What if we all grew up knowing 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 us to learn about and care for ourselves differently, starting with our very first period?
What would our teens, twenties, and thirties look like if understanding our cycles and caring for our hormones were simply part of growing up? If tracking our cycles were as normal as brushing our teeth or learning to drive, and every young woman learned how the body she’ll live in for the rest of her life actually works? This is the world I’d like us to imagine together.
Because even if we didn’t inherit this culture, and even if no one taught us any of this, we can still create it now, through our own choices and 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 start learning the language of your own body! Imagine having this beautiful, incredibly complex female body, the only body you’ll ever have, home to your soul, your intellect, your memories, your subconscious, and your sexuality, the vessel for every ambition and relationship in your life, and no one ever teaching you how it works.
That’s the reality for most women in our culture.
On top of that, we grow into womanhood in a culture that has, for generations, pathologized many of our body’s normal functions, while offering solutions that often move us further from understanding it in the first place. Rather than learning to interpret our body’s signals, we’re encouraged to suppress them. Rather than getting curious about our symptoms, we’re taught to manage them. And rather than trusting our own observations, we’re taught to hand the job of understanding ourselves to someone who barely knows us.
Since this body is home to everything you’ll ever experience, how well you function in it shapes your agency in every other area of life: your health, relationships, fertility, sexuality, work, energy, and even your sense of self.
Understanding your body isn’t just about improving your reproductive health, it’s also about developing a deeper relationship with yourself. And we’re trying to understand female bodies in a culture that has historically been built around male bodies. Men and women share most of our biology, but there are crucial physiological differences that require different knowledge and different care. For much of modern medical history, women were studied far less often (if at all), partly because our cyclical hormonal changes made us “complicated” research subjects.
As a result, we’ve inherited a healthcare system that knows far more about treating disease than about helping women understand the normal rhythms of healthy female physiology, and this unfortunately leads to a lot of fear around our bodies’ function and appearance.
Many of us grow up with a confusing mix of shame, frustration, curiosity, fear, and resignation about our bodies. We learn that 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 just 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 naturally difficult, and maybe even gross.
Beyond the bare basics of how pregnancy happens and how to prevent it, most of us learn very little about what our cycle is doing each month, or what it might be telling us about our overall health.
For decades, our culture’s main solution to the challenges of having a female body has been one option: hormonal contraception.
A girl develops painful periods, acne, irregular cycles, or debilitating PMS, and before she has any chance to understand what’s actually happening underneath, she’s often offered a treatment that suppresses the very hormonal patterns she might have learned from. If her mother was never taught about her own body, she has little knowledge or confidence to pass down, so both generations end up depending almost entirely on medical professionals to interpret what’s happening inside their own bodies, and what’s safe to shut down or disrupt.
And those of us who never used hormonal birth control aren’t necessarily any more body literate.
I’ve never been on hormonal contraception, but I grew up in the same culture, shaped by the same assumptions, and just as disconnected from my own physiology as my friends on the pill. Whether we’ve spent years suppressing our cycles or simply ignoring them because no one taught us otherwise, many of us reach adulthood knowing remarkably little about the powerful monthly rhythm happening inside of us. This lack of body literacy shows up everywhere; in years of PMS, painful periods, PCOS, endometriosis, PMDD, missing periods, acne, weight gain, low libido, irregular cycles, clotting, ovarian cysts, and countless other symptoms women endure without ever understanding what their bodies may be trying to tell them.
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 hormonal contraception is the only safe way to prevent pregnancy, because we’ve never been shown how fertility actually works. And it shows up in our sexuality, where many women never notice the natural shifts in desire, energy, confidence, and emotional sensitivity that come with a healthy ovulatory cycle, because they’ve never learned to observe one. I don’t believe this is because women can’t understand our bodies, or because our bodies are simply too complicated, either.
I think we’ve inherited a culture where female body literacy is so rare that most women don’t realize it’s something they’re allowed to pursue.
The beautiful thing is that this can change.
Understanding your cycle opens the door to understanding your whole body, because your cycle isn’t an isolated reproductive event. Ovulation and menstruation are shaped by your metabolism, nervous system, thyroid, nutrition, stress physiology, sleep, and overall sense of safety. That’s why I often describe our periods as a monthly report card. Not because they grade us as good or bad women, or because every symptom is something we caused, but because they offer regular feedback about how our bodies have been functioning over the previous one to three months. It’s free and incredibly useful data!
