How does period cycle tracking work. What are the benefits of using a period tracker. Can period tracking help predict ovulation. How accurate are period calculators. What information do you need to use a period tracker.

Understanding the Menstrual Cycle: The Four-Phase Journey

The menstrual cycle is a complex biological process that extends far beyond the days of bleeding. It consists of four distinct phases, each playing a crucial role in reproductive health. Let’s delve into these phases to gain a comprehensive understanding of the cycle:

1. Menstrual Phase: The shedding of the uterine lining
2. Follicular Phase: Maturation of ovarian follicles
3. Ovulation: Release of the egg
4. Luteal Phase: Preparation for potential pregnancy or the next cycle

By comprehending these phases, you can better predict your body’s patterns and prepare for upcoming menstrual periods. But how exactly can you keep track of this intricate cycle?

The Power of Period Tracking: Why It Matters

Period tracking is more than just marking days on a calendar. It’s a powerful tool that can provide valuable insights into your reproductive health. Here are some key reasons why period tracking is essential:

• Predicts upcoming periods, reducing unexpected surprises
• Helps identify irregular cycles that may indicate underlying health issues
• Assists in family planning by pinpointing fertile windows
• Aids in managing period-related symptoms and planning activities
• Provides useful information to share with healthcare providers

Is period tracking only beneficial for those with regular cycles? Not at all. Even if your cycles are irregular, consistent tracking can help you identify patterns and anomalies over time.

Tampax Period Calculator: Your Personal Menstrual Assistant

The Tampax Period Calculator is a user-friendly tool designed to help you predict your menstrual cycle. But how does it work? The calculator uses the information you provide about your cycle to estimate future periods. Here’s what you need to input:

• The start date of your last period
• The length of your last period
• Your average cycle length

Using this data, the calculator can predict when your next period is likely to start. Is the Tampax Period Calculator accurate for everyone? While it’s a helpful tool for many, it’s important to remember that every body is unique. Factors like stress, diet, exercise, and certain medical conditions can affect your cycle, potentially impacting the calculator’s accuracy.

Beyond Bleeding: Tracking Ovulation and Fertility

Period tracking isn’t just about predicting your next menstrual flow. It can also be a valuable tool for understanding your fertility. Ovulation typically occurs around the 14th day of a 28-day cycle, counting from the first day of your period. By tracking your cycle, you can estimate when you’re most likely to ovulate.

Can period tracking replace other methods of fertility awareness? While period tracking can provide useful insights, it’s not as precise as other methods for pinpointing ovulation. For more accurate fertility tracking, consider combining period tracking with other techniques such as:

• Monitoring basal body temperature
• Observing changes in cervical mucus
• Using ovulation predictor kits

Remember, these methods require consistent effort and careful observation to be effective.

The Role of Birth Control in Cycle Regularity

Many individuals use hormonal birth control methods, which can significantly impact the menstrual cycle. How does birth control affect period tracking? Most hormonal contraceptives work by regulating the menstrual cycle, often making periods more predictable. This can make period tracking easier and more accurate.

However, it’s important to note that some forms of birth control may eliminate monthly bleeding altogether or cause irregular spotting. In these cases, traditional period tracking may not be as relevant. If you’re using hormonal birth control, discuss with your healthcare provider how it might affect your cycle and the best ways to monitor your reproductive health.

Decoding Your Unique Cycle: What’s Normal for You?

While the average menstrual cycle is often cited as 28 days, the reality is that cycle lengths can vary significantly from person to person. A normal cycle can range from 21 to 35 days. Does this mean there’s something wrong if your cycle falls outside this range?

Not necessarily. What’s most important is consistency. If your cycles are regularly shorter or longer than the average range, but remain consistent for you, this may simply be your body’s normal pattern. However, significant changes in your cycle length or sudden irregularity could be signs of underlying health issues and should be discussed with a healthcare provider.

How can you determine what’s normal for your body? Consistent tracking over several months can help you establish your personal baseline. Pay attention to:

• The length of your cycles
• The duration of your periods
• Any patterns in symptoms or mood changes throughout your cycle

By understanding your unique patterns, you’ll be better equipped to notice any significant changes that might warrant medical attention.

Maximizing the Benefits of Period Tracking

To get the most out of period tracking, consistency is key. Here are some tips to help you make the most of your tracking efforts:

1. Choose a method that works for you: Whether it’s a digital app, a physical calendar, or a notebook, select a tracking method you’re likely to stick with.
2. Be consistent: Try to record your data at the same time each day for the most accurate results.
3. Track more than just bleeding: Note symptoms like cramps, mood changes, and energy levels to get a comprehensive picture of your cycle.
4. Be patient: It may take several cycles to start seeing clear patterns in your data.
5. Review your data regularly: Look for trends and changes over time that might provide insights into your health.

How often should you review your tracking data? Monthly reviews can help you prepare for upcoming periods, while quarterly or biannual reviews can help you spot longer-term trends.

When to Seek Medical Advice: Red Flags in Your Cycle

While variations in cycle length are normal, certain changes or symptoms may warrant medical attention. Here are some signs that it might be time to consult a healthcare provider:

• Sudden changes in cycle length or regularity
• Periods that last longer than seven days
• Extremely heavy bleeding (soaking through a pad or tampon every hour for several hours)
• Severe pain that interferes with daily activities
• Bleeding between periods
• Absence of periods for three months or more (if not on hormonal birth control)

Remember, your period tracking data can be valuable information to share with your healthcare provider. It can help them identify patterns and potential issues more accurately.

The Future of Period Tracking: Technology and Innovation

As technology continues to advance, so do the tools available for period tracking. From smartphone apps to wearable devices, new innovations are making it easier than ever to track and understand menstrual cycles. Some emerging technologies in this field include:

• AI-powered apps that learn from your data to make more accurate predictions
• Wearable devices that can detect subtle physiological changes throughout your cycle
• Integration with other health tracking tools for a more comprehensive view of overall wellness

How might these advancements change the way we approach menstrual health? As tracking becomes more precise and user-friendly, it could lead to earlier detection of reproductive health issues and more personalized healthcare recommendations.

Empowering Yourself Through Knowledge

Understanding and tracking your menstrual cycle is more than just predicting your next period. It’s about gaining insight into your body’s unique rhythms and taking control of your reproductive health. By using tools like the Tampax Period Calculator and consistently tracking your cycle, you can:

• Be better prepared for upcoming periods
• Understand your body’s patterns and what’s normal for you
• Identify potential health issues early
• Make informed decisions about family planning
• Optimize your lifestyle choices based on your cycle phases

Remember, every body is different, and what’s normal for one person may not be for another. The key is to get to know your own body and its patterns. With consistent tracking and awareness, you can become an expert on your own menstrual health.

Period Tracking and Overall Wellness

Your menstrual cycle is not an isolated aspect of your health; it’s intricately connected to your overall well-being. By tracking your cycle, you can gain insights into various aspects of your health, including:

• Hormonal balance
• Nutritional needs
• Exercise performance
• Emotional well-being
• Sleep patterns

How can you use this information to improve your overall health? Consider tailoring your diet, exercise routine, and self-care practices to align with the different phases of your cycle. For example, you might find that you have more energy for high-intensity workouts during certain phases, while gentler exercises are more beneficial at other times.

Addressing Common Concerns About Period Tracking

Despite its benefits, some individuals may have concerns about period tracking. Let’s address some common questions:

Is period tracking time-consuming? While it does require some effort, most tracking methods are designed to be quick and easy to use. Many apps allow you to input data in just a few seconds each day.

What if my cycles are irregular? Irregular cycles can make predictions less accurate, but tracking can still provide valuable insights. It can help you identify patterns over time and provide useful information for healthcare providers.

Is my data safe? If you’re using a digital app, research its privacy policy. Many reputable apps use strong encryption to protect your data. If you’re concerned, consider using a physical calendar or notebook instead.

Period Tracking for Different Life Stages

Your menstrual cycle changes throughout your life, and so might your reasons for tracking it. Here’s how period tracking can be beneficial at different stages:

• Adolescence: Understanding your body and establishing what’s normal for you
• Reproductive years: Family planning, whether trying to conceive or avoid pregnancy
• Perimenopause: Monitoring changes as you approach menopause

How should you adapt your tracking as you move through these stages? Focus on the aspects most relevant to your current life stage and health goals. For example, in perimenopause, you might pay more attention to changes in cycle length and symptoms.

The Role of Diet and Lifestyle in Menstrual Health

Your menstrual cycle doesn’t exist in isolation—it’s influenced by various lifestyle factors. By tracking your cycle alongside your diet and lifestyle habits, you can identify potential connections. For instance:

• How certain foods might affect your symptoms
• The impact of stress on your cycle regularity
• The relationship between exercise and menstrual discomfort

Can making lifestyle changes improve your menstrual health? While everyone’s body responds differently, many people find that balanced nutrition, regular exercise, stress management, and adequate sleep can contribute to more comfortable and regular cycles.

Sharing Your Cycle Data: When and How

Your menstrual cycle data can be valuable information to share with healthcare providers. It can help in diagnosing conditions, adjusting medications, or planning treatments. But when and how should you share this information?

• Annual check-ups: Provide an overview of your cycle patterns
• Specific health concerns: Share detailed data related to your symptoms
• Family planning: Discuss your cycle when considering conception or contraception

How can you effectively communicate your cycle data? Consider creating a summary of your tracking data, highlighting any significant patterns or changes. Many tracking apps allow you to generate reports that can be shared with healthcare providers.

The Global Perspective: Period Tracking and Menstrual Health Awareness

Period tracking isn’t just a personal tool—it’s part of a larger movement towards menstrual health awareness. Globally, increased understanding and open discussion of menstrual cycles are contributing to:

• Improved menstrual education
• Reduced stigma around menstruation
• Better access to menstrual health resources
• Advancements in menstrual health research

How can individuals contribute to this global movement? By openly discussing menstrual health, supporting menstrual education initiatives, and advocating for improved access to menstrual products and healthcare, we can all play a part in advancing menstrual health awareness worldwide.

Period Tracker | Tampax®

There’s nothing worse than feeling a little squish in your pants and being faced with the potential horror that you might’ve just started your period unprepared. “When should I get my period?” you wonder, followed by “Did I just start my period?” are not the best things to cross your mind on a day you’re not expecting it. Be your own period prepper with the Tampax Period Calculator to know when your flow is about to start.
For those vagina-havers with regular cycles (how’s it feel to be genetically lucky?), use our period calendar tracking tool to find out when you can roll the dice with your favorite pair of white jeans.

