Why Your Fertility Tests Are Normal But You Still Can't Get Pregnant (And What to Do About It) with Courtney Saye

Traditional fertility care is great for IUI ivf, but there are gaps in the tests that they run and the support that they provide that don't dig in on the root causes of why people are having trouble getting and staying pregnant.

Hey there and welcome to let's Talk about it with Laurie Streeter. A space to talk honestly and get real about mental health, therapy and all things wellness. I'm Laurie, licensed therapist, speaker and your host, here to bring you insights, tools and information you can actually use, whether you're navigating anxiety, healing your relationship with food, or trying to figure out which techniques will work for your life. I'm so glad you're here. Let's dive in and let's talk about it.

Welcome, Courtney, to Let's Talk About It. As badly as I wanna jump right into everything, can you give us a little idea about what you do? And the reason we're sitting here today is because of what you do.

Amazing. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for having me. So I run a functional fertility clinic and I'm also founder of the IVF prep method. In our clinic, we help women get and couples get ready for a healthy pregnancy, regardless of if they are getting ready for an IVF cycle or trying to get to a natural pregnancy by filling in gaps in traditional fertility care. Traditional fertility care is great for IUI IVF and that brings millions of babies into the year, into the world. But there are gaps in the tests that they run and the support that they provide that don't dig in on the root causes of why people are having trouble getting and staying pregnant. And sometimes those same reasons why they're having trouble getting and staying pregnant naturally can cause IVF cycle failure. So we dig in on root cause tests that go far deeper than what they're digging in on in traditional medicine and then help support women or couples together through healing those root cause things that we find so that they can get to a healthy pregnancy.

Awesome. And this is going to be, I think, such a powerful conversation because. And I'm going to ask you some questions about it. I'm not sure why we hear about so much infertility and fertility struggles nowadays and is it because we're more open about it? So I think the work you do is really, really powerful. Before we get started, I want to do something I call gut checks and I just want, based on your expertise, a yes or no. Just a few questions that I see come up a lot, like around this topic. Cool.

Yeah. Awesome. Let's do it.

If a Woman had a normal fertility workup but isn't able to conceive. Do you think there's a root cause waiting to be found?

Yes, absolutely. 100%. Yeah. Unexplained is, yes, I will shut my mouth and not go deeper on these. Even though it's tempting, we'll get into it.

Women under 35 tend to get less support for fertility.

Yes.

And traditional fertility medicine prematurely pushes women toward IVF without enough additional testing.

I love IVF clinics and doctors. We partner with them a lot. And I don't want to knock them, but I think a lot of women and couples aren't ready for it yet. Their bodies aren't prepared to have success when they go into that cycle.

Yeah, I just. I think that stuff is super powerful. And then those are the. Some of the things that, like, I see my clients who have been on an. An IVF or a fertility journey and some of the things I see online. So I think they're. Those are some commonalities. And before kind of we dig into all that, can you give me a definition or how would you explain functional fertility?

Yeah. And, you know, I. Yes, functional fertility, I would actually like to call it. You know, we're rebranding as optimizing your body because functional fertility is like, what does that mean? What is that? Is that, you know, something holistic or different? And it's like, no, it's all based on science and data, and it's really optimizing your body for a healthy pregnancy. Let's talk about couples that come to us to get ready for ivf, because we've got quite a bit of that in the clinic now. They are going to work with a doctor on their IVF protocols. We're not touching any of that. They're going to do the retrievals. They're going to handle the embryos and the trans. They're amazing at that. But they are not digging deep on root causes that can prevent the cycle from actually working. Whether it's the retrieval failed and they had to cancel the cycle, or they had a perfectly good embryo and the transfer didn't stick. And that's digging in on things like metabolic health, mitochondrial health, which you can just think of as cellular health, and energy in the body gut health. How are your detox pathways operating? What's your micronutrient status look like? How are your adrenals functioning? How's your sleep? What's your melatonin levels look like? All of those things play together and have a big impact on your ability to get and stay pregnant. And there are things that western medicine, and again, this isn't knocking western medicine. Their training is diagnosis of disease or unexplained in the infertility world. And then they've got drugs and treatments. This is like I told somebody the other day, it's like, it's like the difference between engineering school and law school. Like digging deep on root causes is not the same as what they did in med school. And so this work that we're doing, I think a lot of them are getting smart to the fact because they see what's wor who's having success and who's not. Like, they understand that your metabolic health plays a big role in your ability to get to success. But we're going deep on that stuff. And we're using non drugs protocols which are really focused on targeted nutrition and targeted supplementation based on what your body actually needs. We run a full panel of labs. Instead of saying like here, this works for everyone, because it doesn't work like that to heal the imbalances that we find in your body. And so that process, usually when someone comes to us to get ready for ivf, I say if you can give us four months before you hop in, that's ideal. If you can give us at least three months before you get started, that's okay. But you know, usually it takes about four months to make a really good impact. And with couples who want to get to a natural pregnancy, I'll say, you know, wrap your head around pausing on trying to conceive for a minute, let's get your labs back. And then once they're around month four, they're in a good enough place to get back to trying to conceive naturally. I tell them it's like slowing down to speed up because they're all living in two week increments. And they're like, whoa, I don't want to stop. Like I, I want to keep going because maybe next month will be the month. And it's like gently have to say, you know, it's everything you've been doing to date hasn't worked yet. And so let's figure out what's actually going on in there, let's correct it. And it's like slowing down to speed things up.

So you're doing a lot of blood testing, nutrient testing, vitamin panels and stuff to figure out what's going on with the person. And then like you said, nutrition protocol, supplement protocols, stuff like that.