When we learn to read that report card, we stop seeing symptoms as random inconveniences and start seeing them as meaningful information.
That’s why I believe cycle tracking is one of the most powerful pathways into body literacy; it teaches us to observe rather than ignore, to be curious rather than fearful, and to build a relationship with our bodies based on trust instead of uncertainty & control. Once you see your cycle this way, it’s almost impossible to think about your health the same way again, or to hand your understanding of your own body entirely over to someone else.
What It Means to Be a Modern Woman
We’re living at a fascinating point in history as women.
My generation, and my mother’s before me, inherited both the freedoms and the consequences of the movements that shaped women’s lives over the past sixty years. The sexual revolution, hormonal contraception, advances in reproductive medicine, and women’s growing participation in education and the workforce have transformed what it means to be a woman. Many of these changes gave women opportunities and autonomy earlier generations could only dream of, which is obviously a good thing!
At the same time, it’s worth asking whether we’ve also inherited some assumptions about women’s health that deserve to be questioned.
One is that the most empowering way to live is to make our bodies function more like men’s: suppress our cycles so we don’t have to think about them, and treat our fertility mainly as something to control rather than understand. Another is that our reproductive health is separate from the rest of our physiology, as if our hormones exist in isolation from our metabolism, stress, thyroid, nutrition, and nervous system, which of course they don’t.
Whether or not we’ve personally used hormonal contraception almost doesn’t matter, because we’ve all absorbed, to some degree, the idea that periods are an inconvenience, hormonal symptoms are just part of being a woman, fertility is something to fear, and the answer to female health concerns is to control or suppress our reproductive system rather than understand it.
I see the consequences of this in my work all the time. Some women grew up with loving mothers who did everything they could, but who’d never been taught about their own cycles either. Others were raised by single fathers, like I was, or in homes where menstruation, sexuality, and fertility simply weren’t discussed for one reason or another. Different childhoods, remarkably similar outcomes: intelligent, capable women reaching adulthood knowing surprisingly little about the physiology that shapes how they feel every single month.
This is the water we swim in, ladies.
It’s a culture where we’re told everything from “You don’t actually need a period” to “It’s normal for periods to be incredibly painful,” “Hormonal birth control is the only truly safe and effective way to prevent pregnancy,” and “If you have hormonal symptoms, the answer is hormonal treatment.” A culture where fertility awareness is dismissed before it’s understood, women’s health is politicized in the most divisive way, and many women come to believe they’re infertile, hormonally broken, or destined to suffer, without ever being taught to interpret what their bodies have been telling them for years.
The result is a generation of women who experience hormonal symptoms throughout the month but rarely see them as connected to their overall health.
From this view, fertility becomes separate from metabolism, reproductive health becomes separate from mental health, and our periods become separate from our stress, nutrition, sleep, and sense of safety. Instead of seeing the body as one beautifully integrated system, we divide it into unrelated parts and treat each symptom as though it exists on its own. I believe we’ve lost something important in this process: the expectation that women should know their own bodies.
Within self-knowledge lies our own personal agency.
Despite dropping out of college to attend a holistic health school, completing a year-long holistic health practitioner program, and immersing myself for years in the crunchy alternative health world of the San Francisco Bay Area, I spent most of my twenties thinking cycle tracking was something witchy, earthy, herbalist women did, not a heady tomboy like me. In my mind, cycle tracking was an inconvenient practice for long-haired, flowy-dress-wearing women who made their own toothpaste and talked about the spirit of sage and worshipping the moon.
Or, alternatively (and more pragmatically, in my mind, as a practicing doula at the time), it was for women who needed to know when they ovulated so they could fit a pregnancy into their busy lives. That was the extent of my knowledge, or really, my ignorance and judgment, about fertility tracking!
I’ve since realized that many otherwise health-seeking women see cycle tracking in a similar way, even if not as cliché a one as my younger self did, lumping it in with home births, placenta eating, and anti-modern-medicine circles. Fortunately, I think that’s starting to change. As women’s chronic illness, infertility, metabolic dysfunction, and hormonal disorders continue to rise, more clinicians, researchers, and everyday women are starting to ask different questions about their own bodies and health, which is great!
Rather than simply asking how to suppress symptoms, more women are asking why those symptoms developed in the first place.
