Before you start trying to get pregnant, you should be doing this…
You can improve your chances of conception, enhance the health of your baby (throughout their lifetime!), and contribute to a healthier pregnancy if you can take a little time to care for yourself before you start trying to conceive.
What can you do? Make sure you’re getting all the essential nutrients, support your detoxification, cultivate a healthy microbiome, create a healthy endometrial lining, ensure you have good oral health, have your doctor check your thyroid, and you can even improve your genetic expression. These are all things that need to be done before you get pregnant in order to access their benefits for you and your baby and are incredibly powerful for creating a healthy pregnancy and a healthy family. The sooner you get started, the better!
Get replete in essential nutrients
It’s vital to support your nutritional status long before you get pregnant. Intentionally getting replete with many essential nutrients will improve the quality of your eggs and the health of your baby once you do get pregnant, prevent miscarriages, and support your health during your pregnancy.
You want to be doing this before you get pregnant for many reasons. First of all, it’s a losing battle if you wait until you are pregnant. Eating can become pretty tricky in your first trimester. Many people become adverse to things like vegetables and animal protein, some women have a hard time eating at all because of the nausea that they experience. Making sure your baby has the proper nutrients to grow ideally starts many months before you see that positive pregnancy test.
Ensuring that you are getting all of the essential nutrients will improve the quality of your eggs. Good egg quality will result in higher chances of conception and a lower risk of miscarriage. Your eggs begin developing many months before they get to the ovulation stage. The most influential time for your eggs is in the early development stages when they are susceptible to nutritional status and environmental factors. So make sure you are consuming important nutrients such as folate and other B vitamins, vitamin D, choline, magnesium, iron, selenium, and omega-3s many months before you start trying to ensure your eggs are ready for a healthy pregnancy.
Plus, early in pregnancy, before the placenta is formed, the embryo gets its nutrition from the endometrium and the egg sac that is formed by the egg, so healthy eggs are how your baby grows and develops in the early weeks of pregnancy.
Let’s talk about one vitamin for example. By becoming replete in Vitamin D, you can slow down your ovarian aging, support good hormone balance, potentially prevent adverse pregnancy outcomes, and even positively affect your genetic expression. Pretty cool, huh? For instance, studies show that adequate vitamin D status in early pregnancy may reduce your baby’s risk of developing diabetes. Sufficient vitamin D levels in early pregnancy may also reduce your risk of developing bacterial vaginosis in pregnancy, which is linked to adverse pregnancy outcomes such as preterm birth, late miscarriage, and low birth weight. Having adequate vitamin D levels while TTC is also associated with higher implantation rates.
What can you do?
Make sure the majority of your meals are nutrient dense. Regularly eat healthy animal proteins such as organic chicken, low-mercury fish, pasteurized eggs, and grass-fed beef and boost your diet with things like bone broth and liver. Ensure you are “eating the rainbow” in order to get plenty of micronutrients. Eat 6-8 cups of a variety of colorful vegetables and berries daily.
In addition, start taking a high-quality prenatal vitamin as soon as possible. You want to choose a vitamin that includes nutrients such as folate, vitamin B6, choline, zinc, iodine, and iron. (You can get 10% off of my favorite prenatal vitamins here). In addition, you may want to consider taking vitamin D, a good quality fish oil, a probiotic (more on this below), and a magnesium supplement.
Support detoxification
Environmental toxins have been shown to have adverse effects on fertility, pregnancy, and the health of your offspring.
Toxin exposure and toxin accumulation can hinder your ability to conceive, and if you do conceive, can potentially lead to preterm birth, low birth weight, and neurodevelopmental delays. Exposure of the fetus to toxins is also associated with health problems later in life such as obesity, ADHD, cancer, and endocrine disorders.
Unfortunately, we are all exposed to endocrine-disrupting toxins through our water, air, household cleaners, beauty products, clothing, plastics, furniture, and more, and many of these toxins don’t break down in our bodies, they bioaccumulate overtime and get stored in our tissues.
Two important steps of preconception care are reducing your exposure to whatever toxins you can avoid and helping your body excrete and reduce your toxin load. There are many ways to do this, but just to name a few, make sure you’re having daily bowel movements, regularly break a sweat, and support your liver with the proper nutrition and botanicals.
However, it is definitely not a good idea to actively support detoxification while trying to get pregnant, or if you’re already pregnant. Reducing your exposure to environmental toxins, and actively supporting your natural detox pathways should be done months before you start trying.
There is no need to think in extremes. Supporting your natural detoxification is not starving yourself on green juices or doing extreme cleanses. It’s about knowing how to assist and improve what your body is already busy doing for you. It’s not difficult, but it does take time.
Cultivate a healthy microbiome
Taking care of your microbiome is a secret to good wellness throughout your lifetime, and it’s especially important when you are trying to conceive and once you are pregnant.
Your microbiome is the community of microorganisms that live within (and on) your body.
If your microbiome is healthy, it will help you create a robust immune system, synthesize your vitamins, break down toxins, and reduce inflammation and the risk of disease. However, an unhealthy or imbalanced microbiome can cause a whole host of problems in your digestive system, reproductive system, immune system, and more.
