What if we all grew up recognizing that our bodies were different from boys’ and men’s in some fundamental ways — ways that didn’t make us less than, but did require that we learn about ourselves and care for ourselves differently, beginning in our menarche?
What would life be like throughout our teens, twenties, and thirties if understanding our menstrual cycles and caring for our female hormones was simply part of growing up? If tracking our cycles was as normal as brushing our teeth or learning to drive, and every young woman was taught to understand the body she would inhabit for the rest of her life?
This is the world I’d like us to imagine together. Because even if we didn’t inherit this culture, and even if we weren’t given this education ourselves, we can still create it now, with our own choices and personal values.
Whether you’re twenty or forty, trying to conceive, hoping to avoid pregnancy, or simply wanting to understand yourself more deeply, it’s never too late to begin learning the language of your own body!
Imagine having this beautiful yet incredibly complex female body—the only body you will ever have, the home of your soul, your intellect, your memories, your subconscious, your sexuality, and the vessel through which you’ll pursue every ambition and experience every relationship in your life—and no one ever teaching you how it actually works.
This is the reality for most women in this culture.
Not only this, but imagine growing into womanhood in a culture that has, for generations, pathologized many of the normal functions of this body while offering solutions that often move us farther away from understanding it.
Rather than learning to interpret our body’s signals, we’re often encouraged to suppress them. Rather than becoming curious about our symptoms, we’re often taught to manage them, and rather than developing trust in our own observations, we’re often taught to outsource the responsibility of understanding ourselves to someone else who barely knows us.
Since this body is the home of everything you’ll ever experience, your ability to function well within it naturally shapes your agency in every other area of your life. The way you experience your health, your relationships, your fertility, your sexuality, your work, your energy, and even your sense of self cannot be separated from the body through which you experience these things.
To understand that body isn’t simply to improve your reproductive health; it’s to develop a deeper relationship with yourself.
On top of all of this, we’re attempting to understand female bodies within a culture that has historically been built around male bodies.
While men and women obviously share the vast majority of our biology, there are crucial physiological differences between us that require different knowledge and different care. For much of modern medical history, women’s bodies were studied far less frequently because our cyclical hormonal changes made us more difficult research subjects.
The consequence is that many of us have inherited a healthcare system that knows far more about treating disease than it does about helping women understand the normal rhythms of healthy female physiology.
As young women, many of us therefore grow up experiencing a confusing mixture of shame, frustration, curiosity, fear, and resignation with how we experience and relate to our podies.
We learned that our periods are inconvenient, that pregnancy is something to avoid at all costs — even if we know nothing about how it works — and that hormonal symptoms are simply part of being a woman. We learn to carry tampons discreetly, to expect pain, to joke about PMS, and to accept that having a female body is, by nature, difficult and possibly even gross or dirty.
Beyond the barebones of how pregnancy happens and how to prevent it, many of us receive very little education about what our menstrual cycle is actually doing each month or what it might be telling us about our overall health.
For the past several decades, the primary solution our culture has offered women for many of the challenges associated with having a female body has been one main option: hormonal contraception.
A young girl develops painful periods, acne, irregular cycles, or debilitating PMS, and before she’s ever had the opportunity to understand the physiology beneath those symptoms, she’s often offered a treatment that suppresses the very hormonal patterns she might otherwise have learned from. If her mother was never taught about her own body, she has little knowledge or confidence to pass down to her daughter, and so both generations are left depending almost entirely on medical professionals to interpret experiences that are happening within their own bodies.
And for those of us who never used hormonal birth control, we are not necessarily any more body literate.
I never went on hormonal contraception myself, but I still grew up in the same culture, influenced by the same assumptions, and just as disconnected from understanding my own physiology as my non-cycling peers on the pill. Whether we’ve spent years suppressing our cycles or simply ignoring them because no one ever taught us otherwise, many women arrive in adulthood with remarkably little understanding of the monthly hormonal rhythm occurring inside them or how powerful this rhythm truly is!
This body illiteracy shows up everywhere. It shows up in years of:
- PMS
- painful periods
- PCOS
- endometriosis
- PMDD
- amenorrhea
- acne
- weight gain
- low libido
- irregular cycles
- clotting
- ovarian cysts
…and countless other hormonal symptoms that women endure without ever understanding what their bodies may be trying to communicate. It shows up in believing we’re fertile every day of the month because no one ever taught us otherwise.
It shows up in believing that hormonal contraception is the only truly safe way to prevent pregnancy because we’ve never been shown how fertility actually works. And it shows up in our relationship with our own sexuality, where many women never come to recognize the natural fluctuations in desire, energy, confidence, or emotional sensitivity that accompany a healthy ovulatory cycle because they’ve never learned to observe them.
Here’s the thing, though: I don’t believe this is because women are incapable of understanding our bodies, nor do I believe our bodies are simply too complicated.
I think we’ve inherited a culture where female body literacy is so uncommon that many women never realize it’s even something they’re allowed to pursue. We’ve normalized graduating from school without ever learning the rhythms of the body we’ll inhabit for the rest of our lives, and in doing so we’ve become increasingly dependent on others to interpret experiences that belong, first and foremost, to us.
The beautiful thing is that this can change.