How do menstrual calculators work?
Glad you asked. Basically, your body runs on a four-part “menstrual cycle” — and while you might assume that phrase means just the week of bleeding, in actuality, your menstrual cycle also refers to the weeks you don’t bleed. Your body is still grinding and putting in work — it’s not like your reproductive system just goes all-out the one week you bleed.
You start with the menstrual cycle (your period, when the lining of your uterus sheds), followed by the follicular phase (when the follicles in your ovaries mature and get ready for the prime time: ovulation), then comes (you guessed it) ovulation (when the egg is released), followed finally by the luteal phase (when the egg makes its way down your fallopian tubes and gets ready to bleed).

Knowing this, you can track your period and your cycle. Voila!

It’s like those annoying SAT logic questions. If luteinizing is def gonna happen, then the menstrual cycle is def gonna happen next, and it’s only a matter of time before you bleed. You can also tell other ways to see where in your cycle your body is, like tracking your basal body temp (your temp when you first wake up), and checking your cervical mucus, both of which are helpful to know if you want to see if you’re ovulating, aka at your most fertile. But since seeing your period is an easier way of pinning down where you are in your cycle, tracking the days you bleed can also help you fill in the missing gaps to better picture your cycle’s timeline.

It’s using this information that you can get a chronological, clearer picture of what to expect.

Of course, not everyone’s cycle is totally the same. The average length that people usually go by is 28 days, but anywhere from 21 to 35 days is normal too, so don’t stress if you tend to be on the earlier or later side, as long as it’s consistent for your bod. If you’re on birth control, this can also help give you a more stable idea of your cycle, as birth control regulates your period a bit better.

But whether your period is three days, five, or seven days, whether it comes every month or more like every month-ish, you can still use a period calculator to better learn your cycle.
How to Use a Period Tracker:
Simply input the length of your average period and the length of your last period, and let the period calculator do the rest.

Pop in the date your last period began, the length of time it lasted, and the average length of your cycle to get a better idea of when you can reasonably expect your next period. If you have no idea how long between your periods, make a note the next time it starts and when it ends so you have it on hand for next month. Better late than never amirite?

You can also use a “period tracker” for way more than just predicting bleed week. Since ovulation usually occurs on the 14th day of your cycle (with Day 1 of your cycle being the first day you bleed), you can also learn and track peak ovulation.

Period health

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    Period Health

    Did You Know Period Protection Is FSA and HSA Eligible?

    Flexible spending accounts (FSAs) and health savings accounts (HSAs) are now covering Feminine Care products. Learn how to get an FSA or HSA and which menstrual hygiene products are included.

    All Your Period Questions, Answered

    Get answers to your period questions around menstrual cycle duration, symptoms, discomfort, and more.

    Can Stress Cause a Missed or Late Period?

    Stress can lead to irregular periods and changes to your menstrual cycle. This can include delayed or missed periods.

    Everything You Need to Know About PMS

    PMS can result in changes to women’s physical, emotional, and behavioral health before their period. Learn the signs and ways to ease your symptoms.

    How to Manage a Heavy Period (aka Menstrual Menorrhagia)

    Experience heavy menstrual bleeding? Learn about the causes, symptoms, treatments and Tampax products best for Menorrhagia or heavy periods.

    How to Tell if You Have a Vaginal Yeast Infection: Causes and Symptoms

    How do you know if you have a vaginal yeast infection? Know the signs, symptoms, risk factors, and get tips for preventing yeast infections.

    The Facts on Menstrual Cycle Phases

    Learn what happens in the 28 days of your menstrual cycle. View a breakdown of the menstrual, follicular, ovulation, and luteal phases.

    The Stages of Female Puberty: Hair, Boobs, and Other Signs

    Know the signs and stages of puberty for girls. From breast buds and hair growth, to body sweat, discharge, and the first period. We’re here to help guide you.

    The Truth About Period Sex

    Can you get pregnant on your period? Is it safe to have sex? Get the answers and learn about risk factors, sex and period benefits, tips, and more.

    Tips for Talking with Kids about Puberty & Periods

    Girls can get their first periods as early as 8 years old, making chats around body changes, puberty, and menstruation difficult. Use this guide for help.

    Vaginal Discharge: What It Is, Why It Happens, and What Different Types Mean

    Vaginal discharge is common; however, there are certain signs like color, consistency, odor, and texture that can indicate greater health concerns.

    Vaginal Odor: What Should My Vagina Smell Like?

    Wondering why you have a strong odor down there? Learn the various types of vaginal odors and their causes. Find out what’s normal and abnormal.

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        A Gynecologist Busts 9 Common Myths About Tampons

        Is it bad to sleep with a tampon? Can a tampon get lost inside you? Get the medically accurate facts to these 9 common tampon questions.

        Worried about a Lost Tampon or Getting a Tampon Stuck?

        Can a tampon get lost in your body? What do you do if a tampon is stuck. Get the facts from gynecologist, Dr. Holmes.

        Do Tampons Take Your Virginity?

        Do tampons take your virginity? Get the answer and more details about the technical impact of tampons if you are a virgin.

        How to Insert a Tampon

        Follow these easy step-by-step instructions for how to insert and use a tampon. Learn how to remove a tampon and when you should change it out.

        Things You Can (and Can’t) Do With a Tampon

        Find the basic can and can’ts when it comes to wearing a tampon. Can you shower with a tampon? Or go to the bathroom with a tampon? Get answers.

        What You Need to Know About Menstrual Cups

        Menstrual cups can offer an eco-friendly alternative to tampons and pads with up to 12 hours of period leak protection. Learn how it works.

        Which Tampon Sizes Do you Need? Know Your Flow

        Is your period normal or irregular? light or heavy? What tampon size should you get? Know your flow and what it means for your health and period protection.

        How to Decide Between Pads and Tampons

        Need help deciding between tampons vs pads. Use this guide to compare the pros and cons and find out the best protection for your period.

        How Long Can you Leave a Tampon In?

        Wondering how long you can keep a tampon in before you need to change it? Or if you can wear it overnight? We’ve got answers and resources.

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        Period Trackers: The Benefits of Tracking Your Menstrual Cycle, Calculating Your Period, and the Best Apps

        If you had to name the date of your last period, could you tick it off without thinking or are you like most women who would offer a blank stare?

        Closely tracking your menstrual cycles and other monthly changes on a regular basis has many benefits, whether you’re a woman thinking about getting pregnant, trying to prevent conception, or simply assessing your overall health.

        RELATED: 10 Home Remedies to Relieve Menstrual Cramps

        “Charting your cycle is empowering and fascinating,” says Toni Weschler, MPH, the author of the classic book Taking Charge of Your Fertility. “It is so much more than just a method of both natural birth control and pregnancy achievement. It’s also an excellent tool for assessing gynecological problems and understanding your sexuality and body.”

        Keep a Record of Your Periods

        Tracking your menstrual cycle simply means keeping a record of when you’re menstruating and documenting other information related to your cycle. You used to have to do this with a calendar and pen, but now many great period-tracking apps make the job easy.

        If you prefer to calculate your period the old-fashioned way, you’ll want to mark on a calendar the first day of bleeding with, for example, a slash or check mark, says Marjan Attaran, MD, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

        The length of your cycle is measured from that day to the first day of your next period, Dr. Attaran explains. For most women, the average cycle is 28 days, although anything from 21 to 35 days is considered normal in adult women.

        RELATED: Is It Safe to Have Sex During Your Period?

        Tracking Menstruation: How It Helps Your Reproductive Health

        Knowing your cycle length is beneficial for a number of reasons. For women trying to conceive, understanding the timing of your cycle is valuable for determining the time you are most likely to get pregnant.

        Women are considered fertile when an egg has been released from the ovaries and is able to be joined by a man’s sperm. Because of how long both the egg and the sperm survive inside a woman’s fallopian tubes, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecology says you can become pregnant if you have sex anywhere from five days before ovulation until one day after.

        Generally, ovulation is said to occur about 14 days before the start of your next menstrual period. But every woman and every cycle are different. Knowing when you might really be ovulating and having intercourse around that time can enhance your odds of getting pregnant.

        RELATED: National Period Day Is October 19

        Charting Additional Measures Leads to Greater Success

        Weschler cautions that monitoring only the timing of your menstrual cycle, as some apps do, doesn’t give you enough information to accurately predict your future ovulation. The most accurate tracking apps include additional markers like basal body temperature (BBT), changes in cervical fluid, ovulatory pain, and the like, she says.

        In addition to period-tracking apps, a good way to monitor ovulation is with an ovulation predictor kit, which you can buy in the drug store. This uses hormones to most accurately tell you when you have ovulated.

        How Tracking Helps You Avoid Pregnancy

        For women trying to avoid pregnancy who have very regular cycles, the fertility awareness method (FAM) is used by some women as a means of birth control. The idea is to avoid sex during the time in your cycle when you are most likely to conceive.

        However, Attaran cautions, this isn’t foolproof and “will definitely not work for people who have irregular periods.” For these reasons, it is not recommended as a way of preventing pregnancy, she says.

        RELATED: Real Women Tout Their Go-To Period Products

        Trackers Are Not a Foolproof Way of Preventing Pregnancy

        “As the technology stands now, tracking should never be used as a sole method of birth control,” Weschler says, including with her own app, OvaGraph.

        This is because so many factors influence ovulation from one month to the next.

        A study published online in July 2019 in the journal Nature Digital Medicine found that women using tracking apps find they often do not ovulate at the exact midpoint of their cycle.

        Other research presented at a technology conference in May 2017 found that, when writing their reviews of the tracking app they used, women often cited unhappiness with inaccurate predictions. The scientists speculate this may be because the app didn’t account for factors that can throw off your cycle, like recently giving birth or approaching menopause.

        So while an article published in March 2016 in Global Health: Science and Practice called FAM an effective modern contraceptive, other experts point out that the method has a much lower effectiveness rate than the most reliable methods, such as intrauterine devices or contraceptive implants. In fact, the Department of Health and Human Services says about 25 percent of couples who use FAM may become pregnant.

        Because it is difficult to know exactly when you ovulate, to most successfully prevent pregnancy it is best to use an additional type of birth control, even if you are closely monitoring your periods.

