Dr. Jane Levesque [0:30 - 28:47]: Pregnancy is a natural process. So if it's not happening or if it's not sticking, something is missing. After having a family member go through infertility and experiencing a miscarriage myself, I realized how little support and education women have around infertility. I want to change that. I'm Doctor Jane Levesque. I'm a naturopathic doctor and a natural fertility expert. Tune in every Tuesday at 09:00 a.m. For insightful case studies, expert interviews and practical tips on how you can optimize fertility naturally. If you've been struggling with infertility, pregnancy loss, women's health issues, or you just want to be proactive and prepare yourself for the next big chapter in your life, this show is for you. Alright, ladies, today I want to talk about the bigger picture of infertility. A couple of weeks ago, I made a post on are you ready to be a mom on social media. And of course the initial response is like, yeah, Doctor Jane, obviously I'm ready to be a mom. I'm ready to be a mom like yesterday. And so emotionally, you might be longing for this deeper connection and this deeper purpose. And you may have felt this calling for a really long time now, and this is probably why your gut instinct is to answer, yes, I'm ready. But I want to bring awareness to the bigger picture of infertility and what our body is trying to tell us as to why you may be not have been successful in your journey so far. So the question that I always ask my patients, and this is actually a chart that I'll grow, I'll draw out for my patients before we start the journey, is the first peak in the mountain is your fertility journey. The next peak is pregnancy, and the following peak is postpartum. And I believe that this is one of the most critical time in our life as female. And it could be very either traumatic or empowering and transformative. And I'll tell you a little bit about my story, because if you're new here and maybe haven't listened to the first podcast, but there's kind of three main reasons as to why I got into the fertility space. And that first one was my pregnancy really rocked me. I got very sick. The first pregnancy for 20 weeks, I was nauseous and throwing up for 20 weeks of the pregnancy, not just the first twelve or 13, it was 20, which I know now is a sign of actually nutrient deficiencies and imbalances within the liver, not being able to process those high hormones. The other thing that happened that was a clue for me, that my body was working really hard, and there were some things that were going on, is I got cold sores almost every month now. I used to get cold sores once in a while when my body was under a significant amount of stress, you know, when I was a teenager and drinking and partying, that was a different story. But then when I was a naturopath, I very much had it under control. So when it started to pop up, I knew that something was going on in my body. Now, the pregnancy was not the joyous and transformative experience that I thought it would be, nor was the labor. The labor was really intense. I always envisioned having a pregnancy or having a home birth, and it transforming me into this new woman, into a mother. And essentially, that didn't happen. I had to be rushed to the hospital. I was one push away from a c section. I was able to get my baby out. They needed to use forceps, but of course, there was lots of tearing. They took the baby away because they wanted to make sure that she was okay because the labor was so long. And that was really traumatic. Even though it was like 30 seconds, it literally felt like forever. Not having. Giving birth to a baby and not having your baby on your chest was very traumatic. And at the end of this whole experience, I didn't feel transformed or empowered. I felt really empty, and I was empty. And for the first time in my life, I really understood how postpartum depression existed. Before that, I was like, why would you have postpartum depression? You just gave birth, and now you have this beautiful baby, and you should be really excited. But in reality, I realized that, oh, my goodness, if I, as a naturopathic doctor and an athlete, which I was at the time, went through this horrific experience bringing a child into this world, what are other women going through? And I wish that somebody told me more than you should take a prenatal for three months before trying to conceive. I wish somebody told me about the journey to come ahead and how much stress it was on the body and how much nutrients it required and energy it required to do this well, to do it well. And, of course, I wanted to have more children, and I knew there was no way that I wanted to go through that again. And so when I went to try again for my second pregnancy, three years, three and a half years later, now I miscarried. And, of course, that was another really big shocker, because how could this happen to me? How could my body fail me? This time? I prepared, and I prepared everything physically, at least. What I thought I did at the time with my knowledge, but mentally, emotionally, I wasn't in the right space. My husband and I had a lot going on and we were moving, and I insisted that we need to start trying now because I want to give birth in this month. And it was very scheduled, which I think took away from the fact that I wasn't actually ready. That wasn't the best time for us to get pregnant, let alone my husband. I believe he was, like, going through surgery at the time. So it was