Pregnancy and Basal Body Temperature
On an average, a couple in good health can attain their goal of pregnancy within 6 to 12 months. If you are trying to get pregnant, you should know the exact time period when you are ovulating. That way you can time intercourse to match your fertile days. If you wish to speed up the process of conceiving, you’d have to learn when you are at the peak of your fertility in your personal cycle by carefully paying attention to your body signals. The most simple and popular method to recognize when you are most fertile involves keeping track of your BBT (basal body temperature).
It takes about 28 days for a usual menstrual cycle, and the ovulation occurs around 14th day, if you count the day when your period starts as the 1st day of your menstruation cycle. This cycle repeats periodically. If you chart the changes in your basal body temperature, you can predict when you are ovulating, and if you’re having regular ovulation cycle. This will assist you in predicting your fertile days and trying to have your intercourse in that period to improve the chances of conceiving.
What is basal body temperature?
BBT or Basal body temperature is a term used to name the minimum body temperature during a day. Normally, the body temperature is at the lowest early in the morning when you wake up. You should therefore take the BBT reading when you wake up in the morning, and remember not to even get out of bed to do any physical activities like standing, brushing teeth, drinking water or going to bathroom. In fact you should keep your thermometer in a handy location near your bed so you won’t even need to move much to pick up the thermometer. Just make sure that you take your basal temperature at roughly the same time of the day when you wake up. You can take the temperature orally or other methods such as vaginal or rectal. Charting your BBT and monitoring your cervical mucus is the natural and free way to get an idea of your ovulation cycle.
You can buy a basal thermometer without any prescription at most drug stores. They normally come with a blank chart where you can note your BST every day. That way you can identify the pattern of changes in your basal temperature over your menstrual cycle and figure out your ovulation pattern. Normally your BBT would fall in the range of 97.1 to 99.7 degrees F; but when you start ovulating, your BBT would go up by around 0.2 degrees. You should always check for this spike. If you get pregnant, your body temperature will remain at a high level throughout your pregnancy period.
Thus by charting your BBT over few cycles would help you to guess when you would have ovulation next time. If you want to get pregnant, you can then decide the best days to have sex matching your most fertile days.
Filed Under: Ovlulation Predictor Kits • Ovulation • Preconception Planning • Pregnancy Planning
