My FLO Vitamins Review: A Terrifying Way to Deal with PMS

I’m sure you’ve seen the commercials for FLO Gummy Vitamins, and thought that they were just another product promising to erase your hormonal acne and level out your time before your period. I was hopeful, so I decided to try them out for myself.

Now I want to share my (brutally) honest FLO Vitamins review with you.

And if you are so inclined, be sure to read all the comments. Since I published this post, women have been pouring in, telling their own horror stories from taking these vitamins.

 

 

Honest FLO Reviews: Do These Vitamins Do What They Claim?

FLO are gummy vitamins that claim to reduce symptoms of PMS. If you’ve seen their advertisements, they’re very convincing! Some explain how FLO cleared up acne, other ads explained about how it balanced hormones to make a woman feel more grounded and level during PMS and her period.

Seriously, these advertisements are really good. There are tons of reviews and other people who endorse them as well. How could you not want to try them?

The bottle says:

PMS Sucks! FLO makes it suck less!

In my case, unfortunately FLO made PMS suck more. I’ll explain below.

FLO Vitamins for PMS

There are plenty of benefits FLO vitamins give you. They are:

• non GMO
• all natural
• vegan
• gluten free

These qualities are enormously beneficial for someone who is very careful about what I put in my body! It’s also impressive that they are vegan, as most gummies are made from animal products (gelatin is derived from bones, skin, and tendons of animals, usually pigs and cows).

4 Ingredients Flo Vitamins Includes

Here’s the FLO vitamins ingredients and what each one does:

Chasteberry

Chasteberry is an herb that has been taken for hundreds of years to help regulate hormones in women. It has positive benefits to alleviate breast pain and symptoms of PMS. It also goes by the name vitex.

Chasteberry is known to help alleviate symptoms like constipation, breast tenderness, anxiety, depression, cravings, and even migraines.

There are some side effects of vitex, including headache, upset stomach, and increased acne, but they’re usually mild.

Chasteberry hasn’t had a lot research done on it, but it’s probably not safe for pregnant or breastfeeding women. (So don’t take FLO gummies while you’re pregnant or nursing.)

Doctors recommend about 35-40 mg of chasteberry.

Dong Quai

Dong Quai is an herb used by traditional herbalists for hundreds of years to treat menstrual cramps and other women’s reproductive issues. It’s often called “female ginseng”. Dong quai is safe in doses up to 100-150 mg for 6 months.

The main side effect of dong quai is that it can cause skin sensitivity to sunlight, so be sure to wear sunscreen.

Again, dong quai might not be safe for pregnancy or chestfeeding, so be sure you stop taking FLO vitamins when you’re expecting or nursing!

Lemon Balm

Lemon balm is another herb that has been used by traditional herbalists to treat anxiety and depression. It can also be used as an alternative treatment for fatigue, headaches, indigestion, and cramps. Lemon balm can help you is to decrease your body’s production of cortisol levels.

Lemon balm might cause headaches, nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, skin irritation, and allergic reaction.

Doctors recommend taking 300-500 mcg, 3 times daily.

Vitamin B6

Vitamin B6, also called pyridoxine, is a vitamin that helps regulate your red blood cells, immune system, mental health, skin, hair and metabolism. While your body does not need the other ingredients to function, your body relies on Vitamin B6 for many of its daily functions. It’s anti-inflammatory and is great for enhancing your overall health.

Leafy green vegetables, potatoes, bell pepper, dried apricots, cantaloupe, yogurt, salmon and all kinds of other foods contain this important vitamin!

Vitamin Amounts and Daily Values

Here’s the interesting thing. FLO doesn’t tell you how much of the herbs are in your gummies!

It says there is a “proprietary herbal blend” which equals about 111mg. But we don’t know how much Chasteberry, Dong Quai, or Lemon Balm is in this supplement! I even did some research and looked on the website, but I could not find specific information.

For B6 vitamin, doctors recommend about 1.3 mgs per day. FLO gummy vitamins contain 20 mg, which is 1176% of your daily value. This seems like a lot, but it isn’t unusual, however. You don’t absorb most of the vitamins that you consume.

This is an important part of vitamins to review when you’re doing research and want to know whether you want to buy FLO gummies! I like to know exactly what’s going into my body, and these FLO vitamin supplements definitely miss the mark here.

Are FLO Vitamins Safe?

The individual ingredients in FLO are considered generally safe (see the limits mentioned for each supplement above.) But as with anything we’re going to ingest or use, there are potential interactions with other drugs, dosage limits, and side effects.

Talk to your doctor if you’re wondering if these will be safe for you.

RELATED POST: I Tried Clevr Sleeptime SuperLatte to Get Better Sleep… Did It Work?

FLO Vitamins Subscription

You can buy FLO vitamins for $30; you get one bottle of 60 gummies (1 month supply). You can also sign up for a subscription to make it easy for you to get your vitamins every month. The subscription is easy to access with their login.

My Experience with FLO PMS

Ever since giving birth to my second son, my hormones and IBS have been all over the place. It’s been difficult to find something that has cleared my PMS symptoms completely. Pregnancy and birth can really change a woman’s hormones, and after I stopped breastfeeding, my endocrine system went haywire.

