Conceiving with Fertility Awareness: Top 4 Benefits (Episode 406)

Full Transcript: Episode 406

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack:

Welcome to the Fertility Friday podcast, your source for information about the fertility awareness method and all things fertility. I’m your host, Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. I’m the author of the fifth vital sign and the fertility awareness mastery charting journal. I’m a certified fertility awareness educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner with nearly 20 years of experience teaching women to connect to their fifth vital sign through menstrual cycle charting, balancing hormonal health, and optimizing the menstrual cycle without hormones. I’m outspoken about hormonal birth control and its impact on fertility and overall health because you have the right to know how your body works and how artificial hormones disrupt that natural process. I teach women’s health professionals how to utilize the menstrual cycle as a vital sign in their practices and I host live coaching programs to help you achieve optimal fertility and health because it’s important to have healthy menstrual cycles regardless of whether or not you want to have babies. I’m also a wife and mother of two beautiful boys. I know I’m a busy girl but I managed to fit it all in. This podcast is designed to empower you to take full control of your cycles, your fertility, and your overall health. And I’m so excited that you’re here with me today.

Today we begin a brand new series. I hope that you enjoyed the birth control series. I really loved sharing some of my favorite episodes with you and I think that it’s so important for women to know that there’s an alternative to hormonal birth control that’s highly effective when used correctly. And I also think it’s important for us to have candid conversations about how to make the method work for you and to really talk about what are some of the challenges. Why does the method fail? But the other side of fertility awareness is conception. And I would say that many women, if not most, discover fertility awareness at some point in their conception journey. And this can be a result of trying to conceive for many many months without anything happening only to learn that there’s only a small window of fertility each cycle, and this really leads, I think, many women to discover fertility awareness on their path to making a baby. And so in this series that we’ll be going through in the month of March, we will be focusing on conception. We’ll be talking about how to utilize fertility awareness to conceive, what are some of the things that you need to know. One of the most common questions is about timing sex correctly, how to really utilize that, how to do that. And so in today’s episode, we’re going to be jumping right in and talking about conceiving with fertility awareness.

And I think one of the most important aspects of fertility awareness that lends itself to supporting you when you’re ready to conceive is that it’s a method of birth control that obviously does not affect your hormones. And so for many of my clients who jump into my programs who are looking to utilize fertility awareness for birth control, many do have a future orientation date, whether they’re planning to conceive in the general future or whether they’re planning to conceive in six months or a year from now or two years from now. And so I would say one of the benefits of fertility awareness charting is if you are able to implement it during that time period before you’re actively ready to start having a baby, but you’re still actively avoiding, it does give you the opportunity if you’ve been on hormonal contraception to transition off of it, see where your cycles are at, and also to work towards improving your cycles in preparation for conception. So with that said, let’s go ahead and jump right into the first installment of our Conception Series.

So I wanted to jump right in and talk about the top four reasons why fertility awareness can help when you’re ready to conceive. So whether you’re actively conceiving or whether you’re planning to conceive at some point in the future, fertility awareness is a really useful tool to have in your toolbox at that stage. And there’s so many myths in our culture that prevent us from really gaining that accurate and complete information, just about the basic way that our body works, our menstrual cycle works, and our fertility. And for that reason, it’s even more important for us to educate ourselves and just learn, again, this most basic information about our menstrual cycle and how it can apply when we’re ready to have a baby.

I think that some of the biggest myths in our culture make it difficult for us. So one of the biggest myths is just that we’re fertile every day and pregnancy is a given. So as youngsters, many of us, if not most of us, if not all of us, are taught that as a woman you can get pregnant on any single day of your menstrual cycle. I was taught that and most of the women that I’ve ever encountered in my entire life have been taught that. Not every single woman — there’s a small percentage of women who get good, accurate information. Maybe their mother or aunt or sister or someone in their lives did know about fertility awareness and actually taught them the accurate information. But the majority of us weren’t taught that way.

