Tcoyf chart

How to track, with just a thermometer and their fingers, the fluctuations of their hormones. Once a woman knew how to read the signs, this data could tell her when she was most fertile and when she was not. She could recognize that a sustained uptick in her basal body temperature for at least three days meant an egg had matured, been released from the ovary, and was now traveling through her Fallopian tube. She could observe her cervical fluid transform from a viscous white cream that would trap sperm to a translucent, stretchy ooze that would allow sperm to wriggle through. With this knowledge, she could conceive or avoid conceiving. She could also suss out health problems like polycystic ovarian syndrome by noticing long cycles without any temperature shifts. And she could watch as her cycles grew irregular and cervical fluid drier, foretelling the onset of menopause. For decades, this tracking method was almost exclusively practiced by religious Catholics — until Weschler, along with a like-minded group of secular feminists, wrestled these insights about the female body away from anti-birth-control hard-liners and into the mainstream. In the nearly 30 years since its publication, TCOYF has been translated into 12 languages (not including a bootleg Russian version) and has never gone out of print. Fertility researchers recommend TCOYF to their patients, and high-tech thermometers like Tempdrop and Daysy have made basal-body-temperature monitoring a norm for those trying to conceive. A survey published by the CDC found that from 2015 to 2019, almost a fifth of respondents had used FAM at some point. Today the book, which remains a useful reference for many readers, has also gotten folded into a more extreme politics. Like raw milk or off-the-grid living, TCOYF has ended up at the intersection of the Venn Diagram of

Gold standard for understanding how to chart for fertility. It even includes ways to understand fertility signals for pregnancy avoidance. It provides example charts and every single tip you would need to become confident at it yourself.Fertility Friend is likewise the gold standard for fertility apps. It follows the principles outlined in the book above, but instead of writing out paper charts, you can track your fertility on your smartphone.Many other fertility apps and even wearable fertility monitors will track your basal body temperature for you. These devices and apps are loved by some but considered less reliable by others. As with everything, it’s about finding the system or tools that work for you, so explore and find out what you like!Other fertility tracking options include:The Ava braceletDaysy fertility trackerOvuSenseTempdropEach of these comes with its own app for tracking. They can range in price from just under $100 to over $300. If budget is a factor, you can easily track for little to no cost by using Fertility Friend or the principles gained in Taking Charge of Your Fertility (TCOYF, as it is often abbreviated in the TTC world).How to Optimize Hitting Your Fertile WindowMany women believe that they have to have intercourse every day during their fertile window to maximize chances at conception. However, when you consider that sperm lives for at least a few days, this isn’t actually true. If you’ve been trying to get pregnant for months, the thought of daily intercourse isn’t as fun as it sounds either—just ask many in the infertility community.You can relieve some pressure from the situation by understanding your fertility cues. Once you start having fertile cervical mucus, opting for intercourse every other day (or even every two days, if you have a longer fertile window) can be perfectly acceptable. The exceptions would be if you never have fertile mucus and are not quite sure when your fertile window is, or if you know that your partner’s sperm has low motility or he has low sperm count. If he has a low sperm count, you may require fertility treatment, or it might be best just to have intercourse twice, timed as close as possible for one to two days before ovulation.If you have ovulation pain, don’t assume that that means you have officially ovulated.You should wait until you see the thermal shift on your chart to assume that you have ovulated.Until

Requires a lot of motivation, education, and precision to do right. “I am the first person to say that fertility awareness is not for everyone,” she says. To communicate this risk in TCOYF, she created two separate sections titled “Natural Birth Control” and “Pregnancy Achievement.” Each had detailed instructions along with sample charts from real women showing how women could manage different scenarios: how to know when it is safe to have sex after ovulation, how to identify if semen is masking as fertile cervical fluid. She included color-coded charts for each goal, highlighting fertile and infertile days, and wrote an appendix entitled “Natural Family Planning: Highly Effective, Highly Unforgiving” on the risks of using FAM as contraception. But those measures didn’t alleviate her fear that women would have unplanned pregnancies because the book was unclear. “I’m not legally responsible — I get that,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t feel sick about it.” Weschler has since published three more editions, each including more and better information ranging from updated research on treatments for polycystic ovarian syndrome and endometriosis to an entirely new section about female orgasm. The process never seems to get any easier. “You would think by now I would’ve shot myself,” she says. Each time, her garden goes untended. Her carefully terraced vegetable plots lie fallow and her prodigious fig tree unharvested. Her friends won’t hear from her for months. Weschler’s life has stayed relatively untouched. She lives in the same modest house where she taught FAM classes in the 1980s. Some of the other secular FAM women she has worked with have gone on to create a professional association and FAM-certification courses to train instructors, but Weschler was so preoccupied with TCOYF that she never created her own program or certification — something

