Top 10 Fertility Awareness Lessons from 2025 | Ep. 605

Episode 605

There’s still time to join us in the next round of our fertility awareness mastery
mentorship. Classes start in January of 2026 and registration is officially open.
Apply now over at fertility friday .com slash fan live. That’s fertility friday .com
slash f -a -m -l -I -V -E. This is the Fertility Friday podcast, episode number 605.
I can hardly believe that 2025 is almost over. What an incredible year it has been.
And there’s been several important milestones for Fertility Friday this year that I
want to mention, one of which is that we’ve hit our 11th year of podcasting
officially. And we have crossed our 600th episode. We’ve had over 5 million downloads
over the years. So I think the end of the year for me is always a time of
reflection because also the end of the year was when I first started the podcast in
2014. So it is officially that anniversary point. The first episodes dropped,
I think, in December, potentially of 2014. I have to double check that. It was
either November or December. But either way, this time of year is always the
anniversary point for me where I take some time to reflect.
a moment and share my top 10 takeaways from this year. I went back and had to
look at the different episodes that we’ve been covering. I’ve released many new fam
research series episodes this year. I obviously love diving into the research and
sharing it with you. These episodes often spark discussion on the same research
papers that I’m covering on the paper within our fertility awareness mastery
mentorship. So I know that our community appreciates the focus on research. And
ultimately, when I think about the role of the podcast and how it has changed over
the years, I mean, when I first started it, the goal was to share information and
awareness so that women could learn more about charting, cycle charting, and really
understand how their bodies work. And I feel like that has been a theme throughout
the 11 years of podcasting. And what keeps me interested after all these years,
a big part of it is the research.
here.
So the first takeaway is nothing new. It’s the theme. This is like on brand, but
that your menstrual cycle is your most powerful diagnostic tool. Now, I’m sure that
there are people that might disagree that the menstrual cycle is the most powerful
diagnostic tool, but given that this has been my career for the past two decades,
I would argue that it is. And one of the reasons I I would argue that it’s the
most powerful tool is because of how unique it is, because of how personalized it
is. At the end of the day, no two women have the same menstrual cycle, let alone
the menstrual cycle chart. And there’s no other tool that I have seen that gives
you such intimate, real -time data that’s specific to you on a regular basis for
such a relatively low cost. I mean, just tracking your cervical fluid, tracking your
base of body temperature, and understanding how these signs relate to your health can
just be a complete game changer. And I’ve seen it change lives in many different
ways from just understanding better what’s actually going on. You’re no longer
gaslightable because you can clearly see. You clearly have the data from something as
simple as that to something more significant. You know, how many women that I’ve
worked with over the years who had the regular spotting or the irregular cycles or
the ridiculous PMS or the out of control period pain who were able to get a hold
of it and actually have optimal normal cycles as a result of that knowledge.
So it’s so, so powerful and the amount of women who’ve been able to identify some
underlying issue that wasn’t being addressed before and paying attention to the cycle,
the power in that just simply cannot be overstated. So I would say that that’s
certainly a takeaway. It’s always a takeaway. And the second takeaway, I would say,
is that cervical week is still outsmarts your apps and your algorithms and all of
the different predictions. It’s been really interesting this year. I’ve been putting
out different social media content. If you’re not following me on Instagram, you can
find me at Fertility Friday. But it’s been really fun to interact with people and
see how people are engaging with the content, especially when my content goes outside
of my typical audience and I get the different feedback of, is this method really
working? Is it really effective? All that kind of stuff. And so with the technical
age upon us, with AI upon us, that’s been a pretty significant shift in the past
couple of years to see just how much more engaged we are with tech, I still hold
to this, that the cervical mucus is still that number one sign. It doesn’t mean we
can’t use it alongside the tech. I mean, we can all be friends. We can all get
along. But one of the things that I’ve shared over the years is what the research
actually has to tell us. And I know this year, I’ve shared several studies that are
looking specifically at cervical mucus, that are looking specifically at apps, that
are looking at their different algorithms and all of those things. And at the end
of the day, there’s always going to be a value in tracking your fertile signs in
real time. Because you know why? The app does not know what’s in your panties,
right? The algorithm doesn’t know if you had mucus today. It just doesn’t. And so I
will still stress that your cervical mucus, we could say it outsmarts all of these
different tools. And while we can still play together in the sandbox, since the