I experienced all kinds of PMS symptoms, including breast pain (during lucky months I’ve only had breast tenderness), menstrual cramps, bloating, and terrible hormonal acne during my period. My mood swings weren’t terrible, but I did have a tendency to experience irritability, especially around ovulation.

So I’ve been trying a variety of supplements and vitamins, diets, and exercise regimens in order to try to get my hormones under control.

When trying a new supplement, it’s good to try them for about 2 months (more than a month, at least) before you experience the full effects, unless, of course, you experience a lot of negative symptoms from them. You’re supposed to take 2 gummies daily.

Taking FLO is super easy to fit into your routine. They taste great (kind of a raspberry flavor) and take no more than 10 seconds out of your morning!

RELATED POST: My Review of Rasa Coffee Alternative: How It Helped My Hormonal Imbalance

FLO Vitamins Review

Mine is a negative review for FLO vitamins. I’m sorry to say that I hated them.

I couldn’t get to two months in with these FLO PMS gummies. Heck, I could barely take them for a week.

About 3 days in, I started experiencing all kinds of side effects from the gummies that were worse than the PMS symptoms I had been experiencing.

I even completely stopped the vitamins for a week and restarted to see if I would experience the same thing. When I restarted, I only took 1 gummy daily instead of two. I still experienced the symptoms I detail below.

I stopped taking ALL of my supplements and caffeine for another seven days, thinking that perhaps it was a combination of the FLO gummies and something else. I started taking FLO again a second time without any additional supplements.

It didn’t matter. I still experienced these symptoms regardless of the quantity of gummies I was taking or what else I was taking them with.

So basically, while on FLO vitamins, I was still experiencing hormonal acne, menstrual cramps, bloating, irritability, mood swings, PMS, breast pain and tenderness, AND I was jittery, had terrible TMJ disorder, and had painful ingrown hairs in my armpits.

FLO Vitamins Side Effects I Experienced

Here were my symptoms with FLO.

Jittery

Just like having too much caffeine, these vitamins made me jittery! I became even more nervous and anxious than I had previously been, and I found it very difficult to relax.

Lock jaw

If you’re someone who has experienced TMJ disorder, you may have experienced lockjaw. Lockjaw is another word for trismus, which is the medical name for jaw cramping, muscle spasms, stiffness and trouble swallowing.

I would experience this especially at night. I tried taking FLO at different times of the day to see if it changed my TMJ disorder at night, but even taking them first thing in the morning didn’t change how my jaw would lock up as I tried to sleep.

Ingrown Hairs in my Armpits

The official name of ingrown hairs is folliculitis, which is swelling of the hair follicle. They can be super painful and are very much like cystic acne in your armpits.

I tried stopping shaving my armpits and wearing deodorant (seriously) to see if it was my razor or deodorant that was causing my ingrown hairs. But neither my razor or deodorant seemed to make a difference. However, when I stopped taking the FLO gummies, the bumps would go away within 2 days. Every time I started taking FLO again, I would literally get ingrown hairs the next morning.

The interesting thing is that these ingrown hairs are often related to hormone imbalance. Does this mean that these gummy vitamins were making my hormones worse, not better?

A disclaimer

I am SUPER sensitive to caffeine and other stimulants like maca. It’s possible that one of the ingredients in this was similar to these and fired up my system. But I cannot explain the ingrown hairs or trismus.

I give FLO Gummies 2 out of 5 Stars

I was expecting something life-changing and felt totally let down by good advertising and an unfortunate product.

I give the FLO Vitamins 2 stars.

I give one star for how easy they are to take and the taste, and the second star for the ease of starting and canceling a subscription.

But the fact that I received no relief from my symptoms from these gummies does not warrant any additional stars. I wish that these helped me and that I could give them 5 stars. But unfortunately, these did not give me the benefits I was looking for.

I still have a half a bottle of FLO vitamins in my medicine cabinet that I will never use.

Conclusion: Leave These Gummy Vitamins in the Dust

These FLO Gummies were not worth it for me. I’m not sure which ingredient I was so sensitive to. I’ve taken Chasteberry (Vitex) before, and it’s never caused these things. I also highly doubt that the b6 vitamin would cause these kinds of reactions.

This leaves Dong Quai and Lemon Balm. I have not been able to find any symptoms of Dong Quai or Lemon Balm that explain the reactions I experienced.

Many customers have clearly been satisfied with how FLO gummy vitamins have helped them. I won’t tell you that all the positive reviews FLO vitamins have received are bogus. I think they’re legit and that these have have probably helped a lot of women. I just wasn’t one of them. And if you read the comments section on this page, you’ll see that a LOT of other women tried them and had similar side effects.

But if you’re someone who has experienced jitteriness, lock jaw/TMJ, or ingrown hairs in your armpits before, you might find that these vitamins make those symptoms worse.

What about you?

Have you tried FLO PMS gummies vitamins?

What kind of review would you leave for FLO vitamins?

MORE PRODUCT REVIEWS:

Arbonne 30 Days to Healthy Living Review
Arbonne Detox Tea Information and Review
Nutrafol Hair Growth Supplement Review
RASA Coffee Replacement Review
Ka’Chava Protein Meal Replacement Shake Review

FLO Vitamins Negative Review: How These PMS Gummy Vitamins Made Me Feel Worse