For the Big Girls and the Skinny Chicks: Woman Up

Being overweight or underweight. This one sucks ladies. Weight can be an environmental factor for infertility if it is interfering with your menstrual cycles and causing you to skip ovulation, or ovulate irregularly. Which makes sense when you think about it – bodies are pretty smart – and if they are too far to either side of the weight spectrum they tell your baby-making hormones now is NOT a good time to be pregnant, as all is NOT well. As if infertility isn’t devastating enough, we have to face the fact that our personal choices could be contributing to it. It’s a rough row to hoe gals.

Sometimes, if your weight issue has been present since your teens, irregular ovulation and periods have always been part of your life. Sometimes it is later in life that weight gain or loss can reach the point that they trigger the ‘no-baby-now’ reflex in our bodies.  Regardless, here comes the woman-up part.  DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.  Even if your current weight isn’t causing you ovulation problems, being overweight or underweight both have seriously scary implications during pregnancy. So ACT. I got to the point where I realized that although I kept telling myself I wanted a baby ‘soooooo bad,’ I was lying a little bit to myself. Even though my ovulation was still fine, I wasn’t physically in a place where I could have a healthy pregnancy – I had to get myself to a BBB - ‘better baby-making-bod.’

Obviously everyone has their own challenges in losing/gaining weight. It TOTALLY sucks and is the hardest thing EVER. I know.  However, it all boils down to one thing -how bad do you want a baby?I feel like I can really only address the issues of the overweight, because never in my life have I wanted to gain weight and not been able to.  I am REALLY hoping a woman who has experienced this will do a guest post for us soon! However, since I am the kind of person who can gain five pounds just by walking down the candy aisle, the following is for the Big Girls. 

Ask yourself. Do you want a baby bad enough to woman up and do 45 min. of intense cardio a day? First, stop making excuses. Swimming is an exercise that is doable with almost every physical disability -bad back, bad knees, bad feet, joint pain, etc etc. No equipment? Walk/run/jumprope, or get an exercise video from Goodwill. Too hot/cold outside? Join a gym (monthly fees of just $10 can be found!) No time? Get less sleep. The list goes on. There is a solution to every exercise preventing problem if you want to find it bad enough.

Now for the food. Do you want a baby bad enough to change your eating habits? (geez this one is hard, especially if food is your outlet for dealing with the emotional pain of infertility! Talk about a Catch-22!). I don’t care what program you use! I hear weight-watchers is pretty great, but I've never tried it. Basically I just try and write down the calories I consume and the awareness helps me a lot.  You want to aim for about 1500 calories a day - that's a standard amount. If you are unsure the number of calories someone of your height/weight should be consuming to lose weight, it is super-easy to find that information in a million places online. Find out your number, and work really hard not to go over it, whatever it takes. Just Woman up and do it. Remember, sometimes baby-hungry ladies have to get ice-cream-hungry, chips-hungry, candy-bar hungry and soda-hungry first!

*Remember- this series of entries is about environmental factors for infertility. Your weight may not have anything to do with your infertility, and getting to a healthy weight could still not affect it. But you will feel happier!