Adrenal Fatigue and How It Can Impact Your Fertility
“It’s really important to take control of our stressors because if we don’t handle our stress, the stress will handle us.”
Topics Discussed:
🦩 How to avoid excess iron in prenatal vitamins.
🦩 Impact of adrenal fatigue on your fertility.
🦩 Impacts of thyroid issues and past traumas on your fertility.
Did you know that your adrenal fatigue can negatively impact your fertility? Your adrenals are your master hormones, and overdoing things and stressing your body can lead to dysfunction in your fertility.
In this episode of the Finding Fertility podcast, I answer some of your questions plus explain the impact of adrenal fatigue on your fertility. I also explain how to improve your diet and reduce stressors to support your adrenals.
Download your FREE PDF guide :: 3 Steps You Need To Get Right to Improve Your Chances of Getting & Staying Pregnant
Listen in to learn how to improve your whole-body health issues with the right diet and heal your past traumas to improve your fertility.
- “The more you can eliminate, the less stress you’re gonna have on your body.”
Adrenal Fatigue and How It Can Impact Your Fertility
Episode Highlights:
- [0:51] Get checked for iron levels to avoid excess iron in prenatal vitamins.
- [3:45] How to make the right food choices for yourself during your fertility journey.
- [5:39] How to improve your diet and reduce stress to support your adrenals.
- [8:53] The factors that impact your odds of conceiving, plus how to improve those odds.
- [10:32] The common causes of infertility plus how to improve your overall health and fertility.
- [14:30] Take care of your mental and emotional health to support your fertility journey.
- [16:27] My fertility journey and what prompted my lifestyle changes.
- [20:21] How to find the underlying causes of your issues and support them with the right diet.
Listen here: Adrenal Fatigue and How It Can Impact Your Fertility
🌺 Download your FREE Guide: Top 3 Steps to Maximise Your Fertility That Your Doctor Isn't Talking About
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Full Transcript:
0:00
Hello beautiful and welcome to finding fertility Hello, beautiful we are here with Instagram Live. I'm also recording this for the podcast. So we are doing a live q&a. So I have a bunch of questions that have already been submitted. So I'm going to cover those. And then if we have time, I'm going to try to scroll back through. So if you have any questions, we'll try to tackle those. I'm talking fast, because we have a lot to get through. So let's start. Okay, so I had a question about excess iron in prenatal vitamins, this is an issue for some prenatals.
They just add iron in there. As you guys know, I'm a brand ambassador for seeking health, their prenatal I don't know if the light is going to be very good because it's like a shiny package and it's white. But their prenatal does not come with iron. And Dr. Ben Lynch has done this on purpose because some women don't process iron. Well, some people or some women do not need extra iron. So it's not in there.
Now how do you know if you need extra iron is you get a blood test from your doctor to check your iron levels. low iron usually can be associated with fatigue and just feeling really tired and rundown. So that's something that you're dealing with it's, it's highly likely you're already going to your doctor and discussing these things. So just make sure that they run a blood test with your iron levels to get that checked. So that's an easy way to get rid of iron in a prenatal is check out seeking health. There's lots of links in my posts on seeking health to connect with them. Someone Someone wants to know how old am I? I'm 38 years old now. I think I'll be 39 at the end of this year. I think I'm around the age where you just start losing track. So I'm just gonna stick with those numbers even if they're wrong. How many kids do I have? I have two beautiful boys.
And did I get pregnant naturally? Yes, I had an IVF baby out I think I was 35 when I got pregnant with him and 36 when I had him are no 34 and 35. See, you just forget these things. But I fell pregnant naturally. At the age of 36, nine years, I gave birth to him nine years from when we first tried to get started trying to conceive so I was 27 fit healthy young, I shouldn't have had no issues. And I did I had big issues and it took me a really long time to figure them out. Because there was no one around talking about about linking diet, lifestyle nutrition to fertility, especially with unexplained infertility. I think when you have unexplained infertility, you just look healthy, you're normal, you're fine. And if you don't get pregnant, it's just one of those things.
But now the science is coming out and the knowledge that is 100% not one of those things and most unexplained infertility can be explained if we just get down to the root cause of what's going on. So my next question was best foods to help you feel full and stay full longer. I think this was like what for me what it was because as you guys know I'm all about figuring out what you need to do for your body with your foods that is definitely hands down the number one thing you can do to increase your fertility to be honest foods that made me feel for it's just a lot of them was so obviously protein getting your protein is going to help you stay for you have to find your also your right amount for you.
