Episode 2: How to Create A Fertile Environment In Your Body

The number one thing people get wrong about their fertility is thinking they can’t change the fertile environment in their body. Josie dives into the best practices and methods for improving fertility and eliminating reproductive issues on your queer journey to conceiving.

[ID: Josie and their partner play with their kiddos and puppy at a park.]

Episode Transcript:

I'm Josie Rodriguez Bouchier, and this is the Intersectional Fertility Podcast where ideas and identities intersect to deepen our understanding of fertility and ultimately our whole selves.

Today we're going to talk about creating a fertile environment in your body. This is the number one thing that people get wrong about their fertility, when I talk to my patients and people who are trying to conceive, that they can't change the fertile environment and their body. People think that, you know, the way that things are is the way that they're always going to be. And especially if there's any sort of disharmony or disease or any reproductive issue, people think that they're stuck with it, and that there's nothing they can do about it. So today, we're going to talk about the best, most effective ways to change the fertile environment in your body. And these are the practices and theories that I teach most of my patients. And what is also in my online program Fertile.

So the reason we have so much control over the environment in our body is because our bodies are made up of 100 trillion cells, and every hour, 1 billion of those cells renew. It's wild to wrap your head around. So literally every minute, every second, we are a different composition of ourselves, we're constantly changing, we're constantly in flux. So whatever we are feeding our bodies, whatever nourishment, even our thoughts and our feelings, our environmental surroundings, everything affects each new cell that gets renewed.

So we are constantly affecting our bodies, and especially the internal environment and our bodies. So of those cells, we can imagine that eggs, or our follicles that develop into eggs, are actually the biggest cells in our bodies or in your partner's body. So we can really have a big effect on these cells based on what we're doing before they renew.

So it actually takes a follicle about three months, at least three or more months to develop and to fully mature. So whenever we ovulate, or if our partner ovulates, or the person we're working with as an egg donor, whenever they ovulate, the quality of that egg is representative of the previous three plus months. So that's why it's super important to take the time beforehand to do these things to make good changes in your body to create a really good fertile environment, because that's what your egg will be representative of a few months down the road.

What we'll go over today, for today's podcast is the first two elements and my Whole Self Fertility Method. So the Whole Self Fertility Method is a method that I teach, that incorporates all five elements in Chinese medicine. And basically, you know, how we can bring back into balance all five of those elements, and how they relate to our fertility and our whole self, in general.

The first two of those elements are Earth and Wood that we're going to talk about today. And these ones are, I think that these elements are the ones that we have the most immediate access to that we can really make pretty quick changes and see pretty quick results. So these are the things that I really I talk to my patients about the most that come up the most often and all of the fertility cases that I work with.

We'll start with Earth. So every element in Chinese medicine connects with or is associated with a certain organ system in the body. So Earth and Chinese medicine is related to or associated with the spleen and the stomach. So these two organs are paired. And the spleen and stomach are indicative of our digestion. They're in charge of transforming our food into blood and what we call Qi or energy. And the spleen and stomach are responsible for holding our blood and our vessels and holding our energy up. So it has this unique holding function that holds things up and in. And where that comes into play, where that's important in a fertility journey, is that it also holds a pregnancy. So I always look to the spleen when there is a history of miscarriage, for example, it may indicate to me that that spleen Qi is not doing its function of holding properly.

When someone has a weak spleen Qi, where we can really see that it needs to be nourished and built up, these are the things that may show up if you have weak spleen Qi. And I also want to say that this is extremely common. Almost every person that I see and treat has a weak spleen Qi. So if you look in the mirror, you can look at your tongue and see if it's puffy or swollen, if it's pale, so sort of a real pale pink color. And most importantly, if you can tell, if you have teeth marks surrounding the outer, the outer edge of your tongue. If you notice teeth marks, that's a real strong indicator that there might be some weak spleen Qi.

