Stop wasting money on supplements

I'm feeling almost back to normal and happy to be here with you today talking about stop wasting money on supplements. Now when I say stop wasting money on supplements, I'm not telling you to not buy supplements because I'm a firm, firm believer in quality supplements and their ability to help your overall health and wellness, but Buying the wrong supplements, buying cheap supplements, or you're not doing yourself any good. So I want to tell you a story about when I was going through infertility. I had really low iron, uh, really low iron, and, um, I went through a whole process that I'm going to share with you, um, but I wasn't asking the right questions back then, okay? So I had really low iron. And if you don't know, it's really hard to get pregnant if your iron is really low. It has to do with your red blood cells and your, your antioxidant capacity and things like that. So I had really low iron. I went the complete traditional route. I didn't know any better at the time. I was taking oral iron pills and I would retest and I was being very faithful about taking the iron pills. And when I retested via blood work, nothing was happening. So it, it was a little confusing to the doctors, and they knew that I wasn't absorbing the iron. I'm taking the iron, my iron is not changing, and so we knew that we had to do something different. So I had a pretty— I have a great relationship with that doctor, and he suggested that I take an herbal iron supplement. It's called Floradax. I'm a big fan of it, kind of, because it— I'm not gonna lie, it tastes terrible. But it's really great for people that have poor iron absorption, which by the way is most people. Most people cannot absorb iron via a tablet. By the way, just so you know, because this is not something that I, I talk a lot about, but I had I had a really good diet in terms of iron consumption, things like red meat and kidney beans and leafy greens and things like that, and I still had really low iron. Um, part of that had to do with my massive blood loss every month through from my endometriosis and my fibroids, but I digress, that's a conversation for another time. So I was taking the oral iron, that wasn't working, so I went to Floradax. Tastes terrible, you guys. It's an herbal liquid supplement, tastes terrible, but it's supposed to be great for improving your iron levels. Well, it did not work out for me. It did nothing for my iron levels. And where I ended up was I ended up having iron IV transfusions, which is as pleasant as it sounds. So it's sitting in a chair, um, a lot of times at a place where they give chemotherapy to people which has a whole nother level of distress associated with it. But you sit with an IV in your arm for 2 hours and— well, it took me 2 hours because I'm sensitive because of my MTHFR mutation. You sit there for about 2 hours and allow that iron to be absorbed into your bloodstream. Yeah, it's as fun as it sounds. So it did fix the problem for me. It did increase my iron, but it didn't do it permanently. So I ended up having 2 of those iron IV infusions for subsequent pregnancies. The question, the question, and before I get to that, if you're just joining us, we're talking about not wasting money on supplements today. And I'm just talking to you about a story that, uh, what I went through, um, not being able to absorb iron and just wasting my money on over-the-counter oral iron supplements. So the long and the short of it was the question, the good question that I did not know to ask, that I hadn't learned to ask, is why isn't my body absorbing iron? Why am I, as a 36-year-old healthy adult I'm a healthy person with no, like, other medical conditions. Why isn't my body absorbing iron? And the answer to that question that I know now is that I had leaky gut and my, my gut wasn't, wasn't able to absorb any of those kind of nutrients from my food or otherwise. So again, a conversation for a different day. But when you're talking about not spending Wasting money on supplements. Let's talk about, first of all, if you're buying supplements for fertility, go ahead and put in the comments, put in the chat section, how much roughly you would guesstimate that you're spending on supplements, because this is a big topic of conversation, right? A lot of these nutritional supplements for fertility can really add up. So I'm just curious, go ahead and drop that in the chat. All right. So the first thing that you need to do before you start taking supplements to improve your fertility is you need to get some baseline blood work done as much as you can afford or your insurance will pay for. So baseline blood work, like your D levels, your B levels, especially, um, like your iron, um, any of those that will, would be covered in a basic, it's called a CBC panel. That you do for your health exam, sorry, your annual, like your annual checkup or your physical, that's the word that I'm looking for, your physical. Go ahead and get a baseline on that. Also, when you're talking about that, this is the time to check in with yourself. How is your energy level when you get up in the morning? How are you sleeping? Is your hair falling out? How is your skin? All of those things are indicators to pay attention to for vitamin supplement deficiency. Okay, so we're going to start with a baseline. Now, if you're taking a supplement, um, like I was with the iron, now you have something to compare it to in 60 days, 90 days, even 6 months. You have some starting point to see if the supplements that you're taking are actually doing you any good. All right, so we talk a lot about this in my world. Synthetic supplements are bad. Not only are they bad for you because they can cause additional toxicity in your body, stress on your liver and your kidneys, but they might not even have the— it might not even be the thing that you're taking. Meaning if you're trying to take the supplement and it's labeled X, Y, and Z, it might contain little to none, because it's not regulated, little to none of that XYZ in there. So it's really, really important for you to source your supplements, not only that they are non-synthetic, but that you can have some kind of, some kind of reassurance that what you are purchasing is actually what's in the bottle. That's what I'm trying to say. So also synthetic vitamins are not absorbable. That iron that I was taking back in the day that I couldn't absorb was a synthetic iron. And so my body just wasn't able to do it. All right. So number 1, start with blood work. Number 2, make sure it's not synthetic because we don't wanna make ourselves sick while we're trying to make ourselves healthier. Most often, cheap means poor quality. So if you can buy it at a big box store and in bulk, even the corner drugstore, you're not going to get a good quality supplement. You need to go to a specialty store. Whole Foods actually has a pretty good selection. Around here, we have things like Super Value Nutrition. We have like a Richard's Emporium. There's a lot of little mom-and-pop vitamin type stores that are going to have good quality, non-synthetic vitamins. So if you are overwhelmed about this whole synthetic vitamin thing, how to pick a good prenatal, how not to spend a fortune, what's important to your fertility journey, I'm doing a workshop tonight in my support group, my Infertility Success community chat. So we're doing a workshop on picking a good prenatal. I'm doing a workshop on picking a good prenatal, and I want you to either DM me, slide into my DMs, or send me a message if you want the link. Check in the comments, the link should be there as well. So have a great weekend, you guys. I am here Monday, Wednesday, Friday, um, and if you like this content and want more and you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit that like and subscribe. Health and blessings to you guys.