If you are starting your fertility diet, I recommend you ease yourself into it, eliminating one or two “stressful” food items, such as caffeine and alcohol, at a time. After about two weeks, eliminate another one or two additional items, such as sugar and overly processed foods. It can take up to two or three weeks of strictly abstaining from a food item to begin to lose the craving for that item. So give yourself and your body time to adjust.
A list of other tips for starting a fertility diet can be found in these two previous blogs: Fertility Diet Tips and Top 5 Fertility Diet Tips.
To support your mind and your emotions as you make this journey, and also to help relieve the inevitable stress, I recommend daily meditations and visualizations. For these I recommend the following:
Circle + Bloom™ has a fantastic set of mind-body meditation products tailored to your cycle (natural or IVF) to help you achieve pregnancy. I’ve even reviewed one of their products in this blog. It takes only about 15 minutes a day. Check it out.
I also highly recommend the CD of visualizations by Julia Indichova, the author of Inconceivable, which can be found at her Fertile Heart Community. I recommend all her work, including her workshops at her home in Woodstock, NY. She’s amazing at helping women and men tap into the mind-body link to bust through emotional blocks and clear paths toward parenthood. Her visualizations will take you 10 minutes a day at the most. Very doable.
Changing how you eat and incorporating daily meditations and visualizations is already a lot of positive change. I would also recommend working in one additional modality: Yoga 4 Fertility, and for this I recommend Brenda Strong’s DVD. If you can squeeze in two sessions a week, I believe this helps too.
Congratulations on making a fresh start. Let me know how it goes! I love to hear from you.
photo by: http://blog.foodnetwork.com/healthyeats/2011/01/01/have-a-happy-healthy-new-year/