The Woman Who Got Your Best Friend Pregnant Taking Charge of Your Fertility is the reproductive manual embraced by both the right and the left. By , a freelance journalist who primarily writes about science, technology, and health Toni Weschler in a 1988 View magazine article. Photo: Robb Mitchell via Toni Weschler Toni Weschler in a 1988 View magazine article. Photo: Robb Mitchell via Toni Weschler Women read the book because they wanted children, because their older sisters sent them copies, because they had idly paged through it at a cousin’s house and couldn’t put it down. Because it contained information about their bodies that they didn’t get in their all-girls high schools or sex-ed classes or OB/GYN visits. They bought the book because all their friends were using it instead of hormonal birth control — they thought, Sure, it seems better to be “natural” than to keep taking pills. They read it even though they weren’t really into health books and the whole thing seemed “a little woo-woo,” but the friend who swore by it had two Ivy League degrees and worked in finance, so why not give it a go? They brought it to their doctors and midwives. They used it to conceive their daughters and then passed it on to them when they started to consider having families. They clung to it like a best friend, carrying it around the city, dog-earing the pages. The book is Taking Charge of Your Fertility, a 557-page manual on the female reproductive system, first published in 1995 by a women’s-health educator named Toni Weschler. In 23 chapters — on everything from gynecological health to the menstrual cycle to sexual pleasure — TCOYF laid out instructions for an advanced form of period-tracking called the Fertility Awareness Method (FAM). It taught readers

Transform cervical fluid from a white gummy paste into a slippery, translucent liquid. She used a lemon to model how the uterus moves, and she’d unfurl 17 feet of her own laminated charts, using an ornately carved wooden yad to point to the low temperatures that precede ovulation. She encouraged men to participate in charting so they could understand and be equally responsible for their decision to have or not have children. Her students were a mix of couples and single people. Some were married and struggling to conceive, but most were trying to avoid pregnancy. There were chemists, teachers, people who worked in publishing or were professors at the University of Washington. Over and over again, Weschler found her female students were alternately thrilled to learn this information and furious. “I can’t believe that we were never taught this in school,” they would tell Weschler. “I can’t believe my mom never talked about this.” Weschler decided the only way to reach women outside Seattle was to write a book. She roped in her younger brother Raymond as a co-author. Raymond had no interest in fertility — and was so sure he didn’t want kids that he’d gotten a vasectomy (he jokes that if he’d written the book, it would have been two words long: “Get clipped”) — but he was great at research and had access to the UC Berkeley library system. The two set out to re-create the experience of Weschler’s class in an accessible, thorough, well-researched book. It’s a process that, to this day, she describes as “absolute hell.” One problem was that TCOYF was trying to address two audiences with diametrically opposed goals: people who very much wanted to get pregnant and people who very much did not. The effectiveness and risk of using FAM for

She now regrets. She lives on her book royalties, which she says amount to about $40,000 a year. In the past, she would respond to everyone who wrote to her with questions. Once, when a reader included her phone number, Weschler called her. They spoke for hours. Weschler spent a long time debating whether to have children. She shows me flyers for her “Ambivalence About Motherhood” potlucks, which she hosted for several years in the early 1990s to discuss the ethics of “to have or have not.” Women were assigned to bring appetizers, entrées, or desserts depending on whether they were leaning toward having kids, not having them, or whether they were truly ambivalent. For Weschler, the choice to have children is something momentous and profound. “It is the only decision you’ll probably make in your life that’s irrevocable,” she says. After many potlucks and a lot of thought, Weschler ultimately decided not to do it. She loves them, but she says she’s squeamish and didn’t think she’d be able to adequately discipline her own. She’s a devoted aunt, writing cookbooks for her nephew and, for the past 14 years, taking her niece out every year to celebrate the day she got her first period. In the past, she has tried to keep TCOYF politically neutral, though she always includes information about using it in combination with other barrier methods, and she prides herself on TCOYF’s scientific bona fides. But now, amid so much distrust of hormonal birth control and so many new restrictions on abortion access, she feels she can’t stay neutral anymore. The newest edition will, for the first time, include a section that explicitly mentions the Pill and explains that she supports any choice a woman makes about her reproductive health. In her dining room, Weschler shows