We see the word inflammation everywhere, and while it is a pretty common part of life, it can be devastating. Here we look into how chronic inflammation can impair your fertility.
What Creates Inflammation?
Inflammation refers to a normal reaction in your body. When you hurt yourself or have an illness, your immune system responds to it immediately. If there is a foreign bacteria in you, your body tries to fight it. It is the expected behaviour for an optimal functioning of the human body.
But there are factors that can increase your level of inflammation in the long term. When external factors attack your body regularly and require an immune response constantly, your body becomes overwhelmed. That’s chronic inflammation.
Your brain is responsible for sending out messages, via hormones, to other organs when it captures data, such as “inflammation is here”. If there is an intruder in the body, the team of “helpers” is sent out. When there are too many or too frequent attacks, it impairs its capacity to heal or handle normal cellular functions.
Your body then learns to live and cope with all these weaknesses, while keeping the rest of the body functions running. It shows signs of these diminished functions with fatigue, brain fog, weight loss or weight gain, sleep disruption, and more.
These external factors can come from your environment and your lifestyle. The main ones are:
- Diet
- Stress
- Sleep quality
- Exercise (or lack thereof)
- Exposure to toxins
Each one in itself can contribute to high inflammation, you don’t need all of them to impact your health globally.
How Inflammation Impacts your Fertility
Let’s go back to the brain sending out messages via hormones to different parts of the body. In fertility, the main hormones are oestrogen and progesterone, with the LH, running the show. The brain is sending messages to the ovaries and uterus.
For fertility, the aim is to promote the egg maturation in the first phase of the cycle with oestrogen. Then with the LH surge, the goal is ovulation, second phase of the cycle. Once ovulation has occurred, progesterone helps with the uterus preparation in the third phase. And if there was no conception, the message is to start from scratch again by shedding the uterus lining. All hormones are low, it’s your period phase.
These are parts of the female body working together as part of a typical cycle. When inflammation is too high and your body cannot cope anymore, the vital parts of fertility are impaired. And it can impact different aspects of it: the maturation of the eggs, ovulation ( a pretty big one if you ask me), or the implantation of the embryo if conceived.
If any of these parts is not happening correctly, if your hormones are too low, too high, not sent out by the brain at all, out of sync, etc. A healthy conception and implantation cannot take place. Our bodies are beautifully designed, but with glitches in the system, the machine is derailed.
Fertility is a Health Marker
We are looking at the effects of inflammation on your fertility. Not at the conditions and pathologies that can prevent you from getting pregnant. I am not a doctor, and I am not here to make a diagnosis. I am a health coach and my (self-assigned) role and mission are to help people, thanks to the wonders of Mother Nature to get back to health.
And I genuinely believe that the body is beautifully designed machine. Sometimes, there are “unintentional glitches” in the design, and some people become heroes at turning their fate around.
I also believe that taking care of our own body is our biggest mission on earth, so we can do anything. And as Dr Nathalie Crawford says, fertility is a marker of health. It means that this orchestra of hormones and body responses are working in harmony, enough to make humans.
I can tell you how frustrated I was and doubting myself when I couldn’t get pregnant. As a health coach, and a natural and healthy life advocate, it took me a while to accept that I needed help. Just a little bit to nudge me in the right position.
So I got in touch with someone specialising in natural fertility. Adapted my diet and did a whole detox on toxin exposure. I think I was covering the rest in terms of sleep, stress, exercise, so it was relatively quick after I started. Got pregnant within 6 weeks. But you don’t know what you don’t know. So I hope what I’m sharing with you today can give you hope that your fertility journey is not over, even if it takes time.
Infertility rates might be rising, but so are inflammation levels in people. We live in environments that are laden with processed foods, toxins, endocrine disruptors, making us sleepless and stressed beyond reason. It’s time to go back to basics.
Also read:
Essential Hormones to Know About When TTC
How to Know When Your Fertile Window Is
The Road to Motherhood Can Be a Bitc*