        Other Reasons Period Tracking Is Helpful

        In addition to fertility concerns, charting your menstrual cycle is a good way to identify other gynecological health issues you may not be aware of, Weschler says.

        For example, a change in your cycle might suggest that you have fibroids, a vaginal infection, pelvic inflammatory disease, or endometriosis. In rare cases, it can be a flag for endometrial cancer.

        Tracking what happens in your body each month also helps your doctor diagnose the reason you are not getting pregnant when you want to, since it can reveal if you are not ovulating, if you are having a short second part (luteal phase) of your cycle, or even if you have polycystic ovary syndrome or another hormone imbalance, Weschler says.

        What’s more, tracking problems with your period is important because bad periods are not something you need to suffer through. If the next time you see your doctor you point out painful cramps or long bleeding days you have tracked, they may be able to suggest lifestyle changes or medicines to make things better for you.

        Finally, tracking your period can help you plan your life. Knowing when to expect your period means you won’t be caught without sanitary products or in your nicest white pants. It can also help you decide the best days to go on vacation or host that party, when you won’t be suffering from cramps.

        How to Calculate Your Period Accurately

        The best way to track your period really means the best way for you. This partly depends on what you want the information for and on your personal preference for an app’s function and design.

        Tracking your monthly cycle to try to get pregnant, for example, requires different features than if you want to assess your PMS. And whether you love or hate designs that go all feminine with pink colors and lots of curlicues is a matter of taste.

        Potential Downsides to Using Period-Tracking Apps

        Some privacy advocates have raised concerns about all the data you input in a period tracker and the potential for that data to be misused.

        Consumer Reports notes that period-tracking apps gather a lot of intimate information — about your sex life, whether you are trying to have a baby, if you engage in unprotected sex, have experienced a miscarriage, are approaching menopause — that could potentially be sold to third parties for marketing or other purposes.

        Having your personal health information out there may have serious repercussions, Consumer Reports cautions, such as whether and how much you pay for life insurance, or whether your employer discriminates against you.

        If an app lets you opt out of sharing your data (typically buried in the fine print), always do so, Consumer Reports says.

        The Best Period-Tracker Tools and Apps

        Fortunately, there are many tools available to help you track your periods. Everyday Health examined a number of them and selected some favorites.

        Spot On From Planned Parenthood

        Best For Monitoring all forms of birth control and identifying menstrual symptoms

        What It Does If you miss a birth control pill or don’t know when your next Depo-Provera shot is due, this app not only reminds you, it helps you figure out when backup methods are required if you get off course. Since the app is from Planned Parenthood, the comprehensive birth control info is top-notch. The app also lets you comprehensively track changes in your body and mood to better understand what affects your cycle. Bonus: This app doesn’t make assumptions about your sexual orientation or gender identity.

        OvaGraph

        Best For Trying to conceive and also intimately understanding your body

        What It Does Available as an app or on your computer, Weschler’s program is a comprehensive approach for tracking all your natural signs of fertility: basal body temperature, cervical mucus, cervical position, vaginal sensations, menstrual cycle timing, and more. All of this gives you the best odds of correctly determining your date of ovulation. With this program, you also get support from an active community of women and trained moderators who can answer any question you have.

        Natural Cycles

        Best For Using for birth control or a means of contraception

        What It Does This digital birth control method was cleared by the Food and Drug Administration as a form of contraception in 2018. You take your temperature when you wake up each morning, and the app indicates whether your BBT makes you likely to conceive (indicated in red) or not (green). The company claims the app is 93 percent effective as birth control with typical use, but this still leaves 7 out of 100 women with a potentially unwanted pregnancy.

        Flo

        Best For Predicting your period

        What It Does One of the most popular period trackers, Flo gives you the option to log dozens of symptoms and activities — your sleep, how much water you’re drinking, discharge color, and more — to home in on when your period (and ovulation) should come next. A selection of articles by experts can answer most of your questions, but if you have a concern you can’t find covered there, you can ask anonymous questions to the app’s millions of users and see what they say.

        MyFlo

        Best For Looking for holistic ways to balance fluctuating hormones, especially for women in perimenopause

        What It Does Under the premise that where you are in your cycle affects so many things in your life, including your skin, bloating, sleep, cravings, and more, this app takes the symptoms you record and provides the ways changing your lifestyle can help. Some of the holistic suggestions the app offers are around eating whole foods, taking certain supplements, and exercising or doing other activities — all tailored to the phase of your cycle. The app was created by a woman who found her own holistic help after years of battling hormone demons.

        Clue

        Best For Learning about your body

        What It Does More than 30 optional tracking categories (including BBT, cervical fluid, even what’s up with your hair) help you keep tabs on your upcoming period, your birth control method, period symptoms, and more. This very popular tracking app is also chock-full of health articles on what’s going on with your body as you go through the month, giving you an education that sex ed likely never did.

        11 Best Period Tracker Apps For 2021, According to Ob-Gyns

        So you’re sitting in that dreaded paper gown, swinging your legs off the exam table as your doc asks, “When was the first day of your last period?” Ugh, you knew this question was coming and yet you still hem and haw for a bit before answering something generic like, “Hmmm, a few weeks ago.”

        Sound familiar? Knowing zilch about your menstrual cycle isn’t just inconvenient at the doctor’s office (or when you realize you need a tampon like right now). “Changes to your cycle, or abnormalities—like irregular or heavy bleeding, or severe pain—can all signal issues that benefit from medical evaluation,” says Rashmi Kudesia, MD, reproductive endocrinologist and clinical assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Houston Methodist. “If something suddenly changes with your cycle, or your period is late, you may not realize it right away if you’re not keeping track.” Enter, period tracking apps.

        First things first: You might be wondering whether period tracking apps are really that accurate. The answer: They should be—that is, if you’re a woman who has a regular ovulatory cycle and who habitually updates the app.

        While each app has its own algorithm, they all depend on accurate input of info from the user so that they can best generate an estimated day of ovulation, a five-to-six day fertile window, and the date of your next period, per Dr. Kudesia. The longer you’re tracking your cycle, the more data the app’s algorithm has to work with, and the more likely it is to be correct.

        Yes, period tracking apps can sometimes be wrong—especially if you’re a woman with an irregular or variable cycle. “For example, if your cycle ranges from 28 to 32 days in length, the ovulatory window shifts three to four days each month,” Dr. Kudesia says. “Though the app shouldn’t miss the entire fertile window, it may be unable to pinpoint the exact day of ovulation.” Similarly, if you have a cycle longer than 35 days, there is, in Dr. Kudesia’s words, “a substantial likelihood” that you’re not regularly ovulating, which the app may not flag as possibility.

        Assuming the above scenarios aren’t happening and you have a fairly regular cycle, a period tracking app can help you calculate the average length of your cycle, which it’ll then use to help you predict your next period. They can also help you chronicle any symptoms during your cycle.

        Thankfully, there are dozens of period tracking apps available for download that make tracking your period as easy as sending a text message or checking your Facebook notifications. These are the 11 best period tracking apps out there, according to ob-gyns.

        1

        Clue

        Clue markets its app as being able to teach you about your body (because be honest, you weren’t paying attention back in sex ed class).

        With tracking options related to literally everything that goes on in your body during your cycle, like your period-induced breakouts or your PMS headaches, this one is pretty legit. It’s also Dr. Kudesia’s favorite app, and the one she actually uses herself.

        “I like its clean, modern interface, the impeccable science behind it, their transparent citation of supporting data, and the multitude of options you have for what you can track,” she explains.

        Get it for Apple

        Get it for Android

        2

        Flo

        If you don’t use the Flo app already, you probably know someone else who does—it’s just that popular.

        Literally millions of users log in daily to record ovulation and period symptoms, turning their data into super useful graphs that show exactly what your body is doing and when. (These also come in handy at your doctor appointments, whether you think something’s up with your reproductive cycle or not.)

        Bonus: Flo also turns into a pregnancy tracker if and when you ever need it to, so it’s pretty all-in-one.

        Get it for Apple

        Get it for Android

        3

        Ovia

        If you’re really hoping to not get your period (a.k.a., you’re looking to get pregnant), the Ovia app might be your best bet.

        It’s technically a fertility tracker so it really excels in helping you chart your basal body temperature, cervical position, and cervical mucus. But, unlike a lot of other fertility trackers, it has the ability to chart your period, too, and gives you predictions about your menstruation or fertility based on the data you input.

        Get it for Apple

        Get it for Android

        4

        Eve by Glow

        The original Glow app is one of the better rated fertility tracking apps out there, but the Eve version of the app focuses primarily on period tracking, in addition to letting you keep tabs on your sex life and gym habits. Dr. Kudesia compliments its clean and attractive interface, which features colorful, eye-catching graphics and icons.

        Get it for Apple

        Get it for Android

        5

        MagicGirl

        If you’re new to getting your monthly flow (or know someone who is), the thought of tracking your period in an app might be kinda intimidating.

        Luckily, the MagicGirl Period Tracker was designed with teens in mind, so it makes learning the digital ins and outs of your cycle pretty easy. The app also helps you learn about hygiene product options, chat with other girls and get period advice, and remember to take your birth control pill (something we could all use help with).

        The bright interface will be instantly attractive to most teens, but it’s a fully functioning period tracker, so there’s no minimum or maximum age required for use.

        Get it for Apple

        Get it for Android

        6

        Period Tracker Period Calendar

        Period Tracker’s Period Calendar is the top period tracking app on Google and consistently gets good reviews. A lot of that may come down to ease of use: It’s simple to navigate, straightforward in how you track and rate symptoms, and literally anyone—regular or irregular, newly menstruating or premenopausal—can use it. If you’re looking for an app that’s not fussy and gives you more than enough room to log all kinds of data, this might be it.

        Get it for Apple

        Get it for Android

        7

        MyFlo

        For women with irregular menstruation, women starting menopause, or women wondering why they’re experiencing other random cycle symptoms (think excessive bloating, migraines, constipation, or low energy), the MyFlo app promises to do way more than simply track your periods: It takes the symptoms you record and turns them into useful information about your overall health.

        My Flo can clue you into possible hormone imbalances and suggests lifestyle changes (like the best foods to eat or activities to engage in) that could make you feel better during different phases of your cycle. The app works great for women with textbook menstruation, too.

        Get it for Apple

        Get it for Android

        8

        Cycles

        Cycles is ultra-customizable but also just looks good. With simple graphics and soothing colors, this is the period tracking app you want to download if you don’t want anyone to know you’ve downloaded a period tracking app (so you can semi-discreetly update it in public when you need to).

