There could be more than 1 thing stopping you from getting pregnant

Hi, and welcome to Episode 52 of the Fertility Rewire

So, in this episode, I wanted to talk about how fertility can be more than one thing. So, when you're trying to get pregnant and it's not working, you are looking for the cause and you are looking for a cause generally.

Many factors affect fertility

So, it might be that you get a diagnosis like Endometriosis or Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, or it may be that your cause is unexplained. As I've said very many times, there is always an explanation. We just have to know that we're looking in the right place, and more and more what I'm seeing with clients, in fact, all the time really is it's hard to say the one thing that might be affecting your fertility.

When you think of all the factors involved in fertility, for example, nutrition which is massively underplayed, your vitamin B specifically, your folate levels, your vitamin D, your vitamin C, your antioxidants all have a huge impact on your fertility, and there's lots of research looking into that. So, optimal, I mentioned that in last week's episode, optimal nutrition levels are really, really key for both male and female.

Remember. a third of fertility issues are female related, a third male related, and a third a combination of the two which you could put to 50% on each side, I suppose, in a roundabout way there. So, when we're looking at aspects affecting fertility, yes, we're looking at nutrition, we’re looking at nutrition for both male and female, and don't forget any nutritional changes you make are going to take three to four months to make changes to your cells because that's how long a cell cycle is. So, the egg and the sperm are cells

So, we look at the digestive system. The liver has a huge role to play in supporting the body and may have an impact on fertility. When we look at the pelvic space, so look at how you're sitting, how you are standing. Your postural aspects may affect the position of your uterus, blood flow to your uterus. Lots of different aspects that could be affected there, and of course, we come back to stress and the effect that stress plays specifically on testosterone, on progesterone, also on thyroid function that we talked about last time as well.

So, we can look at the physical aspects and we can look at the emotional aspects, and they do have an effect on each other, and that's really, really important, and as you know if you listened to me before, I am not just going to tell you to just relax because we know that is not a possibility, but when you start to think less about “what's stopping me from getting pregnant” and “more about what can I do to improve my chances of getting pregnant”, it becomes, in some ways, physically, that can become more straightforward, and that's an action plan that I work with, with people.

What can we do to improve your fertility based on where it is now? Let's look at your cycle, let's look at these test results that you have, and what can we do to improve this, what can we do to bring this into an optimal place?

But also, I do not doubt that for many of you listening have tried everything. You have taken those supplements. You have done that practice. You have had that medical treatment. I know that. It is not a case of me saying, "Well, you obviously haven't done enough." That is not what I'm saying at all. But for those of you who are searching for this one aspect that might be causing it, I'm just asking you gently to be open to the possibility of a shift in that.

What else can you do?

Now, when all your tests are normal, everything has come back in the normal range. Look at, like I said last week about that optimal range, look at how close they are to the low and the high parameters. Let's look at your cycle length, and let's look at your cycle length in detail. So, we want to see that the luteal phase is longer than 10 days, ideally 12 days or more. Is the follicular phase, that part from your bleed to ovulation, is that long? Is there any way that we can look at reducing that, bringing that back a bit to ovulation being a little bit earlier? And we can do that through different therapies.

You can look at that in terms of nutrition, and certainly with nutrition lack that could be affecting the follicular phase, but also, we have to come back to stress and the emotional stress on you when you are trying to get pregnant month after month after month is huge, and you will have heard me talk about acceptance, not acceptance that things are rubbish, not acceptance of a situation, but an acceptance of this is how you're feeling now, and when we start to look at the emotional impact of fertility, and we start to look on that emotional impact on your physical health, on your relationships, on your day to day life, it is huge. And often that is the area where your support or your interventions might be lacking.

So, we have to address everything. We have to address nutrition, your blood tests, your thyroid, your ferritin, your vitamin D. We need to look at stress, and we need to look at the effect that that's having on your body. So, we want to improve the overall health of both partners, and we want to improve your fertility health specifically, and this is about, as I've said, improving the health of a future baby. More tests perhaps than are offered might be needed, and it's important to know which tests you might need, and I have pointed you to a couple. We talked last week about thyroid stimulating hormone and ferritin and vitamin D. I've alluded to some vitamin B levels already in this, but actually, we don't just need to test everything.