When I eat solids, they're just large solids because you can consume a lot more of that and you are going to need to consume a lot more of that you know all the kind of heavy starches that were starches and carbs that we're trying to avoid. may seem to fill you up but it you know you're burning sugar that converts into sugar. So yeah, just Whole Foods. If you eat enough of them, you find the right balance. for you,
5:02
is going to make you feel full. I used to I know when I first started this, I used to snack in between meals, where now I You guys know I love my grated vegetables for breakfast and eggs, avocado salmon, you know, I can easily make it to lunch without having to like have a snack.
So yeah, there's not really a right answer for that one. But it's just eating the right amount for you. Let's see. So can adrenal fatigue impact your fertility? So some of you might have heard about adrenal fatigue, it might be a new term that you're just hearing about. Now, it's not necessarily like a proper medical diagnosis. But in your adrenals are your master cortisol hormone function. And when you have adrenal fatigue, which can be from, you know, over exercising, overdoing it not sleeping, all your stressors on your body can overdo your adrenals. And then your cortisol can either go up or it can go down. And then that messes with everything else, all your other hormones.
So your adrenals are a part of your endocrine system as well. And your endocrine system is basically top to bottom. It's your penal, your pituitary, your thyroid, your adrenals, your pancreas and your ovaries. So this is your endocrine system, and it works in like this big, like, oval shape loop. And they if one isn't functioning correctly, then that's highly likely the other ones are going to be going out of whack too. So adrenal fatigue, because it's part of the endocrine system. And because it is attached to your ovaries, and it is controlling a lot of your hormones, it can have a huge impact on your fertility. I think, you know, this comes back to people saying, just relax, don't stress. You know, even though we want to punch people in the face, when they say that it's really important to take control of our stressors. Because if we don't handle our stress, the stress will handle us. And in a really bad way, they'll win the war.
So when we talk about meditation, when we talk about yoga, when we talk about slowing down, saying no to people, when we talk about all those things, and dealing with life stressors, dealing with infertility stressors, is really, really important to your overall health, including your fertility health to do these things. Because it affects your adrenals. And, you know, especially if you're type A, or if you're over exercising, I know we have all kind of been taught that exercise is super good for us. And we have to go to the gym and hit it hard to lose weight. While the research is really coming out that that is the complete opposite. Because if you're putting a lot of pressure on your adrenals, your cortisol is going all over the place, your other hormones are going all over the place, all of a sudden, you're gaining weight, and you can't lose it, even though you have this perfect diet, and you hit the gym. So it's finding a really good balance, also, to support your adrenals.
Finding the right diet is really key to eliminate that stress as well. So this one kind of piggybacks on to the odds of conceiving each cycle and what you can do to improve those odds. Now, the odds of conceiving for everyone is completely different. It depends on your age or situation. Yeah, so I don't have really a straight answer for that one. And to increase your odds though, no matter who you are, what age you are, what your situation is, is finding the root cause of your issues of your stressors. So that's, you know, once again, getting back to your diet, figuring out what foods are inflammatory to you.
9:34
Dealing with your stress, all life stressors, and then obviously you have your sleep. Your sleep is you know, so important because that's when you detox your day and your body regenerates and is always trying to get into homeostasis. So and then your environmental toxins as well. So that's when the dreaded plastic comes in and your body you know Washing shampoos and your makeup and your sprays and your deodorant and all that come into play. It's finding a really good balance of what you can eliminate. So the more you can eliminate, the less stress you're going to have on your body. But you obviously want to do it that, you know, like a slow process if necessary, so you don't stress yourself out trying to do all these things. Okay, so other questions that I have?
Is infertility, a normal symptom. So, before this live, we were talking about normal health issues on IG stories. And obviously, infertility is not normal. We were all made to reproduce. Some of us definitely didn't get a full set of cards when we were born. And but most of us have all the working equipment, and something just within the body somewhere has kind of pushed our fertility off track. And this includes a new moon Josias PCOS, unexplained. You know, we are dealing with issues that are affecting our fertility, because people with endometriosis and PCOS can get pregnant, you know, some people don't have any issues. And some people have major issues. And that's all down to the genetics, and how deep your issue is. And then also, it comes back to your diet and your lifestyle. You can manage PCOS and endometriosis. You will never get rid of it. It's something that you're going to have your whole life.
