How to get more fertile cervical mucus

How to get more fertile cervical mucus

Transcription:

Marc Sklar:

Accurate timing with menstrual cycles and cervical mucus and so we’re going to get into that information today. Welcome everyone to another episode of Fertility TV. I’m Dr. Marc Sklar, the fertility expert. What I’ve been doing recently aside from sharing the knowledge that I have about fertility and giving you episodes every week on different fertility topics is that I’ve been reaching out to my community of health experts and fertility experts from the world at large and sharing their knowledge and information with you. And today I’ve got Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. Lisa is the author of a beautiful book called The Fifth Vital to master your cycles and optimize your fertility. And a little bit more about Lisa, but I’m going to keep it short, is that Lisa is a certified fertility awareness educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner.

Marc Sklar:

And one of my favorite things is I was on honored to be on her podcast is her podcast which is called Fertility Fridays. And I was lucky enough to be on that episode, on one of the episodes of her podcast with Lisa talking about male fertility and one of Lisa’s strengths in how she works with clients and a big part of what the book was all about today with Lisa. So I’m excited to have you, Lisa. Welcome, welcome.

Lisa:

Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Marc Sklar:

Yeah. I’m excited to have you and where I like to start with everybody is just I don’t know if everyone who’s watching knows a little bit about you. But I’m going to assume they don’t. So why don’t you share a little bit about how you got into this and just a little bit about yourself?

Lisa:

Well sure. So I came into the world of fertility awareness at a pretty young age. So I was about 18-ish years old.

Marc Sklar:

My goodness.

Lisa:

Yeah. I was just out of high school, first year of university. I had been on the pill for period pain and heavy periods because I didn’t know how else to deal with that and when I actually needed birth control I was kind of… because I hadn’t been using the pill for birth control, I wouldn’t take it at the right time. I had read the insert so I was nervous about relying on it. And I also knew that I had some issues going on in my cycle and every time I had gone off the pill they’d kind of come back. So I twas right around that time that I discovered fertility awareness. And basically I was at a lecture and I discovered that I wasn’t fertile every day of the cycle, that there was only a small window of fertility. And that you could actually learn how to pay attention to your fertile signs to then either navigate to avoid pregnancy or get pregnant. So that changed everything for me obviously.

Marc Sklar:

Light bulb going off.

Lisa:

Totally. And so I jumped into the method for birth control, at that young age, and combined with barrier methods, et cetera. And gradually I took a training class in my early 20s and starting teaching them in the same. So that how I got into the work at the beginning.

Marc Sklar:

That’s awesome. I imagine that… well not maybe how you got into the work per se, but the story leading up to it, what you were dealing with as a teenager into your late teens and early 20s, that development and the realizations of certain things and how your body worked, I’m sure that that story is familiar to a lot of people who are watching, right? “I’ve got some issues with my cycle and so my OB/GYN says let’s go on the pill. And so I’m using the pill but I don’t know much about it.” Right? So I hear that story often. I’m sure, in some way, you hear the same. Is that accurate?

Lisa:

All the time. I think the main difference in my case, I remember my dad was… would kind of always be like, “Are you still on the pill?” And when I would go off of it thinking… so I had the painful periods and then I would go on the pill and the periods were… like the “periods” were a lot better, easier to manage. But every time I came off of it, they would come back, like they felt worse than before. So even at that young age, I had the sense of like, “I don’t know what it’s doing. But it’s not fixing anything.” And I didn’t want to have a kid when I was 18 but I wanted to have children in the future and I had seen some women in my family struggle with fertility challenges and fibroids, all those types of things. So I was already kind of nervous that I would have some potential issues and I didn’t want to add anything to the pot.

Marc Sklar:

Yes. You know I think this piece is really an important piece and we’ve got a couple different topics we want to talk about today but I do think this realization or this understanding for all the women watching that birth control does not fix the problems that you… the reason you’re taking it unless you’re taking it specifically for birth control because it then does

Lisa:

Yes. Highly effective at that.

Marc Sklar:

But often it’s used to help take away dysmenorrhea or menstrual pain, often it’s used to regulate cycles in women who have PCOS. I spoke to someone yesterday about that and it’s not really fixing anything, right? It’s just masking a lot of things.