beginning. So even before we had these really artificially intelligent apps and all
these things, I’ve always said that if you want the best outcomes, even if you love
tech and you want to engage with it, you’re going to get the best outcomes when
you have a really solid foundation of knowledge. With that as your basis, then you
can use any app and the app won’t outsmart you, right? You need to be smarter. So
you actually need to get a hold of your data. My third takeaway is that ovulation
isn’t optional. And I mean, this has been essentially my message throughout the many
years. But from my perspective, it’s not optional. It’s actually foundational for
lifelong health when you are a female, when you’re in a female body, when you’ve
been equipped with this hardware. Ovulation, when we disrupt it, when we suppress it,
whether it’s intentionally with hormones or unintentionally with some of our practices
like under -eating and over -exercise or something like that, it really does disrupt
our health. And so this is the whole reason why we can track our cycle and use it
as a vital sign because it is actually this foundational piece of women who are in
reproductive age. Like when we are in that reproductive age range, ovulation is a
part of the picture. It is not an optional add -on. It is not a cool feature. It’s
really central. And when we look at what the research has to show, the hormones are
not just so that we can have children. The hormones are impacting all of the
various aspects of our life, right? They’re impacting our energy. They’re impacting
even our stress levels, impact our insulin response. I mean, all of these hormones
are specifically acting together in unison, affecting our moods, affecting how we
process and absorb nutrients. It’s just incredible when you get into the weeds and
see how deeply our bodies are impacted by estrogen and progesterone and testosterone
and cortisol and all of these different hormones. So yeah, ovulation isn’t optimal.
We could talk about the effects that these hormones have on our bone density. We
can talk about the effects that these hormones have on our metabolism, on our
cardiovascular function, we could talk all day, really. But the bottom line is that
healthy ovulation sets the stage for a healthy body. And then on that foundation,
we can certainly look to fertility as an additional sign of health. So the fourth
takeaway, of course, it has to make a little show here. Hormonal birth control. I
spend a lot of time talking about birth control because they feel like birth control
gives us the research evidence -based kind of data.
health. Well, let’s just find out what happens when we shut them off, right? And we
talk a lot about hormonal birth control on the podcast. I’ve written a lot about it
in my books. Fortunately, we have a ton of research on it. And even last week, we
talked about the scary study about the impact that hormonal birth control has on
clitoral size and volume, right? So we know that hormonal birth control has
measurable effects on libido, on our vulvar tissues, on our reproductive organs,
on sexual function, on fertility, potential.
They impact our sex drive. They impact our mood. They impact how we process
synthesize our nutrients, nutrients like our B vitamins. And we know that it has a
measurable impact on fertility. So I would say that continues to be an important
piece of the conversation. One thing I’ll say is that it was a lot more
controversial to talk about hormonal contraceptives when I first started. I feel like
when I first of the podcast back in 2014. When you talked about the pill, people
used to come at you and you know, you’re anti -feminist and you’re going to make it
so that we’re not going to have access to the pill. And like, I used to get a
lot more flag from talking about birth control. So what I think is interesting is
that I think generally speaking, it’s just become because of the voices out there
talking about the side effects, people can’t just deny them anymore and pretend like
we shouldn’t be talking about it. So I do feel like we’ve made progress. But I
would say one of the themes that has come up this year because of the different
research that I’ve been seeing more of is certainly this kind of hyper response of
the drug companies and then therefore also the research that has been coming out.
So while there’s been certainly an improvement in the awareness of side effects
related to hormonal contraception, I think that voices like myself and others who’ve
been putting out this information, more and more women have been bringing these
questions to their physicians and their practitioners. So this has become more of a
conversation. But at the same time, what has been happening is that now the medical
establishment is starting to get a little bit nervous. And so they’ve been putting
more controls on, okay, what are people talking about on social media? What are
people talking about on the internet. And so they’re trying to take back the
conversation and take control of it again. So we are in an interesting time as far
as this conversation goes about hormonal contraceptives. I feel like when I first
started, I was more free. So how do I explain this? I don’t think I was more or
less free to talk about it, but I would say the information itself was more freely
disseminated. there was no real systematic social media or internet control mechanism
to kind of collectively suppress this information. So it wasn’t hard to find.
