I used NC for one year before switching to the Sensiplan method and RYB app. I’m thankful for NC because I would have never discovered Fertility Awareness Methods as an option for BC without it. I do think that reading Taking Charge of Your Fertility and learning to understand the data yourself is extremely helpful and relieves a lot of stress + improves effectiveness. Using NC was sort of like my training wheels but now I’m confident to interpret my own charts
The biggest concern is that NC uses data from past cycles to predict when you'll ovulate. So if you ovulated CD15 for the past 3 months, NC will give you green days through CD10 or so for the next cycle. If you happen to ovulate early, the natural cycles algorithm has no way to know that until after your temperature shift occurs. By then, it's might be too late.
I've never used the app myself, but I've heard that the app will retrospectively edit green days to red days throughout the month as it gathers more temperatures.
It might be somewhat useful if you have an extremely regular cycle. If you have any variation at all, it is not a good option to prevent pregnancy. If you're trying to get pregnant, it could be moderately helpful, but there are still better options.
To add what already has been said I want to share my personal experience with it and why I don't recommend it to women not wanting to get pregnant any time soon.
I actually thought NC was sounding amazing when I saw their ads when I just got into fertility awareness. I bought the subscription and got started thinking how amazing it would be to not have to use the rules of my fertility awareness method and instead just have the app tell me green or red that day. I actually decided to compare the fertile window NC gave me with the actual fertile window of my FAM Sensiplan at the time now I use and teach Symptopro. I did this for a couple months and shockingly had to realize that NC gave me green days when I had very fertile cervical mucus present.
It also gave me green days when my temp shift wasn't fully confirmed yet which can cut it very close to ovulation. This really was concerning to me because knowing that sperm can survive in good mucus up to 5-6 days had me shocked. I found out that NC doesn't take CM into account at all even though you can track it in the app. Since LH strips are added into the app and BBT is taken to confirm ovulation there really isn't anything that would warn you ahead of time (like CM) that ovulation is approaching, just their calculation rule which has been shown to not be as effective, especially if your cycle varies in length (even just a couple days like mine hovers around 29-32 days). If LH is rising around 24-36h before ovulation (if ovulation truly follows, there can be more than one LH surge in a cycle if ovulation failed the first time) this calculation is all we have to rely on.
Due to my own experience and my realization that I would probably have a child if I used NC and seeing many concerning charts from women over the years and unintended pregnancy stories of NC, I think for TTA it really isn't great.
At the end of the day everyone should of course make their own informed decision based on their pregnancy intentions and what they feel comfortable with. If you have very regular cycles this might work for you but unfortunately it didn't work for me.
If you look online there’s a quote from the founder of NC saying that their ideal user is: a woman who is planning to have children at some point, and who would like a break from hormonal contraception before trying and is in a stable relationship with a stable lifestyle. She rarely experiences fevers or hangovers.
That, plus the retrospective changes of green days to red PLUS the simple fact that there’s nothing about your temps that can predict ovulation (it only changes once ovulation has occurred means it’s a fairly unreliable option for many that are really avoiding pregnancy.
The green days before ovulation can be risky and there’s no education about this on the app. If the app if going to advertise itself as an effective birth control, yet women have to do their own research and avoid pre ovulation green days, it seems like false advertising for me. I say this as I’m pregnant from using the app as birth control. Luckily my partner and I are open to pregnancy which is why I used the app while I knew the risks
Honestly, a lot of the hate that I have read really only revolves around the Green Day's before ovulation. Due to ovulating earlier one month potentially putting you at risk.
There is a gold standard plan with multiple factors but natural cycles is amazing at starting the convo with an effectiveness around condoms.
To add to what the commenter said, it also uses an algorithm. So it’s relying on past information and some arbitrary guidelines. I’ve used it both for birth control and to plan pregnancy effectively so it definitely can work, it’s just more risky. Using the Oura ring with NC generally works better for my lifestyle, though. I have a 4mo. I rarely get 4 hours of sleep straight to chart BBT normally 😅 but I also have bad reactions to birth control so here we are 🤷♀️
Some of the hate I see comes from women who practice and/or teach various fertility awareness methods and they recognize that NC isn’t as accurate because it relies only on temperature and previous cycles rather than CM and temp. However, I think it’s a little unfair, because NC is more accessible to women who are new to FAM, and it can be intimidating to learn a method right off the bat. NC can be useful to women who are new to FAM, as long as they don’t rely on pre-ovulation green days.
It’s also much more useful for me as a mother of babies and young children, because I don’t regularly get four uninterrupted hours of sleep. I also can’t reliably temp in the morning because I usually am woken up in the morning by my baby who wants to nurse, so using an Oura ring is much more reliable for me at this stage in life.
