Ep.148: 5 ways to boost your natural fertility

Caitlin:

Welcome to the Woven Well Podcast. I'm your host, Caitlin Estes. I'm a certified fertility care practitioner with a master of divinity degree. Each episode will cover a topic that helps educate and empower you and your fertility while honoring the deep connection your fertility has with your faith. Let's get started.

Caitlin:

Welcome back to the Woven Well podcast and Happy New Year! I get a lot of questions around the last week of December, first week of January about trying to conceive within the new year, and that's so exciting. I love a New Year's resolution. I'm a sucker for one. And so if you're New Year's resolution is to try to conceive a pregnancy this year, then congrats. That's a really exciting time. It can be a really exciting time. It can also be a really scary and intimidating time. You start looking for information online and there are so many resources out there about what you should be doing, what app you should be downloading, what program you should be buying--I mean it's endless. So I thought it may be helpful, instead of looking at this crazy market out there with all the promises about things and telling you to do anything and everything in order to conceive, I thought it may be helpful to talk about five things that I recommend that you can do to boost your fertility.

Caitlin:

And these are not like crazy out there things. These are foundational aspects that affect your fertility. Okay, so we're going to put a little less emphasis on things like eating pineapple and raising your legs after intercourse. Okay? And more focus on these foundational things that have been shown to boost your fertility. So it's going to be quick and helpful, hopefully. Okay, number one, eat balanced meals. So what is it that we're balancing? You know, I noticed sometimes, we get a lot of talk out there about balanced meals, but then they don't go on to share what that means. Basically protein, healthy fats, and carbohydrates. Okay? So you want to have all three of these things in every meal and you want to make sure to have a healthy portion of protein, really good, healthy fats like nuts, seeds, avocados, those kind of things. And then of course, you absolutely need carbohydrates.

Caitlin:

By the way, vegetables are actually carbohydrates. So it's not always just bread, pasta, chocolate, those kind of things that fit into that category. Along with this, in eating balanced meals, I would say eat enough food. Sometimes we get it in our minds that we have to eat less in order to be healthier, but we want to nourish this body that we've been given, okay? So we don't want to starve the body. We want to eat enough and we want to eat what it would need. So we start seeing ourselves as a body too, and not just a mind, you know, that's got to make this body do what we want, but we are human being, you know, created in the image of God. We are mind, body, spirit all together. And so learning how to honor that body through what we eat can really make a big difference.

Caitlin:

I will often encourage women to work with a registered dietitian. I am not a registered dietitian; I can just tell you the basics. But if you want to learn more about how to eat balanced meals, then I would highly recommend calling a registered dietitian, talking with them about what services they can provide. And sometimes you need a six-month program to help you learn everything, but sometimes you just need one or two consultations to really understand the basics or to confirm that what you're doing really is the best and make small little tweaks here and there. Last thing I'll say about balanced meals is the importance of glucose levels. So we don't often learn about glucose and insulin unless we have an issue with it, but so many women that I work with don't realize that they have an issue with glucose until maybe it's too late or it's affected their reproductive health.

Caitlin:

So I would say it's not a bad thing to go ahead and start looking into your glucose and looking into health there and how it may be contributing to what you eat when you eat and how you feel afterwards. Your glucose and your insulin levels do actually play a fairly large role in the health of your reproductive system. All right, that is point number one. Now, point number two is to prioritize rest and sleep. Okay, this sounds amazing, you know, because everybody thinks, oh, I would love to be able to sleep, I would love to take naps, those kinds of things. But when it comes down to it, nobody actually wants to do this, because it means sacrificing, you know, maybe watching a television show that we really love, or you know, just kind of changing our lifestyle, changing how we go about our day in order to work in this sleep and rest.

Caitlin:

I promise you though, it is so worth it. So sleeping seven to nine hours a night really is the ideal. You absolutely want to make sure you get that time in and maybe you need to intentionally start winding down ahead of time so that you can actually fall asleep when you get in bed. This can be important too: things like having the light dimmed or closing any curtains, not looking at blue light on your phone. Some people enjoy drinking some chamomile tea right before bed or getting into cozy pajamas long before they actually get into bed. Whatever you can do to help you get in a restful state of mind to go, go to sleep and be able to sleep that seven to nine hours, it is worth it. But I don't want to only focus on the seven to nine hours of sleep, but also rest in your daily life.

