How well do you really know your period? Sure, you deal with it monthly (probably), and you deal with the moodiness and pain that can accompany it, but are you really paying attention? If you are, you’re doing better than many of us. If you're not, no worries — Planned Parenthood is coming to the rescue yet again.
Planned Parenthood wants to make you and your period BFFs with a new app that tracks your cycle and helps you manage your birth control. Spot On, a new, free app for iPhones (Android coming soon!) will help you better understand what’s going as you shed the lining of your uterus, what your birth control is doing in there, and what it all means.
After fielding every question under the sun on periods and birth control, Planned Parenthood experts wanted to create an easy resource for anyone with a period to better figure out what’s a side effect of their cycle and what’s just a body being a body.
“At Planned Parenthood, we understand that your period is a normal — if not always welcome — part of life, and we hear pretty much every question in the book about periods and birth control,” Dr. Raegan McDonald-Mosley, chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. “This led us to create a resource to help every person understand their own unique cycle and body. We’re thrilled to introduce the Spot On app, and hope it empowers users to take control of their period, their birth control, and their overall sexual health.”
In the app, you can log whether you’re feeling bloated, fatigued, dizzy, experiencing breast tenderness, or if you have a stomach ache (complete with the poop emoji). It lets you log your mood, and how you’ve treated your body that day from whether you’ve exercised or ate junk food. As far as your period, you enter whether you’re clear, or if your flow is light, medium, heavy, or you’re just spotting.
The idea is that the more you use the app, logging when you get your period, whether you’ve taken your birth control, what your mood is, and how your body is feeling, the better the app will be able to let you know what should be happening and when.
“We know how important birth control is to helping people achieve their goals in life, so Spot On is designed to help manage your method and show how it might affect your period,” Dr. McDonald-Mosley said.
Spot On takes into account that not everyone with a period is a girl. This app is for everyone of any gender identity who menstruates. Though it’s not the only period tracker on the market, it is the only one to use dinosaurs to help you through your cycle, which is pretty awesome. Spot On also provides tips and resources around periods and birth control, including words to know and basic facts.