        It also stands out from the crowd for the fact that it gets your partner in on the tracking action: You can invite him to sync up with the app on his device so he knows what’s up with your monthly mood swings and weird cravings, too.

        Get it for Apple

        9

        Glow

        Before the aforementioned Eve, there was Glow—a tried-and-true period app backed by experts like Sheeva Talebian, MD, a board-certified reproductive endocrinologist at CCRM in New York and a Women’s Health advisory board member, who considers it to be one of the most useful period apps on the market because of all of the data points it collects. Glow allows you to track 40 different health signals including but not limited to sexual activity and body basal temperature, all through its easy daily log.

        Not only can it help you avoid or attempt pregnancy, but it can also help those who are undergoing fertility treatments through their online communities and accessible resources, says Alyssa Dweck, MD, an ob-gyn in Westchester County, New York.

        Get it for Apple

        Get it for Android

        10

        Cycle Tracking

        These days it seems like you can do just about anything and everything from your…wrist. That includes tracking all things menstruation thanks to the new Cycle Tracking app for the Apple Watch. Available through the iPhone Health app that’s already built into the phone, Cycle Tracking gives you the ability to log info related to your cycle, including flow level, symptoms like cramps and mood changes, and basal body temp if you’re looking to get pregnant.

        Plus, you can opt in for notifications on your watch screen that alert you to when your next predicated period is on its way and when you’re in your fertile window (a big win for those trying to conceive).

        11

        My Calendar: Period Tracker

        Described as “sophisticated” and “elegant” by Dr. Dweck, this app allows you to customize everything from its watercolor theme to the style of your period reminders as either personal (“your period is due on…”) or discreet (“upcoming event…”).

        Taking birth control? You can finally shut off that daily phone alarm and just schedule pill reminders through the app as well. Dr. Dweck also compliments the app for its ability to be password-protected to ensure that your info remains private.

        Get it for Apple

        Sarah Bradley
        Sarah Bradley is a freelancer writer from Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and three sons.

        Elizabeth Bacharach
        Elizabeth Bacharach is the Assistant Editor at Women’s Health where she writes and edits content about mental and physical health, food and nutrition, sexual health, and lifestyle trends across WomensHealthMag.com and the print magazine.

        This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

        How to track your period, and what you can learn from tracking

        This article is also available in: português, español

        At a basic level, tracking your period can remind you when your next period is coming.

        But there’s more to your menstrual cycle than just your period: tracking every day can help you understand all the cyclical symptoms that you experience, from PMS to acne to headaches and more.

        (If you’re new here: we’re Clue, a menstrual cycle tracking app and online resource about menstrual and reproductive health. We’re biased, but we think Clue is the best period tracking app.)

        Should I track my period?

        Tracking your period can help you understand the patterns of symptoms that you experience throughout your menstrual cycle—from pain, to cravings, to sex drive. Tracking can give you a better idea of when you are fertile, which may be helpful if you’re trying to become pregnant.

        The basics: How to get started tracking your period

        In this article we’ll talk about the features in the Clue app, but you can use this info with almost any tracking app.

        When you open your app, you’ll be asked a series of questions about your period and birth control type. Answer the questions as best you can, but don’t worry if you don’t remember the exact date of your last period. The Clue app will fine-tune your predictions as you continue to track.

        If you want to change your birth control options in the future, you can do so by going to your profile in the Clue menu.

        Track your period, PMS, cravings, and more in the Clue app.

        4.8

        2M+ ratings

        How to enter your period in Clue:

        1. Tap the green + button

        2. Choose light, medium, or heavy bleeding to track your period

        Spotting is used to indicate bleeding that happens outside of your period.

        How to calculate when your next period is due

        You can view your past and future period dates in the Clue calendar. Past periods are shown as red squares, and your next 3 periods are shown as light red squares.

        Track other symptoms in Clue

        1. After you’ve tracked bleeding, swipe left to track other symptoms, like pain, emotions, or sleep.

        2. You can add extra tracking options by tapping the grey circle with a + inside at the end of the tracking screen, or by going to the Menu and tapping “Tracking options”.

        3. For anything you want to track that is not covered by Clue’s existing tracking categories, use Custom Tags.

        Keep your data safe by creating an account

        When you have a Clue account and you are logged in, your data is stored safely on our EU-based servers. You’ll be able to re-login from any device. This means you can easily recover everything you’ve tracked in Clue if you get a new phone, or if your phone is lost or broken.

        Beyond the basics: learn about your menstrual cycle

        Set a reminder so you’ll never forget to track

        To set yourself a daily reminder to track in Clue, go to the Menu, then tap Reminders. You can customize your reminders with your own text and emojis! 🙂 You can also set reminders for when your period or PMS is coming up.

        Add your past periods in Clue

        You can add past periods and other symptoms by going to the calendar view and tapping any day in the past.

        Understand where you are in your menstrual cycle

        Clue’s home screen shows you an overview of your current menstrual cycle. The cycle begins with the first day of your period (day one of your menstrual cycle).

        View detailed information about your periods and menstrual cycle

        When your healthcare provider asks, “When was your last period?” you can simply grab your phone and tap on the calendar icon to show them your last periods in the calendar. You can also see a list of your past cycles, and your cycle averages by going to the Analysis screen (the icon for Analysis looks like a little line graph).

        On the right side of the screen, you can see a summary of how long your cycles have been. Period days for each cycle are shown in red, the estimated ovulation day is indicated with a star, and if you’ve tracked PMS those days are shown in blue.

        This section of the Clue app also shows your typical cycle length (the number of days between the first day of your period and the day before your next period starts), your typical period length (the number of days of bleeding each cycle), and the typical cycle length variation (a measure of your cycle’s changes from one cycle to the next.)

        Next level: Gain a deeper understanding of your menstrual cycle and fertility

        Track every day to discover patterns in your symptoms

        If you simply track your period in Clue, you will be able to view your cycle averages and future period predictions, but when you track every day of your menstrual cycle, you can gain a whole new understanding of your body. Daily tracking can help you to find out whether the symptoms you experience are related to your individual cycle—from headaches, to greasy hair or high sex drive.  

        Trying to conceive? Check your ovulation day

        The days leading up to, including, and immediately after ovulation are the days in your cycle when it is possible to get pregnant. In Clue, the predicted day of ovulation is shown indicated with a star.

        Please note that Clue is currently not designed to be a contraceptive. If avoiding pregnancy is important to you, you should never rely on the predicted ovulation day for birth control. Your body is not a clock, and you will not always ovulate at the same time each cycle. The predicted ovulation day is just an estimate and may never be your actual ovulation day. Use birth control to avoid pregnancy.

        If you are currently taking hormonal birth control and have entered it in your profile in the Clue app, then your ovulation day will not be displayed. If you’re taking hormonal birth control and haven’t entered it, please do that now, so Clue can give you the best tracking experience possible.

        Please note: Clue monitors your cycle using the latest research from our academic and clinical collaborators and our guidelines do not replace the advice of a healthcare provider.

        Period-tracking apps like Clue and Glow are not for women

        A cartoon cloud told me I might be pregnant.

        Its little cloud body drifted across my iPhone screen: “7 days late!” written in friendly blue lettering on its belly. It was very cute, and indeed, two pregnancy tests later, it could be confirmed that I was pregnant — not cute at all. “8 days late! 9 days late! 10 days late! 11 days late!” the cloud informed me, as the day of my abortion approached. “25 days late! 36 days late! 41 days late!” it announced, as I waited six weeks for my post-procedure cycle to reset. When it did, I realized I couldn’t just go back to logging my period as normal: The app would think I’d undergone a cycle more than twice as long as usual and adjust all my averages, rendering all of its future predictions completely useless to me.

        I had been using the same ad-riddled, ultra-pink app since I bought my first smartphone in 2014, and now I was going to have to delete all of its learnings and start over. There was no way to explain to it that something out-of-the-ordinary had happened to my body, and while this wasn’t a huge inconvenience, it did strike me as wildly silly. I mean, the culture I live in had already done a thorough enough job prompting me to codify myself as a “bad” woman, and now some poorly designed app was telling me I was also bad data.

        ---

        In the past three years, an estimated $1 billion of investment has been poured into women’s health technology. This has nothing to do with the tech industry becoming pro-woman.

        The “femtech” market is estimated to be worth $50 billion by 2025, but globally, only 10 percent of investor money goes to women-led startups. At Apple, women hold 29 percent of leadership positions and 23 percent of tech positions, and almost all of those women are white. This is very much the industry standard — if anything, slightly better than it. Because “femtech” is everywhere these days, it’s easy to forget that when Apple Health debuted in 2014, senior VP of software engineering Craig Federighi told users, “You can monitor all of your metrics that you’re most interested in.” This did not, for nearly a year, include period tracking.

        In Apple Health today, users can log not only their menstrual cycles but their basal body temperature, their cervical mucus quality, and results from their ovulation tests. The resulting graphs and data displays are academic-looking and confusing, and most of this data must be collected elsewhere first (there’s no iThermometer or MacMucus, you know, yet).

        Apple’s Craig Federighi announces Apple Health in June 2014. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

        To fill in the gaps, there’s a handful of fancy, venture-funded period-tracking apps. And there are hundreds of free, ad-supported, easy-to-use apps that track menstruation and fertility and simultaneously invite users to track their diet, their workouts, their sex lives, their mood, the state of their skin, the smell of their vaginal discharge. They are mostly glitchy and cheaply made, and the result of opportunists seeing a need and kind of, not really, fulfilling it.

        In the health category, this type of app is reportedly the fourth most popular among adults and second most popular among adolescent women. My floating cloud app was one of these junky, generic options, and the choice to download it was not an educated one; it was just whatever the App Store guessed I would want when I typed in “period tracking” more than four years ago.

        This app wasn’t designed for me. It wasn’t designed for anyone who wants to track their period or general reproductive health. The same is true of almost every menstruation-tracking app: They’re designed for marketers, for men, for hypothetical unborn children, and perhaps weirdest of all, a kind of voluntary surveillance stance.

        ---

        Sara Wachter-Boettcher, author of Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech, tells me that “you still see underinvestment and underdevelopment of those features that are used most often by women.”

        “Yeah, sure, [Apple] added period tracking, but you see some holdover effects of that,” she says. “You still have to use a lot of third-party apps to track women’s health.”

