McCall McPherson talks with a fertility expert about tracking your cycle accurately. Routine progesterone tests are unreliable because the hormone fluctuates too fast. Instead, watch your cervical mucus: when it turns sticky and egg-white-like, that signals peak estrogen and ovulation.
Chapters
When you're trying to put those pieces together, like when you're trying to detective work this system and see at what point there might be failure, how are you looking for that? Are you doing like weekly lab draws of hormones? Obviously, you take into account the cycle duration and that sort of thing. But tell me what that looks like from a fertility detective standpoint.
Let's say that you, you think your cycles are regular. You're just trying to detect maybe when ovulation occurs, trying to know, are they normal? Right. Because regular is an important piece of normal, but doesn't mean that they are exactly normal. There's more to the puzzle. It's actually, lab work is not that wonderful for this because your progesterone level's gonna fluctuate up and down. You know, it's a very responsive system. So one of the best things to do is to learn to track your cycle and with what we call fertility awareness methods. And these are physical clues and symptoms that your body's giving you from these hormonal changes. So for example, when your body has peak estrogen level— we said has to be high and long— one thing that that high estrogen does is it changes the cervical mucus. So the cervical mucus protects the uterus. The cervix is the entry point to the uterus so that nothing can get in and cause an infection, except it wants to allow sperm in. So it changes to be sticky, stretchy, and egg white when it sees that really peak estrogen level.
