Taking Charge of Your Fertility: Toni Weschler on 30 Years of Fertility Awareness

Full Transcript: Episode 621

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: This is the Fertility Friday Podcast, episode number 621.

Today’s guest needs no introduction, but I mean, of course, we’re still going to introduce her. I’m really excited to welcome Toni Weschler back to the show. It’s been quite a few years since our initial interview. Toni Weschler is the author of Taking Charge of Your Fertility. One of the reasons that we were connecting today is because she’s currently working on the 30th anniversary edition, which is a huge landmark.

It hasn’t been officially released yet, but it’s certainly a work in progress — we talk about that. Toni shares some really fun stories, some that I have not heard before. She shares a little bit about how Taking Charge of Your Fertility came to be. I’ve shared this on the podcast many times, but of course, like many women, Taking Charge of Your Fertility was actually my first foray into the fertility awareness method. This was back in probably the year 2000 or 2001.

Toni’s work has been the cornerstone of the worldwide increase of awareness and knowledge in fertility awareness. Her contribution to the field is immeasurable. It was obviously a really fun opportunity to chat about how the field has changed over the past 30-plus years since Toni had not only released this book, but the years leading up to that when she was teaching the method.

Before we jump into today’s episode, I’ll read Toni’s bio. Toni Weschler has a master’s degree in public health and is an internationally respected women’s health educator, author, and speaker. She is the author of the groundbreaking classic Taking Charge of Your Fertility, which has been translated into 12 languages and counting. In today’s episode, we are also talking about her new app, Cyclisity, which was specifically designed to complement Taking Charge of Your Fertility. She is also the author of Cycle Savvy, which is an ebook for teen girls 14 and up.

Also joining us today is Toni Weschler’s niece, Sabrina Nowicki. Sabrina leads Cyclisity with an engineering and product design background, bringing the technical expertise and user-centered thinking that’s critical to making Cyclisity a successful fertility awareness method cycle charting app and the official charting app of Taking Charge of Your Fertility.

Without further ado, let’s go ahead and jump into today’s episode.

Well, hello. It’s so nice to meet you, Sabrina.

Sabrina Nowicki: Nice to meet you, Lisa.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Nice to see you, Toni.

Toni Weschler: Hi, Lisa.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I am beyond thrilled today to be here with Toni Weschler and Sabrina Nowicki. Welcome to the show.

Toni Weschler: Thank you so much.

Sabrina Nowicki: Thank you so much. We’re so happy to be here.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I’m just so thrilled. We were having just the funnest pre-chat. One of the reasons why we’re here today is to celebrate the 30th anniversary edition of Taking Charge of Your Fertility. On behalf of all of the people in the fertility world, we’re just so thankful. I’m so thankful for the work that you did. I mention you in my story because your book was the first one that I read and it changed everything. So many women have that same story where it’s your book that really introduced them to what was happening in their body. And look what came out of it — a whole career. Thank you for starting my entire career, Toni.

Toni Weschler: That’s so touching. Thank you. That’s so sweet. If you only knew how it all started, though, even to write the book.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Would you like to tell us more about that whole story? I think our listeners would love to hear how the book came about.

Toni Weschler: It was never in my plans to write a book. What happened is that when I first started teaching my classes — and this was 40 years ago — I noticed this pattern that happened constantly. Women would come in, they would put their charts down, they couldn’t wait to meet with me, and they were really excited. I knew I’d done my job. I made it as exciting for them as it was for me the first time I learned it.

But then I heard the same refrain over and over from each woman that sat down, whether it was them by themselves or with a couple. They would say, I am so excited. But I have to tell you, I’m also really angry. At first, when women started telling me that, I thought, what did I do? But then because I started hearing it more and more, the comments ranged from: I’m angry. I’m filled with rage. I don’t get it. Why did we not learn this sooner? Why is it that my mom didn’t tell me about this? Why is it that I went through 20 years menstruating and not once did somebody tell me that there’s something so incredibly enlightening?

The rage was often toward their doctors. There were women who were trying to get pregnant who felt really angry that they were railroaded immediately into high-tech procedures like IVF, and nobody ever explained to them: Are you sure that you know that you’re ovulating? Are you sure that you know when you’re ovulating and whether you’re timing it correctly? Are you sure that you’re producing cervical fluid that would allow sperm to even be able to move in your vagina?