        There have been free period-tracking apps ever since there have been apps, but they didn’t really boom until the rise of Glow — founded by PayPal’s Max Levchin and four other men — in 2013, which raised $23 million in venture funding in its first year, and made it clear that the menstrual cycle was a big business opportunity.

        By 2016, there were so many choices, surrounded by so little coherent information and virtually zero regulation, that researchers at Columbia University Medical Center buckled down to investigate the entire field. Looking at 108 free apps, they concluded, “Most free smartphone menstrual cycle tracking apps for patient use are inaccurate. Few cite medical literature or health professional involvement.” They also clarified that “most” meant 95 percent.

        The Berlin-based, anti-fluff app Clue, founded by Ida Tin, would seem like an answer to this concern. It’s science-backed and science-obsessed, and offers a robust, doctor-sourced blog on women’s health topics. It arrived the same year as Glow but took several more to raise serious funding, provided mostly by Nokia in 2016. Today, Glow has around 15 million users and Clue has 10 million. There are still dozens of other options, but they’re undeniably the big two.

        Still, they are not built for women.

        “The design of these tools often doesn’t acknowledge the full range of women’s needs. There are strong assumptions built into their design that can marginalize a lot of women’s sexual health experiences,” Karen Levy, an assistant professor of information science at Cornell University, tells me in an email, after explaining that her period tracker couldn’t understand her pregnancy, “a several-hundred-day menstrual cycle.”

        Levy coined the term “intimate surveillance” in an expansive paper on the topic in the Iowa Law Review in 2015. At the time, when she described intimate data collection as having passed from the state’s public health authorities to every citizen with a smartphone, she was mostly alone in her level of alarm. This was just after Apple Health launched (sans menstrual tracking), hailed as the future of medical care. But even before that, Levy argued, the “data-fication” of romantic and sexual behaviors was everywhere. There were smart pelvic floor exercisers that could pair with smartphones via Bluetooth. There were sex-tracking apps that quantified performance by counting thrusts and duration and “noise.”

        “The act of measurement is not neutral,” Levy wrote. “Every technology of measurement and classification legitimates certain forms of knowledge and experience, while rendering others invisible.” Sex tracking apps and their ilk “simplify highly personal and subjective experiences to commensurable data points.”

        “Every technology of measurement and classification legitimates certain forms of knowledge and experience, while rendering others invisible”

        Levy also pointed out that popular period-tracking app Glow, in addition to tracking menstruation and cervical mucus quality and other typical hallmarks of fertility monitoring, asked female users to log each time they had sex, including what position they were in during ejaculation. Glow Nurture, the iteration of Glow designed for pregnant women to track their symptoms, exercise, diet, prenatal vitamins, and so on, also asked women to track their moods and provided a “mirror” app for the woman’s partner, which would ask them to provide an “objective” reading of that mood.

        Clue merch.Clue

        At the time of Levy’s writing, she described an app called iAmAMan, which allowed men to track multiple girlfriends’ periods at the same time, setting up alerts for when they could expect PMS or “horniness” or too much blood. (“Each girl can be set with their own separate password, so when you punch it in, it looks like you’re only tracking her,” the app’s description read.) That app has since been removed from the app store, but others have taken its place. I had no problem downloading and using one called PeriodMe, which will send me notifications when my roommates are about to start PMSing.

        Obviously, those are niche products that aren’t being created by major companies or signing up sizable user bases. But they reflect a mode of thinking that’s common in the category. In 2015, Glow would remind women who were trying to become pregnant and entering a fertile window to wear nice underwear that day, and it would also remind their partners to bring home some flowers.

        Maggie Delano, a quantified self scholar and PhD candidate at MIT, had an experience similar to mine. She wrote about period-tracking apps in a popular Medium post in 2015. Delano couldn’t get Clue to understand that she had a shorter, often irregular cycle because it literally wouldn’t let her input a cycle that short, and it wouldn’t let her remove the algorithmically generated “fertile window” from her calendar despite the fact that there was no physical possibility of her getting pregnant with her partner, who was also a woman.

        “These assumptions aren’t just a matter of having a few extra annoying boxes on the in-app calendar that one can easily ignore,” she wrote. “They are yet another example of technology telling queer, unpartnered, infertile, and/or women uninterested in procreating that they aren’t even women.”

        Glow was even worse. The first onboarding screen asks users to choose their “journey” and provides three choices: avoiding pregnancy, trying to conceive, and fertility treatments. “Five seconds in, I’m already trying to ignore the app’s assumptions that pregnancy is why I want to track my period,” Delano wrote.

        Period Diary user interface. Period Diary

        Glow launched with the promise of using data to “help you get pregnant.” In 2014, it raked in a funding round of $17 million — including major investments from Andreessen Horowitz and the Founders Fund — which it then used to branch out from its initial pregnancy-oriented offerings and create Eve, an app for documenting “your period and sex life.” This was a logical decision: Glow realized half of its users were not trying to get pregnant but trying to avoid getting pregnant. And those are very different market demographics.

        “People are realizing, oh, women or cycling people spend money on things and we want money from them,” Delano tells me in a phone call. “But the assumptions drive the products in a weird direction.”

        The first iteration of Eve was criticized for referring to its users as “girls” and describing sex with cutesy emoji code that centered solely on dicks: banana with a condom, banana without a condom, or no banana. In the current iteration of Eve, the emoji code is banana with a condom, banana without a condom, or a peach, and users can still redeem collectible gems to get sex tips.

        The app still opens with a landing screen that says “Get it, girl.”

        Period-tracking apps are not conceived of as mass-market products but as niche products: “shrink it and pink it,” the familiar guiding ethos of sportswear and basic household tools. They have odd design elements, like floating clouds, superfluous flowers, and strange faux-empowering language where straightforward medical terminology would more than suffice. They’re a product of the culture of Silicon Valley user interface design: mostly male, and predicated on quantitative metrics like interaction counts and time spent.

        “Popular wisdom about ‘engagement’ meets weird ideas about femininity, and you get a lot of design and product choices that are quite questionable,” Wachter-Boettcher tells me. “It’s funny because people don’t do this kind of thing if they’re designing a health app about literally anything else.”

        Can you imagine a glucose-tracking app laid out in Candy Crush aesthetics? How about a blood alcohol content tracker shouting out its users as “bro” each time they opened the app? Of course not! But you’re just tracking your period symptoms for fun, or to avoid being caught on a long car ride without a tampon, right? Why not decorate it?

        The ways in which period-tracking or fertility-tracking apps are different reveal the ways most designers think of them: as products that provide information that’s not actually very serious or important medically, and that should exist mostly to convince a woman to spend as much time as possible looking at ads, while supplying the owner with as robust a data set as possible, so they can better target more ads.

        “It’s good enough” is the refrain Wachter-Boettcher says she hears from women. “It does what I need, but I don’t know why it’s making this assumption or that assumption.”

        ---

        The University of Canberra’s Deborah Lupton — a researcher focused on what she terms “quantified sex” — told the Atlantic in 2014 that the way period-tracking and fertility-tracking apps are lumped together shows you everything you need to know about how developers think of women. “When you look at these types of apps, they’re completely about the surveillance of pregnant women,” she said, “making them ever more responsible and vigilant about their bodies for the sake of their fetus.”

        The data they generate can also be shared with developers, advertisers, researchers, and data brokers. Patient Privacy Rights founder Deborah Peel told the Washington Post in 2016 that reproductive health data is uniquely valuable to marketers — knowing that someone is preparing to become a parent means knowing that someone is about to enter one of the very few life stages in which they’re likely to get “hooked on new brands.”

        The commercialization of pregnancy is not exactly a new concept, but it’s reached a fever pitch in the digital age, when marketing to someone based on the hormones and genetic material swimming in their abdomen is as simple as pulling a few key pieces of easily trackable data.

        “When you look at these types of apps, they’re completely about the surveillance of pregnant women”

        In some cases, this data is not even in anonymized formats. In 2016, Consumer Reports found security vulnerabilities in Glow so severe that user profiles could be accessed by “someone with no hacking skills at all.” That might sound like an exaggeration, so let me put it to you another way: The way Glow was set up in 2016, all you had to know in order to see a user’s full profile and account information was their email address, which is what led reporter Kelly Weill to dub the app “a jackpot for stalkers.” (Glow quickly fixed the issue and commented, “There is no evidence to suggest that any Glow data has been compromised.”)

        Today, the app has 15 million users, and this type of scale is its own pressure: Glow is now the only HIPAA-certified reproductive health app, and its 2016 panic was followed by a third-party security audit. That’s great! Unfortunately, scale is also what allows a tech company of this size — and with this obligation to investors — to open a whole other can of worms. With a wealth of fertility data at its disposal, Glow has expanded into the trendy business of IVF and egg freezing, equipped with a marketing strategy I don’t really think we should even try to get into without some light sedation, but we have no choice.

        In a questionnaire on the app’s website, Glow promises to debunk common myths about egg freezing (a procedure that can be invasive and cost tens of thousands of dollars, and which has not been done frequently enough to have reliably citable success rates), insisting that even though your gynecologist will tell you that you don’t need to worry about it in your 20s, you really ought to consider it.

        Glow’s approach is even seedier than a swanky informational IVF cocktail party, in that it preys on women who have been logging years of intimate data. You haven’t gotten pregnant yet? Well, we’re not necessarily saying it should concern you, but if anyone would know, wouldn’t it be us?

        If the goal of tech-enabled health tracking is to empower users to make informed medical choices, Glow is a great example of how not to do that. It takes its millions of users on a well-designed, user-friendly, fertility-obsessed road that ends in promises that egg freezing is a logical thing to pursue in your mid-20s. CEO and co-founded Mike Huang has also said that Glow data may be used to make “more accurate risk assessments … which will ultimately result in better health insurance,” an interesting comment given that the major North American life insurance company John Hancock announced last month that it will only sell “interactive” policies that track health via smartphones and wearables.

        Clue gives anonymized data to scientific researchers, encrypts its identifying information separately, and discloses all of its research projects in detail on its website. Tin tells me, “Our scientific collaborations are exploring questions like what pain patterns are considered ‘normal’ in which populations? What mood patterns do we see around ovulation? How might our menstrual and symptom patterns help us spot disease and illness earlier?”

