How Fertility Awareness Helps You Conceive (Episode 300)

Full Transcript: Episode 300

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: This is the Fertility Friday Podcast, episode number 300.

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 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 know, I’m a busy girl, but I manage 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 us today.

I’m really excited to share today’s episode with you. Today is the 300th episode of the Fertility Friday Podcast. I’m really excited that we’ve hit this incredible milestone. The podcast is just over five years old — we celebrated our five-year anniversary in December of 2019 — and so it’s really incredible and exciting that we have officially hit 300.

So I was thinking about what I should talk about, and what I should do, for the 300th episode, and I thought that I would focus on conception and conceiving with fertility awareness — how fertility awareness can help optimize your chances of conceiving. This is something we’ve talked about quite a bit on the podcast, but I think it’s important to revisit it and to keep opening up that conversation. As I’m recording this, I’ve actually just recently started my 10-week program, so I’ve been talking about that program quite a bit lately, and we’ve had our first few sessions together by this point. At the very beginning of the 10-week class, I always take some time for everybody to introduce themselves and get to know each other, and what I find to be really important, being that I’ve been doing this work for so long — nearly 20 years now — is that it’s really easy to lose sight of why it’s so important.

So for those of you who’ve been listening to the podcast for a long time, you’ve likely heard me say a lot of the same things, and repeat some of the same details, and share these important pieces of information in different ways multiple times. But the thing is that on a pretty regular basis, when I’m working with clients, I’m always connecting with women who are just discovering fertility awareness. No matter how many episodes I’ve released, no matter how long I’ve been talking about this, no matter how many years in the field, how many hundreds of women, thousands of charts — this information is new for the majority of women on planet Earth. And I’m always reminded of that when I work with new clients, when I’m running a new group program, and it really energizes and refreshes me, and reminds me of how much this information can truly change your outlook on life, and even just your experience.

And if you’re new to the podcast, welcome. I would highly encourage you to listen to the Pill Reality series episodes — FertilityFriday.com/PillReality — and to the FAM Reality series, where I do my on-air client sessions — FertilityFriday.com/Reality. The reason I recommend those episodes, if you haven’t listened yet, is because it’s really important to hear the stories of real women, hear what real women are experiencing and going through. I’ve heard from so many listeners who say that hearing these episodes made them feel like they weren’t alone — that everyone around them took hormonal birth control without a problem, but they were having a problem, and it was the podcast that helped them recognize it wasn’t just them. It’s so important for us to continue making space to have these conversations and share this information.

So with that said, I wanted to take the opportunity in this 300th episode to talk about fertility awareness and how it applies to conception specifically, and to go beyond timing — because obviously timing is important, but it’s not the whole picture. We’ll talk about the top four ways that fertility awareness can help when you’re trying to conceive, or when you’re planning ahead for conception at some point in the future. If you are either actively trying to conceive or planning to conceive in the future, I’ve created a free online course that goes into these topics in a lot more depth — head over to FertilityFriday.com/TTC, that’s TTC as in trying to conceive, to download that free course all about optimizing your chances of conceiving with fertility awareness.

So with that said, let’s jump into today’s episode.

I wanted to jump right in and talk about the top four reasons why fertility awareness can help when you’re ready to conceive — whether you’re actively trying, 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 are so many myths in our culture that prevent us from gaining accurate, complete information about the basic way our bodies and our menstrual cycles work, and how that relates to our fertility. For that reason, it’s even more important for us to educate ourselves and learn this basic information about our menstrual cycle, and how it applies when we’re ready to have a baby.

I think one of the biggest myths in our culture is that we’re fertile every day, and that pregnancy is a given. 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 I’ve ever encountered in my entire life were taught that too — not every single woman; there’s a small percentage of women who got good, accurate information, maybe from a mother, aunt, sister, or someone in their lives who actually knew about fertility awareness. But the majority of us weren’t taught that way. And that myth — that we’re fertile every day and basically guaranteed to get pregnant if we ever have sex — makes things really challenging, because then when we flip that over and we’re ready to start having babies, it gives us the impression that pregnancy can happen on any day, so we assume we should get pregnant the very first time we have unprotected sex.