And so that myth, the myth that we’re fertile every day and that we’re basically guaranteed to get pregnant if we ever have sex with another human being, those myths make it really challenging because then when we flip that over, when we’re ready to start having babies, then it just gives us the impression that pregnancy can happen on any day. So it makes sense then that you should just get pregnant like the first time you ever have unprotected sex. And so I think that it’s really important to balance and kind of eradicate those myths and really focus on, okay, what does the science have to say? What’s really going on in the menstrual cycle?

One of the ways to look at it when we take a look at the research is by looking at what is the chance of pregnancy per cycle, even in the healthiest couple. So when you take a look at the research, even the healthiest couple has about a 30% chance of conception per cycle. So even if you have ideal situation, ideal scenario, on average, it’s still taking three cycles to conceive. And that’s really important to consider because it’s not what we’re taught about fertility. We’re so actively engaged in preventing pregnancy at all costs that we’re not really thinking about what it would take to get pregnant.

And it is a bit of a mind shift, and it is a bit of a different type of a conversation. And so when you’re avoiding pregnancy, the mindset is that it’s going — it’s absolutely going to happen. Pregnancy is automatic. Oh my goodness, if my partner looks at me, I’m going to be pregnant. And we are taught that pregnancy can happen on any day. And we spend a lot of our adult lives, many of us, actively avoiding pregnancy and not just actively avoiding it, like absolutely terrified — like living in a constant state of terror. Because we’re not taught enough about it so we can understand it. We’re just taught such a small amount and it’s not even completely accurate, or we’re taught that it just leaves us in a state of fear. And I’m sure every single human isn’t in a state of fear, but I know I was and a lot of the women I speak to were as well — like just always afraid, just constantly afraid.

And I speak to women who are now in their 30s and mid 30s and even close to their 40s who are still just as terrified as they were when they were 18 years old. And often I find that to be interesting because we’re not taught enough about our fertility and how it changes with age to even shift that mindset mentality. You can still prevent pregnancy. It is possible to prevent pregnancy without hormones. I think that is something — like you can prevent pregnancy with hormones and you can prevent pregnancy without hormones. One is not necessarily more effective than the other. And that can be a hard thing to hear and it can go against everything you’ve ever heard. But there are enough women who successfully use fertility awareness and don’t have accidents, who don’t get pregnant when they don’t want to. When you learn the method, when you work it, when you really figure out the rules, figure out where you’re at, have those conversations with your partner, it is possible to successfully avoid pregnancy without hormones.

Also, the conversation about fertility — fertility changes as we get older. So the chance and the ease at which we can conceive, it may be different at 35 than it is at 20. And these are real conversations that we need to be having. So the healthiest couple alive — what the research tells us is that there’s about a 30% chance per cycle of conceiving. So on average, taking about three cycles, even in the best case scenario. Generally, the average is about 25%. So your average couple, when you take a look at the research, takes about four cycles to conceive.

Now, when you throw hormonal birth control into the mix, if you are not giving yourself a period of transition, your body goes through a temporary period of subfertility post-hormonal birth control. And so the amount of time, the duration, it does vary a bit based on the type of birth control. So the birth control pill — the combined pill where there’s a combination of synthetic estrogens and progestins — on average, it takes about eight months post-pill for conception to occur. So I’m saying months now, not cycles, because the studies aren’t looking at the cycles per cycle chance. They’re looking at how long it’s actually taking when you come off of that particular birth control method. But what we’re looking at though is on average it takes about twice as long for your average couple to conceive post-pill. If you’ve taken the shot, that time doubles to about 16 months on average that it takes to conceive post-shot. And then the different methods of hormonal birth controls kind of fall in the middle. And so it’s really helpful to have that level of understanding, and this really leads us into our discussion of how fertility awareness can help you when you are ready to conceive.

