How To Track Ovulation With PMOS And Irregular Periods | Ep. 159

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Hello, my friend.
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Welcome to this episode of I'm Hormonal.
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I'm your host, Bridget Walton, functional nutritionist, and today we are going to be talking about ovulation.
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Now, this is a follow-up to the last episode where I talked about PMOS.
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If you are new to the conversation, you're like, what the heck is PMOS?
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Well, maybe you've heard of PCOS.
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PCOS polycystic ovary syndrome got a rebrand earlier this year and is now PMOS, which is polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome.
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And ovulation, this is a really helpful thing for I think every human on the planet to have more information about.
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But if you or somebody who you know has PMOS, then this is also a really important data point because as you are making changes to your nutrition, to your sleep, to your stress, to your supplementation, like how are you, how how can you tell if what you're doing is helpful or not?
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How can you tell what you should continue to put time into and effort into or not to actually accomplish your goals?
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It's also just a really good way to stay in tune with your body and understand, of course, where you're at in your cycle.
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So let's go ahead and get into it.
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Ovulation, okay, if we're being super basic, let's bring it back.
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That's when the egg is actually being released from your ovary, right?
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For most, for typical um menstruators, right?
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So this would be for somebody who doesn't have PMOS, right?
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Who has an average 48 days.
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Oh my gosh, 48 days.
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For somebody who has an average 28-day cycle, ovulation usually occurs around halfway through around day 14.
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Or if you're just you're using whichever cycle tracking app, it's probably, without more information or context, going to assume and suggest that you ovulate around the 14th day of your cycle.
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Now, for those folks with PMOS, you're usually not ovulating um in the middle of your cycle because in an ovulatory cycle, a cycle during which you do not ovulate, um, those are one of the hallmark characteristics of PMOS.
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So that's why knowing if and when you do ovulate can be so helpful because it can help you predict when is your next period going to start, which would generally be about two weeks after you ovulate.
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And so let's talk about what are some ways you can tell if you are going to be ovulating soon.
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Okay.
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One way that you can tell is because your cervical fluid is going to change.
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In the five or so days, and everybody's body is different, but in the five or so days before you ovulate, that's your fertile window.
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And your cervical fluid is going to usually become thicker, kind of like ropey.
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Um, and there might just be more of it overall.
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And that's because the cervical fluid that your body produces during a fertile window, it actually can like sustain and feed and nourish sperm and help shuttle it to the egg.
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And it can help to like weed out the duds that your body's like, mm-mm, we don't wanna, we don't wanna let that sperm through.
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Now, obviously, your cervical fluid is still going to have those, uh, those skills, if you will, even if you're not trying to conceive, but you can still see those changes.
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So if you see changes in your cervical fluid in that way, then that's a good sign that you might be about to ovulate.
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Now, also worth noting that ovulation prediction kits, those can be helpful tools to tell as well.
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Those are going to be kits that allow you to test certain hormones that usually spike just before you ovulate.
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And so, just like their name implies, those are prediction tools.
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Those cannot confirm that you've ovulated.
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So let's talk about that next.
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How can you actually confirm if you've ovulated?
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Well, okay, getting pregnant, that's a pretty good way to confirm that you've ovulated.
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But other than that, the way that you might confirm ovulation is by a temperature change.
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So after you ovulate, your body temperature actually rises by about a third of a degree, a third of a degree Fahrenheit for the rest of that cycle.
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Um, right, your body is producing progesterone, and that's one of the hormones that helps your body or results in your body warming up a little bit.
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So you may have a smartwatch that tracks your temperature, you may have a whoop, you might have a temp drop thermometer, which actually is designed to track your temperature very closely to specifically detect ovulation.
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And those are the ways that you can actually confirm it.
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So I like to reiterate that because some people think, well, my app said that I ovulated on this day, so I must have.
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Um, but your app doesn't, you know, your app is also just predicting it, it doesn't know for sure what happened in your body.
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And I think that can be certainly a point of confusion that I don't want you to fall into.
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So if you want to confirm ovulation, then that's going to be through tracking your temperature.
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I'll put a link in the show notes.
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Um, if you are intrigued in learning more about temp drop, that's my recommendation for a tool to invest in.
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I think right now it's about 150 buckaroos for the thermometer, which isn't a small amount, but if you're going to be using it for a hot minute, then that might be worth it.
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And it's just so much easier to wake up with the armband on and sync it to your phone, which is how it works with tempdrop, as opposed to, you know, maybe you have a thermometer on hand, like for, you know, like you used when you were a kid when you were sick.
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Um, but you'll have to wake up in the morning and immediately take your temperature before you get out of bed.
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And like that doesn't always work.
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So um, I guess I went down a little rabbit hole on that, but just something to consider.
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And you can check on that link in the show notes um and save a couple bucks if you use the code there.
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So we've talked about how to predict ovulation.
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We've talked about how to confirm ovulation.
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Where are we headed next?
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Well, in the next episode, what I want to go through with you is a conversation that I had with Chat GPT, where I was asking it, like, okay, I was pretending to be somebody with PMOS or with the symptoms of PMOS and ask for its advice about what I should do.
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I was really curious myself about, okay, what the heck is ChatGPT telling people?
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What are the things that like which bits are really good advice?
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But what is it missing?
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Right.
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I mean, you if you're listening to this podcast, you're obviously looking for information about your hormones, about your health, about how you can make changes.
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So if you're like me, like I certainly, when I have a question, I'll ask ChatGPT about it or whichever tool as well.
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And so I wanted to bring you through that conversation so that you could understand and hear what are the things that make a lot of sense.
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Um, but what are the parts that don't make sense to?
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There's so much information out there, and how can you how can you make it best serve you?
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So that's what we're gonna get into next.
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Thank you so much for listening today.
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As always, the information I share with you here is for educational purposes only.
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It's not meant to be used as a replacement for medical advice or diagnosis.
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And yeah, that's it.
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I'll see you on the next one, or you can catch me on Instagram at I'm underscore hormonal in the meantime.
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All right, thanks.
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We'll see you on the next one.