But once you figure out the right diet and the right lifestyle for you, you can really manage those symptoms and really increase your odds of getting in staying pregnant with unexplained infertility, once you figure out or if you can figure out as much as possible, other issues going on with your body and reversing those. So for me, I have an overactive immune system due to a leaky gut. Now, I will always forever have that if I eat like you eat nightshade, or eat a load of gluten or drink loads of alcohol. It's something my body will always always have. But I've reversed it. And I maintain it by eating a certain way by living a certain lifestyle. And because I've reversed that my fertility came back into play. So if you don't know me by now, that was my issue for almost six years, we did not know what was causing my unexplained infertility. And once we did testing and figured out what the root cause of what was going on, I was having fertility issues, I couldn't even get pregnant with the assistance of IVF. And we did three frozen embryo transfers, which resulted in two miscarriages and one beautiful baby boy.
So and just to say on a note on that, my last frozen embryo transfer, I had the whole shebang, I had the diet, I had the lifestyle, I had an immune suppressing drugs, I had two top quality embryos, and still things didn't work out. So we have to remember that infertility is a super fickle thing. And you you know, as much as you want to have it all figured out. Sometimes we just can't do that sometimes, you know, nature is there. And as much as we want to try to control it, we just can't, we can only do the best we possibly can. And I feel really passionate that if you do keep going you do you know keep up the diet, the lifestyle, figure out what you need to do that the end result can be super magical, not only with a child but your health as well because you are going to need that the rest of your life.
14:29
So we've got a question about what can you do to improve your fertility when you have Hashimotos. Now any thyroid condition is an autoimmune issue and can definitely have an effect on your fertility because once again is part of the endocrine system. And if one of those things is whacked off then other things can fall into place. Also, thyroid issues is a pretty good saying that your body is under a lot of inflammation, and basically your body is attacking your thyroid.
So we need to once again, address why your body is doing that it's highly likely it's coming from your gut. So leaky gut syndrome. So once again, figuring out what diet you need to do, figuring out all your stressors, your mental emotional issues. And if you've been here long enough, you know, it can stem way back into your childhood. early trauma basically stays with us, whether we know it or not, and can have a real impact on our subconscious mind. So that is leading us to self sabotage. So if you have some limiting, limiting beliefs that from the past and you've continue those on, it's really easy to just give up on diet and lifestyle, give up give up on changes.
So it's really important to work on your mental emotional health to support all the necessary changes that you are going to need to make. Um, let's see adrenals we didn't die. Okay, so I've got one that what was the one thing that made you feel like you had to take care of your fertility naturally? And this question makes me laugh, because obviously, I get it a lot. And there wasn't one thing. I didn't even believe in diet, nutrition lifestyle, when I decided to do it. I literally was desperate for something to work because I still had the unexplained infertility diagnosis. And and because I'm maybe so bullheaded, that I just refused to believe that there was nothing that I can do. So I was willing to try everything. And so I was obviously still in the conventional way of thinking that IVF was maybe going to fix it or give me an answer.
That didn't happen twice. Obviously, I did every single tip and trick that Google allowed me to do, I basically took every single fertility supplement out there going, legs in the air, you know, everything. So when it was suggested by a good friend, that we change up our diet, I didn't, I didn't believe in it. But we, yeah, had a failed IVF I felt like I had already tried everything in anything.
So I was willing to just do the diet. So I connected with a coach. And he looked into a few different things and suggested basically going paleo and things started to improve my health started to improve my moods, you know, like I saw a lot of benefits, but I still wasn't getting pregnant. So we did another round of IVF. And we saw proof from the first shambles of an IVF to the second one, that the diet and a little bit of lifestyle made a huge difference. We went from basically having no viable embryos to five like great A plus plus embryos. So that was proof enough for me that what I was doing was working.
18:48
And I kept continually like growing and digging in and going deeper into things. Because on our second IVF even though we got these amazing embryos, I didn't even make it today 28 on that cycle, and it was like mind blowing, like, what does a girl have to do? So we did the immune testing, and that came back with the high natural killer cells. And because I was already on this journey of diet and lifestyle, I just dug into more of why why do I still have that when I have seemingly the most amazing diet and you know, a pretty good lifestyle didn't feel like I was overly stressed. And then that's where the autoimmune came from.
