Whether you're trying to conceive or you want to track your cycle to better understand your body, OPKs (Ovulation Predictor Kits) are commonly used to determine when you ovulate based on hormones released by your body. They are one of my favorite ways of determining ovulation because they are fairly easy to use and pretty damn accurate, but of course they do come with a few perimeters and a bit of a learning curve.

Which ones to buy? When to test and how? And what do these tiny pee strips actually mean? I'm going to explain it all for you right now.

The 4 Phases of the Menstrual Cycle

If you are trying to conceive, starting to chart your cycle, or if you just want a better understanding of the changes your body undergoes each month, understanding the 4 main phases of the menstrual cycle is a good place to start. Unfortunately there is a ton of confusion about these phases, when they happen, and what each means, especially for women with irregular cycles. But I'm here to break it all down for you!

PMS Sucks! How to Treat it Naturally

While there are phases of the menstrual cycle when our hormones can leave us feel energized, confident, and cheerful, there are also phases of our cycles that may cause us feeling depleted, irritable, and self conscious. The premenstrual phase (the one and a half to two week period prior to bleeding) is most notorious for these feelings, the dreaded PMS.

Premenstrual Syndrome can look very different for different women, but the most common symptoms are emotional changes, mood swings, general irritability, anxiety, or sensitivity, breast tenderness, digestive upset, food cravings, headaches, or acne. While one woman may complain of one or two of these symptoms, some women can attest to nearly every annoying symptom on that list.

But PMS isn't something we're sentenced to as women, in fact there are a number of things you can do to balance your hormones naturally and start feeling better!

Intro to Basal Body Temperature Charting

Women's hormones change so significantly during the course of their cycles that just by looking at graphs of daily temperatures you can see when ovulation occurs, if implantation has taken place, or when the period is about to start. It can even spot subtle signs of hormone imbalance, for example, if enough there's not enough progesterone being produced to sustain pregnancy.

Not just any temperature though, specifically our basal body temperature (BBT) is what must be measured to better understand what our hormones are doing. Basal refers to the bottom, in this case it's the lowest our temperature gets each day. For most people, that happens to be when you first wake up in the morning, after your body and metabolism have been resting several hours.

I wrote earlier about the Fertility Awareness Method (FAM,) which uses temperature charting as a major component of tracking the menstrual cycle and determining a woman's fertile window. Click the link above to learn more about FAM and if it's right for you.

What is the Fertility Awareness Method?

If you're trying to conceive, or even if you're not but you don't use contraceptives such as birth control, it's super helpful to understand when you're most fertile and when you aren't. The goal of the Fertility Awareness Method (FAM) is just that, to track your cycle and ovulation to best predict how fertile you are on any given day.

Hormones getting you down? How to eat to restore balance

Guest post by Miriam Jacobson, MS, RD, CNS, CDN of everybodybliss.com

Brain fog, bloating, PMS and erratic mood swings are signs that you might be struggling with a hormonal imbalance. Despite what your doctor said, these symptoms are not ‘normal’ and there are ways that you can eat to help balance your hormones naturally.

Western medicine often focuses on how to eliminate symptoms, which is why you might walk out of your doctors’ office with a birth control prescription after complaining about your lady problems. Although every body is different, birth control tends to mask many hormonal problems without addressing the root cause.

As a functional nutritionist, I seek out the underlying causes of these symptoms and work with foods and nutrients to help restore optimal health.

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