How can I monitor my ovulation naturally?

What some of us may not know as women is when is the day of the start of our cycle and this is very common. Some people assume that the first day of their cycle is when they finish their period, in actual fact, the first day of our cycle of ovulation is right on the first day we have a first full flow of our period so, that’s the day one and therefore, from there on, you can monitor and depending on how long your cycle is whether you get your period every 28 days, 30 days or it can be even less then, you can kind of maintain a diary where you can see where the midline of your cycle or day 12 or 14 is. Some women have ovulation around earlier between the 10th to 14th day of their cycle, some patients may have actually ovulated a bit later on. So there are kits available that you can purchase perhaps from pharmacies where they can monitor your cycle, especially if there is irregularity in your cycle so some months you may get period earlier, someone might be later. So it is possible to obtain these ovulation kits where you can monitor yourself when you are going to ovulate in the middle of the month or middle of your cycle.

Lots of different ways of observing when you’re ovulating and many women might start off using ovulation predictor kits or OPKs and these are sticks that you pee onto and it tells you when you’re luteinizing – when the hormone, you’re luteinizing hormone has raised which is going to indicate you’re going to ovulate in the next 24-48 hours. Make it quite difficult for many women – you can feel quite obsessive with it and it can have its toll emotionally also for some women – particularly with women with PCOS, they’re not always reliable. That’s one way but there are other ways of monitoring your natural fertility indicators. Your natural activity indicators are your temperature, your cervical mucus and the position of your cervix and you can do that in various different ways by taking your basal body temperature every morning for example and then throughout the day observing your cycle mucus or you can choose to use a sensor. There are a number of sensors that you can use: either skin or vaginally which will be really accurate in identifying when your temperature rise occurs at the time or just after ovulation.
Lots of different ways that you can observe and it really depends on what you feel most comfortable with and also financially which you feel is the best option for you too.

There are various ways that we can monitor ovulation naturally. The first would be measuring the temperature. The body temperature rises 0.3 to 0.5 degrees during the ovulation time. The other one would be  detecting changes in vaginal discharge that becomes more thin, more clear and like egg white so that it facilitates the transport of the sperm and finally using the LH kits. LH is detectable, the surge of LH hormone that exists in the female body is detected by these kits and once detected within the next one or two days ovulation will take place.

There are different ways to monitor ovulation. I would start from the most precise one: that is doing the intravaginal ultrasound. With the ultravaginal ultrasound you can actually see the growth of the follicles and depending on the size you can actually infer when they will rapture and release the ovum or there will be ovum or not. Of course this method requires going to the hospital, making an appointment and having the ultrasound equipment.
There are other ways to monitor ovulation at home, for example, by using hormone tests. Hormone tests can give you an indication when the ovum will be released, when the ovulation will happen and it is very well known that the LH and FSH hormones peak 24 hours before the ovulation roughly.
That is also the exact method that you can do at home. Of course there are ways that you can estimate ovulation by tracking the cycle. If you know your cycle length – 13,5 days before the last period that was when the ovulation was. With this method, you can only know when the ovulation was, after the ovulation had happened with precision. If your cycle is regular – it will be day 15, 16 – the problem is that the first part of the cycle is variable so you could never be so sure – you could always have 3 days up, 3 days down of the estimation. Cycle length is also a good way but it is not the most accurate one. Of course there is also the temperature method that you use the thermometer and after the ovulation temperature rises a bit and that is also good to find when the ovulation was but it is only after ovulation so you could only know after the ovulation has happened. So far the best method to do it naturally by oneself, is with hormone testing at home.