Understanding your menstrual cycle opens the door to understanding your body as a whole because your cycle is not an isolated reproductive event. Ovulation and menstruation are influenced by your metabolism, your nervous system, your thyroid, your nutrition, your stress physiology, your sleep, and your overall sense of safety as a woman. This is why I often describe our periods as our monthly report card. Not because they’re grading us as good or bad women, or because every symptom is something we’ve caused, but because they offer us regular feedback about how our bodies have been functioning over the previous one to three months.
When we learn to read that report card, we stop seeing our symptoms as random inconveniences and begin seeing them as meaningful information.
This is why I believe cycle tracking is one of the most powerful pathways into female body literacy. It teaches us to observe rather than ignore, to become curious rather than fearful, and to develop a relationship with our bodies based on trust instead of uncertainty. And once you begin seeing your cycle through that lens, it becomes almost impossible to think about your health in the same way again or to outsource your somatic agency to someone or something outside of yourself.
Here’s What You Need to Know About Being a Modern Woman
We’re living at a fascinating point in history as women.
My generation, and my mother’s generation before me, have inherited both the freedoms and the consequences of the cultural movements that shaped women’s lives over the past sixty years. The sexual revolution, hormonal contraception, advances in reproductive medicine, and the growing participation of women in education and the workforce have undoubtedly changed what it means to be a woman in the modern world. Many of these changes have given women opportunities and autonomy that previous generations could only dream of, which is obviously a good thing!
At the same time, I think it’s worth asking whether we’ve also inherited some assumptions about women’s health that deserve to be questioned and challenged.
One of those assumptions is that the most empowering way for women to live is to make our bodies function more like men’s: to suppress our cycles so we no longer have to think about them, and to see our fertility primarily as something to control, rather than something to understand.
We’re also taught to separate our reproductive health from the rest of our physiology, as though our hormones exist in isolation from our metabolism, our stress physiology, our thyroid, our nutrition, our nervous system, and every other process occurring within our bodies.
Whether or not we’ve personally chosen hormonal contraception almost becomes beside the point because even women like myself who have never been on hormonal birth control have still grown up swimming in this cultural water.
We’ve all absorbed, to some degree, the idea that our periods are an inconvenience, that hormonal symptoms are simply part of being a woman, that our fertility is something to fear, and that the solution to many female health concerns lies in controlling or suppressing our reproductive physiology rather than understanding it.
I’ve also seen the consequences of this firsthand in my work with women.
Some women grew up with loving mothers who did everything they could to support them, yet those mothers had never been taught about their own cycles either. Others were raised by single fathers, like I was, or in homes where conversations about menstruation, sexuality, and fertility simply didn’t happen or weren’t treated as appropriate or important.
Different childhoods, but remarkably similar outcomes; intelligent, capable women arriving in adulthood knowing surprisingly little about the physiology that influences how they feel every single month.
This is the water we swim in, ladies.
It’s a culture where body illiteracy is so commonplace that most women don’t even realize there’s another way to relate to themselves. Where we’re told everything from, “You don’t actually need a period,” to, “It’s normal for your periods to be incredibly painful,” to, “Hormonal birth control is the only truly safe and effective way to prevent pregnancy,” to, “If you have hormonal symptoms, the answer is hormonal treatment.”
It’s a culture where fertility awareness is often dismissed before it’s understood, where women’s health is easily politicized, and where many women come to believe they’re infertile, hormonally broken, or destined to suffer without ever being taught how to interpret the messages their own bodies have been giving them for years.
The result to all of this is a generation of women who often experience hormonal symptoms throughout the month, yet rarely view those symptoms as connected to their overall health. Fertility becomes something separate from our overall metabolism, and reproductive health becomes something separate from our mental health.
In this culture, our periods become something separate from our stress, our nutrition, our sleep, and our sense of safety, and instead of seeing the body as one beautifully integrated system, we divide it into unrelated parts and treat each symptom as though it exists independently.
I believe we’ve lost something important in this process of compartmentalizing and pathologizing a woman’s body.
We’ve lost the expectation that women should know their own bodies — not because we’re incapable of learning them, but because very few of us were ever invited or encouraged to in the first place! Despite dropping out of college to attend a holistic health school, and completing a year-long holistic health practitioner program where I immersed myself for years in the crunchy alternative health world of the San Francisco Bay Area…
I spent most of my twenties viewing cycle tracking as something that witchy, earthy, herbalist women do — not a masculine tomboy such as myself.
I viewed cycle tracking as this inconvenient practice mainly applied by those long-haired, flowy dress wearing hippy women I knew who made their own toothpaste and talked about the spirit of sage and the importance of worshipping the moon. Either this, or by the women who needed to know when they ovulated so they could fit a pregnancy into their already busy lives. This was the extent of my knowledge (aka ignorance and judgements) of fertility tracking!
I’ve grown to recognize that a lot of otherwise health-seeking women in this culture have spent their lives viewing cycle tracking in a similar — even if not as distinctly cliche’ — way as my younger self; placing it into the same category as home births, placenta eating, and potentially anti-modern medicine circles.
Fortunately, I think that’s beginning to change.
As women’s chronic illness, infertility, metabolic dysfunction, and hormonal disorders continue to rise, we’re also seeing more clinicians, researchers, and everyday women asking different questions of their bodies, the research, and their providers.
Rather than simply asking how to suppress our symptoms, more women are asking why those symptoms developed in the first place.
