The lifestyles of fertility awareness users: 2.) The health freak

This is a continuation of a series that was started in this post. Please check it out if you want more of this or want to see the introduction to the series.

Health freak is a kind of funny term, yeah?

Why does it make me freaky to want to be healthy? Other than the obvious minority of people truly caring about their health enough to make large changes in their lifestyle, there shouldn’t be anything freaky about it.

But it is. Or that’s the way we define it based on our language, anyway.

 

Even still I’m proud to be a health “freak.” While I’ve actually chilled out in the last couple of years on what I worry about, I can also discuss the most ridiculous minutia of health with anyone who’s interested and I love learning about health and new (to me) healing modalities.

 

I think there are obvious and not-so-obvious things about fertility awareness that support the healthy lifestyle, and today lets talk about why some people who are *ahem* more health conscious than the average person *ahem* might choose to use fertility awareness as their birth control.

 

Hormonal contraception doesn’t support health

You can make every argument in the book that says the average pill (which is a combined oral contraceptive, or  COC) reduces the risk of certain cancers (namely, ovarian and endometrial cancer), and I don’t deny that it has been shown to do that for the average person, what I do deny is that it is the most effective way to reduce your risk of those cancers.

Saying that something is good simply because it helps with one or two things does not really give the whole picture. What about the increased risk of liver cancer, breast cancer, bone loss (or not developing your bones to their peak potential), minor and major side effects endured, and the countless other bad things for your health?

Instead of taking the pill and tricking yourself into thinking it’s good for you because it reduces your risk of a couple of cancers, you can do things that reduce your risk for cancer in general and boost your overall health.

That helps you both reduce your risk of ovarian and endometrial cancers, and reduce your risk of other cancers and other chronic diseases. And it’ll probably increase your short term quality of life, to boot.

Talk about a win-win.

 

When you understand what’s going on with your health you can fix things better

Fertility awareness is seriously amazing due to the fact that it helps you understand what’s going on with your hormones.

Conventional methods of figuring out what is going on with your hormones mean:

• Massive cost!
• Not super accurate
• Can be a pain in the a**

And that’s not even getting into whether you want to monitor how your hormones are changing based on lifestyle or diet tweaks you are making (which means more tests and more expense and PITAness).

The sympto-thermal method of fertility awareness is so cool because the fertility signs that you monitor are directly linked to what is going on with your hormones that day. (That’s why the method works so well, in fact.)

So when you start charting your cycles and these fertility signs you end up having a really clear picture of what’s going on with your hormones. AND, if you want to fix up your hormones you have an amazing way to see what tweaks are making a difference instantly.

Is this herb you started taking actually making any difference? You will know based on what is going on with your cycle. Maybe you are trying to lengthen your luteal phase (so you want to increase progesterone) and want to keep adding things on until you see a big difference. No problem.

 

The monitoring part also comes in handy when you want to see what kinds of symptoms might be hormonally related. These could be various PMS symptoms, migraines, appetite, libido… I could go on, but I’ll just leave you with this: It’s fun to figure out why your body reacts in the way it does and how you could potentially help it function optimally.

 

Did you start using fertility awareness for health reasons or are you thinking about using it to better your health or monitor your hormones? Let me know in the comments, I love connecting with you!