Can Charting Apps Actually Predict Ovulation? (Episode 579)

Full Transcript: Episode 579

Lisa: In today’s episode, I’m sharing my interview with one of our FAM practitioners in training, Lauren Mallers. We touch on a whole bunch of interesting topics from her early experiences with PMS that ultimately led her to take hormonal contraceptives, to her journey off contraceptives, discovering fertility and fertility awareness. And one of the interesting themes that came up in today’s episode was how little Lauren knew about timing and fertility and how to identify ovulation, even though she was in the midst of trying to conceive for quite some time. So she shares some of those details. I think they’re very not only interesting but within the FAM program we talk about a lot of the common misconceptions, of course, about the cycle and about fertility. And as she was talking, it was almost word for word some of the common experiences that our clients have and our clients face. Because even though if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you are in the know about a lot of these topics. But the average woman still doesn’t know much if anything about her fertility, even if she’s using charting apps. So we’re going to get into also the role of charting apps in helping us to identify our fertile days and where they can help and potentially hinder. So before we jump in, let me tell you a little bit about Lauren. Lauren is a certified integrative health practitioner and the founder of Calibrate Health and Wellness, where she helps women address chronic symptoms and hormone imbalances using a personalized data-driven approach. After a 15-year career in digital marketing and a personal journey through IBS, fertility struggles, and postpartum depletion, Lauren shifted her focus to functional lab testing, nutrition, and lifestyle medicine to reclaim her health. And now she empowers other women to do the same. And without further ado, let’s go ahead and jump into today’s episode.

And I’m excited to be here today with Lauren. Welcome to the show.

Lauren: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Lisa: Well, as you know and the audience knows, I always love doing the episodes, these particular ones, and I always enjoy the opportunity to have some more time outside of class. And of course, I also love starting with my most favorite question. So tell us a little bit about when you had your first period, what that was like, and I guess take us through your journey, whether you use contraceptives, and what led you to want to be diving into fertility awareness at this stage in your career.

Lauren: Yeah, I started my period when I was 14. I remember the day because my entire family was over, like extended family was over, and I had to like quietly tell my mom that I was bleeding and we had to go to CVS and it was a whole thing. And I was kind of embarrassed and mortified by it. Like that’s what I remember — the just general feeling being. And then I was very quickly put on hormonal contraceptives at 15. So looking back now and all the knowledge that I have, I know how wrong that was. But it was interesting, the reason why I was put on them was I was like an angstier teenage girl with some mood swings. And I remember going to the doctor with my mom and the doctor first actually prescribed me or like wanted to prescribe me anti-depressants because of my mood swings. And thankfully my mom had like the wherewithal to kind of reject that — it wasn’t bad enough for that. But the second option, like the alternative, was birth control pills to help me regulate my moods. So I got on those early just for mood and PMS and just like teenage girl things, and then really never went off of them until I was 28 when we started trying to conceive. So I had a really long journey with hormonal contraceptives.

Lisa: Well, you know, it’s interesting. I’ve done so many of these interviews. I’ve worked with so many clients. I feel like this is the first time I’ve actually heard someone say that they were specifically put on HCs for their moods. Maybe talk a little more about that. I mean, obviously you know a lot more now. Your mom was obviously trying to do the best she could with what she knew. And you weren’t saying no. So I feel like for one reason or another, it seemed like the best solution. So I’d love to hear more about that from maybe from your teenage perspective, but now looking back from your more informed perspective.

Lauren: Yeah, I think it was just typical butting heads with my parents at 15 years old. I had a boyfriend for the first time and wanted to be out later and they had rules and boundaries that I didn’t like. And I think it was very normal mood things, but I think looking back, I mean, this was in like the ’90s, early 2000s, and I don’t know, I think we were just less willing to kind of deal with and handle uncomfortable emotions back in those days. So I think looking back now, it’s like those things I think would get a very different approach. But at the time it was like maybe my mom wanted to keep the peace, maybe I wanted like more peace in my day and my relationships with my family. And so I am really thankful that it wasn’t just antidepressants because I think it was just normal teenage stuff. But yeah, it was hormonal contraceptives. And now looking back on what I know, I’m thinking about my diet at the time. I was a very proud vegetarian for like 12 years in my teenage years. I think at 12 years old, I decided I was going to be a vegetarian. I was always interested in kind of how food impacted my body. But knowing what I know now, I wasn’t eating any animal protein. I was probably living on breads and salads and didn’t have much nutrients and no wonder I wasn’t feeling good or balanced throughout my cycles for that first year of my adolescence.