Some other things that can you may experience with the weak spleen Qi are low energy, feeling hard to wake up in the morning, like you just could stay in bed, you know, for a lot longer. Having an afternoon slump, usually, you know kind of three in the afternoon around there. Feeling bloated, bloated a lot, having bloating and gas a lot. Bruising easily, having any sort of bleeding issues like usually with your cycle, so bleeding, like breakthrough bleeding, you know, between your cycles or lots of spotting before or after your cycle.

What I like to call circular thinking or it can kind of feel like constantly worrying or sort of obsessing about things. I imagine people sort of thinking in a circular direction where they just keep going over the same thoughts over and over and over again, that's really that spleen energy is that circular thinking. Having a cold stomach actually to the touch. So it may be hard to feel that on your own. But it maybe you have someone you know close to you that would feel comfortable touching your stomach, they might be able to tell you whether or not your stomach feels cold to the touch. And a way you can try to do that is actually by using the back of your hand. Because sometimes it's harder to tell temperature with the palm of your hand. But by using the back of your hand, you may be able to tell you know compared to other areas on your body that your stomach might feel cold to the touch.

Headaches that feel like a band around the head are those typical spleen Qi headaches or just feeling foggy, like a foggy head in general. Having cold hands and feet or one or the other. Having pretty intense sweet cravings can be an indicator of that spleen Qi deficiency. And then not feeling thirsty so, you know, it's when you have to remind yourself to drink water rather than feeling thirsty all the time and constantly drinking water. But if your spleen Qi is deficient, you have what we call accumulating dampness. So when you have that dampness, you just really don't want any more dampness or any more water in your body because you already have some. So usually that manifests is not feeling thirsty, so you have to remind yourself to drink.

So if you notice that you have a lot of these symptoms or manifestations of that spleen Qi deficiency, energy. You know, these like I said, these are some of the most common, you know, I rarely run into someone or treat someone who doesn't have this pattern going on. So it's pretty likely, highly likely that you have you know some of this stuff going on. So what we can do to address if this is the case that you do have some of these things going on, that what we can do to address nourishing the spleen Qi is going to help improve your ability to hold a pregnancy and to nourish a pregnancy.

So in Chinese medicine, we view the digestion as a fire. So we don't want it to be burning out of control and we also don't want it to go out, we want it always to be steadily burning. You'll notice a lot of the recommendations are warming. So we want to just keep that fire going, is the general what we're trying to do in Chinese medicine. So foods that strengthen the digestion, these will be listed in the show notes for this episode, so don't feel like you need to go write these down. You can go to my website afterwards and have this all written in one place for you.

The foods that strengthen the digestion, strengthen that spleen Qi, are grains and root vegetables, all of them. And the grains, we want to make sure our whole grains, that we can see the entire grain, so nothing highly processed. Chewing is so important. So the more, you know, our digestion starts in our mouth, with our saliva. We have enzymes in our saliva that start to break down our food. So the more work we can do in our mouth, the less work our spleen/stomach has to do once our food travels down into our tummy. So that's why chewing is so important. So if you can really take the time to chew your food, well, that will really take the burden off of the spleen/stomach, and will help to improve the digestion.

All foods that are slightly sweet or naturally sweet in nature are really nourishing for the spleen. So this includes things like sweet potatoes, most root vegetables, or actually have that slight sweetness to them, especially when you roast them. Cinnamon, things like cinnamon, and ginger, those are really good for the spleen. And then balanced flavors, colors and natures. So everything about nourishing the spleen is as you'll notice is kind of everything is pleasant.

So we really want to nourish all our senses and really take the time to slow down and smell and enjoy our food and, you know, kind of take the time to have different variations of flavors and color on our plate and, you know, breathe while we're eating and not try to multitask or, you know, eat on the go. So this is an important practice and, you know, just being mindful and practicing, you know, feeling at ease and feeling peaceful, which will really help your digestion. And we'll get into that with the next element with wood. We'll talk a little bit more about that, about how stress plays into all of this.

