The Fertility Sisterhood_Episode 5: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

The Fertility Sisterhood_Episode 5: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Lara Messerlian:
1 in 6 couples struggle with infertility, and we know that the environment plays a big role in how our bodies reproduce.

Carmen Messerlian:
In the Fertility Sisterhood, join me, Dr. Carmen Messerlian, Harvard epidemiologist and fertility expert, and my sister Lara, as we discuss what everyone needs to know about how the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and our everyday environmental exposures impact our health and therefore our fertility.

Lara Messerlian:
Now let's dive in and learn how we can clean up our lifestyles not only for ourselves, but for our future generations.

Lara Messerlian:
We all know that exercise is really good for you, but did you know that your physical fitness can also affect your fertility? Even if you're already a healthy weight? Although, in retrospect, it seems to make sense, I had never considered how the amount of time I spend exercising might affect my chances of getting pregnant. I'm someone who exercises every day. I try to stay fit, but I guess there is an optimal place that you need to be when it comes to fitness. Tell me more about this, sister.

Carmen Messerlian:
Yes, sister Lara. That's a great question, and I like that you stay fit. That's so important. Exercise, no matter what you're doing, if you're trying to get pregnant or not, is really an important part of our health and well-being, and it helps us with our physical health, and it helps us with our mental health. So I'm a really big advocate of trying to exercise, even if you can't get to a gym, just walking is really important. But you raise a good point, which is what range of exercise is healthy and good for you while you're trying to get pregnant? And we know through studies that exercise and physical activity is really important to our fertility, research tells us that women and men who exercise actually improve their chances of conception and reduce their time to pregnancy. Actually, we know that women who exercise even just an hour per week can decrease your risk of anovulatory cycles by about 5%. So exercise helps us ovulate, and it also helps men produce healthier sperm and higher quality sperm counts, and so it's really important for both your male partner and yourself to exercise and stay healthy. That doesn't mean you need to lift weights and go to the gym and be obsessive about it, it means try to get some steps in every day, even if it's walking or jogging or even doing house stuff in the home. You can get in a lot of steps in a house if you already have a child, or if you're taking care of a home, you can get a lot of activity in. But the important thing is to get your heart rate up, to get a bit of a sweat in, to not do it excessively. We know, actually, on the other side, excessive exercise, where you're taxing your body too much, when you're exercising too much can put a strain on your health and actually can reduce your fertility, so it can stop you from ovulating, especially when exercise, in particular for women, when exercise is associated with weight loss. So there's an optimal range that we typically are all at a set point, if we can stay within the range of our healthy set point. Set point means where your body naturally ends up for its weight so that you're at the range, that the weight for your height and your body composition and your bone density, everybody has range and your body kind of gravitates towards that range. So if you lose weight and you're not meant to lose weight, you'll go back to your original weight, but also on the opposite side, which is if you're too low weight, you'll go up, and if you're too high weight, you gravitate back to your regular set point. Although it's harder to get there when you're on a higher range of weight, but your BMI is a really important marker of your health. BMI is not a perfect measure, it's a measure that looks at your height over metered square or, sorry, your weight over metered square, and there's a range of healthy weight, typically in the range of 19.5 BMI to about 25 is considered healthy, below that is considered underweight, and above that it's considered overweight. And then, if you're really high, then you could be in the obese range. So people who are overweight and obese have a harder time getting pregnant. Being in the range of a healthy weight is important, and exercise is a really good way of trying to keep yourself fit, reduce some pounds if you need to, and if you don't need to, then just staying healthy and optimizing your chances of ovulation and, for men, improving your sperm quality.

Lara Messerlian:
So not even just physically, the fit, I find that exercising for me is actually, keeps me mentally in a good space. I get in a place where I'm almost meditative, and both my husband and I, we're, he was running marathons at the time that we were trying to conceive, and I was exercising every day. And it just was really good to have a mental space where you are physically and mentally healthy when you're exercising. It really helps your mind too, not just your body.

