Menstrual cycle tracking

If you have a cycle, it is quietly moving your scale every month. Fluid retention in the days before a period commonly hides a pound or more, then clears once bleeding starts. That is why so many people are certain they have stalled in the exact week they have not. Cycle tracking measures the effect from your own weigh-ins and puts it in front of you.

Turning it on

1. Tap the Menstrual cycle tile on your daily log, or go to Settings → Menstrual cycle. The tile only appears if your profile says female and you have not answered before; the Settings card is always there either way.
2. Tell us whether your cycle is natural, on hormonal birth control, or irregular. That decides what we are willing to claim about it.
3. Optionally give your usual cycle length. It is only a starting point: once you have logged two periods we use your real average.

Turning it off hides it everywhere. Your logged days are kept unless you delete them, which you can do in the same place.

Logging a day

Cycle logging lives on your daily log, next to mood and side effects. There is no extra page to visit each evening.

• Pick a flow (spotting, light, medium or heavy) to mark a bleeding day.
• Pick No period to say there was no bleeding. That is what ends a period.
• Leave it untouched and the day simply stays unrecorded. Silence is never read as "no period", so forgetting one evening will not split a period in two.
• Symptom chips (cramps, bloating, breast tenderness and the rest) are optional and can be switched off.

What you get

• A month calendar of your logged days, with your next period shaded in as a prediction.
• Your average cycle length, average period length, how regular you are, and when the next one is expected, all derived from what you logged.
• A chart of how far your weigh-ins sit above or below your own trend line, by day relative to the start of a period. This is where the pattern becomes obvious.
• Shaded bands on your Progress weight chart marking the days you logged a period.
• A note in your weekly and monthly reports when the week fell in the part of your cycle that moves the scale.

How your weight is handled

Your weigh-ins are never changed. Every number you see, in your history, on your charts, in your reports, is exactly what you logged. A reading on the scale is a fact, and quietly rewriting it would be both dishonest and confusing.

What can allow for your cycle is the rolling trend behind the scenes: your stall check, your goal projection, and the trend weight your nutrition targets scale from. With that setting on, a rise we can see is part of your monthly pattern is set aside there, so a predictable water bump does not get read as a stall or drag your targets around.

• It only ever subtracts a rise, never adds one. Your cycle cannot make your trend look better than it is.
• It does nothing until you have logged at least two cycles alongside your weigh-ins.
• It stays off for anyone whose own weigh-ins do not actually show a rise, which is plenty of people.
• You can switch it off entirely in Settings → Menstrual cycle.

Irregular cycles and birth control

Irregular cycles are extremely common, and GLP-1 treatment often makes cycles more regular as weight comes off. When your logged cycles vary too much to say anything honest, we stop showing phase estimates and describe only what you actually logged. On hormonal birth control we do the same, because a follicular or luteal phase would not mean anything there.

Privacy

• Cycle data is private to your account. It is never shown to peers, never shared with a pod or buddy, and never included in a share image.
• It is included in your data export, and deleted with your account.
• You can delete every logged cycle day at any time from Settings → Menstrual cycle, separately from switching tracking off.