UAE-based entrepreneur Nikita Phulwani's battle with PCOS began at a young age
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00:00Hi everyone, my name is Nikita Phulwani. I'm an entrepreneur and content creator living
00:08here in the UAE and I'm here to share my PCOS journey with Gulf News. I think I was first
00:14diagnosed with PCOS at the age of 13 or 14. I did not get my period for maybe one or two
00:19months and with a lot of nervousness, I would have gone up to my mother and told her, hey
00:25mom, I think something's wrong. Bear in mind 10-15 years ago, the words PCOS or the talk
00:31around PCOS was not as normalized as it is today. So I was extremely nervous, extremely
00:38scared and I remember I feared so much going to a gynecologist at that young age and there
00:45being very little information about PCOS. Gathered the courage, took my mom's support,
00:50went to the gynecologist and bear in mind that I was an extremely chubby child. I was
00:56overweight with an extremely poor lifestyle. My food was not exactly healthy. There was
01:03little to no movement from my body on a day-to-day basis. So it is the perfect recipe for a problem
01:11like PCOS to exist. However, over the course of years, given my poor lifestyle, the problem
01:16just kept getting worse. Now this might be too much information, but there was a time I remember
01:22when I was at the peak of my poor weight management, where I wouldn't get my period for maybe
01:28eight to nine months straight. And it's not like I did not try to figure out what the solution would
01:33be. When I visited doctors, some of them would give me certain pills that I did not feel aligned
01:39with or that had too much negative talk around them. So I was extremely apprehensive to take
01:44those. Most doctors would definitely tell me to lose weight, watch what I'm eating, stay away
01:50from sugar and gluten. However, all my attempts pretty much failed. And over the course of years,
01:56my weight just kept getting higher and higher and higher. And the problem of PCOS just kept
02:02getting bigger and bigger. Instead of taking care of things, I think I just started living in denial
02:08and I just kept brushing the problem off because the nervousness around it definitely had an impact
02:14to play. Now if you ask me if knowing that I have PCOS affect me mentally, the answer is yes.
02:20If you want to know how, well certain indicators of PCOS or problems that come if you have PCOS
02:27is hormonal imbalance, because of which you may have facial hair growth, your weight gain.
02:34These aspects directly link to your physical appearance, which are directly linked to how you
02:39feel about yourself, your confidence, etc. So definitely, definitely, definitely it had a
02:45massive impact on me mentally. I think I found myself second-guessing all the time that
02:50something wrong with me, you know, compared to my classmates or my other friends. So that constant
02:56battle and self-doubt was definitely always there. A couple of years later, which is when I think I
03:01turned 28, nearly 14 years later of being diagnosed with PCOS, I actually started working towards my
03:09health and this is when I saw a complete shift in what my PCOS reports were. So for the last three
03:17years, I've actively been working out, watching what I'm eating, drinking plenty water and even
03:23trying to make my sleep better on a day-to-day basis. I work out five times a week and believe
03:28it or not, by taking care of these absolutely basic things, no pills, no medication, I have managed
03:36in my case to literally reverse my PCOS. Now this is my story and my example. Different people may
03:43have different reasons as to why they get PCOS, but what I understood and more so from the recent
03:49blood work that I have done that gets, you know, examined by doctors, they tell me they can find
03:54little to no traces of the fact that I had PCOS. How did I manage that? Literally, the answer lies
04:00in the basics. Just by making sure I live a healthy and active lifestyle, make sure that I
04:07have a balanced diet as well as, like I said, drink enough water and manage my stress and sleep better.
04:15These are the things that doing consistently has actually helped me nearly reverse my PCOS.