Quick Takeaway: Your period is only one part of your menstrual cycle. Throughout the rest of the cycle, changing hormones are involved in ovulation, cervical mucus, fertility, basal body temperature, appetite, mood, energy, libido, and other patterns you may notice in your body.
Learning your cycle isn't about perfectly optimizing every phase.
It's about having enough context to understand what your body is doing—and learning to pay attention to what is normal for you.
For most of my life, when someone said “menstrual cycle,” I thought they meant my period.
That was it.
Bleeding = cycle.
The other times of the month?
Apparently just...life.
I didn't know there were different phases.
I didn't think about ovulation.
I had absolutely no idea cervical mucus was something worth paying attention to.
Actually, I was embarrassed by any discharge in my underwear.
Which is particularly funny now because I will enthusiastically talk to just about anyone about egg-white cervical mucus and the infamous snail trail.
We've come a long way.
I even thought my period was the end of my cycle.
Which makes intuitive sense, right?
You go through the month, your period arrives, and that's the grand finale. Except when we're charting a menstrual cycle, the first day of your period is Day 1 of a new cycle—which I didn't know.
And now? I think of ovulation as the main event.
But I didn't start learning any of this because I was fascinated by hormones.
I started because I wanted to have a baby—and suddenly realized I had no freaking idea what my body was doing.
For Most of My Life, I Thought My Period Was My Cycle
My cycles had always been irregular.
And for a long time, I interpreted that very simply: Something was wrong with me.
I had been put on the birth-control pill when I was young to “regulate” my cycle, and I believed that was exactly what it had done.
Problem solved.
Except I hadn't actually learned anything about my natural cycle.
I didn't know when I ovulated.
I didn't know what signs my body gave me before ovulation.
I didn't know why my cycle might be long one month and different another month.
I just knew that when I took the pill, bleeding showed up predictably.
Then my husband and I decided we wanted to have a baby.
Suddenly, ovulation became very interesting.
Except there was a problem.
When the heck did I ovulate?
My natural cycles would be 55 to 65 days long. The generic examples built around a textbook 28-day cycle weren't particularly useful to me.
I didn't know how to find ovulation because no one had ever taught me how.
After nearly a year of trying to conceive, I found out I was pregnant at the end of 2020.
Then I miscarried.
That season changed a lot for me.
A friend gave me Taking Charge of Your Fertility, and I began learning how to chart my cycle by taking my basal body temperature every morning.
After my miscarriage, I also started seeing an acupuncturist who specialized in fertility. She helped me read those charts and understand the patterns I was seeing.
And I remember thinking:
Why has no one taught every girl this?
Because for the first time, my cycle wasn't just something that happened to me.
I could actually see it.
I Had No Idea My Body Was Talking to Me
One of the biggest mind-blowing moments for me was cervical mucus.
Yes.
We're going there.
Before learning about my cycle, I thought discharge in my underwear was embarrassing.
Now?
Show me that wet, slippery, stretchy, egg-white cervical mucus.
I am thrilled.
As ovulation approaches, rising estrogen changes cervical mucus. It typically becomes wetter, clearer, more slippery, and more stretchy.
That mucus is information.
Something I had spent years thinking was embarrassing was actually one of the observable signs I could use to understand what was happening in my body.
And I freaking love that now.
When I see that wet, slippery mucus, I know my body is giving me signs that ovulation is approaching.
I'm not embarrassed by it.
I'm impressed by it.
Look at you go, body.
This is what my fertile cervical mucus looks like when it's wet, slippery, and stretchy around ovulation.
I used to be embarrassed to see this in my underwear.
Now I'm putting a video of it on the internet.
If that doesn't tell you how much my relationship with my cycle has changed, I don't know what will.
And honestly?
These days I think ovulation is way more interesting than my period.
Your period is pretty hard to miss.
Ovulation requires you to pay attention.
That doesn't mean cervical mucus alone can prove that I ovulated. But it gives me information I didn't even know existed for most of my life.
And learning to notice it was one of the first times I realized:
My body had been talking to me all along. I just didn't know how to listen.
If you're new to cycle tracking and want a simple place to begin, I wrote about how to track your menstrual cycle naturally by starting with awareness—not perfection.
Your Menstrual Cycle Has Four Phases
Before we go any further, let's make the actual biology simple.
Your period isn't your entire menstrual cycle.
There are four phases we generally talk about:
1. Menstrual Phase
Day 1 of your period is Day 1 of a new menstrual cycle.
This is the bleeding part—the piece I used to think was the whole thing.