Carmen Messerlian:
That's really important. So stress, we know, affects your chances of getting pregnant, and it might be a combination of your physical body being improved by exercise, but also your mental health is also improved, and your stress goes down. Like you mentioned, there's a lot of release that happens when you exercise, especially if you break in, if you get your heart rate up, and you start sweating. There's endorphins and dopamine that get secreted, those are positive hormones for your health and for your mental health, but also for your physical health and actually improves what we've talked about in some of the previous episodes, known as the pituitary axis, the adrenal axis, and the hormonal axis, that kind of regulate your mind and your body, your brain, and your body, and your stress levels and your hormonal levels. And so those axes, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal, and gonadal axes, those are fancy words, they're basically how your brain talks to your ovaries or your testes and how your brain talks to your adrenals, which then produces cortisol, which is a stress-regulating hormone. So those axes are improved by exercise, and so there's a combination of reasons why it helps your fertility, and why there is really strong research that shows that individuals that exercise moderately, not extensively, or intensely have a better chance of getting pregnant than couples or individuals that don't. And so it's really important to get into some rhythm of exercising, and again, it doesn't have to be going to the gym, working out like you're a bodybuilder, or you're a pro athlete or something, it's really just getting yourself to a place where you can increase your heart rate and be energized by the experience.

Lara Messerlian:
So the factors that physical activity affect, like ovulation and sperm count are not just important if you're conceiving naturally, even if you're receiving fertility treatments or conceiving using assisted reproductive technology like IVF, exercise influences the chances of the treatment being successful.

Carmen Messerlian:
Correct, yeah, there's good data. There's really good science and research that shows in both populations, individuals that are not infertile, that exercise, have a shorter time to pregnancy. And then couples that are going for treatment, like you mentioned, IVF and other forms of treatment, those that are exercising or start exercising actually improve their chances or their odds or their probability of success. And so it's important for both groups that couples that are infertile and under treatment, but also couples that are at home trying without treatment, that exercise is one of the things that we can do. It doesn't have to cost money, it's not expensive, but it's a really important lifestyle habit that you can enjoy and help yourself improve your chances without having to go on hormones and drugs and get treatment. It's a go-to strategy. If you're at home and listening to this, and you've been trying to get pregnant for a few months, and you're not sure what's going on, and you've not been successful, the one thing that I recommend is really, improve your diet and exercise. Those are the two things that cost no money or very little, and they're habits that are hard sometimes to adopt, but they're cheap, they're affordable, and they're accessible to everyone. You can open up your door, go for a walk. Some people have struggles with time management because they have multiple jobs and different things going on, but you can get yourself with a pair of sneakers outside, and just even a 10 or 15-minute walk can make every day can make such a big difference to your health and your chances of getting pregnant. And, so if you're at home and you haven't been successful, the two things I suggest is, always try to improve your diet, and exercise is probably the number one thing you can do to increase your chances of getting pregnant for both men and women.

Lara Messerlian:
Yes, but as we said, like everything, moderation is important, so too much exercise can actually harm your reproductive health. Is that correct?

Carmen Messerlian:
Exactly. So there's also really good studies that show that when you look at different groups of people, women, for example, that you go and you evaluate, how much exercise do you do in a week, and the ones that do the most like very intense exercise that really strains the body, marathon runners or people who are daily exercises, intense exercise, actually have a lower chance of getting pregnant. You don't, extreme exercise or really intense exercise is not recommended while trying to get pregnant or when pregnant itself, but because it can result in anovulation, which means you're not ovulating in that cycle, so your hormones can get disrupted and can inhibit your chances of getting pregnant because you're not ovulating.

Lara Messerlian:
And then what about diet and pregnancy? Like diet during pregnancy, like exercise and diet during, you mentioned it a little bit, but can we touch on that a little bit more?

Carmen Messerlian:
Yes.

