Tempdrop – Tracking your cycle, fertility + health
A massive part of what I do is empowering women to take charge of their health and wellness. Understanding your hormones and how they show up for you as an individual is a vitally important part of this.
Basal metabolic temperature charting (tracking your temperature while at rest) has been used for many years of a way to assess a women’s fertile window. Ovulation occurs around the middle of the cycle, this can be around day 14-17 but is dependent on the individual and the length of their cycle. When we see a dip and then rise in the body temperature for three consecutive days, ovulation has occurred. This rise in temperature should last for around 11-16 days before it starts to drop, at which point the period comes.
The reason we are able to see this through the temperature of the body is due to the hormone progestrone. Progestrone is involved in our metabolism, specifically it speeds up the metabolism making our temperature rise.
During the second half of the cycle, is the luteal phase, progestrone is dominant during this phase and is when ovulation occurs. Ovulation MUST occur for progestrone to be produced.
Fertility has largely been seen as for the purpose of conceiving only, but due to the fact that ovulation must occur to produce progestrone and progestrone having a myriad of positive benefits on the body, ovulation is so much more then for conceiving.
Yes, if you do want to conceive you need to ovulate, but having sufficient progestrone after ovulation is vitally important for holding onto the fetus till full term.
Why Tempdrop
The traditional way of tracking your basal metabolic temperature is challenging, especially to be consistent with it and consistency is extremely important when we are looking for patterns with the cycle.
Using a digital thermometer, upon waking the temperature is taken. This is then tracked, usually using a generic menstrual cycle tracking app. The thing that trips people up the most with tracking this way is having to take it the same time every day, Monday through Sunday, an alarm needs to be set to wake you up and remind you to take your temperature. This is important because a. we are looking at the resting temperature and b. it’s only consistent if it’s at the same time every day. As soon as we get up and begin moving round, our temperature rises and we are no longer resting. Due to this it is important that an electric blanket isn’t on when taking the temperature also.
With my clients, I have found the consistency the hardest. To really assess how someone’s cycle looks, we are looking at the temperature over at least 3 months to hopefully be able to see a pattern. This is where Tempdrop makes life so much easier.
It comes as an armband with a monitor attached. You put in on your upper arm with the monitor on the inside of your arm, turn it on and go to sleep. You wake as normal and sync it when you are ready (before you wear it the next night). The beauty of this method is that the monitor looks at your temperature throughout the whole night. Its patented algorithm learns your unique nightly and monthly temperature patterns, filtering out disturbances for accurate results. When you sync it, the results go into the Tempdrop app which creates a graph so you can easily see what your temperature is doing. You can also add other symptom details into the app such as when you are menstruating, ovulation signs such as mucous, possible disturbances such as being sick, alcohol consumption, medication use and more. As long as more then 3 hours sleep is had, the results can be tracked.
Consistency is still key as in ensuring the Tempdrop is used each night, however it’s so much easier to find consistency with it, turn it on, put it on, sync next day, done.
Weather your goal is conception, natural fertility (contraception) or just wanting to assess and learn about your cycles from greater health and wellness, temperature charting is highly beneficial.
I am a Tempdrop affiliate which means I can get you a discounted monitor, for 10% off use the code wellness.from.within at checkout.