And more of us are recognizing that the reproductive system is deeply connected to everything else in the body, and can’t be shut down without real consequences. This gives us an opportunity to rebuild something that should have been ours from the beginning: body literacy and medical autonomy. We don’t need to reject modern medicine or romanticize the past to do this, either, we just need to reclaim something many of us never received: an education in our own physiology.
For me, cycle tracking’s one of the most practical places to begin. Not because every woman must use fertility awareness to prevent pregnancy, or because every woman is trying to conceive, or because fertility is the only thing that matters, but because our cycle is one of the clearest windows into our overall health. Every month, our cycle shows us how our body is adapting to the combined effects of our nutrition, stress, metabolism, thyroid function, nervous system, relationships, movement, and recovery.
Once we start paying attention, it’s hard to go back to seeing our cycle as “just my annoying, inconvenient, gross period.” Instead, it becomes one of the most valuable tools we have for understanding ourselves!
Here are the three steps I believe are essential to making cycle tracking a normal, expected part of the culture we want to create.
Step 1: Come Off Hormonal Treatments That May Be Masking Your Baseline
If our goal is body literacy, the first step is getting to know our body’s natural physiology.
That means if you’re using hormonal contraception or another hormonal treatment that suppresses or significantly alters your cycle, you’ll eventually need to consider whether coming off it is the right next step for you. I don’t say this because I think hormonal contraception is evil, or that every woman should stop immediately. It’s because it’s very difficult to learn your body’s natural rhythms when they’re being deliberately suppressed or masked, which is exactly what hormonal birth control does.
For many women, coming off synthetic hormones is the first real obstacle to body literacy.
And it’s a decision best made with your healthcare provider, especially if you’re using hormones to manage a medical condition, and with a backup plan for preventing pregnancy while you learn your cycle. If you’ve been on hormonal birth control since you were thirteen or fourteen, it’s entirely possible you’ve never experienced your adult hormonal physiology. You may have spent years thinking the monthly bleed on the pill was your real period. (Hint: it isn’t. It’s a withdrawal bleed, since your natural cycle is being suppressed.)
You may have assumed your birth control wasn’t changing much besides your pregnancy risk, without ever having the chance to see whether you ovulate consistently, how long your luteal phase is, how your libido shifts through the month, or what your body naturally feels like when it isn’t being altered by medication.
In other words, there may be a whole lot of personal data about your own body that you simply haven’t had the chance to collect. None of this is a criticism of your choices. Most women make these decisions with the information available to them, often under a doctor’s guidance and with the best intentions, but frequently without truly informed consent, because doctors themselves often don’t know enough. The point is simply that if you want to understand your body, you eventually need the chance to observe it functioning on its own.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to every woman reading this.
As I mentioned, I’ve never been on hormonal birth control, yet I still grew up understanding very little about my cycle, because no one taught me to pay attention or that it even mattered. My body wasn’t being suppressed, but I was no more body literate than many women who’d spent years on the pill. The only difference was that my physiology was available for me to observe once I learned how to look and why it mattered. That’s why I don’t see coming off hormonal contraception as the solution in itself.
If a woman stops the pill but stays just as disconnected from her body as before, she’s only taken one step in the right direction, because the goal isn’t just to remove something, but to start paying attention to what becomes visible once it’s gone.
Many women also experience symptoms after stopping hormonal birth control, and those symptoms are often misread as proof they need to go back on it. Sometimes they’re part of the body’s process of re-establishing its natural rhythms after years of suppression. Other times, they reveal imbalances that were there before birth control and simply masked while it was in use. Research also suggests that hormonal contraception can deplete certain nutrients important for hormonal health, including B vitamins, magnesium, and zinc. That depletion is one reason many women struggle after coming off it, a pattern often called post-birth-control syndrome in functional medicine circles.
Either way, those symptoms are valuable information rather than something to fear, because they show where the body needs support, instead of asking us to silence the messenger.
This is one of the biggest shifts I help women make: approaching hormonal symptoms with curiosity and respect rather than as inconveniences to eliminate as quickly as possible. We ask what the body might be communicating, what might be struggling upstream of the sex hormones, and what conditions the body needs to restore healthier hormonal function. Sometimes the answer is surprisingly straightforward, and sometimes it takes much deeper investigation. But we can only start asking these questions once we have access to our baseline.
