Fertility Diet: Strategies for Healthy Eating to Increase Your Fertility

Making good choices in your fertility diet can be a daily battle. For many of us, we are people at war.

Not with some foreign country, but at war with ourselves.

For some of us, our effort to follow a fertility diet can feel like a daily battle: the desire to eat the most fabulous, decadent, mouth watering entrees often involves foods that are not the healthiest choice and don’t enhance fertility.

The food we eat is fuel for our body. When we choose to eat healthy foods our body is able to process the nutrients more efficiently than when we eat unhealthy foods. Following a diet low in carbohydrates with high protein content is the way to go for a healthy happy body. This is a great diet for overall health and also recommended to achieve and maintain a healthy weight when trying to conceive.

Food is such a large part of our lives. We use food to celebrate, as an expression of ourselves, as a focal point for special occasions, and as a way to come together with our friends and loved ones. Who doesn’t love a great meal or wonderful dessert?

It can be hard at times to avoid those foods that are not good for us, and choose the healthier option. We should not deprive ourselves completely of the occasional treat, but we need to have a balance and choose the healthy choices more than the unhealthy ones.

It is no secret the American diet is influenced by our busy lives. This often leads us to fast food options high in calories, high in carbohydrates, and large in portion. We have to get our moneys worth with those large plates of food, right? Wrong. We need to focus making healthy choices in proper proportions.

So, how do we best arm ourselves to avoid all of the unhealthy yet tasty foods out there tempting us on a daily basis?? We have to set ourselves up for strategic success!! As any good military professional will tell you, to win the battle you have to train every day, arm yourself with the right equipment, develop a reliable supply line and have a well thought out plan of attack in place. In this analogy, training creates mental and muscle memory to engage a healthy routine and react to favorably to unexpected situations; our equipment is healthy food, reliable supply line is access and preparation to health food in all situations and our plan of attack is setting realistic goals and measures to assess our progress in meeting these goals.

Taking a little time one day or so a week to prepare healthy meals will not only save you money spent eating out, but it will make it much easier to eat healthy by having healthy food at your fingertips. Preparing healthy meals and snacks will help keep you on track. Load yourself up with a nice set of reusable storage containers. A crock pot size recipe filled with healthy foods that that can be refrigerated or frozen can be heated for meals later in the week at home, work or on the road. This strategy is a health-saver because you will be prepared to enjoy a healthy meal in an instant.

Recruit family, friends, and co-workers to make healthy changes with you. Not only will you help them live a healthier lifestyle; but, they will also not be eating their tempting unhealthy choices in front of you!

Here at Michigan Reproductive Medicine we encourage all of our patients to follow a healthy eating plan. Our wonderful dietician Nancy Padilla, RDN, is available for consultation and will help arm you with a healthy eating plan that works with your dietary preferences and your busy lifestyle!