And instead of viewing fertility as something separate from our overall health, many of us are beginning to recognize that our reproductive system is deeply connected to everything else happening within our bodies and cannot be shut down without real consequences.
This shift gives us an opportunity to rebuild something that should have been ours from the very beginning — our body literacy & medical autonomy.
And we won’t need to do this by rejecting modern medicine, nor by romanticizing the past, but by reclaiming something many of us never received in the first place: an education in our own physiology.
For me, cycle tracking is one of the most practical places to begin this whole process.
Not because every woman must use fertility awareness for pregnancy prevention, or because every woman is trying to conceive, or because our fertility is the only thing that matters…
But because cycle tracking is the most practical way to begin learning about our bodies since our menstrual cycle is one of the clearest windows into our overall health.
Our cycle offers us an opportunity, every single month, to observe how our body is adapting to the cumulative effects of our nutrition, stress, metabolism, thyroid function, nervous system regulation, relationships, movement, and recovery.
Cycle tracking invites us to stop seeing our hormones as isolated events and begin seeing them as part of a much larger conversation happening within our bodies.
When we start paying attention to that conversation, it’s very difficult to go back to seeing our cycle as “just our annoying, inconvenient, gross period,” and instead, it becomes one of the most valuable tools we have for understanding ourselves!
Now, I’d like to share the strategies that are essential for making cycle tracking a normal, common, and expected component of the culture we wish to create.
Strategy 1: Get Off Hormonal Treatments That May Be Disrupting Your Baseline
If our goal is to become more body literate, then the first step is to become familiar with our body’s natural physiology.
This means that if you’re currently using hormonal contraception or another hormonal treatment that suppresses or significantly alters your entire monthly cycle, you’ll eventually need to consider whether discontinuing it is an appropriate next step for you. I don’t say this because I believe hormonal contraception is inherently evil or because every woman should stop using it immediately, but because it becomes incredibly difficult to learn about your body’s natural hormonal rhythms when those rhythms are being intentionally suppressed or masked (which is exactly what hormonal birth control is doing).
For many women, getting off all synthetic hormonal treatments is the first real obstacle to body literacy.
If you’ve been on hormonal birth control since you were thirteen or fourteen years old, it’s entirely possible that you’ve never actually experienced your adult hormonal physiology. You may have spent years believing that the withdrawal bleed you experience each month is your true menstrual cycle (hint: it isn’t, we cannot truly menstruate if our cycle is shut down).
You may have spent years believing that your birth control wasn’t changing much other than pregnancy risk, without ever having the opportunity to observe whether you’re ovulating consistently, how long your luteal phase is, how your libido changes throughout the month, or what your body naturally feels like when it isn’t being pharmacologically altered.
If you’ve been on hormonal contraceptives for any real length of time, then there’s a good chance you have a whole lot of N-of-1 data you simple have not collected about how your own female body works.
None of this is a criticism of the choices you’ve made — most women make these decisions with the information they have available to them at the time, often under the guidance of doctors and with the best of intentions, but oftentimes without true informed consent ( because the doctors themselves often don’t know enough!)
The point is simply that if your goal is to understand your own body, there eventually comes a point where you need the opportunity to observe that body functioning on its own, without disruptions.
Of course, this won’t apply to every woman reading this. I’ve never been on hormonal birth control myself, yet I still grew up with very little understanding of my own menstrual cycle because no one taught me how to pay attention to it or that it even mattered in the first place. My body wasn’t being pharmacologically suppressed, but I was no more body literate than many women who had spent years on the pill.
In both cases, the outcome was remarkably similar; I didn’t understand what my hormones were doing throughout the month, what ovulation felt like, why my energy changed, or what my period might be telling me about my health.
The difference was simply that my physiology was available for me to observe once I learned how to look and why it mattered so much.
This is why I don’t see coming off hormonal contraception as the solution in and of itself. If a woman stops taking the pill but continues living with the same level of body illiteracy she had before, she’s only taken one step in the right direction, while abandoning the rest of the journey. The goal isn’t simply to remove something, but to begin paying attention to what becomes visible once it’s removed.
It’s also important to recognize that many women experience symptoms when they discontinue hormonal birth control, and those symptoms are often misinterpreted as evidence that they need to go back on it. Sometimes those symptoms are part of the body’s process of re-establishing its normal hormonal rhythms after years of suppression. Other times, these symptoms are revealing hormonal imbalances that were already present before birth control was ever introduced but were simply being masked while it was being used.
And in most cases, symptoms of what is now often referred to as Post Birth Control Syndrome involves a body that has been severely depleted of crucial nutrients needed for sound hormonal health through the process of metabolizing the contraception in the first place.
Either way, those symptoms become valuable information rather than something to fear, because they begin showing us where the body needs support instead of simply asking us to silence the messenger.
This is one of the biggest shifts I try to help women make in my work: rather than seeing hormonal symptoms as isolated inconveniences that need to disappear as quickly as possible, we begin approaching these signs and symptoms with curiosity and respect. We ask what the body might be communicating, what physiological processes could be struggling upstream of sex hormones, and what conditions the body may need in order to restore healthier hormonal function.
Sometimes the process of creating conditions conducive to hormonal healing is surprisingly straightforward, and sometimes it requires much deeper investigation, but we can only begin asking those questions once we have access to our baseline physiology.
