How fertility awareness increases your body confidence

After a small time of using fertility awareness as my birth control method I noticed that there were some other benefits (that, honestly, were even better than the birth control part). One of them is obviously learning more about my hormonal health, which I have talked about before, but there was another thing that I found just as important.

Specifically, that is the increased body confidence I got from using fertility awareness. There are a few different ways that you might experience the increased confidence and a few reasons why this might be, so I have a video for you talking about my experience with fertility awareness increasing my confidence:

Has fertility awareness increased your body confidence? let me know in the comments!

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Hey, it’s Hannah from Holistic Hormonal Health and today I want to talk a little bit about what it is about charting that makes you love your body.

If you didn’t know, this is a pretty common “side effect” of charting. A lot of people find it very empowering and very much something that made them kind of comes to terms more with their body. Especially if they are someone who had been struggling with low self-esteem.

I can’t tell you 100% “the truth” and the ultimate thing of what it is about charting that makes you love your body, but I want to give you a little bit of information from my own experience. I came to charting from a place that… I would say growing up sex was kind of one of those forbidden fruits and demonized things (I grew up in a very religious family), and being able to, for one thing, have your body and this whole birth control thing combined I think is something that is really nice for a lot of people because instead of working against your body, as many methods do, and shutting down your reproductive system, and saying “this is something I don’t want to deal with and I’m going to think about this as little as possible and I don’t want to focus on this area in particular.”

Instead you are saying: “I’m going to understand this part of my body. I’m really going to understand it and appreciate what it’s doing.” Especially if you have had any kind of hormonal health or reproductive issues and symptoms like cramps, heavy bleeding, PMS, anything hormonal or gynecological in nature.

When you start charting you instead are like: “Hooooly crap, my body does that? That is sooo cool.”

When you see what your body is doing in that way it’s like a whole new appreciation on a different level than you’ve ever known before and it’s almost like you now can not hate anything about your feminine body like secondary sex characteristics, you can’t hate your period. I know that it’s true that some people use FAM and they still hate their period, but there is something about it still that you can find appreciation in, even if it’s just that reassurance that you aren’t pregnant.

There is something about having that appreciation that is completely healing to your relationship with your body.

Part of the reason that I think that is is because women’s relationships with their body tends to be so superficial and physical because that’s what women tend to concentrate on and that’s what we are appreciated for and focused on in our society and having something else that is distinctly female about your body (I wish I could say this in the most gender neutral/sensitive way, but I don’t know if I can. Distinctly uterine? Distinctly having the female reproductive system?) and you are having that appreciation for that in such a deep way that I think it can really help you not worry as much about the superficial and the physical.

It’s something that can just exponentially increase your body confidence and how you feel about your body. Both the physical/superficial part and how your body is operating and working on a day to day basis.

That is one of my very favorite things about the sympo-thermal method of fertility awareness and that is one of the reasons that I do what I do and one of the reasons that I love being able to share this with people. It’s not just a birth control method or a way to get pregnant, it becomes SO MUCH MORE once you start using it. It’s just a way to totally transform your relationship with your body and your empowerment and confidence and *life* (as stupid and cliche as that sounds).

I hope this helped you understand how it is that charting can make you love your body so much and a bit of the reason why you might want to start charting your cycles.