Cycle Science
Learning to become aware.
It all begins in the brain. Where your hypothalamus and pituitary glands tell your ovaries to begin the process of ovulation. Fertility awareness is a window into this monthly hormonal dance.
Fertility awareness is a secular, scientific method of determining the small window in which a person is fertile each menstrual cycle. It involves charting daily changes to the body on a graph, which gives us a window into our fertility, our hormones, and our health.
It’s all about ovulation.
Menstruation gets all the fame, but the most important hormonal event of every cycle is actually ovulation.
Ovulating every cycle is how we make our hormones estrogen and progesterone, and this gives us long term health benefits, including bone, cardiovascular, and brain health.
Fertility awareness charting.
The fertility awareness graph may look intimidating at first, so let’s break it down. There are two graphs in a FAM chart - a bar graph + a line graph. Each tells us valuable information about our fertility and our hormones. In fertility awareness methods, we observe rules to determine the beginning and the end of the fertile window.
Cycling to your advantage.
Once you begin to understand your menstrual cycle through fertility awareness, you can make the best decisions for your diet, exercise regimens, schedule, and lifestyle.
Transitioning & Optimizing.
I can help guide you in your transition to a healthier you. We start from where you are and gradually build up your fertility awareness skills. We use information from the charts to tell us which parts of the body we need to target, and how to stay on track with a health regimen that works for you.
History of Body Literacy Movement
The Founders
Body literacy was created in 2005 by menstrual health activists Laura Wershler, Geraldine Matus, and Megan Lalonde. The term means that understanding your menstrual cycle is a key to making fully participatory, informed decisions about your health. We are forever grateful to these leaders for building more information about our specific needs, flows, endocrinology, and biochemistry.
Contributors
All kinds of people connect with and have advanced the work of body literacy. Geraldine Matus, Laura Werschler, Chris Bobel, Jerilynn Prior, Sarah Hill, Holly Grigg-Spall, Alisa Vitti, Maya Dusenbury, Lara Briden, Harriet Washington, Dorothy Roberts, Lisa Hendrickson Jack, Toni Weschler, Lara Owen, Emily Varnum, and many others. We celebrate you, and thank you for paving the way for a new generation to learn and love their bodies.