Lisa:

Well yeah. I mean it suppresses ovulation, most hormonal birth control methods, the way that it’s talked about and marketed is as though it is a cycle and you’re menstruating and you’re menstruating every 28 days. But it’s not a true period, it’s a withdrawal bleed and it’s optional because now we have pill formulations that go 84 days at a time so.

Marc Sklar:

Yeah. So for all of you listening who have had this experience, I think the point that we want you to take away from this is one, birth control is not the answer to fix your hormonal issues or your menstrual pain or your menstrual irregularities or anything like that. It can be a, possibly as a proper method, for birth control but there’s a lot of other methods like Lisa mentioned when she was doing it, barrier methods and so forth and timing that really can make a huge, huge difference in the way you manage your health, your hormones, and your menstrual cycle. So bear those things in mind but the main thing or one of the main things I wanted to talk to you about today was accurate timing with regards to your menstrual cycle. So where do you want to start here? How should we start?

Lisa:

I guess we can just start by talking about cervical fluid that kind of draws into right into the middle of it. And I touched on it in my own story which is that most women are taught that you can get pregnant any day of the cycle. I think for women who are then trying to conceive and it’s not happening right away, there’s a steep learning curve where they actually realize, “Oh my goodness. I have to figure out when ovulation is and time it based on ovulation.” So what’s interesting is that when you look at it from a scientific perspective, there’s six days in the cycle that you are fertile that could result in pregnancy and the reason for that is because after you have your period as you approach ovulation, you start producing estrogen and that estrogen causes you to make cervical fluid.

Lisa:

So it stimulates your cervix to make fluid. So a lot of the women watching may have seen it, may have noticed it, may or may not have been aware of what it is but it can look like creamy, white hand lotion. It can look like clear egg whites, like if you were to stretch it between your fingers it forms thread. And some women don’t necessarily have an abundance of fluid that they can stretch but when they’re wiping after they go to the bathroom, there’ll be a part of their cycle when it actually feels really lubricative and really slippery. For some women that’s their only sign. However you observe it, those days before ovulation when you observe cervical fluid whether it’s the lotion-y type or the stretchy type or the lubricative type, those are your days of fertility.

Lisa:

So cervical mucus is essential for understanding how natural fertility works, how natural conception words. Cervical fluid is really fascinating because it can keep the sperm alive for up to five days for a couple of reasons. Your vagina is actually pretty inhospitable place for sperm most of the time, it’s acidic. And when you are in your fertile window, when you’re making the cervical fluid before ovulation, it changes the whole pH of your vagina to make it sperm friendly. And the pH of our cervical fluid is actually complementary to the pH of a man’s seminal fluid, which is interesting. So it’s kind of like your home.

Lisa:

And if we can kind of get our heads around that, I think one of the biggest myths about timing sex for pregnancy is that the goal is to have sex on ovulation day kind of to the exclusion of every other day. So the example that I usually give is if you’re paying attention to your cervical fluid and you notice that you have cervical fluid on Monday and you and your partner have sex on Monday and then your partner goes away for business or something for the rest of the week and you actually don’t ovulate until Friday, you can still get pregnant on Friday because of the sperm that is still alive because of your cervical fluid.

Lisa:

And so in the most basic sense then, timing is really about understand your cervical fluid, understanding your cycle, and understanding that when you see the clear stretchy, when you see however your cervical is presenting before ovulation, those are the days to have sex and then you want to continue having sex until you’ve actually confirmed ovulation because it’s possible… You mentioned that you were speaking to someone yesterday about PCOS and how the pills regulate it, so a classic PCOS cycle is quite long sometimes, 35 or more days, 40 days.

Lisa:

And in that long span you may see cervical mucus multiple times and it doesn’t mean that you’re ovulating multiple times, it just means that your body is kind of gearing up for ovulation and then it’s not happening. And then it’s gearing up again, it’s not happening. And so it can be super frustrating to have to like time sex based on the spread of mucus that’s happening but until you’ve actually confirmed ovulation, it’s possible that you may not have hit it. So that’s kind of a good place to start.

Marc Sklar:

Yeah. And so what would you say to those women watching? Because I’ve heard this often is, “Well I have cervical mucus, I have discharge all month long.”

