national-infertility-awareness-weekThis post is one of many that you will find throughout the week on No Ordinary Homestead about infertility, because this blog has been dedicated to National Infertility Awareness Week (April 24-30). This is being done to raise awareness on behalf of the millions of people, male and female, who have ever been infertile or are considered infertile today. If you or someone you know is dealing with fertility problems, you might enjoy Navigating the Land of IF — you can win a copy here this week.


We all know we’re supposed to eat well when it comes to fertility, we all know the basics of how conception works, but what happens when all doesn’t go as planned?

I always knew something was wrong. My body didn’t do what it was supposed to each month and I never really knew how to ‘fit in’ when my friends were commiserating with each other over their monthly pains. I wasn’t given many options on treatments and told it was all ‘normal’ and didn’t give it much attention until a few years into marriage when my maternal instincts happened to kick in. I wanted to have all my ducks in a row for when I planned to have a baby.

It was in my calendar.

Seriously. I circled the month I was going to have a baby. {also – that calendar date passed by with no baby}

So I read and researched a healthy fertility diet, yet failed to ovulate more than twice a year. But by God’s grace and ultimate blessing, I gave birth to a healthy little boy. Yet my quest to get my body back on track wasn’t over. I didn’t know if I’d become pregnant again, but my focus became getting my body as healthy as possible – to use foods to heal my reproductive system and become……normal. To have my entire body work in the way it was supposed to.

So I hit the books again.

And discovered whole foods. It was like I was viewing food for the very first time and couldn’t believe all that I didn’t know. The more I read, the more I changed in my own life and in my families diet. The changes that were happening were everything I had hoped for and yet I was saddened that no one in the medical community hadn’t been able to fill me in on this little fertility “secret”.

Did you know:

  • Sugar is one of the worst things you can consume for your hormones? No really! I can hear y’all groaning from the other side of the screen, but the consumption of sugar does a few things to the body. 1) It robs your body of nutrients as you try to digest it, many of these nutrients pivotal to fertility. 2) The resulting blood sugar spikes cause your body to increase the release of insulin. Insulin is a hormone, and the constant imbalance in one hormone cascades to your reproductive hormones as well. {having a hard time giving up sugar? try the Sugar Detox Challenge}
  • You need to eat fat? Almost as crazy as the thought of not eating sweets, we’re so ingrained with the concept of eating low-fat, that buying whole fat foods feels “wrong”. But the fact is that our bodies need fat in order to produce hormones, and more specifically they need cholesterol in order to produce progesterone. Without fat, our bodies have a hard time making enough hormones to balance out our reproductive systems. And we’re talking about specific fats; butter, coconut oil, EVOO and even lard are all good choices. You need to skip the vegetable oils; corn, canola, and soy.
  • That along with fat, animal products can be full of nutrients helpful to fertility? Of importance though, is that they be from animals not injected with hormones. Food products are even healthier when allowed to eat diets suited to their bodies; for cows this means they roam around outside and eat fresh green grass,same for all other animals. This helps the nutrient content, out-surpassing their grain fed, confined cousins in every vitamin and mineral.
  • Processed foods are pretty much void of nutrition? Yup, even the “healthy” ones. Sorry. But the way they are ‘processed’ it leaves the foods severely lacking in nutrients, many times even causing our bodies to use vitamin and mineral stores to digest the foods.

Back before I changed my diet, I didn’t think I was eating that horribly. Actually, I ate ‘healthier’ than a lot of people I knew; sticking to skim milk, low fat products, and whole wheat bread (though the sugar consumption was a bit on the high side). But it wasn’t the right diet for me! My body had been trying to tell me this same fact over and over for many years, and once I started to feed it the nutrients that it needed, it began to work for the first time.

Instead of waiting month after month…..after month to see if I’d actually ovulate, my ovaries came out of hibernation and began to actually work! For the First. Time. Ever.

Not every cause of infertility can be helped solely on diet alone. We live in a fallen world and unfortunately we are sometimes born with physical or genetic problems that require medical attention.

But every body can be helped by a healthy, whole foods diet.

{also – I now have a two year old daughter as well as those regular periods}

Donielle is the author of Naturally Knocked Up, a blog about increasing the odds of conception through natural living and nourishing foods. She can also be found at her brand new blog Natural Living Moms, a brand new community meant to inspire and encourage unconventional moms. When not tapping away behind the keyboard, she’s either curled up on the couch reading with her littles or whipping up something new in the kitchen.