For women who get to a place of acceptance that coming off hormonal contraception is the right choice, I don’t believe it should be something they navigate alone. This transition is often accompanied by uncertainty, changing symptoms, and understandable anxiety, particularly if they’ve spent years relying on hormonal birth control for pregnancy prevention or symptom management.
Having guidance throughout that process can make the difference between feeling like your body is becoming unpredictable and recognizing that it’s finally giving you information you’ve never had access to before.
Ultimately, this first step isn’t about rejecting modern medicine or proving that you can do everything naturally because natural is always best… it’s about creating the opportunity to observe your body honestly and become attuned with it’s needs.
If body literacy is our goal, then we need to inhabit a body that’s able to speak to us without disruptions before we can begin interpreting what it’s saying.
Strategy 2: Test to See Where Your Hormones Are At
Once you’ve established your baseline, the next step is to begin understanding why your body is functioning the way it is.
While cycle tracking can tell us an incredible amount about what’s happening throughout the month, it’s only one piece of the picture. If your periods are painful, your cycles are irregular, you’re not ovulating consistently, you’re experiencing severe PMS, or you’re struggling with fertility, your body is telling you that something upstream needs your attention. The question then becomes, what’s driving those patterns?
This is where testing becomes a valuable part of the process.
One of the biggest mistakes I see women make is assuming that hormones exist in isolation, as though estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone simply decide to behave the way they do without influence from the rest of the body. In reality, our sex hormones are responding to everything happening upstream of them. They’re influenced by our metabolic health, our thyroid function, our mineral status, our stress physiology, our nervous system, our blood sugar regulation, and our overall ability to produce enough energy to support healthy ovulation and reproduction.
If we focus only on the hormones themselves, we often miss the very systems that are creating the hormonal picture we’re trying to change.
This is one of the reasons I rely so heavily on the Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (HTMA) in my practice. It gives us an incredibly helpful picture of the physiological patterns occurring beneath a woman’s hormones, helping us understand the terrain in which those hormones are operating. Rather than asking only whether estrogen is high or progesterone is low, we’re able to ask bigger questions about how your body is producing energy, responding to stress, utilizing minerals, and adapting to the demands being placed upon it.
In my experience, this gives us a much more useful starting point than chasing individual hormones alone.
Alongside the HTMA, I also often recommend the DUTCH test, particularly when we’re wanting a closer look at sex hormones and their metabolites. The DUTCH allows us to see not only where hormones are sitting, but also how they’re being metabolized and eliminated, giving us a more complete picture of what’s happening throughout the hormonal system.
Depending on the individual woman and her symptoms, there may also be value in looking at thyroid markers, blood work, or other functional testing that helps us understand the bigger physiological picture.
The goal of testing isn’t to collect as much data as possible or to become overwhelmed by numbers — it’s to answer the questions that your cycle has already begun asking:
- If your periods have been painfully heavy for years, why?
- If you’re not ovulating consistently, what’s preventing ovulation?
- If you’re struggling with infertility, what physiological conditions might be making your body feel that reproduction isn’t a priority right now?
- If your luteal phase is consistently short, why is progesterone struggling to stay elevated?
- If you have symptoms of PMOS (formerly PCOS), what are the driving patterns behind your unique presentation of this?
- If you struggle with estrogen dominance, what are the bottlenecks contributing to this?
These are the kinds of questions that move us beyond symptom management and into genuine understanding.
This is also where I think it’s important to remember something I mentioned earlier in this article:
Your menstrual cycle is your monthly report card.
A report card tells you how something has been going; it doesn’t necessarily tell you why you received that result. So, testing helps us understand the “why,” and it allows us to connect the symptoms you’re experiencing throughout the month with the physiology that’s producing them, so that we’re no longer guessing about what your body needs.
When we’re guessing at what’s going on in our health and, more or less, working in the dark… we become much more susceptible to marketing ploys that sell us on some magic pill solutions that we may not even need and could even make things worse!
When women begin seeing their hormones through this lens, I’ve noticed time and again, that something shifts in how they relate to their own bodies.
Their symptoms can stop feeling random, their bodies often stop feeling unpredictable or as though they’re working against them, and instead, they begin recognizing that our bodies are remarkably logical.
Women are constantly adapting to the conditions they’ve been given, and our job isn’t to fight our own physiology, but to understand it well enough that we can begin changing the conditions that are influencing it so much.
This is one of the reasons I love approaching women’s health through fertility; fertility isn’t a separate category of health that only matters if you’re trying to have a baby. It’s one of the clearest reflections of how well the entire organism is functioning while we’re in our reproductive years. When ovulation is healthy, when menstrual cycles are predictable, and when hormonal symptoms begin improving, we’re rarely looking at changes that happened only within the reproductive system alone.
More often, we’re witnessing improvements in the body’s overall capacity to produce energy, regulate stress, maintain hormonal balance, and create an internal environment where reproduction is possible and safe for the body. Whether or not pregnancy is your goal, that’s valuable information about your health!
For me, this is what makes testing so empowering — it transforms women’s health from a process of reacting to symptoms into a process of understanding physiology.
