Welcome to the Brilliant Fertility Podcast. I'm your host, dr Katie Rose, and this podcast exists to help illuminate the path ahead of you. With expert interviews, clinical pearls and real client success stories, my intention is to bring you hope for what's possible on this journey and to give you tools and resources to navigate the ups and downs on the road before you. If you find this podcast helpful, don't forget to subscribe on your favorite listening platform. And I have a big request If you have a minute, can you leave us a five-star review and let us know what did you learn? What did you come away with? Did you leave with that spark of hope? This helps more people like you find the podcast. My mission is to support as many humans as possible on their path to become parents, and by you sharing and subscribing, you're part of that mission too, and I'm so grateful for you for being here. Welcome back to the brilliant fertility podcast. I almost just forgot the name of my own podcast. I was just so excited about what I was going to share with you. Next, I'm super excited that in next week's episode, I'm interviewing lisa Hendrickson-Jack, author of the Fifth Vital Sign, co-author of Real Food for Fertility, and I'm so excited about this conversation not only because we had so much fun and we could have talked for hours and we laughed so much we couldn't even include all the laughter that this conversation is just so needed.

I remember the first time I became aware of charting your menstrual cycles and, honestly, I was pissed off that I had not learned about this sooner, like why was this not readily available the minute I started my period? Or even I mean, I was just a really curious kid. I think my first friend actually started her period when we were nine and I wanted to know everything and my mom was always like, as age appropriately open as possible. But I think it was even like a little bit taken aback at like how many questions I had and how much I wanted to know about everything. She was like, oh gosh, like I don't. What even is age appropriate to be sharing at this juncture, at nine, 10 years old, at this juncture, at nine, 10 years old? So it's really no surprise that I ended up in the field that I'm in, because I was always really curious about the menstrual cycle. I was always very interested about where babies came from, and then when I found out where they came from, I was like what I needed to know, all the things I really feel for my mom. Thanks, mom, I know sometimes you listen to the podcast. Thank you for really making me feel like my questions were not shameful or, you know, basically just letting me feel like those were normal and doing your best with that information, knowing that it wasn't always comfortable.

Anyway, we're having this conversation with Lisa next week, but as we finished up the episode and I sent it to my assistant to edit, I realized, oh, we might have needed to give a better introduction about fertility awareness methods, because I know, if you're anything like me, that often we don't learn these things until we are trying to get pregnant. Often we don't learn these things until we are trying to get pregnant and even then, depending on the path that you have taken so far, what providers you have, this information may have not been presented to you yet. So I wanted to give a little quickie introduction to the fertility awareness method and then next week you can fully dive into this episode with Lisa Heck. Go get Real Food for Fertility and the Fifth Vital Sign as reading materials to compliment your listening experience. But let's just do this little quickie synopsis.

So the fertility and awareness method, which is primarily what I use in practice. There's other names for it there's FEM, there's symptom thermal method, there's the Cretan model. All of these use many of the same principles. There's some differences within how they are charted, within what emphasis is placed on which pieces of the menstrual cycle sign and symptom picture, but I'm going to give you just the kind of nuts and bolts of this today. So number one is tracking cervical fluid. Now again, if you were raised in a household where other people weren't aware of this, if you have been on birth control for a long time and that communication between your brain and ovaries was shut down, you weren't ovulating and, like you may have no idea where to begin with cervical fluid and we probably need an entire episode just dedicated to that.

But what we mean in the context of fertility awareness method is that you are observing the change in discharge day to day, with the knowledge that as you approach ovulation, that cervical fluid should change as it reaches its fertile quality. It becomes more slippery, more wet, more stretchy. Becomes more slippery, more wet, more stretchy. If you've ever cut open an aloe plant like if you've gotten a sunburn and you want to apply aloe the texture of that fluid inside the aloe plant and, slipping my fingers together, if you're watching on YouTube, you'll see that texture is like the glide. That is very similar to what we observe in fertile quality cervical fluid and even sometimes, when we're at that peak, we'll see like a stretchiness. So if you were to place the discharge between your fingers and pull them apart, you would see like a string of that mucusy discharge. As you can tell, I'm really not grossed out by this stuff anymore.

