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Http://www.mostfertiledays.info Enlightened And Empowered In Fertility Awareness and Family Planning By Inga Goodwin, Copyright 2008 Table of Contents Enlightened and Empowered.........................................................................................................................3 Your Menstrual Cycle, Step by Step..............................................................................................................3 Your Three Primary Fertility Signals.............................................................................................................4 Basal Body Temperature................................................................................................................................4 Cervical Fluid.................................................................................................................................................6 Position and Texture of Your Cervix.............................................................................................................8 The Importance of Charting...........................................................................................................................9 Using Your Chart to Prevent or Promote Pregnancy Naturally.....................................................................10 More Resources..............................................................................................................................................12 A Quick Guide to Charting Your Fertility Signals........................................................................................14 About the Author Inga Goodwin participated in a midwifery apprenticeship for eight months in Nashville, Tennessee, under Heather Wilson, CPM. She studied health evangelism at Wildwood Lifestyle Center & Hospital and has a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University. She served as a missionary for about four years and especially enjoys serving women and families. She enjoys reading, gardening, and composing music. Visit her website www.bondedfrombirth.com for more helpful information on pregnancy, childbirth, and newborn care. Using the techniques described in this manual, Inga and her husband Weston conceived their son, Shiloh. Enlightened and Empowered By observing and charting your body’s fertility signals, you are not only enlightened, but empowered. Pregnancy becomes your choice and not an accident. You become an active team player with your doctor in discovering potential problems and abnormalities in your gynecological and endocrine health and fertility status because you know what’s really normal, healthy behavior for your body. You can demystify and anticipate some of your more emotionally charged or physically uncomfortable days. And of course, by a certain point in your cycle, you will know exactly when to expect your period again. Consequently, if you were trying to conceive, you could detect that you likely were pregnant and or if you were having a miscarriage. This report will outline the basics of fertility awareness and family planning for normal women in their menstruating, childbearing years. It is designed to wet your appetite for further study of this important aspect of female health management and is not to be taken as your final authority or guidebook in practicing these principles for birth control. This information is based mainly from the authoritative resource I recommend for in-depth explanation, Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler, MPH. Your Menstrual Cycle, Step by Step Your menstrual cycle is divided up into two phases, the follicular phase and the luteal phase, with ovulation marking the point of transition. During the follicular phase, your body prepares for ovulation. The follicular stimulating hormone stimulates your body to mature eggs for ovulation and produce estrogen. One egg is ready before the others and gets to be the sole egg released that cycle during ovulation. When the estrogen threshold is reached, luteinizing hormone surges a day or so before ovulation and causes the mature egg to burst through the ovarian wall on ovulation day and make its journey down the fallopian tube where it is likely to be fertilized if there are any available sperm present. If no sperm fertilize the egg, the egg dies within 6 to 24 hours. The follicular phase starts on Day One of your period, which begins the first day of full red flow, and ends on the day of ovulation. After the mature egg was released for ovulation, the follicle, which housed the egg inside the ovary, collapses to become the “corpus luteum” and begins releasing a large amount of progesterone and a small amount of estrogen. This surge in progesterone, occurring the day after ovulation, marks the beginning of the luteal phase. The work of the corpus luteum prepares the uterine wall, called the edometrium, to nest a fertilized egg, which if fertilized, would settle there after traveling a week or so from the fallopian tube. When no embryo embeds in the endometrium as expected, the corpus luteum begins to die and produce less progesterone and estrogen. Consequently, the decline in progesterone and estrogen allows the build up of follicle stimulating hormone. Finally the levels of progesterone and estrogen are so low that the uterine wall can no longer sustain itself and is released from your body through your period. The life span of the corpus luteum does not really change and determines the length of your luteal phase, which begins the day after ovulation and ends the last day before your period starts. 3 Your Three Primary Fertility Signals Your body outwardly reflects the hormonal interplay described above through your three primary fertility signals: basal body temperature, cervical fluid, and cervical position. Fertility awareness is quite simply observing and accurately interpreting your fertility signals, which notify you of where you are in your menstrual cycle. Recording, or charting, your fertility signals, whether on paper or on the computer, is the only way to keep track of this valuable information so that it will be useful to you. In this article, I will also teach you the basics of charting. Basal Body Temperature Your basal body temperature (BBT) is your body’s waking temperature after at least 3 hours of consecutive sleep. During menses temperatures may jump around a bit, but once it is past, your BBT will settle into a low range of temperatures that will characterize your follicular phase. The last day of low temperatures is ovulation day. Due to the release of progesterone, a heat stimulating hormone, your BBT will reflect higher values during your luteal phase than during your follicular phase. In fact, the significant shift in temperature is your indication that ovulation has past and your luteal phase has begun. Using a standard digital thermometer that reads to the .1 degree, take your oral temperature right when you wake up at around the same time everyday before getting out of bed to do anything (even going to the bathroom). It’s helpful to keep your chart near you to record your result immediately as it is easy to forget later on. After menses is past, be on the lookout for a temperature shift of at least .2 degrees higher than any of the last six temperatures. Sometimes, due to lack of sleep, fever, alcohol consumption, or waking up late, your BBT will register an unusually high number, and though it is still worth recording, you may not want to count it towards monitoring your thermal shift. The temperatures after the true thermal shift should remain higher than any of the temperatures after menses and before the shift. Some Interesting Facts about BBT You can learn a lot about your body, just from recording your waking temperatures. The most important observation and interpretation you want to make in recording your BBT is a thermal shift that indicates ovulation occurred. Next, you want to discover the length of your luteal phase (usually between 12 and 16 days) by counting the number of days of high temperatures from the thermal shift to the time when you start full red flow of your period. If you observe no thermal shift in your temperatures, you may have had an anovulatory cycle, in which no egg was released for ovulation. If your luteal phase lasts less than 10 days, then you may have a progesterone problem and may not be able to sustain a pregnancy. If you find that your temperatures remain high beyond your usual luteal phase length and you had intercourse around the time of ovulation, then you are probably pregnant! Consequently, if after they have remained high well beyond your luteal phase length and then start dropping, followed by a lot of bleeding, you could be miscarrying. If your BBT temperatures illustrate a shift, but are all (both follicular phase and luteal phase temperatures) very high or very low, you may have thyroid problems. 4 BBT Observations & Interpretation of a Sample Cycle Look at the example below for a picture of an actual thermal graph. Note that * indicates menses, and (*) indicates spotting, and the temperatures listed are from 97 to 99 degrees Farenheit. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Cycle Day 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Luteal Phase Count Down 99 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 98 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 97 99 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 98 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 97 99 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 98 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 97 99 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 98 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 97 99 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 98 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 97 uploads/Ingenierie_Lourd/ enlightened-and-empowered-in-fertility-awareness-and-family-planning 1 .pdf

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