Pregnant Or Not

Knowing whether you're pregnant or not can be tricky in the first few weeks of your pregnancy. For some women, missing a period could just be a result of stress or other health issues. In other cases, even a missed period may be too early for a home pregnancy test to predict whether you're pregnant or not.

Every woman's pregnancy experience is different. Some women even say their pregnancies are different from child to child. However, a woman's body is going through so many hormonal changes in preparation for the development and nourishment of a child that many women say they could feel changes in their mood before they noticed anything else. Other early signs of pregnancy are nausea, food craving or aversions and headaches. If these sound like premenstrual symptoms, you wouldn't be mistaken. Often, the symptoms for the two overlap, making it just that much more difficult to predict whether you're pregnant or not.

Four weeks into a woman's "pregnancy," she will be able to use a take-home test successfully. It's four weeks into the first trimester because pregnancy technically begins two weeks after the first day of a woman's last period. The egg isn't fertilized until the third week after a woman begins her last period. Implantation follows the next week and the embryonic period doesn't begin until another two weeks after that.