One of the most important things to mention with fertility awareness is that if you have the opportunity to come off of birth control and avoid pregnancy with other means — so barrier methods or a combination of barrier methods as well as fertility awareness — then it gives your menstrual cycle and your body a chance to adapt. So one of the kind of unsaid, unspoken benefits of fertility awareness is that it does preserve your fertility in the meantime. And if you’ve been on hormonal birth control for a long time, you’re not ready to get pregnant, but you are starting to think about it within the next couple of years, you know, it is worth having that conversation with yourself, especially if you’re in your 30s, mid-30s.

Okay, so you’re not 18 anymore. You’re probably a lot more responsible than you give yourself credit for. And you probably — if you’re thinking about it, if you’re kind of toying with the idea — you probably are capable of doing this. I find it to be so interesting how many women doubt their capability and capacity to avoid pregnancy without hormones while they have these really crazily difficult and complex careers, they do all this amazing work. A lot of the women that I work with — I mean, they have high-powered jobs or they do a lot of complicated, complex type of things, all the different types of work that we do. But yet still, we don’t think we can manage to put a condom on before sex. It’s very interesting. So I’m not trying to be judgey and weird — I’m trying to be your cheerleader.

So if you’re kind of thinking about conception at some point in the future, I want to just let you know that if you decide that you want to avoid pregnancy without hormones, it is possible and you are capable of doing it. There’s plenty of things that you’re already doing that are much harder than this, so you can do it. So if you opt for a non-hormonal method of birth control, that is one of the ways of preserving your fertility for when you are actually ready to start trying to have a baby, because you’re not altering your body with hormones, and then when you’re ready to conceive, your body doesn’t have to go through this transition phase. You can just switch from using condoms or withdrawal or abstaining or avoiding unprotected sex on your fertile days to having sex on those fertile days. And at least that’s one less hurdle that you have to go through when you’re ready to conceive.

Another way that fertility awareness helps with conception, with natural conception, is definitely timing. And so fertility awareness helps you to understand your body and understand how your body works. It helps you to understand that all of the days of your cycle are not fertile, that there’s a small fertile window that’s on average about a week or so long, and it helps you identify those days so that you know exactly when to have sex when you’re ready to conceive. It also helps you to get rid of a lot of the myths that are just kind of tossed around — the myth of ovulation on day 14, the myth of 28-day cycles and all that kind of stuff. So it kind of gets rid of all that clutter and all that foolishness, I would say, so that you can just get to it and understand exactly when is the best time to time sex when you’re ready.

The third important point — the third important way that fertility awareness can help you when you’re ready to conceive is that by tracking your cycles, you can actually identify if there’s a problem on your side. So when you’re looking at your cycles, when you start to track your periods and your ovulation and your fertile window and your luteal phase — the second half of your cycle between ovulation and your period again — you can really start to see if there’s a problem. And you can see if there’s an issue with your cycles, if they’re not regular, if your periods are problematic, and that can really be the thing that gives you that heads up or tells you the direction that you should be looking at if there is in fact an issue. If you’re not ovulating at all, if you’re ovulating really sporadically — these are things that you need to know. And so by tracking your cycle with fertility awareness, and especially if you’re able to start tracking before you’re actually — so tracking when you’re still avoiding pregnancy — then it gives you the opportunity to have that window of insight into your cycles before you need to do something about it when you’re ready to conceive.

So finally, one of the things I think is really important — one of the ways that fertility awareness can help you when you’re trying to conceive is it can be a way to get your partner involved in this process in a couple of different ways. One, if you’re charting your cycles, then you’re having more conversations about your fertility, about your cycles, and it really brings your partner into the conversation. It takes away some of that mystery and makes things more tangible. A number of my clients have used paper charts and put them up in their bedroom, or they have their charts laying out so their partner can see what’s happening with their cycles. And for a lot of couples, this is an avenue for conversation and for connection that just didn’t exist before they were charting.