Lisa: Well, and do you remember having — it’s hard because I remember being that age and having zero knowledge about the menstrual cycle. I wouldn’t have been paying attention to when I was irritated, I wouldn’t have known that there would have been a correlation with my cycle. But do you kind of remember that time and anything that stood out to you in terms of the moods and the shifts? And then the second question was, did it improve? So like, you went on the pill and it was like, okay, now everything’s perfect?

Lauren: I definitely was not in tune with my menstrual cycle at the time. I don’t think my mom was. I think she knew enough to know that maybe it was cyclical and maybe it was like right before my period I got like much moodier, but I definitely didn’t correlate the two at the time. And getting on them, I think things improved maybe slightly, but I mean I was still a teenage girl who wanted to do her own thing and didn’t want my parents to tell me what to do. So the HCs didn’t solve that. It’s just normal.

Lisa: That’s so interesting. And then when you shared a little bit about your diet — from everything that we’ve delved into in FAM — I mean if the tables were reversed and you had a teenage daughter that was similarly going through some of these challenges, you would have so much more information. So you would kind of know a little bit more, even if she wasn’t open to talking about her cycle. You would still kind of know.

Lauren: Yeah, and I would definitely be like sneaking things into her diet where I could. I think I try to do that — I have a six and a three-year-old and my three-year-old is a girl and I think about that a lot, like what I’m going to do differently for her when she goes through menarche. And I think that it’s so good to be more empowered and have more knowledge and just a better understanding of what’s really going on so that you’re not jumping to hormonal contraceptives right away, for any reason — for irregular periods, for all the normal things that they’re prescribed for — and kind of supporting a little bit more naturally and making sure that the foundations are taken care of.

Lisa: Well, that’s interesting to be a parent in this time. And I know my kids are — I don’t know if they’re excited or annoyed. But they already know that the food pyramid, mommy’s not a fan, and that we need to be talking about macronutrients and they need to get enough protein. So they’re like, okay, mom, I get it. So back to your story though. You shared with us that you did have a long experience with contraceptives. So maybe share a little bit about that experience. If you did notice anything, you could tell us a little bit about what it was like when you transitioned off. And I’m also curious to know how your professional story kind of falls in. So tell us a little bit about how you got into the work that you’re doing now and how you ended up finding your way to fertility awareness charting.

Lauren: Yeah. So yes, I was on hormonal contraceptives for almost 15 years. Throughout my 20s, despite me always being interested in food and wellness in general, I had gotten into yoga certifications, I was just always really interested in this space, even though I had a career in marketing. I kind of got burnt out with my corporate career and I felt it in sort of the health issues that were starting to manifest. I had really, really bad gut issues and my family sort of has a history of IBS and those types of symptoms. So I just always kind of thought that it was something I’d have to live with. But the deeper down the wellness rabbit hole I got, the more I was just unwilling to accept that I was going to have to live with that for the rest of my life and just kept digging for answers. I would try a new diet, put a new supplement in my routine, start meditating. I understood that stress was really impactful to what I was feeling in my gut and I would sort of get things under control every once in a while and then things would go off the rails and I’d be right back to where I started. But I think what I understand now is that when I decided to get off hormonal contraceptives, when my husband and I decided to start trying for our first kid, I thought that I was doing all the right things. So I was a little smug when I got off birth control and was like that one-year time period that they tell you you need to conceive — that’s not going to apply to me. So I was a little blindsided when nine months into us trying to conceive, we still hadn’t. I had had two chemical pregnancies throughout that time period, too, which was really confusing. And there’s not a lot of information online about what that is and doctors don’t really treat it like a miscarriage. So it felt like I was bugging them when I had questions about it. They don’t see you in the office until eight weeks. So when you’re bleeding at five or six, nobody wants to talk to you. And so I got really disheartened and frustrated and started not trusting myself. Eventually we did conceive. I think I probably was in that year-long birth control transition period and just didn’t want to believe it. But at the same time, I actually found the Ava bracelet — this was seven, eight years ago. But the BBT tracking of the Ava bracelet was really I think what got me pregnant. I started understanding when I was actually ovulating versus when my app was telling me I was ovulating — those were two very different things. I understood that now. Eventually conceived a healthy baby boy, but my postpartum experience was nothing to write home about. I was super depleted. I hadn’t really taken care of myself the way I now understand we need to take care of ourselves for hormonal health specifically. And yeah, just kept dealing with the gut issues. Long story short, I started taking other health classes. I did a functional nutrition course, got a health certification, and then finally what helped me really overcome my gut issues was functional lab testing — and I got certified in that too and just decided to leave marketing and start my own health and wellness practice.

