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Chart Your Cycle, Part 2, The Follicular Phase

Chart your cycle, part 2, the Follicular Phase. If you haven’t read part 1, click here. 

Hormones during menstrual cycle

The Follicular Phase

 

Your follicular phase starts on day 1 of your period and it goes until the day of ovulation. In part 1, we discussed charting your menstrual cycle, what to look for and what to chart. Following you menstrual cycle, you will want to start observing your cervical mucus. If you have never paid attention to your cervical mucus you may be thinking, Ok, what?! If that’s you, click here for a more detailed blog on cervical mucus. For this post, I’ll give the cliff notes version. 

Following our menstruation, women typically have several dry days. What does dry mean? It means when you go to the bathroom and you wipe, you don’t notice any sensation, it just feels dry- except for the urine of course. 

These dry days are present because our estrogen has not ramped up yet. 

Checking for cervical mucus 101:

If you aren’t charting, most women don’t pay attention to their cervical mucus but every woman is aware they have it. During some points in your cycle, you are going to be producing more cervical mucus than others, you may have a wet sensation during the day, you may notice more mucus in your underwear or you may even see some on your toilet paper when you use the bathroom. Before I was charting, I didn’t pay much attention to it, it actually annoyed me when I was younger because I had to prewash my underwear. Now, I know what it is and it makes so much more sense.  So how do you check for cervical mucus? Check when you go to the bathroom. When you sit down and use the bathroom, wipe- front to back- notice what sensation you feel. Is it dry? slippery? wet? Now look at your toilet paper, do you see anything? Can you pick it up and stretch it? What does it look like? Take note of all of that and write it down on your chart. 

Okay, now you know how to check for cervical mucus, let’s talk about what it means. 

Hormones

Toward the beginning of our cycle, Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH) is released from the pituitary gland in the brain and it acts on the ovaries to stimulate the follicles to grow. Each follicle contains one egg. As the follicles grow, they start producing Estrogen. Estrogen supports the secretion of cervical mucus. As Estrogen rises, we get more estrogenic mucus leading to our fertile mucus. 

 

Charting mucus

So now we know how to check for cervical mucus, we know why we see it- increased levels of Estrogen, so how do we chart it. 
After your period, you will want to take note of what you see. The dry days, note how many, note the sensation when you use the bathroom. Then once you start seeing something on your toilet paper, what does it look like? If it’s creamy like a lotion? As our estrogen rises, we begin to enter our fertile window and our mucus becomes less dense. We will start to notice it changing. Mucus changes as we get close to ovulation because it allows the sperm to survive.  
Our bodies are so amazing! Our cervical mucus changes from being inhospitable to sperm to actually nourishing sperm and keeping it alive. Sperm can survive up to 5 days inside our cervix and fallopian tubes, waiting for an egg to be released.
 We are fertile for 5-6 days during our cycle. Once you start to notice this mucus, you have entered your fertile window. As we approach ovulation, our mucus will change again and be more of an “egg white” consistency. If you notice clear, lubricative or slippery mucus, this is peak mucus and ovulation is near. 
Normally, you will have 5-6 days of fertile mucus with 2-3 days being the peak egg white mucus. 

 

Ovulation

I’ll do a short post coming up on LH test strips and what my opinion of them are and how to use them because they can help predict ovulation when you are first starting to learn to chart  

Okay, so we’ve seen the lotiony type mucus, we’ve seen the egg white so now what.

Ovulation is next. With tracking cervical mucus, you can predict the day you are going to ovulate, but you can’t confirm it unless you are using basal body temperature (BBT), read more about that here.  So we see this egg white mucus, we feel ovulation is coming. 

Some people feel ovulation when it happens, you can have some light cramps, some heaviness in your ovary-that’s usually what I feel, and some people won’t feel anything.

The biggest sign you have ovulated is that your cervical mucus dries up. The egg white mucus is no longer there and you have a dry sensation when you wipe again. 

This isn’t always the case however, sometimes our hormone levels fluctuate or some people just have more mucus that’s observable than others so the best way to confirm ovulation has occurred if by using BBT. Then you will be able to confidently have unprotected sex without the risk of pregnancy. If you’re using the fertility awareness method for pregnancy then the BBT  will confirm you have ovulated and that your fertile window has ended. 

On your chart, you can color your ovulatory window certain days so you know you observed different types of mucus or you can just write in the notes so you can see when you were fertile, how long, and the approximate time of ovulation. 

Next up, we will be talking about charting after ovulation and I’ll also do a couple posts on LH test strips and on checking cervical position also.

If you have any questions, feel free to send me an email or go to my Instagram and send me a DM!