So women who were looking for this information could just find it. I think that’s
one of the big differences between then and now. I think now way more people are
talking about it. But it’s ironically harder to find the information because because
now the social media giants and the internet companies are collectively suppressing
these voices. So that is something I’ve been talking about a lot more. I would say
2025 was kind of what I started to see this trend of these types of papers coming
out. Ooh, look at these women talking about PCOS on TikTok. Ooh, why are women
talking about birth control on social media? And they’re kind of trying to do these
damage control campaigns because the word is getting out. And ironically, I don’t
think they’re making less money. So they’re so scared that women are going to be
talking about it. But at the end of the day, just because women are empowered with
the knowledge and understanding of birth control, doesn’t mean that all women on
earth are going to stop using it. I don’t think the pharmaceutical companies are in
danger of not making money anymore. I just think that it’s important as women for
us to be aware of the side effects and to be able to freely talk about it and to
make choices. And if that means that more women are going to choose fertility -aware
to space methods, so be it.
Registration is officially open for our next round of our fertility awareness mastery
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.com slash f -a -m -m -l -I -V -E. Okay,
so that brings me to number five. I think a theme that has always come up, but I
do recognize that I’ve been talking more about some of these changes, especially in
2025, is this whole thing with under -eating, stress, all of this stuff.
Ultimately, when women start charting their cycles, you start to see clear.
One example that I shared on the podcast was one of our practitioners had a client
whose cycles were right around that 29 -day average. And so she just assumed that
the client just assumed that she was ovulating around day 14, right? That’s what
would make logical sense. But when she actually started tracking her cycles, her
ovulation was taking place closer to cycle day 21. And that would mean that her
ludial phases were closer to like nine days. And that is something that she wouldn’t
have understood from charting. So when we start paying attention to our cycles, we
really start to see what’s going on. And there’s certainly a theme that I’ve seen
emerge more and more over the past several years. And especially for women who are
kind of in my age category, when we get over age 35 and we’re kind of moving into
our early 40s and it becomes easier to gain weight. And we start to have some of
the changes as our body is shifting ultimately towards our final period. Now, I’m
not saying that we’re immediately in perimenopause or that perimenopause is an
illness. That’s a whole other conversation.
shows you how your body is actually responding to what you’re doing. And so one of
the themes that has arisen, I would say in 2025, both on the podcast, so on air
and also in the background, because I spend most of my time not podcasting.
Actually, I do this podcast, but I spend most of my time working with our
practitioners. And so the themes that arise are simply that when you start charting,
you actually see the reality of what’s going on and how your body’s responding. It
gives you the opportunity to see where could I improve and what could I do better.
voted an entire chapter. And let me tell you, we went back and forth so much on
that chapter because we really wanted to dial in what we were talking about.
We really wanted to have the research to support. So if you have found yourself
somewhere on what we call the HA spectrum, the hypothalamic amenorrhea spectrum, we
define it in real food for fertility. And we argue that you can be on the spectrum
even if you’re still having a period. So some women are underfueling to the point
that they don’t have a period anymore. But other women, they used to not have one
and now they have one again, but we’re still not in the optimal range because we’re
still having short ludial phase. We’re still having significant PMS issues. We’re
still having maybe some premenstrual spotting. We’re still having maybe a delayed
ovulation. We’re still having some ovulatory disruption because we haven’t quite found
that sweet spot. And that’s where charting comes in because we can think whatever we
want, but the chart is actually what is going to show you what’s really going on.
As we say in real food for fertility, the cycle isn’t lie. So the sixth takeaway I
wanted to share is always, like I said, these are themes that are ever present. But
we can’t stress the importance. I can’t stress really the importance more of accurate
timing. So for women who are trying to conceive, it’s nuance. There’s a lot that we
can talk about. When it comes to conception, there’s a lot of different moving
parts. And of course, we cover so many of them on the podcast. We talk about egg
quality. We talk about AMH. We’ve talked about that quite a bit. But I think one
of the core foundational pieces, of course, from this perspective of charting, is
really understanding the importance of getting the timing right. And what’s interesting
is that I think we can really take that for granted. So if you have been, for
example, a long -time listener of the show and you’ve charted your own cycles for a
while, I think it’s easy sometimes to forget the fundamentals and the basics. And
this is something that comes up a lot with our practitioners. At the very beginning
of the program, many of our practitioners do have charting experience, but not all
do, because that’s not a requirement to join our fan program. So we do have always
a handful of practitioners who are charting for the first time. And so once you get
the hang of it and you get several cycles under your belt, I think it’s easy to
forget how important it is to stress those basics. You can just assume people know
when to time sex accurately or assume that when your client tells you that they’re
doing that, that’s really what’s happening. But really and truly, that is not always
the case. And this is again, where charting is really important. It’s important for
us to have those conversations and get a general understanding of what’s happening
based on what our clients are telling us, but it’s even more important to have them
put it down on their chart and verify that what’s happening is already happening.