So they're digging. We have our own customized blood panels that we put Together for men and women that are looking at all the things. So some of it's things you would get at a traditional doctor, but we're looking at it from a different lab range, the basics, and then we're going deeper on everything. Like a thyroid panel, for example, they'll run TSH and T4. Usually we're running free T3 and reverse T3 and the antibody levels. And we're looking at it from a very different range that is going to identify issues much earlier than Western medicine, because lab ranges in Western medicine are based on an average of the population. And unfortunately, our population has gotten more and more sick over the last few decades. So those ranges have gotten wider and wider for you to be, quote, unquote normal. And so normal doesn't necessarily mean healthy or optimal, which is what we're looking for for fertility. So we've got the blood panel. We look at a deep gut test that they do at home. It's a stool test that they mail off. Everyone hates it, but it gives us a ton of good information about what's going on in the gut with the microbiome. Are there any parasites, yeast overgrowth, inflammation, gluten sensitivity? How's your digestion working? Because if you're not absorbing your nutrients and minerals or eliminating toxins and hormones properly, that plays a big role in fertility. We also run a deep stress and hormone panel that's looking at what's going on with the hormones and how is your body detoxifying and metabolizing them and what's going on with your adrenals? How is your body biochemically handling stress? A lot of people want to talk about stress reduction, which we can talk about. It's important to reduce stress as much as you can, but no one can eliminate stress. It's like, how can we make your body more cellularly resilient to stress? And so we look at those channels too. And then some people will. They can add on a vaginal microbiome if it's indicated. And then we're looking at some genetic components too.

I think I would be remiss if I didn't ask you, how did you figure all this stuff out? Like, how did you get into doing what you're doing? Because I had blood testing done about a year ago and she was like, your, for example, your iron level was normal. She goes, but for. She called me middle aged, but it's fine. But she's like, for middle aged, menstruating female, it's on the low end of normal. You're scraping the bottom of the barrel. And I don't like that for you. And that's probably why you're exhausted all the time. So even though everything, you know, on my panels were normal, we optimized a lot of things. And lo and behold, I felt a lot better. Right. And so it didn't necessarily have to do with fertility, but that is what typical medicine looks at. But I went to her because she does take a deeper dive. And it was fascinating to know that all my stuff was normal, but, like, not really for me. So how did you get into the fertility world and just come to really realize, hey, there's something else going on here other than that traditional stuff?

Oh, yeah. So it's. How far back do I go? I'll keep it as brief as possible. So I like you're saying, you know, I think society wants us to believe that, like, when you're an adult or a mom or, you know, a woman, that you're going to be tired and your period's going to hurt and you're going to have headaches and your digestion sucks. And, like, that's just life. Because the way Western medicine is designed is to find disease. And if you're not in a disease state, then you're okay, but you're not actually optimized. And for fertility, your body has to be in a. This sounds cheesy, but it's. There's biochemistry behind it. Your body has to feel very abundant cellularly, a lot of energy, and it has to feel safe. And to do that, you've got to be optimized. Right. And so the same things that are going to make you feel better, like you mentioned, your iron panel, are also going to be directly related to your ability to conceive and carry. Okay, so how did I get into. I found functional medicine a few years ago. I was working as a CFO in tech. Very different space. But I found I always prided myself on being very, like, up on health and wellness. I thought I knew food, I thought I knew exercise. I thought I knew all the things about healthy lifestyle, but I'd always had these ongoing symptoms. And I had also had a tough fertility journey before this. We can get into that in a little bit. But I'd had a bunch of gut symptoms, skin stuff, and I'd been to, like, the GI doc and had a full workup, the dermatologist for a million things, you know, you name it, a bunch of different specialists, and it was always like, everything's fine. You. You see, everything seems great. And it was the same when I was struggling with fertility. Like, my periods aren't normal, regular, and I've got, like all this stomach pain. They're like, you seem great. Because I was like a normal weight and didn't have any. Obvious to them things going on, but I couldn't conceive and had a. Had a miscarriage and then couldn't conceive for a long time. Anyway, I find functional medicine a few years ago and I go through a lot of this testing and for the first time in ever, I get answers about what's actually going on that's caused these symptoms that I've had for decades of my life and go through protocols that are similar to what we. Everybody's different, but similar to what we work with our clients on that within, like, six months, I was, I would say, 70% better. And I'm like, wait a minute. I thought I knew a lot about how to take care of my body and was going to the best doctors and that we're in the LA area, like, there's great medical professionals here. And everybody kept telling me everything was fine and now I feel better because of this. And so it's a long story, but I went and got certified in as a functional practitioner, learned everything I could learn about it, um, decided I needed to bring this to the world. And I didn't know what that was going to look like at first. And I started going deeper on advanced. I'm a total, like, research nerd and I love to learn. So I'm taking, like, the hormone courses and all the advanced study stuff. Um, and I was like this. If I had known this when I was going through my fertility journey, everything would have looked different. Everything would have looked different. And there are some deeper stories to that. And I felt like God was telling me, like, you've got to go be what you didn't have back then to all of these people who clearly aren't getting any answers or support. And so I built the clinic around that mission and drive to bring this to women in the world. And while I've gotten, you know, I've done some certificate, I've done certifications, I've helped build the method, I've put together a team of professionals who've done this work for 10 to 25 years in women's health, um, with the resumes that when they. I'm like, thank you, God, for bringing these women to me. Because when these women have come into the clinic, I'm like, how blessed are we to get these women that are Board certified, dietetics, nutrition, Master's degree, Women's Health, like these amazing backgrounds and they're all a little bit different and we work together as a team on cases to make sure everyone's getting the best possible protocols out there. And so I've hired these amazing clinicians to help co build this method with me. And then they're the best of the best over here, but they're also incredibly compassionate because the work that we do is not just like, here, let me tell you what's going on and like, see ya, have a nice day. They're working side by side with these women and becoming like, I just got a testimonial the other day that was like, you know, my practitioner has been my emotional support through this and I didn't expect that at all. Like I show up sometimes like non verbal on calls and being like everything's fine and I'm angry and she's held me accountable and coached me through it and it's been a life changing experience and I feel better than I ever have before, even though I'm not pregnant yet at month four. And so I've got this team that's both like amazing clinicians and incredibly compassionate, supportive women to our, to our clients. And so I feel like I went down a tangent with that, but that's kind of what we do.