Caitlin:

So this doesn't necessarily mean naps, although if you need one and can take one, absolutely go for it. But also doing things that are restful, maybe physically restful, mentally, even spiritually. So if you enjoy exercising, that's fantastic, but make sure not to overexercise. Maybe things like not spending all your extra moments scrolling. You know, if you find that you get to a stoplight and you immediately pick up your phone to start scrolling through things, whether it's social media or the news or your email, that is missing out on a moment of rest. So intentionally choosing not to sacrifice moments of stillness for entertainment can make a huge impact on our ability to rest. Also, things like reducing caffeine that can sometimes make a difference physically and mentally as well because we're go, go, go. And if we don't have that caffeine, then we actually can't get through the day.

Caitlin:

That's a sign that we need more rest. Okay? So whatever your lifestyle looks like, whatever your daily schedule looks like, it doesn't have to be major massive things. It can be small little choices that help incorporate a little bit more rest into your day and that can make a big difference. Okay, point number three, take a quality prenatal. So if you want to boost your natural fertility, then you want to make sure that you are ready for pregnancy whenever it occurs. And ideally if you could have a prenatal in your system three months before you can conceive, that's kind of best case scenario. So I often get asked if I have a perfect brand out there that I recommend, no, I don't have a perfect brand, but you do want to look for ones that have the full version of the vitamins available. For instance, you want to look on the back of a prenatal and see if it has methylfolate or if it has folic acid.

Caitlin:

So I would say go ahead and use ones that have methylfolate because that form of that vitamin can be processed by anyone. Even if you happen to have some sort of genetic change that may not allow you to process folic acid into folate, you don't have to worry about it because that vitamin is already in its original form. So looking for vitamins that prioritize that kind of form of the vitamin can make a big difference. Also whole food versions of prenatals I find to be helpful. And I would say don't worry too much about prenatals that talk about balancing hormones or sometimes you'll see, instead of prenatal, it'll be like a pre-pregnancy vitamin that they recommend. And it's all about balancing hormones and that sort of thing. You are looking for a prenatal for pregnancy health. I would suggest getting your hormones balanced elsewhere.

Caitlin:

Okay? Sometimes those supplements that promised to balance hormones aren't actually what you need. Sometimes they reduce estrogen when maybe you have a really low estrogen or maybe they spike your estrogen, but you're already dealing with estrogen dominance. So instead of just taking something over the counter that promises to balance your hormones, I would suggest working with someone who can figure out what's going on with your specific hormones and then can actually work to balance those naturally. Which perfectly leads me to the fourth way to naturally boost your fertility. And that's to learn to interpret the language of your reproductive system. Now I am a certified fertility care practitioner. I dedicate my life and my time. I consider this to be my vocation, to teach women and couples how to understand their fertility and then how to chart their cycle so that they know exactly when they're in their window of fertility or when they're not able to get pregnant that cycle.

Caitlin:

But you don't have to learn it from me. You know, my goal in saying this is not because, hey, I want everyone out there to work with me. It's because understanding your specific reproductive system is an essential for trying to conceive. If you don't understand how you get pregnant and when you can get pregnant, then you'll try for way longer than you need to. I mean, I really have worked with couples that were simply missing that window and they had no idea that they were missing it and no idea how to identify it in the first place. Maybe they were using LH strips or OPKs and they were trying to figure it out, but they just weren't getting it. They don't always work for all scenarios. So instead you want a system like the Creighton method that is able to use your particular cycle to look at your reproductive system, not the norm or what everyone else out there has.

Caitlin:

It really is unique and tailored to you. Even more than that, charting your reproductive cycles with a formalized method can also give you information about what's going on in your reproductive health. So let's say you try to conceive, it is normal to take an average of six cycles to try to conceive even when you don't have any reproductive health issues at all. Okay? So that is normal. It's not a bad thing, but maybe it's taken you longer than six months to try to conceive. We want to go ahead and figure out why I don't want you to have to try to conceive for 12 months and then find out that there may be something going on underneath the surface. Charting with a formalized system like the Creighton method will actually allow you to see what some of those issues could be very early on.