Lisa: Well, I mean, thank you for sharing your story and I’m sorry to hear about your losses early on. It’s such a challenging experience. We recently had Dr. Marguerite Duane come and present to our FAM class and she spent two years doing a specific fellowship where she was researching miscarriage and she shared a lot of that data with us. And it made me think of exactly what you said — because you said that typically when you get pregnant, they don’t really see you before eight or ten weeks. And one of the things Dr. Duane was advocating for was early screening to really prevent a lot of those early miscarriages, when it seems like our medical community just perceives it to be this is just how it is. She shared a lot of research indicating that you can actually prevent a lot of those earlier miscarriages with early screening and addressing that. So I can appreciate your frustration and I can just imagine how many women are listening who may have had a similar situation where it’s just you’re so confused — you were told that you were going to get pregnant so easily, you’re having this early miscarriage, doctors won’t even book an appointment. So yeah, hopefully at some point we see this shifting. And with research, I feel a little bit more hopeful hearing Dr. Duane’s research in this area, maybe she will somehow start to impact that change where they actually see the clinical benefits of screening women sooner.

Lauren: Yeah, especially women over 30. And that’s really where the fertility awareness and charting cycles — I wanted to learn more about this because what I found was I was helping a lot of women in my health coaching and integrative health practice and I didn’t feel like I was doing them a good service by not understanding hormonal shifts and fluctuations and how their hormones are impacting other parts of their body. A lot of the general recommendations, even some of the recommendations that I learned in some of my previous trainings, didn’t feel like they supported women. It felt like it was the general recommendations based on research that’s been done on men. And I just really wanted to dive in more to offer really specific advice for women who might not even know that they have hormonal issues, but the other things they’re experiencing like gut issues are impacting their hormones whether they know it or not. And using the cycle as a vital sign — I’m huge into data — but what I love about cycle charting is that data can be available to us all month long for free and we don’t have to initially jump into all of these expensive tests. We can get some baseline knowledge just from paying attention to what our body is telling us.

Lisa: Well, I love that you shared that. So you’re trying to conceive and it’s obviously not happening, which is shocking. It’s just I can just imagine how many women have had the similar experience because I’ve certainly worked with many women for whom this is their story, because it’s unreal. I mean, just the indoctrination in junior high and high school alone sets you up to have this expectation that you’re just going to get pregnant so simply. And you mentioned your experience with the Ava bracelet — kind of having that tangible way to actually see when ovulation had happened, to actually finally understand more intimately what was going on hormonally — and you said that that allowed you to identify ovulation, which is hugely helpful. We can’t underestimate the importance of correct timing.

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, turns out I’m sure the post-hormonal transition phase was playing into it too, and I probably needed some months just for my body to get back to normal. Maybe I wasn’t ovulating at all in the first few months — I have no idea because I wasn’t charting at the time. But turns out we were mistiming by at least five days. I was ovulating way later than I found out, and we were timing it around day 14 because that’s what my rhythm-based app was telling me. So I thought I was charting. I was paying attention to when my period was going to come next, but it was very much just an algorithm that was estimating and not really taking any real data into account.

Lisa: I feel like for you having this personal experience — because you’ve obviously heard me talk about that a whole lot just in our training — but for you having had that experience, you didn’t have that information available to you, you were timing based on day 14. Obviously we’re all indoctrinated with that. And you actually saw that you were able to conceive much quicker once you started timing correctly. So working with fertility clients who are trying to conceive, those types of experiences — we can look back on them and beat ourselves up, but at the end of the day, why? We didn’t know. Nobody taught us. There’s no room to beat up ourselves at all. But that’s going to be so powerful for you to share with your clients and it helps you to be an even better advocate for this.