Lisa:

So, first of all, I would say that that’s outside of what we could consider to be normal or optimal. And so that’s really important. So of course I would have a thousand questions. What type of mucus are you seeing all the time? So if you have kind of a low lying, always kind of lotion-y then you’d really want to just make sure to, the next time you’re in your doctor’s office, screen for potential yeast or bacterial overgrowth. It doesn’t always make you itchy, sometimes your cervical fluid kind of changes that are outside of the normal what we consider normal, would be that indicator. So I’ve had women who don’t have any other signs other than having a low level mucus every day or having even yellow tinged mucus and then they find out that they have some sort of infection. So that would be the first thing.

Marc Sklar:

I’m going to pause you right there real quick. So for all of you listening to this specific point, this is fairly common and it’s something that does need to be treated and addressed because not only do I see that, let’s say, the overgrowth of yeast or candida or whatever you want to call it, is a problem for fertility in terms of creating a proper vaginal environment. But it’s also an issue ongoing if it becomes systemic it can affect hormone regulation and cause all sorts of long term and more widespread issues with patients. So I do think that that’s something that needs to be looked at and I cannot count right now how many patients I have who I’m actually treating for candida overgrowth as part of their fertility plan because it’s that many. So I just want to point that out because it is something I see all the time.

Lisa:

Yeah. Well and just another reason why I’m always referring the menstrual cycle is a vital sign is because you can break it down into all these different parts and understanding what’s normal for cervical fluid helps you to understand what’s not. So what’s normal is, in a typical, healthy cycle, we would expect anywhere from about two to seven days of mucus, cervical mucus/fluid, I use those words interchangeably, as you approach ovulation. So in a typical, healthy cycle you’d expect to have several days of mucus and then it would stop. But we wouldn’t expect to have two weeks of it. So one other thing that I think is helpful to point out is that so some women experience kind of like a wet, watery discharge all the time. So when I say all the time, I mean, it’s not just in their fertile window.

Lisa:

So cervical fluid, you make it as you approach ovulation. So there’s a period when you have it and then there’s a period when you don’t. So if you’re having cervical fluid and you’re ovulating, but you’re having this whatever you’re observing and it’s like before ovulation, you ovulate, it’s after and it’s just like all the time, it could be an infection but it could also be a sign of abnormal cervical cells. So women who have cervical dysplasia or otherwise abnormal cervical cells will often have this wet, watery discharge. So a number of the clients who I’ve worked with with kind of confirmed cervical dysplasia will find that they feel like they have something there all the time. When they wipe, it’s kind of wet all the time, their underwear might be wet. And some women, depending on kind of how far advanced it is, will even find that they have a gushing.

Lisa:

What I always ask is, “When is it happening?” Because it’s possible to have a gushing around your fertile window and that’s your cervical fluid and will feel really lubricative when you’re wiping so it’ll be really kind of obvious that it’s related to fertility. But there’s other times, say you’ve already ovulated, when you have this gushing, it’s not lubricative, it doesn’t line up with your cycle. And that’s when you want to go to your doctor and have a pap. You have to ask separately for the to screen for infections so there’s two separate things. So just to add to what you said.

Marc Sklar:

Yeah. This piece is really important and it kind of dovetails into the name of your book, quite frankly, right? Which is The Fifth Vital Sign. That we don’t think it… I say we kind of as it [crosstalk 00:14:21] cervical mucus but I’m not. So I apologize for that. But it’s how I relate to the process. We don’t often think as women about our cervical mucus in the way that Lisa and I are discussing right now. And I could use my wife as an example. I mean, it’s not something that often is paid attention to, right?

Lisa:

You don’t even learn about it.

Marc Sklar:

No, nothing about it, a huge sign which is why the this book is so important because it gives you so much information just like Lisa said, like these little nuances can be an indicator for you having to go and get screened for something. And we don’t even pay attention to it until it’s time for you to get pregnant and then I would bet how many women continue to pay attention to it afterwards, right? That number probably drops significantly. So this is a really key piece to evaluating your overall health certainly as it relates to your reproductive health.

