What You Are Not Being Told About Your Fertility
- Brainz Magazine
- 5 hours ago
- 9 min read
Kate Oliver is a functional health and nutrition coach specialising in gut, hormone and nervous system imbalances. She is the founder of Kate Oliver Coaching, which provides one-to-one support and online learning programmes, helping people to resolve the root causes of their health issues, for lasting wellness.
Many of us will wake up one day, unable to comprehend that making babies, supposedly the ‘most natural thing in the world,’ just isn’t happening for us.
But this was the timing that worked in your life plan. Maybe you finally met the person you want to have babies with. Maybe you now have the home you can imagine raising children in. Maybe you are at a point in your career where you can afford to take time away. It’s the right time to start a family.
The problem is that our fertility doesn’t dance to the tune of our rational life plan.
Our fertility care only about whether the union of egg and sperm is optimal enough for them to grow into a human being. Furthermore, as a female, it cares about whether your body can provide the safe and nourishing conditions needed for a baby to thrive, and for you to withstand the massive strain pregnancy will put on you.
Knowing this doesn’t make it any easier. A study showed that women struggling to get pregnant after two years experienced depression symptoms equivalent to people who had been diagnosed with cancer or heart disease. This might sound far-fetched to those who are fertile, those who have decided against children or those who don’t know what they want yet. But to me, it’s completely believable. You see, this is a very unique kind of journey, one where every single month you go through a process of hope followed by despair. Even if you try not to, every month that comes around, there is a small part of you that thinks this month will be the one. After all, you’ve done everything right, how could it not be? But this feeling swiftly shifts to one of utter desperation. What did I do wrong? Or even shame, how could I be so stupid as to believe it this time? Over time, this cycle wears you down to the point where you can feel hopeless and yes, depressed.
Surrendering to your body’s fertility timeline
My own journey to becoming a mother started in a gynaecologist's office, where they told me there was nothing wrong with me or my husband. In other words, they didn’t know what was wrong.
What was interesting was that no one was curious about the fact that I had suffered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome two years earlier, I had gone a whole year without a menstrual cycle and I was still suffering from an array of vague but debilitating symptoms such as recurrent infections, dizziness, anxiety and bouts of significant fatigue.
After some hormonal therapy to try to regulate my cycles, but which didn’t result in the baby we longed for, we were referred for in vitro fertilisation (IVF). I knew in my heart and my gut that if we tried it, it would fail; my body was not ready to welcome and nourish a baby. We would end up burning through money we didn’t have and suffering even more of an emotional toll than we were already facing, because whilst IVF is incredible, it can be brutal too.
By this point, I had found functional medicine, and I knew that our answers lay in healing my gut, my immune system, and my nervous system. When I did, my body would know it was safe enough to grow a baby. So we spent the next two years rebuilding my health and optimising my husband’s. We learnt to surrender to the timings of our bodies, timings we didn’t have sight of but had to trust in.
It took four and a half long and emotionally exhausting years to get to our baby bo,y who was in no small way helped along by the incredible invention that is IVF, but who probably wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t done all the other work on our health.
Whilst it’s quite possible that he would have come along naturally in the end, age was a factor we had to take into account, and I believe our story shows that a combination of conventional medicine and lifestyle medicine is often very effective.
Understanding why you are facing fertility issues
If you have been struggling with fertility, you might find yourself diagnosed with something specific, like polycystic ovarian syndrome, endometriosis or low sperm count. Or you might be told that your fertility struggles are ‘unexplained’.
Depending on what is going on, the treatments available range from supplemental hormones to surgery to being referred for IVF. Whilst these treatments can bring you to that miracle baby, it’s unlikely that anyone has told you why you had to go down this road in the first place. Why was your sperm not doing what it should? Why was your uterus an ‘inhospitable environment’? Why could you not reproduce when it’s the ‘most natural thing in the world’?