For women who decide coming off hormonal contraception is right for them, I don’t believe it’s something to navigate alone. This transition often brings uncertainty, shifting symptoms, and understandable anxiety, especially after years of relying on hormones for pregnancy prevention or symptom management. Having guidance can be the difference between feeling like your body is becoming unpredictable and recognizing that it’s finally giving you information you’ve never had before.
Ultimately, this first step isn’t about rejecting modern medicine, or proving that natural is always best. It’s about creating the opportunity to observe your body honestly and become attuned to its needs. And before we can interpret what our body is saying, we need a body that’s able to speak to us clearly.
Step 2: Test to See What’s Driving Your Hormones
Once you’ve established your baseline, the next step is understanding why your body is functioning the way it is.
Cycle tracking can tell us an incredible amount, but it’s only one piece of the picture. If your periods are painful, your cycles are irregular, you’re not ovulating consistently, you’re dealing with severe PMS, or you’re struggling with fertility, your body is telling you something upstream needs attention. The question becomes: what’s driving those patterns?
This is where testing becomes valuable.
One of the biggest mistakes I see is assuming hormones exist in isolation, as if estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone decide how to behave with no input from the rest of the body. In reality, our sex hormones respond to everything upstream of them: metabolic health, thyroid function, mineral status, stress physiology, nervous system, blood sugar, and our overall ability to produce enough energy to support healthy ovulation and reproduction. If we focus only on the hormones, we often miss the very systems creating the hormonal picture we’re trying to change.
That’s one reason I rely so heavily on HTMA (hair tissue mineral analysis) in my practice.
HTMA gives us a helpful picture of the physiological patterns beneath a woman’s hormones, the terrain those hormones are operating in. Rather than asking only whether estrogen is high or progesterone is low, we can ask bigger questions about how the body is producing energy, responding to stress, using minerals, and adapting to the demands placed on it. In my experience, that’s a far more useful starting point than chasing individual hormones.
Alongside HTMA, I often recommend the DUTCH test when we want a closer look at sex hormones and their metabolites.
DUTCH shows not only where hormone levels are, but also how hormones are being metabolized and eliminated, which gives us a more complete picture of the whole hormonal system. Depending on the woman and her symptoms, thyroid markers, blood work, or other functional testing may also help fill in the bigger picture. The goal of testing isn’t to collect as much data as possible or get overwhelmed by numbers. It’s to answer the questions your cycle has already started asking:
- If your periods have been painfully heavy for years, why?
- If you’re not ovulating consistently, what’s getting in the way?
- If you’re struggling to conceive, what 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 PCOS, what’s driving your particular presentation of it?
- If you struggle with estrogen dominance, where are the bottlenecks?
These are the questions that move us beyond managing symptoms and into genuine understanding.
Remember that report card? A report card tells you how things have been going, but not necessarily why you got that result. Testing helps us understand the why. It connects the symptoms you experience throughout the month with the physiology producing them, so we’re no longer guessing at what your body needs. And when we’re guessing, working more or less in the dark, we’re much more susceptible to marketing that sells us magic-pill solutions we may not need, and that could even make things worse. (I write more about this in my article on why generic health advice keeps failing us.)
When women start seeing their hormones through this lens, I’ve noticed time and again that something shifts in how many of them relate to their own bodies.
Their symptoms stop feeling so random. Their bodies stop feeling unpredictable or like they’re working against them. Instead, they start recognizing that the body is remarkably logical, and this can relieve a lot of the anxiety, fear, and mistrust that accompanies confusion and ignorance around what’s happening and what to expect! We’ll begin to find that our bodies are constantly adapting to the conditions we’ve been given, and our job isn’t to fight our own physiology, but to understand it well enough to change the conditions shaping it.
That’s one of the reasons I love approaching women’s health through fertility; fertility isn’t a separate category that only matters if you want a baby.
Fertility’s one of the clearest reflections of how well the whole body is functioning during our reproductive years. When ovulation is healthy, cycles are predictable, and hormonal symptoms improve, we’re rarely seeing changes in the reproductive system alone. More often, we’re seeing 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.
Whether or not pregnancy is your goal, fertility tracking provides valuable information about your health!
For me, this is what makes testing so empowering: it turns women’s health from reacting to symptoms into understanding physiology. We start seeing the patterns beneath the patterns, and we can build a plan specific to our own body, rather than one based on generalized recommendations, which you can find all over the internet now!