But another important way that charting can get your partner involved is if you actually start charting and you start to see that your cycles are pretty typical, your cycles are pretty regular — you see that you are ovulating, you see that you do have cervical fluid, you see that you do have a long enough luteal phase. And for a certain percentage of my clients, when they start charting, they often are afraid that there’s something wrong, that their cycles are totally out of whack. But many of them find that their cycles are actually pretty okay, pretty normal, and they’re pretty healthy. We can always tweak something. We can always improve our diet. We can always take a different supplement. But overall, maybe charting will show you that you’re pretty healthy.

So then what’s the problem? If you’re having sex every single time during your fertile window and it’s not conceiving, fertility awareness charting can help you to draw the attention maybe to where it needs to be — if it needs to be on your partner. And so having those conversations — and it’s not about laying blame, but it’s really about starting to understand, well, this is how fertility works. I think with fertility awareness charting, you can no longer ignore male factor. It has to come front and center because when you’re hitting all those days, cycle after cycle, and it’s not happening, there’s only so much you can beat your head against the wall before you have to look in a different direction.

And so I find that in my practice, charting really puts a spotlight on the male partner and really causes you to kind of have to step up and do your part. And depending on how you talk about it and how you look at it, it can really make the two of you partners in this process in a totally different way that you weren’t before.

That, in a nutshell, are the top four ways that fertility awareness can really help when you’re ready to start trying — to help with the process of natural conception. So I’ll go over that again. The first way that fertility awareness can help with natural conception is by preserving your fertility. By charting and using a non-hormonal birth control method, you’re not altering your body. And so when you’re ready to switch it up and to start conceiving, there’s no transition period that your body has to go through. Your body is just as it is, and you’re just switching the days that you’re having unprotected sex.

The second way is timing. Of course, understanding your cycle — fertility awareness helps you to understand your cycle in a way that you wouldn’t really understand it if you weren’t charting. And it really helps you to get rid of some of those myths that our culture commonly tells us and helps you to identify which days of your cycle are the days to try. The days that you need to try in your cycle may be completely different than the days that a different woman has to try in her cycle, because all of our cycles are not exactly the same and we don’t all ovulate on the same day or at the same time. So it’s really helpful to zone in on what is happening in my cycle and when is the best time for me to try.

In addition to that, fertility awareness can help to identify cycle issues. So when you’re tracking your cycle on a regular basis, you clearly start to see if there’s a problem, and that can give you an important heads up — something that you may not have noticed, may not have been brought to your attention at all if you weren’t charting.

And finally, fertility awareness can get your partner involved in more ways than one. Especially if your cycles are overall healthy, it can help you to overcome that initial fear that there’s something wrong with you, that your body’s broken and all of that, and start to look at the real issue, which in some cases is male factor. And so it really helps to broaden the conversation. And I think with a little bit of support — I think it doesn’t always happen so naturally — but fertility awareness can be the thing that helps you stop blaming yourself and start looking for the real problem, which in some cases is actually the male partner.

Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend. I hope that you enjoyed today’s episode. I thought it was a great way to start the conception series by really highlighting some of the benefits of fertility awareness as it applies when you’re ready to conceive.

I feel like it can’t be understated. I know that one of the most popular trends that’s kind of rising more and more is fertility preservation. And if you’re not familiar with that, it’s the process of actually going through the procedure to have your eggs extracted and then frozen so that when you’re older, you have them there kind of like insurance if you’re wanting to conceive. And so that’s certainly a valid strategy for preserving your fertility. I would also argue that fertility awareness could be used — not in the same way, because it’s a different beast — but as a way to monitor and maintain your natural fertility. If you’re not changing your body with hormones and you’re able to track your cycles and observe what you’re seeing from cycle to cycle, then it does give you this unique opportunity to work towards improving and strengthening your cycle when you are not actively trying to conceive, so that when you are ready, there’s no transition that your body has to go through.

I feel like this is an aspect of fertility and preparing and planning for pregnancy that we don’t often hear talked about. Basically, what is typical for many women is to be on contraception. And even if they ask their doctors what they should do, if they should take a break or anything like that, they’re often told, no, just go ahead and come off of it the month you’re ready to start trying. And I think we can do better. So with that said, I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. 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.