This came up over and over and over again. Women would say, I don’t get it. Why are we the only ones learning this here in Seattle? If this is something that is so scientifically validated, why is it only those of us that have the privilege? I started hearing this word — privilege — to be able to learn this.

Finally, I heard too many times about those two concepts: rage and privilege. Why do only we get to learn it? The original plan was to do a video. But I like to go under the radar. I like to just live my life and not have anybody recognize me. So I thought, okay, I’ll just write a book instead. And that led to a five-year near breakdown about every other week or so, five years. This was before the internet. It was before email. It was before anything. Just working on the book alone was absolutely daunting.

Now, when you ask about the 30th anniversary, here I am again, and I’m saying it is absolutely daunting. So much has changed. I’m almost rewriting the book. There is so much new information about things like endometriosis and PCOS. Even for the rules for birth control, I’ve added some more to make it even more effective than it already is. And perimenopause is a new chapter in my book. I’ve basically rewritten that whole chapter. Throughout the book, there’s a massive amount of new information.

Sabrina Nowicki: Toni’s doing a lot right now because she’s working on the book and also the app that we’re working on together. She’s got a lot going on.

Toni Weschler: A lot on my plate, trying to spin them all in the air. That’s the answer to why I decided to write the book.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: When you think about it, 30 years ago — that was 1995 when it came out. But you started working on it in 1990, when a lot of our listeners weren’t even born. Given that this is my career, it’s the quintessential fertility awareness book of our time because it’s obviously the most popular. This is how so many women have discovered charting. And I love about it that this is not your first rewrite. You’ve kept it current. How many people can say that they wrote a book that continues to be a top seller 30 years later? Did you know that it’s in 12 languages now?

Toni Weschler: It’s been in 12 languages for quite a while. I don’t like to talk about that kind of stuff because it feels embarrassing. I’m not shy — trust me, Sabrina, am I shy?

Sabrina Nowicki: You’re definitely not shy. You’re probably the opposite of shy.

Toni Weschler: I just don’t like to toot my own horn.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Sabrina and I can probably toot it for you. I can understand — when I’m around people just living my regular life, I’m not telling people anything about what I do. If they ask me, I’ll tell them and then I’ll get inundated with all of their fertility history.

Toni Weschler: Exactly. I think that’s part of it. There are so many women walking around totally confused about their bodies. I’m so afraid that it’ll change just regular conversations. I just want to be able to read the paper, work on whatever, and just not be inundated. And maybe that’s a subconscious thing — that it’s just nice to have a life where you’re not recognized. That’s one reason you will hardly find a single video of me.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Will this one be a video? Will people see it?

Toni Weschler: Well, at some point I need to get with the times eventually, just like you’re updating your book.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I started the podcast before people knew what podcasting was. Audio was great back then. Now I’m kind of having to figure out eventually putting it on video. Up to this point, it has been audio only. But I can appreciate not wanting to go out there having written the number one book on fertility. It’s been a bestseller for 30 years. At the same time, as uncomfortable as it can be, I think it is nice to be acknowledged for your work. Because someone had to do it — and I don’t think any of us can truly grasp the magnitude of what you’ve done.

Toni Weschler: Thank you. Because someone had to do it, right? You know what I always feel — on my tombstone, there should be something about Toni changed the world and in the process had 10 nervous breakdowns. The amount of work, the amount of minutiae that goes into writing a book of this magnitude is just unparalleled.

I can explain something that I think people might find really interesting. The book is really written for four audiences: women who are trying to get pregnant, women who want to avoid pregnancy, women who want to get a hold of their cycles in general — because our cycles are really a window into our health, every facet of our health is basically reflected in our cycles — and the fourth audience is health practitioners, which includes many OBGYNs and reproductive endocrinologists.

So when writing the book on a sentence-by-sentence level, I have to think to myself, okay, who’s reading this? Let’s say we’re talking about cervical fluid. Is this cervical fluid a quality that would allow sperm to live in it or not? Well, it depends. If you’re talking to a woman who’s trying to avoid pregnancy, I have to be thinking to myself, can sperm live in this quality cervical fluid? Let’s say it’s a really dry, sticky quality. Under a microscope, you would probably see that it’s the kind of cervical fluid that couldn’t allow sperm to even move in it.

