The process of maturing an oocyte into an egg ready to be released at ovulation goes on for at least three months. It also takes at least three months for sperm cells to develop fully.
What happens in your body during this time affects your eggs or sperm. If you want them to be healthy and active, you need to be healthy and active. Consider this time a three-month “pre-mester” during which you can help your body prepare to conceive. Take the same careful care of your body as you would if you were already pregnant. Do it for the same reason you do it during pregnancy (providing the best health for your baby), and you’ll get a bonus: a smoother, surer path to conception. Men, follow your partner’s lead and take care of your body with the same care. You’ll reap the same rewards.
For the most part, the things that keep your body healthy also support fertility. So the basic principles in this chapter will probably come as no surprise. But many of the reasons behind our recommendations may shed new light on familiar ground. We’ll look at the specific links to improving fertility in order to reinforce your motivation to implement any necessary changes in your life.
Wanting to have a healthy baby is a primal urge, and most women are therefore capable of being really well behaved while pregnant. What’s not always as clear to our patients is that cleaning up their acts in similar ways will help them get pregnant in the first place. This is a news flash for some would be dads, too: your health affects the likelihood and health of a pregnancy, especially before that pregnancy is ever conceived.
So on the one hand, we take a firm stand: everyone who wants to conceive will benefit by getting himself or herself in good shape before he or she even starts trying. We recommend taking a full three months to do so. On the other hand, this is not a rigid program. We won’t be telling you never to let coffee cross your lips, or to exercise every day (or drop exercise altogether), or to swear off all junk food, or to quit your job so you will never experience stress (as if that would work anyway). We advocate moderation in all things. We lay out our advice clearly, but we don’t want to cause anxiety by making you feel that you have to heed every last piece of it if you ever want to get pregnant. As long as you are making choices for general good health and following our guidelines whenever possible, in ways that make sense in your life, you’ll be doing the right thing.
And you’ll be rewarded for your efforts. British researchers surveyed more than two thousand pregnant women to assess how much lifestyle factors influenced time to pregnancy. They wanted to know if drinking, smoking, being overweight, being over age 35 for a woman or over age 45 for a man, or drinking caffeinated beverages as if you owned a Starbucks really made an impact on how long it took couples to conceive once they started trying.
They found that couples with, between them, more than four strikes against them in these areas took more than seven times longer to conceive than couples with none of these bad habits, and they were more than seven times as likely to take more than a year to get pregnant. The chances that they would conceive at all fell by 60 percent; less than 40 percent of them were able to conceive within a year. The more they smoked or drank or caffeinated themselves, the greater the impact on their fertility. Even couples with just two bad habits between them—maybe he’s overweight and she’s over 35, or she’s into espresso and he’s a beer connoisseur—took two and a half times longer to get pregnant than those without any bad habits.
Despite these findings, we see this as a good-news study. At bottom, what these sci-entists found was that 83 percent of the couples with fertility-friendly lifestyles got pregnant within one year. They estimated that if couples planning a pregnancy led fertility-friendly lives, they’d cut their chances of fertility problems in half. This research is backed up by findings from a study at the University of Surrey which showed that couples diagnosed with infertility who made lifestyle changes, especially in their diets, and followed a program of nutritional supplements had an 80 percent pregnancy rate. (In couples without infertility diagnoses, pregnancy rates normally range from 44 to 96 percent within a year of trying, de-pending on age.) Other research indicates that cleaning up your act can also help increase your chances of success with ARTs.
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