Over the course of my career, I’ve seen so many interesting things from clients who
are actively trying to conceive, but aren’t even having sex in the window, to
clients who are having sex, but maybe only once or twice per cycle due to a lot
of different reasons. And maybe they’re just doing it on day 14, right? So there’s
a lot of, and if anyone’s newer to the podcast, ovulation doesn’t always happen on
day 14. So there’s plenty of clients who were doing that, but maybe they ovulated
on day 12 already. So that’s not helping, right? So the timing is important. The
basics are important. And they build the foundation. So timing is not the whole
picture. There’s so much more to the picture of conception. But without accurate
timing, you don’t have anything because pregnancy is only possible when the sex
occurs during the window. Otherwise, pregnancy is not possible. And that’s why we can
use fertility awareness for birth control. So on that topic, I always give a call
out to male fertility. So that’s going to be my point number seven. Male fertility
is half of the equation. Like I guess I’m just going to keep on this. Like it’s
another one of those hills that I’m just dying on. But while I think it’s important
for us to focus on female fertility, and we do that actually most of the time, I
do think, especially after years of working with clients who are trying to conceive,
it just changes your brain when you are working with women who are charting their
cycle and you see when they’re having sex and you see that they’re having sex at
the right time. You see it. You understand the biology. You understand the science.
They’re doing it over and over again at the right time. And nothing is happening.
At some point, you have to ask, what is going on with the sperm? So this is a
huge piece that I will continue to draw attention to. And the reason that I draw
attention to is just because of my experience. It’s obviously not the whole issue.
About 30 % of the time, male fertility is a sole cause of infertility issues if
there’s an issue on his side. But 50 % of the time, it’s a contributing factor. So
when, you know, you’re working with clients who are trying to conceive and it’s not
happening, yes, we want to be focusing on her. We want her to charter cycles. We
want to figure out what’s going on. We want to identify any hormonal imbalances and
apply any related protocols and all of the things. But we also have to look at him
because we have some interesting research coming out. And one of the studies I’m
going to be sharing in the next few weeks is a study that literally is linking his
sperm quality to your chance of miscarriage. And so we really have to have a
conversation about male sperm if we’re going to look at fertility that picture as a
whole. And I would also say this is one of the reasons that many practitioners jump
in and join us in our fertility awareness mastery programs because ultimately many of
our practitioners have a lot of knowledge but haven’t necessarily had the opportunity
to specialize in fertility in particular. So that’s something to consider as well.
Did you know that you can listen to Real Food for Fertility for free with your 30
-day trial of Audible? Head over to fertility friday .com slash real food to listen
That’s fertility friday .com slash real food.
Now, a big theme on the podcast, of course, in the 2025 year is the importance of
overall psycholiteracy in women’s health care. And the more that I do this work,
the more that I work with clients and practitioners. And then through our
practitioners, all of our interns are doing practicum. So we really see a gamut of
experience here. There is just a huge missing piece in our health care system
without this aspect of charting that is so personalized, without the ability to
actually have these conversations with your clients to actually see in real time how
their cycles are unfolding and see how that relates to their habits, their nutrition,
just all of the different pieces that play a role in maintaining cycle health and
hormone balance, this piece is not there. So for anybody who thinks, how important
could this really be, how could cycle charting make such a difference? It’s
incredible what happens when we start paying attention. And I would say part of the
reason that it resonates so much with me and my science mind of brain is because
every cycle is you’re gathering very specific, nuanced data about your client.