We designed the rules to be so accurate for birth control that we put a buffer zone on both sides to make sure that there is no way a woman can get pregnant if she follows the rules. That means a woman using this for birth control would have to assume that any cervical fluid whatsoever before ovulation is considered fertile. But a woman who’s trying to get pregnant — that same quality cervical fluid — I would tell her: realistically, we probably want to work on improving your cervical fluid because right now it’s of a quality that will probably make sperm die in it or not be able to move.

And then there are doctors who don’t want to talk about it as cervical fluid because maybe that’s not the term they use. They might use the word discharge, which I hate. Cervical fluid is an absolutely healthy marker of what’s going on in her body. So you can imagine how crazy-making the book is to write when I’m writing to four different audiences and every sentence I have to think about.

I noticed sometimes people say the book could have been much shorter, but it’s pretty redundant. And I have to think to myself — yeah, but women that are using this for pregnancy achievement might’ve skipped all this stuff that people using it for birth control read. So I have to be redundant and make sure that every facet of the book is absolutely accurate.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: As an author of much shorter books — because Real Food for Fertility was long but I just don’t think it’s as long — I can relate to what you’re saying. For people who don’t write, it is a whole thing. And for the record, this was before the time of AI. It’s just your mind, your brain. And the research, the old-fashioned way that takes forever because you have to actually read everything and peruse through and use your brain to make things. And the redundancy — I had good editors, but man, there were a lot of red lines in my manuscripts.

We are — and I’m saying this on behalf of all the people — we are so glad that you took the care. Someone had to do it and it really is necessary. I’ve been in this field for about 20 years. I’m in my 40s. And during that time, I have seen a huge shift. So many more women have become fertility awareness educators. But on the other hand, we’re not actually there yet in the sense that the average woman still doesn’t know. What do you think is different and what’s the same, and where do we need to go still?

Toni Weschler: When I started in the 90s, I went through so many humiliating experiences. When I first started teaching, I think your listeners probably already know how I even learned about fertility awareness to begin with — the humiliating experience I had in a women’s clinic.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: That was a humiliating but hilarious story. Hilarious in retrospect.

Toni Weschler: Humiliation is comedy in retrospect — that’s a good way to think of it. The way I learned about it is I had been abroad for two years. When I came back home, I somehow just had this idea that I wanted to be a women’s health educator. I don’t understand where that came from. It wasn’t what I studied. It was just something that I wanted to do.

So I went to a women’s health clinic. While I was waiting, I picked up this brochure that said something about the fertility awareness method. And I remember being shocked. I could not believe that this reputable women’s clinic was teaching what I perceived as the rhythm method. So when she called me in to interview me for the women’s health educator position, I said, excuse me, can I just ask you one question before you start interviewing me? I see from this brochure that you teach the rhythm method. I’m actually kind of surprised because we all know that the rhythm method doesn’t work. So I’m wondering, why would you teach the rhythm method in this clinic that I’ve heard is really reputable?

Silence. Total silence. Awkwardness. Blood left my brain, my face. She looked at me and said, yes, Ms. Weschler — actually what we teach isn’t the rhythm method. It’s the fertility awareness method. And it would probably bode well for us to have a women’s health educator that would know the difference between the two. But thank you for coming.

She escorts me out the door. I go to my car feeling utterly humiliated. And I burst out crying. The ugly cry. I get home, I read the brochure and it’s explaining what’s the difference between the fertility awareness method and the rhythm method. And I’m looking at it going, oh my God, I want to learn this. What is this?

So I turned around. I had to call in because this was in 1988. I had to call and hope that the director didn’t answer, enroll in the class, go at night. I slithered in and tried to make myself as anonymous as possible. I sat in the back and I took that class and that was it. It just blew my mind. I came home and said, this is what I’m going to do the rest of my life. I went back to UCLA and got my master’s in public health. And the rest is history. It started with that humiliating experience.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I’ve heard you share that story before. This was meant to be because that was in the 80s. How likely would someone just walk into a clinic at that time?

Toni Weschler: Exactly. And Lisa, one of my biggest regrets in my life — I will die with this regret — I never went back to thank the woman, the teacher. I don’t even know what her last name was because I was so focused on getting in and out. I didn’t go up to her and thank her because I was afraid the director might come in. This is what humiliation does to people. It causes them to lose their mind.

