Podcast EP 23
===
[00:00:00] Plus sized women get pregnant all of the time. But maybe you've been told that you're too big to get pregnant or that your fertility doctor has said you need to lose some weight before we can start treatments. So many women are told to just lose weight and they'll get pregnant. But fertility is way more complex than that.
By the end of this video, sis, you are going to understand why weight plays a role, how it plays a role, what you can do to support it, and how you can still bring your baby home at any size. Let's go.
Hi, I'm Sophie Byfield and when I decided I was ready to be a mama, I thought it would be so easy. Get off birth control. Baby dance, like no one's watching. And poof, I was pregnant. But like many of you, that wasn't my story. After months of negative tests, endless treatments, and more supplements than you can count, I realized that getting pregnant isn't about fixing one piece of your fertility puzzle. It's about bringing your whole body. Back into balance so it feels safe enough to conceive. And this is where we focus on what really matters. Healing your whole body so that you can see those two pink lines. Welcome to the Heal to Conceive podcast.
I get so many messages from women, plus size women, who have been told that they just need to lose weight, and they'll see those two pink ones. Or a doctor saying something as evil and [00:01:00] vile as, You are too fat to get pregnant. While weight plays a role in hormones, it does not mean that you cannot get pregnant, and it does not mean that your body isn't healthy.
Doctors often focus on your BMI, but that does not tell the full story about your body, your reproductive health, your ovulation. There's so much more to it. Weight alone doesn't define your ability to get pregnant, but it does affect key hormones like estrogen, insulin, and progesterone. When you focus on the number alone, it can put blinders on so you're not dealing with the true and real issues, which are those hormones.
When you understand that your weight plays a role in those hormones, we can look at strategies and ways to heal [00:02:00] and rebalance or bring those hormones back into synchronicity to help you get pregnant. It's not about losing weight. to get pregnant. Weight loss is just a side effect of you building your healthiest body, of you rebalancing those hormones to get pregnant.
This isn't about looking at it in black and white. You're overweight so you're not healthy enough to get pregnant. Sis, that is not the case. Don't let anybody tell you that. It is important to look at the side effects of being plus size, so inflammation in the body, not having balanced insulin or your blood sugar, hormones out of whack.
If we can heal those things and bring those things back into equilibrium, we can improve your reproduction and two fold your chances. I was working with a client who came to me because she was told she needed to [00:03:00] lose weight in order to get pregnant. And she was devastated. Because all of her life, she was told that she was a big girl.
And she's done all of the extreme dieting. She did working out till she was blue in the face. She was telling me about P90X and Tybo and all of the different things that she was doing. Extreme dieting, not eating, starving herself to lose weight and it wasn't working. But nobody looked at the fact that she might have PCOS, insulin resistant metabolic syndrome.
And looked at healing those and forgot about the weight. When it came to her fertility, everyone just focused on her weight. We took a completely different approach and a completely different strategy, sis. We turned it on its head. We focused on [00:04:00] tracking her ovulation and understanding what her hormones were doing.
We made a supplement plan completely customized to her body so that she could make it as healthy as possible. And we got her on a fertility friendly diet that fed her enough. It wasn't about losing weight, sis. I need your soul to hear me when I say this. It wasn't about losing weight. It was about building the healthiest body possible, managing her insulin resistance, and that brought things into equilibrium.
She started ovulating again, she started dropping that egg, and we pinpointed her fertile window. The side effect from bringing her body into balance was weight loss. Fertility isn't just about being a certain size. Fertility is really about the health of your overall body and the health of your overall reproductive system.
There are [00:05:00] real risks to being underweight and overweight when it comes to your reproductive system. Both can play a major role on your ovulation, on your hormone balance, on your uterine health, all of it. We can have too much estrogen or too low estrogen. We can have our progesterone completely thrown off.
We can have too much insulin, which will block ovulation. Focusing on weight alone can lead to crash dieting. Your cycle is even more of a mess and the stress, the impact of stress on your body and your cycle, is out of this world. Instead of focusing on the scale of Focus on hormone health, body health, reproductive health, and you'll start to bring things back into balance.
You'll start to see your ovulation regulate. You will start to heal from the inside out. And all of these changes will help to support your fertility. So here [00:06:00] is the key areas to focus on at any weight to build a healthy reproductive system. Number one, really focusing on balancing your blood sugar. That can help with ovulation, egg quality, and implantation.
Number two, anti inflammatory nutrition. Sis, you do not want inflammation in your body because it can prevent implantation. So we're focusing on nutrient dense foods, not high sugary processed foods. Three, movement is medicine, but too much movement can hurt your chances. Yes, not overdoing it on cardio and implementing strength training can really help to improve your hormone health.
And don't forget a little bit of yoga for your mental and spiritual health. Number four, you know your girl's gonna say it. You're mastering your ovulation. It is the key to everything. If [00:07:00] we don't know when the egg's dropping, we don't know when to baby dance to see those two pink lines. So as you build the healthiest body possible, let's nail down when you drop your egg.
Weight can influence your reproductive health. It does have an impact on it, but it is not the whole story. The people that are telling you that you need to lose weight in order to conceive are not telling you the whole story. There's so much more to it. Inside the Heal to Conceive tribe, we focus on real healing strategies to build the healthiest body and reproductive system possible to get pregnant.
The healthiest. We take a holistic healing approach to looking at your whole body. We just don't focus on the number on the scale. So, let me know in the comments below, what kind of approach are you ready to take? Sis, fertility isn't about [00:08:00] fitting into a certain size. It's about doing what your body needs to be as healthy as possible.
It's about building the healthiest reproductive system possible, so you can see those two pink lines. I'd love to hear from you. Let me know in the comments below if you've ever been told that your weight is the reason why you're not seeing those two pink lines so I can send you some extra love and support.
And remember, you have the power to build the healthiest body possible to see those two pink lines. I want you to know that you got this, sis. You got this. And when you don't got this, I got you. Baby Dust.
