Episode #124: Conceiving with PCOS: What Every Woman Should Know

I’ve gotten several questions lately about specific, unique, I have this going on, but I want to get pregnant, and I don’t know if the normal ways of doing things will work for me. Basically, I’ve been getting a ton of questions on how to get pregnant with PCOS, and I wanted to address the basic path forward of what do we do? Because a lot of women have been instant messaging me about things their doctors have told them or their doctors have been having them try and wanting to get feedback on what’s going on with their fertility. I just wanted to go through and just give you a quick couple steps on, What does it look like to repair your fertility, optimize your fertility, and ultimately increase your chances of conceiving naturally, or even with the help of fertility interventions when you have PCOS. So let’s dive in.

You’re listening to the PCOS Repair podcast, where we explore the ins and outs of PCOS and how to repair the imbalances in your hormones naturally with a little medical help sprinkled in. Hi, I’m Ashlene Korcek and with many years of medical and personal experience with polycystic ovarian syndrome, it is my joy to watch women reverse their PCOS as they learn to nourish their body in a whole new way. With the power of our beliefs, our mindset, and our environment, and the understanding of our genetics we can heal at the root cause.

Welcome back to the PCOS Repair Podcast, where today we’re going to be talking about PCOS and fertility. This can also pertain to even if you’re just trying to repair your cycle and have natural recurring regular periods but what do you really need to know about your fertility and optimizing your fertility when you have PCOS? First of all, a few weeks ago, we did a mini-series here on the PCOS Repair podcast about root causes. They really talked about how all the different root causes of things that are going on deep in your metabolic health and your endocrine health, what’s going on that’s increasing your androgen. All of those symptoms that we have with PCOS, in particular, fertility issues and period problems and not ovulating, those stem from the excess androgens but what’s causing that? I want you to go back if you haven’t already or if you want a refresher, I will link on the web page for this episode. I’ll link in there all of the five episodes in that mini-series. I’ll link those there for you so you can go back and learn about what’s causing that excess in androgens because what happens is that when we have excess androgens, and specifically, usually that’s testosterone.

We have this extra to testosterone in our system, and that increases our LH and when our LH goes up, what happens is our baseline LH is high and so we’re going through the month and we don’t have this nice huge rise or a surge in LH It tells our body it’s time to ovulate and when we don’t have this nice surge in LH, we tend to just have this confused, I almost think of it like each hormone is looking at each other like, Wait, is it my turn? Is it my turn? I think it’s your turn. Nobody’s having this nice rhythm of passing off the next step to the next person or the next hormone. In a regular cycle, we would have FSH stimulate the maturing of a follicle. Actually, it matures several follicles. Then there’s usually one that’s the primary one that’s taking off for the month, and the other ones will back off and let that primary one fully develop. It’ll get all the way developed, and then you’ll have this lovely surge of LH because it wasn’t already elevated. Then you’ll have ovulation occur, and you’ll release that mature follicle that is met with a sperm, it’ll become an embryo. It’ll embed in the uterine lining because you have all this lovely progesterone because while estrogen was helping the first half. Now in the second half of your cycle, which we call the luteal phase, now your progesterone is nice and high, supporting that nice, cushy, healthy uterine lining where the embryo can implant and pregnancy can occur.

Now, if any of those things are off, we have a problem. We’re not going to get the next step to occur. We can create some chaos because none of these are coordinating. They’re all going off on their own, and it ultimately just ends up in chaos. How do we start to bring those different systems into a rhythm so that we can have regular periods that are having ovulatory cycles so we know when we should be trying to get pregnant, and so that after we’ve been trying to get pregnant, that the environment is conducive to implantation and carrying a healthy pregnancy to term.

With PCOS, we know that androgens are a problem. We can take the PCOS root cause quiz and learn how each root cause is maybe affecting us more than another. Then it’s really important to start tracking. As we begin the process of improving our fertility naturally, it’s not something that’s going to happen quickly. Each follicle takes about three months to even be ready for its turn to be matured for the month. When we start thinking about how long it really takes to start optimizing our fertility, we’re thinking a minimum of three months, probably a little bit more, to really get our body ready for that and side note, and I’m sorry to disappoint, fertility Fertility treatments don’t really help you any faster. In fact, if anything, unless you were so close to your body was already doing all of this naturally, and you were just so close and you need this little tiny push over the edge, fertility treatments aren’t really going to be as beneficial as we want them to be. Because in PCOS, we’re in this chaotic hormonal. It’s not like we’re ovulating but it’s not strong enough or that we just need a little extra progesterone. We haven’t reached that point yet. We’re still under chaos and when we’re under chaos, we need to start to address those root causes first. As we start addressing those root causes, I highly recommend you start tracking.

If it doesn’t drive you completely insane to start tracking, if you can track your basal body temperature, that’s the one I would like you to track, it’s so much more helpful. At the beginning, it’s going to be chaos. It’s not going to look like anything like it’s supposed to. It’s going to look like everything’s a mess. You’re not going to have any pattern. That’s what you want to see because you want to see where you started. Then you may start to see a little bit of a pattern. Now, it may not be as much as you want it to be, but if you don’t start tracking till four months in when nothing has been happening, you won’t know how far you’ve come that you went from other chaos to a slight pattern and so that slight pattern can be very discouraging after four months of hard work but if you have that slight pattern starting at four months after several months of charting chaos, all of a sudden, that little bit of a pattern is actually quite rewarding. So that’s where starting to chart, but don’t get too excited about it. Don’t get too upset or don’t get too invested in trying to make a pattern where there isn’t one. It’s more just so that in a couple of months, you can look back and see the progress that you have made.

