How to increase AMH and improve your ovarian reserve -☝️ ⬆️ Improve EGG QUALITY VIDEO SERIES ⬆️

How to increase AMH and improve your ovarian reserve -☝️ ⬆️ Improve EGG QUALITY VIDEO SERIES ⬆️

Transcription :

Welcome to the second video in my new mini series, dedicated to helping you improve your egg quality. This is where you can learn everything you need to know about improving your AMH, increasing your ovarian reserve and improving your egg quality. Last week, I released the first video in this mini series, but don’t worry if you didn’t watch it, but hopefully you did. But if you didn’t at the end of this video, I’m going to leave a link so that you can check it out afterwards. In case you did miss it, just a slight recap. In the first video, I did talk about testing what labs you need to be doing if you want to understand your ovarian reserve and egg quality. And I also discussed how to understand those labs, what are they telling you? In addition, I did talk about different variables overall that might influence these numbers. Okay, so that’s everything that I discussed in the first video. Obviously, again, if you haven’t watched it, you can check it out by using the link at the end of this video.

Today, I’m going to be talking about how you can improve your AMH, your ovarian reserve, and your egg quality through diet and lifestyle. So keep watching to find out more. My name is. Dr. Marc Sklar, also known as the fertility expert and welcome to Fertility TV, your YouTube channel dedicated to helping you get pregnant. I’ve been helping couples for over 18 years from all over the world with my online coaching programs and right here at both of my clinics here in San Diego. If you are not here in San Diego and you want to work with me and my team, then my online coaching program is open for enrollment to find out if you qualify, all you have to do is apply by using the link in the description below. All right, so let’s get started today. We’re going to be talking about diet, lifestyle and sleep and how much these three areas or variables impact your egg quality and ovarian reserve.

Now I know I talk about this all the time, but today we’re going to dive a little bit deeper. I want to get into a little bit more detail when it comes to these three areas. All right? Yeah, you’ve seen my little pup here come in and out of the video, he’s been a little anxious today, keeps going in and out and bothering me. So, we’ve had to do a couple of takes, but regardless he’s back here visiting and sleeping clearly because he’s not interested in diet, sleep and lifestyle, but hopefully you are. So, let’s get into it a little bit more right now. So there are lots of different diet plans out there, and there’s no one right diet plan for every fertility patient for every condition.

This has to be customized for each one of us. I do want to talk about some of the different types of diets and some different types of foods that you can start to consider and incorporate into your daily meal planning, as you are trying to improve your egg quality and ovarian reserve. And the first one is antioxidants. We heard in the first video, how important mitochondrial function is. And one of the biggest variables to improving mitochondrial function is antioxidant support. Antioxidants are found in certain foods. They actually help to keep ourselves young and functioning, healthy and strong. And this is really important for egg quality and ovarian reserve because it supports mitochondrial function right? We talked about that a lot in the first video, you’re going to hear this as I discuss it quite a bit, moving forward. So, what are some of the top key antioxidant producing foods?

Well, berries are one of those key variables, right. They have tons of antioxidants and berries are so important and tasty. Who doesn’t love berries? Now you might not like all of them and that’s okay, but it’s important you find the ones you do like, and that you start to incorporate them into your diet, regularly. So blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, which are my favorite ones of all of them are things that you should absolutely be incorporating. Again, just find the one that you like and then go on from there. One of the other berries, which I don’t include in that category, because it is a standalone berry in and of itself, are goji berries. Goji berries are so good for you. Super high in antioxidants, often used in traditional medicines like acupuncture or Chinese medicine, Tibetan medicine. They are berries that are dried, but when you do get them, you don’t want them to be really dry and hard. It means that it’s been dried out too long or they’re stale.

You still want them to have a little bit of give in them, a little bit of squeeze if you will, right. Some juice still left in it. And they’re really, really good for antioxidant health. And in Chinese medicine, we use it for a lot of other areas as well, but it has far reaching impacts. So, goji berries are great antioxidants as well. I often talk about green leafy vegetables. And at the top of that list of green leafy vegetables filled with antioxidants is kale. Kale is wonderful. Now there are a couple of things that I do like to mention about kale. I’m not the biggest fan of eating kale raw. It is difficult for our digestive system to digest that, it’s also difficult for those of you who have thyroid issues to eat a lot of raw kale.