Sadly, many people are not lucky enough to get a miracle baby at the end of their treatment, which is often exhausting, gruelling and takes a significant toll on the woman’s body. In these people, the root causes of their fertility issues may not have been found.
Even if you are successful, there is a reason why your body was preventing you from becoming pregnant. Our body does everything for a good reason. If you have circumvented that reason with a treatment like IVF, does your body just move those symptoms elsewhere and ask you, again, to pay attention?
Are issues such as gestational diabetes, post-natal depression and autoimmune thyroiditis, the imbalances which put pressure on fertility, showing up in another form?
Infertility is a whole-body issue
Fertility medicine looks at one narrow area of the body for answers, it looks at the reproductive organs. Yet, every organ system in the body is connected and communicating with each other all of the time:
When our body is in a state of oxidative stress from too many toxic inputs (alcohol, stress, sugar, ultra-processed foods, environmental chemicals) and we don’t have enough antioxidants from nutrients and good liver health, we will not produce good-quality eggs and sperm.
When our liver has become ‘fatty’ from blood sugar imbalances, it is less efficient at clearing excess oestrogen, which may lead to endometriosis or simply an imbalance in sex hormones, which can interfere with ovulation and sperm.
When our thyroid is underactive because of nutrient deficiencies, stress or inflammation, it can interfere with the release of an egg from the ovaries, cause insulin issues resulting in polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) and affect sperm quality.
When our gut is imbalanced from poor-quality foods, toxins or stress, it can lead to poor sperm quality, and in women, the overproduction of androgen hormones resulting in PCOS.
When our adrenal glands are under pressure from psychological or physical stress, they produce high levels of cortisol, which can lead to insufficient progesterone to maintain a pregnancy.
How much does age affect fertility?
A woman assigned female at birth is born with a finite number of eggs that she will not produce any more in her lifetime. Each month her body selects a group of eggs which could be contenders for ovulation. In a healthy body, where the menstrual cycle is working as it should, one of those eggs will be taken to ovulation and the rest of the eggs die. This means that every month a woman’s egg reserve declines, and by the time she is in her 40s, she will have, on average, approximately 10% of the eggs she was born with.
In addition, a woman’s egg quality diminishes with age (1), simply due to being exposed to factors which cause oxidative stress (toxins, ultra-processed foods, alcohol, sugar, stress) for longer. But this is where it gets interesting.
If we live in a way that limits our exposure to things which put our body under stress and maximises the things which promote our health, we can maintain a healthy number of good-quality eggs for longer.
Whilst men do not face the same level of age-related decline in their sperm, sperm is highly affected by oxidative stress. So the choices we make have a very real impact on our ability to reproduce later in life.
This is why I believe in biological age over chronological age. You can be healthier and more fertile at 45 than someone making different choices at 35. We are the architects of our destiny.
Fertility: The functional medicine approach
1. Start by asking yourself the tough questions
Is your lifestyle truly aligned with what is required to grow and raise a baby?
Do you know how to look after yourself?
How much do you lean on substances which help you to deal with stress, such as caffeine, sugar and alcohol?
If you are female, are you ready for your body to be under, perhaps, the most significant amount of pressure it has ever faced?
2. Hold a mirror up to the stress in your life and make changes
Stress is the elephant in the room for almost every client I see. Many of us are attached to how the stress in our lives benefits us, whether that be a certain identity, the adrenaline rush of achieving something, or simply a distraction from feeling tough emotions. There is no way to sugarcoat it. Chronic stress is the enemy of fertility, so now is the time to take a hard look at it. Sometimes we need to make different life choices and sometimes it’s enough to create habits which build resilience in our nervous system. Some simple things we can all do is have less screen time (especially before bed), more time in nature and more boundaries around our rest and sleep time.