That's where I learned about leaky gut. That's where I learned more about mindset and you continue on and on. And that's where you learn about your limiting beliefs and your subconscious and the trauma that you hold. So it's all this huge snowball effect. It's definitely a lot of matrix is like well like the blue pill, the red pill, once you die Sighs to even, you know, lick that pill, maybe you don't even swallow it whole. You see the amazing benefits and the results that you can get when you dig deep and get into your diet, your lifestyle and start changing things up. So we also talked about you know, the normal health issues, and you saw my list. You know, I had like the IVs, the snotty nose, allergies, I had signs of an ulcer. I mean, the list goes on for me, and some people added to that list, and I'm just going to read a few endometriosis, the PCOS tendinitis as my kidneys nose, Hashimotos backache, irregular or absent periods and just being put on birth control to solve that issue. I got a comment to that none of these are normal, common, but not normal. And totally 100%. And that's the point.
But the thing is, is that I think as a society, we look at these things as normal. And we definitely do not link them to fertility issues. If we're having those fertility issues, you know, we are very much focused on the ovaries and that area. And, you know, even when you have endometriosis, endometriosis and PCOS, you know, it's very much focused on that area, not like what is having an impact on those specific normal health issues. So it all can be mostly time reverted back to your gut, and then also, your adrenals and your endocrine system.
Those are the two main things that I as a fertility health coach, look into your ovaries in your room, or I don't even look at those because I know that they're I know they're functioning for the most part, because you've already had a doctor look at them at several times, inside and out.
So we're looking at the other areas that can have a really big impact on your fertility, health, and finding ways that you can improve those situations. It's very rare that you cannot improve your normal health issues with finding what is the underlying cause of it, and how we can support that with the right diet for you. You might need supplementation I'm not a huge fan of like bombarding people with like 10 different supplements. I truly believe that if you get the right diet and do the right lifestyle, you don't need as many supplements. But if you are dealing with a gut issue, say, a parasite, or bacterial overgrowth, you definitely need to address that with supplementation. If you you know, supplements are there to help ease any symptoms, they're not going to get rid of them. And they might help ease your way through healing.
23:27
So So yeah, any kind of normal health issues that you're dealing with, can definitely be improved by figuring it out. I know, a lot of people with secondary infertility really struggle with this because they got pregnant easily, let's say or didn't think about getting pregnant and there was baby. And then all of a sudden, they're dealing with issues that they maybe never thought they were dealing with before because infertility has highlighted highlighted them. But what happens with secondary infertility is that you are on a slow path of decline. We all are right if we're not taking care of our health, other than ageing because we're all gonna die. But if we're, you know, like really impacting our health through diet lifestyle. You know, we're on this decline. Now, some people like myself, I was there early on, like, I'm pretty sure I was infertile at like 19 years old, like hands down.
I'm sure I had high NK cells, probably even in my early teens. But for other people, it doesn't happen until later in life, and this can be after a kid or two. I know I spoke with someone who had four kids really early on in life she was now only late 30s and struggling to get pregnant. And that was just Her system is catching up with her and they were just whacked. And especially if you have kids already, that's just going to add to the other stressors that have been on your body. So, for all of us, no matter where we are, it is super important to take care of our health in a whole body situation. And, you know, we easily get hung up on our lady bits because that's what we're dealing with is fertility. But at the end of the day, we're it's all connected, you're literally like what four feet away from each other, you know, like all of your organs, everything you need to function is in this small little package. And yet we are so easily just dismiss the impact that it can have on other areas of the body.
So I hope that that has helped sum up a few things for you. If you've had any, you know, lingering, lingering look anyone say the word questions about you know, dealing with your adrenals or dealing with your gut and relating those to fertility. You guys know that I do one on one coaching. So if you want any support or help during these times to really figure out what's going on if you are like done and dusted with guessing I'm here there is a waiting list for the one on one coaching so get on the waiting list and 2020 seems to you know kind of be branded the shit year of the last like century. But let's make this your year to figure out what your fertility issues are and conquer that so that is me you guys have a beautiful day. Thank you so much for joining in and please reach out with any questions.
26:54
Thank you once again for joining us for another episode of finding fertility if you're loving the podcast please leave us a rating and review. Let us know how this podcast is helping you through your infertility journey. Hope you have a beautiful weekend and we will see you next Tuesday for another closer today clip
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Monica
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Anything written or said about health and diet are my opinions, that I have formed over the years, through trial and error, study, reading, listening and observing. What worked for me may not work for you. I am not a doctor, nutritionist or dietician and all medical advice should be gotten from a qualified professional. Product recommendations are based on what I used during my infertility journey or wish I had.
