Building a better understanding of your body is always important. It helps you feel at home in your skin, and understanding the processes going on under the surface is a good way to spot when something is going wrong. Knowing what’s normal means something abnormal stands out early. It also helps you be a better advocate for your own needs when you’re talking to a doctor, a partner, or even a manager at work.
If you’re trying to get pregnant then understanding your fertility specifically becomes absolutely vital. It’s no longer a theoretical issue: this could cut months off your journey to conceiving!
You are fertile for a surprisingly few days in each menstrual cycle. To get pregnant you need sperm to encounter a fertile egg. Unfortunately, when an egg leaves the ovaries (the process known as ‘ovulation’) it’s only fertile for 24 hours at most. Sperm have a longer lifespan, at a maximum of five days. The time when these lifespans intersect (the four days before ovulation and the day after it), is known as your fertile window, and it’s only during your fertile window that sex can reliably result in pregnancy.
There are two easy ways to boost your fertility without medical help: identifying when you ovulate, to pin down that fertile window and boosting the health of eggs and sperm to help them reach that maximum lifespan that gives them the best chance to meet.
Detecting Ovulation
The best way to identify and predict ovulation (especially if you have a condition like PCOS, where hormones interfere with your body’s ability to ovulate) is to track your Basal Body Temperature. This changes in a distinct pattern when your body is getting ready to ovulate. Hitherto it’s been quite a difficult task to track it accurately, but using a modern fertility monitor device, you can automate both taking your temperature and turning that information into a prediction.
Boosting Reproductive Health
Plenty of services promise an ideal ‘fertility diet’, but there’s no single cure all that boosts your fertility easily. It’s best to talk to your doctor to get some specialist advice that applies to you specifically. In general, one of the best things you can do is boost the amount of leafy green vegetables you eat. This gives your body better building blocks to build healthier eggs or sperm (depending on your body!), as well as topping up some of the important electrolytes your body uses to regulate important processes (including fertility cycles!).