Erica Hoke, an infertility coach, talks about eliminating habits, relationships, and lifestyle factors while trying to conceive. She covers ditching dietary habits that don't serve fertility, setting boundaries with unsupportive people using the "crabs in a bucket" metaphor, and building resilience through accountability and stepping outside your comfort zone.
Chapters
Again, it's hump day. Oh my goodness. It just seems like a series of weeks just flying by, especially this time of the year, right? So thanks for joining me today. If you don't know who I am, I'm Erica Hoke. I'm an infertility mentor and an empowerment coach. And today we're talking about things that you can weed out while you are waiting, while you're waiting to get pregnant. So what does that even mean to weed things out? It can be habits. So let's talk about habits, both good and bad. So weeding out bad habits for the sake of your fertility, for the sake of your life now. So weeding out bad dietary habits, bad— let's not even say bad, things that are not serving you. Okay? So let's not label things good or bad. Let's look at our life and determine, is it serving you or is it not serving you? And is it serving you as you? Because you as a woman are important, and it's not just about getting to the end goal of pregnancy, but it's about creating a life that you really love and that you're thriving in and that you're your healthiest, best self. So let's look at those habits that we can weed out, um, that are going to get us to that goal. Right? Things that are not serving you and things that you can do better to serve your health and wellness where you are now. So other things that you can weed out are people in your life. This is really touchy for some people because they, um, they look at boundaries as a bad word. But the older that you get in life, the more that you realize that people, um, generally you are connected to to most people for a season in your life. And sometimes as you're growing, as you're improving yourself, and as you are looking to make lifestyle changes and things like that, they don't always— the people in your life don't always come along with that. So you either have to limit— you have to make choices, um, if they're not being positive, if they're not supporting you and your decision-making, if they're bringing you down, if they're providing a lot of negative influence. It doesn't mean that if, you know, necessarily it could be, but you could choose just to limit the interaction with those people and not participate as much with them and not allow them as much access to your life, right? So sometimes the weeding out might be people, especially when you start to grow. My friend describes this scenario, maybe you've heard it, of the crabs in the bucket, right? You have decided for yourself to get healthier, make better choices for the sake of yourself and your fertility. And people that are still stuck, like crabs in a bucket— when one crab tries to climb out of the bucket, the other crabs pull it down, right? So that's the visual example of that. Sometimes you have crabs in the bucket, people in your life that are just pulling you down because they see that you're making changes and they're not ready or willing to do those things. So the weeding out process too is also moving outside of your comfort zone. So no growth happens in change. Again, not making this stuff up myself, lots of people have said it out there, but no growth happens in your comfort zone. You have to change, something has to change in order for you to grow. So that goes for your infertility too. Like, you can sit as a passive participant and just not look at the things that are within your control, not look at what you're contributing to your health or your, your illness. And this is not, this is not placing blame, but we're just taking an accountability check, you know, on what we can do to be our healthiest best self. Because sometimes that's what's needed in order for you to get to your end goal, which is the baby of your dreams and your pregnancy. So we've talked about habits, we've talked about people and lifestyle choices, right? So all of these things you can have in your control and you have the ability to participate and manage for not only your health in the future, But Your Health Now. And I will tell you, um, in talking to my 20 authors that we did the book collaboration with— if you don't, uh, if you don't know, this, uh, not this month anymore, in the month of November of 2021, I released a book collaboration with 20 other women of infertility success stories. And even though everybody's story was dramatically different Some of them, like myself, um, I couldn't do IVF. I couldn't do reproductive medicine because of a lot of different reasons. Um, some other people chose not to do reproductive medicine for religious reasons. Some other people went the embryo, um, do, uh, egg donor route. Uh, some other people did, you know, reproductive medicine. So the common thread in Everybody's story seemed to be that we persisted, that we were willing to make changes, that we kept asking questions, that we kept pushing for answers. And in the end, in hindsight, every one of those authors would tell you, including myself, that we needed to go through the process of infertility for our parenthood and our motherhood journey. And just our future best selves. So it has— it gave us the resilience, the stamina, if you will, to— for like, for instance, in my case, when I had my first son, I was very, um, very adamant about breastfeeding. It was my personal choice, and I wanted to make it work at all costs. And so that for me meant that I had to do um, a lot of research. He had dairy and soy intolerance, so I couldn't have a slice of white bread. White bread has milk in it, just in case you didn't know. Um, I couldn't have a slice of white bread for a year. If I had a slice of white bread, he would react. I had no dairy in any form. So if I had not gone through like the researching, um, had built up the resilience and the stamina during my infertility journey, that gift that I was able to give him of the breastfeeding for a year, my ability to weed out things in my diet so that he was non-reactive and we could both be happy and he would sleep. If I didn't, if I didn't eat dairy, he would sleep. And that's the key to every decision in motherhood is what can you do to get your baby to sleep better? Then I might not have been able to go through that. And so we can look at it one of two ways. We can look at the journey and the weeding out, and maybe it's a pruning process, right? As giving us stamina and tools for our future and to keep, to keep going for our best selves, not only to get pregnant, but in motherhood as well. All right. Well, thanks for joining me today. If you're watching on Facebook and you want to get notified Um, Facebook probably won't do it, so you can head over to YouTube and hit that like and subscribe if you're watching on YouTube today. Thank you so much. Health and blessings to you. Hit that like and subscribe. I will see you Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time. Bye, guys.
