Endometriosis affects fertility but that doesn’t mean that there is no hope. Nutrition can be a powerful tool to improve your chances of falling pregnant, and Shelley’s story is a good example.
She came to me at the end of 2021, and she had just one focus: she wanted to improve her changes of a pregnancy. She was in her mid-thirties and had endometriosis, including Endometriomas (chocolate cysts on her ovaries). She also had pain in her chest and in her legs. And she really struggled with her moods, especially around her period. She was already going through IVF and was looking for things she could do herself to improve her odds.
In her first consultation we talked about her goals and her symptoms and then we looked at her diet. She had done a food intolerance test and that showed that she was intolerant to some normal, healthy foods, such as dairy (like most of my clients), almonds, chickpeas, apples, chicken, coconut, mushrooms and green beans.
Now, normally, to improve fertility, we look at 2 things: improving egg quality and reducing inflammation. In Shelley’s case the immediate focus was not on improving egg quality because she still had a frozen embryo and was a few weeks out from its transfer.
So the immediate goal was to reduce her inflammation to reduce the risk of implantation failure. Inflammation has been shown to be a key factor in an embryo not being able to implant and reduce your chances for a successful pregnancy.
We looked at her current diet and then tweaked it to remove the foods she was intolerant to. I also prescribed her a probiotic to improve her gut microbiome and after her initial consultation she went off and tried very hard to stick to her new diet.
In her next appointment 2 weeks later she was doing really well. She had implemented most of the changes to her diet and had increased the amount of fruit and vegetables she ate. One of the things she found most difficult was what to eat instead of chicken, as that had been a protein staple. As an alternative we discussed turkey and I also recommended she add more fish into her diet. Fatty fish in particular is an important element of an anti-inflammatory diet as it contains omega 3 fatty acids (read more about that here).
Her next appointment was just after her embryo transfer, so she was in that terribly stressful 2 week wait period. We discussed some ways to manage that stress and also how she was doing with her diet. She found eating more fish instead of chicken was a good option. She also shared that she’d ‘fallen off the wagon’ at a birthday party and had eaten some of the foods she was intolerant to and had felt awful afterwards, with lots of bloating and other symptoms returning. To be honest, I’m always happy when that happens because it often causes symptoms to come back and that provides powerful evidence that the new diet is doing good.
We had booked her 3rd appointment and when she rescheduled it I wasn’t sure whether to be worried or get a little bit excited .. Well, turns out she was pregnant! She had changed the appointment to be after her pregnancy test.
So we now changed focus of course to dealing with some nausea and how to make sure her first trimester went well.
I wanted to share Shelley’s story with you to give you an idea what it would look like to use your diet to improve your fertility and also to give you some hope that pregnancy is possible despite your Endometriosis. Now I obviously can’t say that the work we did together was the one thing that got her pregnant, but it will have reduced her inflammation. And she found the fact that there was something she could do herself to improve her chances reduced her stress.
Now, the strategies I describe using with Shelley were personalised to her and her unique health situation. They are not generic. What I recommended to her I may not recommend to someone else. What worked for her may not work for you.
Perhaps reading Shelley’s story makes you wonder how nutrition may be able to help you to increase your chances of a successful pregnancy. I have a free guide “5 Strategies to improve your fertility naturally when you have Endometriosis”.
If you’d like to discuss your options with me, book a free 30-minute Endometriosis SOS Call.