Some people will still say like maybe this is TMI, but like there's no such thing. This is just part of our bodies. 50% of the people out there who have a cervix and a uterus are going to experience this, so let's just normalize it. Cervix and a uterus are going to experience this, so let's just normalize it. So as we go throughout our cycle, oftentimes we'll see this pattern of when a period is finishing up. We might have a couple of dry days and then have sticky days and lotiony days and then this more slippery, wet, stretchy fluid. There's some variation. Some people will get the very typical egg white quality where, again like similar to the aloe, if you crack an egg open, you see that egg white texture. Some people it will feel like they have literally cracked an egg up in there. Some people will feel like it's just more of a glide there. It's wet but it's not as copious.

What's important is that you learn to observe your discharge. Uh, there's not really comparing it to anyone else's just like, what does yours look like? And start marking that. So I use an app in the Brilliant Fertility Program to help my clients track their cycles and their cervical fluids that I can see at real time. You can do the good old fashioned method on a paper chart. There's no wrong way to do it. It's what works within your lifestyle.

The other piece is looking at the basal body temperatures. Other piece is looking at the basal body temperatures. So this is your resting body temperature after you've been sleeping for minimum four hours without moving around, taking your temperature orally. If you're waking up at the same time every day and you're not waking up at 2 am to go to the bathroom and then you're up for the day at five and you won't get the most accurate result like you want to make sure that you have some consistency If you're using an oral thermometer. If you don't have that consistency, then using a device like the temp drop, which I love, or an aura ring which syncs to the natural cycles app.

These are all ways that you can collect your basal body temperature to tell us more about what's happening in your cycle. What we should see is lower temperatures in the follicular phase that go up after ovulation and they stay up for the rest of the cycle. So we have this biphasic appearance and there's definitely some individual variation between what temperatures we would expect to see. But what's great about basal body temperature charting is it can also show you do you maybe have excess inflammation, and that's presenting as having a slightly higher temperature? Do you maybe have some subclinical hypothyroidism, and that's presenting with a lower than ideal temperature? Do we see this wild sawtooth pattern that tells us that your stress response is kicked into gear, even though you may not subjectively be feeling that there's so much objective information that those temperatures can give us. I love evaluating a good temperature chart.

And then the third piece is all the other signs and symptoms. Around the fertile window, the cervix will move. So if someone can't really tell what their cervical discharge is looking like, then I will often have them start to observe the location, texture of the cervix. I use an acronym I wish I could give credit to where it came from. First show of the cervix will be soft, high, open and wet as you approach ovulation. And again, it takes just some comfort with really getting in touch with your body and what it's doing, to palpate the cervix and know what it's up to. Not everyone has to do that to know when their fertile window is, but it can be a really helpful compliment to also observing the cervical fluid and the basal body temperatures.

And then how about other signs and symptoms? So does your energy change? Does your libido change? Do you get really bloated? Do you get middle schmertz, which is mid-cycle cramping that can be indicative of ovulation? Do you get these bursts in creativity and feeling more outgoing and like you want to plan everything and you can conquer the world? There's a lot of other little subtle shifts that happen as we have that estrogen surge around ovulation that we're not always in tune with, unless you pause and observe and note it somewhere.

Now, unfortunately, some people have some more negative to try to conceive, so that you can really have this good foundational knowledge of what your body is doing, what your cycle is doing, what it's asking for, and then know that there's, you can easily get caught up in the weeds. Lisa and I talk about this in the episode about how you know, we both tend to attract like type A individuals who can get very fixated on the data point. But what's really important to understand is that we actually need a bird's eye view of a cycle and being able to look at it as like this entire report card for what's happening in the menstrual cycle and your body, because this really is a vital sign. I agree with that wholeheartedly, that we need this bird's eye view in order to really look at what's happening in someone's body, and sometimes we don't have that full understanding in one cycle or with just one week of data. So if you've been charting your cycle and you've been feeling like it's creating stress or anxiety, um, there is an article that I contributed to with Forbes that I will link in the comments with my notes about how I approach that when we start to get obsessive around the data, and I'm also going to include a link to a little mini course that I created for cycle charting for conception, and I go in much greater depth in each of the modules within that course around what we're looking at how to observe what you know.

Pictures of that cervical fluid. What does that look like? Pictures of the base of body temperature charts. Examples of charts in my real practice what they looked like before and after. We made some changes and that's been a really helpful place for people to start understanding their body. It's included in the Brilliant Fertility Program, so if you're already in the program, don't worry. Like that's in module two, but we took that out and created our own little mini course around it. If you are interested in diving deeper, I will link that in the show notes today. But keep your questions in mind because we may do a follow-up episode around fertility awareness and the charting principles. So over the next two episodes, write down your questions, send them on over so that we can do a follow-up episode for you with all of those questions answered later on. And happy charting. Thanks for listening, as always.