        More recently, after our call, Tin made headlines by disclosing that Clue saw a huge spike in users reporting “sadness” in the daily mood-tracking section of the app in the wake of the 2016 election. Cool?

        “People, they share data about the most intimate parts of their lives. They talk about their mood, they talk about their pain, they talk about their sex lives. If you ask people to share this data, you’ve got to have ethical conversations about what you’re going to do with that data,” she said in the same talk.

        Eve’s notifications interface.Glow

        ---

        Tin tells me that Clue’s pill-tracking feature — in tandem with regular logging of pain, mood changes, and bleeding — has helped users figure out that they need to switch to a different pill. And with all its trackable categories, Clue “helps [users] identify correlations between their cycles and general well-being, such as an increase in stress levels or a decrease in their sex drive at certain points in their cycle.”

        It’s all fine, good even. I guess I don’t care if she talks about mood trends in public, if her product is going to help people figure things out about their bodies. At the same time, it is deeply weird and makes me feel alienated from my own body, to tattle on it in such a precise, point-by-point way. I downloaded Clue last month, and each time I inform it that I have taken my birth control pill, or that I’ve had sex that day, or that I experienced spotting or a mood swing, a tiny animation responds and tells me “Clue is getting smarter!”

        I don’t want to tattle on my body in such a precise, point-by-point way

        Gross? I’m trying to be thorough because that seems like I what I am being told I ought to do if I care about my health, or the algorithm, or research about women’s health. Would my boyfriend think it’s freaky that I’m keeping a log of the particulars of our sex life? I mean, I certainly wouldn’t show it to him. It’s all fine; it’s all so undignified.

        And while period-tracking apps broadly come with minor annoyances and sinister fine print, we haven’t even talked about the ways that lazy research and bad design can tangibly ruin lives. This summer, amid the dozens of headlines about the Apple Watch’s Food and Drug Administration–approved EKG feature, there was a lighter buzz around a tech company called Natural Cycles. The FDA announced in August that its app’s algorithm was so good at predicting fertility windows, it could officially market itself as contraception.

        Except it was only 93 percent accurate — only working for women who cycled “regularly,” which excludes a lot of people — and Facebook ultimately pulled its ads for being misleading. One Swedish hospital alone reported 37 unwanted pregnancies last year in women who were using Natural Cycles as contraception, out of a total of 668 women who sought abortions at the hospital all year.

        In July, novelist Olivia Sudjic wrote for The Guardian about her experience seeking an abortion after using Natural Cycles, saying, “I felt colossally naive. I’d used the app in the way I do most of the technology in my life: not quite knowing how it works, but taking for granted that it does. Speaking to others who bought the app as contraception (about 75 percent of Natural Cycles’ total user base, according to its CEO), it seems that many felt the same.”

        Natural Cycles was marketed to women primarily on Instagram, by dozens of pretty, 20-something influencers who vouched for it as foolproof. The demographic the ads are shown to — and 50 percent of its subscriber growth came from these ads — is susceptible to the ads because of their youth and because of their anxiety about getting pregnant.

        Anxiety is profitable. Fear is profitable. Desire is profitable. If you desire pregnancy or fear pregnancy, someone can make money off you. If you don’t, well, don’t bother tracking your health. It isn’t worth anything.

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        Menstrual Cycle Calendar | HUAWEI support russia

        Your device can predict your menstrual cycle based on the data you add to the app, as well as period length and fertility window. Cycle calendar data and reminders can be viewed on the device. This feature can be enabled in the following ways.

        Open the Health app and then open the Cycle Calendar and grant the appropriate permissions. If you cannot find the Cycle Calendar feature on the home screen, select the CHANGE option on the home screen to add this card to the home screen.

        Method 1. Open the watch home screen, press the side button, select Cycle Calendar, and then press the icon. You can edit and customize the start and end of your period. After completing the settings, your watch will forecast the next period based on the entered data.

        Method 2.

        1. Open the Health app, in the lower right corner of the Cycle Calendar function screen, click the icon, go to the Settings section, adjust the settings for the duration of the period and the menstrual cycle, return to the previous screen, select the Reminders option on the wearable device and turn on the All switch for reminders.
        2. The device will send reminders for the start and end of the period and the fertility window.
           • The first method is only available on HUAWEI WATCH FIT and HONOR Watch ES.
           • This function is not available when the device is connected to certain devices ().
           • Go to the Records section to view and change the period data. The dotted line marks the estimated period.
           • The device will remind you to start the period at 8:00 the day before it starts.You will receive other notifications on the day of the event at 8:00 am.
           • When the wearable device is on, it vibrates without activating the device screen. You can touch the screen to view reminders. If the wearable device is not wearing it, it will not vibrate and the device screen will not activate. Reminders will not appear even if you turn on the screen. You can see the messages in the message list.

        Cumulative Flow Guide – Azure DevOps

        • 11/25/2021
        • Reading time is 9 minutes

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        This Article

        ---

        ---

        Measures the time it takes to move work through a single process or workflow state. The calculation starts from the beginning of one process until the beginning of the next process.

        Leading time ¹

        For a continuous process flow : Measures the time it takes to complete a request (for example, add a suggested user story) until the request is completed (closed).

        For a sprint or fixed period process : Measures the time that work began on a request to completion (that is, the time from active to close).

        Work in progress

        Measures the amount of work, or the number of work items that are actively working.

        Represents the amount of work committed over a given period of time. Applies only to processes with a fixed period.

        ---

        ¹ The CFD gadget (analytics) and embedded CFD (performance tracking data store) do not provide discrete numbers for cycle times and times. However, the time and cycle time gadgets provide these numbers.

        There is a well-defined correlation between lead time and cycle time and work in progress (WIP).The higher the WIP, the longer the cycle time, which also results in longer production times. The opposite is also true, the smaller the WIP, the shorter the lead cycle and time. When the development team specializes in fewer items, they reduce cycle times and lead times. This correlation is a key reason why you can set limits on how you can complete work on the Kanban board.

        The number of work items shows the total amount of work for a given day.In a fixed period, a change in this counter means a change in the area within a given period. In continuous flow CFDs, it indicates the total amount of work in the queue and how it was completed during a specific day.

        Breaking the work into specific columns on the Kanban board provides a view of where the process is running. This view provides insights into where work is flowing smoothly, where there are locks, and where no action is being taken.It is difficult to decipher the tabular representation of the data, however there is evidence in the CFD visual schema diagram that something is going in a certain direction.

        Identify problems, take appropriate action

        CFD answers a few specific questions and, depending on the answer, actions can be taken to customize the process of moving work around the system. Let’s take a look at each of these questions.

        Will the team shut down on time?

        This question only applies to the fixed CFD period.You get an idea of ​​the curve (or progress) of work in the last column on the Kanban board.

        In this scenario, it may be advisable to reduce the scope of the iteration if it is clear that the work at a steady pace is not going fast enough. This could mean that the work has been underestimated and needs to be done as part of the planning for the next sprints.

        However, there are other possible causes that can be determined by viewing other data in the chart.

        How does the work progress flow work?

        Will the group finish at a steady pace? One way to indicate that you should pay attention to the spacing between different columns in a chart. Do they have the same or uniform start-to-end distance? Does the column show up in a flat row for several days? Or, if it seems, it is “bulge”?

        Moore, an economical term for flat lines and bulges, means irregularity and indicates the shape of the waste (muda) in the system.Irregularities in the system will result in bulges appearing in CFDs.

        Flat Lines and Bulges CFD Monitoring supports a key part of the constraint project management process. Protecting the slowest region of the system is called the buffer-swap process and is part of the work scheduling process.

        Two problems are displayed visually as flat lines and as bulges.

        Flat lines appear when a team does not update its work with normal rhythm.On a Kanban board, you can quickly move work from one column to another.
        Flat lines can also appear when work on one or more processes takes longer than planned. Flat lines appear on many parts of the system, because if only one part of the system or two parts of the system have problems, you will see a bulge.

        Flat lines

        Bulges occurs when work is built in one part of the system and does not move through the process.
        For example, a bulge can occur if testing takes a long period of time, but development takes a shorter period of time, resulting in an accumulation of work in the development state (bulges indicates that during the execution of a step there was a problem, not necessarily in a phase in which is the bulge).

        bulges

        How do I troubleshoot flow problems?

        The problem of lack of timely updates can be solved with:

        • Daily food waiting.
        • Other routine meetings.
        • Schedule an email to remind you of daily commands.

        Flat line system problems indicate more complex problems, although such problems are rare. Flat lines indicate that the system has been stopped. The main reasons may be:

        • Process-level locks.
        • Processes are taking a long time.
        • Move on to other opportunities that are not captured on the board.

        An example of a system flat string is the CFD function. Functions can take a lot longer to work than user stories because functions are composed of multiple stories. In such situations, a slope is expected (as in the example above), or this error is well known and is already caused by the group as a problem. If this is a known issue, fixing the issue is beyond the scope of this article.

        Teams can proactively fix problems that look like CFD bulges.Depending on where the bulge occurs, the fix may be different. As an example, suppose a bulge occurs during development. Bulge can happen because the tests take much longer to run than the code. Testers can also find a large number of bugs. When they continually move to developer jobs, developers inherit an ever-growing list of active jobs.

        There are two possible ways to solve this problem: 1) developers move from development to testing until the bulge expires, or 2) change the order of work so that work that can be done quickly is done with work that takes more time.Find simple solutions to eliminate bulges.

        Note

        Since many different scenarios can occur that result in uneven performance, it is very important to do a real analysis of the problem. The CFD will report that there is a problem and approximately where it occurs, but it needs to be investigated to get the root cause. The guidelines provided here indicate Recommended Actions that resolve specific problems, but may not apply to your situation.

        Has the area changed?

        Changes to scope apply only to the fixed CFD period. The top line of the diagram indicates the scope. The sprint is preloaded with work in progress on the first day. Changes to the top line indicate that the work has been added or removed.

        One scenario where CFD cannot track area changes occurs when the same number of work items are added on the same day as deleted.The line will still appear flat. Compare several charts with each other. Tracking specific issues. Use View / Set Up Sprint Development to track area changes.

        Too Much WIP?

        You can easily track over WIP limits from the Kanban board. You can also track it using CFDs.

        Large WIP volume is usually displayed as a vertical bulge. The longer there is a large amount of WIP, the more the bulge will unfold to become an oval.This indicates that WIP negatively affects lead cycle and timing.