Lauren: Yeah. I’m such a huge fan of — I think the more I’m working with women on cycle charting specifically, I think we all think — I said this before too — I thought I was charting my cycle. And I think the majority of the women I’m starting to work with, they think they’re charting their cycle because they have an app. It tells them when their period’s coming and it’s more or less accurate. So they think they know exactly what’s going on. But I think it’s so powerful to have an extra layer of data and information and really understand what’s going on. Because not only can it tell us when we’re ovulating and time correctly, but it probably could have cued me into the gut issues and what was actually going on, and maybe I would have gotten the testing that I needed done earlier. I think that was playing into maybe low progesterone, delayed ovulation — my body was just stressed out because of my gut issues.

Lisa: Well, and of course, as we record this, you are well into your FAM journey. You are in the practicum stage. You’ve been applying this with some of your early clients. So maybe share with us what has changed for you in your practice, like from when you started to now, and what you’re kind of looking to do in the future once you complete everything. How has this changed your approach or your perspective or just the work that you’re doing with your clients?

Lauren: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think it’s changed a few things and I’m really excited about all of it. I originally was kind of just diving into lab work with women and gut testing right off the bat. And I am now taking sort of a more — I don’t know if it’s like a conservative approach, but just like, let’s see what your body’s telling us first and then we’ll decide what test we need to do and if we even need to do anything depending on their goals. If their goal is to get pregnant, we might not need to do any testing. We might just need to chart and kind of understand how our body needs to be supported best. And I think clients appreciate that. At least what I’ve seen — it’s like if you don’t have to spend $250 on a functional lab test, great. So that’s a change. It’s sort of like a wait-and-see approach — let’s use your body as our first line of data before we jump into adding any quantitative data. I’m also really excited to focus on fertility and really niche down into women who are over 30 who are trying to conceive or thinking about trying to conceive in the next year or two and just want to set their body up for the most success. One of my first clients — a client that I had been working with already before I started the program — I was kind of finishing things out with her a few months into the program, so I didn’t have all the knowledge yet. But we were — she was a fertility client trying to get pregnant. We had done a lot of diet and lifestyle things and when we were looking at her cycle and her Oura data, we saw that it was normalizing the timing. She had really long cycles and it was like shortening the length of her cycle, so it was working. And I remember listening to one of the lectures and hearing you talk about ovulation timing and that the luteal phase is pretty static and the follicular phase is where we see the most variability. And literally just that one piece of information and telling her that she might be timing things wrong — she was able to conceive naturally like two months before her IVF process would have started. And I was — that was just the most rewarding thing. And I think sometimes we’re overcomplicating what needs to be done in the wellness world and wellness sphere. And I just want to simplify things for people so that they don’t feel so overwhelmed by their fertility journey and their bodies.

Lisa: I mean I love that so much. It’s one of the things that can be hard to convey, right? Like it’s easy for you to understand because you’re in the program. You’ve seen all the things and you’ve heard the philosophy behind it. But I feel like you really touched on one of the most important pieces of it, which is that the cycle knowledge allows us to be a lot more specific where we don’t have to treat everybody exactly the same, where we don’t just have to have this protocol where everybody has to spend $2,000 on all of these tests before we even do anything. And not that I’m anti-testing at all. The approach that we take though is that we get that baseline data from the person first. And I think what you pointed out is really important, especially PCOS. I have a whole lot to say about PCOS — from women being misdiagnosed, women who have PCOS but don’t meet the physical expectation of their practitioner because often practitioners are expecting women with PCOS to be significantly overweight. And so if you have somebody who presents with a fairly normal body shape who literally meets the diagnostic criteria, sometimes a diagnosis is not made. And then on the other hand, you have women who are being diagnosed but don’t necessarily meet the diagnostic criteria. And then you have women who are identified correctly with PCOS but are told that that means they won’t be able to have children naturally, which is just not true. And especially from the charting standpoint, the first step of just understanding correct timing can literally, for some women, be sufficient. Obviously there are other issues that need to be addressed as well, but if you add those things together — the timing aspect, really understanding even with irregular long cycles you can still learn how to time sex correctly to improve your chances of conception, plus you can address the insulin resistance and inflammation issues — a lot of women are able to conceive. The point you were making was that we don’t have to start with this huge cookie-cutter approach that involves all of these things. We can assess it first based on the cycle data and see what’s really going on and then once we identify certain issues that are recurring, we can move forward with some of that testing, taking more of a customized approach.

