How to Track Your Menstrual Cycle: A Guide to Understanding Your Cycle

Cycle tracking involves keeping a record of your periods and what’s happening in all phases of your menstrual cycle. 

Tracking your menstrual cycle can be beneficial for: 

• Knowing how long your menstrual cycle is and whether your cycle is regular or irregular for you

• Connecting with your body and your menstrual cycle to better understand when you’re in the follicular phase or luteal phase

• Giving you more potential to predict when you’ll get your period, which can be challenging if your periods are irregular)

• Providing insights into your reproductive and overall health, particularly around whether you’re ovulating regularly. 

• Highlighting symptoms and patterns that could help you to get a diagnosis for a women’s health condition such as Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) or endometriosis.

• Recognising patterns in how you feel (both physically and mentally) during the different phases of your menstrual cycle so you can respond to what your body is trying to tell you

• Flagging up reasons why you may be struggling to get pregnant such as lack of ovulation or a short luteal phase. 

What to track in your menstrual cycle

What can you track in your menstrual cycle?

Details about your period length and flow is the most obvious place to start. 

But since the menstrual cycle has several phases, cycle tracking can go far beyond this. 

You may want to consider things like: 

• The total length of your cycle and whether it’s optimal (21-35 days is generally considered ‘normal’)

• The length of your follicular and luteal phases and whether they’re of optimal length for hormone health and/or fertility

• Physical symptoms such as bloating, headaches and pain and how they may change throughout the different phases of your menstrual cycle

• How your sleep, energy levels and mood may change throughout your menstrual cycle

• Basal Body Temperature to help identify ovulation

• Changes in cervical mucus (which can indicate ovulation)

To calculate your menstrual cycle, start on the first day of menstruation. Your cycle ends on the first day of your next period and a new cycle begins. 

The menstrual cycle in a nutshell

To understand your menstrual cycle effectively, let’s break down what happens in the different phases: 

Menstrual - If pregnancy doesn’t occur in a particular cycle, oestrogen and progesterone levels drop and the lining breaks down and is shed (aka your period starts). Ideally, your period will last from 3-7 days and you shouldn’t experience very heavy bleeding or lots of pain. 

Follicular phase- This is the first half of your menstrual cycle and the period from the start of your bleed to ovulation. Oestrogen rises and Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH) is released. This phase can range from 14-21 days, depending on your cycle length. If your follicular phase is shorter or longer than this, it can affect hormone health and fertility. 

Ovulation - As an egg matures, the body releases luteinizing hormone. This encourages an egg to be released from its follicle and travel via the fallopian tubes to the uterus so that it can potentially be fertilised by sperm.   

Luteal phase - This is the second half of your menstrual cycle and the period between ovulation and the start of the next menstrual phase. It sees progesterone levels rise and the uterus lining thicken in preparation for a potential pregnancy.  If you don’t become pregnant, progesterone and oestrogen levels will drop, prompting the start of the menstrual phase. 

Ideally, your luteal phase will range from 12-17 days. Less than 10 days is considered short and can impact fertility whereas a luteal phase that lasts longer than 17 days can be linked to hormone imbalances. 

How to track your menstrual cycle to get pregnant 

If you’re cycle tracking for fertility, it’s essential to pinpoint your fertile window (more on this later) and whether you’re ovulating regularly. 

The most common ways to predict ovulation are:

• Tracking Basal Body Temperature (BBT) first thing in the morning - Basal Body Temperature usually increases slightly during ovulation and stays higher in the luteal phase of your menstrual cycle. If you don’t fall pregnant, BBT usually begins to fall just before your period starts. BBT should be taken first thing in the morning, before you even think about getting out of bed for an accurate reading. 

• Tracking changes in cervical mucus - Your cervical mucus can change throughout your menstrual cycle due to hormone changes. Prior to ovulation,  you may notice more cervical mucus is being produced and that it has a creamier consistency. Around ovulation, it often becomes thinner and stretchier and may have the same consistency as egg whites. 

• Logging symptoms throughout your menstrual cycle to spot patterns.

Even if you’re not trying to get pregnant, ovulation is still important for hormonal health. Estradiol (a form of oestrogen) is made in the lead up to ovulation while progesterone is made post-ovulation.

What’s the best cycle length for fertility?

You’ve probably heard that a 28-day cycle is a ‘textbook’ menstrual cycle but anything between 21 and 35 days is considered normal. 

Even in a 28-day cycle, you won’t necessarily ovulate on day 14 or have optimal follicular and luteal phases so it’s not necessarily the best cycle length for fertility. 

The best cycle length for fertility is one with: 

• Optimal follicular and luteal phases

• Regular ovulation 

When are you most fertile?

Knowing when ovulation is likely to happen is crucial for pinpointing your fertile window for getting pregnant, if this is something you’re hoping for. 

Your fertile window is generally the 5 days leading up to ovulation, the day of ovulation itself and the day after ovulation.  

These are the days in your cycle when you’re most fertile and therefore most likely to get pregnant. 

If you’re tracking Basal Body Temperature, bear in mind that it’s an indicator of ovulation and your fertile window is likely to be already happening when you can track this temperature rise. But over time, you may be able to spot patterns in your BBT that can help to predict ovulation and make the most of your fertile window. 

Optimising the menstrual cycle with nutrition and lifestyle

Once you start to feel more confident with cycle tracking, you may become aware that the phases of your menstrual cycle aren’t of optimal length or that certain patterns or symptoms are tending to crop up in specific phases of your menstrual cycle, for example. 

These are areas that you can look to through nutrition and lifestyle as the foods you eat and your day-to-day lifestyle can have a big impact on hormone balance. 

Through nutrition and lifestyle changes, we can work on restoring hormone balance, regulating your menstrual cycle so that the phases of your menstrual cycle and if desired, improving your fertility. If your menstrual cycle is irregular to a condition such as Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), nutrition and lifestyle changes can help to balance hormones and restore a regular menstrual cycle.

There’s a lot of conflicting information online around how to support hormone health and much of it won’t necessarily help your unique situation. Getting personalised support to know what will work for you is crucial to successfully use nutrition and lifestyle to optimise your menstrual cycle. 

Working with a women’s health dietitian

to optimise your menstrual cycle

If you’d like to get personalised support to optimise your menstrual cycle for hormonal health or fertility, I can support you via my 1-1 women’s health consultations. 

As a women’s health and fertility dietitian, I help my clients to use nutrition and lifestyle to support hormonal health, manage an existing women’s health condition (if diagnosed with a condition such as PCOS, endometriosis or amenorrhoea and cycle tracking to help to manage symptoms) and/or increase their chances of falling pregnant if they’re trying to conceive. 

If you’re cycle tracking for fertility, we can work on optimising the different phases of your menstrual cycle to ensure this isn’t making it harder for you to fall pregnant.