Here I will share all things female hormones and family planning. The hormones specifically in regard to how they are affected by birth control and what their purpose is in your body and ultimately how that can affect your overall health. You'll also find content on how to plan your family naturally and if you even should from a biblical standpoint. When I really started to dive into this, I was shocked by the truth I found, and I think you just might be too.

Birth control has a lot of uncommonly known and often unexpected side effects and one of those is the effect it has on your attraction. If you were on hormonal birth control when you started your relationship and then came off and noticed a change in how you feel or vice versa started birth control after getting married and struggled with feeling like you married the wrong person, the birth control might be the problem. Fortunately, men typically become more attracted to a woman when she is off birth control (more on that later) and women have a unique ability to learn to love if they choose to so if you are in this situation know that it can work out and not to give up on the one you love instead show yourself and your spouse some grace and give each other some understanding as you work through this transition. I will talk more about Love being a choice later in this post as well so read on for that.

The sympto-thermal method is the most accurate method of fertility awareness because it combines both cervical mucus observations with your basal body temperature and the option of tracking your cervix positioning and openness to determine your fertility. This is the method I use and have really enjoyed it.

There are many differing opinions on the subject of family planning and how many children a couple should have as well as how they should be spaced but today were going to take a dive into what God's word says on the subject and discover God's heart for the family and marriage. I believe unknowingly many people hold a worldly view of having children and I was once one of them. There are several main reasons why people today choose to delay having children or not have them at all and I'm going to cover them here as well as what God has to say one the matter.

Basal body temperature (BBT) method of natural family planning uses your body temperature to tell you when you have ovulated. When you ovulate is cause a slight increase in temperature due to your hormones changing and an increase in progesterone. 

The first thing I think we need to address is what even is birth control. I am far from an expert but will give brief overview of what I know here. Many people will simply say well it is a way to prevent pregnancy which is true in a way, but there are lots of different kinds. There is the most popular type, the pill which also has many different formulas but all of them are either estrogen, progestin or a combination, usually a synthetic form, that replaces your hormones to prevent ovulation.

The Creighton model is one of the popular methods of fertility awareness that uses a woman's cervical mucus patterns to determine on a day by day basis whether or not she is fertile. This is a great method because it determines each day off you have the chance to become pregnant so it works with most people's cycles weather regular or not.

My husband and I will be married 5 years in December. When we first got married in 2018, I went on the birth control pill because I just thought that that was what I was supposed to do. Well as a result of that my hormones responsible for my sex drive were destroyed. I know this is what caused a dip in my sex drive because before we got married it felt impossible to keep it distance and uphold boundaries in our relationship and after I started the pill, I have had very little desire for intimacy with my husband.

There are a few different methods of natural family planning here were going to talk about the calendar tracking method. I will explain how it's used and who it would be best for. There are many reasons you may want to choose a more natural way of family planning and cycle tracking; from wanting to protect yourself from the negative side effects of hormonal birth control, being prolife and thus against the abortive aspects of birth control, or just simply wanting to get to know and be more in touch with your body to name a few. I like to track my cycle for all of these reasons and there is a growing popularity in doing so amongst women in our society.

I heard someone once say that a woman's monthly cycle is like the seasons of the earth and that was eye opening to me. I realized that I was trying to do all the wrong things at the wrong times of my cycle and not prioritizing certain projects but rather starting a bunch of things that never got finished. Once I realized that my body has a flow of energy that rises and falls at varying parts of my cycle, I began to understand how to properly channel my energy to get the most done and be the most efficient with my days and routines. Going into this new year I'm going to make it a goal work with my body and cycle in the coming year rather than against it to be more successful and feel accomplished and I hope this post can help you do that too.