I’ve been doing the 21/7 method for 10 years now, and recently I was thinking about how they drill into us that we need to take it exactly the same time every day, or it’ll be less effective. Or when we miss it, it’ll be less effective. Make sure to use condoms for a week if we miss it more than twice. All that jazz. Women are told to opt for different methods of contraception if they aren’t able to commit to taking it 100% regularly.
From what I know, the pill works by keeping the hormone cycle steady, to prevent an egg from maturing. After 24h, there is a spike in some hormone which the pill normally keeps steady (I think it’s progesterone but not 100% sure), so we take the pill, and the hormones remain in tact.
Surely then by not taking it for 7 whole days would mess the entire thing up. How come the risk of pregnancy stays low after 7 days, if missing it for 1 day can increase it?
In: 3
So for all normal healthy women, there’s a 7-day period of the monthly cycle where you’re *naturally* infertile, because of a certain hormone. The way the pill works is basically by tricking your body into thinking you’re *always* on that portion of the cycle, so you’ll be infertile all month, instead of just during a fraction of it.
But when that 7 day period comes, you don’t want to be taking the pill because that would give you an *excess* of the hormone, and that would make you sick. If you took the pill during that 7 day period you’d be getting like a *double-dose* of the hormone, you’d be getting both your natural body’s production of the hormone *and* the artificial version that you take as a pill. So for that 7-day period (and *only* on that seven day period), you don’t take the pill as normal.
So it’s not that you can miss the pill for 7 days and still be fine. It’s that during those 7 days your body is already *naturally* “on the pill”, and you’d be taking too much if you were to also take the actual pill during those days.
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