Lara Messerlian:
I think it can be dangerous. When I was pregnant, I didn't really want to, I was told it was okay to exercise, but I didn't really want to because it was a high-risk pregnancy. It is completely normal to eat more while you're pregnant and exercise, but I guess everything again is in moderation, right?

Carmen Messerlian:
So two things. One thing you can, for sure, exercise when you're pregnant. In fact, even high-risk pregnancies, depending on your doctor's recommendation, obviously. Exercise can help for things like gestational diabetes and a major preventative strategy in your pregnancy is to exercise because it could reduce your chances of gestational diabetes, which tends to occur in, more commonly, in women who are 35 and older and who have a little bit higher BMI. Those are kind of risk factors. So keeping your weight and your weight gain in pregnancy in a range that's healthy and normal is important, but exercise in pregnancy is safe and effective for keeping you mentally healthy and physically healthy. But extremes of anything is not good. So dieting in pregnancy, not good; obviously, really, you can't diet in pregnancy, and calorie restrictions. And sometimes, it's documented that individuals that have eating disorders or prior histories of eating disorders can end up having an exacerbation during trying to get pregnant when you're infertile, the stress of that, trying to manage your calories, and even in pregnancy, some individuals get a recurrence of an eating disorder. And getting help for those types of conditions is really important because there's really some pretty good science that tells us that those babies that are at high risk of things like small for gestational age and being born preterm, things that are putting your child at risk or not just those birth outcomes, but actually impacts their health across their life. So your birth weight and your gestational age of your child, gestational age means like how many weeks were you pregnant when you gave birth. So preterm birth is defined as less than 37 weeks of pregnancy, and term birth or anything above 37 weeks. But babies that are born preterm are high-risk across their life course for diseases, neurodevelopmental diseases, premature mortality. Same thing with small for gestational age, so you want to make sure your baby's born at the right gestational age, more than 37 weeks. In fact, 39 is better than 37, there's just data and science that tells us that, and then small for gestational age too. So not dieting and being careful for your exercise and weight, it is important while you're trying and during your pregnancy itself. Calorie restriction and fasting is not, has not been shown to be, yeah, effective for pregnancy attempt, yeah.

Lara Messerlian:
You have to eat healthy during your pregnancy because you're not eating for two, because I think that's not really the right way to think about it because you're not doubling the amount of food that you're taking in, thinking, you're definitely eating, thinking about what foods are healthiest for your fetus and your baby while you're pregnant. And for me, I didn't exercise in the sense that I wasn't doing rigorous physical activity. I would go for like light walks every day while I was pregnant. I did a couple bike rides and stuff like that, like light bike rides, because I didn't want to push my body too hard. I made sure I got out every single day and exercised, so.

Carmen Messerlian:
That's important, just the habit

Lara Messerlian:
I was keeping myself fit.

Carmen Messerlian:
Yeah, and keeping some steps going. I'd say like a fair target of steps is minimum 3000 a day, and if not, 5 to 10 is really great, which is hard to do, but 5000 steps a day is, you could take them in any way, shape, or form you want. You could take them while you're vacumming, you get, I get a lot of vacumming my house and cleaning it and taking the dog for a walk. Those all count as physical activity, and keeping active, a sedentary lifestyle is what you want to avoid, like sitting all day and eating. That's not good for your fertility, not for your male partner or for yourself. And so, really, the message is, yeah, exercise.

Lara Messerlian:
Yeah, so what do you, like how do we guide people who may be feeling a little heavier than they should be? And is it too late for them, or how would you guide someone who's not in their optimal weight? They're feeling a little bit heavy, and both them and their husbands, or their partners are not at their best goals.