        Below is a good rule of thumb for the job being done. At any given time, no more than two elements must be performed for each team member. The main reason for the two elements and the more limited constraints is that reality often reduces the number of attacks on any software development process.

        Sometimes it takes time to get information from a stakeholder or extra time to get the software you need.There are any number of reasons why work may be interrupted. Having a second work item to collapse to provide some variance. If both items are locked, it’s time to start showing the red flag to get something unlocked and not just switch to another item. Once a large number of items are executed, the user working with those items will have difficulty switching context. Most likely, they forget what they did and mistakes may occur.

        Lead time and cycle time

        The diagram below shows how the wait time differs from the cycle time. Lead time is calculated based on the creation of the work item to enter the completed state. The cycle time is calculated from the first entry into the “running” or “allowed” category to enter the completed state category.

        Illustration of the lead time and cycle time

        If a work item transitions to a completed state and then reactivates, any unnecessary time that is spent in an intended, in progress, or enabled state will contribute to its state and cycle time when it falls into the completed state category a second time.

        If your team uses a kanban board, you need to understand how kanban columns map to workflow states. For more information on customizing a Kanban board, see Adding Columns.

        For more information about how the system uses status categories (suggested, in progress, allowed, and completed), see Workflow States and Status Categories.

        Scheduling Using Lead Time Estimated Delivery or Cycle

        Average lead / cycle times and standard deviation can be used to estimate delivery times.

        When you create a work item, you can use the average execution time of a command to estimate when the team will complete that work item. The team’s standard deviation indicates variability in the score. Likewise, you can use cycle time and its standard deviation to estimate the completion of a work item after a job starts.

        In the following chart, the average cycle time is eight days. The standard deviation is +/- 6 days. Using this data, it can be estimated that the team will execute future user stories 2-14 days after starting work.The larger the standard deviation, the more predictable the estimates are.

        Example Cycle Time Gadget

        Identify Process Problems

        Examine the team management diagram for outliers. Outliers often represent problems in the underlying process. For example, the wait is too long for the pull request checks to complete or the external dependency to resolve quickly.

        As you can see in the following chart, which shows multiple outliers, multiple errors took longer than the group average.Determining the cause of the errors can help in identifying problems with the process. Troubleshooting process issues can help reduce team standard deviation and improve team predictability.

        Example Cycle Time Gadget Showing Multiple Outliers

        You can also see how process changes affect interest and cycle times. For example, on May 15, the band made a live effort to limit WIP and fix outdated bugs. You can see that the standard deviation decreases after that date, indicating increased predictability.

        Follow-up

        Azure DevOps Services | Azure DevOps Server 2020 | Azure DevOps Server 2019 | Team Foundation Server 2018 – Team Foundation Server 2013

        Use Cumulative Flow Diagrams (CFDs) to track the flow of work in the system. Two main metrics for monitoring, cycle time and lead time can be derived from the chart. For information on setting up and viewing CFD charts, see the article Set up a cumulative flow.

        Sample Charts and Core Metrics

        A sequential description of a continuous process is the diagram most preferred by teams that follow a lean process.

        However, many teams have begun to combine Lean with Scrum or other methodologies, which means Lean within an iteration or sprint. In this case, the diagram looks a little different and provides two additional and very valuable pieces of information, as shown in the following diagram.

        Continuous flow

        Shown here is the CFD period for the completed sprint.

        The top row shows a set of sprint areas.And, since the work must be done on the last day of the sprint, the slope of the closed state indicates whether the team is in the loop to complete the sprint. The easiest way to represent this performance is with a burnout diagram.

        Data is always represented as the first step in the process, both in the upper left corner and the last process step in the lower right corner.

        Fixed CFD period for completed sprint

        Chart Metrics

        CFD charts display the number of work items grouped by status or kanban columns over time.Two main metrics for monitoring, cycle time and lead time can be derived from the chart.

        Track your menstrual cycle in Health on iPod touch

        Home »Apple» Track your menstrual cycle in Health on iPod touch

        In the Health app, track your menstrual cycle for fertility predictions and windows.

        Start by tracking cycle

        1. Click Browse in the lower right corner, then click Track Cycle.

        2. Click Get Started and follow the instructions on the screen.

           To help improve projections for your period and fertility window, enter the information requested for your most recent period.

        Register your cycle information

        1. Click Browse in the lower right corner, then click Track Cycle.

        2. Do any of the following:

           • Record the day of the period: Tap the day in the timeline at the top of the screen.To record the flow rate for that day, click Period under Cycle Log, then select the option you want.

             Or click Add Period at the top right, then select the days in the monthly calendar.

             Registered days are marked on the timeline with solid red circles. To delete a registered day, touch it.

           • Log Symptoms: Drag the timeline at the top of the screen to select a day, tap Symptoms, then select all that apply.When done, click Done. Days with symptoms are indicated by purple dots.

           • Log Spot: Drag the timeline to select a day, tap Detect, select Detect, then tap Done.

        3. To add additional categories, such as ovulation test results and basal body temperature, tap Options, then select categories.

        View Period Predictions and Fertility Window

        Click Browse in the lower right corner, then click Track Cycle.

        The timeline shows the predictions for your cycle, along with previously recorded information. Information is displayed in the following format:

        • Light red circles: Your forecast for the menstrual cycle.

          To hide or show the days of the forecast period, tap Options, then turn Forecast period on or off.

        • Blue Days: Predict your likely fertility window.Fertility window predictions should not be used as a means of birth control.

          To show or hide the forecast from the fertility window, tap Options, then turn Fertility Forecast on or off.

        • Solid red circles: The days you registered during your period.

        • Purple dots: The days you registered for symptoms.

        Drag the timeline to select different days.The data that you recorded for the selected day will appear below in the cycle log.

        Control Cycle Factors

        When you enter information about pregnancy, breastfeeding, and contraception, Health uses this information to help manage your cycle prognosis (iOS 14.3 or later).

        1. Click Browse in the lower right corner, then click Track Cycle.

        2. Scroll down and tap Factors.

        3. Do any of the following:

           • Configure Factors: Select any factor that currently applies to you, then click Finish.

           • Add factor: Click “Add factor”, select the factor, click “Started” if you need to change the start date, then click “Add”.

           • Change the end date for the current factor: Tap the factor, tap Completed, select a date, then tap Done.

           • Remove Current Factor: Tap the factor, then tap Remove Factor.

           • View previous factor logs: Tap Show All.

        Period and fertility change notifications and other cycle tracking parameters

        1. Click Browse in the lower right corner, then click Track Cycle.

        2. Scroll down and tap Options.

        3. Touch an option to turn it on or off.

        View your cycle history and statistics

        1. Click Browse in the lower right corner, then click Track Cycle.

        2. Scroll down to see the graph for the last three periods; scroll down to see related statistics.

        3. Touch in this part of the screen to view more detailed and older information for cycle history or statistics.

           To find only days in the detailed cycle history that match a specific symptom or flow rate, click Filters in the upper right corner, select an option, then click Done.

        Related Guides / Resources

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        90,000 Jabra CC&O Policy

        As a leader in the professional business communications market, Jabra is committed to continually innovating and developing future-oriented audio solutions to provide our customers with tomorrow’s communications solutions today.

        This is a long-term strategy for Jabra to ensure that its product portfolio has multiple flexible and cost-effective platforms for the future. An integral part of this process is the discontinuation of obsolete products after the introduction of new products with improved and improved functions and characteristics to the market.

        When deciding to discontinue a product or series, Jabra will announce an End of Production (EOM) at least three to six months prior to the actual discontinuation date (notice times vary by region) to enable our customers to plan their product strategy.Commercial availability, and the sale of products and product series with an announced EOM date continues until the end of stock of Jabra and its partners.

        After the last product is sold, the service period continues until the end of the warranty period. Product Life Cycle (EOL) ends at the end of the warranty.

        Jabra is committed to making the transition from one product to another as easy as possible by providing timely information on new products and key dates.We have developed this Product End-of-Life Policy to help our customers migrate to the new and emerging Jabra audio solutions.

        EOM:	After the End of Production Date (EOM), Jabra will no longer manufacture this product, series of products or component. Commercial availability and sales continue until Jabra and partners’ stock runs out.
        Product Maintenance Period:	After the EOM date, Jabra continues to provide the same customer support as it did during the sales period.The product maintenance period begins after the EOM date and continues until the end of the warranty period. Accessories will be available throughout this period.
        EOL:	The End of Life (EOL) date is after the end of the Product Maintenance Period. After the EOL date, the product becomes obsolete and no longer offers improvements, repairs, maintenance or support.

        90,000 Menstruation and the menstrual cycle: what’s the difference and why is it important?

        The menstrual cycle is a series of regularly repeating biological processes, which is one of the main differences between a woman and a man.The biological meaning of the menstrual cycle is to prepare the female orgasm for potential conception and pregnancy.

        What is menstruation?

        Menstruation is bleeding that usually occurs every month in mature women if they have not been pregnant.

        During menstruation, there is a rejection of the mucous membrane of the uterus, endometrium, which is accompanied by bleeding.

        Menstruation usually lasts 3 to 5 days. On average, the first menstruation, menarche, begins at 11-14 years of age.About half of girls 12 years old already have their period, however, doctors recognize the normal age of the onset of menstruation from 9 to 16 years. From this moment on, the female body is capable of fertilization and pregnancy. At about 40-55 years of age, menstruation stops and menopause occurs.

        What is the menstrual cycle?

        If menstruation or periods come regularly, they are called the menstrual cycle. However, the length of the menstrual cycle may vary slightly from month to month, this is also normal.A longer menstrual cycle is typical for adolescents, with age there is a tendency for a decrease in the length of the cycle and a clearer regularity. Typically, the menstrual cycle lasts 21 to 35 days.

        The female body controls the menstrual cycle through a complex hormonal balance. The human body’s response to stress involves changing hormone levels, which affect many processes in the body, and therefore can affect the menstrual cycle.

        Important: A regular menstrual cycle is a sign that important organs in your body are functioning properly.That is why it is extremely important to monitor your cycle not only when you are afraid or trying to get pregnant: any deviations from the usual in the cycle may be signs of some unusual processes in the body or diseases, which are always better to exclude right away, because if the concern turns out to be justified, it is always best to start treatment as early as possible!

        What should be the menstrual cycle and how to calculate its length?

