Trying To Get Pregnant? 13 Secrets To Natural Fertility

Have you ever been curious about your fertility health? Maybe you've wondered how your day-to-day choices affect your reproductive hormones? Or how your age truly affects your ability to conceive?

Your hormones affect your fertility, mood, energy, weight, and even your happiness! Estrogen and progesterone are two of the most important hormones for optimal fertility, and they need to be happy and balanced to prepare your body for pregnancy. When your estrogen and progesterone are out of balance, you experience things like breast tenderness, irritability, low libido, mood swings, insomnia, irregular menstrual cycles, pregnancy loss, painful periods, and yes—fertility struggles.

While progesterone and estrogen are two key hormones for your fertility health, there are several others that need be in sync as well. During the course of a menstrual cycle, various hormones are working together in a complex symphony to trigger the components of ovulation and menstruation.

Risk factors such as age, weight, reproductive history, and length of time trying to conceive can have a significant impact on your odds of getting pregnant and having a healthy, full-term pregnancy without any complications. Unfortunately your age really does matter when it comes to fertility. At age 30, the average woman's chance of conceiving during any one cycle is 20 percent. By age 40, that chance drops to a low 5 percent.

Weight can also be a major fertility factor, and being excessively thin or overweight can lead to fertility problems. Estrogen is partially produced in our fat cells—so too much or too little fat on the body can wreak havoc on estrogen levels.

Did you know that one in eight women will develop a thyroid disorder during her lifetime? Thyroid disorders are very common in women with unexplained fertility issues, premature ovarian failure (a condition in which the number and quality of eggs severely limits fertility), ovulation disorders, and recurrent pregnancy loss.

There have been plenty of recent studies confirming that having an autoimmune thyroid disorder (such as Hashimoto's or Graves disease) significantly increases the risk of pregnancy loss—36% in women who tested positive to thyroid antibodies, compared to just 1.8 percent for those without thyroid antibodies.

The adrenal glands support a proper stress response and play a key role in hormonal balance. One of the main jobs of the adrenal glands is to release hormones in response to stressors like intense emotion, physical injury, overexertion, or environmental factors such as eating unhealthy foods and chemical exposure.

Chronic stress affects fertility by signaling to your body that conditions are not ideal for conception. Your brain doesn't differentiate modern-day "stress" from "primal" stress. In other words, if you're constantly stressed out, your body perceives that stress the same as if you were running from a bear, deciding that your environment is not safe to bring forth new life and diverting all your energy away from the reproductive system and to the organs necessary for survival.

We've all heard the saying "you are what you eat," but I would argue that what you DON'T eat is equally important. What you choose to avoid plays a huge role in your fertility health, and consuming toxin-free food is essential.

Eating toxin-free foods means that the foods you choose to eat are grown and raised without chemicals (pesticides, herbicides, insecticides), hormones, antibiotics or steroids and are not genetically modified. Many of the pesticides, chemicals, and hormones used in conventional farming contain synthetic estrogen-like substances. All of this excess estrogen exposure wreaks havoc on your body's delicate hormonal system.

One of the key goals of an optimal fertility diet is to keep your blood sugar levels nice and steady. This ensures that you're not creating extra stress for your body, and you do this by choosing the right kinds of carbohydrates. To get off the blood sugar roller coaster that keeps you spiking and crashing all day, it's important to limit your consumption of refined, processed carbohydrates like pasta, bread, cookies, dessert, pretzels, etc.

When we eat processed carbohydrates and sugar, we get a rapid rise in glucose levels, which causes the body to overcompensate by sending out a huge release of insulin. We've all experienced this before—the high you feel from the sugar rush followed by the sugar crash—headache, exhaustion, irritability, anxiety, and more.

Eating plenty of healthy fats is essential for getting your hormone system in shape and preparing for pregnancy. Once you're pregnant, fats are critical for the development and growth of your baby's brain and central nervous system, as well as your emotional health during and after pregnancy! Healthy fats keep you satiated and feeling full longer so you're not hungry all the time, eliminating the need to snack all day.

Heavy caffeine and alcohol use should be avoided while trying to get pregnant. There's no evidence that a few drinks a week will affect your fertility, but a 2004 Swedish study1 that tracked more than 7,000 women found that the heaviest drinkers were more likely to have sought out fertility treatments. Studies have also shown that regular caffeine consumption increases the length of time it takes to become pregnant.

Nutritional deficiencies have been linked to ovulation issues, hormonal imbalance, poor egg quality, low sperm count, and so much more. Certain nutrients such as vitamin D, folate, fish oil, CoQ10, and prenatal vitamins specifically promote fertility health and prepare your body for a healthy pregnancy.

Vitamin D is all the rage these days, especially when it comes to fertility health. Studies2 show a significant correlation between vitamin D levels. Research3 also show that omega-3 fatty acids (found in fish oil) not only support healthy egg and sperm health, but proper formation of your baby's nervous system, brain, eyes, and heart. Folate is another nutrient that is needed by the young fetus before you can even detect pregnancy, and a deficiency in this nutrient can cause serious birth defects.

CoQ10 has been shown in studies4 to improve both egg and sperm health while playing a key role in protecting DNA at a cellular level. CoQ10 is especially important if you've been diagnosed with poor egg health or are over the age of 40.

When we're under stress, our bodies respond by producing the hormone cortisol. Cortisol is often referred to as the main stress hormone, and with good reason! Cortisol is made in the adrenal glands and is produced and secreted in response to stress. This can be any kind of stress—physical, mental, or emotional.

The thing is, our sex steroid hormones are made from the same raw materials as cortisol, so when the body has to make extra cortisol, you run the risk of decreasing your other steroid hormones (like progesterone and estrogen) on behalf of cortisol production. This wreaks havoc on your reproductive hormones, leading to missed periods and ovulation, weight gain, and altered sleep patterns, which can all affect your fertility.

Consistent exercise should be one of the first steps in optimizing fertility and improving uterine health. Walking and yoga are two of the best ways to promote circulation and improve strength and flexibility of the muscles surrounding the uterus.

Leading an inactive lifestyle limits blood flow to the uterus and other reproductive organs. The main artery that supplies blood to our legs is also responsible for supplying blood to our uterus, ovaries, and vagina. If we sit around too much, the blood flow to our uterus may be compromised, so get moving!

Various dietary and lifestyle factors have the ability to affect your fertility and hormones, but sleep—quality and quantity—is at the very top of the list. Unfortunately for us, studies have shown that upward of 35 percent of Americans don't get enough quality sleep. That's HUGE! Interrupted sleep patterns can suppress ovulation, negatively affect your thyroid and adrenal glands, and consequently create hormonal chaos and decreased fertility.

Sleep affects the production of our key fertility hormones including estrogen, progesterone, luteinizing hormone (LH), and follicle stimulating hormone (FSH). Proper sleep is critical to keep these hormones in balance and in check. But there is another hormone that is a vital link between fertility and sleep: leptin.

This is a topic that definitely doesn't get enough attention. In our modern world, we are exposed to more chemicals than ever before, and unfortunately, many of these chemicals are estrogen-based, meaning your hormone and fertility health are the first to suffer.

Research shows that exposure to pollutants, pesticides, and industrial chemicals can decrease a couple's ability to conceive by up to 29 percent. Yes, that is FOR REAL!

These chemicals include PCBs (which have been banned since 1979 but still exist in older products), pesticides, plastics, phthalates (often found in personal care items and beauty products like shampoo, deodorant, perfumes, and nail polishes), sulfates (found in most of the lotions and potions we put on our skin), and BPAs (found in canned goods and plastics). It's super important to clean up your environment when preparing your body for conception.