Charting your Basal Body Temperature or BBT is an excellent way to help you to learn about your cycle and which days of the month are your most fertile.  It is also a valuable tool to help determine if you are not ovulating or ovulating later or earlier in your cycle than is normally expected.  In the world of fertility treatments and testing, charting your BBT is one thing that you can control and do not have to rely on anyone else to do for you.

To chart your BBT you must first purchase a BBT thermometer and either download a BBT chart or make your own.  There are plenty of BBT charts that you can download for free.  I chose to make may own chart because it was something I could have control over and I could personalize it however I wanted to.

The best time to start charting is on the first day of your next menstrual cycle.  Place the thermometer next to your bed and as soon as you wake in the morning reach over and put it in your mouth.  Do not get out of bed, sit up, talk, drink a glass of water or do anything else. The first thing you need to do every morning is to take your temperature or you will not get an accurate reading.  You should take your temperature at the same time every morning.  This means setting the alarm on the weekends so that you take your temperature at the same time that you do during the week.

As soon as you take your temperature mark it on your chart.  If you don’t do it right away and the reading is lost on the thermometer it is easy to forget if it read 97.2 or 97.4.  Each day, connect the dot from the day before.

Right before you ovulate you might see a slight drop in temperature, but not all women experience this.  When your temperature is elevated for at least 3 days, you know that ovulation has occurred.  When you are about to start your menstrual cycle, your temperature will drop again.  For me, when my temperature dropped was a hard day because I knew I wasn’t pregnant again.  However, sometimes my temperature would drop and it would be over 24 hours before I started my cycle. Since I knew my temperature had dropped, I didn’t have to play the all too familiar “am I pregnant or not” game that so many of us experience when going trough fertility problems.

After you have charted for at least three months you can begin to notice patterns.  You will be able to tell around which days you ovulate and exactly how long your cycle lasts.  It is a good idea to wait until your temperature has been elevated for about 20 days before you take a pregnancy test.

There are a number of factors that can affect your BBT and give you an inaccurate reading on a particular day.  Whether you are on vacation, have experienced a significant event in your life, the room is a lot colder or hotter than normal or you have taken your temperature over an hour before or after you normally do can all affect the accuracy of the reading.

In addition to charting your BBT, you should also chart your cervical mucus.  Cervical mucus changes during your most fertile days and becomes similar to the consistency of egg whites when you are at your most fertile days.  This information is important to note when you are charting your cycle.

Charting your Basal Body Temperature is an easy process that can help give you or your doctor answers about what is happening to cause your fertility problems.  It might indicate that you are not ovulating or that you are ovulating early or later in your cycle than expected.  Since most clinics require you to do charting when you start working with them, it is an important step that you can take now so that you will a step ahead when you go to your fertility clinic for the first time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 at 3:05 am and is filed under Fertility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.