SYNCPodcast_InfertilityFactors

[00:00:00] Jenny Swisher: Welcome friends to this episode of the Sync Your Life podcast. Today, we’re diving into the topic of lifestyle factors that impact fertility. As you may have heard, I am launching a functional fertility course on January 15th of 2024, and I am so excited to get it out into the universe and into the hands of couples and women everywhere who need this information.

[00:01:18] Jenny Swisher: Truly, this course is a compilation of all the things that I wish I had known when Chris and I found ourselves in the emotional journey of infertility. We didn’t know what we didn’t know, and we truly left our future family in the hands of modern medicine, fertility specialists, OBGYNs, and so forth. We didn’t realize until later how much was actually really within our own control to learn.

[00:01:40] Jenny Swisher: I filmed this course alongside Alyssa Broadwater, who is a registered dietician specializing in functional fertility. We deliver this course, my friends, and I’m telling you, it is over delivery. We are giving so much value in this course. So much goodness, proper testing for both men and women, questions for your doctors, supplement guides, endocrine disruption knowledge, lifestyle factors, and so much more.

[00:02:03] Jenny Swisher: I believe every 20 to 40 year old female, and certainly anyone wanting to achieve pregnancy in their life, needs this course. In our case, in my story, I came off of birth control at the age of 22, right after we married. If you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know that this set off a spiral cascade of migraine issues that lasted into my late twenties.

[00:02:23] Jenny Swisher: When we finally rectified my hormonal migraines through a functional wellness approach, we started to embrace the idea that we could now start thinking about having a family. Never mind the fact that we hadn’t really been avoiding pregnancy for five years. I’d been off of birth control pills and I was not super familiar with my cycle at that time in my life.

[00:02:41] Jenny Swisher: So when I met with my OBGYN at the age of 28 and I asked the question, Hey, should I be worried? Uh, we haven’t gotten pregnant in six years off the pill. And she said, Nah, everything’s probably fine since you have regular cycles and your labs are normal. I didn’t know any better. I’ll lump that one into the category of normal is not optimal.

[00:03:00] Jenny Swisher: Anyway, at my next visit, one year later, at the age of 29, she suggested that I see a fertility specialist. I was never given any information on tracking ovulation, what to look for, nor was it ever deemed necessary for my husband to be checked. So we got on a list for a local fertility doctor and we waited another six months to be seen.

[00:03:19] Jenny Swisher: In our first appointment, we learned that I likely had been dealing with endometriosis for a number of years, undiagnosed. We scheduled surgery, and the next thing I knew, we were another six months down the road, post surgery, when the same doctor finally recommended that my husband be evaluated as well.

[00:03:35] Jenny Swisher: Sperm samples, and multiple visits later, including a surgery for him, there we were, at the age of 31, at a round table in a fertility clinic, with this doctor, hearing this phrase. I’m sorry to say that both of you are dealing with infertility issues. Your chances of conception are very slim, maybe 10%. Your best chances would be with IVF.

[00:03:56] Jenny Swisher: We went from everything is probably fine from my OBGYN to two surgeries and a death sentence when it came to conceiving. Now here’s a caveat for you. I had never truly craved or desired pregnancy myself. We had always known that adoption was on our hearts to pursue given my own infant adoption. I was adopted at birth, as was my brother.

[00:04:16] Jenny Swisher: And at this point in our journey, we decided it wasn’t worth the risk to continue hormone treatments for the sake of my migraines that we finally had under control. So instead we chose to pursue adoption. But that’s another story for another day. I’ve actually shared our adoption story here on the podcast and I can link that up for you in the show notes.

[00:04:32] Jenny Swisher: But the point is that years went by, years, as we investigated our infertility, what modern medicine would call unexplained infertility. Yet knowing what I know now, thanks to being a total nerd when it comes to hormone health, is that if I had focused on proper testing early on, if we had evaluated our lifestyle, focused on ovulation as my fifth vital sign, and advocated for my husband being checked early, we could have saved some time, money, and definitely some stress.

[00:05:01] Jenny Swisher: I would never change our story. But when I see other couples out there on similar paths, I want to shout from the rooftops that there is so much within your control. And so this course was born today. I want to just take a few minutes to chat about some lifestyle factors that are very much involved when it comes to priming your body for conception.

[00:05:20] Jenny Swisher: And yes, this episode goes for men too. So you can share it with your spouse or significant other. These lifestyle factors include nutrition and supplementation, exercise, sleep and stress, and endocrine disruption. I’ll touch on these briefly today for the sake of this short solo round, but just know that we go much, much deeper in the course itself.

[00:05:39] Jenny Swisher: First, let’s touch on nutrition. It goes without saying that while Americans are the most overfed society on the planet, we are undernourished. Every single one of us is walking around with a deficiency of some kind. Our gut microbiome issues are rampant these days with the use of antibiotics, poor diets, the overconsumption of sugar, the list goes on.

[00:06:00] Jenny Swisher: In case no one has mentioned this to you yet, we are what we eat. Our food, quite literally, makes up our cells. If we’re consuming low nutrient density foods, our bodies will suffer. I say often that our bodies will always prioritize survival over reproduction. It will not procreate and make babies if it feels unsafe.

