Angélique, you might want to read this:
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That is what I'm going by on. Remember that women naturally are not on a constant level of estrogen and progesterone. Read the file up there and look at google images of women's menstrual cycle charts. There is a reason for the cycling. If anything, everything happens in cycles. Everything in this material world is on cycles, whether it is the cycle of a Universe, the birthing/death of stars, weather cycle over millions of years, a year, a day, etc., the chemistry cycles of living beings and plants/trees, even the electron cycles of seemingly stationary/inanimate objects. Everything is movement, and movement is life. Nothing is static, including a woman's cycle.
I will repeat it again. It is my feeling that the reason women have cycles is for at least two reasons I am aware of. We all know of the periods that help with periodic preparation of the ovulation and potential pregnancy, but what about the development of secondary characteristics? I get the feeling from my experience of being on a constant dosage regimen for years that cycling helps estrogen (or testosterone) receptors and the like to get periodic breaks from hormone exposure during the low parts of the cycle, so that when the hormones are released again, the hormone receptors and the like are as sensitive as they were during the first few cycles of a person's life.
What I notice is that during the growing phase, you have a certain amount of development by the end of a particular cycle, and when you go through the low of the cycle, you may lose a little development (if any), but usually a smaller amount than you gained during the cycle. For each subsequent cycle you start on, you have a little bit more development than last time. The issue with constant-dosage regimens is that when your body is exposed to such a level over a long period of time, your body may develop estrogen resistance/insensitivity, and you seem to "max out" too early. My case has been that I seemed to reach a maximum early on, and even I was starting to regress somewhat noticeably (I'm 50 now).
Now that I'm approaching the primary peak of my third cycle, I can say that the following has abated:
Formication (the sensation of bugs crawling on the skin even though there aren't any).
Hair thinning out.
Being flat-chested.
Dry, rough hands all the time.
The formication has largely gone away, my hair is not thinning out now. I'm not flat-chested anymore with more development than I've seen in the past, and my hands are not always dry and rough (I still haven't ascertained when it stops being rough during the cycle (sometimes, it stops during the low part of the cycle, sometimes the high part).
It is like exercising. Is it better to do 5 sets of repetitions all at once, or is it better to do one set at a time with a short recovery break in between? Most likely, you don't have the strength at the beginning of set 5 as you did at set 1 (if you run through them all at once). If you do cyclical breaks between the sets in a consistent manner, then you will perform better for each set than all at once (constant-dosage regimen). If you're going through all five sets at once, you're probably losing strength and performance in the last 2, if not 3 sets. Only this isn't about strength, but about sensitivity of responses to an input stimuli (don't do coffee all the time, just once in a while, and you feel that zing, or do it all the time, and you can probably go to sleep on coffee at 10 PM at night - I've done the former and the latter with sodas when I was a kid, and I know my body will respond this way).