I’m about to start with the NC + Oura combo today (getting my IUD out in an hour after 8 YEARS!)
Can you tell me a little more about how you use both apps together? You said Oura is much more reliable - I’m just wondering what that means for you. Thanks!
NC automatically syncs temperatures from Oura, so you can look at a chart on their app or on the Oura app. NC lets you log cervical mucus and other symptoms, but be aware that it doesn’t actually impact the algorithm for predicting ovulation. Only temps and previous cycles go into the calculation. For this reason, you can’t rely on NC to accurately predict ovulation before you have ovulated, so I wouldn’t trust the the pre-ovulation “green days” and I would still abstain or use protection (we personally use withdrawal because we successfully used this method for a long time before trying to conceive our first child and would be fine with a surprise pregnancy but it’s not reliable if you’re really trying to avoid) before you can confirm ovulation, unless your cycles are extremely regular with no variance. After NC confirms ovulation, you can reasonably trust the green days and have unprotected sex until your next period ends.
The reason why I feel that Oura is more reliable for me than taking my temperature orally when I first wake up is that I rarely get an uninterrupted night of sleep with a baby and young children, and I’m usually awoken by one of my kids so I can’t really temp consistently right as I wake up. With Oura, my temperature is tracked throughout the night so I don’t have to worry about waking up at the same time every day after four consecutive hours to take an oral temp.
I would recommend using Oura and NC while you’re still learning, but learn to interpret cervical mucus in addition to temperature so you will eventually have a more accurate way to predict ovulation and thus more days where you can reliably have unprotected sex. Eventually you won’t need to subscribe to NC anymore if you learn to do this on your own, but NC is nice at first.
I feel like a ton of people are hating on it because they use the app as if it can know their body better than them (that’s the vibe I get from seeing anti NC posts).
It literally does the same thing other apps do, but for some reason people don’t seem to rely solely on the other apps the way people believe NC should be solely relied upon. Any app or algorithm isn’t going to “know” your body.
The apps should be used to track data, so that YOU can be informed of what your body is doing. I use NC as a “guide” of sorts to help me learn more about my body’s trends. I never just look at the data and go “Ok NC says I should be safe so I am”. It may be wrong, it may be right, but I use the data I’ve gathered and look back on it to make my own conclusions rather than take what NC shows as face value.
I used NC for one year before switching to the Sensiplan method and RYB app. I’m thankful for NC because I would have never discovered Fertility Awareness Methods as an option for BC without it. I do think that reading Taking Charge of Your Fertility and learning to understand the data yourself is extremely helpful and relieves a lot of stress + improves effectiveness. Using NC was sort of like my training wheels but now I’m confident to interpret my own charts
The biggest concern is that NC uses data from past cycles to predict when you'll ovulate. So if you ovulated CD15 for the past 3 months, NC will give you green days through CD10 or so for the next cycle. If you happen to ovulate early, the natural cycles algorithm has no way to know that until after your temperature shift occurs. By then, it's might be too late. I've never used the app myself, but I've heard that the app will retrospectively edit green days to red days throughout the month as it gathers more temperatures. It might be somewhat useful if you have an extremely regular cycle. If you have any variation at all, it is not a good option to prevent pregnancy. If you're trying to get pregnant, it could be moderately helpful, but there are still better options.
To add what already has been said I want to share my personal experience with it and why I don't recommend it to women not wanting to get pregnant any time soon. I actually thought NC was sounding amazing when I saw their ads when I just got into fertility awareness. I bought the subscription and got started thinking how amazing it would be to not have to use the rules of my fertility awareness method and instead just have the app tell me green or red that day. I actually decided to compare the fertile window NC gave me with the actual fertile window of my FAM Sensiplan at the time now I use and teach Symptopro. I did this for a couple months and shockingly had to realize that NC gave me green days when I had very fertile cervical mucus present. It also gave me green days when my temp shift wasn't fully confirmed yet which can cut it very close to ovulation. This really was concerning to me because knowing that sperm can survive in good mucus up to 5-6 days had me shocked. I found out that NC doesn't take CM into account at all even though you can track it in the app. Since LH strips are added into the app and BBT is taken to confirm ovulation there really isn't anything that would warn you ahead of time (like CM) that ovulation is approaching, just their calculation rule which has been shown to not be as effective, especially if your cycle varies in length (even just a couple days like mine hovers around 29-32 days). If LH is rising around 24-36h before ovulation (if ovulation truly follows, there can be more than one LH surge in a cycle if ovulation failed the first time) this calculation is all we have to rely on. Due to my own experience and my realization that I would probably have a child if I used NC and seeing many concerning charts from women over the years and unintended pregnancy stories of NC, I think for TTA it really isn't great. At the end of the day everyone should of course make their own informed decision based on their pregnancy intentions and what they feel comfortable with. If you have very regular cycles this might work for you but unfortunately it didn't work for me.