[00:06:21] Jenny Swisher: Yet we don’t realize that by undernourishing, and we can also throw in stressing, which we’ll talk about, we’re putting our bodies into a state of fight or flight. For women, this can mean a disruption in our menstrual cycles and hormone imbalance. Doing proper testing to see what deficiencies might exist for both men and women is a key step in the process of functional fertility.

[00:06:41] Jenny Swisher: Supplementing these through our diet or otherwise can be game changing. Also worthy of discussing is exercise. I find that most women embrace exercise to some degree, where most men do not. I find that most women I work with really love exercise through gym classes, home workouts,

[00:07:00] Jenny Swisher: and they can even tax their bodies by doing a bit too much at times. Usually, it’s one end of the spectrum or the other. Working a sedentary job and very inactive, or very, very active. At the time that we saw our fertility specialist, I was a gym owner teaching boot camps twice a day and at a very, very low body fat percentage, which was not healthy and ideal for conception.

[00:07:22] Jenny Swisher: Exercise matters. We need it in moderation to build strength and mobility, but not to the nth degree, and it can actually be harmful in our fertility journey. Exercise is a form of stress, and while it is crucial to put this type of stress on our bodies regularly for muscle purposes and heart purposes, too much is not a good thing, just as too little is not a good thing.

[00:07:43] Jenny Swisher: We’ve got to find that happy medium. Now, stress can come in the form of exercise, and in a variety of other ways, such as traumas, work stress, emotional or relationship stress. The list goes on anytime our cortisol is impacted, this affects our blood sugar and that four legged hormone chair, which we talk about often here on the podcast that can essentially cause an earthquake of sorts in the endocrine system downregulating our nervous system.

[00:08:09] Jenny Swisher: As we’ve discussed on the podcast before and previous episodes, prioritizing quality sleep and understanding our emotions and stressors are key and trust me, the infertility journey is a stressor in and of itself. Finally, endocrine disruption. This could be a course all in itself. The world we live in is full of xenoestrogens, toxins that we breathe, we wear, we lather on.

[00:08:33] Jenny Swisher: I always like to tell this story. When I was on my migraine journey in my twenties and I finally found a functional wellness doctor, She decided to take me off of all the pharmaceuticals that I was on treating migraine. At that time I was on anti seizure drugs, I was doing Botox, I was on all different kinds of abortive therapies for migraine.

[00:08:51] Jenny Swisher: She told me to stop them all cold turkey and to start using a bio identical progesterone cream that was derived from yam root. I started using this cream, just a dime sized amount of cream, on my inner wrist every night. And within three to four months, I went from having daily chronic migraine to having maybe one or two migraines per menstrual cycle.

[00:09:10] Jenny Swisher: It was game changing. My first thought when I started having this experience was, well, if this dime sized amount of progesterone cream is literally changing my life and the quality of my life, what is all this other body lotion and makeup and household cleaners and these other things that I’m touching and putting on my skin throughout the day, what is that doing to my hormones?

[00:09:31] Jenny Swisher: Right? And that’s the point. If a tiny dab of cream can change my life and migraine pain, what does a handful of body lotion, makeup, plastics, toxin laden mattresses, what do all these things do to our endocrine systems? Paying attention to endocrine disruption in your life can be one of the primary factors for improving your hormone health.

[00:09:52] Jenny Swisher: Let me say that again, paying attention to endocrine disruption in your life can be one of the primary factors for improving your hormone health. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming. It can start small, replacing one item at a time until you feel like you swapped everything within your control, household cleaners, skincare, and the things that you put in on and around your body play such a crucial role in your overall health.

[00:10:15] Jenny Swisher: This goes for both men and women. I realize that this is just a small glimpse into the world of infertility, but it is my hope that someone hears this and thinks, wow, my doctor never talked to me about this stuff. Sadly, we hear that story quite a bit. Whether it’s with psychosyncing or healing the gut or infertility, taking your health into your own hands and stepping into body literacy so that you can advocate for yourself and get true root cause answers.

[00:10:41] Jenny Swisher: That is what this podcast and these courses that I’ve created are all about. Okay, my friends, as always, thank you so much for tuning in. We will have a link in the show notes in case you’re interested in hearing more about the fertility course. We’re starting an email list for that, so we’ll be sending out information as we get closer to the launch in January.

[00:10:57] Jenny Swisher: But I hope you found value in this episode today. Share it out with friends, family, anyone you know who is thinking about a fertility journey or conceiving in the near future. And I’ll tell you this, my friends, this information is needed in the world. We’ve got to educate more people, men and women, on the topics of body literacy, endocrine disruption, hormone health, and hormone balance.

[00:11:19] Jenny Swisher: Because at the end of the day, it’s all about finding that maximum energy, right? I am so grateful for the family I have today and the story that is my life. But if there’s one thing that I could go back and relive, it would be this hormone health journey of my own. Dealing with migraines, dealing with infertility.

[00:11:35] Jenny Swisher: If I had known more about my body, I could have advocated for myself in so many ways that I wasn’t able to do. So education is power, my friends. Thank you so much for tuning in as always. I hope you found value in the episode, share it out. And until next time, we’ll talk soon. Bye bye.

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