Questions about your cycle, your food, and your data.

Menstrual, follicular, ovulatory and luteal. Menstrual is your period. Follicular runs from the end of bleeding to ovulation, with estrogen rising. Ovulation is the release itself, roughly a day. Luteal is everything after, with progesterone rising and then falling, which is what brings the next period.

The stretch between ovulation and your next period. Progesterone is the dominant hormone, core body temperature runs a few tenths of a degree higher, and appetite usually increases. It is also the phase most premenstrual symptoms belong to.

Usually 12 to 14 days, and it is the steadiest part of the cycle. When a cycle is longer or shorter than average, it is nearly always the follicular phase that moved, not this one.

From the first day of your period until ovulation. Estrogen climbs through it, and energy, mood and tolerance for hard training usually climb with it. It is also the part of the cycle whose length varies most between people and between months.

Only if your cycle happens to be 28 days. Because the luteal phase is the fixed part, ovulation lands about fourteen days before your NEXT period, not fourteen days after your last one. On a 34-day cycle that is nearer day 20, and day 14 is still follicular.

Count back roughly fourteen days from the day your next period is due. That is an estimate from your own history, not a confirmation — nothing short of a hormone test or a sustained temperature shift confirms that ovulation happened.

Cervical mucus turning clear and stretchy, a small sustained rise in resting temperature afterwards, and for some people a brief one-sided ache with a name of its own, mittelschmerz. Appetite often drops for a day or two without any decision being made about it.

Anywhere from about 21 to 35 days in adults, and normal for you is what repeats for you. A cycle that is consistently 33 days is not irregular; a cycle that swings between 24 and 40 is worth mentioning to a doctor.

Broadly, cycles that vary by more than seven to nine days from month to month, or that fall outside the 21-to-35-day range. One odd month after illness, travel or a hard training block is common and not the same thing.

Illness, travel, sleep loss, a change in training load, stress and weight change all move it, and so do perimenopause and thyroid conditions. A single shifted month is usually noise. A trend across several is worth writing down and taking to an appointment.

The commonest reasons are a late ovulation this cycle, illness, stress, travel, or a change in sleep or training. If pregnancy is possible, test — an app cannot rule it out. Ovulating four days late makes a period four days late, which is why prediction slips.

Yes. An anovulatory cycle can still end in bleeding, which is one reason a calendar alone cannot tell you whether you ovulated. It becomes more common in perimenopause and with conditions like PCOS.

The evidence does not support it. The original 1971 study has not held up under larger reanalysis, and cycles of different lengths will drift in and out of alignment by chance often enough to feel meaningful.

Core body temperature runs slightly higher through the luteal phase, and a warmer core makes falling and staying asleep harder. It is one of the better-supported premenstrual effects, and it is measurable in your own log if you track sleep.

Falling progesterone and estrogen at the end of the luteal phase, often on top of the worse sleep above. If it is severe every month, or it comes with heavy bleeding, low iron is worth ruling out with a blood test.

The years of hormonal change before periods stop, commonly starting in the forties and lasting several years. Cycles get less predictable first — shorter, then longer, then skipped — which is why prediction is least reliable exactly here.

Often, but not every cycle, and less predictably. That mix is why a phase estimate during perimenopause should be read as a rough guide rather than a fact about this month.

Parts of it. Higher iron needs during menstruation and increased appetite in the luteal phase are well supported. The four-phase meal plan built on top of them — specific foods prescribed for specific weeks — has not been tested in any trial we could find. Patterns grades the two differently rather than selling you both.

The practice of changing what you eat and how you train according to which phase you are in. The underlying idea, that your body is not the same in week one and week three, is sound. The specific weekly food lists sold alongside it are mostly extrapolation from mechanism.

Because you are. Energy intake genuinely rises in the luteal phase — the increase is one of the more consistent findings in this whole area, driven by progesterone and a slightly higher resting metabolic rate. It is a hormonal signal, not a lapse in willpower.

A little. Resting metabolic rate rises modestly in the luteal phase. It is real and it is small — enough to explain some of the extra hunger, not enough to build a diet around.

Falling estrogen affects serotonin, and carbohydrate does something about that quickly, which is a fairly direct loop. Meeting the craving with something substantial earlier in the day tends to work better than resisting it until nine at night.

Mostly water and slower gut transit, not fat. Progesterone slows things down and shifts fluid, which is why the scale can move several pounds in a week and then come back down on its own. Patterns treats a premenstrual rise that reverses as exactly that.