Lisa:

Yeah, absolutely. And one other scenario that I’ll just point out because I’ve seen, I’ve worked with women who have kind of that clear peak, stretchy fluid and they have it a lot, maybe weeks on end. So, again, an example of PCOS when you’re having multiple patches, if your cycles happen to be really long. But I’ve also seen it in women with issues with gut health where potentially they have some sensitivities, food sensitivities, some IBS symptoms going on. And when they expose themselves to those foods that they have the sensitivity to it kind of aggravates it. So it’s an interesting relationship then between the mucus and other health issues as you can see. I would say that for the woman who’s trying to conceive and trying to figure it all out, the most helpful thing is that if you are ovulating, there will be a difference between the cervical fluid that you actually see around ovulation and outside of it.

Lisa:

So if you were to have a low lying infection and you always have some sort of wet discharge that’s kind of lotion-y, you would still, if you track it, notice that there’s some days where it’s different. So for some clients I have seen in this situation, they’ll notice that perhaps during their fertile window it is clear and stretchy, they get more and it’s more of the clear, stretchy or cloud, clear, stretchy or whatever. But outside of it, it kind of changes and they see a different type. So that would be for the timing for the woman who has it all the time but with the side note of get it checked out.

Marc Sklar:

Yeah. I talk to women all the time who are not aware or pay attention to their bodies. And I would use those words kind of interchangeably. Our body, whether it’s your cervical mucus, your breast tissue, your coloration of our nipples, bloating, fatigue. All these things are your body talking to you, right? And cervical mucus is no different but we don’t often pay attention to it in the way that we’re describing because sometimes it takes a little bit more effort to look for those things, right? And so this is an important piece because just like you were to evaluate and pay attention to how you’re feeling in terms of energy and digestion and anything else, this is a key piece that you should be looking at and paying attention to. Now does it mean you have got to pay attention to it every day? Probably not.

Marc Sklar:

But the month ebbs and flows, the cycle ebbs and flows, and so just pay attention at different times of the month for how your body’s responding, what changes are going on. And these are some really key changes that Lisa’s talking about that you really should be paying attention to more regularly whether you’re trying to conceive or not, quite frankly.

Lisa:

That’s true.

Marc Sklar:

So let’s say we’ve got a couple, they know 50% of the time there’s a male factor issue involved. That’s right, for everyone listening, 50% of the time fertility issues are male factor related. So let’s just say they’ve got a partner with male factor related issues. Do you have specific suggestions in terms of timing and cervical mucus, some tips that you would suggest to them?

Lisa:

Yeah, there’s a few fertility awareness kind of techniques that you can use. I think first and foremost, it’s really… I’m sure you talk about this all the time, but it’s really important to look beyond the basic results that your practitioner gives you when they hand you the paper and tell you it’s fine. Which is apparently the party line, it’s really important to look beyond that to talk to someone like Marc so that you can understand the difference between the bare minimum World Health Organization requirements and what would be considered optimal for natural conception because what the research tells us is when the parameters are low in that sub fertile range, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible. A man has to basically be shooting blanks in order for him to be considered sterile but it could take a lot longer because your average chance of conception per cycle is much lower when you have an issue like that.

Lisa:

And so I think that the timing piece in general is rally important because that can give you a clue that something’s wrong. In a situation where you have healthy couple, healthy situation, and you’re actually getting that timing. So you’re having sex on the actual days of your cervical fluid before ovulation, you’re hitting that window, and you’re doing that six months, 12 months, and it’s not happening, that’s a really big sign. It’s also helpful to track because I have seen this, because this is what I do, where even if you hit the window or not, if it’s been 12 months you feel like you’ve been trying for a year even if your partner was away for four of those months and you didn’t actually hit the window during those four months.

Lisa:

So when you’re tracking and noting when you had sex, then… and sometimes it’ll be like we had a fight, we didn’t have sex or whatever, I’m sure you’ve heard it all. So the other thing I think is really important for kind of just to get everything organized is to note it. So when you know that there’s an issue with male factor, there’s a couple ways that you can approach it. So this is for women who are tracking their mucus. So, I mean, step on, track your mucus. But this is for women who are tracking. So as you pay attention to your cycles, you’ll get a sense of how many days of cervical fluid you’ll typically have. It’s not necessarily going to be the same very single cycle but it can vary. So for women who are in their late 30s, early 40s, sometimes they may have fewer days like two to three, one to two versus women who are in their early 30s or late 20s where they may have four to five.

