How to Increase your Fertility Naturally ?
Transcription :
So this week is National Infertility Awareness Week. So in honor of National Infertility Awareness Week, I want to talk about the basics, some of the basic foundational things that you can be doing to improve your fertility naturally. If you’re watching this video, you’ve probably been trying to get pregnant for longer than you ever anticipated, or maybe you’ve already been to your OB-GYN, maybe even an REI, which is a fertility expert and they’ve told you that your only option is to go forward with IVF or possibly even donor eggs. So before you venture into IVF or donor eggs or whatever options you’ve been told you need to do, let’s make sure that you’ve really peeled the onion, that you’ve dug deep, that you understand your body, that you understand fertility, and, more importantly, that you understand what’s going on in your fertility and your reproductive health so that you can do everything possible to improve it and go down the right path on your fertility journey.
Before I get started with this week’s topic, I want to first say thank you to the sponsor of this week’s video, Fairhaven Health. Fairhaven Health is one of my favorite supplement companies. They produce products like FH Pro for men and women. They also have this wonderful product called FH Probiotic, which is a specially formulated probiotic to help male fertility and a whole slew of other products. So if you want more information on supplements that may improve your fertility, I want you to check out Fairhaven Health. You can do so using the link below in the description.
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 working with couples from all over world for over 18 years through my online coaching programs and right here in sunny San Diego, if you’re lucky enough to live here, you can visit me at one of my clinics as well. I have great news for all of you. My fertility program is back open for enrollment. It was closed for a few months because we were at full capacity, but now we can work with more of you. So if you are interested in having me and my team as your fertility coaches, then I want you to apply to see if you qualify. All you have to do is use the link in the description below to apply.
So it’s National Infertility Awareness Week, and I want to get down to the basics of your fertility and the 12 areas that you need to be looking at when you’re starting or going through your fertility journey to make sure that you’ve checked off everything you need to, and you’re moving down the right path. Before I do that, I just want to acknowledge how important this week is. National Infertility Awareness Week is a time in the year for us to raise more awareness on the struggles and the journeys that we all go through on the fertility process. I want all of you to do one thing this week to bring more awareness to the fertility struggles and journey that everybody goes through.
So what I’d like for you to do is pick one of two things to do: tell somebody that you’ve never spoken to about fertility or your fertility journey, what you’ve been going through. Let them know how real and important it is. Or, on one of your social media channels and platforms, just post a message that fertility, the fertility journey and struggle is real, and that your friends and family need to have more awareness and understanding for it. So pick one of those and announce it. Put the information out there and bring more awareness to this really important topic.
I bring awareness to this important topic every week right here on Fertility TV as I talk about new information, important information, and information that you can be doing and using to improve your fertility from the comfort of your home, hopefully or usually. So today we’re going to go along that theme as well. I know that I mentioned that there’s 12 areas when it comes to fertility that I often use as my base to look at for everyone I work with and couples from all over. Today, I’m not going to be able to go into all 12 areas. I did just do a free training on this exact topic that really dove deeper into all 12 areas. If you want to watch that, check that out. If you haven’t, then you can use the link right here, or the link in the description below. Today, I’m going to talk about three main areas that I want to dive deeper into because these are ones that don’t get discussed enough and I do find that they’re becoming more and more prevalent and they are extremely important for us to spend a little bit more time on.
All right, so I want to talk about inflammation, autoimmune issues, and toxins. The reason I’ve chosen these three is because often these three can go hand in hand. They can go together. They don’t always have to, but they can, and that’s why I’m putting them together in this video for you. So we have multiple organs in the body, multiple systems in the body and the reproductive system is part of the endocrine system, and that’s just one system in the body. So when our body is not functioning properly and we are not able to get pregnant, then often the symptom of that is fertility issues or reproductive issues, that is not usually the root issue. That is usually a symptom that is being expressed because other areas of the body are not functioning properly or ideally. That’s why we’re talking about these three areas because these three areas often or can be the root issues that we need to start to understand and treat to support our endocrine system and to support our reproductive function and get pregnant.
