•Do not multitask while eating, as you might normally do. Just eat and breathe and notice the calmness that arises as you practice being present during your meal. You may even notice that this style of eating helps your digestion, since normally you may not chew your food as thoroughly and may gobble things down too quickly.
•If you are following a specific dietary regimen, treat yourself once in a while (ten to twenty percent of the time) without worrying about it. If chocolate is your vice, buy organic chocolate and enjoy every morsel. If you love the ritual and taste of coffee, drink a small cup of organic coffee once or twice a week. Make treating yourself a meditative and soulful experience. Ironically, as you begin to eat healthier foods, your taste buds may become more sensitive and, when you give in to a craving, the food may not taste as good as you imagined. That piece of chocolate cake with ice cream may taste sickly sweet and make you feel bloated. The good news is you can make your own treats and control the quality and quantity of the ingredients (like sugars).
•Stop judging what you (or others) are eating. Eating something “bad” does not make you a bad person. This type of self-judgement is tied directly to guilt and shame, both of which can negatively impact your physical, mental, and emotional well-being, and affect the environment into which you hope to grow a baby.
•Share and enjoy food with others. Humans in most cultures have been eating communally since the beginning of time. Sharing food with family, friends, and colleagues affects your natural healing response. It brings more relatedness, laughter, and joy to your life, which leads to physiological, psychological, social, spiritual, and quality-of-life benefits.27
•Eat at regular intervals and do not skip meals; this will help keep your blood sugar levels balanced.
•Prepare and eat home-cooked meals as much as you can. This allows you to control the ingredients in your food. It also enables you to make extra food to freeze in meal-sized containers for when you don’t have time to cook properly. You can also cook fresh vegetables, but make enough for two days. If you find it’s difficult to cook during the week, make several recipes on the weekend that you can eat and freeze. If you need to resort to take-away food sometimes, choose health-conscious establishments, avoid deep-fried foods, and make special requests such as adding more vegetables and decreasing high-carb foods.
NOTE: Often, my patients complain to me about the cost of organic food, yet not too long ago it was considered normal for the average family to spend forty percent of their income on food.28 In 1901, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey found that families from New York and Massachusetts spent 42.5 percent of income on food.29 Now it seems we want to spend less on food and more on material goods like cell phones and computers. Perhaps it’s not that organic food is too expensive, but that you might consider re-evaluating the cost of your health.
Vanessa’s spontaneous miracle
Having undergone several IUI and IVF cycles, Vanessa and her husband were taking a break from the stress of fertility treatments, although Vanessa was still doing acupuncture at my clinic and eating a balanced diet. She and her husband felt they had exhausted the technological resources in their hometown of Toronto and were researching the Colorado Clinic of Reproductive Medicine (CCRM) in Denver. They thought the CCRM offered more advanced testing than the Toronto clinic she was attending, and Vanessa and Robert met with the fertility doctor to discuss this option.
After the meeting, Vanessa noticed she had some spotting, although her period wasn’t due for five days. She joked with her husband that her ovaries were reacting to the sound of the fertility doctor’s voice and got scared into getting pregnant in order to avoid another IVF. What she didn’t know was that the spotting was implantation bleeding. A few days later, she couldn’t ignore the symptoms anymore; she’d been pregnant so many times that she was completely in tune with her body.
“It was three o’clock in the morning and it sort of hit me,” she told me later. “I got up and did a pregnancy test in the middle of the night. After four years of trying to conceive, I was pregnant with Mia.” What surprised her most was that her husband had been away for work that month and they’d only had intercourse once, well before ovulation.
A woman’s fertile window is about five days before ovulation, and on ovulation day. After ovulation, the window of receptivity to sperm is twelve to twenty-four hours. The idea is to try to have sex before ovulation, allowing the sperm to swim up to and sit in the fallopian tubes, where they can live up to a maximum of seven days ready and waiting for the ovulating egg. This must have been what happened when Vanessa finally became pregnant—the old-fashioned way, with no technology.
2
The Everywoman of Fertility Challenges
It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.
J.K. ROWLING, HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE
Avery: Poor ovarian reserve
Avery was a hard-working, goal-oriented woman. At thirty-six, having achieved partnership in her law firm, she focused on her goal of having two children before she reached forty. After two years of trying to conceive with her husband of seven years, they sought help from a fertility clinic. After undergoing IUI unsuccessfully, she attended my clinic feeling desperate and frustrated.
Avery’s first impression of my TCM clinic was that it was calm, restful, welcoming, and warm, in contrast to the necessarily sterile medical environment of the fertility clinic. She sat on my treatment table, commenting on the comfort of the pillows and sheets in contrast to the disposable paper at the medical clinic. When our conversation turned to her unsuccessful IUI, however, her tears began to flow.
I encounter this almost daily in my practice. The women who come to me feel more than devastated; they feel broken, as if their inability to have a child negates every area of their lives—lives in which they are not only competent but sometimes very accomplished. I provide a safe space for much-needed emotional release. I told Avery there was nothing I could say to ease her pain. There’s no other way to describe it except to say it’s unfair, and, well, it sucks.
I call this the mourning period, a time to grieve the loss of a wanted child. In Chinese medicine, we view this as a healthy and necessary emotional purge. It’s important and healthy to experience your emotions and get them out rather than trying to bottle them up inside and get on with your busy life.
The seven affects of emotions
In Chinese medicine, we recognize the need to experience the “seven affects” of emotions. It is a healthy and necessary part of the human experience to express joy, sorrow, worry, grief, fear, fright, and anger. When we harbour and suppress these feelings over a prolonged period without expressing or purging them, we give rise to disharmony, which affects our physical well-being, including our fertility.
Infertility myths
Before coming to my clinic, or going to a fertility clinic, Avery and her husband had tried to conceive on their own for twelve months. After six months of having sex three times a week without conceiving, Avery used an ovulation predictor kit (OPK) from the local pharmacy to time their intercourse during her peak ovulation times. She would pee on a urine stick every day from eight days after her menstrual period began; when a happy face appeared on the pee strip, it indicated her most fertile time (when her surging luteinizing hormone triggered the release of a mature egg from one of her ovaries). This peak indicated the small window of opportunity each month in which she might conceive, typically about six days.
Avery, an overachiever, said she and her husband would have intercourse daily, sometimes twice, to “get the job done.” She admitted their love-making had become mechanical, timed, and devoid of spontaneity. Instead of focusing on their connection and mutual enjoyment, she strategized the best sexual position to maximize conception; after he gave his “sperm