To this day, it’s not me that is responsible for this information being out there in the world. Maybe that’s why I feel more humble about it. It’s the woman who taught me and she has no idea that she is responsible for this being in Turkey and Israel and Croatia and Mexico and all these places. Because this one woman in a clinic in LA — and I don’t even know her name — and I didn’t go back to thank her. I’ll go to my deathbed with that. What I wouldn’t do to thank her.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: It makes you wonder — maybe she found out. Your book did pretty well. Everyone in the fertility awareness world knew about your book. I would imagine that she might know. And that interaction sounds memorable — even on her side.

Toni Weschler: Maybe. I don’t know.

The other thing I wanted to share — before I wrote my book, I went through a lot of humiliating experiences trying to explain that this is not the rhythm method. I started trying to do in-services for OBGYNs and doctors. They would come into a room or a little auditorium. I felt like I was a snake oil salesman. I felt like they just looked at me with disdain.

My book wasn’t out yet. This was when I was just trying to get the word out because it was unacceptable that doctors were still telling women that there was not a scientifically validated and effective method of birth control. I wanted doctors who were working with women trying to get pregnant to understand that the first thing they should be doing is teaching women how to chart their cycles so they can learn a myriad of things that go on in the body.

The cycles alone can help her self-diagnose and then go to her doctor and work as a team member. You can’t blame doctors completely because they have 15 minutes. They don’t have time to go over this. Of course, they never learned it in medical school, which is a disgrace. They still don’t learn it in medical school.

But we, as women, can be empowered to work with our doctors by bringing in charts. And even if they don’t know how to read them, we tell them. The luteal phase needs to be at least 10 days in order for a pregnancy to be sustained, for implantation to occur. If a woman knew that she was having a miscarriage just by charting, the doctor wouldn’t need to do invasive tests. Back then, doctors just looked at me with a side eye, like, here’s this little MPH trying to teach us something we don’t know. The only thing that kind of changed is once my book came out. Then I think doctors started to realize — we’re getting too many of our own patients coming in asking: I noticed that I’m not producing any cervical fluid. And they’re thinking, well, you don’t need cervical fluid. Just time it on day 14 and you’ll get pregnant. So I think things are starting to change in that regard.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: This is the reason why I remain hopeful but slightly cynical. I think it just started so small — exponentially more, but exponentially from a dot.

Toni Weschler: I feel like we’re on the verge of getting mainstream. I still don’t think fertility awareness is mainstream. I feel like we’ve made huge strides, but we are not mainstream. And I think, Sabrina, you and I have talked about this — I hate the name of the title of my book, Taking Charge of Your Fertility. And I don’t like the term fertility awareness method either.

It’s not just about fertility. By definition, my book is divided into thirds: pregnancy achievement, birth control, and all sorts of women’s health issues they may experience that they can determine by charting their cycles. And they insisted on calling it Taking Charge of Your Fertility. When I first was trying to sell the book, I did something called my week from hell.

I wrote a proposal and something like 18 publishers were interested. I agreed to meet with eight of them, but I told my literary agent that I would only consider meeting with them if they were willing to let me do a little demonstration — a little mini class. I was not willing to go with any publisher that didn’t understand that I’m not looking at this as a little book. I’m looking at this as a women’s health revolution. My goal even back then was to change the face of women’s health.

The first publishers I went to — an editor and a publicist — I took out my toolkit with all of my fun stuff to show what cervical fluid looks like and what the uterus does. And I brought my chart scroll. This is 17 feet long — I put charts together as a learning tool. Anyway, they looked at me, disgusted, like: why would women even want to know this stuff? I get back to my hotel and there’s a call from my literary agent. She says, Toni, I want to give you some feedback before your next publisher. They were disgusted. And she said, you need to maybe change what you do. I thought, no, I can’t do that. This is what women need to understand.

The next morning I go to HarperCollins and I’m sobbing. It’s a good thing I don’t wear makeup. I get to HarperCollins and they’re going absolutely nuts. They’re treating me like royalty. Please come in. And all the women were in there. There was another publisher where there were probably 20 women at a long table. They brought all their women in, and one just got up and said, Toni, when I read your proposal, I wanted to pass it out to everybody in Times Square. I could not believe what I had learned. I wanted to scream from the rooftop.

