Petit Sophia
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Taking Your Temperature
Monitoring a woman's basal body temperature, or BBT, has been a time-honored way of helping to record and thus help predict ovulation, and it's helped many women get pregnant.
Just before ovulation, a woman's basal body temperature is usually about 97.0 to 97.5 degrees Fahrenheit, although those numbers can vary from person to person. During ovulation, your body releases the hormone progesterone, which results in a slightly raised temperature a day or two after ovulation, usually by 0.1 to 0.2 degrees. If you become pregnant your temperature will stay elevated.
A 0.1 degree difference is not much, and a sensitive “BBT” thermometer is normally used to pick up this small change. Please remember that the temperature change happens just after ovulation, which means that once your temperature goes up, or “spikes”, you've probably already missed your chance to become pregnant in that cycle. By charting your temperature every day over several cycles, you will most likely start to see a pattern and be able to predict when you are most fertile.
Tips for Taking and Understanding Your BBT:
· Begin taking your temperature on the first day of your period.
· Take it at about the same time every day, preferably before you get out of bed in the morning.
· Don't do anything -- eat, drink, smoke, or even move around -- before you take your temperature.
· You can take your temperature however you want but make sure you use the same technique each time.
· Write down your temperature every day on your fertility chart; you can make a graph with each day of your cycle on the bottom and temperatures on the left, connecting the dots as you go. The Petit Sophia product will record and graph your temperatures for you.
· Keep in mind that you will probably get some occasional freak readings either high or low temperatures that don't fit into the larger pattern. If they don't happen often, don't worry about them.
· You may want to have your doctor look at your chart to help you interpret it.
· Although BBT charting is a widely used technique, it is by no means foolproof. Some women may not see a clear pattern emerge by recording their temperature. Since ovulation can occur at different times in your cycle from one month to the next, your BBT chart may not be effective at predicting when you'll ovulate.