It’s not great for your thyroid. So, what we want to do is at least have it slightly steamed or blanched. You can saute it, you can make kale chips. Kale is a wonderful vegetable with antioxidants, but there’s a lot of other good vegetables filled with antioxidants that are also green. One of which, which you might not think about often is artichokes. Artichokes are awesome, they’re tasty if done the right way. And it does take a little bit of practice to cook artichokes the right way. The wrong way is to make artichoke dip, which has a ton of dairy in it, which is what we don’t want in this situation and it’s really heavy. We want to have the artichoke in its true sense, right. In its pure sense. So, typically you would steam it for a period of time. You might make a nice olive oil and garlic dip to go along with it.

Doesn’t it sound tasty? These foods can be tasty and good for you. Okay, just because they’re full of antioxidants doesn’t mean that they’re bad for you or they have to taste bad okay. So, kale and artichokes are two awesome ones as well for you. Now, one of my favorites and probably your favorite, which is going to be the last antioxidant rich food that I’m going to talk about, is dark chocolate. That’s right, dark chocolate is full of really good, healthy antioxidants. And it’s a wonderful treat. Now, when we start talking about healthy foods, we often take away all those sugary foods and rightly so, but dark chocolate doesn’t have a lot of sugar if it’s done the right way. If you get like a pure 70% or above dark chocolate and it’s tasty, it satisfies some of that sweet flavoring. It will be a little bit bitter, the higher concentration of dark chocolate that you get, but it is still very good for you, super rich in antioxidants.

So, that’s a little treat that you all can have and feel good about incorporating into your diet. Now, antioxidant foods are really, really important for you. But so our anti-inflammatory foods. So here are some things that we want to talk about with anti-inflammatory foods. One obviously, or hopefully, obviously, none of us want to increase more inflammation in the body. We want to minimize the inflammation and the inflammatory response in our body. It’s not great for ovarian reserve, also not great for implantation. So, that means not only incorporating foods like the antioxidant rich foods we just discussed, but also eliminating foods. Some of the key foods we need to eliminate to reduce the inflammatory impact on our body is gluten, and too much gluten. Dairy, and also not the right quality of dairy and sugar, especially processed sugar. It doesn’t mean you can’t have some honey here and there or that you can sweeten some things from time to time.

But as a society and culture, we use way too much sugar and way too much dairy in our cooking. And for that matter way too much gluten and these things impact our body, and cause more inflammation often when I have those who joined my programs do a detox for three weeks to kick off the dietary changes that we want to do. The key areas that we are eliminating are the three that we just discussed. And I can’t tell you how often these members of my program rant and rave about how good they feel, how much energy they have, much less pain they’re sleeping better. So, these foods are really important to eliminate from our diets. So, a lot of the foods that I talked about in the first section of antioxidant rich foods are also anti-inflammatory food. So all those barriers that we talked about are also really important for you to help reduce inflammation in the body.

But one food that I think is also really important or a couple of areas of foods that are really important for reducing inflammation are good, rich fatty foods. So eating fish, right, because it’s high in fat, avocados and olive oil. These are all foods that are very, very high in fat, really good for our bodies, great for our hormones. And also they reduce inflammation. So, these are important foods to incorporate as well into your dietary program. I’m a big fan of incorporating water and a lot of it into our diets. But if you need something else in your diet that might also be beneficial as an anti-inflammatory and antioxidant for that matter, then you could start to incorporate a little bit of green tea. I don’t want any of you having cups and cups and cups or pitchers of green tea every day, but a cup of green tea, especially here comes good quality green tea can make a big difference in improving your antioxidant levels and decreasing inflammation as well.

So, that could be something nice that you incorporate into your dietary program as a drink, and you can have that hot or cold. My preference when it comes to green tea is to get the loose leaf tea. You can control the bitterness. The quality is typically better, and then you can choose the flavor profile that you want as well. So, the third point that I want to talk about is, and we already started talking about it is healthy fats. So in the anti-inflammatory section, I just discussed avocados and olive oil and fatty fish. These healthy fats are really, really important for your fertility and your ovarian health. They improve and can help you balance your hormones and they’re essential and super important, even more important for women than they are for men. So, I don’t want you to shy away from healthy fats.

We often go towards low fat foods, and I want you to steer away from that. I did just talk about minimizing or eliminating dairy. I do think that that’s an important piece of what you should be doing, but if you do decide to have a little bit of dairy, I do want to encourage you to have full fat dairy versus low fat or no fat dairy, because that’s going to be much better for you as well. So, I just wanted to take a brief moment to talk about that a little bit more detail before we move on to the next section, which is the quality of the food that you eat. Now, we just talked about all different types of food, but above all of those things, the thing that trumps everything is quality. So, if you’re going to have berries, but they’re going to be sprayed with chemicals and pesticides and toxins, and then you eat them.

