4 Hormones You Need To Test To GET PREGNANT without IVF (BEFORE YOU WASTE TIME OR MONEY)
Transcription :
So, if you’re watching this video, it’s probably because you’re trying to get pregnant and you’ve been told that you need to improve your egg quality, or just on your own, you’re saying to yourself that you want to improve your egg quality. Maybe even you were told that you have low AMH. Well, this video is in inspired by a testimonial that I’m going to share with you right now from a member of my Hope Fertility Coaching Program, as she was able to get pregnant with low AMH. And so, let me read that testimonial to you right now.
She says, “Marc, and everyone in the community, I would like to share a fertility win today. I guess I should have shared it on Saturday, July 1st, but I lost a bit of confidence in my body, so I decided to wait it out. Saturday, post ovulation day 12, I took a pregnancy test and it was a big fat positive. I took another one on Sunday, and the line got darker. Today, being my missed period, the line instantly got dark within two minutes of testing. It sucked that my big fat positive was over the holiday. So, tomorrow I should be able to get my blood work completed.”
“FYI to everyone, Dr. Sklar said that low AMH doesn’t mean you can’t get pregnant naturally. My AMH went from 2.84 in August of ’22 to 0.39 in May of ’23. I was bummed about it, but look, I’m pregnant.” And I did tell her not to worry about it. “Thank you for trusting and believing in me when I lost confidence in myself and my body. This has been a long journey. My gut is definitely 90% better than it used to be. Thank you again. It shows that it can happen.”
So, if you’ve been told you have low AMH and you need IVF, great, you’re in the right spot because I’ve helped thousands of women improve their egg quality, fertility, and get pregnant over the last 20 years. I do this through my program, called the Hope Fertility Program, which she is a member of, and 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 empower your fertility from home. That’s right, and totally free. Download it right now with the link in the description below. In this Fertility TV, we’re going to do a deep dive into the four hormones you need to test when you’re trying to get pregnant, especially if you’ve got low AMH.
And at the end of this video, I’m going to share the most important thing we added to this HOPE member’s personalized plan so you can start doing it as well, or hopefully, you can do it if you need to. If you’re excited about this, then give me a thumbs up, leave a comment below, and let me know what you think or what questions you have about your fertility. And subscribe so that I know that you like this topic and I can do more videos just like this one.
If you’re new here, first, welcome to Fertility TV. And now let’s get started. Okay, so four hormones that we need to talk about, that we need to understand a little bit better, and more importantly, that you need to test so that you know what those levels are and you can do something about them if they need to be supported in some fashion. Now, I know many of you, because we’re talking about AMH, might be thinking that we’re going to talk about AMH as one of the four hormones. But we’re not because the assumption here is that you’ve already had your AMH tested, you’ve been told that your AMH is low, and so now we need to look at what else needs to be done.
So, the reason why I think it’s really important that we look at other hormones besides AMH is, first and foremost, your hormones, your fertility, your reproductive function, your bodies are not predicated on one hormone, and your fertility is not dictated or determined by one hormone. So, AMH is important, it gives us a value, and it also tells us if that is something that we need to look at and support. But what I like to look at is hormones that I trust a little bit more, hormones that have been tested for much longer in time, that I believe are more reliable and are easier for us to focus our attention on because there’s more that we can do about these things.
So, the first one of those hormones is going to be FSH. So, AMH tends to tell us a little bit more about how many eggs we have left or follicles we have left. It’s about ovarian reserve, whereas FSH is about quality. I like to focus on quality. Would it be nice if we can improve our ovarian reserve regularly? Sure, and I’m not saying that’s not a focus, but more importantly for me is that you’re producing one good, healthy, quality egg every cycle.
And so, that’s why quality is more important for me. I also trust FSH a little bit more, so I want to make sure that you’re getting your FSH tested. Sometimes FSH can fluctuate from cycle to cycle. It doesn’t mean that you have to have this hormone tested every month or every cycle, but it’s good to get a baseline, understand where it’s at, then do some things, create a plan to support that, which is what we do for the members in our programs. And then, from there, we can retest and see what sort of progress we’ve made and determine how we move forward.
So, FSH is number one. Please make sure you get this tested on either cycle day two, three, or four, meaning cycle day one is the first day of bleed. That is essential, but we can’t look at FSH on its own. It has to be tested in conjunction with other hormones as well. So, what are those other hormones? Well, the main one, for the sake of this video, is going to be estradiol or E2. That’s right, your FSH and your estradiol balance each other out, and there’s a feedback loop between the two to make sure that they are balanced and supported and regulated properly. Estrogen is one of the most important hormones that a woman produces, and so testing estradiol is going to be essential, not only to understand its relationship to FSH and making sure that what we’re seeing is accurate, but also in and of itself, estrogen is essential in the first half of the cycle because women need this hormone for many, many reasons.
One is also to support FSH and make sure that we are recruiting and maturing a good, healthy follicle. The estrogen helps to nourish the thickening and growth of your endometrium, the lining of your endometrium in the uterus so that once you do have embryo created, it has a good solid place to implant. So, FSH and estradiol are the two top hormones that we need to get tested, and that you need to get tested, and I want to make sure that you do get them. What I’m seeing a trend of now is that many women are just getting AMH and not the other hormones done, and we need a complete picture so that you know how to move forward.
