It goes without saying that you’re more likely to get pregnant if you and your partner are in good health. You need to bear in mind that some medical conditions, such as obesity and diabetes, can affect your chances of becoming pregnant. We look at ways you can increase your chances of getting pregnant.
Lose even a little bit of weight
Too much body fat can cause you to have irregular periods and this can affect your ability to conceive. Women who have a BMI or Body Mass Index of between 20 and 25 are considered healthy, but more than 30 and less than 19 can cause difficulties with conceiving.
Being overweight has other negative connotations with IVF because it makes monitoring the ovaries during IVF more difficult. With egg retrievals, it increases the chance of complications. You don’t want to face complications with something you could have so easily dealt with.
Choose the best medical partners
When you do research, you discover that IVF is certainly not always successful. It is therefore important to choose doctors, clinics and laboratories of the highest caliber. This is where IVF Authority becomes so utterly valuable to you.
Their medical staff does all the research and probings on IVF clinics, the way the clinics do things, their costs and much more. IVFAuthority.com does a superb job in presenting the top IVF clinics so that you can choose the most excellent reproductive team as you start this most emotional journey.
Determining credibility is very difficult if you’re not a medical professional and if you’re looking for a clinic and medical team known for their exceptional outcomes, this is the place to start.
Quit smoking
There is clear evidence that smoking reduces fertility in men and women. In fact, it has been found that men who smoke have a higher proportion of abnormal sperm than those who don’t.
Like smoking, alcohol can damage a man’s sperm, but since this sperm is being made afresh throughout his sexual life, it can improve if he cuts down on smoking and drinking. Health sperm unaffected by nicotine gives the best chance of effective fertilization.
Smoking can decrease your chance of success while doing IVF, affecting egg and sperm quality. Not only that, women who smoke have a good chance of giving birth to an underweight baby.
Supplementation
There are quite a few supplements such as folic acid, DHEA and CoQ10 that have shown to offer positive results with an increase in egg quantity and quality.
Also, many people, without even realizing it, are deficient in Vitamin D. There is more and more information emerging that links a lack of vitamin D to infertility and if you’ve undergone IVF, with outcomes that may well not be positive.
You can always ask your doctor to check your vitamin D levels and consider taking such supplements.
Your diet and exercise
During IVF, there is a huge need to eat healthily but it’s also not the time to make sudden changes such as deciding to suddenly become a vegan.
Certainly, eating a healthy diet during the weeks leading up to IVF will be beneficial in every way. A nutritious diet before pregnancy should also contain at least one good portion of protein, roughage, fruit and vegetables and not too many carbohydrates.
Exercise shouldn’t be abandoned during the IVF process. Certainly, if you have a healthy body mass index (BMI) and have been exercising all along, you should continue with what you were doing. If you’re a runner, though, you don’t want to go thundering along, doing 20 miles a day during this time, but to rather resort to some light jogging.