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Why Is No One Talking About Infertility from 1,200 Calorie Diets? · Nourished Fertility

• 0:00
  Welcome back to the Nourishing Women Podcast.
• 0:02
  This is Victoria Myers, your podcast host, peer recovery
• 0:04
  specialist, and fertility dietician.
• 0:07
  You know, some episodes are gentle nudge, others are.
• 0:10
  A full on truth bomb.
• 0:11
  And today it's the latter because I am so fired up about this.
• 0:15
  Why is no one talking about infertility from 1200 calorie a day diets?
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  Here's the direct link between what we've normalized as quote
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  unquote healthy and infertility, no one seems to be talking about it.
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  So today we are going to change that.
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  Let's just like set the scene here.
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  I know you're a healthy person.
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  You love eating organic Whole foods, clocking your daily 10
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  K steps, if not 20, 30, 40 k.
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  You never miss a workout.
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  You take your supplements religiously, but you still can't get pregnant.
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  If this is you, I bet your body's whispering that something's off.
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  Like your pure, your unpredictable, or completely gone.
• 0:53
  You're not seeing any signs of ovulation like fertile cervical mucus.
• 0:57
  You're peeing constantly freezing all the time.
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  Your libido is nonexistent.
• 1:01
  Let's not forget the low key anxiety and Mitchell chatter, especially about
• 1:05
  food in your body that never stops and exercise is the way that you earn food.
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  And if this is you, I also wonder if you potentially had
• 1:14
  a past with an eating disorder.
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  We talked about this recently on the podcast.
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  The episode is all about what do you do if you had an eating
• 1:21
  disorder back in high school?
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  Is that potentially affecting your fertility today?
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  Because a lot of the people that I see, you know, maybe did have a eating
• 1:28
  disorder way back in high school and college, and they're 95% recovered.
• 1:33
  I. But you know, there's still that 5% that lingers and your body remembers too.
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  You may be almost completely fully healed and just have a little bit
• 1:41
  of food rules and a little bit of, you know, exercise rigidity.
• 1:45
  But your body needs time to repair itself after all those years, especially
• 1:49
  for a lot of you, you were on birth control that entire time, so it's
• 1:52
  not like your hormones have learned how to work on their own, let alone
• 1:56
  get the micro and macronutrient support needed to function optimally.
• 2:01
  If you're listening to this episode two, I bet 1200 calories a day is
• 2:04
  just like what you see as norm.
• 2:07
  I don't know about you, but I grew up in the late 1990s, early two thousands.
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  Trust me, when I say I get it, like that was the life I grew up.
• 2:14
  Hello.
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  I can like still envision all those freaking magazines with like Lindsay
• 2:18
  Lohan on the cover looking Ralph and, and that just being like the goal to get to.
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  We have just normalized not eating enough.
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  However, if you're struggling to get pregnant, I think it's really
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  important that you consider.
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  That potentially it may be because you're under fed 1200 calories a day
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  is the amount a toddler needs yet?
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  We've been sold as women that this is some magic number for weight loss and wellness
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  and somehow just like, oh, that's all we should eat for the rest of our lives.
• 2:51
  And that's so unfortunate because it's metabolic sabotage.
• 2:55
  When you eat consistently for years and years, 1200, or even let's say
• 3:00
  1500, 1700 calories a day, 1800, your brain perceives the famine, your
• 3:06
  hypothalamus doo sound, reproductive hormone production, estrogen drops,
• 3:10
  ovulation stops, and boom, hypothermic.
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  A amenorrhea or pure loss caused from your undereating and over exercising steps in.
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  But it's more than just pure loss that's affected.
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  We know that low estrogen impacts your bone health, your
• 3:24
  brain health, your heart health.
• 3:25
  We know too, if we looked that episode recently with Nicole, where she talked
• 3:30
  all about thyroid health, if we think of a table and there's four legs, your
• 3:34
  adrenals, your thyroid, your ovaries in your brain, that every single one of
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  these will be impacted by undereating.
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  So it's more than just your peer loss.
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  It's your adrenals, it's your thyroid health too.
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  It's why you feel so shitty, because you're just not
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  eating enough, and it's why.
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  Your body has stopped that communication between your brain and your ovaries.
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  'cause it's saying, Nope, this is not a safe time to get pregnant.
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  Shut it all down.
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  Remember, fertility is one of the most energy demanding
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  times of a woman's body's life.