3. Good nutrition is fundamental to good egg and sperm quality, and for growing a healthy baby
Whilst supplements are helpful, they are not enough on their own. Real food is many times more effective at providing you with the nutrients you need, in the doses you need. A good place to start is by removing or limiting the things which deplete your body, such as ultra-processed foods, alcohol, caffeine, and artificial sugar. Eat a wide range of colourful vegetables, good quality protein such as grass-fed meat, wild fish, tofu and eggs, healthy fats such as nuts, seeds and extra virgin olive oil and complex carbohydrates such as sweet potato and whole grains.
4. Skip fasting and welcome in fat
Many women I see in my clinic are restricting calories in an unhealthy way or skipping breakfast. This very often creates more stress in an already stressed body, the opposite of what we want for fertility. Fat is, quite literally, the starting point of all hormone production, so if you are avoiding it, you likely won’t make enough of the hormones needed for reproduction. The key is to know which fats are healthy and which are not. Focus on monounsaturated fats from olive oil, seeds, and avocado, and omega-3 fats from fatty fish and walnuts.
5. Understand your level of toxin exposure
It is now widely understood that toxins in our environment interfere with hormone balance.
I carry out a toxin inventory with all my clients, especially those wanting to improve their fertility and have a healthy pregnancy. A good place to start is with anything that goes on your skin because there is no intricate digestive system between our skin and our bloodstream.
6. Endometriosis, PCOS, poor sperm motility? Trace the root cause upstream
Rather than only putting a ‘sticking plaster’ over it with a drug or hormone, work with someone who can help you identify and then unravel all the connected puzzle pieces in your unique body.
7. Consider functional testing to understand the root causes
Blood tests only go so far, especially when looking at hormones, which fluctuate every minute of every day. DUTCH testing looks at hormones over 24 hours, how they interact with each other and the role that stress plays in hormone balance. In addition, it’s important to get a full thyroid panel tested, not just TSH, which is what is typically reviewed. I have seen plenty of people with healthy TSH levels, yet they have an underlying thyroid problem.
8. Finally, don’t wait to find out
It’s so easy to normalise symptoms like irregular, painful or heavy menstrual cycles, low energy levels, anxiety, or gut issues, but all of these symptoms could be ‘simmering’ imbalances which lead to fertility problems. Rather than waiting until you want to try for a baby, answer your body’s cries now. If you are putting up with symptoms such as these, your body is trying to tell you something, but are you ready to listen?
Read more from Kate Oliver
Kate Oliver, Functional Health and Nutrition Coach
Kate Oliver is a functional health and nutrition coach specialising in gut, hormone and nervous system imbalances. After suffering her own health crisis for which she struggled to find answers, Kate teaches people about what is happening in their body so they can take control, advocate for themselves and develop the lifelong practices which will enable them to thrive. Kate holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Sheffield, a certificate of health coaching from the Institute of Integrated Nutrition and is a functional medicine practitioner with the School of Applied Functional Medicine.
References:
Diminished Ovarian Reserve – Cleveland Clinic
Oxidative Stress and Infertility: Causes and Consequences – International Journal of Molecular Sciences
Reproductive Toxicity of Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals – Frontiers in Endocrinology
The Role of Gut Microbiota in Reproduction and Infertility – Biology of Reproduction
Male Reproductive Health and Environmental Toxins – Environmental Health Perspectives
Effects of Diet and Lifestyle on Sperm Quality – Nutrients
The Impact of Endocrine Disruptors on Female Fertility – Environmental Health
Stress and Its Impact on Fertility – Journal of Human Reproductive Sciences
Environmental Exposure and Male Reproductive Function – Environmental Science and Pollution Research
Microbiota and Endometrial Receptivity in Infertility – Maturitas
The Gut Microbiome and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) – European Fertility Society
Gut Microbiota and Sperm Motility – Antioxidants
Plastics, Environment, and Reproductive Health – Environmental Health Perspectives
Endocrine Disruptors and Reproductive Health – Current Opinion in Pharmacology
Understanding Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals – National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