Instead of wondering what our body is doing each month, we begin seeing the patterns beneath the patterns. We can develop a clearer picture of WHY our hormones are behaving the way they are, and that understanding allows us to create a plan that’s specific to our own body rather than based on generalized recommendations… which you can easily find all over the internet now!
Strategy 3: Track Your Cycle
Once you’ve established your baseline and have a clearer understanding of the physiology that’s influencing your hormones, the next step is to begin tracking your cycle.
This is where all of the information you’ve gathered begins to come to life, because instead of relying on occasional blood tests or trying to remember how you felt over the past few months, you can begin developing an ongoing relationship with your body’s monthly rhythms.
When many people hear the words cycle tracking, they immediately think of pregnancy, and while fertility awareness is certainly an incredibly effective tool for both achieving and avoiding pregnancy, I think reducing cycle tracking to family planning alone misses the much bigger opportunity that it offers women.
Your cycle is one of the only physiological processes in your body that gives you regular, predictable feedback about how your health is changing over time.
The more consistently you observe it, the more you’ll begin recognizing patterns that would otherwise remain invisible.
What those patterns look like will depend on your goals and your overall health.
If you’re single, not sexually active with a partner, and simply wanting to understand yourself better, your approach to tracking may be relatively simple. You might begin by recording the length of your cycle, noting when you bleed, paying attention to your cervical fluid, observing changes in your energy, mood, appetite, sleep, libido, and physical symptoms throughout the month, and gradually becoming familiar with how your body feels throughout the month.
There doesn’t need to be any urgency or pressure attached to this process because you’re simply gathering information and becoming more familiar with yourself if this is your main goal.
If your primary goal is improving your metabolic or hormonal health, your tracking can become more detailed. This is where taking your basal body temperature each morning, tracking your waking pulse as a reflection of thyroid function, observing cervical fluid, libido, and recording your symptoms throughout the month can become incredibly valuable.
Rather than looking only at whether your period arrived, you’re beginning to understand how your body moves throughout each phase of the cycle, what ovulation looks like for you, how your temperatures shift after ovulation, and how changes in your lifestyle are reflected in your cycle over time.
If you’re struggling with your hormonal or metabolic health, then you’ll begin to notice patterns that tie in with this, such as greater histamine, MCAS, or mood instability symptoms during estrogen surges or when progesterone is low.
For example, one of my clients who has had so much unremitting stress in her life that the hormonal patterns impacted by this stress have only began to surface as her stress levels are gone down. As her body became more nourished and more safe throughout our work, her hormonal patterns began to become more predictable in things like severe histamine reactions in her fertile window when her estrogen was peaking.
This wasn’t something she was able to notice when she was in such acute survival states that her sex hormones felt unpredictable all month long. But a few months into our work together, and this has become a predictable pattern each month that we get to witness and address through nourishment and upstream repair.
Had she not known the mechanisms upstream that are impacting her sex hormones, she likely would’ve seen these histamine symptoms as a sign she’s getting worse instead of a sign her body is safe enough to communicate more clearly.
And remember, how we interpret our body’s messages often determines how we respond; what treatments we choose, and how much patience we have for our whole experience.
One of the things I love most about cycle tracking is that it gives women something we’ve rarely been encouraged to develop: confidence in the evidence received from our own lived experience.
Instead of relying entirely on generalized information about what women are supposed to experience, we begin collecting years of observations about our body, noticing that our sleep changes in one phase of our cycle, that our appetite naturally increases during another, that our workouts feel easier at certain times of the month, or that our patience, creativity, confidence, and desire all fluctuate in remarkably consistent ways.
These observations stop feeling random because you now have a framework for understanding and addressing them.
This is one of the reasons I believe cycle tracking can become such a powerful tool for supporting a woman’s overall health, not just our fertility. Our menstrual cycle doesn’t exist separately from the rest of our physiology — it’s constantly responding to the quality of our nutrition, stress levels, metabolic health, sleep, relationships, fitness training, and the countless other variables that shape how safe and well-resourced our body feels.
The more consistently you track your cycle, the more clearly you begin seeing these relationships for yourself.
If your goal is pregnancy prevention or fertility support, cycle tracking becomes even more valuable because it allows you to identify your fertile window based on your own physiology rather than generalized assumptions. This is also a wonderful opportunity to involve your partner in understanding your cycle alongside you, and rather than fertility becoming something that belongs only to the woman, both partners begin learning when conception is possible, when fertility is lowest, and how to work together in supporting your health and your family planning goals.
I’ve found that this often creates a very different relationship with fertility altogether because instead of seeing it as something to fear or control, couples can begin relating to it as something they can understand together, knowing when the woman is most likely to want sex, be most fertile, or likely to need more gentle touch and care.
Perhaps one of my favorite aspects of cycle tracking, though, has very little to do with pregnancy:
it’s watching women reconnect with parts of themselves they didn’t realize had been there all along.
Many women have never noticed that their libido changes throughout the month because they’ve never had a reason to pay such close attention to it. Others assume their energy is unpredictable when it’s actually following a remarkably consistent pattern from one cycle to the next, and that they don’t have to change their entire view of themselves and their health each week because they’re not getting sucked into what are, oftentimes, predictable changes from one week to the next!
Some women begin recognizing that they’re naturally more introspective during one phase of their cycle and more outwardly focused during another, and finally understand why certain hormonal symptoms appear at the same point every month instead of feeling as though their bodies are simply betraying them at random.