So that’s why we’re going to start talking about these two. I’m going to group inflammation and autoimmune issues together because often that is what happens and there’s a lot of similarities between those. For those of you watching, do you already know if you have any inflammatory issues or autoimmune issues? If you do, comment below. Let me know. I want to hear from you, and not only do I want to hear if you do such as yes or no, I want to hear what it is. Because I often find there’s a lot of similarities and commonalities from patient to patient, or person to person, or couple to couple that we start to see these trends and these patterns and I love, being in the science world, I love to be able to start to see these coincidences and these connections. So let me know. Post a comment below and let me know if you do have any of these things and what they might be.
Okay, so first and foremost, how do we know if we have any of these issues? You need to do testing. I know I always talk about testing, but testing is going to be the basic information that tells us what’s going on. Sometimes we might have autoimmune issues or inflammatory issues yet we might not feel the symptoms often or at all yet they show up as a first sign in our lab work. So if you haven’t had regular testing at all recently, I do encourage you to start there. We want to make sure we’ve ruled out some of the basics when it comes to autoimmune issues. So some of the foundational testing that I would encourage you to do for autoimmune issues are ANA, anti-nuclear antibody. I also find that doing a thyroid antibodies, and we can start to do a family history to see, are there any autoimmune issues in your family and then we certainly want to test for those things.
The ANA is just a general marker. It doesn’t tell us where you have autoimmune issues, what systems being affected. It just gives us a general understanding for like yes or no. Now, just because it comes back negative might not mean that you don’t have any, but it is a good sign if it came back negative. The other important piece that I do often talk about as a separate system or area of concern when I’m talking about the 12 areas is our digestive function. If your gut health is not functioning properly, it’s going to be hard for your immune system to be functioning properly. The start of all of our immune systems begins in the digestive tract, in the gut, in the large intestine and small intestine. So if we don’t have proper function there, if we do not have healthy bacteria that is able to kill off other unwanted bacteria and infections in the gut, then that’s going to be really difficult for our body to function properly and our immune system to function well.
So when it comes to testing blood work and then potentially, also, I would typically recommend doing a stool test to just get a basic. Now we could go beyond that. That’s when we start to get into like the black hole of testing, so to speak, and I usually like to find a rhyme or reason why we’re going to order additional testing that will help dictate what that testing might be. So when we’re looking at autoimmune issues, that would be what I would do. If we’re going to add on inflammatory markers, then you can add on CRP and homocysteine, but inflammatory markers can show up in other areas in other labs as well, depending on where the inflammation is in the body. So I’m just giving you some of the basics. That’s where you do need a little bit of coaching and guidance from a trained healthcare provider to really look at your specific case, your needs, and then help dictate which way you need to go in terms of testing.
But some of the questions you can just naturally ask yourself is, “What’s your energy level like? Do you have enough energy that you can get through the day? Or do you have a lot of fatigue, you’re unmotivated, difficult to get going in the morning. You crash in the afternoon. Energy is a keen sign of how your body overall is functioning and could be a marker for how your immune system is functioning. When we’re talking about inflammation, we also want to look then at pain. Pain is the number one inflammatory marker that your body experiences, so do you have pain anywhere in the body? Headaches, neck pain, abdominal pain, uterine pain, ovarian pain, menstrual pain, dysmenorrhea, right? These are all signs and symptoms that there is inflammation in the body in some form. Then the degree of that pain can tell you the severity of the inflammation as well.
So can we always see inflammation? No, we can’t, but typically we can feel it or we can see it. So if there’s swelling or redness in an area, that would also indicate inflammation. So that’s a question you can start to ask yourself and you can be more conscious of on a regular basis to pay attention to how your body feels. You can have a diet journal where you start to document how you feel. Do you have headaches if you do, or body aches or pain, whatever it might be. I might have some categories in my journal: pain, level of pain, fatigue or energy, level of energy; so you can start to see a trend over a period of time that starts to give you information about how your body is functioning.
Many of us just get used to functioning at a certain level and we think that that is the best we can feel and we think that, that is normal. But until we experience what it’s like to feel better than that, we don’t know what that’s like, and we can’t really conceptualize it. I want to encourage you all to try to strive for more and for feeling better. You should have energy throughout the entire day and you should feel pretty good on most days, every day of the week, right? So both that comes to energy and pain, and if that’s not being experienced by you, then we have to look deeper to figure out what else is going on.