And it’ll
your kind of protocols and what you think should be working to what is actually
working for this client right now. And you don’t have to guess and wonder because
you can actually see how it plays out. So if you’re working with a client and you
see that there’s an issue in their cycle and you have a protocol that you feel
like is going to help them, what you find when you incorporate the charting is
that, yes, some clients are going to respond to that protocol right away and you’ll
start to see the shifts in their cycle and others don’t necessarily respond in the
same way. So in real time, you’re able to adjust and really provide
time and we take it seriously. This is something that is not common. If you’re a
practitioner, just have a conversation with your next five clients. Just ask them if
they’ve ever had a negative experience with a clinician. Just ask them if they’ve
ever gone to a practitioner with menstrual cycle issues and what the outcome was of
that. Just ask. Because I know that whenever I ask, I hear variations of the same
story. So All this is to say that this is a huge missing piece. Women are
underserved. We know this. So what do we do about it, right? And instead of just
talking, the charting allows us to have a very personalized, specialized tool,
a data point that is not really being paying attention to. And, I mean, maybe I’ll
have to do a podcast on the top 10 specific ways that it’s being addressed. But I
can tell you, every time we have a class, there’s just another example of it,
whether it’s that your client was given progesterone and no direction of when to
take it. So now she’s on it and she probably hasn’t ovulated for like three months
because she’s taking it on day 14 and she’s not like, right? So she has not
ovulated yet and so therefore it’s suppressing ovulation and she’s wondering what’s
going on. Like whether it’s that she was told that she’s not ovulating because she
was told to take a day 21 progesterone test, but she didn’t ovulate until day 23.
Like, whatever. It’s constant. It’s all the time. This lack of cycle knowledge is
making a tangible negative difference in women’s experience. And when we are dealing
with women who are really struggling with whatever issue they’re having, whether it’s
fertility related, hormone related, cycle related, pain related, whatever the case is,
we need to have the tools to be able to support them. So I would say that’s a
huge theme, that’s been a huge theme for me, and I feel like it’s growing because
the more and more that I am in the weeds working with our practitioners, helping
them to support their clients, it just becomes more and more obvious and prevalent
that this is a whole that’s not being filled by our conventional medical healthcare
system. Okay, so to switch gears a little bit then, my ninth takeaway is
perimenopause. So while we didn’t go into perimenopause a ton this year, I would
just say stay tuned. It is a topic that’s interesting to me. I recently turned 43,
so I am certainly not there. I’m not there, but I’m on the precipice, as they
would say. And for anyone who’s been following for a long time, I don’t just like
to say stuff because I think it’s interesting. I like to see what the research has
to say. I like to share my client experience, real world experience. So I like to
root whatever I say in what’s actually going on, whether that’s the scientific
evidence or whether it’s clinical experience. And so I have a lot of different
thoughts about perimenopause and how our culture is looking at it, capitalizing on
it, monetizing it. I certainly have a lot of thoughts on that. But what we’ve
actually covered this year when we’ve looked at the data, I’ve really focused on how
it plays out in the cycle. So at this stage, I haven’t gone into all the weeds
about all the things, but we have looked at how it plays out in the menstrual
cycle. And there was a really interesting recent paper that I talked about in one
of our episodes this year that looked at the cycle length variation and how it
shifted. And so it looked at this massive data set and it looked at the 10 years
before menopause and really looked at how the cycles are shifting and changing. Now,
what we found when we are supporting our practitioners because, of course, we have a
perimenopause unit in the program and we support our practitioners to be able to
work with women in that stage. We look at how the cycle is shifting. We look at
some of the changes, what the research has to say about that. And ultimately, we
can help to prepare ourselves and our clients for what to expect and anticipate.
What is normal in terms of the cycle during that time. And one thought that I’ll
leave you with is that we’re in a really interesting time where perimenopause just
seems to be the buzzword. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it seems, just
everyone’s talking about it and everyone has a thought. And we’re identifying 150
symptoms that we’re calling perimenopause, as if perimenopause itself is a disease.
And any woman who is over 35 that has any one of those symptoms is automatically
like diagnosed with perimenopause and then we’re kind of moving into all of that. So
one thing I’ll just say and a thought that I’ll leave you with is with cycle
charting and understanding how cycles do shift and change and understanding that this
is a phase. It is a transition phase. We’re transitioning from cycling to non
-cycling over a period of about 10 years. And It is a transition phase. It is not
necessarily an illness. So one thing I will say is that when you understand your
body and you chart your cycles and you understand historically what has been normal
for you. So for those of you who are listening, who have actually charted your
cycles for a period of time, whether that’s six months a year or several years, or
like in my case, like 20 plus years, you then can adjust a little bit easier when
you start to see shifts and changes. And one thing that I will be
and I’m just going to go back to the first thing. I said, your menstrual cycle is
your most powerful diagnostic tool. That was my first takeaway. Now, I’m not of the
opinion that the menstrual cycle is supposed to be highly problematic. I have always
been of the opinion that your menstrual cycle is your fifth vital sign. And if it
is acting crazy, if it’s going haywire, if all this stuff is going on, then it’s a
sign that we need to be looking deeper at underlying issues. So I’ve seen many
clients in these perimenopause ages who have been able to restore maybe not 100 % of
optimal menstrual function, but certainly been able to restore 80 to 90 % of normal
menstrual function, despite the fact that they’re in this age category by just paying
attention and really looking at what is your body saying and applying some of our
different protocols. So I think like with most things, there’s going to become a
need for alternative voices on this.