Humans are notoriously bad at pattern recognition and tracking, which plays a big role in a lot of our failures in life — we simply keep making the same mistakes or missing vital signals because we’re not keeping track effectively.
I’ve seen this play out again and again with women’s health work because we often don’t keep track of our own patterns closely enough to recognize what’s actually happening and act on it effectively.
I blame a lot of this on the culture we’ve created where many women aren’t cycling, so we just don’t recognize what cycle tracking can do for us; we’ve built a culture where birth control dominates our own expectations of our bodies.
But over time, something subtle but profound begins to happen when we begin tracking: we stop organizing our life around fighting our body, and we begin organizing it around understanding it.
We know when our body is asking for more nourishment through more carbs (in our luteal phase), we recognize when we’ve pushed ourselves too hard, and we notice when stress begins showing up in our cycle before it appears anywhere else. We become familiar enough with our own physiology that our menstrual cycle no longer feels like something happening to us each month, but something we’re actively participating in and learning from!
I’ll use a fun example from my own life to illustrate how patterns can show up and be tracked predictably. Since I began tracking in my thirties and then stepping it up to increase my fertility now that I want to be a late mother… my fertile window has become amplified by high sexual desire beginning at about day 5 or 6 and then dropping off and declining shortly after ovulation, around day 16 or 17. I’m currently single and seeking a serious partner, so I’ve been chatting with men on dating apps, and just generally on the lookout for potential mates.
Therefore, the ways that I engage with men, the amount of and types of men I’m open to engaging with, and the overall energy I have to do so each month up until ovulation is huge compared to my luteal phase!! So huge, in fact, that I will literally go on or set up several dates during my follicular phase and then blow off or lose interest in many of these men in my luteal phase.
And while I’m not sleeping with any of them, I find that I have a lot more interest in chatting with some of them whom I have no real compatibility with if I find them attractive enough during or around ovulation!
Maybe tracking stuff like this isn’t every woman’s idea of a good time — perhaps not even yours. But to me, this is the real gift of cycle tracking, and endlessly fascinating to observe.
Yes, tracking can help you conceive. Yes, it can help you avoid pregnancy. And yes, it can help you identify hormonal imbalances earlier and make more informed decisions about your health for the long-term…
But beyond all of those practical benefits, tracking invites you into a relationship with your own body that many women were never taught was possible, (and sad to say, many women look at with suspicion and low trust).
After months and years of paying attention in this way, your cycle will no longer feel complicated because you’ve accumulated enough lived experience (n-of-1 data) to understand your own rhythms and to TRUST that you can interpret those rhythms accurately and act accordingly. You will inevitably be inoculating yourself from the experience of going to the doctor and being scared into taking a drug or undergoing a treatment you may not need, may not be able to afford, and may actually end up regretting.
What once felt confusing and scary can become familiar, and what once felt unpredictable begins making sense and even feels validating.
For me, this is where body literacy stops being an abstract idea and becomes a woman’s lived experience because it isn’t something you achieve by reading one book or attending one medical appointment — it’s something you cultivate through consistent observation, curiosity, and a willingness to let your own body become one of your greatest teachers.
Every single month I KNOW when my libido is highest and I know (as a single woman who doesn’t participate in casual sex) that I’ll need to have more outlets for my sexual desire to be channeled healthfully (which can include chatting with men I’d otherwise not bother with because I like the attention 😉
Every single month after ovulation, I know that my progesterone dips and that I become more sensitive to:
- Insufficient carb intake & blood sugar dips
- Stressful emotional exchanges
- Late nights and poor sleep
- Excessive histamine and inflammatory food choices
- Less sun exposure
…and once upon a time, I would feel EVERY SINGLE MONTH like I was failing at life.
I would feel like all the progress and agency that seemed to exist in me just a week or two ago… suddenly disappeared and I had somehow regressed in life and in health. I would begin to search for what I’d done wrong or what had happened that created this regression, this failure. And I would often feel ashamed and disappointed.
And if I couldn’t figure it out intellectually and shift out of the helplessness this induced, I’d reach for something like alcohol.
Little did I know that I was progesterone deficient, that I struggled to clear out estrogen from my body, that I was under-eating, and that I was dealing the the hormonal and metabolic cascade of symptoms that shows up in women’s luteal phase when they have excess stress in the cell with little buffer (progesterone, minerals, thyroid) to calm them down and support a smooth hormonal transition.
Stack on top of this my C-PTSD that can get triggered whenever I feel low agency… and you have an experience that feels like regression every. single. month.
I’ve seen process play out in coaching clients with C-PTSD countless times now, and its the tracking that we did together, month by month, that taught them how to recognize this whole process and address it effectively without reacting, making things worse, or making it mean something about who they are as a woman.
You Might Be Wondering…
“Isn’t Fertility Awareness Less Effective Than Birth Control?”
One of the most common objections I hear whenever fertility awareness is discussed is that it simply isn’t as safe or effective as hormonal birth control or the IUD. Many women have been told that tracking their cycle is unreliable, that it’s based on guesswork, or that it’s little more than the old “rhythm method” that failed previous generations.
The truth is that these are two very different things.