Progesterone relaxes smooth muscle, including the gut, so transit slows through the luteal phase. Fluid retention adds to it. If it is severe every month it is worth raising, because it overlaps with symptoms of conditions that get diagnosed late.

Iron alongside vitamin C is the one that genuinely changes — red meat, lentils or spinach with citrus or peppers, because vitamin C substantially increases absorption of plant iron and you are losing iron this week. Beyond that, warm and simple is a fair answer.

Complex carbohydrate deliberately rather than reluctantly, and more protein and fiber, both of which blunt the swings. Calcium and B6 have some evidence for premenstrual symptoms. None of this is a prescription — it is what to reach for when appetite is already up.

This is the easiest week to eat well without effort, so it is the one to spend on variety and on protein at breakfast. If there is a hard training week in the month, this is usually where it belongs.

You lose iron with menstrual blood, so intake matters more that week, and heavy periods are one of the commonest causes of low iron in women. The daily target for a menstruating adult is 18 mg against 8 mg after menopause — a difference most trackers do not know exists.

Chronic underfuelling can delay or stop ovulation, and low iron makes the fatigue around a heavy period worse. Beyond that, claims that specific foods regulate a cycle are largely unsupported, and Patterns grades them as such.

Two changes are worth making: more iron during menstruation, and more protein and complex carbohydrate in the luteal phase when appetite rises. The rest of the four-phase food chart is widely repeated and not supported.

No good evidence. Rotating flax and pumpkin seeds in one half of the cycle and sesame and sunflower in the other has not been tested in humans for the effects claimed for it. The seeds are fine food; the schedule is doing nothing.

Slightly, and upward in the luteal phase. A fixed daily target that never moves is treating a body that changes every week as one that does not, which is the whole reason Patterns puts the cycle behind the nutrition rather than beside it.

On methods that suppress ovulation — the combined pill, the implant, the injection, the ring, the patch — there is no ovulatory cycle to sync to, and the monthly bleed is a withdrawal bleed. Patterns asks once and then says so, rather than naming a phase you do not have.

Protein and calcium both matter more as estrogen falls, because muscle and bone are what is most at risk. Iron requirements drop once periods stop. Patterns moves the targets rather than leaving you on the ones you were given at 25.

18 mg for a menstruating adult, 8 mg after menopause, and 27 mg in pregnancy. The gap between the first two is more than double, and it is the single clearest example of a target that should not be the same for everybody.

Plant iron is absorbed far less readily than iron from meat. Vitamin C in the same meal improves it substantially; tea, coffee and calcium in the same sitting work against it. Which is why the pairing matters as much as the total.

The floor for avoiding deficiency is about 0.8 g per kg of body weight, but that is a minimum, not a target. Most evidence on preserving muscle — particularly around and after menopause — points higher, and it is one of the more robust findings in nutrition.

1,000 mg a day for most adults, rising to 1,200 mg for women over 50. Bone loss accelerates after menopause, so this is one of the targets that should change with life stage rather than stay put.

Around 310 to 320 mg a day for adult women. Most people fall short of it. The evidence for magnesium specifically helping period cramps is mixed and Patterns grades it as such — but the shortfall itself is real and worth closing.

The target is 400 mcg a day, and 600 mcg in pregnancy. It matters earliest in a pregnancy, often before anybody knows there is one, which is why it is a standing target for anyone who might conceive rather than a pregnancy one.

If you eat no animal products, almost certainly — B12 is not reliably available from plants. If you eat meat, dairy or eggs regularly, usually not. Absorption also falls with age and with some medications, which is a conversation for a doctor rather than an app.

A blood test. A food log can show you that your intake has been below target for weeks, which is useful and is the thing you can act on, but intake is not status. Patterns will show you the shortfall and will not tell you what it means.

For most women: iron, calcium, folate, magnesium, vitamin D and B12. Tracking all forty is a good way to stop tracking anything. Patterns surfaces the handful you are actually short of rather than showing you a wall.

Protein is the macro worth watching for most people, because it is the one most often short and the one that changes how full you feel. Splitting fat and carbohydrate to the gram rarely earns the effort it costs.

It depends on size, age, activity and where you are in your cycle, so any single number in an article is wrong for almost everyone reading it. Patterns estimates from your own details and shows the estimate as an estimate.

For most adult women, yes — it is below what the body needs at rest before any activity is counted, and it became a default because it is a round number rather than because it fits anybody. If you have been told to eat at that level, that is a conversation to have with a doctor or a dietitian rather than with an app.