As the week progressed, it got so much better. But the problem was with my title. They wanted Taking Charge of Your Fertility because they felt that the only women that would be motivated enough would be women trying to get pregnant. There was a bidding war among eight of them. And I feel like the title has been kind of an albatross. There are so many women who, if they finally get out of me what I do and I tell them I’ve written this book, will say: oh, I’ve already had my kids. I don’t need to know anything about fertility. So that’s too bad.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I just want to say — thank you for sharing that. I’ve never heard your experience with the publishers. But I love your determination and your vision. You had a very bold vision behind it. And that takes a lot of courage to go against what they’re telling you and say, no, I’m going to do a presentation. Who does that? You knew that this is not a thing because there was never a book like yours until there was a book like yours.

I want to comment also on the title because it’s so interesting — none of the listeners who are fans of yours can imagine it being titled anything else. But I also deeply understand what you’re saying as a fellow fertility awareness educator. I titled my book The Fifth Vital Sign. I had full control over that. And there are pros and cons. That was my vision because that is how I’m able to talk about it not only through the lens of fertility, but from a broader perspective. And then even with Real Food for Fertility — the nutritional strategies we’re talking about apply to anybody. But it wouldn’t sell as much if it didn’t have that title.

But I think you and I share this one vision of wanting to have a paradigm shift. By calling it The Fifth Vital Sign, you want women to know that it’s not just about heart rate and blood pressure. And for you, the paradigm shift is that women need to understand that their cycles are everything in terms of their health. If they’re not ovulating, that’s a problem. Even for women who say, well, I’m not going to have children, so why would I care? You do need to care. You need to have progesterone. There are reasons to care.

Toni Weschler: My ultimate goal is to make a paradigm shift worldwide for women to understand the reasons why your cycles are so important and what you can do to address any problems that you may have. And charting is the way you get to the destination.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Charting is the tool that we’re using for this bigger story. We’re aligned. Okay, well, there’s more that we need to talk about. It wasn’t enough for you to do the 30-year edition. You also created an app. Sabrina, I’d love to hear all about how this happened.

Sabrina Nowicki: I should just disclose for the listeners that might not know — Toni is actually my aunt. We both live in Seattle and we’re very close. When I was young, I’ll just go back a bit. A lot of aunties and uncles celebrate things like birthdays or holidays. But Toni, she was like — you got your first period, every year from now on we’re going to go to lunch and celebrate the fact that you got your period and talk about womanhood, talk about what it feels like to be in our bodies, what’s changing, what’s going on in our lives that year. That was a tradition that we started on the first-year anniversary, and we still do it to this day, every single year.

About 18 years into one of our lunches, Toni was talking about how she really wished — and she’s in this modern era where she knows everyone has a phone in their pocket and not everyone’s carrying around a binder like Toni is — she was feeling a little discouraged because she really wished she had built an app that would be like the perfect companion to the book. She talked about how she knows there are a lot of apps out there, but she can’t vouch for them because she doesn’t know how they work.

With the apps out there, there’s also some danger because they are using predictive algorithms. They’re basically like the rhythm method — taking calculations from past cycles to predict future cycles. Every woman’s cycles are different even within themselves. There was none that was like the perfect match to the way Toni teaches the fertility awareness method, which is the symptothermal method. And she was talking about this vision, and I’m sitting there thinking — wait a minute, I’m a product designer, software engineer, I have a tech background. And then my husband has a medical background and also worked in business and biotech venture capital. So he understands the business side. I just thought to myself, Toni, we actually might have the perfect team for you to bring this vision to life. This was about over three years ago now.

What we wanted to focus on — and the app is called Cyclisity — our whole mission is to make the fertility awareness method as accessible as possible to anyone who wants to learn it. It’s really, really focused on education. What I believe sets us apart from other apps out there is, first of all, it’s the perfect companion to the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility. It uses the exact same terminology. Toni talks about going from dry to sticky to creamy to egg white. We use that exact same terminology. There’s no confusion at all when you’re learning about the method and applying it in the app.

As Toni mentioned, her book is written for four audiences, so it’s quite big and thick. The app makes it really easy to use the book as a reference book. If a woman is tracking basal body temperature and cervical fluid, and one day she thinks — I’m really confident in this now and I want to learn how to measure cervical position but I don’t remember where to go in the book — the app actually points you directly to the pages and chapters so you can learn that and apply it directly in the app. There’s a synergy between the book and the app. You can think of the book as the manual for the app. There’s no other app out there that has such a comprehensive guide into the fertility awareness method.

