by Leslee Boldman, C.D. (DONA), CLC<\/p>\n
Like most modern women, I grew up with very little knowledge about how my body works. Sure, I understood the general concept but was never taught about signs of fertility and the phases of a woman\u2019s monthly cycle. Through lack of information I was led to believe that becoming pregnant immediately upon trying was the norm. I know I\u2019m not the only one who has this way of thinking.<\/p>\n
When my husband and I started trying to conceive, I began to realize that there was more to the story than I had heard. After searching online for more\u00a0 information about understanding my body, guess what I discovered? Our bodies are doing amazing things while we go about our day, and if you learn how to listen you will realize your body has been talking to you all along.<\/p>\n
While no two women\u2019s bodies are the same, our bodies speak to us all in ways we may have never noticed before. If you look up the term \u201cfertility awareness method,\u201d you can learn the subtle ways of knowing when your fertile time is so that you can attempt pregnancy when it is actually possible. For example, did
\nyou know that your body temperature first thing in the morning is different depending on where you are in your cycle? Your waking temp before ovulation is lower than after you ovulate, which can be helpful to confirm it has occurred when charting fertility signs.<\/p>\n
Although plenty of people get pregnant without knowing the first thing about their bodies, what if it isn\u2019t going so quickly for you? There are visible signs and internal shifts that we feel only when we are paying attention. Learning these cues, whether overt or subtle, is essential to understanding what our bodies are up to. If you\u2019re hoping to get pregnant, this knowledge is very important to being successful. Despite what you would guess by the three weeks of active pills in a birth control pack, women aren\u2019t fertile every day of the month.<\/p>\n
A lot of women I know use phone apps to track their periods, but don’t understand that logging the first day of your period alone isn’t going to provide you with accurate information to conceive or avoid pregnancy. For example, not every woman ovulates on the 14th day of her 28-day cycle. Some might have a shorter second half, called the Luteal Phase, and therefore might ovulate on day 16 of her 28-day cycle. This is one of the reasons why about half of women who use this method become pregnant when hoping to avoid pregnancy, and why women trying to get pregnant and only looking at the app instead of listening to their bodies struggle to understand when they are actually fertile. There are many fertility signs that can be put into your app (I have been using Fertility Friend for over a decade) to get an accurate picture of what’s going on in your body. You can log your waking temperature (meaning you use a basal thermometer and take your temperature each morning before getting out of bed), your cervical fluid, your energy levels, libido (women typically have an increased libido around\u00a0 ovulation\u2014this makes perfect sense when you think about it in an evolutionary way), and more. Once you have figured out your fertile signs, you will have a better idea of when your fertile time is coming, and your app will be able to more accurately tell you what is going on.<\/p>\n
This is only the tip of the iceberg, though. I encourage all women to learn how to listen to their bodies, no matter if you\u2019re hoping to become pregnant or not.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re interested in learning more about fertility awareness, start by checking out the book \u201cTaking Charge of Your Fertility,\u201d and tcoyf.com. Leslee Boldman, C.D. (DONA), CLC, is a certified birth doula and certified lactation counselor who provides support to families on everything from conception through\u00a0 parenthood. For more information, please visit boldbirth.org.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Leslee Boldman, C.D. (DONA), CLC Like most modern women, I grew up with very little knowledge about how my body works. Sure, I understood the general concept but was never taught about signs of fertility and the phases of a woman\u2019s monthly cycle. Through lack of information I was led to believe that becoming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":628,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_cbd_carousel_blocks":"[]","footnotes":""},"categories":[12,72],"tags":[133,134,13],"class_list":["post-624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health","category-self-help","tag-fertility","tag-myth","tag-pregnancy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":625,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624\/revisions\/625"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}