9 Things You MUST KNOW before DOING IVF and making it a successful cycle
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You’re here because you want to get pregnant. Maybe you’ve been trying for a while with no success. Maybe you’ve been able to get pregnant but have had a loss, or maybe you just started and want to know what to do to get pregnant faster. Getting pregnant is not always as easy as it seems. This may sound weird because you’ve been consciously not trying to get pregnant for most of your life. It seemed that you were going to get pregnant immediately when you started trying, but let me tell you, that is not always the case. Getting pregnant easily and having a healthy full-term pregnancy sometimes comes with a lot of testing, planning, trying and readjusting your eating habits, lifestyle changes, and a lot of other things you might not have ever thought were affecting your fertility.
I say this because it comes from a wealth of experience. I’ve helped thousands of women improve their fertility and get pregnant during the last 20 years, I’ve been a fertility expert. I’ve helped them find out what’s not letting them get pregnant, developing a personalized fertility plan for them, and giving ongoing support while following the plan and improving their health and fertility. I’ve created a free guide for you that you can download right now to take a look at the seven steps that are going to help you and empower your fertility from home. That’s right, totally free. Download it right now with the link in the description below.
Myself, I know a thing or two about fertility, as I’ve been a natural fertility expert for the past 20 years, and I’ve helped thousands of couples and women become parents, many after struggling with infertility for years.
Okay, so nine tips has to start with number one. So number one, know why you are doing IVF. I hear all too often from so many couples that they don’t even know why they’re doing IVF. They were just told that’s what they should do, that that’s the next step or the first step on their fertility journey when they go see the OB-GYN or fertility clinic, and they don’t really understand why. I’m always amazed when I talk to couples that when I ask them, “Why are you doing IVF?” That they can very rarely answer that question. Obviously, we know that you’re doing IVF because you want to get pregnant, but why do you need IVF? Is the real question here, and so many of you don’t even know why you need it.
So number one, understand why you need to do IVF, why you’re doing it, why it’s recommended for you, because if not, maybe there are other options that you’re not aware of, which actually brings me to number two, which is, have you found out what the root issue is of your fertility issues?
This may go hand in hand with number one. I know many of you have heard me say this all too often, but we need to understand the root issues that are behind your fertility struggles so that we know how to support you so that you know how to support yourself. Well, if we don’t know what those root issues are, then how can you know what you need to do? Or even if you need IVF, which was number one. So those two often go hand in hand, knowing why you need it and what the root issue is of your fertility struggles. Maybe you can speak to somebody else to get a different perspective, understanding, and allow you to dive deeper into your fertility struggles, into your overall health so that you understand what is behind the difficulties that you’ve been having.
Tip number three, which might sound strange or simple to all of you, but prepare, prepare, prepare. That’s my tip, prepare. Why do I say this? Because all too often I see so many of you who just jump into IVF, and then you reach out to me afterwards saying, “I’ve had one, two, or more failed cycles, and I don’t know why.” And when I ask, “Did you plan and prepare for your IVF cycle?” And often the answer is no, so first in this section, in this tip number three is give yourself time. If you’re able to give yourself time, and most of the time you are, then give yourself a little bit of time to prepare before you go through IVF.
You wouldn’t just step up to the starting line of a marathon and say, “Okay, I’m going to run.” No, you wouldn’t. You would train, you would plan, you would prepare, and you would train. This is the same thing, so give yourself time to prepare, plan, and train so that you are successful when you do go through IVF, and plan for it. What are you going to do during this time? Do you have a plan that’s supporting you to address the root issues that are behind your fertility struggles? And have you given yourself enough time to manage that plan and to facilitate it so that you can get the results that when you are ready for IVF? That’s an important question. That’s an important process, and often that takes at least three months or more to do.
So give yourself time, plan, and the third part of number three, which is find the right clinic for your needs. That’s part of preparing, right? Any clinic that you go to may not be the right clinic for you, and just because you got a referral from a friend doesn’t make it the right clinic. Can they address your root issues? If you know why you need IVF and you have the root cause of why you’ve been struggling with fertility, then it makes finding a clinic to support you through the IVF process so much easier because you know what you’re looking for. Do you need conventional IVF? Do you need low-dose IVF? Do you need mini-IVF? Do you need a natural cycle? Do you need a donor? Do you need a surrogate? What do you need? And that’s going to help you find the right clinic for your needs. So make sure you prepare, prepare, and prepare.