Lauren: Yeah. I think nobody wants a cookie-cutter approach. They want to feel like they’re doing the things that are right for them. And I think that’s where practitioners come in because there’s just so much information online and it’s hard to know what to do first and where to start. And I’m certainly a bit biased in it, but I always say that I can’t imagine working in women’s health without having this information.

Lisa: And until you really dive in, you might not realize how powerful it can be. It doesn’t replace the need for additional testing, but in many cases it can reduce it — because instead of having not a lot of data and needing the testing to give you the first piece of information, you can actually get a lot of the data and then like you said, customize and do the specific testing that really stands out. Like okay, we see that you’re having this issue with your hormones in this stage of your cycle, so let’s do these specific tests to see what’s going on there, instead of having to do every single thing under the sun.

Lauren: Exactly. Exactly.

Lisa: So I mean, we could literally delve into all of these things all day long, but as we start wrapping up, one of the questions I love to ask is — if somebody who is thinking about jumping into the FAM program, who’s been kind of looking for a while, what if anything would you want them to know about your experience?

Lauren: Oh, I feel like I’ve done a lot of certification programs and this one — I’m not just saying because I’m on the phone with you, I promise — it’s honestly been the most valuable because of the live aspect of it. I think a lot of health and wellness certifications these days are just online programs, they’re self-paced, which has a place and is valuable for other reasons. But I think just having people to talk about cases with and ask questions live about what’s going on — it’s been extremely valuable just in terms of my learning and being able to apply what I’m learning directly to my clients immediately. I also really appreciated having to go through this process myself and learning about cycle tracking in a deeper way. I didn’t have a ton of cycle tracking other than the Ava bracelet. I understood BBT, but everything else was brand new to me — all of the cycle parameters and how to assess somebody’s health based on the cycle parameters. It’s so impactful. And I think even just for yourself, it’s just hugely valuable. So highly recommend if anybody’s on the fence.

Lisa: Oh, well, thank you so much. I mean, I always say that I feel like there are certain things that you can’t learn unless you do it. I feel like a lot of us approach cycle charting with a lot of assumptions, and I feel like some of the assumptions are that it’s natural, so it’s going to be easy. And even assumptions about your own cycle because if you’re in the health field already, you’re doing a lot of making healthy choices. So I feel like there are a lot of assumptions that are made. But interestingly, when you dive in and start charting your own cycle, inevitably you learn something. Did you find anything out that surprised you that you didn’t anticipate or that you never thought you would know?

Lauren: Yeah, huge. So the luteal phase information and that needing to be 12 to 14 days for it to be optimal — I’m shook by how, still, I think my body has done a lot to address my gut issues but I think there are still some things I need to address because my luteal phase is consistently 10 days or less. And on really stressful months — I remember one month, it was probably during a hot seat, we went through it — I had a seven-day luteal phase from the flu, from travel. And so I think there are still some underlying things that I need to address. It actually prompted me to take a Lyme disease test because of just some of the things that I had been witnessing and noticing. And that came back positive. So I think when you understand that and you’re like, I’m doing everything that I possibly can to lengthen my luteal phase — I’ve cut out coffee, I’m doing so much — and it’s still at 10, it kind of tips you into like, could there be something else here? And I don’t know if I would have found that at this stage of my life. It probably would have been much later in my life where I would have thought to test and found that out. So yeah, I think it’s just hugely valuable.

