Understanding Your Menstrual Cycle

Understanding your menstrual cycle is the key to assessing your health and your fertility. Knowing when you ovulate and the quality of your ovulation really is the pinnacle of understanding your chances of conceiving, diagnosing causes of infertility and preventing miscarriage. 

The first thing I ask you to do after your initial consultation is to start tracking your waking body temperatures. 

Charting or Basal Body Temperature (BBT) Charting has been used for many years with incredible accuracy when done correctly. 

BBT charts are designed to show you when you ovulate. Progesterone is a ‘warming’ hormone. Progesterone is also only made in the body after you ovulate. When we see a noticeable rise in your basal body temperature, we can be certain you have ovulated. 

From a Chinese medicine point of view, we get to see so much more! Different hot and cold patterns can tell me so much about your egg quality, the health of your ovulation, the presence of inflammation or cold in the uterus and the quality of your luteal phase. 

This helps me, along with your case history to make a diagnosis, form a treatment plan, and observe the effects of your treatment. 

Steps to take:

1. Purchase an ‘ovulation thermometer’ from a chemist or online. They should be between $12-$20 and have to have two decimal places for accurate measurement. 
2. Download a free app – Kindara. Set the app up with the goal of falling pregnant. Put in as much information as you can. Kindara gets more accurate at predicting ovulation and period with more temps and information
3. Every morning, immediately upon waking, take your temperature and record it in your Kindara app. Ideally you need 4-6 hours of solid sleep prior to the temp being taken but if that doesn’t happen, take it anyway and write in the journal notes a reason it could be less accurate
4. Add in symptoms – especially changes in vaginal mucous, energy changes, appetite changes, libido changes and notes on days where you feel stressed or anxious
5. Do this for a whole cycle. One cycle is day 1 to day 1. Kindara will automatically start a new cycle when you put in a bleed day.
6. Email me at hello@paigewatersacupuncture.com.au once you have an entire chart if you’d like some thoughts on what it all means for you. 

(if you’re a client of mine already, go into ‘settings – share – share with practitioner’ and pop my email address in there so it comes up in my practitioner login).

If you have any questions, please get in touch. 

Paige x