Infertility and Diet -Where to Start

Happy Monday, all the things. I am back here doing the same title. Um, if you look that I did on Friday, um, I had some technology problems, so I'm back to my trusty headset and praying that this goes out, uh, the way that it's supposed to. So I'm Erica Hoke. I'm an infertility coach and I'm talking to you today about infertility and diet and where to start because I get this question all the time. And honestly, when people start thinking about it, they get super overwhelmed, right? And it doesn't have to be that hard. So where, where I tell people to start, first of all, why are we even talking about infertility and diet? Um, we're talking about infertility and diet because your gut health, um, is super, super important to your overall health, but especially your fertility health. So, um, if you've never heard of something called leaky gut, A lot of people are walking around with leaky gut, um, symptoms, and that is what's causing their infertility, and they don't even know, right? So if you back that all the way up, then it's our diet, right? It's what we put in and on our body, not just what we're eating. So we're not just talking about what we're eating. So what I tell people when they're getting started making dietary changes is think about what your favorite foods are, right? Um, think about what your favorite foods are and let's not start there. Okay. So there are some inflammatory foods like dairy and, um, different oils. Palm oil is super inflammatory. Vegetable oil is super inflammatory. Canola oil is super inflammatory. So, um, Those things affect your gut health. They affect your diet. Corn syrup is super inflammatory and causes a lot of leaky gut because, and this is what I was talking about on the video on Friday, corn is one of the heavily, most heavily sprayed produce products, vegetables on the planet. Like when you see people of the, the, see the photos of the people out in the field with like the full hazmat dress, they're usually spraying corn, okay? It's super, super heavily sprayed. Um, corn syrup is then the concentrated form of the corn, so you've got a high level of glycosphate in corn syrup. Corn syrup is in everything. And dye— food dyes. We know food dyes are carcinogens, so it's not made up, it's not a myth, it's not Um, something for debate. We know that red dye, yellow dye, those are all carcinogens. A lot of them, a lot of us are ingesting those on a regular basis. Excuse me. And they are leading to leaky gut. So when you're looking at your diet, first of all, we want to— our goal is a whole food, unprocessed diet, right? Okay. So do you have more money than you have time, or do you have more time than money? The reason that I ask that and the The reason that we're kind of going to start there and systematically work our way down is if you have more time than money, then you can do more food prep, right? Um, and you can shop a little bit more and things like that. If you have more money than time and you still need convenience foods, then we need to start there. So basically what we're going to do is we're going to answer those— one of those, pick one of those, right? And then we're going to start working our way down. So starting with proteins and vegetables. You can look at ewg.org at the Dirty Dozen and the Clean 15 list for vegetables. We want to get our protein switched out to an organic protein, not only because of hormones and pesticides, things like that, okay? And then we want to look at overall what's gonna be the easiest for us to switch. So do you like fried food a lot? Do you eat a lot of pizza? We want to start eliminating the inflammatory foods that are easiest— easy— easiest. Not easy for me to say this morning. Easiest for us to switch out. So I was talking to a client the other day and she said, listen, you know, I, I'm trying to switch out dairy, but I realized in buying all this fake dairy, this vegan dairy, that there's a lot of bad ingredients in that. And so this is what I said to her, because this is the other part of switching your diet and making changes. Some people, most of us, feel like if we can't do it perfectly, it's not worth doing at all. So I said to her, I said, okay, so you've switched out these dairy items. You're being intentional, what I call intentional, intentionally eating your dairy, because dairy also is in everything. So you're intentionally eating dairy. So you're not eating dairy on salads, which it adds no flavor. Dairy on, um, even on sandwiches doesn't add a lot of flavor for the most part unless you're eating like a really strong cheese. So we're going to want to be intentional with the dairy, take the dairy out where it doesn't provide taste and it doesn't matter, right? So white bread, chips, lunch meat— dairy has lunch— lunch meat has dairy in it. Stop eating, you know, yogurts and drinking milks and things like that and substitute those. But if you're like me and you love a good pizza once in a while, you can eliminate all this trace dairy, all this junk dairy, and stop eating dairy and still have pizza. This all or nothing mentality is not going to— it's not going to serve us. So the same goes with other things. If you can easily— if you eat a lot of sautéed foods, a lot of fried foods, switching out your oils is going to help your inflammation. Okay. So I'm doing a whole gut health deep dive later this week. And so you can take a look at the rest of the information there. It's in my group, Infertility Empowered. I hope this came through. This morning. Just got a notification that it might be a little janky again, so, um, I will work on my tech end, uh, technology issues on my end, and I will see you Wednesday. Health and blessings to you.