Lisa: That’s such a good example for so many reasons. I mean, it’s one of the reasons why I firmly stand behind the need for training, because I feel like one of the assumptions I was talking about is if you experience something personally and you have personally experienced that thing for quite a while, we tend to normalize it and just assume, especially if we don’t have the training in the background to recognize that it’s not. So one of the benefits of having been in the field for so long and thousands of clients later, all the different charts that I’ve seen, there is an actual normal parameter guideline for human women. And if you’re consistently out of it, it doesn’t just mean like, hi, I’m Lauren and I just have 10-day luteal phases and that’s just how it is. This is one of the things where for a lot of our practitioners in the program, they start to realize that when you see a client consistently having 15-day luteal phases and other clients having seven-day luteal phases, you really have to start thinking — well, what is optimal and what is normal? And so that’s such a great example because certainly I’ve heard it all — oh, mine are never that long, that’s just what’s normal for me, right? And I mean, I was that way when I first started charting because my cycles were 38 days, I think, in my early 20s when I first started charting. I do think I had some insulin resistance issues and I definitely know I had some thyroid issues, but I didn’t know that at the time. I was just like, oh, I just have long cycles, it’s cool. And then fortunately for me, I had a charting instructor who was like, actually, your temperatures are like way too low and your cycles are way too long — you should go get your thyroid tested. And that was really one of the key moments in my understanding and why to this day I’m still talking about the menstrual cycle being like a vital sign. Because that was the moment for me where I was like, what do you mean you can look at my cycle and tell me I have an issue with my thyroid? I thought my long cycles were fine. And then I did have a positive test, similarly to your experience having the positive test for Lyme. And you’re like, oh, so what I thought was normal actually wasn’t, and it was actually an indication of something. And like you said, if that hadn’t been the case, I mean I didn’t have any severe symptoms or anything. So I definitely wouldn’t have figured that out in my early 20s.

Lauren: Yeah, it’s so powerful and I’m just really thankful for all the knowledge that I have, and I can’t wait to help other people understand this better too.

Lisa: So well before we wrap up here, let us know a little bit more about you — what you do, share with us where you are in the world, how people can get a hold of you, website, socials, all the things, all the places, and anything that’s exciting that’s happening in your world these days.

Lauren: Yeah. So I started, after all of my own health issues, I started a company called Calibrate Health and Wellness. It’s a little play on my love of data and just having information to make decisions off of. We specialize in root cause hormone and fertility support for women over 30 and really just help women feel more empowered and less overwhelmed. I like to simplify what’s going on so that they can do what’s going to move the needle for them and forget all the rest. But I’m on Instagram @calibrate.well and I’m in Denver, Colorado, but I see clients all over the United States.

Lisa: Amazing. Well, we will make sure to link all of the places for anyone who’s listening on the go. And thank you so much for being here, Lauren. This conversation was so much fun and I feel like we covered a lot of really interesting topics.

Lauren: Thanks for having me, Lisa.

Lisa: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode and you’re wanting to share it with a friend or you’re wanting to grab any of the links that we talked about, head over to fertilityfriday.com/579. One of the themes and takeaways that stood out to me after having this conversation with Lauren was, I think, how much we can take for granted our knowledge. So if you’ve been a longtime listener of the podcast and you’ve discovered fertility awareness, if you’ve charted your own cycles or whether you’ve even just dabbled in it or thought about it, there’s a lot that you know about your cycle just having been here and been part of the community. And the longer that we’re in it, the longer that we chart our cycles, the easier it is to forget where we started from — where our knowledge was at the very beginning of our journey and where our clients’ knowledge base is as well. And it’s so easy to underestimate how transformative and incredible this knowledge can be for your clients. And it doesn’t matter whether your clients have an incredibly significant educational background. It doesn’t matter if your clients have seen multiple practitioners. The average woman has done all of those things and still doesn’t have very much if any knowledge about her cycle. If you are timing your sex every month based on day 14 and you don’t know about your cycle and you don’t know that ovulation shifts and changes based on what’s happening, even just a few days here and there from cycle to cycle — if you don’t have that information and the ability to identify which days are fertile, which days are not, and to know how to integrate apps, how to integrate LH testing strips, how to do this if your cycle is irregular — there are so many women out there with PCOS who are just told that they can’t get pregnant, and that’s not true. It’s still possible to identify the fertile window even if your cycle is 90 days long. And as a practitioner, if you don’t have the skill, then your clients are really missing out on this incredible opportunity. So that’s my biggest takeaway from today’s interview with Lauren, because she shared her experience of kind of going into it like most of us do until we discover this knowledge. So definitely an important reminder, I think, for all of us, especially those of us who have been immersed in this knowledge and this field for quite some time. So with that said, I hope you have a wonderful week, weekend, whenever you’re tuning into the show. And of course, as always, until next time, be well and happy charting.