I think it’s really important to balance out and eradicate those myths, and really focus on what the science actually says about what’s going on in the menstrual cycle. One way to look at it, when you take a look at the research, is by asking: what is the chance of pregnancy per cycle, even in the healthiest couple? When you look at the research, even the healthiest couple has about a 30% chance of conception per cycle. So even in an ideal scenario, on average it’s still taking about 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 actually take to get pregnant — it’s a bit of a mind shift, a different type of conversation.

When you’re avoiding pregnancy, the mindset is that it’s absolutely going to happen — pregnancy is automatic, almost like if your partner looks at you, you’re going to be pregnant. And we’re taught that pregnancy can happen on any day, so we spend a lot of our adult lives actively avoiding pregnancy, and not just avoiding it, but living in a fairly constant state of worry, because we’re not taught enough about it to actually understand it. We’re taught such a small, and not even completely accurate, amount, and it leaves us in a state of fear. I know I was, and a lot of the women I speak with were too — just constantly afraid. I speak to women in their 30s, mid-30s, even close to their 40s, who are still just as afraid as they were at 18, and I find that interesting, because we’re not taught enough about how our fertility changes with age to even shift that mindset.

You can still prevent pregnancy — it is possible to prevent pregnancy without hormones. You can prevent pregnancy with hormones, and you can prevent pregnancy without hormones; one isn’t necessarily more effective than the other, and I know that can be a hard thing to hear, because it can go against everything you’ve ever heard. But there are plenty of 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, work it, figure out the rules, figure out where you’re at, and have those conversations with your partner, it’s possible to successfully avoid pregnancy without hormones, and I think that’s important to say out loud.

Fertility also changes as we get older, so the chance and ease of conceiving may be different at 35 than it is at 20, and these are real conversations we need to be having. So again, in the healthiest couples, the research tells us there’s about a 30% chance per cycle of conceiving, taking about three cycles on average even in the best-case scenario. For the average couple, the average is closer to 25%, taking about four cycles to conceive.

Now, when you throw hormonal birth control into the mix — if you’re not giving yourself a period of transition — your body can go through a temporary period of subfertility after stopping hormonal birth control, and the duration of that varies a bit based on the type of method. For 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. I’m saying months, not cycles, because the studies aren’t looking at per-cycle chances, they’re looking at how long it actually takes once you come off that particular method. On average, it takes about twice as long for the average couple to conceive post-pill. If you’re coming off the shot, that time roughly doubles again, to about 16 months on average to conceive post-shot, with other hormonal methods generally falling somewhere in the middle. It’s really helpful to have that level of understanding, and this leads us into our discussion of how fertility awareness can help you when you’re ready to conceive.

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

I find it interesting how many women doubt their capability to avoid pregnancy without hormones, while managing incredibly complex careers and responsibilities in every other part of their lives. I’m not trying to be judgy — I’m trying to be your cheerleader. If you’re thinking about conception at some point in the future, I want you to know that if you decide you want to avoid pregnancy without hormones, it’s possible, and you’re capable of doing it. If you opt for a non-hormonal method of birth control, that’s one way of preserving your fertility for when you’re actually ready to start trying, because you’re not altering your body with hormones — and when you’re ready to conceive, your body doesn’t have to go through that transition phase. You can simply switch from using condoms, withdrawal, or abstaining on your fertile days, to having sex on those fertile days instead, which is one less hurdle to work through when you’re ready to conceive.

Another way that fertility awareness helps with natural conception is timing. Fertility awareness helps you understand that not every day of your cycle is fertile — there’s a small fertile window, on average about a week or so long — and it helps you identify those days, so you know exactly when to have sex when you’re ready to conceive. It also helps you get rid of a lot of the myths that get tossed around, like the myth of ovulation on day 14, or that every cycle looks the same, so you can cut through the clutter and understand exactly when the best time to try actually is.

The third important way that fertility awareness can help you when you’re ready to conceive is that by tracking your cycles, you can identify if there’s a problem. When you start tracking your periods, ovulation, fertile window, and luteal phase — the second half of your cycle, between ovulation and your period — you can start to see if there’s an issue: if your cycles aren’t regular, if your periods are problematic, if you’re not ovulating at all, or ovulating sporadically. These are things you need to know, and tracking your cycle with fertility awareness — especially if you’re able to start tracking while you’re still avoiding pregnancy — gives you a window of insight into your cycles before you need to act on it when you’re ready to conceive.

