Most of the women who come to me for fertility coaching arrive having tracked their cycle in an app for at least a year. Sometimes longer. Most of them have done their job well: they have logged periods, they have logged ovulation tests, they have logged intercourse, they have followed the predicted fertile window. Most of them haven’t gotten pregnant. This is the moment they call me.

The app isn’t the problem. The app is doing what it was built to do, which is to predict a fertile window from a sample of past cycles, assuming you’re statistically average. The problem is that the body isn’t statistically average. The body is yours, specifically, and the app doesn’t see that.

What the app sees

The app sees the day you said your period started. The app sees if you took an ovulation test and what it said. The app sees the days you marked as intercourse. The app sees the symptoms you logged.

From that, it draws a small predicted fertile window in the middle of your cycle and tells you to try then.

This works for some women. Particularly for women who ovulate at day fourteen of a twenty-eight-day cycle, with a normal luteal phase and a normal hormone profile. If you’re one of those women, you probably got pregnant in the first three months of trying. You’re not the person reading this letter.

What the app doesn’t see

The app doesn’t see your basal body temperature. It doesn’t see what your cervical fluid is doing across the cycle. It doesn’t see your cervical position. It doesn’t see the LH surge across more than the single moment you tested. It doesn’t see whether the cycle even contained ovulation.

This is the heart of the matter. About fifteen to thirty percent of cycles, depending on age and circumstance, are anovulatory, they look like cycles, with bleeding at the expected time, but no egg was released. The app will mark the bleeding and predict your next fertile window. It can’t tell you the previous cycle didn’t contain one.

Body literacy is the work of reading the signals the app can’t reach.

What I actually teach

The first cycle we work together, you start charting three things every morning before you get out of bed: your basal body temperature, your cervical fluid (which you check the night before), and your cervical position if you’re comfortable with that. You write them down on paper. Not in the app.

A normal ovulatory cycle has a clear pattern. Temperatures stay low in the follicular phase, around 97.0 to 97.5 °F. Cervical fluid becomes wet, then stretchy, then peaks. The day after the fluid peak, the temperature rises by at least 0.4 °F and stays there for at least ten days. That’s the signature of an egg released and a corpus luteum producing progesterone. If you don’t see that signature, the cycle was probably anovulatory or had a short luteal phase, and that’s information.

By the third cycle, you start to see what your body actually does. Sometimes it’s reassuring. Sometimes it explains why a year of app-tracking didn’t work. Sometimes it points us to a question we should bring to your reproductive endocrinologist, with specific data attached.

Two scenarios where the app gets it wrong

The first scenario is the woman who has a twenty-six or twenty-seven day cycle and is told to try around day fourteen. Her actual ovulation is on day nine or ten. The fertile window passed before the app told her to look. She and her partner have been doing the work, on the wrong days, for a year.

The second scenario is the woman who has a thirty-five day cycle and is told to try around day twenty. Her actual ovulation, if it happens, is on day twenty-three or later. The window is wider than the app predicts and shifted past where she has been looking.

In both cases the body was saying so the whole time. The apps didn’t have a way to ask.

Working alongside IVF

Some of my clients come to me already in IVF or IUI. The clinical protocol is run by their reproductive endocrinologist; I don’t interfere with that. I don’t say anything that contradicts your protocol. I don’t suggest stopping anything your clinician prescribed.

What I do is the supporting layer: sleep, nutrition aligned to your specific cycle phase, stress regulation, and the optional homeopathic protocols I’ve trained in for five years and used with hundreds of clients. None of it conflicts with the medication or the egg-retrieval timeline. All of it helps the body do its part.

What I’m inviting you to

If you have been tracking with an app for a year, and the year hasn’t been enough, that’s the kind of conversation I can have. The first conversation is fifteen or thirty minutes, depending on which you book, and there’s no obligation in it.

You don’t need to know what you want before you call. Most people don’t, the first time.

Susan, 8 March 2026