The third hormone, which there’s quite a bit of controversy around is DHEA. DHEA, not to be confused with DHA, which is fish oil, an essential fatty acid. DHEA is a precursor hormone. It also does many, many things in the body. It’s a precursor hormone to both your estrogen and primarily your androgens like your testosterone, but it’s also an important hormone for egg quality, and it’s also a stress hormone. So, it’s an important hormone to test so that we know where your levels are at and if you need supplementation with DHEA. Why do I say this? Well, because so many of you may be taking DHEA without ever testing it or have been told you need 75 milligrams of DHEA because you’re trying to get pregnant, without ever looking at testing this hormone and knowing what your levels are at.
In my world, that’s a no-no. We do not recommend you start DHEA until you know what your levels are, and then we do not recommend that everyone takes the same level or amount of DHEA. For me, that is going to be specifically determined on what your levels are, will dictate how much you actually need of that hormone, or if you need it at all. It’s also something that we need to be very, very careful of. Many women who do supplement with DHEA can throw off their hormones, even with just a little bit. So, it has to be monitored closely, retested regularly, and you do need to make sure that your cycle is maintained, and can continue to be regular if you’re taking DHEA.
The last hormone, number four, is vitamin D, and you all are going to be scratching your heads and say, “Well, Marc, you just said hormone, and then you said a vitamin.” Well, vitamin D is actually a hormone, but we don’t call it hormone D. We call it vitamin D because it is essential, essential for life, right? You need it to continue to live. Without it, we wouldn’t function very well. So, that’s why it’s not called hormone D. It’s called vitamin D. Vitamin D is primarily sourced from the sun, and for those of you who live in cooler temperatures or don’t get outside much, then I do recommend that you supplement with it. But before you do that, I recommend that you get it tested and get it tested regularly. You get it tested first to find out what your levels are and how much you need, and then you get it tested second to see how it’s improving and how much you need to maintain in terms of a dosage.
Why is vitamin D important here as we’re talking about AMH? Because you might say, “Well, vitamin D has nothing to do with AMH.” Well, the reality is, is vitamin D has a lot to do with our overall function, and we do know through research that vitamin D and AMH have a correlation. That often, when we see low AMH, we also see low vitamin D, and that if we increase or are able to increase and elevate our vitamin D levels, that often we will also see that happen in an increase with our AMH.
This won’t happen with everybody, but this does happen pretty regularly, which is why I’m talking about it here. Not to mention that vitamin D is an essential nutrient that we all need for the function of every cell in our body. So, I do think that many of you should be supplementing with it. The real question is how much, and that’s why you get tested. So, those are the four hormones that we want you to look at. Remember, we’re going to recap, FSH, estradiol, DHEA and vitamin D. Those are the four hormones that I want you to look at now if you’ve been told that you have low AMH.
I also said, for those of you who is going to stick around to the end, so kudos to all of you, that I was going to talk about some special things that we did for that member I shared her testimonial about earlier in her personalized plan, and actually I want to highlight two specific things. The first thing that we did for her, first and foremost, and really have spent quite a bit of her time with me doing, is addressing, and supporting, and improving her GI function, her digestive system. She alluded to that in her testimonial, in her little share that she posted for us about her pregnancy, which was awesome, but she did allude to her digestion being 90% better.
That was a huge factor in her getting to this place that she is today with this big positive, as she refers to. So, that is often the key, and many of you may have heard me already talk about this, but digestive health, and function, and support is essential in my world when we start supporting the members in my program, if they need it. She needed it, she got those results, and she was able to get this result.
But the second piece that I wanted to highlight, on top of the digestive support, is time. She’s been in my program for well over a year. I don’t remember the exact time, but well over a year. And it can get frustrating, it can get hard. It can be difficult to continue to do all the things that you know that you should be doing, that you’ve been told you should be doing, that are right for you to be doing because you’re feeling well, and still not get the results that you want to see, that we want to see.
So, time and the patience with time, to give it the space to be successful, is potentially the hardest and most difficult thing that I asked her to do, but she stuck with it. And so, that’s why I wanted to highlight that, that the digestive support was essential too, but so was her ability to give herself the time and space to continue to try and to continue to get pregnant, which allowed her to be successful. If it wasn’t for that time and space, who knows what would’ve happened or where she would’ve gone, or where else we’d be right now. But she was able to do that, and more importantly, she was able to get those results.
So, now I want to hear from you, which hormone of the four that I talked about did you not know much about or was new information for you? Comment below and let me know. What else did you like about this video? I want to hear from you. And again, I want to hear your questions, so post your questions below and I will do the best I can to answer them. Thank you again for watching until the end. As you can imagine, testing these hormones is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other pieces of the fertility puzzle that you might need to look at to get the answers that you deserve, and many other tests and hormones to evaluate as well.
If you really want to go deep into your fertility, find the root cause that’s not allowing you to get pregnant, then I want to make sure that you fill out the application as soon as possible, using the link in the description below, to speak to a real human on my team so that we can identify if this is the right next step for you and see if you are a good fit to join the Hope Fertility Program.
Now, make sure to check out this other video next, the five AMH killers you need to stop now, and improve your egg reserve. I just posted that video a few weeks ago, but I want to make sure you didn’t miss it, so check it out. And until the next video, stay fertile.