No, I appreciate you sharing and I think it's awesome. And yeah, I don't want to dog on western medicine. There are definitely some great advances happening, but I hear time and time again fertility or other struggles, they feel dismissed or you know, they see their doctor for six and a half minutes and what can you get to know? So the fact that the women you work with feel so supported and cared for, I mean it says a lot about what you guys do. I think it's so important. Absolutely.

Yeah, it's a big, it's a big part of the program. And you know, I both with natural pregnancy and ivf, but I feel like, especially with ivf, a lot of those clinics, especially some of the, I won't name names, but some of the chains around the country are so busy and churning through so many patients that like you maybe meet your doctor once and you don't really ever get to talk to anybody along the way and they're feeling like anxious and scared and we give them a place where they have power to do something to help change the outcome of their cycle and they've got their support network there too.

You mentioned you went through your own fertility struggles. Can you Share a little bit about that.

Yeah. So.

When we were trying to have our second, we got pregnant easily, and I had a missed miscarriage. It's for those that aren't familiar. The baby passes, but your body isn't releasing anything, so you're not starting to bleed or anything. That was found on a. An ultrasound during the second trimester. It was heartbreaking. I still cry with my clients all the time when they tell me their own stories, which I feel like gives me a unique ability to really connect with these women as they're coming into the clinic and help coach my team on. On how to. How to connect with them.

But anyway, I had a missed miscarriage. And I remember thinking that day when the ultrasound tech was like, I gotta go get the doctor. I knew something was wrong because we had an older child, and I blocked the grief for a long time. I mean, I was sad and overwhelmed and anxious, but I was like, I'll get pregnant again easily. I'll get pregnant again. We get pregnant easily. And I didn't. I went through, you know, what's called unexplained secondary infertility for a long time. We tried all the things. We tried fertility treatments. I had exploratory surgery to see if it was endometriosis. Nothing was ever found. And I did, you know, make some little changes and go on to have my daughter later. But I look back on that, and there were some clues as to what was going on in my body that were just completely ignored by the fertility doc I was working with. I had some liver damage that was from drinking in my 20s, and everyone's different. You think, like, it doesn't happen until you're later in life. But I had drinks in college and then had regular wine in my 20s. And when they did the exploratory surgery, it was like, your liver. But, you know, he wrote it off as no big deal. I've changed my life since then, and I don't drink anymore, and it's completely healed, which is incredible. But they wrote that off as no big deal. And now with the work I do, it is the biggest deal. It is the biggest deal. And I'll tell you that I think what got me to the healthy pregnancy, I was young enough that a little bit of a tweak made a difference. And when he said that, I was like, ooh. And I pulled back on the drinking for a few months and then got pregnant with my daughter. But the fact that no one said, like, hey, your liver actually converts your thyroid hormone into an active Thyroid hormone, which is what helps you have a healthy ovulation and be able to get and stay pregnant. And your liver also metabolizes estrogen, and you have to eliminate that out of the body so that you can get to a healthy pregnancy. Like, those dots were never connected. And that was one of the first things when I was going through all of this early training, thinking about, you know, I know there's a lot of women that could use help in, in their lives in a lot of different ways. Like, you're talking about what you went through, but I'm like, gosh, the fertility journey was the hardest thing I've ever been in my life. It was very lonely. It's isolating. You feel like everyone around you is getting pregnant and you're not. And then I also wasn't getting answers. And I'm like, there's that little clue that was back there, and if I'd had this full picture and somebody to help guide me to optimize my body two years earlier, what would that have looked like? So that's what, you know, that's kind of what, what drew me into this place years later, you sharing that.

And, and I, I think at this point point, we all unfortunately, probably know someone who has struggled with fertility. Do you think there's a rise or do you think we're talking about it more? And it's one of those things that, like, well, we just hear about it more, or do you think there's stuff going on possibly with lifestyles or, like, are these, are these incidences maybe going up?

No, it's absolutely on the rise. And like, how quickly it's rising. Your data's slow, like, new data, slow to catch up. But we have plenty of data showing that, you know, sperm counts have decreased 50% and testosterone has decreased 50%, and women are struggling with PCOS and endometriosis and adenomyosis and Hashimoto's and other autoimmune diseases at, like, record rates? Yes, it's going up. Like, it's. The data shows it's going up, but the data is over decades. But you can see in.