Finally, one of the ways fertility awareness can help you when you’re trying to conceive is that it can bring your partner into the process, in a couple of different ways. First, if you’re charting your cycles, you’re having more conversations about your fertility and your cycles, and it brings your partner into the conversation — it takes away some of the mystery and makes things more tangible. A number of my clients have used paper charts and put them up in their bedroom, so their partner can see what’s happening with their cycles, and for a lot of couples, this becomes an avenue for conversation and connection that didn’t exist before they were charting.

Another important way charting can involve your partner is that if you start charting and see that your cycles are pretty typical and pretty regular — there’s no such thing as a perfect chart, so this isn’t a conversation about perfection — but when you start to understand the different parameters of the menstrual cycle, and you see that your period falls into a healthy pattern, that you are ovulating, that you have cervical fluid, that you have a long enough luteal phase, that can be really reassuring. For a certain percentage of my clients, when they start charting, they’re often afraid there’s something wrong, that their cycles are totally out of whack, but many of them find that their cycles are actually pretty healthy. We can always tweak something, adjust a diet, take a different supplement, but overall, if charting shows you that you’re pretty healthy, then the question becomes: if you’re having sex every time during your fertile window and it’s not happening, fertility awareness charting can help draw attention to where it needs to be — including, in some cases, to your partner.

Having those conversations isn’t about laying blame, it’s about starting to understand how fertility actually works. With fertility awareness charting, you can no longer overlook male factor — it has to come front and center, because when you’re hitting all the right days cycle after cycle and it’s still not happening, at some point you have to look in a different direction. In my practice, charting really puts a spotlight on the male partner, and depending on how you approach it, it can make you true partners in this process in a completely different way than before.

In a nutshell, those are the top four ways that fertility awareness can help when you’re ready to start trying, to support the process of natural conception. To go over them again: the first is preserving your fertility, by charting and using a non-hormonal birth control method so you’re not altering your body, meaning there’s no transition period your body has to go through when you’re ready to switch to conceiving. The second is timing — understanding your cycle in a way you wouldn’t if you weren’t charting, and getting rid of the myths our culture commonly tells us, so you can identify exactly which days in your cycle are the days to try. The third is that fertility awareness can help identify cycle issues — when you’re tracking your cycle regularly, you clearly start to see if there’s a problem, which can give you an important heads-up that you might not otherwise have noticed. 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 move past the fear that something is wrong with your body, and start looking at the real issue, which in some cases is male factor. It really helps broaden the conversation, and with a little bit of support, 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.

With that said, I want to thank you for tuning in to today’s 300th podcast episode. I was so excited to share this one with you, and if you know somebody who could benefit from the different ways that fertility awareness can help when you’re trying to conceive — or from the way it can help you look at your cycle differently, connect with your body, and preserve your fertility when you’re not yet ready to start trying — make sure to share this episode. The link for today’s episode is FertilityFriday.com/300. And if you enjoyed today’s episode and want to go into even more depth on how fertility awareness can help you conceive, get the timing right, and identify potential health issues, make sure to download my free e-course, Conceiving With Fertility Awareness, at FertilityFriday.com/TTC.

So I hope you have a wonderful day, weekend, or week, whenever you’re listening to this episode. I appreciate you for being part of the Fertility Friday community. Even though if you’ve been an avid listener for a long time, this information isn’t new to you, I’m always reminded of how important it is for the women who have never come across it before. For the number of years I’ve been talking about these topics, there are hundreds of thousands, millions of women out there who have never heard about the menstrual cycle in this way, or how it’s connected to overall health, how it can help with conception when you’re ready, and how it can be used as a natural form of birth control without hormones. There are so many women for whom this is the first time they’ve ever heard of it, and so I appreciate you being part of this community, and for continuing to help me spread the word about these important topics.

And so with that, I will let you go. Of course, as always, until next time, be well, and happy charting.