Interestingly, I wasn't completely crazy for thinking of my period as an “ending.” The bleeding happens because pregnancy hasn't occurred and the hormones supporting the uterine lining fall at the end of the previous ovulatory cycle.
But for charting purposes, that first day of full menstrual bleeding marks the beginning of the next cycle.
2. Follicular Phase
As the new cycle begins, your body is already starting the process that can lead toward ovulation.
During the follicular phase, follicles in the ovaries develop. As a dominant follicle matures, estrogen generally rises.
The length of this part of the cycle can vary—which is one reason assuming every woman ovulates on cycle day 14 can be so misleading.
My 55- to 65-day cycles certainly weren't following a cute little 28-day diagram.
3. Ovulation
Ovulation is when an ovary releases an egg.
And this is the part I wish I had understood so much earlier.
Your body can give you observable signs as ovulation approaches.
Cervical mucus should become increasingly wet, clear, slippery, and stretchy. And when you think about sperm literally needing to swim through this mucus on their way toward the egg, suddenly the slippery, stretchy part makes a whole lot more sense.
Then, after ovulation, progesterone rises.
And progesterone does something else I find fascinating:
It raises your basal body temperature.
That's why I chart my temperature.
Basal body temperature can't tell you when you're about to ovulate because the temperature rise happens after ovulation. But that sustained temperature shift is what I look for to confirm that ovulation occurred.
That's why I want to see a biphasic pattern on my chart—a lower range of temperatures before ovulation followed by a sustained higher range afterward. It gives me evidence that my body moved from the follicular phase into the luteal phase.
But that's exactly what I love about charting.
I can see the pattern and learn my body's natural rhythm for ovulation.
This is one of my actual charts from the early years of learning to track my cycle.
One of my early cycle charts from when my cycles were much more irregular and I was learning how to recognize my own patterns.
Learning to chart this myself is what taught me what I'm actually looking for. And I think that matters—even now that there are wearables and apps that can collect some of this information for us.
A device can give you data. I still want to understand what that data means in my own body.
4. Luteal Phase
After ovulation, you enter the luteal phase.
The follicle that released the egg becomes the corpus luteum and produces progesterone.
Progesterone helps prepare the uterine lining for the possibility of pregnancy, and its thermogenic effect is why basal body temperature typically stays in that higher range after ovulation.
If pregnancy doesn't occur, progesterone eventually falls.
Your temperature typically returns toward its lower, pre-ovulatory range, menstruation begins, and Day 1 of a new cycle starts again.
That's the basic biology.
But knowing the names of the four phases isn't what changed my relationship with my body.
Understanding what those changes could look like in my actual life did.
Learning My Cycle Gave Me Context for Myself
Once I started paying attention, I began noticing things that went far beyond fertility.
My energy wasn't always the same.
My appetite wasn't always the same.
My mood wasn't always the same.
My desire wasn't always the same.
And maybe most importantly:
I stopped expecting all of those things to stay exactly the same every day.
Around Ovulation, I Feel Like Her
When I'm nearing ovulation, I tend to feel confident. Social. Attractive.
I want to be around people.
And I want my husband in a different way.
You know what I mean.
For a long time, I think I unconsciously treated that version of myself as the version I was supposed to be all the time.
Energetic! Confident! Social! Let's go!
Now I understand that I don't need to feel like her every single day of my cycle.
She's part of me.
She's not the standard every other version of me has failed to meet.
That has given me so much more grace for myself.
In My Luteal Phase, I'm Hungrier
I also notice that I'm hungrier during my luteal phase.
Old me could turn increased hunger into a moral crisis surprisingly quickly.
Why am I so hungry?
Why can't I just eat what I was eating last week?
Do I really need more food?
Now I have context.
Research suggests energy intake can increase during the luteal phase compared with the follicular phase, although individual experiences vary and the research isn't perfectly consistent.
That doesn't mean every woman needs to eat a prescribed number of extra calories.
For me, it means I no longer automatically interpret a change in my appetite as a failure of willpower.
Maybe my body is asking for something.
I can notice that without judging it.
And Then There Are the Days Before My Period...
When I'm just...
A little bitchier.
Yes. I said it.
I have less patience.
Things bother me more easily.
And now, instead of wondering why I'm suddenly incapable of being the delightful human I apparently was ten days ago, I have context.
I'm not using my cycle as an excuse to be an a**hole.
I just understand myself better.
And honestly, my husband does too.
He may not always use the technical phase names, but that man has absolutely learned to recognize where I am in my cycle.
Sometimes he'll point it out before I do.
And instead of either of us treating a shift in my mood or energy like it came completely out of nowhere, we have a better understanding of what's going on.