Step 3: Track Your Cycle
Once you’ve established your baseline and have a clearer understanding of what’s influencing your hormones, the next step is tracking your cycle.
This is where everything comes to life. Instead of relying on occasional blood tests, or trying to remember how you felt over the past few months, you start building an ongoing relationship with your body’s monthly rhythms. When many people hear “cycle tracking,” they immediately think of pregnancy. Fertility awareness is a powerful tool for both achieving and avoiding pregnancy, but reducing cycle tracking to family planning misses the much bigger opportunity it offers. Your cycle is one of the only 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 patterns you’ll notice that would otherwise stay invisible.
What tracking looks like depends on your goals and your health. If you’re single, not sexually active with a partner, and simply want to understand yourself better, your approach can be fairly simple. You might start by recording your cycle length, noting when you bleed, watching your cervical fluid, and noticing changes in your energy, mood, appetite, sleep, libido, and physical symptoms throughout the month. There doesn’t need to be any urgency or pressure, since you’re simply gathering information and getting to know yourself.
If your main goal is improving your metabolic or hormonal health, your tracking can be more detailed.
This is where taking your basal body temperature each morning, tracking your waking pulse as a window into thyroid function, observing cervical fluid and libido, and recording symptoms throughout the month become incredibly valuable. Rather than only noticing whether your period arrived, you start to understand how your body moves through each phase, what ovulation looks like for you, how your temperature shifts afterward, and how changes in your lifestyle show up in your cycle over time.
If you’re struggling with your hormonal or metabolic health, you may also start noticing patterns tied to it, such as histamine reactions, MCAS flares, or mood instability when estrogen surges or progesterone is low.
For example, one of my clients had lived with so much unrelenting stress that her hormonal patterns only started to surface as her stress came down. As her body became more nourished and felt safer through our work, her patterns became more predictable, including severe histamine reactions during her fertile window, when estrogen peaks. She couldn’t have noticed this while she was in such acute survival mode that her hormones felt unpredictable all month long. But a few months into our work, it became a predictable monthly pattern we could anticipate and address through nourishment and upstream repair.
Without understanding what was driving her hormones, she likely would have seen those histamine symptoms as a sign she was getting worse, rather than a sign her body finally felt safe enough to communicate more clearly.
And remember: how we interpret our body’s messages often determines how we respond, which treatments we choose, and how much patience we have with the whole process. One of the things I love most about cycle tracking is that it builds something we’re rarely encouraged to develop: confidence in the evidence of our own lived experience. Instead of relying entirely on generalized information about what women are supposed to experience, we start collecting years of observations about our own bodies. We notice that our sleep changes in one phase, our appetite increases in another, our workouts feel easier at certain times of the month, and our patience, creativity, confidence, and desire all shift in remarkably consistent ways.
These observations stop feeling random, because now we have a framework for understanding and responding to them.
That’s why I believe cycle tracking is such a powerful tool for a woman’s overall health, not just her fertility. Our cycle is constantly responding to our nutrition, stress, metabolic health, sleep, relationships, training, and all the other variables that shape how safe and well-resourced our body feels. The more consistently you track, the more clearly you see these connections for yourself.
If your goal is preventing pregnancy or supporting fertility, tracking becomes even more valuable, because it lets you identify your fertile window based on your own physiology rather than generalized assumptions.
It’s also a wonderful opportunity to involve your partner. Instead of fertility belonging only to the woman, both partners learn when conception is possible, when fertility is lowest, and how to work together toward your health and family planning goals. I’ve found this often transforms a couple’s relationship with fertility. Instead of something to fear or control, it becomes something they understand together: when she’s most fertile, when she’s most likely to want sex, and when she may need more gentle touch and care.
But one of my favorite parts of cycle tracking has very little to do with pregnancy: watching women reconnect with parts of themselves they didn’t realize were there all along.
Many women have never noticed their libido changing through the month, because they’ve never had a reason to pay attention. Others assume their energy is unpredictable, when it’s actually following a remarkably consistent pattern from cycle to cycle, which means they don’t have to rethink their entire view of themselves and their health every week! Some women realize they’re naturally more introspective in one phase and more outward-focused in another, and finally understand why certain symptoms show up at the same point every month, instead of feeling like their bodies are betraying them at random.
