Gaining a healthy BMI and eating a varied diet can improve your natural fertility and make treatment more successful.
Below are some top tips :
- Try to avoid processed foods, takeaway foods, and increase your intake of fruit and vegetables.
- Eat protein for breakfast – Protein is essential for the ovarian follicles to mature, and also for eggs to be released during each cycle. Eating protein also makes you feel fuller, which can help reduce the amount of food eaten. Replacing carbohydrate-heavy breakfasts such as cereal with a protein-rich one such as scrambled egg or high protein yoghurt with berries is a good choice.
- Eliminate simple carbs such as sweets and biscuits – unbalanced blood sugar can make it even more difficult to maintain a healthy BMI as excess sugar is converted to body fat. This increases the amount of oestrogen in the body, causing hormone imbalance.
- Increase colour in your diet – leafy vegetables and colourful fruit are rich in antioxidants and help protect you from disease. They also reduce damage to DNA from free radicals – unstable molecules created in the body in response to stress and environmental toxins – therefore improving the quality of sperm.
- Don’t cut out essential fats – these are important for egg quality and for successful implantation of the embryo, and for improving sperm morphology and motility.
Although an increase in a certain food won’t affect fertility, a balance of healthy whole foods with a focus on macronutrients can definitely improve fertility and chances of conceiving naturally. As well as this, a healthy lifestyle can aid the IVF process and ensure that a couple has the best possible chances of giving birth to a healthy baby.