So yeah, so pleasant to the eye and taste, balanced flavors, colors and natures and then we also want to do primarily cooked food. So this is going back to what I was saying earlier about how you'll notice a lot of the recommendations are warming because we want to keep that fire going, our digestive fires, we don't want to put it out. So we want to do primarily cooked food which really goes against a lot of the popular nutrition advice that's out there right now about eating raw and you know eating lots of raw veggies.

So in Chinese medicine, you know, veggies are great and have lots of wonderful healing properties. But in general, we want to make sure that they're cooked to in order to nourish our spleen Qi. So, it can just be you know, briefly steamed. I think they call that blanching. I actually don't know because I'm not like a super amazing cook. But you know they can be briefly steamed or roasted or fried or you know, however you want to add warmth to the veggies will be good for the digestion.

So I get a lot of pushback on this, which is totally understandable. Because I know there's a lot of convenient healthy, quick foods that we can eat that are cold so you know things like salads and raw veggies and raw fruit and smoothies is a big one that people a lot of my patients are into smoothies and I'm actually I love smoothies myself so I get it.

So there's a little trick that I usually teach people that if your only option is something cold to either have some tea or some soup or some warm water, either with it or right before or right after, you eat the thing that's cold. And it doesn't have to be very much. So in fact, you actually want it to be about a teacup amount of warm water broth, super tea. And the reason why we don't want it to be more than that is because you never want to have too much liquid with your meals. Because what that does, from a Chinese medicine perspective, is that it puts out the fire.

So we don't want to be pouring liquid or water on the fire, on our digestive fires, we want it to be able to keep burning. And what that does in the kind of Western medicine sense, by drinking too much water with your meals, that actually dilutes your own naturally occurring digestive enzymes in your stomach. So we want to keep those nice and potent. So that's another sort of way to look at it.

So yeah, so just doing a small tea cup amount of that warm water broth, super tea, you know, either before your smoothie, or after your smoothie, or you know, sip on it, you know, in between while you're taking sips of your smoothie, same goes with salad or anything like that. And then some warming spices are great for the digestion, and for that spleen Qi, and those include black and white pepper, cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, orange peel, and fennel. So those are all great to add and actually, you can add them to cold things too and that will give them a warming property even if they're not actually warm. So those are my suggestions for helping to nourish your spleen Qi, and that will help with your increase in the fertile environment and your body.

So now, we'll talk about Wood, element of Wood, which in Chinese medicine correlates to the liver and the gallbladder. Also, these organs are paired in Chinese medicine. And a lot of times if I refer to, I'll usually refer to what we call the Yin organ. So with the spleen/stomach Earth pair, a lot of times I just referred to spleen and that means that's sort of the organ that we're working with mostly. So same with the liver/gallbladder, I'll usually just say the liver Qi and I am sort of referring to both, but it's more typically just said the liver Qi.

So the liver is in charge of the smooth flow of energy or Qi, that's what we call it, in the body. So anything that requires micro movements in the body like ovulation, or implantation, or menstruation, anything that requires these little tiny micro movements to be happening inside of us, that is orchestrated by the liver Qi. So whenever we're stressed or when we are, you know, perceiving stress in any way, that Qi, that liver Qi constricts, and it becomes really blocked and tight and what we call stagnated. So that's called a liver Qi stagnation. And that energy or Qi no longer flows smoothly. So that ends up causing issues with things like ovulation and implantation, and menstruation.

So normally, when this happens when we get that stressed, sort of tight, stagnated feeling, we usually crave things to temporarily smooth out that liver Qi. Usually the things that we crave end up causing more liver Qi stagnation in the long run. So it's sort of this vicious cycle that happens. And the things that we crave that temporarily smooth out our liberty are what's called liver loaders in Western medicine. And these liver loaders are usually things like alcohol, caffeine, spicy food, sugar, and some drugs also. And the liver is where most of these are processed.

The other thing that's processed in the liver is estrogen. So when the liver is backed up, or what we call stagnated in Chinese medicine, with all of these other liver loaders, then it can't process estrogen efficiently in the way that it needs to in order to keep our estrogen levels balanced and in an ideal ratio in order to conceive. So instead, if our liver is backed up with these liver loaders, the estrogen can actually get recycled back into the body in various forums that are not healthy for us. So that can lead to all sorts of different reproductive health disorders.