a really painful lesson. But that miscarriage actually made me appreciate pregnancy. And, of course, there was a lot of thoughts of, I'm a failure. I'm never going to be able to do this again. I can't believe a lot of shame around the experience. But then I realized because I've already, this wasn't the first time where I quote unquote, was faced with, like, a healing crisis. So, and I have a lot of colleagues who are in the space, I could heal myself through the miscarriage and have a healing experience, but it wasn't because the conventional system or my midwives provided any support or any testing. It was because I had to do my own research. I had to reach out to my friends and my colleagues to get the help that I needed to go through the miscarriage. And it made me wonder how many women went through this experience as well. And turns out a lot, because if you've been following me from the beginning, that's when I first shared my miscarriage. It was really painful, but it also allowed me to heal because all of you lovely people shared your stories and provided a listening ear and told me about everything that you've been through. And I felt heard and supported, and I didn't feel very alone through the journey, which allowed me to heal fairly quickly. And so this is, you know, two of the reasons that I'm here today. The other one is my sister, and I'll talk about that another time. But essentially now, when I walk women through and I look at somebody, my couples, when they come to see me and they're trying to see if, you know, if I'm the right person to help and we're starting to go through their history, what I look for in the couple is not if they have the ability to get pregnant, but is the woman, is the couple sitting in front of me. How are they going to handle the stress, the mental, physical, and emotional stress of what a pregnancy can bring? And how are they going to handle the postpartum period, which will be a very isolating, difficult time for the most part. And how do we set this couple up for success? Because a lot of the women that come to me, they emotionally are ready to become a mother, and they have been wanting for this deeper connection and a deeper purpose in life and fulfillment. And, of course, that's a natural way to feel. But when we look at their physical body and how they feel mentally and emotionally, there's a lot of gaps for us to fill in. Physically, for example, I see a lot of women who are quite frail and fragile. They don't have very much muscle tone or muscle mass. Sometimes they just, like, have excess weight that they're trying to lose that's now stubborn. They have acne, they have digestive issues. And then we look at the mental and emotional picture. They have a lot of anxiety or depression or both. And so I know that what I went through when I went through my first pregnancy and how hard it was on my body, and I had what I thought a lot of resiliency, both mentally, physically, and emotionally. And the pregnancy really rocked me. Like, it was really hard, let alone the labor. And it was years after, when I reflected back on the journey and I came out of the postpartum period, I realized that, oh, my goodness, I was actually depressed. Like, I actually went through postpartum depression without knowing that that was what I was feeling, because you kind of just go through the motion. We had a business that we just acquired that we needed to take care of, and then we had this new baby, and there was a lot of stuff that was constantly going on, either with the baby or the business or both. So I never had an opportunity to actually sit and look at it. And this is why I said, I don't want to do that again. If I'm going to have children, I want to experience the transformation and the empowering experience that I have seen women do. You know, a lot of my colleagues talked about and even on social media, women sharing their journeys and going through labor and having this basically a transformation for the lack of a better term. I didn't have that. I felt like I was gypped, so I knew that I needed to do something different. And so obviously, I did my third pregnancy. So when I had the miscarriage, I took a lot of time to heal. I did a lot of counseling. I approached preparing for pregnancy very different. So before that, I was like, I need to lose some weight, and I need to eat a little bit less. And I cut out a bunch of foods. Don't get me wrong. Some of those foods were good. But I really did like, I did the old style of, I was in the fitness world for a long time, so I just counted macros and it was very rigid. And, uh, you know, I exercised a lot. Even on the days where I didn't really feel like exercising, I wasn't very much in tune with my cycle still at that time, which wasn't that long ago. And so after the miscarriage, it made me really dive into the research and say, hey, is what we're being taught in the health and fitness industry really applying to the fertility industry? Right, because health, and I used to say health and fitness, and now I just say, there's the fitness industry and then there is the health industry. And so what we do in the fitness industry sometimes isn't actually very healthy. When you look at it long term, short term, it's okay, but long term, if you're counting macros, if you're cutting, uh, you know, certain food groups out or you're doing, you're following certain protocols to, let's say, build muscle or to lose weight. Even when you think about the concept of losing