Without records, humans are notoriously bad at noticing patterns that unfold over weeks and months, which plays a big role in many of our struggles.
We keep making the same mistakes, or missing vital signals, because we aren’t keeping track. I see this constantly in women’s health. And I think part of the reason is that we’ve built a culture around birth control, where so many women aren’t cycling at all, that we simply don’t recognize what cycle tracking could do for us. But over time, when we do track, something subtle and profound happens: we stop organizing our lives around fighting our bodies and start organizing them around understanding them.
We know when our body is asking for more nourishment, like more carbs in our luteal phase. We recognize when we’ve pushed too hard.
We notice stress showing up in our cycle before it shows up anywhere else. We become familiar enough with our own physiology that our cycle no longer feels like something happening to us, but something we’re actively participating in and learning from! Here’s a fun example from my own life of how predictable these patterns can become.
Since I started tracking in my thirties, and stepped it up to support my fertility now that I want to become a mother later in life, my fertile window has come with a big rise in sexual desire, starting around day 5 or 6 of my cycle and dropping off shortly after ovulation, around day 16 or 17.
I’m single and looking for a serious partner, so I’ve been chatting with men on dating apps and generally keeping an eye out for potential mates. And the way I engage with men, how many and what kinds of men I’m open to, and the overall energy I have for it all is huge in the weeks leading up to ovulation compared to my luteal phase! So huge that I’ll literally set up several dates during my follicular phase, then lose interest in many of those men in my luteal phase.
I’m not sleeping with any of them, but I find I’m far more interested in chatting with men I have no real compatibility with, if I find them attractive enough, around ovulation!
Maybe tracking this kind of thing isn’t every woman’s idea of a good time. But to me, it’s 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 catch hormonal imbalances earlier and make better-informed decisions about your long-term health. But beyond all that, it invites you into a relationship with your body that many women were never taught was possible, and that, sadly, many women view with suspicion.
After months and years of paying attention, your cycle stops feeling complicated, because you’ve gathered enough lived experience to understand your own rhythms and to trust that you can interpret them and act accordingly.
You also protect yourself from being scared into a drug or treatment you may not need, may not be able to afford, and may end up regretting. What once felt confusing and scary becomes familiar, and what once felt unpredictable starts making sense, and even feels validating. That’s where body literacy stops being an abstract idea and becomes lived experience. It isn’t something you get from one book or one appointment. You cultivate it through consistent observation, curiosity, and a willingness to let your body become one of your greatest teachers.
Every single month, I know when my libido will be highest. And as a single woman who doesn’t do casual sex, I know I’ll need healthy outlets for that desire (which may include chatting with men I’d otherwise skip, because I like the attention ;).
And every month after ovulation, I know I become more sensitive to:
- Too few carbs and dips in blood sugar
- Stressful emotional exchanges
- Late nights and poor sleep
- Histamine-rich and inflammatory foods
- Less sun exposure
Once upon a time, I felt EVERY SINGLE MONTH like I was failing at life.
All the progress and agency I’d felt just a week or two earlier seemed to vanish, as if I’d somehow regressed in life and in health. I’d search for what I’d done wrong, or what had happened to cause this failure, and I’d often feel ashamed and disappointed. If I couldn’t figure it out and shift out of the helplessness, I’d reach for something like alcohol.
Little did I know that I was low in progesterone, that I struggled to clear estrogen, that I was undereating, and that I was dealing with the cascade of hormonal and metabolic symptoms that show up in the luteal phase when a woman carries a lot of stress with little buffer (progesterone, minerals, thyroid) to calm her system and smooth the transition. Stack my C-PTSD on top of that, which can get triggered whenever I feel low agency, and you have an experience that feels like regression every. single. month.
I’ve watched this same process play out in coaching clients with C-PTSD countless times; it’s the month-by-month tracking we did together that taught them to recognize the pattern and address it without reacting, making things worse, or deciding it meant something about who they are as women.
“Isn’t Fertility Awareness Less Effective Than Birth Control?”
One of the most common objections to fertility awareness is that it isn’t as safe or effective as hormonal birth control or an IUD. Many women have been told cycle tracking is unreliable, based on guesswork, or just the old “rhythm method” that failed previous generations. These are two very different things.