We now know that the microbiome plays a role in every part of conception and pregnancy, as well as a significant role in the health of your baby after birth. While there is no such thing as a perfect microbiome (we all have our own unique blueprint), having an abundance of beneficial species, and a low occurrence of the “bad bugs” is beneficial for getting pregnant and having a healthy pregnancy.
When we think of the microbiome, we often think of the gut, but we also have unique microbiomes in our vagina and endometrium that contribute to our chances of conception and a healthy pregnancy. Studies suggest that an abnormal vaginal microbiome in early pregnancy is associated with a five-fold increase in late miscarriage and preterm birth. Both your intestinal and reproductive microbiomes are important to care for. To improve the microbiome, you can start by ensuring you’re eating plenty of fiber, prebiotic and probiotic foods, and reducing things that feed undesirable bugs such as sugar, refined carbohydrates, and alcohol. To keep your vagina healthy, treat any underlying infections and wear breathable, cotton underwear.
Make sure your teeth and gums are healthy
Speaking of the microbiome…did you know recent studies suggest that the placental microbiome is most closely associated with the oral microbiome of the mother? Researchers are investigating if inflammation in the placenta could be a reason for preeclampsia and preterm birth, and its associations with periodontal disease. Ensuring your teeth and gums are healthy can be a great preventative measure for the health of your pregnancy.
However, you do not want to wait until you are already pregnant to get dental work done. The bacteria levels inside your mouth increase significantly in early pregnancy. Early and late pregnancy are not typically a great time for dental work due to this change in bacteria levels. Ideally, you would have your dentist check things out to make sure you don’t have gum disease or oral infections that need to be addressed before you start trying to conceive.
Eating a healthy diet, caring for your gut microbiome, and regularly brushing and flossing can all help you care for your oral health during your preconception phase.
Support a healthy endometrial lining
East Asian medicine has always taken careful observation of the quality of the women’s endometrial lining, and if necessary, it takes measures to ensure a healthy build and flow of the period. This is one of the reasons EA medicine can be very successful in helping couples conceive.
For example, signs such as heavy bleeding, dark and clotty bleeding, or even very bright red blood can show signs of inflammation and a less-than-ideal endometrial lining for healthy implantation. Very thin or light-colored bleeding can suggest nutrient deficiencies that need to be addressed
Luckily, much can be done to change the quality of your lining. Diet changes, castor oil packs, acupuncture, abdominal massage, and herbal medicine can all be beneficial in changing the quality of your endometrium for the better.
The best interventions for you depend on your experience of your bleeding, so pay attention to the quality of your blood during your period and take notes. What sanitary items are you using and how often do you need to change them throughout the day? Do you have pain with your period and when does it start…before, during, or after? Are you seeing clots when you bleed? How large are they? What color is your bleeding? How many days do you bleed?
Work to pass on better gene expression down to your little one
Habits such as exercise, eating nutritious foods, and stress management can positively modify the behavior of the genes you pass down to your children. This works through the magic of epigenetics. According to Dr. Kara Fitzgerald, “Epigenetics refers to the biological markers that sit on top of your genetic material and dictate which genes are turned on and which are turned off. To use a computer analogy, your DNA is the hardware—it is what it is. It can be damaged, and it can be repaired, but without software, it can’t do much. So what’s the software? That is epigenetics.”
Studies in epigenetics suggest that the lifestyles of parents can have vital effects on the health of their children and future generations. It might help keep you motivated to take care of yourself knowing that exercising and eating your greens could reduce the chances of your child developing diabetes or lower their cardiovascular risk.
Make sure your thyroid function is optimal
A thyroid hormone imbalance of any kind can have a negative impact on your reproductive health, making it difficult to become pregnant. Even minor thyroid dysfunction can increase your risk of ovulatory disorders, miscarriages, and poor fetal development.
Signs of an underactive thyroid include fatigue, lethargy, weight gain, feeling cold, or cold hands and feet, dry skin, thinning of the eyebrow, constipation, and brain fog. If your thyroid is overactive you may feel anxious, irritable, have some tremors or shaking, insomnia, and experience skipped periods.
Many women in the early stages of having an underactive or overactive thyroid experience very few symptoms and don’t even know there is a problem. Therefore, if you are thinking about getting pregnant, or actively trying to conceive, it’s a good idea to ask your doctor to check your thyroid lab values the next time they run a blood test. You want to have a TSH value (TSH stands for Thyroid Stimulating Hormone–this is the most commonly checked lab value for thyroid function) that is between 0.5-3 mU/L and ideally between 1-2 mU/L. If you have any symptoms of a thyroid imbalance, TSH alone doesn’t show a big enough picture of what is happening with your thyroid, and you should ask for a full thyroid workup that includes TSH, T4, free T4, free T3, TPO , and Anti TG.
It can take a few months to improve thyroid function, so the earlier you know how well your thyroid is working, the better.
Does this feel like a long list? That’s exactly why I created the Root Care Coaching Program in a 4 to 6-month format. The program gives you plenty of time to learn how to support your detoxification, improve your egg quality, and address any imbalances before you conceive, while still having support once you are ready.
If you would like to work together, fill out the application form on the contact page of my website and we can schedule a time to meet before we get started.
SOURCES
https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/committee-opinion/articles/2021/07/reducing-prenatal-exposure-to-toxic-environmental-agents
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