Carmen Messerlian:
Yeah, so that's a great question because if you are in fertility journey, i.e., you're going for treatment or undergoing an investigation for infertility, the number one thing that's advised is go and try to lose 5 pounds. Even a 5-pound loss of weight can really drive up your chances of conceiving without treatment, even if you've been trying for 12 months or more, which is the classic definition of infertility for women under 35 and more than six months for women over 35. But losing 5 pounds doesn't cost you much money, and it's cheaper than IVF, and there's no risks involved to your baby. IVF comes with risks. There's risks to the mom, and really there are risks, documented risks to the baby as well because of treatment. So you want to avoid unnecessary treatment. If you can do something without treatment, like changing your habits, eating better, sleeping better, exercising, those are cost-efficient methods. A cycle of treatments, 20,000 US dollars, it's not affordable to the vast number of people in the United States. And so people that are listening to this podcast that don't have the means for IVF and don't have the means here or don't have insurance plans to get the treatment that they need, these are the tips that you need to listen to. You have control over some factors that influence your fertility, they're big factors. You don't have control over your age, that's set. You have control over your diet. You have control over your supplements. You have control over your exercise. You have control over the personal care products that we talked about before, your sleep. These are all factors that you can action on, stress, meditation, exercise, and meditation, and detox. And then, we're going to talk about alcohol and substance use in one of the episodes, but those kinds of things don't cost money, yet they're shown in science that I produce at Harvard, and my colleagues produce in other universities, that really have important influence on our partner's fertility and on our fertility. And this is the message behind this podcast, is cleaning up your lifestyle for healthy reproduction and for healthy offspring and babies. And it's about doing stuff that you can do without treatment to help yourself, if you're going for treatment or if you're not going for treatment.

Lara Messerlian:
And don't get overwhelmed because at the end of the day, try and take small steps and make small changes. We're creatures of habits, changing a routine can be hard. So think it's okay to take a small step and make small changes like going, one thing that I did when I was pregnant, I had gestational diabetes, and I really changed the way that I eat. I always ate healthy, but I really had to start to pay very close attention to. I would eat white rice, but I had to change to brown rice, because, or whole wheat or whole grain rice because white rice doesn't really offer a lot of nutrients, or white bread, doesn't offer, it's delicious, but it doesn't offer the nutrients that you need. So making small adjustments to your diet and to your lifestyle, and to your physical fitness can actually make a big difference.

Carmen Messerlian:
That's the key message here is, do something. Little, tiny, incremental things every day can add up to a lot of benefit to your health, and so start somewhere. Maybe you're doing 500 steps a day, go up to 600 tomorrow, and by next week, try to get yourself up to a thousand. That was your small little changes and getting into the habit, and set realistic goals. Like, we don't, it's so hard. We set these huge barriers to ourselves. We put the benchmarks so high, and we're like, I've got to run three miles. No, you don't, you can walk 500 feet, that's better than yesterday where you didn't walk at all. So set really manageable goals and take the time that you need. And just what I do a lot is like, just unplug and tune out for a few minutes a day, like 10, 15 minutes, just sit with nothing and just take some breaths. Like even that is something that's beneficial to your health and helps you regulate your nervous system and your anxiety.

Lara Messerlian:
I found one thing that helped me is, I'm not a soda drinker, but my husband drinks, and a lot.

Carmen Messerlian:
So do I.

Lara Messerlian:
You're guilty of that. One thing that I found was like, drink a lot, forget all the juices and the Gatorade and the soda and all the store-bought.

Carmen Messerlian:
Brilliant.

Lara Messerlian:
Products for drink, hydration. Just stick to water, and if you really want something, if you're a soda drinker, I would drink bubbly water or whatever you call it, like sparkling water.

Carmen Messerlian:
Sparkling water, Perry Water, Pellegrino, whatever.

Lara Messerlian:
Drink sparkling, squeeze half a lemon in it. And you know what? It's better than any soda I've ever had.

Carmen Messerlian:
I know, it's true.

Lara Messerlian:
So cut out all the stuff that you can cut out.

Carmen Messerlian:
Oh, my God, great suggestion.

Lara Messerlian:
Drinks, just cut them out temporarily, and then you can go back to it if you really want to later. But you, really small adjustments like that I found was a really big deal.

