone in three months after taking contraceptive pills.
English brawler Kate McLaren, who fights out of Sydney, Australia, got into boxing last year after a messy break-up.
But after having her period on the night of her first fight, McLaren decided to go on the pill.
The 32-year-old told News.com.au: “I fell out of love with food and I couldn’t bring myself to eat. And mentally I thought I was a big girl and I thought that I’d been dumped because I was bigger and tall.
“So I then got into boxing, for my first fight, but on the night of the fight, I ended up getting my monthly cycle. And that basically put me into shock and I was like, ‘I’m about to go and perform and this has come’.
“Obviously I knew prior to it, ‘I think I’m due’ because I was feeling heavier. And then that came on the night of that and I was like, ‘This is an absolute disaster’.”
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“After that fight I spoke to my mum and she said, ‘Look, if you’re going to pursue your boxing career, you need to be in control of knowing when your weight is going to fluctuate, when your cycle is going to be, if it’s on the fight night that is something you’ve got to take into consideration’.
“Also I was very, very insecure about my skin. She said ‘If you go on the contraceptive pill, it will clear up all of your skin’. So that was what originally made me go on the contraceptive pill.”
However, she then found herself unable to stop eating after previously falling out of love with food.
And McLaren ended up piling up one-and-a-half stone in just three months.
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She explained: “I went to the doctor, ended up on Diane-35 and all of the insecurities and worries about eating food completely disappeared, and I went in the complete opposite end of the spectrum to the point where I was uncontrollable, I could not stop eating.
“I didn’t have my next fight lined up then, so I just was uncontrollable and I ate and ate and ate, and trained a little bit, and ate, to the point where then I couldn’t get into any of my clothes.
“But mentally I was loving food so much because there were flavours and things I’d completely deprived myself of.”
PHANTOM PREGNANCY
It turned out McLaren had experienced a “phantom pregnancy”.
But after coming off the contraceptive pill, she has since lost the weight and is loving boxing again.
She added: “I get to an appointment with the doctor and I said, ‘The doctor put me on this three months ago, I’m now 10 and a bit kilos heavier, do you think it’s down to the pill?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, most likely’.
“What can happen with the pill is sometimes your body can go into like a phantom pregnancy where your body thinks that you’re pregnant, your hormones are running around all over the place.
“So she put me onto a pill called Yasmin, and that pill has worked really, really well for me, it is the pill I’m still on at the moment.
“And the weight just came off. She said to me, ‘I’m pretty sure all the cravings are going to stop and the weight will just fall off of you and you’ll go back to normal weight’. That’s exactly what happened.”
Source: Boxing - thesun.co.uk
