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Why You Need to Test for Ovulation (Even if you don’t want to get pregnant)
October 1, 2009 by Dee
Filed under Estrogen Dominance Causes
You have no desire to get pregnant right now and you’re not monitoring or testing for ovulation. Either you’re not ready for children or you’ve already had as many children as you want. So if 
you’re not ovulating regularly, it’s no big deal, right? Wrong. Ovulation is important for other reasons than just producing an egg so you can have a baby. When your body doesn’t ovulate, you are in danger of becoming estrogen dominant.
Ovulation Sends a Signal to your Hormones
A healthy premenopausal woman produces estrogen during the first two weeks of her menstrual cycle. In mid-cycle ovulation normally occurs when a luteinizing hormone (LH) causes an egg to be released from the ovary. When the egg emerges, a signal is sent to your system to begin producing progesterone.
If there is no ovulation, however, there is no signal sent. Since it didn’t get the message, your body fails to produce the progesterone it needs to balance the estrogen in your system. Without ovulation, the progesterone level in your body begins to fall quickly while the level of estrogen spirals upward. Now you are a prime candidate for estrogen dominance and all the troubles it brings.
Some Reasons Why you Might Not be Ovulating
There are a variety of reasons why a healthy young woman might not ovulate. Some of the most common ones include:
- Excessive exercise and weight loss. A strenuous, long term exercise regime, such as extensive running, sometimes interferes with the ovulation cycle by limiting the hormone gonadotrophin produced by the hypothalamus. When this occurs, ovulation ceases and menstrual cycles often stop.
- Stress is another cause of missed ovulation. Emotional stress and anxiety can wreak havoc on the hormonal system, but you may continue to have periods.
- Medications such as birth control pills and other steroidal drugs can cause this condition.
- You could already be estrogen dominant and experiencing a hormonal imbalance.
How to Test for Ovulation
One way to find out if your are ovulating is to consult your doctor. He/she can run tests to find out if your body is releasing the egg when it should. If that is not a viable option for you, there are other ways you can determine if you are ovulating or not, including the use of over the counter ovulation tests. Home ovulation tests are most often used to help women predict when they are most likely to become pregnant, but can also be used to determine if you are ovulating.
Learn more about 3 ways to test for ovulation at home .
Although you may not want to get pregnant, you do want and need to ovulate to maintain healthy levels of progesterone in your body and prevent hormonal imbalance or estrogen dominance. Take a proactive stance towards your health and find out if you are ovulating monthly.
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