That's one of the biggest things knowing my cycle has given me: context.
Not an excuse.
Not another rulebook.
Context.
The Pill Didn't Teach Me My Natural Cycle
This is something else I understand very differently now.
When I was younger, I thought the birth-control pill had regulated my cycle.
What I didn't understand was that hormonal birth control suppresses ovulation. With combination pills, the predictable bleeding that often occurs during the placebo or hormone-free days is withdrawal bleeding caused by the drop in hormones.
That's different from menstruation that follows your body's own ovulatory cycle.
Which means:
The pill wasn't teaching me how my natural cycle worked because it was suppressing the very cycle I was trying to understand.
I'm not saying that makes the pill inherently bad.
I'm not telling anyone whether they should or shouldn't use hormonal birth control.
I'm saying I misunderstood what it was doing in my body.
I thought it had “fixed” my irregular cycle.
In reality, when I eventually came off of it, I still had no idea what my natural cycle was doing.
Those are two very different things.
And I wish I'd understood that distinction much earlier.
My Cycle Became Something I Could Get Curious About
This is probably the biggest change of all.
I stopped seeing my body as a problem I needed someone else to fix.
I started getting curious about it.
After my miscarriage in 2021, acupuncture was one of the tools I used while trying to understand my cycle before conceiving Bode.
And in my experience, it worked.
As I continued acupuncture, I watched my previously long, irregular cycles settle into a much healthier, more predictable rhythm.
I went back to acupuncture again in 2023 when Levi and I were preparing to try for Rosie.
It also cost more than $100 a visit, and going multiple times every month forever was not a realistic or sustainable lifestyle for me to regulate my cycle.
After Rosie was born, my cycles became irregular again.
Some irregularity postpartum wasn't surprising to me, especially while breastfeeding.
But about a year postpartum, I started working with my dietitian.
And I had another: Holy shit. Why did I never know this? moment.
We experimented with my food.
And I use the word experimenting very intentionally.
We removed certain foods.
We reintroduced them.
I paid attention to how I felt.
I watched what happened to my cycle.
When I removed gluten and dairy, my cycle settled around 33 days.
Over roughly the next 21 months, I intermittently reintroduced them and watched what happened.
In my body, I've noticed a pretty striking pattern.
When I reintroduce gluten, I've repeatedly watched my cycle stretch back into the 50-day range.
Dairy seems more dose-dependent for me.
A little Parmesan on my breakfast regularly doesn't seem to make an obvious difference.
But when dairy starts showing up everywhere—cottage cheese, whey-based protein powder, cheddar cheese—I've watched my cycles move closer to 40 days.
Let me be very clear:
I'm not telling you gluten or dairy is making your cycle irregular.
I'm telling you what I've repeatedly observed in my body.
And honestly, the most transformative part isn't even gluten or dairy.
It's that I know to look.
Food had never really entered the conversation in my OB-GYN's office when we talked about my irregular cycles.
It wasn't presented to me as something I could experiment with alongside appropriate medical care.
No one said:
Let's get curious about what your body responds to.
Years later, at a recent OB-GYN appointment, my doctor noticed the physical changes in me.
I told her about the changes I'd been seeing in my cycle too, and she essentially told me that whatever I was doing was working and to keep going.
And part of me thought:
Yes! This is why I wish some of what I'm learning with my dietitian were part of these conversations too.
That's my opinion.
I'm not saying every irregular cycle can be solved with food.
And I definitely don't think everyone needs to remove gluten or dairy just because I noticed a connection in my own body.
I do think food is worth experimenting with if you're curious about your body and what helps you feel your best. Make a change, pay attention to how your body responds, and see what you learn.
My personal experiment isn't a prescription for someone else's body. It's simply what made me realize how much there was about my own body I had never been taught to notice.
And I just wish curiosity about food and lifestyle had been part of the conversation at all.
What is my body responding to?
That's the question I didn't know to ask.
Now I experiment on myself all the time.
Not recklessly.
Curiously.
What happens if I change this?
How do I feel?
What does my cycle look like?
Is that pattern still there next month?
And the month after that?
Sometimes I learn something useful.
Sometimes I don't.
But I'm no longer disconnected from the experiment.
I'm paying attention.
An Irregular Cycle Doesn't Mean Something Is Inherently Wrong With You
I wish I could go back and tell younger me this.
Having an irregular cycle wasn't a character flaw.
It didn't make my body bad.
It didn't mean I had failed at being a woman whose body supposedly knew how to operate on a perfect 28-day schedule.
And having predictable withdrawal bleeding while taking the pill hadn't taught me how my natural cycle worked.
I needed information.