The third thing that sets us apart is that we don’t have a predictive algorithm at all. We run the four FAM rules as taught exactly in the book so you can double-check your work. As you’re putting in your basal body temperature and cervical fluid, it will help you draw your cover line or your peak day and your fertile phases based on the inputs you put in. It’s based on a day-to-day basis, running the exact rules as taught in the book. There’s no prediction. It’s really just to be able to double-check your work and focus in on education.

The next release is going to have a feature where you click on a date and it tells you exactly what rules were running to classify that date. We’re really focused on education, making women feel really confident in charting.

One thing to note is that we’re not a medical device. We’re not providing any medical advice. It’s really just informational and educational purposes only. Our vision is just to make this as accessible as possible. All my friends — the only reason they know about fertility awareness is because of me. They have no idea. I just hope that with the book and the app together, it really helps women who want to learn at a self-paced method feel really confident in charting.

Toni Weschler: I was not a fan of apps for a long time. And most apps are terrible. A lot of them claim to be very advanced but use algorithms that look at past cycles to predict future fertility, which is absolutely unacceptable. The whole point is that the fertility awareness method — and symptothermal specifically — is as effective as it is because it treats each cycle day as unique. Is this a fertile day or not? Am I close to ovulation or not? Can sperm live in my cervical fluid or not?

I’ve written blogs about how concerned I am about this proliferation of fertility awareness apps, because I think so many of them don’t allow for the woman to input what are the really important signs. A lot of people don’t understand that cervical fluid — whether you’re trying to avoid or get pregnant — is in many ways even more important than temperature. Because the bottom line is, either sperm can live in your body or not. And your cervical fluid identifies when you’re approaching ovulation.

One of my concerns — and I cover this much more extensively in my new book — is that women using fertility awareness for birth control may think that because ovulation predictor kits are so cheap now, they can just use those instead. A lot of women may think they can use OPKs and it’ll tell them when they’re about to ovulate. Absolutely not. Sperm can live inside the woman’s body for five days. The idea of an ovulation predictor kit telling a woman she’s going to ovulate within the next 24 hours doesn’t do her any good if she has intercourse on Monday and doesn’t ovulate until Friday — because the ovulation kit wouldn’t tell her until that Thursday.

And as far as the apps themselves — this is where I get into the garbage in, garbage out mentality. If a woman isn’t educated about how to chart her signs, the apps are really worthless. Even temperatures — if a woman doesn’t understand how important it is to use a specific type of thermometer, or how important it is to leave it in for the right amount of time, or for Canadians, you go out to two decimals — it’s a whole thing in itself.

If a woman gets an app and she doesn’t really know anything about taking her temperature, and the app has a place for cervical fluid — how does a woman who just downloads an app and starts using it know what to do? Does she check internally or externally? Is it just once a day? What does each kind mean? That’s where you get into garbage in, garbage out. A woman, at a minimum, should start with either a class or a book to thoroughly understand how to chart her cycles before considering inputting into any app.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: The whole app conversation is so interesting because I am an old-school fertility awareness educator. I started charting before I even had a smartphone because they didn’t exist. I used paper. My first thing when I was in my 20s was I started making books with Excel charts and selling them to my friends. I had my little introduction to charting. All my friends knew about charting.

For a long time, I was really anti-tech. But if you can’t beat them — we’re in a new time. I think I have the same perspective. I really resonate with what you’re saying. I’m at the point now where I see different potential benefits and also downsides. One of the potential benefits, of course, with apps is that you will get more people interested. More people will find it. It’s like the gateway drug.

I totally agree with your assessment. I still have an issue with the apps that have predictor settings and the period tracker apps masquerading as fertility awareness apps. I promote TempDrop regularly on the podcast and I’m a fan, but I always explain that there are settings on there that will change the temperatures based on the algorithm. You have to know these things.

I believe that the tool should be secondary to our knowledge. If someone really legitimately is using fertility awareness for birth control, I personally think that they should have at least a few sessions with a trained educator. We’re on the same page. I love that you’ve created the app essentially to go with the book, and that it includes the educational piece because then it becomes an educational tool. I have not heard of any other apps specifically tied to that education piece where the information is within the app itself so that women aren’t just thrown random stuff.