There is some evidence for lower B vitamins, folate, magnesium and zinc on the combined pill, though the size of the effect and whether it matters clinically are both still argued about. Patterns grades it honestly instead of turning it into a supplement recommendation.

Enough that you are not thirsty and your urine is pale, which is a more useful test than any fixed number of glasses. The eight-glasses rule has no real source behind it.

Less accurate than the two decimal places suggest. Packaged food labels are permitted a wide tolerance, portion estimation adds more, and cooking method changes what you actually absorb. It is useful for direction and comparison over weeks; it is not a measurement.

Usually one of three things: a user-submitted database entry that was never checked, a portion size that does not match what you ate, or a label tolerance you cannot see. The first is the one an app can fix, and it is the one most apps have not.

Because they are reading different sources — a laboratory reference database, a manufacturer label, and a crowd-sourced entry will all disagree about the same bowl of oats. Patterns marks which of the three each number came from instead of averaging them into a number with no parent.

Three places, and every nutrient says which: label-read, taken from the panel on the box; USDA reference, from the published food composition data; or estimated, where we have inferred it from a similar food. The third one is marked precisely because it is the weakest.

For whole foods it is the best public reference there is, built on laboratory analysis. It is still an average of samples, so a specific apple is not the average apple, and it covers branded packaged food much less well than it covers raw ingredients.

Often not. A database that lets anybody add a food and never checks it accumulates entries with missing micronutrients, wrong serving sizes and duplicated barcodes. Patterns does not show you an unmarked number from an unknown source.

The scan is exact; the record behind the barcode may not be. Published work on barcode nutrition databases has found meaningful error rates, mostly from stale entries after a manufacturer reformulates. Reading the label itself is the more reliable route, which is why Patterns photographs the panel.

Because the source did not measure them. A label lists what regulation requires and nothing more, so a packaged food will often have no magnesium or folate figure at all. Showing a blank is honest; filling it with a guess and not saying so is not.

Because something it is calculated from changed — your weight, your activity, your life stage, or where you are in your cycle. Patterns shows what moved rather than quietly presenting a new number.

No. The most accurate wrist tracker in Stanford’s comparison against laboratory measurement was off by 27% on energy expenditure. Movement is logged so it can be correlated against everything else, not priced and subtracted from your food.

Reasonable for regular cycles and poor for irregular ones, because nearly all of them are projecting your average forward. Accuracy falls off exactly where people need it most — irregular cycles, PCOS, perimenopause — and most apps do not say so.

Because a prediction is a running estimate, not a promise. Ovulating later this month moves the period with it, and a new logged cycle updates the average. Patterns would rather revise the estimate than defend an old one.

No. A calendar estimate works on averages and cannot confirm ovulation happened. Patterns is not contraception and should not be used as such.

A relationship between two things you track that held up across several of your own cycles — your iron dropping during your period, or your intake rising after a short night. It arrives with the size of the change, how many of your cycles agreed, and the days it was drawn from.

Targets and graded answers are there on day one. Trends arrive in a fortnight. Findings need about three cycles, and the app tells you how many it has rather than making you guess.

A within-cycle comparison only repeats once a month, so three months is three replications. Anything that claims to know your personal patterns after a week is describing noise.

Every relationship Patterns tests was written down, with a direction, before we looked at your data. Letting software roam a health log manufactures results: thirty-two symptoms against four phases is over a hundred comparisons, and a handful come back looking significant from chance alone.

It is reported, with the same weight as one that came back interesting. Printing only the exciting answers and quietly dropping the rest is the same distortion as hunting through the data — it just hides better.

Yes — pick a food and pick a symptom, and that is one question, asked once. What there is no button for is "what is bothering me", because two hundred foods against thirty-two symptoms is thousands of comparisons and hundreds would come back positive from noise.

No. Log what you care about. More signals means more that can be crossed, but a food log on its own still gets you targets, provenance and trends.

Every general claim in the app carries a grade — well established, some evidence, mechanism only, or widely repeated and not supported — and the citations behind it. There are 289 claims and 460 citations, and every citation was opened and read.

A claim is what is known about people in general: available on day one, graded and cited. A finding is what is true about you: it takes months, and it is drawn only from your own days.

No. It shows you your own record and the relationships in it. What they mean is a conversation for you and your doctor.

That is largely what it is for. The symptom vocabulary is deliberately the clinical one, so a dated record of what you logged arrives already in the language the appointment happens in. Conditions like endometriosis take years to diagnose mostly because nobody joins the dots.