Carmen Messerlian:
Huge, great suggestion. I love that because look, beverage, right? We think of our beverages like, oh, they're not calories. They're calories, and if you're having five lattes a day, five chai lattes a day, I had two today, by the way, they're like 300 calories a pop. If you're on exercise and stuff, but if I didn't have, that's a lot of extra calories, and then you get those big, people get the big venti. I take the little ones, but the big like Starbucks extra larges and stuff like that adds up to a lot of calories cutting down. Just saying no juice, no soda, no sugar, sugar-sweetened, but we could talk about sugar-sweetened beverages. We have a lot of research at Harvard on sugar-sweetened beverages and fertility in men and women. Those are things that we know can impact the sperm counts, and for women, ovulation. Beverages is a good way of cutting down and doing little steps, little tiny baby adjustments, tiny adjustments to your day.

Lara Messerlian:
Actually simply planning your meals before you go to the grocery store can also save plenty of time and money, and it can help you make healthier decisions. The CDC, I know, has this thing called MyPlate program. It's MyPlate. It's a program that offers excellent tips and online resources tailored to your own local area, and it's a great place to start if you're looking, if you're feeling overwhelmed and you're looking a place to start, I would suggest that's a good place to go.

Carmen Messerlian:
I know. So here's what I'm going to say. I'm going to say this because I'm going to talk for other mothers and people out there that are trying to get pregnant. Some of them already have children, they might be having secondary infertility, which means you didn't have infertility maybe the first time you do when you want to have a second baby. And sometimes it's the opposite, you had infertility for the first baby, and then you are totally fertile for the second. You have a surprise baby. Both things can happen, but it's so hard. You know what? The worst, for me, the worst thing is, just when you're struggling to get your, get through your day, what do you do? You go for the fast stuff, right? And you cut down on the, you go for the quickest, easiest solution that you need to be able to feed your family or get something done. Busy families, it's hard, right? So it's hard to plan your meals before you go to the grocery store. I don't think I've ever done that one, I've got a 17-year-old, 14-year-old, so really hard for someone like me, but it is a great strategy because then you have your organized meal plan, and you know what you're making every day, and you don't end up with what I did today, which is order chicken fingers for my kids from the local pub to feed them dinner because I had to do this and other things. The point is that, try to do what you can and don't, another thing is the guilt and the shame that we feel we're not doing what we think we should be doing. And weight loss is such a challenging one for so many people across the United States, there's so much shame and stigma around it. But at the same time, you don't have to go for like the whole 50-pound weight loss. 5 to 10-pound change is manageable. And there are so many weight loss programs online. There's apps now that you can use to help download to increase your steps to encourage yourself. There's free ones, freemium models on these platforms, and take what you can to get yourself out there and encourage yourself. Get a walk buddy in the neighborhood. Not saying you should get a dog because that's a lot of work, but if you have a dog, walk your dog. These kinds of things are great, I think, really great for people trying to get pregnant, and it's a struggle, and to build a family and to get it all right. And the science is clear, though, and that's the part that really makes me want to encourage people, is that we know that it can really make an impact. And one of the things I'm a real big advocate of is, if you don't need treatment and you can do something before you get to treatment, prevent the chances of needing treatment is really a goal, should be a goal. And there are things we need to educate and inform and raise awareness around, what are those things that I can do to improve my chances of pregnancy? Like, how am I supposed to know you're not a fertility professor? You got to know. But like, you're super informed and out there reading the, reading all the health news out there.

Lara Messerlian:
Even then, it's hard. My sister is a fertility professor, and I still found it hard. So case in point.

Carmen Messerlian:
It's true.

