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Welcome to As A Woman, the podcast hosted by fertility physician Dr. Natalie Crawford to educate and empower women.

Each week learn about your health, your fertility, and how they relate to your true self.

Become a part of the community fostering collaboration over competition while learning how to authentically find your voice and amplify others as a woman.

Hi friends, welcome back to the As A Woman podcast. I am so excited to sit here and talk to you today about ovulation.

This is one of my favorite topics I've done research on this in fellowship and I really think it's important that we understand our bodies and what happens each cycle.

So let's dive in. But first I want you to know I have a lot of individual videos on this on YouTube. So if you're a visual person, you should go check it out.

And this episode is going to cover both basic overview of the menstrual cycle, methods of fertility awareness, monitoring or FAM, what they mean, how you detect ovulation, and number three answering some of your ovulation questions.

One thing I know and the study support is that if you track your cycles in some form or fashion, you try to detect ovulation, you have a higher chance of getting pregnant than if you don't.

So this is really important if you're trying to optimize your fecundability or your chance of getting pregnant per month.

Inside the ovary, I like to think about a vault where all your eggs are kept. At the start of a month, a group of eggs comes out of the vault. Each egg is microscopic, but grows inside a small fluid filled structure called a follicle.

The brain sends out follicle stimulating hormone or FSH. The brain and ovaries are best friends. And so this is just the right amount of FSH to get one egg to start growing. As that egg grows, it makes estrogen and the follicle gets bigger.

When you have high estrogen levels, the lining of the uterus is optimized for implantation, but it also triggers the brain to send out a surge of the other hormone called LH. LH is luteinizing hormone.

This allows the follicle to rupture, the egg to be released and hopefully picked up by a fallopian tube, and in the follicle reforms and becomes a cyst called a corpus luteum.

This cyst then makes progesterone, which is stimulated in pulses from LH from the brain. The corpus luteum can only live around 12 to 14 days, and so if there's no stimulation to save it, which is HCG, the hormone made from an implanting pregnancy, then the corpus luteum will die, progesterone production will stop, and you will get a period, which is essentially shutting of the lining induced by a drop in progesterone.

If you are pregnant, that HCG hormone then stimulates a more constant progesterone exposure, and the pregnancy continues, and the corpus luteum lives on until the placenta is fully grown in around 9-ish weeks.

That is the menstrual cycle, and it's shortest, shortest fashion. When we talk about fertility awareness methods or monitoring, there's different ways that you can check to see if you're ovulating.

Number one, if you have regular predictable cycles that come every 27, every 28 days, you are ovulating. That is the number one sign that you are ovulating.

Can you have a period if you're not ovulating? Yes and no, it's not always a real period. Sometimes that lining of the uterus can just overflow.

I like to think of the analogy of a cup, just constantly gets stimulated by lotus of estrogen like a dripping faucet, eventually the cup will overflow.

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