Learn how to improve your egg quality
In terms of male and female fertility there is a massive difference. Men on average eject between 40 million to 1 billion sperm compared to the woman that generally only produce one egg a month. Therefore it's critical to improve the quality of the woman's egg to maximise the chances of getting pregnant.
Knowing how to improve egg quality will improve your fertility and help your chances of conceiving and having a baby, where it's natural conception or using assisted reproductive technologies such as IVF.
Each egg has a life span of around 85 days. During those 85 days, the quality of the egg is based on the woman's general health. The human body is a survival organism, it will only support fertility if there is enough resources left after your daily needs have been meet. It doesn't understand that your job is secondary to your fertility, it just sees what's going out in terms of energy and what's coming in and what's left over for egg quality.
If you're dieting, working or exercising excessively or don't get enough sleep, your body will be weak and there won't be enough resources to produce good quality eggs. To improve natural fertility, you need to improve your general health over the lifespan of the egg (120 days).
It's especially important to improve the quality of your eggs before starting any reproductive medicine treatment such as IVF. Most fertility clinics don't think or help you improve your egg quality before starting fertility treatment and will start straight away and will stimulate your ovaries to produce around a dozen eggs.
If your overall health is poor or you have a low AMH level, stimulating your body to produce this many eggs can dilute the quality of them, making it less likely to reach blastocyst (day 5 embryo) in the fertility clinic lab before it's transferred back into the woman's uterus. Having poor egg health can increase the occurrence of chromosomal abnormalities.
If you have a low AMH level (poor ovarian reserve), you should try my top 12 tips below and allow several months before trying either naturally or with IVF.
My top tips to improve egg quality
Here is my top tips to improve your egg quality:
- It's a good idea to take nutritional supplements such as DHEA 25-75mg, coenzyme Q10 600mg and melatonin 2-4mg every day
- Don't diet. If you need to lose weight exercise instead
- Eat 3 meals a day and optimise your fertility diet with foods that are high in protein with lots of sea food
- Don't work night shifts
- Don't sleep after 10pm, sleep before
- Don't exercise more than 3 times a week
- Have acupuncture weekly
- Practice mindfulness or meditation to reduce anxiety and stress
- Take Chinese fertility herbs
- Take a good quality prenatal supplement every day
- Reduce stress by having acupuncture or practising mindfulness, meditation or yoga
Things that can worsen embryo quality:
Avoid this things which can cause poor egg quality:
- Smoking
- Trans fats
- Illegal drugs such as cocaine and mdma
- Free radical damage
- Plastics
- Chemicals (environmental factors)
- Reproductive medicine (over stimulation of the ovaries and exposure to oxygen in the fertility clinic)
- PGS/PGD testing
- Freezing your eggs
- Poor mitochondrial function
- Poor overall health
- Oxidative stress, which your reproductive endocrinologist will try to minimise
