Erica Hoke shares five ways to prepare your body for pregnancy: cut coffee (it increases estrogen and cortisol), eat whole foods high in antioxidants like dark leafy greens and berries, skip processed carbs, take food-based supplements, and do light daily exercise like walking to boost oxygen.
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Oftentimes when women are getting ready to go through IVF, they'll ask me, how can I prepare my uterus to be optimal to receive the IVF transfer? Or if they're trying to get pregnant on their own, how can I increase my chances? How can I prepare my uterus for pregnancy? There are a few things that I feel like are really important in this aspect, and I'm just going to break it to you. One of them is cutting out coffee, not necessarily caffeine, although caffeine is not great for your body either, but specifically coffee, which everyone is super addicted to, and it's a really hard conversation to have, is detrimental in a few different ways. Most coffee has a high mold toxicity level, so you're ingesting amounts of mold into your body and funguses and things like that, which are, as you can imagine, not good to your overall health. Caffeine, coffee can also increase your estrogen production. So that, as you can imagine, when you're looking for optimal health and optimal conditions for transfer or for getting pregnant naturally, is not a good way to go. Um, coffee can also increase the permeability of your gut. So, um, very briefly, if you've heard me talk about leaky gut before, a lot of people, um, think of their intestines as a garden hose that is a sealed, um, tube, but in fact it's more permeable and it has junctures like this. And so caffeine, coffee specifically, opens up those junctures and allows the toxins into your bloodstream, which is not great for your overall health and certainly not good for your reproductive health. The other thing that it does is it creates a negative cortisol loop. So the abundance of caffeine contributes to increase cortisol. Cortisol is also a contributor to hormone disruption as well. So that's just one thing, you guys, that you can do to help increase your chances of getting pregnant and staying pregnant is cutting out caffeine, um, especially around transfer time. Uh, the second thing that you can do is you can eat a high antioxidant diet. Now, antioxidants reduce free radicals in your body, and I'm not going to go into that today, but you can Google that. Um, so what are antioxidant foods. What do they look like? They're typically your dark leafy greens, things like spinach, kale, broccoli, Brussels, things like that have a high level of antioxidants in them. And then your dark red fruits and berries or your dark berries, blueberries, pomegranate, strawberries, dark cherry, tart cherry juice, all of those things are high in antioxidant and also wolfberry as well. Eating a whole foods diet with as little processed food that you can consume as possible, and that includes refined carbohydrates like breads and pastas and things like that. The third thing is, if you're keeping track by number or taking notes, is taking quality supplements. So I always recommend a food-based supplement and a non-synthetic supplement. So taking quality supplements will help support your reproductive health and your body. Also increasing the oxygen that you are— that you're increasing the oxygen through exercise is what I'm trying to say. So just even moving your body a small amount more a day, taking the stairs, walking that extra few blocks to work, you know, parking farther away in the parking lot, taking a walk in the morning around the block. Any of those things can help increase the overall oxygen in your body. And those are all good contributors to your reproductive health, as is reducing stress. So I talk a lot about this, and I remember myself feeling maddened when people would say, just relax or just reduce your stress. It's terrible to hear, and it's not terrible information, it's not wrong, um, but you have to do it in a way that you're not self-shaming yourself, right? So you have to create some coping tools. It's one of the things that I provide to all my students in Accelerate Your Fertility Bootcamp are tools to help you cope, because if you can't cope, you can't continue, right, on this infertility journey. And, um, tools to use in the moment that the stress occurs. So, um, reducing your stress is certainly for a number of different reasons— hormones, cortisol, things like that— are going to provide the best environment for that IVF transfer or for that natural conception cycle. Go ahead and hit that like and subscribe, and if you're looking for the notes from this, just go ahead and click on that link below and you can get a transcript of video, um, already typed out for you. See you next time.