Then it’s about prepping your body for sustaining a healthy pregnancy. As we start to see those trends and what you’re tracking, we want to be supporting your root cause hormone so that you are having a high enough progesterone so that you are having the nice LH surge to allow ovulation. What happens is as you’re doing that, those cycles feed off of each other. Every time you have the ovulation occur, even if it’s not quite enough to really be a full ovulation, in other words, you have a slight surge, all of those hormone responses, even if they’re not as strong as we would want them to be, they do have a little of a downhill or a continued effect on the next phase. The more times we go around this cycle and we have these phases playing off of the next phase to the next phase to the next phase of your cycle, the stronger each phase gets in and of itself, especially as you continue to support your body through the root cause healing, making care of what’s going on in your metabolic and endocrine health.

This brings me to one of the questions that I’ve been getting a lot is, if I’m trying to get pregnant, does it matter what my specific root cause is, or how do I take my specific root cause and then also focus on improving my fertility? And does that change what supplements I should take? Does it change how I should be eating throughout the month and things like that. The bottom line is it really doesn’t exactly change how that works. Basically, by improving your root cause hormones, so getting in there and improving your cortisol, your adrenal health, your insulin health, and decreasing your inflammation, and allowing your hormones to regulate and to improve any nutritional deficiencies and things like that, and creating a lifestyle bubble that promotes repair and relaxation and nurturing and nourishing your body and daily movement to help your body with all the benefits of exercise. These are the things that will ultimately improve your fertility. You don’t have to do anything massively different.

I do work with women who are purposely trying to get pregnant. We do have specific things that we’re tracking maybe a little bit more strictly or we’re paying certain attention to more than we would if someone was trying to just increase their energy or to feel better in their body or to lose weight but ultimately, working with your root cause health allows all of these surface symptoms to start to optimize and improve themselves. So knowing what’s going on in your root causes, and you may have a couple, you may get to address all of the root causes on some level in order to improve your health but knowing which ones are your biggest bang for your buck, so to speak, are really, really, really, really helpful in allowing you to learn what you need and how you need to create your fertility path on your way to becoming a mommy.

As we wrap up today, I know this is a broad view, but really what I wanted you to take away from this episode today is that the excess androgens are messing with your cycle. That’s why you’re having your regular periods. Other people may be more concerned by the acne that it’s causing or the hair problems that it’s causing or the weight gain that it’s causing. If you’re trying to get pregnant, you’re more concerned about how it’s messing with your period. The first step really is, it’s almost always one of two hormones or both of these two hormones that are the problem and that is your LH is usually too high, and your progesterone may be too low. LH really has to do with the excess androgens, progesterone usually has to do with your lack of ovulation as well as high stress.

Reducing your response to stress, allowing your body to find more peace and calm, as well as addressing your root causes that are elevating that LH, is really going to be beneficial to your cycle and then starting to know when you’re ovulating, tracking what’s working, seeing that improvement through tracking your BBT. A couple of ways you can do that, you can take your temperature yourself. There’s a couple of different devices that will take it for you. You want to get something that’s relatively accurate because there’s nothing more frustrating when you’re already trying to stare at this chart and try to make sense of it and try to somehow see a pattern in it that you want to your data is a little fuzzy because your device that you’re measuring your temperature with isn’t great. So you do want to get a good device.

There’s different options out there. There’s ovusense sense, there’s the Aura ring, there’s just a good old thermometer with, ideally, two decimal points of reading, so it’ll give you something like 97.89 as compared to just 0.9 and then you can also do some Apple watches, we’ll do that as well. If you don’t mind wearing your Apple watch at night. Your sleep is very important, so choose something that’s not annoying to you while you’re sleeping or somehow buzzing or causing alarms, like little dings and reminders to go off while you’re sleeping. We don’t want to disrupt your sleep, especially when we’re trying to optimize fertility. Then all of the things that you’re doing to help repair your cycle are also going to be so helpful as you begin your pregnancy. They’re going to help to reduce your chance of complications and your chance of any problems throughout pregnancy and help you carry a healthy baby to term. So lots of benefits there as well.

Then just that there’s really… I’ve had this question a lot. Is there a difference of what I need to do if I’m trying to get pregnant, or is it different things that I do to manage my root cause is if I’m not trying to get pregnant? Essentially, they’re the same things we track and pay attention to different things, depending on what your goals are but insulin or inflammation or stress pretty much get addressed a similar way and so hopefully that sheds some light on the steps of what you’re looking at as you optimize your fertility and if you have any questions or I’ve been getting so many ideas in my DMs about different podcasts people want me to do, I’ll try to answer some of them even on my Instagram page. So be sure to follow me over on Instagram @nourishedtohealthy and subscribe to the podcast because there’s lots of episodes coming up that were inspired by questions that I’ve been getting in my DMs and as always, I really welcome you to leave me messages in my DMs over on Instagram. Sometimes it takes me a couple of days to get back to you because I’ve been getting many, many, many DMs a day and so it gets a little busy in the chats over there and sometimes if I somehow missed your message, please feel free to ask it again or say, Hey, just following up on this, because I’m not trying to ignore anyone over there in my messages, but it does get a little busy in my chat over there, especially after episodes like today where I’m just going to bring up certain questions for you, feel free to jump over there on Instagram and start a conversation with me. I’d love to hear from you.

So with that, I will say goodbye for now and same time, same place next week. All right. Bye for now.