weight, you literally either need to cut calories or move more, or, um, ideally you're going to do both. Losing weight is very stressful on the body, so it's not ideal to try to put your body into this low caloric state, high activity, in order to lose the weight. Even though, don't get me wrong, the weight loss is important, but we have to understand why the weight is there in the first place. And so that's how I started looking into all of this after my miscarriage. And then what I decided to do for the following three months was very, very different. I opened up a lot of fertility books, a lot of traditional chinese medicine books, and looked at, how did they look at infertility, how did they treat miscarriages? And a lot of traditional chinese doctors don't believe in infertility. They see that there's an imbalance, and they want to fix that imbalance and understand where that imbalance is coming from. So we need to. So I essentially use that approach. I changed my diet a lot. I stopped counting macros. I really focused on high nutrient dense foods, a lot of broths, um, some juicing, a lot more relaxation, a lot less intense activity. I still exercise, I still move my body because it's something that I enjoy. And of course, the mental and emotional aspect, I really wanted to make sure I grieved my miscarriage properly before I stepped into the next, into the next pregnancy. I didn't want to bring any emotional trauma, if you will, into the next pregnancy. So because of these experiences, now, what I want to inspire you guys to do is to look at the bigger picture. It's not just about getting pregnant. We want to have a healthy pregnancy. We want to have a healthy child. And the conventional system has such a poor standard for health right now that when they say, well, this person is perfectly healthy or this baby is perfectly healthy, what they mean by that is there's no congenital malformations. That's it. They're not really, they don't know anything about the microbiome. If this baby's going to be fussy, if that baby is going to sleep well, if they're going to have colic, or if they're going to have huge reactions every time they're teething. And to me, just like we have decreased the standard for our own health, we have also decreased the standard of the health when we see when the babies come out, because a lot of the times people don't actually know if the baby is healthy or not. We can just tell if they have some really glaring, obvious red flag or congenital malformation. But health is so much more than not having a malformation or a disease. And I genuinely believe that our health is going to be a reflection of our fertility. And yes, there's plenty of unhealthy quotation marks, unhealthy people who are getting pregnant. But usually I would say that, not that I was terribly unhealthy, but I was one of those people. And it was not a great pregnancy and it was not a great postpartum. It took me a lot of time to recover, and it took me even still. Now it comes up for me that I wish I would have done something to prepare for pregnancy. I wish I would have had a different experience, because I believe it has hindered my relationship with my firstborn, because I had no idea what I was doing. And there's a lot of regret. And I have to live with that regret and learn how to forgive myself so I can continue to learn and improve and heal through the journey, because it is, it's the most defining journey of our lives. I'm just blown away by the fact that we get so little support. And so obviously this is one of the reasons that I'm running the podcast while I jump on social media and other speaking events, because I want women to be supported through the entire process, not just getting you pregnant, and then as soon as you're twelve weeks or nine weeks, you're just dropped off because you assume that everything is going to work out the way that it should. And in reality, when you've been struggling with infertility, once you do get pregnant, you still have a hard time trusting your body that it's just going to do the thing that it's designed to do. And so I encourage you to make your fertility journey, your healing journey, because your healing journey should be all about regaining trust in your body, regaining confidence in your body, really learning and understanding how it works. We place a lot of shoulds on our body. One of them, if you are on my email list, there was a couple of months ago, I think that I send out an email asking for some feedback, like, hey, guys, what are you most frustrated with in your fertility journey? Or, like, what are you really pissed off about? I was floored to hear so many women say, I am mad that my body can do this one simple thing that it's designed to do. And the reason that I was floored to hear this response is because we think that becoming pregnant and making a baby from scratch and giving birth to that baby is a simple thing. It is far from simple. It is the most complex thing that the female body will ever do. It is the most stressful thing that the female body will do. You are building a baby from scratch. And the fact that I know why you're mad, because you know that pregnancy is a natural process. And for us women, when it's not happening, we feel broken. And absolutely the. There is validity to that feeling. But what I want to do is zoom you out on the bigger picture and help you understand. Well, when did that feeling actually happen? Why did you stop trusting your body? When did that