Number four, don’t lose hope. That’s right. Hope is so important in this. I didn’t choose that word lightly as the main focus and title of my fertility program. It’s called the HOPE Fertility Program for a reason, and I have hope behind me and talk about hope all the time because of how important that one word is to our success. You have to maintain your hope and belief that you can conceive, that you can get pregnant, and carry a healthy pregnancy. If you don’t believe, take the fact that I believe in you as part of your hope and belief in yourself. If you need more support and more belief that it is possible regardless of the struggles that you’re going through and how long you’ve been trying, then you need to hear other stories, other stories of hope, of women, of couples who have struggled for various reasons and been able to go through the process and be successful.
That is exactly why I created this playlist so that you can watch some of the real stories of hope that I’ve shared, because if it was possible for them, it’s possible for you too. So you can see those real stories of hope and get motivation, support, and belief in yourself through their stories.
Number five, I created this acronym called SMILE to hopefully remind you, one, that it’s important that you smile and remind yourself that life is still good and that everything is going to be okay, but also to help you remember the five points of what SMILE means for me, for all of you.
Number one, S, means sleep. We all need to improve our sleep and have a better sleeping habits so that we get good quality sleep so that our body can rest, recover, rejuvenate and support ourselves, whether it’s in the preparation phase leading up to IVF or while you’re going through it.
Number two, mindset. We started talking about mindset before when we started talking about hope, but in the SMILE, mindset is also really important. That’s part of smiling, to remind us that our mindset is so essential to our success. Because if we have the right mindset, the right belief in ourselves, then we can conceive, we can achieve anything that we put our mind to, so having the right mindset.
The I in SMILE is improve your diet. That’s right. All of our diets can use a little bit of tweaking, readjusting, and improvement, and I want all of you to know that that is essential for your success as well. I’ve talked about diet in so many other videos in so many places, but I didn’t want to forget it here. So I want to remind you to go back to those basics and make sure that your diet is where it needs to be.
The L in SMILE stands for lifestyle changes. We all need to improve our lifestyle, whether it’s exercising more, whether it’s managing our work schedule more, managing our home life better, managing our friends better. Whatever it is, we need to manage our lifestyle. So make sure that you have the appropriate lifestyle changes and that you are managing it.
The E in SMILE, the last one, is environmental toxins. Make sure that you’re getting rid of all the chemicals and toxins in your home and around your home that you are exposed to. Because every day I see more and more that this is impacting your fertility. I can’t tell you how many couples that I have been supporting in the HOPE program that we’ve run testing on their environmental toxins and seeing their chemicals through the roof. So this is so important to address and is part of my SMILE. So that is sleep mindset, improve your diet, lifestyle, and environmental toxins, SMILE.
Number six, acupuncture. Acupuncture is here for a reason. Anytime we talk about IVF and fertility treatments, the research behind acupuncture is amazing and something that all of you should be incorporating for various reasons, but especially in your preparation leading up to your IVF cycle and through your IVF cycle is where the research is really profound. So I want to make sure that you are incorporating acupuncture. It increases blood circulation to your reproductive organs, helps you regulate your nervous system. Those two things are so important when you are going through fertility and trying to regulate your hormones, regulate your nervous system, and improve your blood circulation. So acupuncture is something that all of you must incorporate. I recommend using acupuncture weekly for 12 weeks leading up to your IVF retrieval, your egg retrieval, and then certainly when you are preparing for your embryo transfer once a week leading up to the embryo transfer and on embryo transfer day.
The research shows a huge increase in success rates when we incorporate acupuncture in those ways. Some of us might need it more frequently depending on our conditions, like PCOS, if we’ve had previous failures, or we’re trying to really nourish our egg quality and ovarian response during the stimulation phase. But in general, that’s what I recommend. If you are looking for a qualified, trained reproductive acupuncturist, fertility acupuncturist, then the only place you should be looking is at a website called aborm.org. That’s right, these acupuncturists have all been trained, they’ve all passed an exam, and they all are certified to support you on your fertility journeys. If your acupuncturist doesn’t have this or the office doesn’t have a team of acupuncturists with this, then you may want to consider looking elsewhere.
Before I jump into number seven, I do want to remind you all that I want to hear from you. So comment below and let me know. Leave a comment and let me know what did you liked about this video. What tips did you like, and what questions do you have on your fertility? Leave them below in the comment section.