Lisa:

And it’s not always the same. This is a general kind of average. So if you happen to be one of the women who have feer days, I’ve worked with a number of women in their 40s who have one or two days. That makes it challenging in and of itself because you kind of have to check and track and figure out when you actually get… seeing this cervical fluid. And then you have to figure out how to organize your life around having sex on those days. So depending on how long your fertile window is, one of the things you can do is have your partner hold off for a couple of days on ejaculation before you hit your fertile window. So if you have had your partner’s sperm tested, you know that they usually ask for about three to five days where he doesn’t ejaculate before the test. So when you get the test you’re getting the best case scenario really.

Lisa:

And men produce sperm every day but the density of the sperm in each ejaculate is going to be… if he ejaculates five times in one day it’s going to be lighter than if he… so that’s something to consider. And it’s not helpful to go beyond five or six days so then there’s kind of like this magical window that you kind of have to sort out. And like I said, you can’t always predict exactly when you’re going to ovulate but you can get a general sense of what your cycles are typically like and that can help you to kind of do that particular strategy.

Lisa:

If your fertile window tends to be a bit longer, so if you tend to have several days of cervical fluid leading up to ovulation, you can consider holding off a couple of days before you start to see your cervical fluid. And then every other day. But I wouldn’t take the every other day too far because once you get close to ovulation you just want to hit those days.

Marc Sklar:

Yeah, awesome. The one, I think, variation that I usually tell patients is I want you to go a day after ovulation. For some, maybe even two but really that day after ovulation because there are some sperm that swim faster and you want to give them that opportunity and I’ve seen plenty of successful pregnancies happen that way as well so.

Lisa:

Well I think that… so a lot of people use the ovulation predictors to kind of help them to time everything. And so I think that the way that I usually talk about it, because it really depends, not all women are tracking or taking their basal body temperature. So the three main signs that you would pay attention to if you’re using fertility awareness techniques are your cervical fluid and your basal body temperature and then the cervical position. So if you’re full on doing this as a method then you confirm ovulation when your cervical fluid basically dries up. So you have the clear, stretchy, and then it stops and then you basically go to dry. And that’s how confirm that you’ve ovulated.

Lisa:

And then for temperature, you wait until, if you’re taking your temperature every morning before you get out of bed, you wait until your temperature rises and that’s a sign of the progesterone which has thermogenic effect on the body, et cetera. So I basically teach my clients the birth control rules for conception. It’s kind of the same thing.

Marc Sklar:

It applies the same way.

Lisa:

So if you’re using the method for birth control, you’re going to confirm, you’re going to count three days, you’re going to do all that stuff to verify ovulation happened. And if you’re trying to conceive, my recommendation is to do the same. So keep having sex until either your cervical fluid dries up and you’ve confirmed ovulation or your temperature has stayed high for three days. And that ensures that because… so our cycles can be affected by stress, it can be affected by all kinds of different things and it’s possible that you could have a really stressful week, you could see your cervical fluid, you could hit it, and then ovulation doesn’t actually happen and then you have a next patch of cervical fluid and you don’t hit it. So everything that you said and more.

Marc Sklar:

Absolutely. So one last question for you. If a woman says, “Well, just in general, I run really dry. I don’t produce a lot of cervical mucus and intercourse can be a little bit uncomfortable or painful because I’m not having a lot of cervical mucus. What lubricant can I use, what do you recommend?”

Lisa:

So when I hear that, first of all, cervical fluid is separate to arousal fluid. So those two things are different and produce from… so your arousal fluid seeps through your vaginal walls and your cervical fluid comes from the cervix. So those two things are separate. Like you could have very little cervical fluid and still have arousal fluid. But I mean just to kind of put it out there, for women that have no cervical fluid, that’s a sign of… like if you’re really dry and there’s nothing and there’s never anything, there is a couple of reasons. It could be related to cervical… if you’ve had ever a surgical procedure for dysplasia, that’s associated with it. If you’ve been on the pill for a really long time and you just came off, that could be associated with it. Usually it comes back.