Lara Messerlian:
I had access to like the most valuable information when it came to my infertility, and I still found it challenging. So I think it's totally normal to get overwhelmed and not really understand what, and not even just overwhelmed, but feeling a little bit less having that feeling of not being empowered. So I think this is really important, to empower people to know that you can make small changes, do some physical activity, even if it's just light walking every day, change your eating habits, try to lose even 2 pounds to 5 pounds is even better than nothing, change your diet, and by taking small steps, like, for example, eating whole grains instead of white flour and white rice, changing your habits, not drinking sodas and sugary drinks, try drinking water and sparkling water, keep your exercise on a daily basis if you can. Don't get overwhelmed, don't exercise too much if, and if you're exercising too much, try to reduce it a little bit because your body needs a little bit of a break, too, in order to create the optimal situation to have a child. All this can help you maybe not become a candidate for fertility treatments, which could be very expensive. So try to keep that in mind, it might be a little bit of a motivator for some people.

Carmen Messerlian:
Yeah, exactly. That's a great point. Yeah, it's a great motivator, actually. That's a great point as, if I lose 10 pounds, I don't have to go for IVF. IVF is hard on people.

Lara Messerlian:
And it's hard emotionally.

Carmen Messerlian:
Yeah, it's hard on couples.

Lara Messerlian:
Yeah, so do what you can to get yourself a little bit ahead of the curve, if you can, without over-pressuring yourself or putting too much on your plate. Take small steps, you don't need to have big behavior modification situations. You can just take a little, make a little bit, find adjustments here and there, and I hope that it'll help that much more. I hope you found this informational and educational on the entertainment part of this conversation. My sister's, the inspiration part.

Carmen Messerlian:
I love it.

Lara Messerlian:
I bring the real-life situations where I've done all the things you're not supposed to do, and I've had a sister telling me the whole time to stop doing what I'm doing. So if there's anybody who is a poster child of infertility and having someone who can guide me, it's me. But it took me a long time to get there, but I got there, and hopefully you will too.

Carmen Messerlian:
Yeah, that's great. I think that's so good, it's true. It's like, I was like the cheerleader trying to be like, hey, do this, hey, do that.

Lara Messerlian:
And years of me doing that, and I'm like, years ... get it, why is she not doing it?

Carmen Messerlian:
I didn't understand why.

Lara Messerlian:
Yeah, it was really frustrating from my side too.

Carmen Messerlian:
But this is the challenge that we see as scientists trying to translate our science and research into real actionable things that people can do. What are the barriers? That's the question. What are the barriers of getting our knowledge to people and then people to actually help improve their health? And what are those barriers?

Lara Messerlian:
Keeping it simple is really, and it can be, like for me, when you would say stuff, it created so much anxiety for me that I couldn't even absorb the information. Like, I was like, oh my god, this is overwhelming. She's telling me all this, and I can't. It was just so overwhelming that my best advice to people is just to try to not get stressed over this to your best ability. And even like the walking helps because it clears your mind, and meditating and putting yourself in a mental space where it's positive and you're expecting positive outcomes, not having the anxiety and the negative outcome of, past even put that pressure on your shoulders of where you're going in the future. It's really hard, but for me, the minute I let go and said, okay, I give up, so to speak, like I'm just going to let it go, that's when it happened, so you just need to let it go, and yeah.

Carmen Messerlian:
So that's, I like that you raise this because, what do we know by the data and the research that we do is that 30 to 40% of couples that are going for treatment end up conceiving not because of the treatment. They conceive either between cycles or they conceive when they're on a break from a cycle.

Lara Messerlian:
Happened to me.

Carmen Messerlian:
Yeah, so yeah.

Lara Messerlian:
The first major pregnancy that I had, the real, the first baby that I had, the little we were expecting a little girl, and we lost her in the second trimester. But I was going to fertility treatments at that time, and the doctor had recommended that I go and get a type of surgery for endometriosis to check to see if there was anything internal that was problematic. And when I went to do the blood work, I was scheduled to do the surgery that following week, when I went to do the blood work on the Friday, they said, we can't proceed with the surgery because you're pregnant. And I was like, What? When? Like it blew my mind. I'm like, what do you mean I'm pregnant? I'm scheduled for a surgery next, like on Monday. And I mean, it was an amazing scenario. Unfortunately for us, it was also very devastating because several months later, we lost our little girl, which I know a lot of people have also gone through that. And I still struggle with, emotionally, with having gone through that. I tend to gloss over it because it's too painful, but that's what happened. I was going for fertility treatments, and I guess somehow it just magically happened on their own.