That’s a no-no, you’re trying to get these good things. And then you’re adding in these bad chemicals. They not only offset each other, they actually push you in the wrong direction. So one of the foods that pesticides are most used are actually berries. So, when you do have your berries, I think it’s essential that you choose organic berries. This is where they don’t use those pesticides and they don’t spray them with chemicals to keep the bugs off, right. So, we want to have the more organic berries because that’s going to be really important. And the same goes across the board for all the types of food that you eat. The quality of the food is so important. So, making sure that you have organic as much and wherever possible that your animal products are grass fed, pasture raised, wild, that they’re not being fed antibiotics, that they’re not farmed and they’re not giving hormones to grow.

So this is really, really important when we’re looking at the quality of the food. And again, above all this can make one of the most significant impacts in your health, your fertility is the quality of the food that you eat. If you’re trying to find out which foods you should absolutely use, that need to be organic and those that maybe you have a little bit more flexibility with, then I encourage you to check out the ewg.org website. They update a list that is called the Clean Fifteen and the Dirty Dozen every year, sometimes every six months. So you can get a new list, usually it’s the same, but it’s maybe adjusted a little bit based on that year and chemicals that are used. But the EWG does update this list of the Clean Fifteen and the Dirty Dozen so that you know which foods you should be eating or concentrating more when you purchase organic and which ones you have a little bit more flexibility on.

If you were looking for more information on specific diet programs like keto, fasting, paleo, and so forth, I did put out a video on this specific topic sometime ago. If you want to watch that video to learn more about those specific things, then you can check that out right here. One of the things that I’m just going to talk about in general is that I think all of you should be following as a general guideline. And again, I go into much more detail in that video, a paleo low carb diet, okay. Not tons of breads, obviously, because I’ve asked you to reduce your gluten intake, but being mindful of how you’re managing your diet as well. Another point that I do want to discuss is fasting. I do think that fasting can be very, very beneficial for us who are trying to improve the quality of the eggs and improve our ovarian reserve.

And again, improve our mitochondrial function and cellular health. So, fasting can be beneficial. I do think that this should be done a certain way called intermittent fasting. And again, I go into that in much more detail in that video so you can check that out after this one. The next point that we need to talk about is lifestyle. Now this is really broad of a topic, right. But your lifestyle dramatically impacts your health. And as a result, your fertility and egg quality. So, we want to have a balanced lifestyle. What does that really mean? It means balancing work and play, balancing home life and life outside, managing your stress, increasing and improving and balancing your exercise. These are all areas that need to be managed and balanced better. I want all of you to take a step back, evaluate all these areas. How is your work-life balance?

How is your exercise regimen? Do you exercise too much or too little? How do you manage your stress? Do you have too much stress and what are you doing about that? These are all areas that I want all of you to take a step back, take a moment and evaluate and score for yourself. We want to grade this so that you understand what areas need to be improved and what areas you need to focus on a little bit more. You all can be real with yourselves. You know what you’re doing good at, you know what you need more help at, and you know what you can do to improve that. So if you’re exercising too much and pushing yourself and feel exhausted afterwards, pull back. If you’re sitting on the couch too much and not going for a walk and getting some nice fresh air and exercising, get off the couch and start moving.

If you come home and your way of managing your stress is turning on the TV or having a drink, an alcoholic beverage, then maybe we need to find a different way for you to relax de-stress and manage those areas of your life. You need more attention in those areas and you need to be real with yourself on what you need to do about those things. These areas dramatically impact your health and your egg quality ovarian reserve. If your body’s under too much stress, it’s going to hold on and it’s going to protect itself. So it’s not going to give you all the eggs that you need every cycle. And the quality is going to be impacted. I see this over and over, and over again with the couples that I work with. So I want you to start to look at that and then make a list of one thing in each one of those areas that you’re going to do to improve it.

The last area that I want to spend time on today is sleep and rest and recovery. This area is often, often overlooked and not given enough attention in general. The reality is, is most of you watching don’t get enough sleep. Most of you watching push yourselves too much. You want to accomplish much more than the day allows. And as a result, the one area that gets compromised is not only how much sleep you have, but the quality of the sleep. Sleep is the place where our body rests, recovers and rejuvenates. And this is the same for every cell being used in the body, including the ones used for your follicular development and your egg quality, right? So, we need to give them time to do those things. If you’re only getting four or five, six hours of sleep, you’re not getting enough, you should be striving for eight.