The Fertility Awareness Method (FAM) isn’t based on averages or assumptions about when women are supposed to ovulate. It’s based on observing your own body’s fertility signs and making decisions according to your individual physiology. When it’s learned properly and practiced correctly and consistently, well-studied methods that combine temperature and cervical fluid tracking can be as effective as many hormonal methods, without the side effects.
But that “correctly and consistently” matters a lot.
With typical, real-world use, where people make mistakes or take chances on fertile days, effectiveness drops considerably, and pregnancy rates vary widely depending on the method and how carefully it’s followed. That’s why learning it well, and giving yourself time to master it, is so important. The key difference is that instead of preventing pregnancy by suppressing ovulation, fertility awareness asks you to understand when you’re actually fertile and act accordingly.
Yes, it requires some maturity, since we need to approach sex differently depending on where we are in our cycle and what our family plans are.
In that sense, normalizing tracking also means normalizing a level of maturity, restraint, and accountability that hormonal contraception culture has made easy to skip. (It’s a frustrating double standard that the consequences of sex fall more heavily on women, and we can’t change that biology. What we can change is which men we let into our lives.) This understanding doesn’t happen overnight. Like any worthwhile skill, fertility awareness requires education, consistency, and practice. I’d never recommend charting for a few weeks and then relying on it as your only contraception!
Just as we wouldn’t expect to become fluent in a new language after a handful of lessons, we shouldn’t expect to confidently interpret our fertility after one or two cycles. During the learning period, other methods, like condoms, can be used until you’re confident in what you’re observing.
Another concern I hear is that fertility awareness only works for women with perfectly regular cycles: “My hormones are all over the place, so I can’t rely on tracking. I never know when I’ll ovulate.” Ironically, I think this is one of the strongest arguments for learning fertility awareness; a hormonal imbalance isn’t a reason to ignore your cycle, it’s a reason to understand it more deeply. Yet this is exactly how birth control culture handles imbalances: if you have PMS, PMDD, PCOS, endometriosis, or painful, irregular cycles with acne, moodiness, or weight gain, you’re often taught that hormonal birth control is the ideal solution, because it shuts down the symptoms, the signals that something is off, so you can ignore them and move on.
If your cycles are irregular, you ovulate unpredictably, or your fertile window is hard to identify, that’s valuable information about your female physiology.
This information tells us something upstream needs attention. It doesn’t mean your body can’t be understood, it means your body needs more observation while you work on the conditions that allow healthy ovulation. In those circumstances, I’d absolutely recommend using another form of contraception while you learn your cycle and address what’s underneath. That doesn’t mean fertility awareness has failed, of course. 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 is to prevent pregnancy while becoming more body literate, and those two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
“Isn’t Cycle Tracking Too Complicated?”
Another objection is that tracking sounds overwhelming. Women tell me they don’t have time to take their temperature every morning, watch their cervical fluid, record symptoms, or keep track of where they are in their cycle. It feels like one more thing in an already busy life.
I can’t tell another woman what’s worth her time. We all have different priorities, responsibilities, and capacities. In fact, I think this is the most compelling argument for hormonal birth control: a large share of women simply aren’t going to track, and they still need to prevent unwanted pregnancies, for everyone’s sake. If that’s you, more power to you. But I doubt you’d have read this far if it were! For those of you who aren’t on birth control but still feel tracking is too complicated, I’d gently challenge the assumption underneath that.
If we’ve come to believe understanding our own bodies is too complicated, inconvenient, or time-consuming to be worth it, I think that says much more about the culture we’ve inherited than about women’s capabilities.
After all, who should understand your body, if not you?
I’ve had several clients who were firmly opposed to both hormonal birth control and abortion for their own reasons, but also found tracking too complicated and time-consuming, and they ended up with unplanned pregnancies that could have been avoided. I believe every baby is a miracle, and I’ll be first in line to celebrate a woman’s pregnancy with her. But it can also be painful to watch a woman struggle emotionally, relationally, physically, and financially with a baby she doesn’t feel resourced to have, when preventing that experience was the easier path.
If your own reproductive physiology is too complicated for you to learn, who do we imagine understands it better, especially when something isn’t working?
A doctor who sees you for fifteen minutes a year? A pharmaceutical company? A health influencer? I’m not being condescending. We all rely on specialists with knowledge we don’t have. But none of them live in your body or experience your cycles, moods, energy, or desires the way you do, and none of them can track your patterns as closely as you can every day. Also, to be clear, I’m not suggesting women replace healthcare professionals or ignore medical advice.