Inflammation and autoimmune issues absolutely impact your fertility and reproductive function. More specifically, they can make it more difficult for implantation to occur and they can make it more difficult to hold a pregnancy. So we do want to look at these areas and assess those areas, and more importantly, if there is an issue here, we want to treat it. So toxins is number three or, in this case, number two, because I grouped inflammation and autoimmune issues together. But toxins are really important. One of the key variables that can cause more inflammation and impact your immune system and cause autoimmune issues for many of us are the toxins that we are exposed to on a regular basis. Or, maybe there was a moment in time that you were exposed to a lot of chemicals that could have impacted your body and its overall health.
I want to tell you all a story about a woman that I am working with and I have worked with for several years, helped her conceive her first child. She’s back for number two, and we wanted to just take an assessment for what was going on and how she was feeling. So based on some of the things she was telling me, I felt like it made a lot of sense to do a toxic screen. We checked for mold and different types of mycotoxins. We checked for different types of environmental chemicals and toxins that might be influencing her body. I have to tell you, I was very surprised by what I found, which starts to make me question what many of you have going on inside your bodies? She is really aware of her health. She has cleaned up for many, many years now well before I started working with her, and then it got more so; her environment, the product she uses on her body, the things she cooks with, the things she drinks out of and eats out of.
So when I started looking at her environmental toxins report, I was actually really surprised. She had several mycotoxins that were very high and elevated. She also had a couple of markers that showed that she had high phthalate exposure or chemical exposure to her body among other chemicals. These are things that she should have already cleaned up and would have already cleaned up many, many years ago. So to find this in her, in herself and in her body, was really surprising and eye-opening. We’ve got a plan to address those things, so it’s not that these are not things we can address. We can absolutely take care of them and help her body get rid of these things. But more importantly, it starts with what we’re exposing our body to, right? So she’s already addressed those things. I did give her a suggestion of some additional things to look back at. Let’s just make sure we’ve looked at all of these areas to make sure they’re not impacting her health and we’ve really cleaned them up.
But on top of that, I am now creating a plan for her on what we’re going to do to get rid of this and clean up and strengthen her body so that she can get pregnant. So these environmental toxins absolutely impact the endocrine system, which is your hormones. They impact your hormonal health, how easy it is for your body to regulate its hormones and keep things balanced, have a regular hormone cycle, ovulate regularly, menstruate regularly. So we don’t want any of these impacting her health or yours and reproductive function because they can impact your fertility. One of the ways, but not the only way it can do that, are the two areas we just talked about, is causing more inflammation and impacting the way your immune system functions and potentially contributing to autoimmune issues. So those are other reasons why you want to do that.
I want all of you to pick one thing that you’re going to start with to clean up in your environment. Is it your personal products that things that you use on your body: shampoo, body wash, soap, whatever it might be. Is it going to be your makeup? Makeup has a lot of chemicals and toxins. Is it going to be the things that you use to clean your house? What is it going to be? Where are you going to start? I want to hear from you. Comment below and let me know. These three areas are so important for you to clean up. They are essential, essential for having not only a healthy body but a healthy reproductive function, and these could be the key that opens the door to improving your fertility and helping you get pregnant.
So I want you to look at these three areas and I want you to let me know what you’re going to start to do to evaluate and address these areas in your personal life. If you’re over 35 or have been trying for longer than six months, and you’re starting to get a little bit frustrated because you don’t know what’s going on, Dr. Google is not quite the right doctor for you and you want more information on how you can create a more personalized plan for what you need, what your body needs on your fertility journey, then I want to invite you to apply for a discovery call with me and my team to see if you qualify to work with us and to see if we can support you on your journey. This is where we create a personalized plan, not just supplements and nutrition, but a comprehensive plan based on what you need to get you the results that you want. If you want to see if this is the right fit for you, then I want you to apply. All you have to do is use the link in the description below to apply to work with my team and I.
All right, I’m going to leave a few videos that I think you might find valuable right here. We’re going to put those links in the description below as well, but I’m going to make it easy and put it in right here for you. If you liked this video, then please give me a thumbs up. More importantly, if you found this video valuable for you, please leave a comment below. Let me know what you liked about it and I want all of you to know that when you leave a comment below, it allows this video to be found by other women and couples going through fertility, so you’re helping them on their fertility journey as well, which I think is amazing.
All right, everyone, until the next video, I want you all to stay safe, stay healthy, and most of all, please, stay fertile.