I just like to explain that to my patients and people that I work with, so that you know the reasons you know why it's important to avoid, you know, things like alcohol and caffeine, you know, during the process of trying to conceive. Because I know a lot of fertility clinics and fertility doctors will recommend, you know, avoiding those things and it's, I find, it's hard to avoid something if I don't know the reason why I'm avoiding it. So I like to explain the mechanism behind that so that people know, okay, this is why I'm making these choices, because those are all fun things, you know, so it's hard to avoid all those things. I get it. So that's, I think it's important to know why you're doing it.

So as you may have noticed, the liver plays a big role in managing our stress levels. So when we're feeling good, when we're feeling peaceful and calm, our liver Qi is flowing smoothly, and all of the mechanisms, the little micro movements in our body are working as they should. And our hormones are optimal levels, all everything is good. But when we're stressed, what is also happening is not only is that liver Qi becoming stagnated, and everything is happening, that I described before, but our brain is also sending signals that it's not safe to conceive, and to bring a baby into the world. So this is a problem when we're trying to do that. So I'd say one of the main things that I work with my patients with is to lower stress levels. And by doing that, just bringing your baseline, you know, stress levels away down, creates these feelings of embodied safety in the body, that creates signals that deliver messages to your brain and different parts of your body, that it's safe to bring a baby into the world. And then I like to jokingly say that, you know, we need to trick our body into not thinking there's a pandemic.

So it's tricky right now, especially right now, with pandemic going on. You know, we're basically trying to argue with our reptilian brain to let our, you know, internal body know that it's safe, that it's safe to conceive at this time. So it's tricky. You know, it's something that we haven't had to deal with before. You know, it's I think what I've seen in my private practice is that it's been, it was definitely easier pre pandemic to work with people on lowering their stress levels on this way to, you know, send these messages of safety to the body. So yeah, it's definitely more challenging right now with everything that's going on. So these practices are even more important to know how to bring these stress levels down so that you can, you know, move forward with your fertility journey and conceiving.

So the best best way to do this, to send these signals of embodied safety is doing, what I call, a belly breathing exercise. So belly breathing is so important. Whenever I'm treating my patients and teaching them this exercise, I always tell them, if you do nothing else, if you don't take any of my other advice, please just take this one, like, this is the most important thing you can do. And I want to explain first, why it works because I'm big into that, I'm big into knowing the why behind things. And then it will just make it that much cooler, you know, for you to know why this works every time you do it. So rather than just me telling you to breathe from your belly.

Our nervous system is divided into two branches. So we have our voluntary nervous system, and we have our involuntary nervous system. So our voluntary nervous system is the one where we have to think about, you know, moving our hand or kicking our leg or, you know, turning our head from side to side, that all comes from our voluntary nervous system, we have to think about it first in order to do it. And then our involuntary nervous system is, you know, controls things like our hair growing, or our food digesting, or our wound healing. You know, these things that we don't have to think about doing but our body just does them so that those come from our involuntary nervous system.

So our involuntary nervous system is further divided into our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. So these are in charge of our fight or flight response. Our rest and relaxation response. So you may think, well, since these are a part of our involuntary nervous system, then we have no control over how we react. We're either going to fight or flight, or we're going to rest and relax, you know. So it feels like what's the point of, you know, trying to control those, because obviously, we have no control over them.

So that's true to a certain extent, but there's a loophole, and the loophole is our breath. So our breath is the only system in our body that we have control over. So we can, we can access it from our voluntary nervous system. So we can say, you know, say to ourselves, we can choose to slow down our breath, or speed up our breath, or even stop our breath for a little bit. And it's also part of our involuntary nervous system. So we will keep breathing, even if we don't tell ourselves to breathe. So it's this amazing loophole our breath is able to access both of those branches of our nervous system, which I think is so cool.