I step back from this and go, well, why is it going up? Well, you can see if you watch population health overall that most American adults aren't metabolically healthy. And it's like, 8% of American adults are actually metabolically healthy. When you look at those statistics and your metabolic health plays a big role in your fertility, and so you go back to, like, what's going on that's actually causing that decline and much like other debates that are going on at a national level about health and what causes what it's like. Well, it's not one thing, it's never one thing. But it's the food supply. The food supply is full of poison and full of chemicals and it is incredibly challenging. You have to be incredibly educated on it to know what you should be eating. Like sometimes I even grab something while I'm on a grocery run where I'm like, oh, that looks good. And I get home and I'm like, I don't like that. That's full of junk. Like it's really hard to eat right. And even if you are eating right, our soil is incredibly depleted of minerals because of commercial farming. And so it's hard to get what our bodies actually need to sustain cellular health and energy. Even if you're eating really well, which most people aren't, because it's pretty tough to do. Environmental chemicals are another one that, you know, we've got some control over and some, you're just going to be exposed to stuff because we're living in the modern, modern world. But like household cleaners, if you're not using, you know, better cleaners, like Branch Basics or something like that, they are endocrine, disrupting all the harsh cleaners in the house. Women put like 100 and somewhere around 190 chemicals on our bodies a day. Between like makeup, personal care, hair care, all of those products. Plastics, plastics are a big one because they mimic like fake estrogen in the body. What we see with all of this. And okay, so I'll back up a little bit. So those are like a lot of the big ones environmentally and exposure and lifestyle wise.

And what happens is our bodies can take in toxins because we have a detox system, like we have a liver and we are meant to process some toxins. But you can think about it like a rain barrel or a cup. Like you can, you can take in so much and eventually you're going to start spilling over. And, and when you're spilling over, you might not feel good. Like you said you were tired. You might not be able to get pregnant. You might have miscarriages over and over again. At six weeks you might have gut issues like those symptoms and fertility issues are symptoms start to creep up and it's like, what can we do to reduce that toxic burden on the body? And what can we do to help improve cellular resilience to stress in the body? And that's at the root of, you know, what we're doing here. We're looking at what's going on in each person's body because you could be exposed to the same things I'm exposed to. And our bodies are going to react differently because we have different genetics and different history and all that. So, yeah, I think that's, that's some of the big ones. People talk about stress, like being constantly connected, like we all are on our phones isn't helpful either because you're never coming out of fight or flight when you're sitting there on your phone all the time. So that can play a role in it. And the other one, I don't know if it falls into the category of what you're asking, but the other huge thing we see with women is undereating. They're like, I can't eat more because I need to lose 25 pounds. And I'm like, you're only eating 1600 calories a day. And that's why you're holding on to extra weight and why you've, you know, you can't get pregnant or you've had three miscarriages at six weeks. We gotta get you eating more, eating more calories every day. So anyway, those are, those are some of the really, really big things that we, we see as like, lifestyle root causes that, that are didn't exist in the way that they exist now 20, 30, 50 years ago.

It's fascinating that our data is, like you said, so far behind. And it has to be because we have to have time to collect it and have comparisons. So I get that and I nerd out on this stuff all the time, right? We're always looking at seed oils, and now it's like, well, the printer in gone receipts. So now we fold our receipts inside, right? Like, so when a woman hears you say all of that, is there anything you could encourage you to start with something, whether it has to do with fertility or not, but just health. Because all of that stuff, again, like you said, I love it all and I try to pay attention to it all, but it can be very overwhelming. And because it's such a compound effect, I think a lot of people are like, well, if I just start changing my hair care product, like, what good is that gonna do? If I got all these other things I'm contending with, what would you say to that? I.

You're right, that it can be overwhelming. And that's why our team works piece by piece with our clients. Because you look at this stuff, the information's out there. I don't have to tell people they can look it up online. But they're like, I, I can't. It's like it's too much. It's going to cost me $50,000 to replace everything. But there are some simple things that you can start with. And I would pick one at a time because it takes about six weeks to build a habit. And so unless you are somebody who's crazy, go getter about change and can actually stick with stuff, I tell people to do one or two things at a time. One of the easiest things to do is change out, change out the cleaning products in your house, especially if you're working from home. That's where a lot of your exposure is going to be. And they're very endocrine system, system disrupting if you're not using something. There's a lot of good brands out there. I like one on Amazon, it's called Molly Suds I think. But Branch Basics is a really popular one that's easy to get and you can make your own bottles of stuff. You can make stuff homemade if you're really crafty. But there's plenty of stuff on the market now that doesn't have all the endocrine system disruptors of like Comet and Bleach and Dawn Dish, all of those things that are standard in most people's houses. And then as far as makeup products go, I tell people to go piece by piece. There's a, there's an app and I'm, I'm drawing a blank on the name of it, but it's for food and makeup products, the ewt. Well so Skin Deep was the other one. So I'm trying to think of the other app but it's not coming to me right now. But yeah, if you use the environmental working groups database and just like don't overwhelm yourself because it's going to tell you there's a lot of junk in your products. And I tell people to like go look at everything, see what the worst offenders are and see what you're willing to trade out. Like do you love your foundation and you don't want to trade it but you don't mind like switching the lipstick and the mascara to get the toxic low down. Great. You want to switch all of your makeup but you still want to get Botox. Okay. Like it's just, it's about making some little trade offs and I would go piece by piece. So I think the cleaning products are the least emotional for women. It's like you can trade those out for the most part pretty easily. And then the Makeup and personal care products get a little bit more like, well I'm kind of attached to this. And if you don't want to go through like the skin deep database and go product by product, an easy way to try to pull back on the toxic, the endocrine system, which is your hormonal system disruption, is to try to cut fragrances out. So look, and it's hard, it's not easy. But start looking at products you're buying and try to go fragrance free at first. That, that's a, that's a good step in the right direction. Another thing you can start with, I'll just give one more is like plastics in the kitchen. Like don't, don't store your food in plastic, don't warm anything up in the microwave. Don't cook with non stick pans. Like switch to cast iron and stainless steel. That stuff can make a huge difference too. But you don't have to do it all at once because again, back to that, the rain barrel explanation, like you don't have to go to perfection. People come to me and they're like, am I going to have to do everything perfect and eat perfect? Because like I don't, I don't want to do all of that. And it's like, no, we need to see what your body needs, like what's actually off balance in your body. We just need to move the needle far enough for you to get to a healthy pregnancy. And most of the women and couples who come to us are hyper focused on the pregnancy. Some of them realize early on like, hey, I also want to work on my Hashimoto's and I'm tired or you know, my gut. But all of them by month three or four are like, I didn't know I was going to feel so much better too. I didn't know I was going to have more energy. Like I didn't know life could feel like this. And, and it doesn't require you to like be like the non talks influencers on, on social media.