all I can say is that as we get older, we do see certain changes. I certainly
think that we have less leeway. If we’re trying to abuse our bodies like we did in
our 20s and not sleep but not eat properly and all the things, we’re going to see
much worse symptoms. But again, I don’t think that as soon as we turn 35 or 40 or
45 that all of a sudden everything we’ve learned about the cycle goes out the
window. I think that we can apply a lot of what we’ve learned to improve our
experience as we move into those older ages. So to be continued on the perimenopause
conversation. Okay. So my last takeaway just ties into everything that we’ve talked
about. Your symptoms ultimately are your body’s way of telling you that something is
going on. Ultimately, that has been the theme. That’s a theme of 2025, but that’s
also the theme of 11 years of podcasting. We really need to learn how to pay
attention to our bodies. And I don’t necessarily means
literally track how many days your period usually is, how much bleeding you typically
have, how long it takes you from the first day of your period to ovulation, you
can track how many days of cervical fluids you have, and you can track your luteal
phase, and you can track your symptoms, you can track any symptoms that you
typically have around ovulation, you can track any symptoms that you typically have
before your next period, you can track all kinds of things. And for me, this isn’t
just about looking at one individual cycle and as if it’s a crystal ball and to be
able to just tell you everything. That is part of it, but not the crystal ball
thing, but looking at one individual cycle thing. But, you know, the bigger learning
here, the bigger aspect that I always love sharing with our practitioners that I’ve
loved sharing on the podcast is getting a sense of what is normal for you, getting
a sense of what your limitations are. If anything over the years for me personally,
my cycle has been like a teacher. And it’s not a biased teacher. It is objective
because it really is your body just sending you symptoms and signs. And so when I
personally have had stressful situations, and let me tell you, the past few years
have had their share of different stressful situations. It’s always an opportunity for
me to pay attention to what my body is saying. So even I was sharing this on one
of our calls, but, you know, there was a period of time in 2024 where my sleep
shifted. And so I’m like 41, 42, and I’ve never had any trouble falling asleep or
anything like that. I still didn’t. But there was a period of time I was waking up
after six hours. So it was like there was this period of time that all of a
sudden I was waking up after six hours. And what’s interesting is that if you start
looking that up and you start going down the perimenopause situation, then all of a
sudden, oh my goodness, I’m in my 40s. It must be perimen. I must have this
illness, right? I must have this disease that they call paramount. But then when I
took a step back and just applied our protocols and looked at the whole situation,
it was a very, very, very stressful time. I believe it was around the time that
Lily and I had released Real Food for Fertility. My daughter was quite small at
that time. She must have been about two or maybe not even two yet, but yeah, I
don’t think she was too yet. So she was still very, very young. My mom had been
sick. And so there’s all these things that were going on and I was traveling a
lot. And then looking at historically what my cycles had been like and what my
sleep had been like, looking at the actual data. So instead of kind of going crazy
on the internet. I just analyzing the data and knowing everything I know applied
some of those principles to the situation. And within a few weeks, I was able to
figure it out. And so this could have gone one of two ways. I could have decided
that it was perimenopause and that I had this newfound illness and all of those
things. But instead, I was able to really pay attention. And I guess the point that
I’m making isn’t that it’s always going to be easy for anybody to figure this stuff
out. But I suppose the point that I’m making is that charting gives you the ability
to learn to speak the language of your body. And if you are charting and paying
attention and you are also making different changes and paying attention to how your
body is responding to those different changes, then it becomes a much more
personalized route to the point that your body, if you are listening to it and
you’re open to the messages, even when sometimes they contradict what you think
should be going on, or you might think, I’m doing everything right and my body,
there’s something wrong with my body. If you actually are open enough to hear the
messages that your body is sharing with you, it gives you an opportunity to filter
out all the noise, to filter out what everybody’s saying and really ask what is
best for me. And not in the sense of I think I know in my mind what is best for
me, but when you see how whatever you’re doing is reflected in your actual data,
it gives you the ability to cut through even some of your own preconceived notions
and literally determine what is best for your body. What is it that I need to do
to get my cycle to be in those normal parameters? And if your cycle falls out of
those normal parameters, what you’ve experienced over all these years, you start to
