Why chart my menstrual cycle?

Good question!!

There are many spectacular reasons to chart your menstrual cycle. These include body/cycle awareness, body literacy, fascination and fun, insights into your menstrual cycle, symptoms, and health, access to information to support your reproductive, life, and health goals, empowerment, and simply, coolness. Yes, our menstrual cycle and the signs and information our body shares with us are downright amazing! We can have unwanted symptoms that are far less than cool (be gone pain and crappy feelings), but often learning to chart our menstrual cycle and knowing how to interpret and use this information can help us to minimize or eliminate these symptoms. I’m sure you would agree that this is, in fact, cool. Charting can help us to know when our period is expected, either for convenience and making our life easier, or for the purpose of avoiding or achieving pregnancy. Charting can help us to decide when the times are when we might be most productive and when we might need more nurturing and slowness. Charting can help us to know when something is not normal for us and might indicate stress, illness, or another factor that we can address. This is only a partial list, but I’m sure you can see that learning to chart our menstrual cycle can be a very valuable skill (and one that we can pass onto our kids, should pregnancy be the way we choose to use our cycle awareness, because - people - how great would it be to help support a generation that knows this information about their/their partner’s bodies before menstruation even begins?).

One method of charting, which is the method I use with folks, is to chart basal body temperature (BBT) and cervical mucus (CM), and optionally cervical position. By charting this information, we can gain a better picture over time of what is happening with our cycle, our body and often our health. Basal body temperature is a measure of resting metabolism. It is lower during the first part of our cycle – the follicular phase – and higher in the second part of our cycle- the luteal phase. By recording this temperature, every day upon waking, we can see the point in our cycle where a shift happens, indicating ovulation has occurred. Observing these temperatures over time can also provide other clues to our reproductive and overall functioning. If our temperatures are consistently low, or are greatly fluctuating, we can do further investigating to figure out why this might be. Is it the way we are taking our temp? Have we been unwell or having disrupted sleep? Are we providing our body with sufficient nutrition? We can be detectives, and as we make changes which we feel might support better health over time, this can be positively reflected in our charts, indicating to us if we are on the right path. We can determine, on our own, whether changes we make to support our health are really making a difference. We can do this without needing tests. We can gather quite a bit of helpful and informative data, on our own, and in a non-invasive way, by charting our menstrual cycles.

Observing and charting our cervical mucus, over our full menstrual cycle, we can gather even more information. It is normal and natural, and in fact miraculous, that we see and feel cervical mucus during our cycle.  Cervical mucus has a myriad of amazing functions, including nourishing and keeping sperm alive for up to five days prior to ovulation (yes, five!!), changing the vaginal pH to be more hospitable to sperm, facilitating the transport of sperm, filtering out of defective sperm, preparing sperm to fertilize an egg, and plugging the cervical opening after ovulation to prevent sperm from entering and to provide some protection from infection. What a fantastic multitasking wonder, right? If we observe and chart the different types of mucus over our cycle, this can help us to determine our fertile and infertile windows and give us clues as to our overall health. Do we see absent or minimal mucus? What is the color and the consistency? Do we see a pattern to our cervical mucus? Do we have mucus during our entire cycle? Each of these points of information we have learned to observe, and document, can provide us with valuable insight, specific to our body and our cycle. Cervical mucus observations can help us determine when we are fertile or not fertile (hint: it’s a limited time – not the whole cycle) and when ovulation has occurred. This is essential for either avoiding or achieving pregnancy. Cervical mucus observations can also help us to determine - are we providing our body with enough nutrition and hydration? Might we have an infection? Is it possible we have an underlying health issue that needs to be further investigated?

It is not an exaggeration to say that our menstrual cycle is a vital sign. Learning to chart our cycle can help us toward our goals of having a side effect and hormone free method of birth control. It can help us to achieve or avoid pregnancy. Of equal importance, it can give us valuable information and insights into our reproductive and overall health. It can both provide us with jumping off points to further investigate and give us valuable feedback on changes we make to support our wellness. The information our body provides is given to us every single day, free of charge, and from an extremely smart and holistic source. The information is always there, waiting for us should we wish to learn to observe and record it. It’s truly a gift. And again, just amazing.

Cycle charting is definitely worth giving a try. There can be a bit of a learning curve, which is common and expected. This language is foreign to many of us who were never taught about these signs in biology class or elsewhere. Give yourself time and be patient with yourself. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and be curious. Soon it will be second nature to make these observations, be a detective, and be empowered to be an expert about your own cycle and body. I am here if you have questions, and clearly, I love to chat about menstrual cycles and health, so I look forward to hearing from you!! If you are interested in a full and supportive, one on one program, to learn how to chart, interpret and use the information you gain for any of the above mentioned reasons, or just for the coolness of it, check out my Healthy Cycles Program or Preparing for Conception & Pregnancy Program. Blessings, and happy charting!