What if your menstrual cycle isn’t just about having children? What if a wacky cycle is a clue something else could be wrong? This is what Lisa Hendrickson-Jack teaches in her book, The Fifth Vital Sign, and we had the opportunity to chat with her a while back about vagina stuff. This brilliant lady is a certified Fertility Awareness Educator and Holistic Reproductive Health Practitioner who teaches women to chart their menstrual cycles for natural birth control, conception, and monitoring overall health. I’m so excited to finally share this interview with you. It’s long overdue. We broke it into 3 parts for ya to digest it better, so enjoy!

Part 1: Should your menstrual be the 5th Vital Sign? What does a healthy menstrual look like?

Part 2: Birth Control and the “Artificial Period?”

Part 3: A Natural Approach to Birth Control. Backed by Science.

Part 3

Joelle:

Tell me more about the natural approach to birth control?

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack:

Of course. For most women this is new. It's an interesting time that we're in. I mean, for me it was new. I just stumbled across this information when I was in my first year of university. I had been put on the pill because I had period pain and I was really active as a teen. I had heavy periods as well.

I went to my doctor wanting the pill because I heard that it made periods lighter, and it got rid of the pain. It took away my real period, so my withdrawal bleeds in my case were a bit lighter. Not all women have that experience. And although I still had some pain when I used it, it was dramatically less.

Because I wasn't using it for birth control at the time, I would come off of it thinking, “okay it fixed the problem,” and then my next period would be horrible and then I would go back on it. So I knew that it wasn't actually addressing whatever was the problem. The actual period was still just as heavy and painful as it was before.

For women using the pill for birth control, please understand from a scientific standpoint, there are six days in your menstrual cycle where pregnancy is possible or where you're actually fertile. Outside of that fertile window what happens is your vagina is naturally acidic, and outside of that fertile window we actually produce a thick mucus plug that closes up our cervix. So, after ovulation is done. Your cervical mucus dries up.

You naturally produce that mucus plug so the sperm can't get through. Let's just say the bouncer is outside of the club. No one's getting in and this is biological.

It's really a mind trip but after ovulation, pregnancy isn't possible, so what I teach is a method of actually tracking. It's a version of the symptothermal method, meaning that we're tracking three main fertile signs, which is the cervical fluid, basal body temperature, and then cervical position.

And so you can actually track when you're making your cervical fluid, which days you have it, which days you don't. The basal body temperature is fairly straightforward. You take your temperature in the morning before you get out of bed after you've slept, and so that is measuring your resting metabolism.

For women who've never heard of it before, there's actually a way to reliably prevent pregnancy without hormones. When these methods have been tested from a scientific basis, they've been shown to be up to 99.4% effective. Because if you can identify the short window of fertility in your cycle, and then of course you have to add a buffer period around it.

But there are rules for how to do this. You can't just read this article today and do it, you've got to take some time to learn about it. But once you learn the rules and you understand how it works and you understand how to chart your signs, you can reliably use this method to 99.4% effectiveness when you're wanting to avoid pregnancy. And then when you want to get pregnant it's also helpful because, you have to know when to have sex if you want to have babies too.

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