learn your limits and you start to pay attention. And I would say that is one of
the most powerful messages. And it’s not always the easiest for me to describe in
words. I think it’s easier for me to work with clients and have them chart and
have them experience that. So I sometimes struggle to share in the best,
most wonderful language on the podcast, this experience, because that’s really what it
is. So behind the scenes, what happens with our clients is that they’re getting to
see this in real time. And not only that, but they’re able to see this play out
with their clients as well. Because sometimes we think, oh, you know, this is normal
for me or that thing won’t work or I’m already doing this but then you’re seeing
your cycle like not be optimal just like time and like cycle and cycle and cycle
after cycle you’re seeing like but my luteal phase is still like 10 days but it’s
like but I’m doing everything right but my and so what this process does is it
kind of cuts through whatever you think in your mind and shows you what your body
actually needs so just to kind of iterate I’ll just kind of briefly go through my
list of takeaways, and then we will wrap up here. Your menstrual cycle is your most
powerful diagnostic tool. Cervical mucous is still smarter than all the apps and
algorithms. Ovalation is not optional. It’s actually a foundational piece of overall
health. Hormonal birth control, man, what a wild ride. But I guess my summary on
that point is that it does have significant impacts. And also, I suppose,
The tide is turning about it. We seem to have made an impact. We just being the
voices that have been talking about the side effects, but there does seem to be
kind of like this countermeasure that’s trying to reduce the power of our voices
around it, I guess you could say. There does seem to be some backlash from the
tech giants to try to kind of suppress some of those thoughts on hormonal birth
control.
Underfueling stress and overtraining are really significant drivers of cycle disrupt.
My number eight was that cycle literacy is the missing skill in women’s health care.
There’s a huge hole there. And until we fill it, what I keep seeing is that women
are being underserved. Number nine, I teased the perimenopause a little bit. So like
I said, to be announced, I’ll have certainly more to say about that in coming
years. But for now, I think that it’s really helpful to focus on what the data has
to say about what is really happening in this transition phase and how can we
prepare our clients for the cycle changes and other changes that are.
needed to be, but that our symptoms are really our body’s way of telling us
something. And when we learn to pay attention to those, it can be one of the most
empowering tools for us to learn what is necessary for our own optimal health.
With so many voices out there, if you ask 100 different people what a healthy diet
is, they’re going to tell you 100 different things. So charting allows you to cut
through all of that and see what’s actually going to work for you.
So I hope that you enjoyed this takeaway, throw down summary of some of my ideas
in 2025. I wanted to put this together for you. I guess just to kind of go over
some of the main themes. I mean, that’s just how my brain works. I like to kind
of summarize things and create systems and takeaways and lists. But I hope that you
took something out of today’s episode. And if you can think of someone who would
benefit from hearing today’s episode, feel free to share it. You’ll find the link to
share fertility friday .com slash 605. And you can, of course, use that link to
share as well. If you enjoyed today’s episode, find me on social media at Fertility
Friday. Take me, send me a DM. I’d love to hear from you. So at that said, I
hope you have a wonderful week weekend whenever you’re tuning into the show. I hope
that you had a very enjoyable and prosperous 2025. I wish you a very Merry
Christmas. If you celebrate Christmas, happy holidays, if you do not. And I also
wish you a very blessed and prosperous new year in 26. So I hope that you have a
wonderful holiday season. And as always, until next time, be well and happy charting.
And that’s a wrap. If you’ve been loving the podcast and you’ve been thinking about
ways to incorporate fertility awareness into your women’s health practice, then I know
you’ll love our fertility awareness mastery mentorship certification program. It’s a
nine -month immersive experience that will completely transform the way that you work
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practitioners have to share about their experience in the program. The FAM program is
so much more comprehensive in terms of menstrual cycle health, hormone health,
and menstrual cycle foundations, charting for diagnostic reasons, chatting for health
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physiology and nutrition, supplementation, protocols,
the previous programs I didn’t touch on that at all. So this was a much more
comprehensive insight. Working with clients who were really struggling with their
cycles, that was a massive difference that I was actually working with. For instance,
someone whose periods were missing for months and we were able to work together with
this protocol to bring that back. Transform your practice in nine months. Head over
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Thank you.