Period Heath - Tracking

Cycle or Period Health can be a very overwhelming thing. If you start trying to look for info on the internet or instagram, you can easily be told “use your BBT to track your follicular and luteal stages” with the letters GnRH , FSH and LH flying about.

Well what the hell is that? And if I don’t want a baby, now or maybe ever, why do I even care?

So I wanted to come back to basics, try and make a resource to make period health accessible, and educate on why period health is important. Throughout April I will be discussing Period Health, both here and on my instagram. To start with, how to start tracking your period and why period health is for everybody, not just those trying to conceive. All the things I mention under tracking your period are things I will ask you about in our consultation - even if you’re not in for anything cycle related.

Tracking

If you want to start paying more attention to your period health, tracking your period is the first thing you need to do, and not just the dates. Unless you’ve tracked your period for a few months, you may not know how things can be improved. You can track the cycle on your phone calendar or download an app for tracking the period. My personal fav is Clue, but there is a few to choose from. None of the tracking I discuss will include Basal Body Temperature, a way of tracking the period using a thermometer. I’m also not discussing the different biological phases in the cycle, but I’ll touch on this in the next post. Remember this post is about going back to basis, or possibly, starting from scratch.

The Numbers

Day one = first day of bleed.

This is something people can often get confused over, but Day 1 of your cycle is your first day of bleeding.

Your cycle is now as many days as it takes to bleed again. Also note how many days the bleed lasts.

An ideal cycle length is around 28 days. When a cycle is 28 days, this shows that all phases in the cycle are lasting the right amount of time.

The Bleed

Knowing how many days we bleed for is important, but there are other things we should be observing and recording with the bleed. a typical 28 day cycle would have a bleed of 4 days.

Firstly, how heavy the bleeding is and how this changes. How often do you have to change your sanitary product? This is something I often ask patients as a way of deducing the flow of blood.

What’s the colour like? Period blood can vary in colour from very pale pink to a very dark brown or black and everything in between. The colour may also change across the bleed, so just have a little look and see.

Now, when I ask about the clots in the blood, I almost always get a funny look. But it really does matter. Some people will have none, others can have pretty large clots that can be painful to pass.

Ovulation

Ovulation is one that I think confuses a lot of people. It is also something many non fertility patients I see just don’t know about. Ovulation usually occurs mid-cycle (around day 14). This is when we are most fertile, and why those trying to conceive often track ovulation. But even when not wanting to concieve, knowing roughly when we ovulate can be very helpful.

Ovulation can be tricky to notice, as for most people the symptoms are subtle or even not there. But if you know what they are, you have a much better chance of spotting it.

-Increased vaginal discharge, it will be watery, and stretchy, a bit like raw egg whites. (This is probably the most universal and obvious symptom)

-Pain on one side of the lower abdomen. This will be over the ovary that is ovulating. (We have two ovaries, one on each side, but only one side releases an egg each month

-Increase in sex drive

-Breast tenderness

Pain

The first thing to say about period pains - they are NOT normal! We are taught that period pains are a part of life, and something women must simply endure each month nice and quietly. Wrong. In Chinese Medicine, any pain of any kind cannot be normal.

So things to note about the pain you experience:

-When. what days of the cycle do you experience pain, whether that is before, during or after the bleed?

-How much. How bad is the pain on each day. A little rating out of 10 will do the trick.

-Where. Where abouts do you feel the pain? Lower abdomen, lower back, thighs?

PMS - pre menstrual symptoms

PMS is a very broad term, it can refer to anything from headaches to bloating to irritability to crying. Basically, PMS is any symptom you get just before the period that lets you know, your bleed is coming. Note what symptoms, but also the severity. PMS, similarly to pain, is not something normal, especially for those women for whom this is very severe.

Other symptoms

There are other symptoms you might not think relate to the cycle, but really they do. I’ll name a few but really anything that happens cyclically, in a similar time frame to the cycle, is most likely linked.

-Appetite. This can change drastically up and down throughout the cycle

- Energy levels. Some patients can experience mild to severe fatigue in relation to their bleed

- Mood.

-Headaches

-Digestion. This covers everything from bloating to bowel movements.

Why does period health matter?

1. Ok, so lets start with the obvious - babies! The better our period health, the higher our chances of conceiving a baby naturally. In Chinese Medicine, we also believe that we should conceive a baby when at optimum health, to ensure the healthiest foetus possible. Therefore the advice given is that before we start trying to conceive, we regulate and improve our cycle. This can take a while to do, so if you are not thinking about pregnancy yet, but think you will in the future, get ahead of the game. So that when you decide you want a baby, you can start trying right away.

2. But its not all about babies! Not all of us want to carry a child but that doesn’t mean we should ignore our period health. What happens with our period is a great insight into the working of the body. It is a resource we can use to see imbalances occurring within the body. By working with the period to improve it this will have a knock on effect to the whole body. If we manage to cause changes to the cycle, we are causing changes to our internal energies.

3. Last but not least, because all women deserve to have pain free, predictable cycles that don’t cause dread. If you’re in pain, or have an erratic bleed, or a super heavy bleed, or no bleed, or PMS the chances are, you’d rather that wasn’t the case, or further still you long for it to be different. Well it can! And the first step towards that is tracking your period and learning what is happening to your body.

Later this month I will be talking about how we can improve our period health, and a bit more of the meanings behind tracking and hopefully continuing to answer some of your questions about the topic. If you have any questions, or want to discuss your period health, then just drop me an email.