If you have ever been “trying” for a baby, and sometimes for those of you know are trying to avoid pregnancy you may have heard about “Charting”, “Basal Body Temperature” or “BBT-ing”.
There are so many ways to check when you are most fertile, including cervix position, cervical mucus, and peeing on ovulation sticks! Remember when you were younger and were told about being careful because you’d get pregnant…? Yeah, they didn’t tell you about all this instead did they?
So, after I had my laparoscopy in Feb or my Endometriosis, I decided that I was going to start charting, and peeing on ovulation sticks – to see if I was “working” as I should be for going back to the clinic.
And then Coronavirus hit and the clinic was suspended. However, I did keep on charting so I had that information, visually for my clinic.
So what is Basal Body Temperature (BBT) Charting really?
Your BBT is your temperature when you are at complete rest, ideally after you’ve had a minimum of 3 hours sleep and before you get up and do anything else.
I take my temperature every day, within a certain 1-hour window before I do anything. No getting up, no sitting up, no moving around. I wake up, I check the time, I grab the thermometer and snooze until my temperature starts beeping that its recorded my temperature. Because I’ve been doing it for a few months now, I tend to wake up within my 1-hour window without an alarm. But at first I was setting an alarm as it was slightly earlier than I naturally woke up – now its not a problem.
Your temperature overall will be lower before ovulation and higher after ovulation. This is due to how your hormones work with your body.
I looked on amazon and found the femometer which is a specific BBT thermometer but has an app too – you don’t need one of these you can use a normal thermometer that ideally measures your temperature to 2 decimal places because your flutuation changes can be so tiny such as 36.71 rather than 36.7
Charting your temperatures for one month won’t show you any trends, you really need to track it for a few months before you start seeing your own personal trends.
I am in no way an expert!
There are things that can cause “wobbles” in your BBT, such as insomnia, stress, emotional upset, drinking alcohol to name a few! But overall you will start to see patterns.
I have 26-29 day cycles and in general my temp has a big drop 1-2 days before ovulation then I have my temperature spike to show that its happened and then approximately 9-11 days after ovulation my temperature will start to decrease, and then my period will begin.
I do find it really interesting – and if you had told me 6 months ago this is something that I would be doing on a regular basis, I wouldn’t have thought it was true! ha!
Do you chart?
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