That said, I also don't want to romanticize irregular cycles.
Your cycle can give you information precisely because changes in it can sometimes be worth investigating.
Persistent irregularity, missing periods, unusual bleeding, or a significant change from your normal pattern can be worth discussing with a qualified healthcare professional.
Paying attention doesn't mean diagnosing yourself.
Sometimes paying attention means noticing something and bringing better information into the room with someone qualified to help you understand it.
That is another reason I wish women were taught this earlier.
Imagine being able to walk into an appointment and say:
Here's what my cycles usually look like.
Here's when this changed.
Here's what I've noticed about my cervical mucus.
Here's my temperature pattern.
Here's what I've been tracking.
Here's the pattern I'm seeing.
That's very different from:
My period is weird.
Cycle Awareness Isn't Another Thing to Perfect
There is one direction I absolutely do not want this conversation to go.
You do not need to become perfect at being a woman in every phase of your cycle.
You don't need an elaborate follicular-phase meal plan.
You don't need to reorganize your entire work calendar around ovulation.
You don't need to feel sexy when some graphic on Instagram says you're supposed to feel sexy.
You don't need to cancel your workout because you're luteal if you genuinely feel great and want to move.
Cycle awareness isn't about performing each phase correctly.
It's about having enough context to stop expecting yourself to feel exactly the same every single day.
That distinction has changed so much for me.
I can have a lower-energy day without immediately calling myself lazy.
I can be hungrier without immediately believing I've lost all self-control.
I can notice I'm more social and confident without deciding I need to somehow hold onto that version of myself forever.
I can recognize that I'm more irritable and maybe give myself a little more space.
Or perhaps Levi can recognize it for me.
Very helpful.
The goal isn't:
What am I supposed to be like right now?
It's:
What am I noticing?
That is a completely different relationship with your body.
What Will My Cycle Tell Me as I Get Older?
This is something I've started thinking about more as I get older.
I'm about to turn 38. I'm not in perimenopause as far as I know, but I know that season is somewhere ahead of me.
And instead of feeling completely blindsided by the idea that my cycle may eventually start changing, I'm actually really interested to see what I notice.
Because this time, I won't be starting from zero.
I know what my normal looks like now.
I know my typical cycle lengths.
I know what my cervical mucus usually looks and feels like as I approach ovulation.
I know what my biphasic temperature pattern looks like.
I know some of the ways my appetite, mood, energy, and desire tend to shift.
So as those patterns eventually change, I'll have something I didn't have when I was younger:
A baseline.
I won't know exactly what every change means.
And I'm certainly not going to diagnose perimenopause from a chart.
But I'll know enough to notice:
Huh. This is different for me.
And then I can get curious.
I can keep watching.
I can ask questions.
I can bring what I'm noticing to someone qualified to help me understand it.
To me, that's another reason learning your cycle matters even when you're not trying to get pregnant.
This isn't only fertility information.
It's body literacy.
Your Period Is Only One Part of the Story
For years, my period was basically the only part of my cycle I could see.
Now, honestly?
It's probably the least interesting part to me. 😂
Because my body is giving me information all month long, and I finally know enough to notice it.
That is what I wish someone had taught me when I was younger.
Not simply:
You're going to get a period.
But:
You have a menstrual cycle.
Your period is part of it.
Ovulation is part of it.
The days in between matter too.
And your experience won't necessarily look exactly like mine—or exactly like a diagram in a textbook.
That's why learning your own patterns matters.
How Do You Start Learning Your Own Cycle?
You start by paying attention.
Not perfectly. Not obsessively. Just consistently enough to begin seeing patterns.
Your bleeding. Your cervical mucus. Your basal body temperature. The changes you notice in your energy, appetite, mood, or desire.
Over time, you may begin to recognize your body's rhythm.
You don't need to know everything before you begin.
Actually, that's exactly why I created my Beginner's Cycle Guide.
It includes my own cycle chart and walks you through how I chart my basal body temperature and start noticing the signs my body is giving me—without turning my cycle into another full-time job.
GET THE BEGINNER'S CYCLE GUIDE →
Because the goal isn't to become obsessed with your cycle.
It's to build a relationship with your body.
Ask questions.
Notice patterns.
Experiment when it makes sense.
Bring those observations to your healthcare team when something doesn't feel right.
Give yourself more grace when your needs change.
My body had been talking to me all along.
I just didn't know how to listen.
Now I do.
And I genuinely believe every woman deserves the opportunity to learn how to listen to hers, too.
This article shares my personal experience and is for educational purposes only. It is not medical advice or a substitute for individualized care from a qualified healthcare professional.
