What Does an Optimal Fertility Care Team Look Like?
It was great chatting with Dr.Erin Wolff this month on our “Functional Medicine for Fertility and IVF” webinar. We were joined by women around the country to talk about the 101 for prepping your body for fertility.
My wish is for women to have what I didn’t: someone to answer my questions and let me know what I needed to know. What do I need to know about nutrition and functional medicine that can help me get pregnant? and How does IVF work and what do I need to know about IVF?
These are good questions and we aimed to provide the answers in our webinar. As a nutritionist certified in functional medicine, I talked about common symptoms that can contribute to hormonal imbalance such as poor sleep, irregular cycles, and weight gain or loss.
The truth is that many of us go along in life kind of knowing that maybe these things aren’t healthy, but we push symptoms off even if we sense that that is a sign our health is off.
It all starts to matter when we want to get pregnant—if we have trouble getting pregnant. Suddenly, our total body health matters: the day-to-day way we live, what we eat, how often we move and what we are exposed to matters.
I chatted about some basic tenets of functional medicine and what I and my clients look at in our discovery process for a functional medicine fertility work-up.
Really good diagnostic and functional testing.
We live in a time when we can capture an astounding amount of powerful health information! It’s important to test and “not guess” when it comes to your health, especially when you’re planning to have a baby.
In addition to getting a preconception work-up with genetic testing from your ob/gyn or reproductive endocrinologist, it is important to dig further into your health. I look at:
Hormones
Gut health
Nutritional status
Genetics. There are some genetic SNPs that can make fertility more difficult and increase the risk of miscarriage.
In each of these categories there are factors we can discover and address that can affect fertility.
The things you can change: elements of lifestyle
Then we get into elements of your lifestyle that can nourish or inhibit fertility. We focus on key elements including:
An ideal fertility-supportive diet with good nourishing foods, based on real life.
Fertility supplements that target specifically what YOU need based on your health history and labs.
Optimal exercise based on what I call the Goldilocks Rule: not too much and not too little, but a moderate amount of moderate intensity exercise that’s just right.
Restorative sleep, based on new science and proven self-care techniques.
Mental health TLC. Mindset and how you feel matter!
Greening your home and personal care, reducing your exposure to toxicity.
All of this helps reduce the process of biological aging—i.e. makes you healthier for your actual age.
This not only can help with fertility, but is MUCH better for you in the long run.
I shared some success stories of clients I have worked with including one that failed five rounds of IVF and had 3 miscarriages, but went on to have a healthy full-term baby naturally after six months with Simplina.
Dr.Wolff talked about what IVF is and what to know about it, as well as different causes of infertility and several terrific success stories.
Your Ideal Optimal Fertility Care Team
The best fertility care team—ideally an MD certified in Reproductive Endocrinology and a PhD, RD certified in Functional Medicine fertility, like Dr. Wolff and I— gives you the opportunity to explore all your options for optimal fertility results.
We have many clients in common, and would love to be your team. :)