Now, moving on to number seven, celebrate your wins. I know that this sounds simple and might be silly. You might be saying, “Why is this even a tip, Marc, celebrating your wins?” That’s right. Wins are often hard to come by, and we often focus on the negative versus the positive. I’m a man of the glass being half full versus half empty, and for that reason, I want to celebrate your wins. When we celebrate our wins, even if they are small wins, that reminds us that we are making progress towards our bigger goal, and we can’t achieve our bigger goal without those smaller wins, those smaller steps that allow us to achieve those bigger growth steps.
So it’s so important that you celebrate your wins, and this is exactly why we ask the members of my coaching program to post their wins, big or small, in our private community so that we keep them accountable, we keep their hopes up, and acknowledge their progress and improvements because we are there for them, not only for those times where they need to be picked up but also for those times where we want to celebrate. A win is not always a pregnancy. A win could be that our menstrual cycle improved, my eating habits are better, and I’m sleeping better. Whatever they are, we want to celebrate those wins.
If you want us to celebrate those wins with you, then I also want to invite you to join my HOPE Fertility Program. You do need to apply to join, but you can do that by using the link in the description below, and you get to speak to a real person when you apply and get accepted to make that call so that we can find out if you are the right fit for our coaching program.
Number eight, this is so important, potentially the most important tip that I’m going to share with all of you when you are going through fertility, advocate for yourself and your needs. I can’t say it enough, advocate for yourself and your needs. This is something that I see over and over and over again. I just had a woman that I’ve been supporting in the coaching program who is going through IVF, and her doctor wanted to do a specific type of IVF with certain dosages of medication that she was just not comfortable with. More importantly, when she had done that protocol before, she did not get the results, and she felt terrible. So if she doesn’t speak up and say something to her doctor in this moment, her doctor has a lot of patients. They forget what that person wants or what that person needs, and maybe they’re trying to push the envelope a little bit and say like, “I want you to do something different.”
But if you don’t speak up for yourself, if she didn’t speak up for herself, nothing would’ve changed and she wouldn’t have been happy. If that cycle wasn’t successful, she would’ve been frustrated. So you need to advocate for yourself for small things and for big things. If you don’t get phone calls back, if you don’t get email responses, if you want to talk to the doctor and you just can’t get a hold of them, if you want to share where you’re at, what you’re going through, and what’s going on, you need to advocate for yourself. You need to ask for support. You need to make sure you’re talking to somebody and that they hear you. So this is essential on your fertility journey, whether you’re going through IVF or not. I’m a huge proponent of making sure that you get the care that you need, and you cannot get that without advocating for yourself.
Number nine, find support. There are three ways that I think all of you need to find support. Number one, you need to find a community that can support you. That’s why I created my private community in my coaching program.
Number two, you need to find someone to talk to that is not your partner. Someone that can support you on your journey, that could just be there to listen, doesn’t always need to give you feedback. That’s also why I created my private community, because we all need an open ear, a lending ear, so someone can hear where you’re at, and you could just vent from time to time. This often happens in my coaching program.
Number three, you all need support in the form of a coach. That’s right. We all have used coaches, mentors, teachers, whatever you want to call them. We’ve all used those on our paths, on our journeys to success, whether it’s work or personal life. This is no different. You need someone who’s been there, who’s done that, who can look at your case and know that this is what you need to do and how to support you through that process. That’s why a coach is so important. That’s also why I created my coaching program.
So the private community that I mentioned before, it’s not just for checking in with me and sharing your wins, although that’s wonderful. It’s also to share your journey with a community that understands what you’re going through and to get the support that you need. Again, if you want to be part of that, then you can use the link in the description below to apply.
So thank you for watching until the end. I know that this was a longer video than I normally post, but now I want to know from all of you. By leaving a comment below, tell me what was the biggest challenge in your fertility journey and which one of the nine points that I just shared with you resonate with you the most. Comments and likes are YouTube’s love language. That’s right. It’s the only way I have to know if you like these videos so that I can also appreciate them and know what you want to hear more about.
Like I said, I created this free fertility guide with seven steps to empower your fertility and get pregnant faster by using some of my favorite fertility-enhancing techniques and a comprehensive plan. So make sure to grab that free guide with the link in the description below. As an additional thanks for watching, make sure to check out this next video right here. Until the next video, stay fertile.