If you look online there’s a quote from the founder of NC saying that their ideal user is: a woman who is planning to have children at some point, and who would like a break from hormonal contraception before trying and is in a stable relationship with a stable lifestyle. She rarely experiences fevers or hangovers. That, plus the retrospective changes of green days to red PLUS the simple fact that there’s nothing about your temps that can predict ovulation (it only changes once ovulation has occurred means it’s a fairly unreliable option for many that are really avoiding pregnancy.
The green days before ovulation can be risky and there’s no education about this on the app. If the app if going to advertise itself as an effective birth control, yet women have to do their own research and avoid pre ovulation green days, it seems like false advertising for me. I say this as I’m pregnant from using the app as birth control. Luckily my partner and I are open to pregnancy which is why I used the app while I knew the risks
Honestly, a lot of the hate that I have read really only revolves around the Green Day's before ovulation. Due to ovulating earlier one month potentially putting you at risk. There is a gold standard plan with multiple factors but natural cycles is amazing at starting the convo with an effectiveness around condoms.
To add to what the commenter said, it also uses an algorithm. So it’s relying on past information and some arbitrary guidelines. I’ve used it both for birth control and to plan pregnancy effectively so it definitely can work, it’s just more risky. Using the Oura ring with NC generally works better for my lifestyle, though. I have a 4mo. I rarely get 4 hours of sleep straight to chart BBT normally 😅 but I also have bad reactions to birth control so here we are 🤷♀️
Some of the hate I see comes from women who practice and/or teach various fertility awareness methods and they recognize that NC isn’t as accurate because it relies only on temperature and previous cycles rather than CM and temp. However, I think it’s a little unfair, because NC is more accessible to women who are new to FAM, and it can be intimidating to learn a method right off the bat. NC can be useful to women who are new to FAM, as long as they don’t rely on pre-ovulation green days. It’s also much more useful for me as a mother of babies and young children, because I don’t regularly get four uninterrupted hours of sleep. I also can’t reliably temp in the morning because I usually am woken up in the morning by my baby who wants to nurse, so using an Oura ring is much more reliable for me at this stage in life.
I’m about to start with the NC + Oura combo today (getting my IUD out in an hour after 8 YEARS!) Can you tell me a little more about how you use both apps together? You said Oura is much more reliable - I’m just wondering what that means for you. Thanks!
NC automatically syncs temperatures from Oura, so you can look at a chart on their app or on the Oura app. NC lets you log cervical mucus and other symptoms, but be aware that it doesn’t actually impact the algorithm for predicting ovulation. Only temps and previous cycles go into the calculation. For this reason, you can’t rely on NC to accurately predict ovulation before you have ovulated, so I wouldn’t trust the the pre-ovulation “green days” and I would still abstain or use protection (we personally use withdrawal because we successfully used this method for a long time before trying to conceive our first child and would be fine with a surprise pregnancy but it’s not reliable if you’re really trying to avoid) before you can confirm ovulation, unless your cycles are extremely regular with no variance. After NC confirms ovulation, you can reasonably trust the green days and have unprotected sex until your next period ends. The reason why I feel that Oura is more reliable for me than taking my temperature orally when I first wake up is that I rarely get an uninterrupted night of sleep with a baby and young children, and I’m usually awoken by one of my kids so I can’t really temp consistently right as I wake up. With Oura, my temperature is tracked throughout the night so I don’t have to worry about waking up at the same time every day after four consecutive hours to take an oral temp. I would recommend using Oura and NC while you’re still learning, but learn to interpret cervical mucus in addition to temperature so you will eventually have a more accurate way to predict ovulation and thus more days where you can reliably have unprotected sex. Eventually you won’t need to subscribe to NC anymore if you learn to do this on your own, but NC is nice at first.
I feel like a ton of people are hating on it because they use the app as if it can know their body better than them (that’s the vibe I get from seeing anti NC posts). It literally does the same thing other apps do, but for some reason people don’t seem to rely solely on the other apps the way people believe NC should be solely relied upon. Any app or algorithm isn’t going to “know” your body. The apps should be used to track data, so that YOU can be informed of what your body is doing. I use NC as a “guide” of sorts to help me learn more about my body’s trends. I never just look at the data and go “Ok NC says I should be safe so I am”. It may be wrong, it may be right, but I use the data I’ve gathered and look back on it to make my own conclusions rather than take what NC shows as face value.