What's so cool about everything you just said too, and you mentioned it earlier, is that changes are noticed very quickly. Like four months is not a long time.

Yeah. If you think about how long we are living in this imbalanced state, to be able to make a difference in 90 to 120 days is pretty quick, right? It's not taking an Advil or taking a shot and you're like okay, it's all better now. But it's pretty quick when you step back from it and go, oh, I was living in an imbalanced state for five years, for 15 years before I started this.

That's pretty wild. So when a woman comes in or a couple comes in and they're on their fertility journey, is four months, like about the average? When you kind of see a turnaround or I don't know what you call it, success or whatever? Like, is. Is that a time frame? Is that why you referenced.

Everyone's a little bit different. So I always tell people that up front, like, everybody's body is going to respond a little bit differently. We will have people that are 60 days into their protocols and like their. Everything's changing. And we will have people that it takes closer to five or six months. But in general, if people are really committed to doing the work. And this is another thing that's very different than Western medicine. Like, you go in and you are.

You are doing what they tell you to by, like taking a medication or shot or a pill or a procedure. This is really a partnership where, like, we can't make changes for people that are in their protocols. Like, we can tell them what the data says, we can tell them what they need to do, we can coach them through it, but I can't sit with them in their home and make sure they're doing all of these things. And so if they are doing it, if they are, and really connecting with their practitioner and sharing where things are going well and not going well and making tweaks along the way with them, four months is, is about average. And I say that because it takes some time to run these functional labs up front. We do some pre work, some what I call initial protocols to get your body ready for what we're going to do after the labs come in. But then the labs come in and we really start the heavy work at about a month into the program. If people get all their labs in quickly and then that gives you. That's. That's about 90 days of being on a layered protocol, say you, you add to them each month, where we start to see some difference. Not coincidentally, it also takes about 90 days for you to make an impact on your egg quality. And for the men, their spermogenesis cycle is about the same length. So these protocols take about that amount of time, and that's how long it takes to impact those cells in your body, too. Which is why we're like, just take a beat. Just take a beat, because we want you to get to a healthy pregnancy when you get there. And it's been like for some people come to us after six months. Some people come to us after 12 years, and it's like, what you've been doing is not working so far. I know it sucks to slow down because you wanted a baby yesterday, five years ago, but this is slowing down to speed things up. And in the whole scheme of things, like you said, a few months really isn't very long.

Can you speak to the loneliness that you mentioned earlier? Because like you said, whether someone's been dealing with it for a few months or 12 years, it can be lonely. Some people don't understand it. Some people are like, just stay positive, you know, all kinds of awesome advice out there. Or they're overloaded with all the advice. But, I mean, can you speak a little bit to the. I guess, yeah, like the mental health aspect of the toll that this can take on. On a. On a woman, on a couple. Because it can be an arduous journey. And I love that you said it's a partnership, and these people aren't going in and then they're leaving and they're on their own. Like, they really do feel supported, and it's just so huge. What do you say about. About the. Just the feeling, the emotions that we go through dealing with this stuff?

Yeah. I will say that women tend to carry this on their shoulders. We have a lot of men that work with the team who are. A lot of men will come in with a posture of like. Like, my wife, you can tell, like, my wife made me be on this call. My semen analysis looked okay. And they think that they're fine, or they're like, it's not that they're cold or they don't want a child. But women. This is like a very primal, feminine thing where we carry it on our hearts. And women tend to go, it's my body, my body's broken. We get intake forms and the woman lists everything that's ever gone wrong in her life and why they can't have a baby. And most men, not all, but will just like, everything's fine on their intake form. I'll get to the question in a second. But we tend to find on labs that men actually have as much or more going on in a couple than the woman because the woman has been doing so much to try to get things in good shape. By the time people get to us, a lot of them are eating all organic. They're, you know, drinking really good water. They know not to exercise too much, but enough they're sleeping. Like, they're doing a lot of lifestyle things fairly well. There's just like, what does your body actually need? They carry the burden on their shoulders and it can be very isolating and lonely. I know when I went through it, it was, you know, it was a few years ago, like, it was 15 years ago. And so there were like the, the chat boards online and that's the only place I could find any connection was it was like the bump. It was the knot was for getting married and then the bump was the baby one. And I made friends with those women, like, I kept in touch with them over the years. We're still connected on social media because in real life, I don't know why it happens, but in real life, there's almost never someone going through it with you. You're like, your cousin's pregnant, your neighbor's pregnant, your co worker, everyone's having a baby and you want to be happy for them, but you also feel really sad for yourself every time. And there's just not a lot of support out there. So it weighs heavy. But I think the flip side of it, you said too much, is like, now we're this very connected world, which in some ways is great. But I think people get into like, you know, the IVF or infertility TikTok algorithm, and I don't think that's better for your mental health. I think you can feel connected in some ways and like, you're not alone, but then it goes down a different spiral that is also not healthy. You know, we can't fix the sadness, we just support through it because it's always a part through almost everyone who's going through the program before they get to the other side. They start and they've got some belief and then they get answers and then they start their protocols and they're like, this is really going to work. Like, is this really, like these things really going to. I don't know, or I don't feel better yet, or I feel worse. I don't know if this is going to work. And that's very common. And like the messy middle right of getting through this stuff and a lot of times, like, somebody will get pregnant or there's a baby shower and they'll reach out to my team. One thing we are implementing starting this month to try to help support these women is some group calls, like, I'm going to do a different themes every month, but a mindset type of call, talking about like all these different topics around mental health and intimacy in your marriage and, and all of those things that they feel, feel very alone on so they can come together in a group. Because a lot of them are the only women they know doing this kind of work, too. Because not only is infertility, it's not uncommon, but it's always. It's like never. You don't ever have somebody in your corner in real life, but then to go down a route like this where you're optimizing your body is even more uncommon. So we're going to bring them together in that way. And then we're also going to offer an optional, like, Bible study, prayer time for the women that are Christians that want that. Because we have a lot of women who come in that are believers that are just craving, like, some soul connection.

