Erica Hoke, a fertility coach, explains why regular periods don't guarantee you're ovulating, and covers three hidden reasons for infertility: you might not be ovulating despite regular cycles, you could have blocked tubes or fibroids, or low progesterone could be causing miscarriages.
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I have regular periods. Why can't I get pregnant? I hear this all the time. Today we're going to talk about 3 reasons that if you have regular periods, why you might not be able to get pregnant. Hi, I'm Erica Hoke. I'm the Infertile Mom of 4, and I'm a fertility coach, and I'm passionate about empowering you to your best optimized fertility health. So let's get started today. So if you have regular periods, that does not necessarily mean that you are ovulating regularly. So the first step is to determine, one, are you ovulating, and, uh, track your ovulation with, uh, an app or something like that. So you ovulate, um, usually on every other side, every other month, alternating sides. And so it's important to verify via ovulation predictor strips that you are actually getting a peak and that you're for sure ovulating. Um, the second thing that I would tell you to investigate with your, uh, practitioner is structural issues to your uterus and your anatomy in general. Things like blocked tubes. So you can, um, be having a regular cycle and still have a blocked tube, and then that's going to reduce your chances by 50%, right? So if you're ovulating every other side and you have a blocked tube on one side, that's going to reduce your chances by half automatically. So you want to make sure that your tubes are open, and that can be done with a simple outpatient, outpatient procedure. You also want to talk to your practitioner about other structural problems in your uterus. Sometimes there is a misshapen uterus. Sometimes you, if you're experiencing secondary infertility, there's some scar tissue that can happen from C-sections. Or some scar tissue that can form after delivery, creating adhesions to your abdominal wall, to your tubes, to your ovaries. All manner of things can kind of get stuck together. Your cervix can have scar tissue on it as well. So you want to make sure that your cervix is open, that your tubes are open, that your cervix— that your— sorry, that your uterus is not having any irregularity because of adhesions or things like fibroids, uterine fibroids, which normally if you're having extensively heavy periods and a lot of pain, you're going to have fibroids. It could also be a cyst or something of that nature. So the third thing that I want to talk to you about is if your periods are— if your cycles are regular and you can't get pregnant, is progesterone. So progesterone is super important to pregnancy and maintaining pregnancy. And a lot of times you can have low progesterone and be having a repeat miscarriage. You can have low progesterone and be having chemical pregnancies. So you want to make sure that you get your progesterone checked and that the levels are optimal for supporting a pregnancy. Now, progesterone can be— progesterone can be administered 3 different ways, both orally, vaginally and topically. And you— I would suggest to you that you get all 3 of those in your system because they're all going to interact with your hormone levels differently. And progesterone is easily excreted by the body if you get a little bit more than you need. So those are my tips today. And if you are looking for more information like this and you like my content, you can follow me here. But I have a private support group on Facebook called Infertility Empowered, and I will drop the link in the comments here. I will see you next time. Health and blessings to you.
