Improve your chance of conceiving with these tips. Optimizign your health prior to trying to conceive can make a huge difference, both with getting pregnanct and with the health of the pregnancy.
What we do before we get pregnant matters.
This is where I discredit the majority of OBGYNS. Most often, I hear women say their OBs recommend to come off birth control a month before they want to try and conceive and that they should be good to go the next month. That’s what mine said. However, they are wrong. There is so much more we can be doing to prepare ourselves and our body for before trying to conceive.
1. Get off the hormonal birth control.
I recommend all women to come off hormonal birth control AT LEAST 6 months in advance. This gives your cycle time to resume and to regulate. It also will give you time to address any underlying issues and to firmly learn a Fertility Awareness Method so you know when you are fertile and when you’re not. Hormonal birth control can disrupt your cycle and in some cases it can take up to 18 months to resume, especially if you come off a birth control implant. Imagine being ready to conceive and you don’t get a cycle for 18 months. That would be heart breaking and nothing any of us expect or plan for.
Learning a Fertility Awareness Method will benefit you in so many ways. You’ll learn when your fertile window is, you’ll be able to identify your peak fertile days and you’ll be able to see if your cycle is healthy enough to conceive. It’s a game changer. Besides learning all about when the best chances to conceive are, it’s also a vital sign that’ll let you see if there are any major health issues going on that you weren’t aware of. Dive into charting here.
2. Reduce as much exposure to plastics and toxins.
Another great way to improve your chance of conceiving is to look at your toxin load and plastic use. This includes taking a look at household cleaning products, beauty care products(I’ll be making a post soon about some of my favorites), and environmental toxins. If you haven’t heard of it yet, the environmental working group is a good resource, https://www.ewg.org/skindeep/. If you find products you want to try, or are curious of how the current ones you use rank up, check out the website above. Enter in the product and see what pops up. Some products aren’t logged, but you can enter in the ingredients and check each one for safety.
This can all be a bit overwhelming and expensive. So start small, replace things with better options as you run out of them.
Try to avoid plastics. Chose glassware over plasticware whenever you are storing food. Drink out of glass or stainless steel options (like Kleen Kanteen https://amzn.to/3KSzYw7). Plastics, especially when they are scratched or hot liquid is added to them, have been shown to leach bpas into your food and water.
3. Exercise
Exercise has been shown to have huge benefits if you continue it throughout pregnancy, given you don’t have any complications and have been cleared by your physician.
Exercise has shown to reduce the risk of gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, c-section rates, and a slew of other benefits.
I do want to note that high intensity exercise, exercising too much, or exercising and not fueling your body with enough nutrition can have negative effects on your cycle. If you start to notice long cycles, very short cycles, bleeding at times throughout your cycle or having a very light period, you may be doing too much and need to change up your workout routine.
4. Get Enough Vitamin D
Vitamin D is something that the vast majority of the population is deficient in and supplementation may not always be the answer. Low levels of Vitamin D during pregnancy result in increased risks of gestational diabetes, preterm labor, pre-eclampsia, c-section and low birth weight. Needless to say, these are all HUGE reasons to up your vitamin D levels.
I took vitamin D supplements for 8 months and my number didn’t budge. However, when I started spending 30 minutes in the sun in the morning, after 10 am, my vitamin D levels went up 20 points within 6 weeks. I recommend 30 minutes of time in the sun for each one of my clients who has lower levels of vitamin D. 30 minutes, without sunscreen, with as much skin exposed as possible. We do that for a month to 6 weeks and retest levels. It really does work.
5. Take a Prenatal And Pay Attention To Your Nutrution
These last two go hand in hand, in my opinion. I took prenatals all throughout the preconception stage and pregnancy.
I didn’t want to eat eggs, salmon or much else besides carbs for about 5 weeks of my pregnancy so it would have been very hard to get the needed nutrients without the prenatal.
Prenatals should contain methylfolate which is a biologically active form of folate, meaning it doesn’t need to be converted to be absorbed, unlike folic acid. Also try and avoid prenatals that contain both iron and calcium as calcium can inhibit iron absorption.
Lastly, look at your food consumption, get enough protein, at least 100 g a day, preferably closer to your body weight in grams. Proteins are made of amino acids, these are the building blocks for every tissue, this includes sperm and egg. Try and avoid inflammatory foods like processed foods, seed oils and alcohol.
All of these changes will not only benefit your fertility, but it will also benefit your health. We live in a world with so many chemicals and toxins, fertility is on a sharp decline and a lot of that has to do with the toxins we are exposed to and our food quality.
Do the best you can, don’t stress following this guide to a T, just make whatever small changes you can, these will build up and can have a big impact on your health and fertility.
Learn more about trying to conceive, improving chances of conception, both through cycle charting and lifestyle changes. Join the newsletter list so you don’t miss out!