Fertility treatments don’t always have to be expensive and sophisticated technologies; sometimes just improving your diet and lifestyle can help offset your infertility.
Even if fitness isn’t a motivation enough for you to follow a healthy diet, you may want to just eat well to make yourself more fertile. By cleansing your diet of toxins, including healthy foods in your meals, and following a good exercise routine you can improve your fertility levels.
According to a large Harvard study that followed 18,000 women for several years, women with irregular periods or ovulation problems can improve their fertility by 80 percent only by making some changes to their diet.
So let’s look at some dietary habits that are conducive to conceiving:
1. Eat more complex carbohydrates – Bad carbs like cookies, sweets, cakes, white bread, etc. are quickly digested by the body and turned into bloodsugar.
This causes an insulin spike in your body and high levels of insulin are known to mess with ovulation.
Instead, when you eat complex carbs like whole grains, beans, etc. your bloodsugar rises gradually, so there is no spike in insulin levels and consequently no problem in ovulation.
2. Replace animal protein with plant protein – Researchers involved in the Harvard study have advised that you replace the animal protein—beef, pork, chicken—in your diet with vegetable protein—nuts, quinoa, buckwheat, beans, peas, lentils, kale, etc.
Plant protein is much lower in calories and contains healthy fats, so it is helpful for weight loss and pregnancy.
3. Have unsaturated fats instead of trans fats – Commercial baked foods, fried stuff such as French fries, snacks, margarines, animal products, etc are high in trans fats, which are known to increase insulin resistance.
That means it takes more effort and time for the body to move bloodsugar to the cells, which is why the body keeps pumping out more and more insulin. As stated in the above point, more insulin can create ovulation provblems and result in poor fertility.
In a separate study it was found that with every 2 percent increase in energy from trans fats, as compared to the same increase from carbohydrates, the risk of ovulatory infertility rises by 73 percent.
4. Include high-fat dairy in your diet – Skimmed milk may be helpful in cutting calories but full-fat dairy is recommended for increased fertility.
Harvard researchers found that women who had too many low-fat dairy products in their diet were less likely to conceive easily.
This is probably because the fat in dairy comes with female hormones such as estrogen and progesterone, which get removed when the fat is skimmed away.
Male hormones are left behind in low-fat dairy, so if you are only consuming that, it can throw off your hormonal balance.
However, you must take care to balance the high fat dairy with exercise, so it does not lead to weight gain.
5. Don’t forget your multivitamins – When women took multivitamin tablets containing 400 micrograms of folic acid, their fertility levels were improved. The risk of ovulatory infertility in these women was down by 40 percent.
When you are trying to get pregnant, it is not just bedroom business. There are several ways to improve your fertility and one of them is simply sticking to a good diet.
Besides, yoga, moderate exercise, and a stress-free life are suggested to improve your fertility levels.