Sabrina Nowicki: In terms of the rules we’re running, it’s really just to double-check your work. Everyone needs to know how to actually practice the method. A lot of apps have algorithms and you have no idea what they’re doing. That’s like a black box. Ours is like an open box. You literally click on the day and it tells you why, what rules were running, exactly as taught in the book, why it was classified that day. The reason we’re doing that is because we want the individual person using the app to feel like — okay, I thought the cover line should go here, but I understand now why it’s drawn here. Let me go back to the book. It says the exact same thing. We’re here to educate, not to take that agency away from the woman.

Just as an example — the thermal shift rule where you’re safe starting the third night. If it showed in the app that the woman was safe starting the third night, it would only show that she’s safe if it coincides with the cervical fluid as well. So then the person can see why. This app should only be used really in conjunction with the book so that people can go back and forth between them.

Toni Weschler: I can’t tell you how opposed I am to most apps out there because all they’ve done is given women a false sense of being able to use something without knowing anything about their bodies. And I feel resentful about a lot of the apps because when women have unplanned pregnancies with the apps, it gives a bad name to fertility awareness. It gives a bad name to what we have devoted our lives to when there’s something as insidious as apps that don’t educate women at all and expect them to just put in garbage and take out garbage. I have really strong feelings about that.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: That’s something that comes to mind as an educator who’s made this my whole career. One of the biggest challenges to this day — when I’ve done a few episodes on the podcast looking at recent research, I find it so fascinating, all these hit pieces on fertility awareness that they call research. They’re so willing to throw fertility awareness under the bus and say it doesn’t work, it’s not effective. And you will always find women who say, I was charting and then I had an unplanned pregnancy, therefore fertility awareness doesn’t work. One of the most challenging pieces is that a lot of these women never really learned how to accurately follow the rules. When we teach our practitioners, in addition to the rules, there’s a learning window of time where you need to not try to test the method before you really understand things. A lot of women are just out there with no rules, no guardrails, an app, and blaming fertility awareness.

Toni Weschler: Another thing we talked about — and I cover more of this in the book as well — is this whole idea that doctors will often say to women: just stay on the pill and when you’re ready to get pregnant, just go off and you’ll be able to get pregnant. Women’s cycles can be completely off the charts, wacko, wonky, and this can go on for months. So if a woman is just going to go off the pill and now start charting and start using the method, that’s when unplanned pregnancies happen. There’s just so much to talk about as to why education is everything. Women hear one thing and then they assume they can apply it without understanding. It’s the Wild West without education.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I’ll take that to one other level because in my world now, I find that because women’s health has become a big topic and menstruation and periods have become a big topic, there is this sub-community of women’s health educators who are a little bit more knowledgeable than the average woman about charting. I find that practitioners overestimate severely their level of knowledge. It’s one thing to chart your own cycles, but then to teach others — when you chart your own cycles, you have your own cycles as experience. When you’re in the real wild west of teaching hundreds if not thousands of women over years, you see all kinds of stuff that you were not prepared for.

Fertility awareness is legitimately its own thing. It’s a whole field. You can’t just think that you’re going to chart your cycles for a few months after reading a book and totally get everything. And the reason it’s a whole field is because our cycles are a reflection of what’s going on in our body. What happens when women get closer to perimenopause? That alone is another world that is enormous. And when women are breastfeeding and they want to get pregnant — there is so much. Women should take classes. They should read books. They should meet with fertility awareness health practitioners and not trust just their doctor. Doctors can’t possibly know a woman’s cycles better than she does, especially if they’re not even taught about fertility-based methods in med school. There are studies about how little they’re taught.

Toni Weschler: We have the evidence to back that up.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Okay, well, this has been so much fun. Such a treat. I love all the different areas we went into. I love the behind the scenes. I loved the conversation around what’s changed and the different challenges. And sadly, a lot of the challenges are similar many years later. Sabrina, I really appreciated you going through the app. Congratulations. I’m very excited for the 30th anniversary edition.

