Top 3 Natural Fertility Diet + Lifestyle Tips

These natural fertility diet and lifestyle tips can help boost your overall health and may help you get pregnant without extensive infertility treatments.

There’s so much information on what to eat and what to avoid in order to get pregnant. It’s no wonder parents-to-be can feel overwhelmed. Especially in cases where women are experiencing infertility, food can start to feel like one of the only areas where we have control. And in an effort to do things perfectly, we may over restrict.

The 3 Natural Fertility Diet + Lifestyle Cornerstones

Food and lifestyle can actually be a great source of pleasure on the journey to conceiving. It’s an area where we can take some simple steps to notice profound change.

Here are three fairly easy-to-follow diet and lifestyle tips to support your fertility and a healthy pregnancy.

1. Eat Anti-Inflammatory Foods

Inflammation is the cause of many imbalances in the body. Inflammation has been linked to multiple fertility diagnoses including PCOS, endometriosis, recurrent miscarriage, and poor sperm and egg quality.

Here are a few ways you can use diet to reduce inflammation in your body and support conception: 

• Reduce refined sugar and artificial sweeteners 
• Limit caffeine (favor green and herbal teas over coffee)
• Eat many colorful vegetables and fruits to benefit from the antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals.
• Cook with anti-inflammatory spices like ginger and turmeric.
• Incorporate herbs that help boost fertility into your diet.
• Favor Omega 3’s over Omega 6’s in foods like salmon,  flaxseed, hemp seeds, walnuts, and pumpkin seeds.
• Reduce or eliminate dairy and gluten intake.
• Eat healthy fats and high fiber vegetables.
• Drink plenty of fresh, filtered water.

The foods you eat today will impact the health of your eggs (and your partner’s sperm) 90 days from now. So, now is a great time to start a natural fertility diet together.

2. Move Your Body Daily

Regular aerobic exercise (anything that increases your heart rate and gets the blood pumping) encourages a healthy cardiovascular system. But don’t worry – it doesn’t have to be strenuous.

Aim to get a little movement each day (30 minutes is ideal). This will invigorate fresh blood and oxygen flow to your reproductive organs, release feel-good endorphins, optimize your weight, and reduce stress. 

Don’t overdo it. Make sure your exercise for fertility focuses on replenishment rather than draining your energies. Apart from walking, swimming and hiking, here are some fertility exercises you might enjoy:

• Fertility yoga is known to relax the nervous system and reduce circulating cortisol in the body. If you can’t find a class locally- check out: the Yoga 4 Fertility series.
• Qi Gong is a great moving meditation that uses breath to open the various energy lines in your body (referred to as meridians in Chinese Medicine). Yin Qi Gong is a movement process specifically designed for women to improve the communication between the brain, pituitary gland and reproductive organs, and reduce stress.
• Dancing is a wonderful form of exercise that is joyful. Whether it’s a Zumba class or Neuromuscular Integrative Action (NIA), dancing opens your hips and pelvis, which is wonderful for fertility.

These habits are great to keep up during pregnancy and may also help you have an easier birth.

3. Make Relaxation a Daily Priority

Stress and fertility aren’t a productive pair. Just because this is third on the list, downtime is just as important and movement and following a natural fertility diet.

From a physiological perspective, increased levels of stress hormones are released by the nervous system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. This sends the body into “survival mode”. If we take a note from nature, we know that animals don’t reproduce when they are in danger. 

Find ways to unwind everyday with simple activities like:

• Try breath work and mindfulness meditation. Mind-body programs for fertility have been shown in research to be effective in helping couples get pregnant.
• Take a bath or try a foot soak. Add 1 cup of epsom salts to a warm bath or foot soak for a wonderful way to gently detox and replenish.
• Acupuncture is deeply relaxing to the nervous system. It has also been studied both for effectiveness in natural fertility and as a part of assisted reproductive technology protocols.
• Sit outside in nature for 5 minutes. Nature is healing to our bodies and nervous systems. It’s also the best place to witness new life being created and sustained every single day.