Caitlin:

And so you can address those maybe in your first or second cycle of trying to conceive, and that will hopefully help you just conceive quicker and be able to sustain a healthy pregnancy. If you think, oh yeah, I'm doing that, I'm using an app on my phone, sorry, the app on your phone is just not the same. You can do better than anything an app ever could. The app is going to use the average of the last six cycles to kind of figure out a guess for what's going to happen this cycle. When you're using a system like Creighton, you never have to guess. Our system is not based on guesses, thankfully. But it's a real-time system that allows you to see what's going on on a day-in/day-out basis. So it is so much better than anything an app could ever do.

Caitlin:

Okay? So trust yourself more than you trust your app. All right? And then the fifth tip is to work with a restorative reproductive healthcare provider to actually get answers. So it's not helpful to try to bypass the reproductive system if it's broken. You know, we want to identify what the broken spots are and instead restore them. We want to help you to be at your optimal health to try to conceive or maybe figure out why you haven't been able to conceive. So a lot of, you know, OBGYNs or reproductive endocrinologists, if you go to them, they look at, okay, how can we get around issues? How can we bypass these? Well, it doesn't actually help to bypass them if the system itself is still broken. We want to instead figure out what are the roadblocks in place that are making it more difficult for conception to happen.

Caitlin:

We want to heal those roadblocks so that they all go down. And now you have that open road to pregnancy and also hopefully you feel better at the end of it. I don't think that you should go through a process that actually makes you feel worse, takes everything from you. It's so physically going to emotionally demanding. And at the end of it, you know, maybe you'll be able to conceive, maybe not, there are no promises there, but you may also feel way worse than you did beforehand. Instead, I want you to know that there are alternatives out there found through restorative reproductive medicine that allow you to actually look at your reproductive cycles and your reproductive health. Identify those areas that are making it difficult, heal and optimize those areas. So whether or not you conceive a pregnancy, because again, no one out there can promise you that good conscience, at least, no one can promise you that, but hopefully you're going to feel better at the end of that.

Caitlin:

Your cycles will be healthier, your overall health will have improved, and hopefully it'll be a positive process for you. So I hope that this has been helpful. These five tips are designed to be used by absolutely anyone. As you can tell, they are foundational to your reproductive health. They're not these little tips and tricks that like, oh, well, you just, like I said earlier, need to eat more pineapple. No, we, we don't need to worry about those kind of things. But knowledge and empowerment really is the key to being able to advocate for yourself and hopefully conceive a healthy pregnancy. So if you are interested in working with a certified fertility care practitioner, I'm available through Woven Natural Fertility Care. There are other certified fertility care practitioners out there, but I also want to make sure that you can get connected with a restorative reproductive healthcare physician.

Caitlin:

So it's so important to have these trusted medical professionals that you can know are on your side and want to care for you specifically. So I'll make sure to have some other shows that we've recorded in the past linked in the show notes, specifically talking about what restorative reproductive healthcare is, maybe even an episode on Creighton, and then specifically NaPro technology, which is a field of reproductive medicine that is looking at optimizing your health, whether you are avoiding pregnancy, trying to conceive pregnancy, or just looking at feeling your best. So I'll include all of those there. But I hope that this has been a helpful episode for you. And if you would like to give us feedback on this episode, you can go to the bottom of the show notes. You scroll down to the bottom where it says, text the show. Let us know what questions you have, what thoughts you have, what would be more helpful for you to hear, and we'll make sure to have an episode on that as well. If you enjoy today's episode or enjoy what we do at Woven Natural Fertility Care, be sure to give us a five star review or a thumbs up. That would mean a lot for us as we are trying to get the word out to other women out there about their alternative options. We care very deeply about you. We want you to feel the best possible, and we want you to get the answers to your greatest fertility questions. As always, thanks for listening. As we continue to explore together what it means to be woven well.