That's really cool. And I think, again, so, so powerful and taking that very holistic approach of health and all of that matters. Like you said, we can't eliminate stress. How do we support you through it? Recovery in between stress on top of all of the, like you said, the medical stuff and everything going on, is there anything that you would encourage if someone's trying to get pregnant in the next couple years? Is there anything that you would say, please start doing X, Y, Z, or in all of the categories like you mentioned, environmental, food, whatever. Like, if someone said to you, I'm going to try to get pregnant in the next couple years, what would you be like, for the love of God, please do this?

Yeah. Yeah. I thought of one more thing right when I stopped talking about the. The mental health side. We also get a lot of people that come through our program that say their mental health improves during the program because they are. Instead of focusing on, like, I've got my Anito or my Mira or my LH strips and I'm timing things and I've got my chart and I've got, like, very focused on kind of the science experiment side of things that they are focused on, something they actually have control over by working through these protocols. And they're like, I feel empowered and. And I've actually enjoyed having sex with my husband again. And things have changed there. So I think that there's a lot of power in focusing on what you can control. Yes, you have to have sex during the ovulatory period to conceive a baby. But do you have to make it a science experiment or could you consider, like, enjoying sex with your husband two or three times a week regularly, again, which is not where people are when they're in this, because it's become. It's become a job. Right. And so focusing on what you can control which these things that we work with are things that they're like, okay, I'm actually making a difference. And it is going to help me that that tends to shift to the mental health a little bit too. As far as, like, what would you, what would I say if, you know, you just got engaged or you're a couple of years off from, from having a baby? My, my wish for our clinic was that women would come to us before they're ready. And it doesn't happen often because no one thinks this is going to happen to them. A lot of our clients that come to us are the healthiest people. They know, they're ex athletes, they worked out, they're runners, they eat really healthy and they didn't think it was going to happen to them. And so they come sometimes within a year, a lot of times, like after an IVF cycle has failed or five IVF cycles have failed and they've been through a lot of trauma and pain. If we could catch people on the front end, that's my dream to say, like, here's everything that you've got going on in your body. Let's get you in perfect balance so that when you go to get pregnant, you get pregnant in the first two or three or four months instead of going through all of this pain now what can you do on your own to start right now? There's a couple things I always tell women, especially because we see this make such a big impact, is go, go grab like the Chronometer app, it's free, and track how much. Track your food for like three or four days and see what you're eating. I would almost guarantee you're eating somewhere between 13 and 1900 calories a day. And it varies wildly. And the amount of time between meals varies wildly. You're skipping breakfast or lunch once in a while when you're busy. If you are not eating regular meals every four hours, breakfast within an hour of getting up and around 2,500 calories a day for the average woman, you're under eating. And if you're skipping those meals and going long stretches, your body goes into a place where it doesn't feel safe. That impacts your adrenals and that's going to impact your fertility in a big way. And it's something that you can control and, and start to make a difference on right now. And women that are listening will probably say the same thing we hear all the time, like, yeah, but I can't eat anymore because I like have 15 pounds to lose and maybe in that case, it's like before the wedding or I feel fat, my jeans don't fit. And society has done us a big disservice by teaching us that calories and equals calories out. And that's simply not true. If you're in a caloric deficit like most of our female clients when they come to us, and if you've done that for a few weeks, like you've got a, you're, you're in a really healthy, balanced state and you're doing it for like five weeks before a vacation and it's only a three or four hundred calorie a day deficit. Your body can tolerate that and you'll drop a few pounds if you do it for longer. Our bodies are really, really smart. And your thyroid, which controls your fertility in a big way, says, oh, I guess we're starving to death. We're going to turn down the heat, which impacts your fertility in a huge way. And so if you slowly add calories to your day, when you're at that, say 1600 a day average and, and you start eating at regular intervals and breakfast and making sure you have protein and fat with every carb, you eat things that balance your blood sugar. Most people that do it right, and sometimes it does need the support of a team like ours, lose weight. Like, we have a client with us now who is eating a thousand more calories a day than she was when she started and she's dropped 30 pounds. So that's a big one that people can do on their, on their own or at least get their eyes open to where they're starting and that it is a big impact.

