NATURAL SOLUTIONS TO INFERTILITY: ABOUT WEIGHT
Your ability to conceive is significantly affected by what you weigh. You can make some very simple changes here to increase your fertility.
Calculating Your Body Mass Index (BMI)
Being the right weight for your height is very important. The easiest way to measure this is by means of the Body Mass Index (BMI) which identifies the percentage of body tissue which is actually fat. The amount of fat is important for fertility because we produce oestrogen from fat cells.
Your BMI is the ratio of your height to your weight and is calculated as follows: BMI = your weight in kg divided by the square of your height in meters. For example, if my weight is 63.5kg (10 stone) and my height is 1.68m (5ft 6in), my BMI is 63.5 – 1.68 X 1.68 = 22.5.
What does your BMI mean?
Under 20: underweight
20—25: normal
25—30: overweight
30-40: obese
Over 40: dangerously obese
A BMI of 30 would indicate a person around 16kg (2 1/2 stone) overweight.
What is Underweight?
Anything under a BMI of 20 is considered underweight and could make it difficult for you to conceive. This is one of nature’s protective mechanisms. The theory is that if we do not have enough fat stores our bodies think we are starving. Since it is not appropriate to become pregnant when food is short, ovulation or menstruation stop. (This is why women of the Bushmen tribes only ovulate at a certain time of year when food is plentiful.) When our weight gets back to normal (because we have stopped dieting and/or reduced the amount of exercise we take) we start ovulating and menstruating again. Our bodies assume that food is now plentiful and we become fertile again.
And even short-term dieting can have an effect. For example, healthy women who were put on a diet of 1,000 calories a day for just six weeks showed hormonal disruption in that short time. Progesterone, the important hormone which maintains pregnancy, dropped significantly and so did their oestrogen levels.
The good news is that getting back to the right weight really does boost your fertility. One study showed that nearly three-quarters of women with unexplained infertility managed to conceive naturally once they stopped dieting and returned to a normal weight.
If you get your weight back up to normal quickly it is still advisable to wait at least four months before trying to conceive. You will almost certainly have some vitamin and mineral deficiencies because you have been restricting your food intake. The four-month wait before getting pregnant is vital because otherwise, if you have been undernourished, you are more likely to have a low birth weight baby.
As we have seen, the current popularity of no-fat or low-fat foods and diets has some serious implications for fertility. Dieting in this way may deprive you of the nutrients that are essential for the proper functioning of your reproductive system. Just how serious an effect this can have was demonstrated by one study which showed that only 27 per cent of the women on a fat-restricted diet were actually ovulating.
To improve your fertility you should aim for a BMI within the normal range of 20-25, the optimum being 24.
Food should be eaten regularly and you should never skip meals. Apart from ensuring that you are well-nourished, regular meals are important to maintain your hormonal balance.
What is Overweight?
A BMI of over 25 is considered overweight and it can reduce your fertility. However, just losing a small amount of weight, say 10 per cent, can be enough to improve your hormone profiles, make your periods more regular, stimulate ovulation and increase your chances of pregnancy.
In fact it has been suggested that changing a woman’s diet should be the first move if she is overweight and failing to conceive. And research shows that even women with normal ovaries gain positive improvements in their hormone balance as they lose weight.
However, once you are pregnant, dieting is positively harmful. This is because, when you diet, your body gets rid of toxins and waste products. This is usually a good thing but if you are pregnant then the toxins can go straight into the developing baby.
For this reason, you must aim to lose any excess weight before you get pregnant. If you are already pregnant, then it is fine to change the quality of your food (by buying healthier foods such as organic vegetables, changing to organic free-range eggs, eliminating sugar, etc) but you still need to eat a good variety of food and not skip meals.
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