It can be, for some people. Daily food logging is associated with worse outcomes for people with a history of disordered eating, and the research on that is not ambiguous. It can also be genuinely useful for someone trying to eat enough iron. Which one it is depends on the person, not on the app.

Yes. Calories can be turned off entirely, leaving the nutrients and the patterns. Most of what is interesting here — iron, protein, what moves with your cycle — has nothing to do with a calorie count anyway.

That is a question for you and someone who knows your history, not for us. If you do use one, the settings that turn off calories, targets and weight are there for exactly this. And if logging is making things worse, stopping is a legitimate answer rather than a failure.

No. There is no default weight goal, no streak to protect and no congratulating you for eating less. Weight is one signal among six, logged so it can be correlated with the rest.

No, and nothing punishes you for a gap. There are no streaks, because a streak turns a tool into an obligation and then into a reason to quit after you break one.

No. There is no good-food-bad-food scoring and no red warnings on a day you enjoyed. A day is a data point, and one day is not a pattern.

Export everything or delete it, in one click, from inside the app. No email to support, no retention flow, and delete means delete.

No. There is no ad SDK in the app, no third-party analytics, and no data broker relationship. That is a design decision about how the product makes money, which is the only thing that ever really makes this answer stable.

From people paying for it, $99 a year, and from nothing else. It is worth asking any health app this question, because an app that is free and has no subscription is being paid by somebody, and it is not usually the person using it.

Because free has to be paid for by somebody, and in this category that somebody is an advertiser, a data broker, or an investor expecting one of those later. Cycle, symptom and food data is among the most valuable there is to sell, which is exactly why it should not be the thing funding the app that holds it. A subscription is what keeps “no ad SDK, no third-party analytics, no data broker” a description of the business rather than a promise that lasts until the money runs out.

No. Nothing you write trains anybody’s model. There is one optional AI step, and it sends your check-in text with no name, no email and no account id attached to it.

No, and there is no ad SDK in the app to serve one later. An advertising SDK is also a tracking SDK, which is the actual reason it is not there.

Yes, in one click from inside the app, in a format you can open and read. Being able to leave is part of the product, not a concession.

Yes, in one click, and delete means delete rather than deactivate. You do not have to email support and be talked out of it.

No app can promise immunity from a lawful order, and any that tells you otherwise is selling you something. What actually reduces the risk is holding less data, not selling or sharing it, and letting you delete it instantly — which is what we do. If this is a live concern for you, deleting your history is one tap and we will never ask you why.

You. There is no social feed, no partner sharing turned on by default, and no employer or insurer relationship.

No. No third-party analytics, no advertising identifiers, no pixels.

HIPAA covers healthcare providers and their business associates, and a consumer app you sign up for yourself generally is not one — which is true of every app in this category, whatever the marketing implies. The protection here comes from not collecting what we do not need and not sharing what we hold.

No. We email you a six-digit code. There is no password to reuse, to leak, or for us to store.

Six signals: food, cycle, sleep, mood, movement and health. The point is that they are read together rather than filed in six separate tabs, because the interesting thing is nearly always between two of them.

Photograph the label and it reads the numbers off the panel, or search, or describe it. The assistant has read your log, so answers come from your own days and open the days they came from.

You are asked once, at sign-up. On methods that stop ovulation there is no phase to name, so Patterns shows you the reason rather than inventing a day 14 for you.

You can set those, along with about eighteen other conditions, and the targets and the language change accordingly. What it will not do is claim to detect them.

Yes, with the honest caveat that prediction is less certain the more your cycles vary — that is true of every app, and this one says so instead of showing you a confident wrong date. The findings side is unaffected, because it works on what you logged rather than on what was predicted.

Yes. The targets move — iron drops to 8 mg, calcium and protein matter more — and the cycle layer steps back. Most trackers do not know the difference exists.

Wearable sync is on the roadmap rather than shipped. You can log sleep and movement by hand today, and the findings engine does not care which way a number arrived.

Yes. The defaults come from your details and your life stage, and you can override any of them.

You can start logging immediately without importing anything, and findings begin from the day you start. Import from other apps is on the roadmap.

$99 a year, after a free trial. One price with everything in it — no tier that holds the findings back until you upgrade, because the findings are the product.

Yes, and it is the whole app rather than a reduced version of it. Findings need a few cycles to arrive, so a trial that hid them would be showing you everything except the reason to stay.

No, and it is built not to try. Patterns gives you the record, the context and the connections, so you can take a more informed role in a conversation that still belongs with a clinician.