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  Creating life is not just cute ultrasounds and baby bump picks,
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  although we love that bar too.
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  From egg maturation to ovulation, to implantation to early pregnancy, your
• 4:21
  body needs a full on like surplus of energy to even consider conception.
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  This is about giving your body the fuel required to be fertile.
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  The energy and demands for fertility are significant.
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  Menstruating, active woman, just like you, needs at least 23 to not
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  2,800 calories per day, depending of course on her lifestyle.
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  And if you're healing right now from disordered eating period
• 4:46
  loss period irregularities, you have hypothalamic Amy Amenorrhea.
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  Like 2,500 calories plus is like a non-negotiable.
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  Obviously, that is so significantly more than 1200 calories a day.
• 5:00
  And I'll be honest with you, what I find to be true for most of my
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  clients, I wonder if this is true for you too, is the idea of eating
• 5:07
  more in theory sounds great, but when they actually start implementing
• 5:11
  and taking action, it becomes.
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  Overwhelming to do on your own because there's so much of that emotional piece
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  and the fear of weight gain that pops up as we try to make these changes.
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  Because the reason we eat 1200 calories a day is more than just like
• 5:25
  we see that as normal and healthy.
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  Right?
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  It's because at the end of the day, you're trying to control your body size.
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  'cause to you being small is healthy and I get that.
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  Been there, done that.
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  But I do think if you want to get pregnant, and I know that is your
• 5:38
  goal, listening to this episode, you're going to have to broaden your
• 5:43
  perspective, what healthy means.
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  And yes, that may mean some weight gain from eating more to properly
• 5:50
  nourish your body for fertility.
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  You know, sharing all this makes me think of a client that recently
• 5:56
  finished working with me, Morgan.
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  She was textbook healthy just like you.
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  She made all of her food from scratch.
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  She did early morning workouts,
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  and she was eating a roundish, you know, 1200 calories a day.
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  Yet her period was gone.
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  Her doctor saw all these alarming things.
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  I remember her being like, he would be so freaked out by how thin my
• 6:15
  uterine lining was, and he'd be so worried about my period loss.
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  Yet he had no answers as to why this was going on.
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  He just told her IVF is your best bet.
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  We said instead, when we started working with Morgan, let's feed your body.
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  Instead, we bumped up her calories.
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  We added way more carbs back into her diet, dropped intense workouts,
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  instead focused on walking.
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  Worked through her food, fears, perfectionism.
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  We had a lot of body image work to do together.
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  And for her.
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  She got her peer back.
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  Morgan got her peer back in 11 weeks, and then the next month on her second
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  time ever ovulating, she got pregnant.
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  And that's all from dishing diet culture and fueling her fertility.
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  Why don't we talk about this more?
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  Why don't we see this as like the first go-to when we're
• 7:03
  struggling with conception?
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  I hope that changes over time, but I do know that diet culture makes
• 7:10
  so much money off of us fearing.
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  Gaining weight makes so much money off of us being obsessed with clean eating.
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  But the truth of the matter is, quote unquote, clean eating is
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  often just dieting in disguise
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  . So if you're listening to this episode and nodding your head along and having
• 7:24
  some like major realizations with yourself, here's what I want you to hear.
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  You are not broken.
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  Your fertility is not broken.
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  You are not unable to conceive.
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  You are just simply undernourished, and fertility is not always about
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  age or genetics or bad luck.
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  Sometimes it's just about that you're eating too little.
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  That 1200 calories a day is not enough.
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  Food.
• 7:48
  It is time for a new strategy, a nourish strategy inside a premier period.
• 7:53
  Recovery for fertility.
• 7:54
  Recreate a tailored period comeback plan that addresses all of these areas.
• 7:58
  Nutrition, eating enough exercise mindset, stress.
• 8:02
  So that your body feels safe enough to ovulate, cycle and get and stay pregnant.
• 8:08
  If you're ready to be next, let's talk.
• 8:10
  You can apply with the link in our show notes and I would love to set
• 8:13
  up a one-on-one call so we can save time and see if it's a good fib.
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  Thank you so much for listening to this episode.
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  Share it with the healthiest woman.
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  You know, she might need it more than you realize.
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  She may be too simply struggling with infertility because
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  she's not eating enough
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  and with that shared, we'll be back, as always for another episode next week.
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  Until then, know that a nourish bodying is a powerful one.