Carmen Messerlian:
That happens for 30 to 40% of couples. It's not uncommon suggesting that the treatment isn't really the necessary component to getting pregnant. It's other stuff that you might be doing, and so that's what this podcast is about, is doing the other stuff that might help you get there, that might help you get there without treatment, might help you get there with treatment, but what are the other things that you can control that might put you over the edge and get you to ovulate that cycle and get you to have healthier sperm so that you end up with a healthy baby. And that's what this podcast is about, is focusing on all the other things that you have. So many of them you don't have control over. Like you don't have control over you have endometriosis, you don't have control over if you're 35 or 38 or 39, you have control over your sleep, you have control over the steps, you have control over your diet, you have control over your alcohol; all things we know that can improve your fertility if you decrease the bad stuff and increase the good stuff, and so that's what we want to do. That's what people like me, that study all those factors, want everybody out there to know, everybody to know there are things you can control, there are things you can do. There are things that you and your partner can get on board with together that can get you on to a path of fertility and a healthy baby. And getting your partner to do steps with you, wouldn't that be nice? Let's go for a walk together and hold hands.

Lara Messerlian:
I'm still trying to achieve that one.

Carmen Messerlian:
And feel intimate and loving together and feel bonded. That's a beautiful experience. And talk about making a baby and get all excited. Like those are great opportunities to be intimate and loving. And I wanted to segue into the stuff about the mental health which you brought about the miscarriage and the treatment failures. We're going to talk about that in a following episode about the mental health, and what we know, what the mental health impact of failed cycles now we see it as PTSD related, so it's trauma related. A failed cycle is a traumatic experience, and then you have PTSD for the next cycle, and you're worried about the next cycle, and that PTSD and that syndrome of repeat failures creates a body response of stress that prevents you from actually getting pregnant in the next cycle. And then if you have a miscarriage, heightened trauma, this is traumatic for people. So we're going to talk about all this stuff in one of the future episodes.

Lara Messerlian:
Let's try to leave it in the positive and try to put yourself in a really strong mental state where you feel happy and you have really positive expectations. You're taking care of your body, you're exercising, you're drinking water, you're eating healthy, you're going for walks with your spouse. You're feeling about great.

Carmen Messerlian:
Talking about good stuff.

Lara Messerlian:
Talking about making babies.

Carmen Messerlian:
Yeah, making babies.

Lara Messerlian:
And expecting great outcomes and expecting wonderful positive outcomes all the way to delivery.

Carmen Messerlian:
Oh, yeah.

Lara Messerlian:
So we're going to leave it there and wish everyone good luck this week.

Carmen Messerlian:
Yeah, wish everyone good luck. But you, again, such a great point. I love them because you're talking about intention and visualization. Maybe we should have an episode on how important meditation and visualization is, and how you can use that as a means of guiding yourself through the journey in a positive way. That's beautiful, and there's people out there that are doing that kind of work supporting women like that.

Lara Messerlian:
... Love it.

Carmen Messerlian:
You always have great one, sister. I love it.

Lara Messerlian:
Because I've gone through it myself. Oh, no, I'm glad that I did, and had a nice outcome and can share it at least.

Carmen Messerlian:
Yeah, it's great to be able to share it and talk with others, and I hope it helps everybody out there listening to this podcast. Yeah, we want you to be happy and healthy.

Carmen Messerlian:
Thank you for listening to the Fertility Sisterhood brought to you by Rescripted. We hope it has left you feeling more educated and empowered about the role environmental factors play in our reproductive health.

Lara Messerlian:
If you've enjoyed this week's episode, be sure to visit SEED-Program.org to learn more about Dr. Messerlian's research. To stay up to date on the podcast, follow Rescripted on Instagram and TikTok at @Fertility.Rescripted or head to Rescripted.com.

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