happen? And sometimes it goes so far back that you don't actually have a memory of it, because let's say if your mom had the same issues and every time she had a headache, she just popped to Tylenol, or she always, or mom or dad, whoever, they always struggled with weight loss. So they thought that, oh, I always have to be on a diet to be skinny or that, and that skinny is healthy. There's so many misconceptions that we have now about health and what our body should be doing, where in reality, we, most of us have no idea how to take care of it. We have this incredible machinery that we are all born with, but we have no idea how to take care of it. And then we get mad when it's not doing the thing that it's supposed to do, aka, get pregnant yet. We don't prioritize our sleep, we don't eat enough protein, we don't eat enough veggies, we don't drink enough water. We don't filter our water because, or let's face it, or water is not a great source anymore. We put a bunch of chemicals and toxins on our skin, and we watch too much tv or stare into our screens. So when I put it like, and then we don't move our body, we don't lift weights, we put all of these together, then all of a sudden it's like, oh, my God, no wonder my body is not doing what it's supposed to be doing, because turns out I'm actually not very good at taking care of it. And I think as soon as we can admit that to ourselves and put our ego aside and say, you know what? I'm actually not very good at taking care of it, I don't know what I'm doing. And that is one of the reasons that I became a naturopathic doctor, because I didn't get any answers from the conventional system. I was struggling with weight loss resistance. I had ib's, I had anxiety, and my doctor had nothing for me but medications. And also he was just said, well, you're young, and, uh, if things get worse, you let us know. We can give you medications, but that's it. I didn't know naturopathic medicine existed then yet, but I knew that I didn't want to be on a diet for the rest of my life. I also did not want to know where the toilets are every time I leave the house, because that's the level of anxiety and IB's that I had, I knew there was another way. And so if you know that there is another way, like, deep down, you just know. All I do is I encourage you to keep looking, to keep looking for answers and to find the help that you need when you need it. The most common thing that people will say to me once we start working together is, I wish I would have found you sooner. I wish I would have found you two years ago. And I'm working really hard and making sure that I'm getting my marketing out. But if you guys are listening to this and you know that somebody who's going to benefit from this, or maybe it's you, thinking like, okay, it's time for me to do something about it. I need to stop brushing off my symptoms, or maybe I'm being too hard on myself and unrealistic, because when I zoom out and I look at the big picture again, when I'm sitting at the initial consult in front of my with my couples, the question that I ask myself is this couple ready to become pregnant? Because I not only have I been through three pregnancies and everything that can come with those pregnancies and postpartum, but now I have taken hundreds of patients through that process as well, that I am not naive about the process and that it's not magical and that it's actually really, really difficult. And if we don't have a certain level of resilience in our physical body, in our mental and emotional body, then it's going to be a very traumatic process. And I'm not interested in taking you through a traumatic process. It's traumatic. Nobody wants that. And so. And I've been through that. Right? I don't want that for you. I want you to have a beautiful, transformative experience. But from what I've seen is you have to put in our day and age now. You have to put a lot of work into it. And the truth is, we've always had to put a lot of work into our health. It's just somehow it got away from us. Somehow. We thought that, I don't have to exercise, I don't have to go for walks, I don't have to lift weights. I can just sit in front of a screen from nine to five and then go home and sit in front of another screen because I'm so exhausted from work and because I'm so tired, I don't have time to cook. And it's. It's just become accepted to eat processed foods or to skip meals or to not drink enough water. And in reality, it's just like that. That has never worked. That has never worked for anyone. We have just masked it really well. And I think now, because we're seeing the numbers of infertility rising, we're seeing numbers in every disease category rising. This is like the worst health that we as a society have been, our children as well. So it's just time to maybe admit, to say, hey, I'm in over my head, and maybe I have no idea how to take care of my body, but I am willing to learn. And if I really want a healthy baby at the end of all of this, then I probably need to figure out my health first, too. And when I say, I know it's mostly women that listen to my podcast, but it's you and your partner. I always treat partners from day one together because even if the male has no issues with his sperm and no issues with his health. I still want to know that he's there supporting you and you're not in the trenches by yourself, because sometimes that feels even worse. Now you feel like you're letting him down, and it's all your fault. So having his presence there