I just don’t believe anyone’s expertise should come at the expense of our own relationship with our bodies.
My hope is that we create a culture where body literacy is so normal that girls learn these things long before they ever need to make decisions about contraception, fertility treatment, or hormonal medications. A culture where tracking your cycle feels no more unusual than tracking your sleep, exercise, or nutrition. (Though, admittedly, plenty of people don’t track those either!) If that culture existed, I don’t think many women would call cycle tracking complicated. I think we’d call it normal, with a shrug, and go on with our day.
Imagine If This Were Normal
Imagine living in a culture where everything in this article was simply a normal part of growing up.
Imagine learning about your body from your very first period, not through shame, secrecy, or awkward classroom conversations, but as an initiation into womanhood. Imagine growing up knowing your cycle wasn’t something to tolerate, gross, or shameful, but one of the clearest windows into your health, and a normal, powerful part of being a woman. Imagine having mothers, grandmothers, teachers, and healthcare practitioners who all expected that one day you’d know your cycle as intimately as your own personality quirks and food preferences.
Imagine reaching adulthood already knowing when you usually ovulate, how your energy shifts through the month, when you feel more social or more introspective, when your libido rises, and what your body feels like when it’s healthy.
Imagine meeting changes in your cycle with curiosity instead of panic, and having other women around you to talk to about all of it, to guide you as you grow. When you’ve tracked your cycle for years, something interesting happens: your hormones stop feeling mysterious, and you start recognizing patterns that were there all along, just beneath 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 undereating, overtraining, or pushing through exhaustion, because your cycle gives you feedback in the form of unpleasant symptoms.
You notice that your daily choices, how you nourish yourself, how well you sleep, how safe you feel in your relationships, and how much stress you’re carrying, don’t just affect how you feel today. They shape the hormonal environment your body creates in 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 things you can discuss openly, which protects against the secrecy and carelessness that so often lead to unplanned teenage pregnancies.
What a world to imagine!
And not because every symptom is your doing, or because tracking will make every cycle perfect (being a woman can still be hard and carries a lot of responsibility no matter what), but because you’ve become familiar enough with your own physiology to tell the difference between what’s normal for you and what’s a meaningful change. In that world, instead of fearing your symptoms, you get curious about them and talk to other women about them.
Instead of assuming your body is working against you, and having that belief confirmed by everyone around you, you ask what it might be trying to tell you, and you find healthier solutions, like nutrition and lifestyle changes.
I often think about what this world would mean 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 part of understanding herself, and where reaching for a pill to suppress a healthy physiological process isn’t the automatic default, because she already understands how her body works. I’m sure you can imagine the confidence that kind of education would create, because so many of us lived the 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 the world I’m advocating for: one where women know enough about their physiology that their decisions are rooted in understanding and informed consent rather than fear or ignorance. Where body literacy comes before intervention whenever possible, and women are active participants in their health rather than passive recipients of information about bodies they were never taught to understand.
I don’t believe this cultural shift happens overnight. I believe it happens one woman at a time, which is why, even though I write and podcast about big cultural issues, my practice is still built on one-on-one work: one conversation, one partnership, one embodiment practice at a time.
It also happens through one mother teaching her daughter something she had to learn herself as an adult, and one woman deciding her symptoms are worth understanding rather than simply enduring. To me, that’s what cycle tracking has always represented. Not just a family planning method, or another health habit, but one of the most practical and empowering ways a woman can build a lifelong relationship with the body she’ll live in for the rest of her life.
Your Next Steps
If you’ve wanted to track your cycle for years but kept putting it off because it felt too complicated, time-consuming, or 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. If you’re struggling with your hormones, your fertility, or other areas of your health you suspect are connected to your reproductive physiology, I can help you understand those patterns through cycle tracking and a whole-body approach to health. And if something in this article simply resonated with you, if it put words to something you’ve felt for years or opened a door you’d never considered, I hope you’ll keep exploring these ideas with me.
You can learn more about my work on my website, and if you’d like conversations like this delivered 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, in the hope of helping more women build the relationship with their bodies that should have been available to all of us from the start. I believe we all deserve a culture where women’s bodies are respected and cared for as distinct from men’s. And I believe that culture won’t exist until we start creating it ourselves.