Yeah, I think we see a lot with weight loss and women these days, you know, society, we've kind of swung in one direction and another with just health stuff. And to tell a woman, you know, when you said 22 or 2500 calories, I know a lot of women out there listening just gasp because there's no way. And, but it's, we need to eat. And this isn't like, stop at Starbucks one extra time. This is like, eat nutritious, nutrient dense. You said protein and fats with your carbs. Like, this isn't like cool. I can, you know, crush that bag of chips. Like, sure, have your snacks, but what you're eating.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. It's not just, well, what we start with is like, let's get the lowest hanging fruit priority is enough calories. Now if you're getting it all in like processed food and sugar, it's not going to be super helpful. But lowest hanging fruit is calories. And then the next step up from that is like, how can we make sure we're balancing your blood sugar too, right? And getting good whole foods. Like the easiest way to shop is to stay out of the aisles and grab really high quality animal protein like beef and really high quality chicken and fish and fruits and veggies and potatoes and rice. People want to complicate nutrition so much and it's not that complicated. Like we talk about going gluten, gluten free. Most people want to go grab every box of gluten free stuff off the shelves and it's like, that's not going to help. It's actually replacing everything that is inflammatory in your body with something else that's inflammatory. Real foods is where it's at. And it's not easy to get that many calories in a day for most people because they're not eating anywhere near that. And they're getting, you know, a lot of people are getting half of their calories from their, their pumpkin latte at Starbucks and like, like cheddar popcorn at night in a glass of wine instead of real food. And so that's a huge one that everyone's got some control over. It's not easy, it's not easy to do on your own, but it's a big factor.

If I can, I'd like to ask you a little bit of a controversial question.

I'm going to take a stab at this. Do you think because there's a lot of controversy around birth control, the amount of young women who are put on birth control for irregular periods, painful periods or for having an active sex life doesn't matter. Do you have opinions on women and birth control?

I do. Oh, I have big opinions. I, I mean, I guess it's controversial, but it doesn't feel controversial to me. And here's why. It's impacting other systems in your body in a big way. And look, birth control, like I, I want to set aside the, like, what is birth control done for women and advancement their ability to, you know, have sex before marriage and go on and have careers. That's a different discussion. I'm talking about what it actually does in the body that I don't think there. I still, it shocks me, but I don't think there's much education in western medicine because I see a primary care doc who's part of a big hospital system here just for like regular check ins. I take my whole list of blood work. So it can get run through insurance. And I am in my early 40s, and a couple years ago, she tried to put me on birth control. And I'm like, whoa, hold on a second. Like, I. And that told me they don't have the education of what it does to your body. It impacts your gut in a big way. It impacts the thyroid for a lot of people. It depletes critical micronutrient levels. And so the data says birth control doesn't impact fertility. But we know all of those systems impact your ability to get and stay pregnant. And so everybody's body is different, by the way. Some people can be on it for 10 years and get pregnant the month they go off of it. Some people get pregnant on birth control, but given unique biochemistry, like, if you have been on it for a long time and it did impact your gut health, and it slowed your thyroid down and it depleted all your B vitamin levels, and then you try to go get pregnant. Well, that's not an ideal state to get to a healthy pregnancy. We can also talk about, like, does it attract the right partner? There's all kinds of things around birth control that are, I guess, kind of controversial. But now science is showing, like, if you're on birth control as a young woman, you're actually attracted to a different partner than you otherwise would be. Um, it's insane. I. You know, I have a teenage daughter now, and I want her to learn about her body, regardless of what choices she makes in life. We weren't taught when we were young anything, anything about our bodies. And I will say that while birth control is handed out like candy, still they do know more. Like, I talked to a girl at the gym about what I do for a living and her life the other day, and she was, like, 26, and she's like, it's super, super popular right now to, like, know all the things about your cycle. And I'm like, I love hearing that from someone, you know, that's in their mid-20s and young, because no one taught anybody that's in the early forties any of that. Early on, like, to look for signs of ovulation, to watch what's going on with your body, that you really only can get pregnant, like, five days a month.

So I don't want my daughter going on it personally. I want her to understand her body, because I was on it for years, and I think it contributed in a big way to a lot of the underlying things I had going on in my body. It just didn't. It didn't play well. With my genetics.

Yeah, I, I hate that I even had to preface that conversation and that question with the word controversy. But yeah, like you said, what it's done for women especially side, I think the health implications are huge. I was put on it as a teenager for acne. Wild. Right. But that was this. They didn't tell me, hey, maybe if you stopped eating dairy or looked at your diet again. I'm also in my 40s. None of that was educated. And then I was in my mid-20s before I got pregnant with my son and there was a recall on the TV and my husband's like, at the time he wasn't my husband. He's like, isn't that what you take? He's like, you should probably stop taking that because there's literally a recall going on, you know, and nobody called and said, hey, you should probably stop taking this. So it's what I'm hearing from you is again, opinions and everything. Just want women to educate themselves and, or get educated from someone who knows what they're talking about.

Yeah. And I, look, I think that every choice we make in life has a good, like a pro and a con and you've got a way like anything else. Like women will say, well, should, like, what do you think about Botox? And I'm like, well that's just another thing that adds to the toxic load. I'm not pro or anti. I just like, what can we pull out of there? And birth control is another one where it's like you have a sexually active 16 year old who might get pregnant and that seems like the worst thing in the world. Well, maybe birth control is the right answer, but, but you have someone who's, you know, in their 20s and has acne, like, so I think it's a, not a decision that we should like across the board say it's a bad thing. But it, like any other drug that you put in your body or toxin you put on your body, it's going to have implications like, and everybody's body is going to be a little bit different. And if you're really sensitive to stuff, which I can relate to because I am and that's how I ended up here. And it can have pretty big impacts.

Well, I just appreciate you touching on all of this stuff today. I think it's so important. And again, the partnership that you have with your patients is incredible and needed and not enough providers out there are doing that. It's just such an important part of the journey because it can be lonely, it can be stressful. And you need someone who can really kind of walk you through it and have a team. So I want to know where people can find you if they want to work with you or even follow you and get some information. But I do want to ask you, how do you protect yourself from compassion fatigue and take care of yourself doing the work that you do because you're walking alongside someone in this difficult at times journey?

