Fertility Awareness: Charting Your Temperature
Natural family planning is most normally looked at as a way to prevent pregnancy, but for lots of couples, it’s also a way to achieve pregnancy. It even works for those of us who don’t have regular menstrual cycles. It’s a way to be in tune with your body, enough to even know exactly when you ovulate. While there is more than one way to achieve this, I’ll focus on the temperature method today.
How to chart your temperature:
At the same time each morning, before you get out of bed (or move or talk), you take your temperature (orally) on a digital thermometer that records your temp within 1/10 of a degree. Chart your temp each morning on a Basal Body Temp Chart. A womans temperature normally drops slightly right before ovulation and then rises sharply following ovulation.The rise in temp should be about .4 degrees. When you see this drop, you can know that it may be time to ‘get busy’, if you get my drift.
A great way to find the different phases of your cycle is to draw a line between the follicular phase and the luteal phase. How do you find this? Take a look at the 6 days prior to ovulation (or the decrease in temp, before the sharp increase) and draw a line across the chart 1/10 of a degree higher than your highest temp those days. You should be able to see the follicular temps (1st part if the cycle) are all below the line and the luteal temps (second part of the cycle) are above.
Charting your temperatures is not only a great way to see when you’ll be most likely to conceive, but it can also help you figure out if you have a luteal phase defect of some sort. Basically after ovulation your temp should remain above the coverline for at least 12 days. And if it stays above the line (or elevated) for 18 days, it may be an indication of pregnancy. Also, if you do decide to seek medical counsel after you’ve been unable to achieve pregnancy, they can help the doctors find out what may be going wrong.
Charting does take time and it does need to be done everyday, but it can also be a very accurate way to achieve pregnancy.
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A lot of people consider my way the lazy one, but I use the LadyComp to do this. It has an alarm that wakes me up at the same time every morning and an attached thermometer that takes my reading down to two decimal points. Then it gives me a light: green if I’m nonfertile, yellow meaning slight possibility of fertility, and red meaning fertile. The red light blinks on ovulation day. I can also look back over my recent cycles, and it will forecast my fertility for the next 6 days. IT tells me what my average rise in temperature is and average cycle length. This has been a life-saver for me! I hesitated over the price as I considered buying it before I got married, but I eventually decided that it was worth it because I was more likely to keep up with charting this way than if I had to do it myself (as Polonius said, “know thyself”). Anyway, we’re using it now for FAM birth control, but we’ll use it in the future for conception. Or, at least, we’ll try. Bad reports coming from the doctor on that. Sometimes I wonder why we even bother to practice birth control… I mean, I know why. If I got pregnant now, it would be bad for baby and me. But then again, that “if” is pretty iffy.
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Alison, I have heard of something like that, but never seriously looked into it myself. Good to know it’s easy to use,as we may use some sort of Natural Family Planning in the future! Thanks for the info!
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Love love LOVE the new site!
I have PCOS too and am just now starting to look into switching our family over to a more traditional foods type approach to nutrition. I’m starting from square one so I really look forward to learning from you!
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We used Natural Family Planning for both avoidance of pregnancy, as well as for conception. When we decided we were ready to have baby number 5, we knew my cycle so well, we actually conceived on the first try.
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I started using FAM after reading Toni Weschler’s book Take Charge of your Fertility about six months before we started trying to conceive. I use the software that comes with the book. I find that very handy. I’ve yet to find a basal thermometer that I like. I just tolerate the ones I have because I don’t have another option. I’d love to get a BabyComp but unfortunately I don’t have an extra $700 laying around, lol!
Tracking my fertility signs clued me into the fact that something wasn’t right early on.
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