Stress. The Real Reason You're Not Getting Pregnant
Female Hormones Do Not Become Imbalanced On Their Own
According to The Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 6.7 million American women between the ages of 15-44 have an impaired ability to get pregnant naturally and carry a baby to term. Western medicine tells us the most common cause of infertility in women is anovulation—the ovary does not release an egg during menstruation. Doctors will prescribe infertility treatments and female hormone imbalance therapies, but these are not necessarily addressing the main issue. While anovulation is definitely a hormonal problem, it is stress hormone issue before it is a female hormone issue.
The circadian rhythm is a daily rhythm created by our exposure to light and dark. It is also impacted by the things we do or don’t do on a daily basis, things that directly or indirectly cause us stress. The circadian rhythm also affects the levels of estrogen and progesterone created during a woman’s monthly rhythm.
As part of the normal female cycle, the growth hormone estrogen rises in the middle of the month and then drops down just before ovulation. This surge in estrogen causes the uterine lining to grow and an egg to be released from a follicle. Progesterone (“pro gestation”) levels are elevated in the middle of the month just after ovulation, and they should stay high until the end of the month. In pregnancy, progesterone is the hormone needed in order for the body to “hang onto” a growing fetus.
If women are unable to conceive and are experiencing anovulation, doctors usually prescribe synthetic hormones. These treatments mimic the estrogen surge (so that an egg can be released) and the progesterone longevity (so pregnancy can be maintained). However, synthetic hormones are not usually covered by insurance and can have unwanted side effects. Modern medicine is treating the female hormone imbalance, but they are missing the reason the hormones are imbalanced in the first place.
In my practice, I have never seen female hormones become imbalanced on their own. Likewise, my mentor Dr. Dan Kalish, who has been correcting female hormone imbalances and helping women get pregnant for over 20 years, has experienced the same. Female hormones are always intertwined with the stress response, an impaired circadian rhythm due to an abundance of the stress hormone cortisol.
A hormone called DHEA creates all forms of estrogen. A second hormone, cortisol, is created by progesterone. Every molecule of estrogen in your body comes from DHEA, and every molecule of cortisol in your body comes from progesterone. In turn, the adrenal glands produce DHEA and cortisol in response to stress, and progesterone and estrogen are created in the ovaries.
The body is designed to prioritize survival over reproduction. If you are under stress, your DHEA and cortisol levels increase while estrogen and progesterone levels drop. To put it simply: the more stress, the lower the sex hormones. This has not changed since the beginning of the human race. If a tribe was wandering around out in the Sahara Desert because they had no food, the women were under stress and would not be able to get pregnant. The body will always put survival above reproduction.
You might not be starving, but you might be experiencing one or more of the three primary stressors: emotional, dietary, pain or hidden inflammation. And when we are stressed, no matter how small or big it might seem, we are in survival mode. If a disruption is perceived by the body as stress, thus eliciting a stress (cortisol) response, there is a direct correlation with the body’s inability to ovulate.
Furthermore, stress can be compounding. The more unaddressed stress, the further one goes from the daily circadian rhythm and also the monthly rhythm. This causes more and more systemic hormone issues and health issues. The good news, however, is that “fixing” it, becoming healthy and fertile, is simple.
Functional medicine will test and then correct the daily and monthly rhythm, and a woman will become fertile. The same can be done for women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), premenstrual headaches, struggling with weight loss, or any other female hormone related problems.
Imagine you are an alien looking down at New York City for a year monitoring what you see at night. Every time you see a fire breaks out, you also see a red truck. You might assume the red trucks are starting fires, but we know this is not true. We know the people in the red trucks are firefighters—they are the emergency response team trying to put out the fires. It is the exact same with female hormones. Hormones are not the problem, they are the response team to our body’s 911 call of stress starting a fire.
If you are struggling to conceive, we will use functional medicine to provide the best infertility treatment around. Testing and then correcting the underlying cause of your infertility and putting out the fire is the key to starting a healthy pregnancy.
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Heidi Toy Functional Medicine Blog
Did you know most people didn’t have refrigerators in their homes until well into the 1900’s? It wasn’t even invented for large scale commercial use until the mid 1800’s [1]. So how did people keep their milk cold and make their food last longer? Fermentation. It sounds like a gross concept, because we often associate fermentation with a bad odor, but foods like cheese, yogurt, sauerkraut and pickles are all fermented foods. And those aren’t gross, are they? Well, some might disagree with me about sauerkraut, but that’s beside the point. Fermented foods are digestive aids. Microscopic living organisms in fermented foods help extend the food’s shelf life, enhance flavor, and help the body absorb minerals. These organisms pre-digest the food, getting rid of harmful components, and create more vitamins and enzymes than the food began with. Enzyme-rich foods have many benefits including [2]: Increase digestibility of food we eat Boost immune system Increase alkalinity; neutralizing pH levels Provide a healthy balance of friendly flora in the gut (Learn more about your microbiome in my other blog posts ) Tone the colon and help with elimination Control cravings for unhealthier foods Eliminate toxins and undigested wastes in the body In the “old days,” people use to ferment all kinds of foods through pickling, canning, pasteurization and added salt. Nowadays, however, large scale fermentation has lost many of its nutritious benefits due to the need for speed to get the product on the shelf as fast as possible and as cheap as possible. The only true fermented foods you will find are sauerkraut, kombucha, yogurt and kefir, beans, wine and beer, some meats (such as salami and pastrami), legumes and nuts (such as tofu, soy sauce and miso), sourdough bread, and various kinds of vegetables [3]. Fun facts about sauerkraut: The Germans “stole” it from the Chinese! Sauerkraut (probably not labeled as such for the Chinese, but the same recipe) was one of the main foods for those who built the Great Wall of China. Genghis Khan brought it to Eastern Europe during an invasion. It also contains high levels of vitamin C, and sailors often took it on long journeys to prevent scurvy.
How can we best keep blood sugar stable? Do what our body is designed to do – use fat for energy. Our species did not survive the Ice Age because of vanilla coffee lattes and cheesecake. Throughout most of our history, we ate a diet that was likely 50-70 percent fat. Look at the old family photo albums, specifically pictures of people in the first half of the 1900s, before we had so many processed foods. You won’t see many fat people--in fact, most look darn skinny. If they lived on the farm, they ate lots of eggs, meat, milk, and vegetables out of their own backyards. “Diet foods” were non-existent. Heart disease was almost non-existent. Our metabolism is designed to work much better with fats better than with sugar. Fats provide the slow and steady fuel our body likes to use for energy. Think of fats as a slow-burning log on the fire. One log (i.e. one meal containing fats) lasts for hours. Starchy carbs, on the flip side, are like kindling. You constantly have to throw more twigs (chips, pasta, bagels) to keep the fire burning. The first step is to know your sugars by reading the labels, and then avoid said sugars as much as possible.
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Omega-3 and Omega-6 are considered “essential” fatty acids because they cannot be produced by the body--we get them from the food we eat. They are biologically active upon ingestion, which means the body utilizes them right away and cannot store them up for later. They are essential because they help with both inflammatory and anti-inflammatory responses.
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