10 Tips for Sticking with Your Fertility Diet through the Holidays

Sticking with your fertility diet and routine over the long run can be challenging under any circumstances, but it’s especially taxing during the holidays.

Gatherings of friends and family, especially if they include children, can bring up emotional stress and pain. And then there’s all the holiday food and sweets—at the office, at home, at parties, at dinner events. How do we resist the temptation to munch on food that doesn’t nourish us, and stay on the path of bringing our baby home?

Here are a few tips and tools to help: 

# 1. KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE PRIZE. In a moment of weakness when you just want that cup of coffee or piece of cake, ask yourself, “Which do I want more? This coffee or a baby?”  This has helped Renee Bornfreund, author of Persevering Through Infertility, get through many moments during her fertility journey.

# 2. PRACTICE VISUALIZATIONS to strengthen your resolve. Imagine your baby already in your arms, snuggling against you. Visualizations, like these, are powerful and effective, especially when repeated over time. When you reach for the glass of champagne, an image of your baby might remind you only to take a sip, or none at all.

# 3. KEEP HEALTHY SNACKS ON HAND. To combat the onslaught of happy, holiday foods, such as cranberry sauce, gravy, and all manner of sugary confections, keep lots of happy, healthy snacks around. These include almonds and raisins, chopped celery and carrots, hummus and non-wheat crackers (the beans in hummus are especially good for fertility), and fresh fruits and veggies. Prepare healthy meals ahead of time as well. Also see Prepping for a Fertility Diet for more.

# 4. BRING YOUR OWN HEALTHY DISH TO AN EVENT. If you’re attending a party in which you know the food won’t work for your fertility diet, bring your own side dish or main dish, as appropriate. One of our most popular party dishes is the Spicy Garbanzo Beans. A good, main dish for winter months is our Chicken with Portobello Mushrooms.

# 5. LET IT BE OK TO NOT ATTEND EVENTS. Don’t be afraid to say “No” to family and friends if you know attending an event will be painful, or if it will cause too much temptation to eat what you shouldn’t. Those who care about you and know what you’re going through will understand. For those who don’t know, you can always tell them you don’t feel well or you're not up to attending. This is YOUR time. You need to nourish and take care of yourself right now—which is all part of putting your body in the best possible position for conception.

# 6. DON'T GIVE UP. Just because you “slipped” one day and ate a pint of ice cream or missed fertility yoga doesn’t mean it’s time to forget even trying. What you do over the long run is more important. Every day presents a fresh start, so don’t let one day, or even one moment, defeat you.

# 7. BE KIND TO YOURSELF. Likewise, don’t beat yourself up for doing or not doing something. This doesn’t help and only hurts. Instead, remind yourself that you’re doing the best you can to move toward parenthood, take corrective action if needed, and nurture yourself.

# 8. GET SUPPORT. Not only does this help to not feel so alone on the journey, but it can also offer the strength of having a team behind you. Support can come from many places: your friends and family, your partner, organizations like Resolve, and numerous online support groups. The latter is where I found comfort and strength, just reading others’ stories. A favorite is Fertility Community.

# 9. PRACTICE MIND-BODY TECHNIQUES. Alice Domar, PhD, a fertility mind-body expert, recommends doing “mini relaxation exercises” whenever confronted with a stressful situation. These help to elicit a relaxation response, essentially bringing you back to inner peace. (Stress is fertility’s #1 enemy, so any healthy way of managing it is vital!) So if you see your very pregnant friend at a party, or plates of candy all over the room, causing stress or anxiety, first take ten, slow, deep breaths. For other mind-body techniques, click here and here.

# 10. KEEP UP (OR START) YOUR AFFIRMATIONS. Affirmations help us stay positive and on track. You can find a few examples of fertility affirmations here and here.

Keep your eye on the prize!! OK, we’ve already mentioned this, but it’s worth repeating. Almost any woman who has travelled down the thorny, gut-wrenching path of infertility and come out the other side with a baby—after years or even decades of struggle—will tell you that their child (no matter how he/she got there) is worth it. There is nothing like the overwhelming love you feel for the child you so badly wanted. And deserved! Remember always, that your child is waiting for you.

I wish you all the best on your fertility journey, through the holidays and beyond.

Fertility Diet and a Fresh Start

The beginning of a new year often brings with it a clean slate, a fresh start and new hope. It is the perfect time to prepare your body and mind for a baby. A fertility diet will help to put your body in the best possible position for conception, and daily meditations and visualizations will help your mind and spirit get in sync with your body as you work toward the goal of parenthood.

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/

Tips for Starting a Fertility Diet

Most fertility diets are not easy. They require that you give up dairy, sugar, and even wheat. Of course caffeine and alcohol are out too. If you’re used to having that cup of Joe every morning (and even if you’re not), the change can be shocking. Here are a few tips for starting a fertility diet:

• Don’t NOT see a fertility specialist. If you’ve been trying to conceive for a while without results, don’t skip this step. It’s great to start a fertility diet at anytime because it will get your body in the healthiest, best possible position to conceive. However, if you have blocked tubes or you’re not ovulating, for example, you may (or will) need medical help to take your body the rest of the way and get you pregnant.

• When choosing what to keep and throw out on a fertility diet, I wholeheartedly believe in the advice of Julia Indichova, author of Inconceivable: follow your instinct and do what makes sense to you. Although there are many commonalities among diets (they all agree on no processed sugar, for example), there are also variations. You have to choose for yourself what makes sense to you, because everybody is different. For example, I researched a list of supplements (vitamins and minerals) that would aid fertility. Among them is zinc. Very important. But when I took it I would break out in mild hives and get really hyper/nervous. (It took me a few days to figure out it was the zinc.) So that came off the list for me. Which leads to the next tip…
  

• Ease into the diet, eliminating one or two items at a time over the course of a few weeks. It can be daunting to go cold turkey. Plus, a lot of what we eat is habit: the coffee every morning, throwing cheese in the eggs… and habits need time to change. Eliminating a couple items at a time also gives you a chance to see how your body reacts to the change.

• Plan ahead and have plenty of healthy snacks on hand. Where I used to chomp on crackers while I work, I would replace that with carrot and celery sticks. It may take a little while for your old cravings and habits to die down, but if you stick to it then your body will adjust to the new eating habits and you’ll start feeling great.

• Do other natural healing regimens; diet doesn’t work alone. Meditation, visualizations, and yoga are all good. They have the aim of putting you in a relaxed state where you really need to be to aid fertility. A book I recommend to help with mind-body exercises to aid fertility is Alice Domar’s Conquering Infertility.

• Think of the diet as a way to clean out your body and prepare for pregnancy, and not necessarily as a way to get pregnant. Why? First, because it’s always best to keep the pressure off (although I know this can be hard). Second, food is one tool, but it’s not the only tool.