The Best Way To Conceive: Tips To Increase Fertility
When a couple decides to have a baby, they will try everything to conceive. But it is also important to remember that conceiving a baby can also take some time.
If you are also trying for a baby then you are at the right place. We are going to discuss every possible way to increase your chances of getting pregnant.
It is also very important to remember that as you age, your chance of conceiving minimizes. A 30 years old woman only has a 20 percent chance of getting pregnant every month.
What is conceiving?
You might have heard that you can get pregnant anytime you have sex. But that's not the case. Getting pregnant is a very complicated process. Every woman has a different menstrual cycle that can vary from 28 to 40 days.
Every month, a woman's body undergoes certain hormonal changes. This series of hormonal changes result in the growth and development of an immature egg in the ovary.
When the egg gets mature, it is released from the ovary, a process known as ovulation. The mature egg then travels down to the fallopian tube that ends into the uterus. Once the egg is released, it can only be fertilized in the next twenty-four hours.
If the egg successfully fertilizes, it keeps traveling down to the uterus where it implants.
Useful Tips to Increase Your Chances of Getting Pregnant
With the help of experts, we've come up with the following tips to help you increase your fertility quickly and safely.
- Monitor Your Period
- Track Your Ovulation
- Monitor your Fertility Window
- Take Prenatal Vitamins
- Eat Healthy Food
- Focus on Healthy Weight Gain
- Avoid Smoking, Caffeine, and Alcohol
- Balance Your Workouts
If you want to optimize your fertility, you should also take care of your health.
The most important advice for a woman who is trying to conceive is to get to know her body, specifically her reproductive system.
To make conceiving easy for you, follow these tips and consult a medical professional.
Your Step-By-Step Guide To Conceive
Let's dive into the steps on how to get pregnant:
• Record and Monitor your Menstrual Cycle Frequently
If you want to have a baby, you should monitor your menstrual cycle. If your period comes the same number of days every month it means your cycle is regular. However, some women have irregular menstrual cycles, which means their cycle lengths vary every month.
Tracking your menstrual cycle helps you to predict your ovulation days (it's the time when your ovaries release an egg so it's best to try these days.)
• Track your ovulation
A healthy woman with regular cycles ovulates about two weeks before her periods start. Women with irregular cycles usually ovulate 12 to 16 days before the start of their next period.
You can use a home ovulation-prediction kit to determine the most fertile days every month.
• More Sex During Your Fertility Window
We are living in the modern age where technology owns everything. Advanced technology has made everything easier. Similarly, with the help of medical science, we can find the most fertile days of the month.
There are several fertility apps and websites available that people use to track their fertility days. But who knows if they give accurate results?
To see how accurate these apps are, scientists have recently analyzed over 50 popular fertility-tracking apps and websites. The results are varied so the result is not satisfactory.
Still, there are some apps with high Acceptable Quality Standards (AQS ) scores:
You can simply find out your fertile days if you identify your fertility window span. The fertile window is six days. It is a time when your chances of getting pregnant are the highest.
There is not a huge difference but having sex during the days of your fertile window can increase the chances of fertilization of the egg.
• Include healthy food in your diet
Many women eat anything they want during pregnancy. But eating specifically healthy foods will help you to prepare your body for pregnancy.
Before trying to get pregnant, make sure your body should have an adequate amount of essential nutrients like calcium, protein, and iron.
Therefore you should include a variety of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, dairy, and healthy sources of fat in your diet.
It is also recommended to consume vitamins directly from the food instead of taking supplements. For instance; you can take your folic acid dose by eating dark green leafy vegetables, fortified pieces of bread and cereals, beans, and citrus fruits.
You should also avoid eating high-mercury fish such as swordfish, shark, king mackerel, and tilefish. The high toxic metal mercury affects fertility in both men and women. Moreover, it can accumulate in the bloodstream of pregnant women which affects the development of the baby. The albacore, also known as white tuna fish, contains this toxic metal too.
You should also avoid the excessive use of caffeine when trying to conceive. According to new research conducted in 2020, there is no safe level of caffeine for pregnant women and for women who are trying to conceive.
• Avoid strenuous exercise
A physically active body plays a key role in getting pregnant. But heavy and strict exercise in the days you are trying to conceiving can affect your ovulation cycle.
Frequent strenuous workouts can cause menstrual disturbance in women. Therefore, you should try to cut off from heavy exercise when you are trying to conceive.
• Avoid smoking and drinking
When a woman is trying to conceive she should stop using birth control pills. Similarly, women should also stop consuming alcohol if she is trying to get pregnant. According to research, drinking alcohol has a bad impact on the reproductive system in men and women. Therefore, both partners should quit their drinking habits as soon as possible.
Similarly, smoking can cause fertility problems in both males and females. The harmful chemicals that are found in cigarette smoke such as nicotine and carbon monoxide are very toxic, especially for women. These chemicals can cause the loss of women’s eggs.
Moreover, smoking ages the women's ovaries. As a result of which the functioning of egg production reduces.
Not only direct smoking but secondhand smoking which is also known as passive smoking should also be avoided. Passive smoking can reduce your chances of getting pregnant. So, when you are trying to get pregnant it is better to avoid marijuana and recreational drugs.
• Age-related fertility declines
You might be aware of age-related fertility declines. When women get older, their fertility starts decreasing. With the growing age of women, age-related changes happen in the ovary. These changes cause a decline in the number of eggs.
The increasing women’s age also leads to several other health issues which cause fertility loss. Uterine fibroids, endometriosis, and blocked fallopian tubes are some disorders that reduce fertility in women. Here is an age-vise list of fertility loss of women.
- Fertility loss initiates in the 30s
- A sharper decrease after age 37
- Steep fertility decline after age 40