could be very calming. And, you know, 95% of my patients, they. The male has a bunch of stuff going on. He. His sperm isn't good. He has high cholesterol. His blood sugar is dysregulated. His testosterone is low. He just doesn't know about it because no one has tested him or no one has actually looked at his stuff. So bigger picture, fertility is a reflection of your health. It is a reflection, not just your health, everybody's health. And some of us squeeze by and can get pregnant without being in our optimal health. But usually what I've seen, in my experience, is you get to, you pay for it somewhere else, whether you pay for it during the pregnancy or the postpartum. I've seen so many women now who are fitness fanatics, and they're super healthy, and they get pregnant, no problems, and then they go into early labor and they need a c section, or they're induced early at, like, 32 weeks, and they have these babies who are really depleted and need to be put in incubators. Like, I know it's hard to look at the bigger picture, but I've had a close friend who went through that experience, and right away, it's like, why did that happen to me? We want to know. We want to have those answers. And the truth is, it's like, well, she never had a health assessment done before. That just because she was fit does not mean she was healthy. And so when you start to look at the gut, you start to look at the environmental toxins, you start to look at energy levels and sleep. It's like, oh, she was really depleted and she was really tired, and she had some microbial imbalances, which we in research see is very much associated with early, early labor, preterm labor, or emergency c sections. Even things like having lower vitamin D levels is associated with a higher c section rate. Right. We just don't know this information, you guys. So I want you to stop blaming yourself. I want you to really, and I want you to stop thinking that this is easy. It is not. Bringing a child into this world is the hardest thing that you will ever do. It is the hardest thing you will ever do. And just because you are built to do it doesn't mean it's going to be easy. In fact, what I'm saying is it's not. And so learn from these experiences that you have seen from myself, from maybe your friends around you, that if you do, if you put in the time, the energy and the effort that it takes to truly heal and be patient with yourself through the process, because I'm telling you that for some of you, infertility is going to be a trickier thing to heal than for others. For some of you, it's three or four months, changing some diet, fixing it, and boom, you're pregnant. For others, it's not that easy. And that's okay. Don't compare yourself to anybody else, because it's not about anybody else but you and essentially you and your partner. And it's going to bring out different things, things for you and your partner. And it's important that you give yourself the space to process each of those things, but also come together and process what's going on for both of you. This is how we grow through this process. This is how we heal through this process. And this is how you can have some peace in this process as well. So I hope you guys found this helpful. I really want to inspire you to stop blaming yourself, stop thinking that this is going to be easy, get the help that you need, and really set yourself up for success. Like I said, I had the pregnancy where I did nothing to prepare, and then I had the pregnancy where I thought I did the right things to prepare, but it was not. And then I had the pregnancy where I did all the things that I knew. And truthfully, there's even more that I know now that I would have done differently. But it was such a healing birth experience for me. I, both my husband and I were just, like, overfilled with love and joy when we met our baby. We did not get that experience the first time. And it's funny because my husband was not the one who carried the baby or gave the birth, but he felt that connection, and we still do to that very, to this day. And of course, we're working on healing our other, on our first birth because like I said, there's still lots of regrets. So I want you to learn from these regrets. I want you to learn from my mistakes, from other people's mistakes, and really just focus on yourself and heal, heal, heal. Ladies, you are the first place that the baby will grow. So figuring out your physical health, your mental and emotional health, why you're stuck in feeling certain things, why you have certain patterns that you're experiencing, all those things are is literally your guide to healing. So take it, use it to your advantage. And please, please, please be patient with yourself and have some grace through this process because it is hard. It's super hard. Thank you guys for tuning in. If you like this episode, please share and like it and I'll see you next time. Thank you so much for listening to read the full show notes of this episode, including summary, timestamps, guest quotes and any resources that were mentioned on the episode. Visit drjanelevesque.com podcast and if you're getting value from these episodes, I'd love it if you took two minutes to share it with a friend. Rate and leave me a review@ratethispodcast.com. Doctorjane the reviews will help with the discoverability of the show show and who knows, I might share your review on my next episode. Thank you so much for tuning in and let's make your fertility journey your healing journey.