So that gives us this little secret passageway into our involuntary nervous system where we can kind of reach in and flip that switch between, you know, going from that fight or flight to rest and relaxation, and we can do that through our breath. So the way to do that, is to take some belly breaths. So this is a little easier to show rather than to explain, but hopefully, you'll be able to follow. It's a pretty simple practice, and it just takes practice to be able to do it really easily and quickly, you know, several times throughout the day.

So what you want to do first is to make sure you're leaning against something. So it's when you're first learning how to do belly breaths, it's best to do them lying down on your back, or you can be sitting in a chair. But just make sure your back is supported. Either way. It's harder to do these when you're standing up, because your back has no support. So your belly has to engage in order to hold your back up. So that's why you want to make sure that your back is supported so that your belly can relax all the way.

So either lying down or leaning back in a chair, you want to place one of your hands over your lower abdomen, so the part of your belly that's under your belly button, you just want to gently place your hand there. And when you take a breath in, let your lower belly expand and push your hand out. So this will feel like the opposite of how we normally breathe. So normally, we would breathe more shallowly, like from our chest. And normally it feels like when we take a breath in, we, you know kind of constrict the inside of our body, so we get smaller. But this, I want you to do the opposite. So I want you to take a breath in and actually expand and become bigger, especially in your belly. And it doesn't have to be a big breath, it's more the location that's important. It's not the actual volume of the breath that's important. It's just that we want to breathe into our lower belly, that's the important part.

So go ahead and try it right now if you want to. So take a second and just kind of get settled. And put your hand on your lower abdomen and lean back on a chair and lay down on your back. And when you take a breath in, let your belly expand and push your hand out. Ready? And then when you exhale, you can let your belly come back down. Ah, that does feel nice.

So what this does is it clears stress hormones from your body and your bloodstream faster than any drug, it is immediately effective, even just one breath, one belly breath. So what I recommend to my patients is to do this several times throughout the day and just get into the habit of doing this as a practice and you really can't do it too frequently.

So you can do it while you're driving, you can do it while you're at a doctor's appointment, you can do it while you're sitting at a desk or at work. You could do it while you're falling asleep at night. If you get acupuncture, I always tell my patients, you can do it on the acupuncture table while you're getting needles put in. And what I like to do is choose something to associate this belly breathing with, so that I'll do it several times throughout the day.

So for me, every time I take a drink of water, I'll check in with my belly breathing and do a couple belly breaths. So that helps me to have that association with something that I'm already doing, you know, several times throughout the day. Or another thing that I recommend to my patients is to set an alarm on your phone, maybe once every hour or so, to do a couple belly breaths. So whatever works for you, but I highly recommend just putting this practice into place now and just getting used to doing these belly breaths as frequently as you can throughout the day. So that is the belly breathing.

And then lastly, I just want to share with you some foods that are good for the liver. So again, you don't need to write these down, these will be on my website and the show notes. But these are great foods to incorporate into your diet that will help support that liver Qi and keep things flowing smoothly. So onions, garlic, basil, chives, and chili, ginger, cardamom, cinnamon and coriander, are great. Green tea is actually wonderful for the liver. When patients are trying to wean themselves off of coffee, I always recommend green tea is actually a great substitute because it does have a little caffeine in it, but that green tea is really beneficial for the liver.

Wine and small amounts can be good for the liver Qi stagnation, but it can also be a slippery slope. So, you know, you decide what would be best for you. And by wine in small amounts, I mean like a glass, maybe two to four glasses a month would be wine in small amounts. So for my patients that are not drinking anyway, I definitely don't recommend that they start but, you know, patients who are having more like three to four drinks per week, you know, then I definitely recommend to go more towards the three to four drinks per month.

Lemon juice and warm water especially first thing in the morning can be really good for the liver and to clear out to help support those pathways in the liver, the detoxification pathways. And apples, carrots, and pears are actually really great for the liver and would be fine to eat raw. So if you are craving a fresh, you know, cold snack of fruits or vegetables, those would be good ones to have.

So I hope today's episode was helpful for you and eye opening. And thanks so much for listening, and I will talk to you in the next episode.

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