The hormones involved in your menstrual cycle directly impact many aspects of your overall health. Often your period is referred to as the “5th vital sign”, referring to the fact that it’s so informative to our overall health and well-being. You may have experienced this. A predictable shift in energy, mood, digestion, or even pain as you move through the different stages of your period. Ideally, our periods to come and go with minimal disruption, If that’s not happening, tracking your cycles can be a helpful starting point to identify if your body needs some extra support and how we can be supporting it.
Helpful lingo when tracking your cycle.
- Cycle length: this is the time from the start of your menses, until the day before the next menses. The most common menstrual cycle length is 28 days. However, normal can range from 26-32 days.
- Menstrual flow: These are the days of menstrual bleeding. A cycle starts on your first day of “full flow”. A typical flow can vary between 20-80mL of blood. It's a good idea to track how heavy or light your period is, and any symptoms you notice once your period starts. (*tip: to track the heaviness of your flow, pay attention to how many menstrual products you go through in a day, i.e. 4 tampons on cycle day 1, 3 tampons on cycle day 2, and so forth).
- Cervical mucus or cervical fluid: the vaginal discharge that shows up before and around ovulation. Everyone person's cervical mucus may be a little different. The most common signs are clear or white stretchy mucus that resembles eggs white.
- The follicular phase: refers to the first half of your cycle. Starts from the first day of your bleed until ovulation. Can vary in length. A typical follicular phase will be 12-14 days.
- Ovulation: refers to when you release an egg from a follicle. Typically, it occurs mid-cycle around day 12-16, but can be variable depending on your environment.
- The luteal phase: refers to the second half of your cycle. Starts from ovulation until the next period. Can be no longer than 14-16 days, but can be shorter for some people. A luteal phase shorter than 12 days is not ideal, especially for those trying to conceive.
What’s the best way to track your periods?
Period tracking apps can be really helpful. They typically keep track of things like the cycle length, and the length of your flow (i.e how many days you bleed). Depending on the app, you can also input things like your cervical mucus, or your basal body temperature (Read more below)
What’s not ideal about many period-tracking apps is that they often use an algorithm to inform users of when they’re ovulating. They base this on a standard, textbook 28-day cycle, so often you can miss the mark of when you’re truly ovulating. If you’re using the tracker for conceiving purposes, or contraception, this can be problematic.
I prefer period apps that let you input the data manually (I love the Kindara app). This way you can input all your specific data (because most of us don’t function as textbook cases!).
Manually inputting things like cycle length, flow length and heaviness, cervical mucus, and noting any specific PMS symptoms is a fantastic way to understand your menstrual cycle and how it’s impacting you day to day.
Extras you can use to track.
Ovulation predictor kits, or LH strips, are urine strips that measure your “LH surge”. LH or luteinizing hormone, is a brain hormone that is released to trigger ovulation. It peaks ~24-48 hours prior to ovulation. It usually coincides with when you're noticing cervical mucus. You can add this data to apps like Kindara if you’re trying to determine when and if you’re ovulation. Note: a positive LH does not guarantee you’ve ovulated.
Basal body temperature is a method of confirming you’ve ovulation. It involves taking your temperature daily, around the same time, before getting out of bed. When we ovulate, we release progesterone. Progesterone causes a rise in our body temperature. Daily temperature tracking can show this rise, after ovulation has occurred, thus confirming that you’ve ovulated. BBT tracking can also be a fantastic way to understand the length of your follicular vs luteal phase. It also lets us know if we should be concerned about a short luteal phase. You can read more about how to take basal body temperature here.
What do I do with this information?
Tracking this data is the first step in truly understanding the ebbs and flows of hormones. It’s common and normal to experience fluctuations in overall well-being based on where we are in our cycle and what hormones are at it’s peak. However, if you notice things like irregularities in your cycle length, inability to figure out when and if you’re ovulating, your LH strips aren’t working for you, bothersome PMS systems, or irregularities in your bleeding - bringing this data to our consults or to your healthcare providers is a massive jumpstart to figuring out what’s going on, what hormone tests may be helpful to run and what treatment options are most suitable.
In Health,
Dr. Ashley Damm, ND
Naturopathic Doctor - Vancouver BC
Women's Health & Fertility