The Fertility Awareness Method (FAM) is not based on averages or generalized information about when women are supposed to ovulate – it’s based on observing your own body’s fertility signs and making decisions according to our individual physiology. When it’s practiced correctly, consistently, and with a solid understanding of our own cycle, fertility awareness can be just as effective as many hormonal contraceptive methods for pregnancy prevention, but without all the side effects.
The difference is that instead of preventing pregnancy by suppressing ovulation, this process requires you to understand when you’re actually fertile and to act accordingly.
Yes, it does require some maturity on our part, as we’ll need to practice sex differently based on where in our cycle we are and what our family plans are. So, in a sense, normalizing tracking is also normalizing a level of maturity, restraint, and accountability that our culture of hormonal contraception has eroded in women. (Men have always had the luxury of being more impulsive and sexually immature than us — this is a shitty double-standard, but its based in biology and cannot be changed. What we can change is what men we grant access to us.)
Of course, this understanding we develop doesn’t happen overnight.
Like any worthwhile skill, fertility awareness requires education, consistency, and practice. I would never recommend that someone begin charting for a few weeks and immediately rely on it as their sole form of contraception! Just as we wouldn’t expect to become fluent in a new language after a handful of lessons, we shouldn’t expect to become confident in interpreting our fertility after only one or two cycles.
Building that confidence takes time, and during that learning period there are other methods, such as condoms, that can be used until you’re confident in what you’re observing.
Another concern I often hear is that fertility awareness only works for women with perfectly regular cycles. The argument usually goes something like this:
“My hormones are all over the place, so I can’t rely on cycle tracking because I never know when I’m going to ovulate.”
Ironically, I think this is one of the strongest arguments for learning fertility awareness rather than against it.
A hormonal imbalance isn’t a reason to ignore your cycle; it’s a reason to understand it even more deeply. But, this is exactly how hormonal imbalances get treated by birth control culture; if you have PMS, PMDD, PMOS, endometriosis, or just painful irregular cycles with symptoms such as acne, moodiness, or weight gain… you’re taught that hormonal birth control is often the ideal solution because it shuts down these symptoms (i.e. signals that something’s off) so you can ignore them and go on with your life.
If your cycles are irregular, if you’re ovulating unpredictably, or if your fertile window is difficult to identify, those are valuable pieces of information about your physiology that need attention. They tell us that something upstream may need attention. They don’t mean your body is incapable of being understood — they simply mean that your body requires more observation while you work toward improving the conditions that allow healthy ovulation to occur.
In those circumstances, I would absolutely recommend using another form of contraception while you’re learning your cycle and addressing the underlying imbalances.
But that doesn’t mean fertility awareness has failed. If anything, it’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do: showing you what’s actually happening in your body instead of asking you to ignore it. The goal isn’t simply to prevent pregnancy — the goal is to prevent pregnancy while also becoming more body literate, and those two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
“Isn’t Cycle Tracking Too Complicated?”
Another objection I hear is that cycle tracking sounds overwhelming. Women tell me they don’t have time to take their temperature every morning, pay attention to cervical fluid, record symptoms, or think about where they are in their cycle — it feels like one more thing to keep track of in an already busy life.
I certainly can’t tell another woman what she should or shouldn’t consider worthy her time. We all have different priorities, responsibilities, and capacities, and each woman gets to decide where she invests her attention. I do believe that this is the one compelling defense of hormonal birth control: simply that a good percentage of the female population simply aren’t going to track, and they need to prevent unwanted pregnancies for the sake of everyone involved.
If this is you, more power to you… but I highly doubt that you’d be reading this whole article if this is you.
For those of you who have this thought about tracking’s complications, but also aren’t on birth control, what I would gently challenge, is the assumption beneath this objection:
If we’ve come to believe that understanding our own bodies is simply too complicated, too inconvenient, or too time-consuming to be worthwhile, I think that says something much bigger about the culture we’ve inherited than it does about women’s capabilities.
After all, who should understand your body if not you?
I’ve had several clients that were staunchly again both hormonal birth control and abortions for reasons of their own personal values, but also found tracking to be too complicated and time-consuming. And these women ended up with unwanted pregnancies that could’ve been avoided.
I’m of the belief that all babies are miracles and will be the first person in line to celebrate a woman’s pregnancy with her, AND it can also be a emotionally painful experience to witness a woman struggle emotionally, relationally, physically, and financially with a baby she simply doesn’t feel resourced to have, when preventing this experience was the easier path.
If your own reproductive physiology is too complicated for you to learn, then who do we imagine is better positioned to understand it, especially when something isn’t working properly and we need treatment? A doctor who sees you for fifteen minutes once a year? A pharmaceutical company? A health influencer online? I’m not being condescending here because I understand that we all seek out specialists with knowledge we don’t possess…
But regardless of their training, none of these people live inside your body or experience your symptoms, your cycles, your moods, your energy, or your desires the way you do. None of these experts will know your health history as deeply as you might, or have the opportunity to track your data and patterns as closely as you could each day.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that women should replace healthcare professionals or ignore medical advice!
But I don’t believe that medical professionals’ expertise should come at the expense of our own relationship with our bodies. My hope is that we create a culture where body literacy becomes so normal that girls begin learning these things long before they ever need to make decisions about contraception, fertility treatments, or hormonal medications. A culture where tracking your cycle feels no more unusual than tracking your sleep, your exercise, or your nutrition because it’s simply part of understanding your health.
