Last year some time, I started thinking about going off the pill because I just didn't like doing something unnatural to my body. I finally made the jump back in December when I found out about the LadyComp through my naturopath.

The LadyComp is pretty much a high-tech thermometer. However, it keeps track of your data and lets you know the days it's okay to have unprotected sex without risking pregnancy. It's pretty simple to use once you go through the pain of setting it up. Every day you take your temperature when you first wake up, and you let the LadyComp know if you have your period or not.

Since being off the pill, my skin is no longer as dry, and my eyes! They are going back to normal. No need to switch contacts. No need to get punctal plugs. Who would have thought it was my birth control pill that was drying me out. I only came to that conclusion because I read something about there being a lot of Vitamin A in the pill. It helps clear up acne because it dries the skin. I knew I was generally quite dry at the time. I also feel less moody, and I think I am losing the water weight. I've been working out less over the last few weeks and I am still looking more trim.

So yeah, I love being off the pill. There really is no reason to take hormones almost every day to prevent pregnancy when there are only several days out of the month that I could conceive.

But getting the LadyComp was a real pain in the butt. At this point, I couldn't even recommend a distributor. I ordered mine through Natural Methods. It took them 2 months to ship it out, and they had taken my money as soon as I ordered it. I haven't figured out the company. My unit was shipped from Ontario, but they had multiple addresses at their website. Maybe they shipped it according to your currency or address. I did learn of another Canadian distributor, and she was a homeopath. She was friendly, but I have no idea what it'd be like to order a unit from her.

Because of the delay in my order, Natural Methods gave me 12 months of free telephone support. I haven't used it, and they encourage people to email first. I sent 3 emails over the week, and I have yet to receive a reply. I was emailing them because I was having a lot of problems setting up my unit. Their manual is horrible because it wasn't originally written in English; it was translated from German. There are a lot of other FAQs and discussion forums out there about the LadyComp, and that is where I got the most help.

The setup is really the most painful part. When you receive your unit, you enter your birth year, height, and weight. If you have dates of past periods, you can enter those too. Turns out I had accidentally (?) started using my unit, so I wasn't able to enter in old data. The LadyComp has made it so idiot proof that you can move the date more than one day at a time. I ended up resetting the unit and started new. Following the manual, I entered my physical data first. I think that was probably a mistake. After I reset the LadyComp, I put in my old cycle data FIRST. And that did the trick.

I was quite proud of myself.