Toni Weschler: Just so they know — the 30th anniversary isn’t out yet because I’m still working on it. So much work, trying not to have a breakdown. Hopefully it’ll be at the end of this year, but I can’t promise that. So make sure your readers know it’s not out yet. Don’t be looking for it just yet. But the book and the app do go together with the book that is currently out. So those two go together. The app is already out and it works perfectly with the book that I already have out. And then we will update it once the new book is out.

Sabrina Nowicki: Part of the app that we’re really taking seriously is privacy — making sure that every woman knows that they have full control of their data, meaning we have no access to your data at all. You could either store it on your phone or in your own iCloud account. We have no access at all. The way we chose to do that is we chose to self-fund the app so that we could have full control over the company so that we can always advocate for our users. We felt this is the best way to always do what’s right by our users. But that does mean that development just takes a little longer than a company backed by a huge VC firm. Because of that, it’s only on the Apple App Store right now in the US and Canada. But we are actively working on the Android version and on getting it out to the rest of the world.

Toni Weschler: One of the big issues with apps that we did not touch on is data and privacy — how women don’t have any idea that when they’re putting their data into these apps, whatever they’re putting in those apps is fair game. As a research junkie, I love all those research studies that come out with 600,000 cycles of data from these apps. But on the other hand, you didn’t necessarily intend to be submitting data for a study you didn’t know about. It’s important, especially for women who want to preserve their data, to choose apps that specifically are not selling your data — where you know it’s secure and not being shared without your consent or your knowledge.

Sabrina Nowicki: Not only do we not have access to your data, there’s no way to sell it because we have no access to your data. And we won’t be running ads or anything like that either.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: As we wrap up today, I feel like we’ve chatted about all the different places. Just one last time — Toni, share where they can get Taking Charge of Your Fertility, the current version, and the app.

Toni Weschler: For the book, I’d like to make a little plug for people to try to get books in their local bookstore. That’s very important to me if possible. Support local anything, especially in this new world we’re living in. But you can get my book anywhere. As far as the app, Sabrina?

Sabrina Nowicki: We have our website, cyclisity.com. That’s where you could get linked to the Apple App Store. And that’s where you’ll find out information about when the Android version is ready and when it’s out to the rest of the world and any other updates we have coming up. And everybody should know — Cyclisity is specifically spelled at the end S-I-T-Y. We explicitly changed that so it didn’t look like Cycle City. We didn’t want it to look like a biking company.

Toni Weschler: It hurts my head as an author to see it spelled with an S, but it’s more important that people know that it’s about cycles and not some big store that sells bicycles.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Looking at it, it looks like a decision you made on purpose because that’s what a lot of brands do when they take a play on words. I think that works out really well, actually. And it’s much better than Cycle City.

Amazing. Well, this has been so much fun. I’m so excited to share this episode and wishing you just the very best in all of your future endeavors.

Toni Weschler: Thank you. And you as well, Lisa.

Sabrina Nowicki: Thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate it. It was really fun.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I hope that you enjoyed today’s episode. It was such a treat, such an honor to be able to reconnect with Toni. That interview was so much fun — you could tell by the conversation. It was really nice to be able to reflect on the field of fertility awareness and what has changed. It was really fun to hear about the stories behind how Taking Charge of Your Fertility came to be. It’s really mind-blowing to think about how much her book has impacted the world, not only in the fertility awareness world, but in the world in general. It is just mind-blowing to think of how many women have successfully been able to conceive because this book exists and teaches them how to identify their fertile window.

It’s really exciting and inspiring that Toni has been regularly updating her landmark best-selling book to incorporate so many of those pieces. The big thing that I talk about all the time is the menstrual cycle being the vital sign. It’s really fun that we’re aligned in that respect and that she has made such inroads to update the material to include so many of those different aspects.

As I mentioned, if you’re listening to this episode in real time, the 30th anniversary edition is still in progress. But of course, her 25th anniversary edition is still available. If you haven’t had a chance to check out Taking Charge of Your Fertility, it is definitely highly recommended. Toni has been an incredible mentor for me. She has been incredibly supportive of my work. She’s endorsed both The Fifth Vital Sign and Real Food for Fertility. In the background, she’s been somewhat of a cheerleader for me. It’s always wonderful to have an opportunity to chat with her. I hope you enjoyed our episode together today.

With that said, I hope you have a wonderful week, weekend, whenever you’re tuning into the show. And of course, until next time, be well and happy charting.