Okay, and most of the time, what we end up doing, and I know this because I hear it from everybody is we go to sleep too late. Why? Because of two main reasons, we’re either trying to catch up on work and do more or two, we are bingeing on Netflix. That’s right we’re watching TV. You’re prioritizing your TV show over your health. You need to get better sleep. And as a result, you need to prioritize your health over those things. Yes, does that mean you might not get all your work done in a day or that you might not finish watching that last episode of whatever TV show you’re watching? Absolutely. But the reality is is that your sleep and your rest and recovery are the most important thing you have. Stop trying to accomplish more. That’s right, watching Netflix, trying to watch that last episode is trying to accomplish more.

Your body needs you to rest. And I want you guys to take this seriously. I can’t tell you how often I see this as a real life situation with women that I work with. I can tell you one story, and this is just an example of many that I’ve seen over the years. I had a patient. Everything was going well. We had accomplished so much, she was improving. Everything was doing really well and we just weren’t understanding why she wasn’t getting pregnant yet. So, I took a step back and I said, “Tell me about your day.” And she said, “Well, I wake up at five in the morning because I get to the gym at 5:15 so that I have an hour of exercise before I have to get ready for work. And then I go about my day.” And I said, “Okay, 5:15 to me seems, or five o’clock seems a little early for me to wake up.”

But that all depends on what time she goes to bed. She walks me through the rest of her day and she tells me that between 11 and 12, she goes to sleep. Which means if she’s going to sleep at 12, she’s getting five hours of sleep. If she’s going to sleep at 11, she’s getting six hours of sleep. Still, either one is not enough. And I said, “That’s just not acceptable.” I said, “Why are you waking up so early to exercise?” She says, “For two reasons, because I’m trying to get in my exercise and exercise helps me de-stress so that’s one way that I manage my stress.” I’m like, “That’s great, but you’re putting too much stress on your body by not giving your body the time necessary to rest and sleep. So, I told her she could not wake up before 6:00 AM and she had to go to sleep by 11.

And she said, “Well, where am I going to exercise?” I’m like, that’s your job to figure out, you still need to exercise, but you need to figure out where you’re going to put that into your day. Now that you can’t wake up before six.” So she did this, she went through, she changed it. She felt much better. Her energy improved dramatically and the next cycle she was pregnant. Does that mean that if you do these changes in one second, you’re going to be pregnant? No, but I have done this with many, many women. And often that is the key that unlocks the door. Now they all don’t happen as quickly as hers did, but they happen relatively shortly thereafter. So I’m telling you, this is the impact of sleep on your health. This is the impact of sleep on your fertility and reproductive function. And more importantly, you have the ability to change it.

So, I want you all to prioritize the quality and amount of sleep that you’re getting. And hopefully this unlocks the door like it did for her. Hopefully all of those tips you found valuable. What I want to hear from all of you is which one you found the most valuable, most important, and which one you’re going to incorporate into your daily practice. So, comment below and let me know. There are so many things that haven’t even begun to talk about and mentioned that you can start to at home to improve your fertility, improve your egg quality, improve your AMH and your ovarian reserve. And I started that in the last video, in the first video of this video series, this mini video series, if you didn’t check it out, then you can do so now by using this link right here to check out video number one.

But next week, I’m going to be going into video number three in this mini series where I’m going to dive even more into this topic about improving your AMH, improving your egg quality and ovarian reserve. So, I hope you’re getting ready and excited for video number three and stay tuned for that next week. One of the ways you can know when I put that out is to make sure you hit that bell right there, to make sure you’re a subscriber to my YouTube channel so that you get notified when that video releases next week. If you’re thinking to yourself that all this information is really, really great, but a bit overwhelming, and maybe you need a little bit more support or you’re listening. You’re saying like, “I want more support now, what else can I start to do now?” Well, I want to let you know that my Hope fertility coaching program is open for enrollment. The application to apply is in the link in the description below. And all you have to do is click that link to apply, to see if you qualify to work with me and my team.

If you’re watching these videos after my whole video series has released, then all you have to do is go to the description below. And you’re going to see the full list of videos in this video series. And you can check them out one by one, right there. Again, all that information is in the description below. If you found this video useful and helpful, again, give me a thumbs up and leave a comment below and let me know by leaving a comment below you help this video be seen by all the other women that don’t even know that it’s there. So you’re helping them on their fertility journeys as well. Super cool, right. And remember, again, subscribe to my YouTube channel so you can get notified when I put out the next video in this video series. All right, everyone. Thanks for watching until the next video. I want you all to stay safe, stay healthy. And most of all, that’s right, stay fertile.