It's interesting. When people take supplements, do you just take a supplement because you've had a blood test that's shown that you're not at optimal levels, or do you take a supplement and see how you go? And actually in most cases, that's pretty much what we're looking at. Let's take a look at your supplements for about three months and see if there've been any changes to the cycle, see if there's been any changes. And if not, we can dig deeper and look into maybe you're requiring higher levels of supplementation.

Be proactive

Be proactive with your medical professionals, but you need to know what you need to be proactive about. So, I hope that the information I'm giving you here on the podcast is supporting you with that. If you want any more help with that, and you want to know more about working with me, then that is what I do with my clients.

The search for answers is exhausting

I just want you to know that this search for a cause can in itself be exhaustive, absolutely exhausting because you're not getting answers and that's an emotional impact as well. So, if we can do that flip of what we can do to improve while still being informed and armed to know what questions to ask, I think we're getting a good balance there.

Seeing the quick wins

Sometimes small tweaks and changes can have incredible results, and these are results that I see all the time, and these positive results aren't always a positive pregnancy test. So, when I'm working with clients, in the first cycle, we start to see changes. We start to see changes in bleeding. We start to see changes in mood. We start to see changes in ovulation symptoms and ovulation recognition. Premenstrual symptoms are a massive indication that we've made a change generally to the strength of the luteal phase, generally, to the strength of that progesterone.

Improved relationships with your partner, improved intimacy, that it's not a chore every month when the stick says it's time to go, these changes are huge and serve you well in your life, generally, in your fertility journey, but also hopefully when you are parents as well. We see changes in test results if we're getting tests redone, see changes in energy levels. This is something huge in an awful lot of my clients, and we see changes in the reduction in stress, and as I've said to you before, this is without just bloody relaxing, really. It's not about relaxing. It's not about doing special breathing necessarily. It's about really taking on those tigers that I've talked about and taming those tigers. So, we’ tame our tigers’. We reignite our relationship.

There's so many subtle changes that you can make, and often when you start on, as I've said, you may be on this journey and you may have been on this journey for a long time, but if you just start to take a slight detour, a slight different route, you might be surprised of the changes that can occur. Your outlook can become quite different, and I'm putting my hands up here. I do not mean that you will be more positive. You may be, you may be, but your outlook can change, and sometimes a less negative outlook can occur. It's different for everyone. This is so generic what I'm talking about here, and I don't want you to listen to this, oh, I've tried that and that didn't work or I've done that and that didn't work. I'm being hugely generic here.

Digging Deeper

What's involved with me when I'm working with people is we're really digging down deep, digging down deep, digging down deep, and looking into all aspects, both physically, and that's far ranging from a male and a female perspective, looking at all aspects of the body, and I don't know if I've mentioned this before, I probably have, but we have a Newtonian model of medicine. So, when you look at the Newtonian model where you see the body as a machine with different working parts, and you'll know that from our healthcare. So, you have a neurologist, and you have an ophthalmologist, an audiologist, and you have ENT, and you have musculoskeletal health, and you have thoracic health, heart health, lung health. You have digestive specialties. You have the urinary system. You have the reproductive system which is run by gynecologists looking after the female reproductive system.

But the digestive system can have an impact on your reproductive system. The adrenal glands can have an impact on your reproductive system. The nutrition that you take in, your stress, so many aspects, autoimmune disease, can all have an impact on your reproductive system because they are responding and switching off and switching down depending on what's happening in your body.

So, I would just encourage you just to take a step back. Can you switch from finding what is wrong to looking at what could you possibly improve? And if you need any help with that, then let me know. Equally, I'm aware that I could be triggering all sorts in what I'm talking about here, but there is a place that we haven't looked. There is a place that we haven't looked. Okay. So, it is not just one thing. It might be a whole host of things. Our bodies are amazing and complex and fantastic, and our mind works to protect us from so many things that perhaps we don't even know it is protecting us from, and that is why a mind and a body approach is so incredibly crucial when it comes to your health, when it comes to your fertility health, and when it comes to the health of a future baby.