        Unfortunately, a huge number of women, even today, do not have the opportunity to obtain reliable scientific information about reproductive health, including menstruation.This topic is still taboo and indecent. Nevertheless, it is very important to know about the structure of your body and its processes in order to maintain your health, this also applies to menstruation. To monitor your own health, you need to track the duration of your own cycle, and for this, mark the start days and the duration of your period in a calendar or a special application on your phone, which will allow you to draw conclusions about the regularity of your periods in a couple of months.

        Let’s figure out how to mark the menstrual cycle.

        The first day of menstruation is considered the first day of the menstrual cycle.

        The end of the menstrual cycle is celebrated on the first day of the next, that is, on the first day of the next menstrual bleeding.

        The average menstrual cycle lasts 28 days, but the norms are variable: 21-35 days in adults and 21-45 days in adolescents 12-15 years old.

        On average, women have 3-5 days of menstruation, but the norm applies to any number of days from 2 to 7. On average, the volume of menstrual bleeding is about 40-100 ml (this is about 8 used conventional sanitary pads or tampons), and in the composition of menstrual blood, in addition to blood itself, includes mucous secretions of the cervix, vaginal glands and endometrial tissue.

        Why is menstrual flow different from normal blood?

        Menstrual flow differs from the blood that flows through our vessels: it does not clot, and it is darker: this is due to the fact that it contains enzymes that prevent its clotting — anticoagulants.

        By the way, those clots that sometimes occur in women are caused precisely by the fact that blood does not coagulate, but this is not necessarily a sign of some pathological processes in the body, this often occurs on the days of the most profuse bleeding, and is often associated with stress , for example, inadequate nutrition.

        Don’t be afraid to ask!

        Unfortunately, the topic of menstruation in society is still considered by many to be taboo and shameful, and menstruation is often presented as something that needs to be hidden from everyone. Nevertheless, even if you are embarrassed to ask the doctor something, remember: women have menstruation most of their lives, this is a normal biological process and in fact there is nothing shameful or dirty about them, so if you have something worried or you want to know if this is the case with others, then ask.

        If someone is ashamed of you that you have your period, remember — this person is deeply wrong and should be ashamed of him, not you.

        Why are some people embarrassed to talk about their periods?

        The taboo topic of menstruation is also due to the fact that for a long time menstruation was used by society in order to justify social inequality in the position of men and women, because a woman during menstruation was considered “dirty” in many cultures. This is due to the fact that in ancient times people did not understand what caused menstruation and for them this phenomenon was mysterious and incomprehensible.

        Even in the twenty-first century, when the biological essence of menstruation has long been clear, many religions consider women during their periods “unclean”: in Orthodoxy, for example, women are forbidden to participate in sacred ordinances, for example, to receive communion during menstruation, to touch icons and prosphora and even drink “holy” water, and in some parishes even attend church.

        However, these rules vary, and there are more progressive priests who oppose the concept of so-called “ritual impurity”.If you are an Orthodox believer, it is better to clarify this question in advance with the priest of the church you are going to visit.

        90,000 The 2 Best Apps to Track Your Period

        Women, girls and other people with vaginas in the 21st century are not defined by any style or color palette. We wear trousers, we value education, and we are gradually gaining freedom around the world. We value resources that can help us make informed decisions about our health in private.

        Many of us also get our period (roughly) every month, and it should be tracked quickly and painlessly (although menstruation is wrong, am I right?).

        At this point I would like to say: yes, we are talking about periods. Even if you don’t have a period, you can stay – if you’re interested! And for parents, take a note: If you have a baby who is reaching the age of their period, these apps can really help them get through this transition period.

        I’ve tested two menstrual cycle tracking apps (available for both Android and iOS devices) and will walk you through each so you can choose which one suits your needs. Also, the apps I show today are not pink … unlike some women outreach workers who have been in the news lately for their color more than their messages.

        Why You Should Track Your Cycle

        It sucks, caught off guard by your period without your supplies.Tracking your menstrual cycle can help you predict when your next cycle will start. While these informative and engaging apps will not save you your period cramps, they will help you cope with a situation where you have to make sure to pack your favorite feminine hygiene product.

        Tracking your monthly cycle can also help you determine when you will be most fertile in case you are trying to get pregnant (or tell you when you should take extra precautions in case you want to avoid pregnancy).

        With that said, let’s look at two different apps for tracking your cycle. Although they are available on Android and iOS, I tested them on an Android device, so some aspects may be different on iOS.

        Option # 1: Prompt

        Prompt has an attractive data entry page. Just select the day you want to enter data in the calendar and then select the type of data you want to enter.

        For example, if you have a period, you can specify how heavy your flow is.I am not trying to enter anything into the other fields, but they will be helpful to anyone trying to conceive a child.

        The Current Cycle Clue page shows where you are in your cycle in relation to your period, PMS (if you indicated that you are experiencing PMS in the Mood category), and your fertile window.

        Clue also includes a period reminder that will send a notification to your device two days before the start of the next cycle. I recommend turning this on – handy to get your head off!

        One of the best things about Clue is that it learns from the data you give it to better predict its cycle over time.However, the developers recognize that the app is most accurate for people with regular cycles. However, they are working to improve it, which is always great for developers to see.

        Download Clue Period Tracker: Android or iOS

        Option # 2: Glow

        Glow exists primarily to help you identify times of increased fertility so you can maximize your chances of getting pregnant, but you don’t have to try conceive her; it is equally useful for keeping track of your period.

        The Glow home screen is inviting, letting you know if anything significant is going to happen in the coming days. It instructs you to fill out your daily fitness log, shares health advice, and includes a notes section.

        Since Glow is all about building a community with others who are primarily trying to conceive successfully (sharing experiences and tips), he invites you to create a profile.

        You can add a photo and biography, as well as fill out your “Health Profile”.Alternatively, from your profile page, you can add integration with MyFitnessPal (the calorie counting app we reviewed).

        ) and Google Fit (the workout tracking app we reviewed

        ) if you’re already using one of those apps.

        Personally I have found this kind of personal profile to be very useful for the app, but if you are trying to get pregnant then providing your data (such as daily basal body temperature) for charting and stories to the community can be helpful,

        Community Tab – It is a kind of in-app forum that includes categories like General Sex Relationships, Angle of Contention, General Health Lifestyle, Menstrual Health, and more.You can add your own themes, polls and photos too. The Alert tab displays all the notifications Glow has sent you, while the Genius tab provides health tips, concepts, and contraception based on your goals and data.

        Download Glow Ovulation and Period Tracker: Android or iOS

        Which is better?

        The answer for me is the Key.

        Clue has a simple basic feature set compared to Glow, which seems to want to share a lot of information almost exclusively for the information’s sake.There is nothing wrong with that if you are in a life stage where you can use this information (trying to conceive), but for me it just gets in the way and makes Glow feel messy. The Clue also looks calmer thanks to its simple icons and flat design, and an overview of the entire cycle is very important to me instead of a few days before and after.

        In case you are using a menstrual tracker app to try and get pregnant and you are doing well (congratulations!), You should check out our list of 10 websites for parents-to-be

        ,

        This is the power of your the fact that you are healthy does not end there – there are many health apps for iOS and iPhone.

        it can help you live a better life. There is also no shortage of health apps for Android users

        or.

        Does color matter?

        The last thing I want to talk about has to do with the color and overall appearance of the apps in this category. I love the design approaches that Glow and Clue have used – they are fresh and inviting.

        If none of the options suit your style, you might be in luck with the period trackers that Joel reported.

        earlier. They all have a more traditional feminine aesthetic – that’s great if you’re into that kind of thing.

        Anyway I’m curious: will you find pink apps for women patronizing? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. And don’t forget to tell us which is your favorite period tracking app!

        Photo Credit: Labor Bus via BBCnews

        Official: New Solar Cycle Started

        Representatives of NASA and NOAA have confirmed that the Sun has entered a new solar cycle: the activity of our star began to grow after the minimum in December 2019.

        The current cycle, according to experts, will be rather calm, as in recent years there has been a long-term downward trend in activity on the part of our parent star. However, no one can still rule out flares, which will cause many problems for earthlings and astronauts.

        Let us remind you that the Sun’s “clock hands” make a full revolution on the virtual dial for 11 years on average. This is how long one solar cycle lasts, during which scientists record periods of increased and decreased activity of our star.

        At a recent press conference, NASA and NOAA officials confirmed that a new solar cycle has begun. Why have scientists announced this only now? After all, the activity of the Sun has been increasing since December 2019. The point is that researchers need enough data to be confident in their findings.

        The ebb and flow of solar activity are calculated by the number and size of sunspots. These dark spots that appear on the surface of the Sun are less heated areas with higher magnetism.

        “We are keeping a detailed record of a few tiny sunspots that mark the beginning of a new cycle,” explains Frédéric Clette, director of the World Sunspot Index and Long-Term Solar Observation Data Center. trends over many months, we can identify the tipping point between the two cycles. ”

        Left: The calm sun of December 2019.Right: sunspots in April 2014.

        The research team suggests that the next maximum of the 25th solar cycle will be in July 2025. The Sun will be calm again by about 2030.

        It is also likely to be a fairly quiet cycle, perhaps even quieter than all the previous ones.

        The 24th solar cycle, which began in December 2008, was the weakest solar cycle in about a century. Although our parent star was still active, overall sunspot counts were much less than average.Even during the solar maximum in April 2014, there were significantly fewer of them than usual.

        This led some scientists to suggest that we are now witnessing a kind of “Great Minimum” – a period of extremely weak activity, which may be part of some long-term cycle that is still unknown to astronomers. Recall that observations of the spots and flares of our star have been going on since about the middle of the 18th century.

        Less solar activity has its advantages. For example, it means more favorable space weather for astronauts, satellites and other spacecraft.Nevertheless, the general weakness of our star does not mean at all that at some point it will not “rebel”. Even the quiet Sun sometimes makes knees.

        However, such statements of scientists are rather not a warning, but a reminder that they are knowingly eating their bread. Constant observation of our luminary (and not only) allows ordinary earthlings and those who plan space missions to avoid many problems.

        For example, the preparation of the Artemis mission depends on space weather.

        “Nature doesn’t have bad weather. We don’t prepare well for its whims,” says Jake Bleacher, lead researcher at NASA’s Office of Human Space Exploration and Human Space Exploration. proper preparation “.

        Earlier Vesti.Ru reported about how the absence of sunspots harms the Earth and its inhabitants, as well as about the most powerful flares on the Sun and their true influence.