Lisa:

Also if you’re allergic to air and you’re using antihistamines, that can really just dry it up. So it’s helpful to know like not normal, let’s look at that. In terms of lube, I mean it’s important if you need to use lube and you’re trying to conceive to consider using a sperm friendly lube. I think it’s really helpful. So I don’t have like a list of brands but there are specific brands of lube that are sperm friendly and look for one that don’t contain the parabens and the chemicals because there are different ones and some of them do and some of them don’t. So a natural version of it.

Lisa:

But what I would say, because a lot of women who don’t necessarily see a lot of cervical fluid will, “Okay, I’m just going to use tons of this lube.” So cervical fluid is not the same as lube. Cervical fluid is magical, for lack of a better word. So the lube is at the same pH that it needs to be and so that can be helpful. But your cervical fluid has these channels that rapidly transports sperm into your cervical crypt. They actually help to sort out the abnormal sperm. So sperm that are deformed or the head isn’t the right size, it’ll actually get caught in the cervical fluid and only the good guys kind of filter through, it’s a thing it’s like a science fiction movie.

Lisa:

And lube doesn’t do all of that. So you want to kind of… of course if you need to use lube, absolutely. Find a sperm friendly lube but don’t think that it’s doing the same thing as your cervical fluid, you might want to look into that a little bit ore to figure out what’s happening because if you think about it just it’s a really different mindset that we’re in when you’re trying to conceive and it’s not happening. If you were 22 and you use regular lube, you don’t think of that as birth control, because it’s not. So if the issue, really, if that’s an issue this is why it’s so important to talk about male factor because if you’re hitting all those days cycle after cycle, you got the timing down, we really have to look to what the real issue is.

Marc Sklar:

Yeah. With the lube piece, I think there’s plenty of women out there and maybe you can relate to this, who automatically think you need to use lubricant when you’re trying to get pregnant and you’re not even giving your body a chance to see what it does on its own. And I do find that many women who are using lubricant don’t really need it but they think because they’re trying that they need to be using lubricant to help in some way.

Lisa:

Okay.

Marc Sklar:

Just like you’re saying, Lisa, nothing replaces your cervical mucus the way your body produces it and what it can do for the conception and the sperm. And so you want to give that the right opportunity to see what it can do and see what your body can do before you go down that road. Ff you do find that there’s really an issue there, then my thing is always, I’m sure everyone’s tired of hearing it, but you want to get to the root issue. You want to know why that’s happening, why your body’s not doing what it should be doing so that way that could be treated and addressed and you won’t have that problem anymore hopefully. But then back to if you need lubricant, what do you use? The one that I recommend these days is called Baby Dance. It is paraben free, ti’s the only that I know that is approved paraben free and safe to use. So for all of you there, we can put a link down before if you want to find it.

Marc Sklar:

But aside from that, hopefully everyone listening got some really valuable information from Lisa here. I think this topic is really, really important and hopefully you all will look at your body, your cervical mucus and these signs in a different way now that you’ve heard Lisa talk about that and what it all means and what you can use it for, right? So hopefully you all found it useful. Please post a comment below letting us know, one, if you do check your cervical mucus. Two, do you check it regularly or are you new to it? Right? Is this going to be a new experience for you?

Marc Sklar:

Lisa and I want to know and we want to get that feedback. Obviously if you’ve got questions about your cervical mucus, please post those below as well. We will do our best to answer those for you. If you want to find Lisa and connect with her, we’re going to put all that information down below. But Lisa, what’s the easiest way for them to reach you?

Lisa:

The easiest way to reach me is the podcast, type Fertility Friday in your favorite podcast player. And I’m on Instagram @fertilityfriday.

Marc Sklar:

There you go. Those are two ways you can follow and connect with Lisa but we’ll put those links below. And if you are not a current subscriber of my YouTube channel, how dare you, you should be. So click that bell, make sure you hit that bell and subscribe so you find out where and when I’m putting out all my new videos and then you can click right over here if you want to find some other videos as well that relate to cervical mucus, male fertility, and so forth. So thank you Lisa so much for joining, sharing your knowledge. I really, really appreciate you being here with me today.

Lisa:

Thank you for having me. This was great.

Marc Sklar:

Yeah, awesome. And thank you all to all of you for watching. Again, until the next Fertility TV episode, be fertile.