(With the caveat that plenty of people still don’t track their sleep, exercise, or nutrition either).
If that culture existed, I don’t think nearly as many women would describe cycle tracking as complicated.
I think we’d describe it as normal, with a shrug, and then we go on with the rest of our day.
Imagine If This Was Normal
As a woman, imagine living in a culture where everything we’ve talked about in this article was simply considered a normal part of growing up.
Imagine being taught about your body from your very first period, not through shame, secrecy, or awkward conversations in a classroom, but as an initiation into womanhood. Imagine growing up understanding that your menstrual cycle wasn’t simply something to tolerate each month, but one of the clearest windows into your overall health — wasn’t gross or shameful or annoying, but a normal part of who you are, and something that made us more powerful as a sex.
Imagine having mothers, grandmothers, teachers, and healthcare practitioners who all expected that one day you would know your own cycle as intimately as you know your own personality quarks and food preferences.
Imagine reaching adulthood already knowing when you typically ovulate, how your energy shifts throughout the month, when you naturally feel more social or more introspective, when your libido tends to rise, and what your body feels like when it’s healthy as a woman. Imagine recognizing changes in your cycle not as reasons to panic, but as invitations to become curious about what your body might need from you, and also having other woman around you to talk to about all this — to act as guides for you as you grow.
When you’ve spent years tracking your cycle, something interesting begins to happen: you stop seeing your hormones as something mysterious that happens to you, and instead you begin recognizing patterns that have been there all along, right under the surface, waiting for your attention.
You know when you’ve had a particularly stressful month because your body reflects it in your luteal and menstrual phases.
You recognize when you’ve been under-eating, over-training, or pushing through exhaustion because your cycle gives you feedback with unpleasant symptoms. You begin noticing that the choices you make every day—how you nourish yourself, how well you sleep, how safely you feel in your relationships, how much stress you’re carrying—don’t simply affect how you feel today, they shape the hormonal environment your body creates over the weeks and months that follow.
Your period becomes less of an inconvenience and more of a conversation with your girlfriends and the matriarchs in your life, and your fertile window and libido as a young woman become something you can discuss openly, which inevitably inoculates you from the secrecy and sloppiness of teenage sex and unwanted pregnancies.
What a world to imagine!
Not because every symptom is your creation or because every cycle you have will be perfect if you track (being a woman can still be hard and holds a lot of responsibility no matter what), but because you’ve developed enough familiarity with your own physiology to distinguish between what’s normal for your body and what represents a meaningful change away from whats normal.
In this light, instead of fearing your symptoms, you can become curious about them and talk to other women about them. Instead of assuming your body is working against you and getting this affirmed by those around you, you begin asking what it might be trying to communicate and you get healthier solutions such as nutrition and lifestyle changes.
I often think about what this world would mean not only for individual women, but for future generations.
Imagine raising a daughter in a culture where body literacy is simply expected, where she grows up believing that understanding her cycle is just part of understanding herself. Where reaching for a pill to suppress a healthy physiological process isn’t automatically considered the default response because she already has a foundation of knowledge about how her body works
Im sure you can imagine the confidence that kind of education creates because so many of us lived with the exact opposite.
Imagine how differently she might approach her health throughout her life because she never learned to distrust her body in the first place.
This is ultimately the world I’m advocating for; a world where women are given enough knowledge about their own physiology that whatever decisions they make are rooted in understanding and informed consent rather than fear or ignorance. Where body literacy comes before intervention whenever possible, and where women are encouraged to become active participants in their own health rather than passive recipients of information about bodies they were never taught to understand in the first place.
I don’t believe this kind of cultural shift happens overnight — I believe it happens one woman at a time, which is why I might write and podcast about large-scale cultural issues, but my coaching practice is still built upon one-on-one consultations. One conversation at a time, one partnership at a time, one embodiment practice at a time.
And in the world of women’s health, creating this culture also happens through one mother teaching her daughter something she herself had to learn as an adult, and one woman deciding that her symptoms are worth understanding rather than simply enduring.
To me, that’s what cycle tracking has always represented — not simply a method of family planning, or another health habit to add to your routine, but one of the most practical and empowering ways a woman can begin developing a lifelong relationship with the body she’ll inhabit for the rest of her life.
Your Next Step
If you’ve been wanting to track your cycle for years but have always kept it on the periphery because it felt too complicated, too time-consuming, or too overwhelming, I’d love to help you get started.
If you’re considering coming off hormonal birth control and want guidance through that transition, I’d love to support you in that process.
If you’re struggling with your hormones, your fertility, or other areas of your health that you suspect are connected to your reproductive physiology, I can help you begin understanding those patterns through the lens of cycle tracking and whole-body health.
And if something in this article simply resonated with you—if it gave words to something you’ve been feeling for years, or opened a door you’d never considered walking through before—I hope you’ll continue exploring these ideas with me.
You can learn more about my work on my website, and if you’d like these kinds of conversations delivered straight to your inbox, I’d love for you to join my email community. Each week I share more about women’s health, fertility, metabolism, and body literacy with the hope of helping more women develop the kind of relationship with their bodies that should have been available to us all along.
I believe we all deserve to live in a culture where women’s body’s are respected and cared for as distinctly unique from men, and I also believe that culture won’t exist until we begin creating it ourselves.