Yeah. So I would say that I, I'm trying to think about the easiest way to say it. It is, it can be difficult. It is the best thing in the world. I'm like, I am leading my life's purpose when someone sends me their pregnancy announcement or is, you know, crying or sending me their baby pic. And then in the beginning or in the messy middle, it's tough. Right. And so the way that I have structured the clinic so that we can serve as many families as possible, I am here to spread the word about the impact and get the message out to as many people as possible and ensure that the team, as we continue to grow, has like the mission and the compassion as well as the clinical expertise of our method and lead them. But I am not working one on one with clients. My team is doing that. And so that's how I can keep spreading the message. Because this work in a lot of ways. If you've got any like therapists that in the audience, they probably understand this, you have to hold space and go all in with these people. Even though it's, we're talking about biochemistry, it's not a ten minute doctor's visit. It's like, here's what's actually going on, here's how we're going to get through it with a whole body approach. And there's a lot of holding space. And so we, you know, make it so that they only have client rosters that are a certain size so that they don't get fatigued from it and all of that. But I'm protecting my energy. I love, I love getting to talk to our clients. I love when they reach out to me on Instagram. I still do a lot of the consult calls before they get started because I like having a touch point with them because I'm so passionate about the work we do. But, you know, I'm on a mission to start serving thousands of couples a year and I can't have enough energy to go do that and, you know, lead this vision and mission forward if I'm doing the one on one work too. And so that's how I've kind of separated things. It was hard for me at first because I do, I love every single client who comes, comes through and they all have a, a piece of my heart for trusting us and working with us on such an intimate journey.

The gratitude that I hear from your voice too, to be able to get to do this work. And like you said, it's just kind of like not to sound fluffy, right? But to step into your purpose. You really are doing what you were meant to do. And you, I can hear it and I can see it as you speaking and it's just, it's so incredible. Where can people find you? Can you work with people outside of California or if someone wants, you know, access, what would you say?

So we work. The clinic is 100 remote. We've got practitioners on the east and west coast, but we work together as a fully remote team. We have a lot of clients in the LA area, I think just because it's big and a couple of us are here, but everyone's getting the same remote service. So we deliver this program. It's funny when people start, they're like, I don't know about remote, like I, I don't know how it'll work if we're not in person. And then by like one month in there, like I've never felt this supported, connected and seen before. And I've never met my practitioner in real life because there's so much interaction and they're going so deep. Like when labs come back, they're getting a 15 minute video connecting it back to everything they have going on in their lives. Instead of like your vitamin D levels low, like go grab some vitamin D. And so we work with clients across the United States and Canada. New York and New Jersey can be a little trickier, but we do have clients there. And then we've, I think I said that we just expanded into Canada. We're looking at other international markets. I've got a lot of demand from the UK and Australia and other countries, so we're starting to peek into those. But right now we are easily able to work across the United States and Canada. And it's seamless. And as far as where people can find us, our website is Functional Fertility Clinic.

I'm most active on Instagram. It's. My name is the handle, it's Courtney. C O U R T N E Y L say S as in Sam A Y E and then Tick Tock less active. So if you send me a message on Tick Tock, it might take a week or two to get back to You Instagram. We're all over the inbox, but the Tick Tock account is functional. I should know this by now. We aren't as active over there. Functional fertility clinic on TikTok. They can find us over there too.

And I'll make sure to link everything. I'm sure people will reach out to you and I can imagine the messages you get on a daily basis, whether it's someone you've worked with or inspired or have found information or they have a question. Again, I. I think it's so needed. Like you said, it's. I don't know if you would use the word common, but on the rise, it's important. It's important to speak about it and get loud about it and the impact you're making. So I definitely, so very much appreciate what you do because it's. It' very needed.

Thanks. Yeah, I also. If I can also share a video we have that you can share with your audience that's totally free, that walks through exactly how we do all of this in our clinic. Because a lot of people who have never done any work like this in their lives are like, I hear you, but I don't really get it. Like, I don't understand what that looks like. I don't think it would work for me. You don't understand. I have Hashimoto. I have stage four endometriosis. We hear that a lot. So I'll give you a video link that you can link in the show Notes. That is our blueprint video that walks them through exactly how we do this, work with our clients that come in with, you know, diagnoses or unexplained infertility and walk them through this method to get to a successful pregnancy. So I can. I can send that over too?

Yeah, that would be awesome. I think that'd be super helpful. And even if you know someone who is going through it, right, to listen to this, to see your stuff, to watch the video, to just understand the journey in general or get some information or pass it along to a friend or loved one. Is there anything you'd like to add if someone took one thing from everything you said today?

Yeah, I've thought about this one a lot because I get asked that a lot in conversations. And I'm pretty clear now that the one. If I have to. If I have to narrow it down to one thing, it's that if you're sitting there listening to this and in that place of waiting and feeling lonely and frustrated, you should have all the hope in the world. You should feel like there is hope and you can be empowered on your fertility journey. And I think that's the biggest piece of the mission here is like, to reinstall hope and empowerment in these women and couples.

Incredible. Courtney, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it. I know it was super helpful. Again, impactful. What you're doing is so important and I think that's a really good message that that hope is needed and you're there to remind people of that. So thank you so much. Of course.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for hanging out with me today on let's Talk about it with Laurie Streeter. If this episode resonated with you, it would mean so much if you'd leave a five star review, share it with a friend, or come say hi on Instagram at Laurie Streeter. Your support will help this podcast grow and I so appreciate you being here today. I want to help people just like you. You feel like they're not alone and gain the tools they need to grow. Until next time, take care.