Told everything's normalbut you know it isn't.
“Unexplained” rarely means there's nothing to find. It more often means the looking stopped at the standard tests, which aren't designed to ask what a body needs in order to conceive and carry.
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Understanding
Your fertility rests on more than one part of your health at once, and knowing what those parts are tells you where to put your effort.
Fertility is not one system doing one job. What you eat, what you absorb, how you sleep, how much stress you are under, what you are exposed to and what has actually been measured all feed into the same picture, and most advice hands you one of those pieces as though it were the whole. Looking across all six areas is usually more useful than going deep on one, because they affect each other. It also leaves room for how different women are: two women can be doing much the same things, and what is getting in the way can still be quite different for each of them, so the area that matters most for you might be the one another woman can leave alone.
- What the six areas are, and how they affect each other
- Why the same advice suits one woman and not another
- How to work out which area is worth your attention first
Mark this area on the wheel and what to read on it appears under “Where to start”, below.
Testing
You can't change what nobody measured. What to ask for, and what the number actually means.
A result inside the reference range is not the same as a result that suits you. Those ranges come from averages across a large group, and they differ from one lab and one country to the next, so the same result can come back normal in one place and flagged in another. Beyond the routine checks there are tests worth knowing about: a full thyroid panel rather than one number, ferritin rather than haemoglobin on its own, blood sugar and insulin in a woman who is slim and therefore never asked about it. Those start to matter when the usual results come back fine and something still isn't right. Knowing what to ask for, and what each result can and can't show, is what lets you make sense of your own picture.
- Which tests are worth asking for
- What a reference range is, and what it can't tell you
- What to do when everything comes back normal
Mark this area on the wheel and what to read on it appears under “Where to start”, below.
Food
This is a time for eating enough, not eating less.
Your body builds hormones, eggs and everything a pregnancy needs out of what you eat, and out of what it's already stored. Those stores take months to fill, not weeks, so what you eat now is what's there later. Iron, iodine, folate and B12 are the ones that most often run low, and they aren't spread evenly across food. Iron and B12 are mostly in meat, iodine in dairy and fish, folate in greens and pulses. If you don't eat any of those food groups, those nutrients have to come from somewhere else. This isn't the time to fast or to diet, because eating less means less of multiple nutrients. No supplement makes up for food you're not eating.
- Where the important nutrients actually come from
- Why this isn't the time to fast or cut back
- Whether you're absorbing what you eat, not just eating it
Mark this area on the wheel and what to read on it appears under “Where to start”, below.
Supplementation
What you need before pregnancy, during it and after birth is not the same, and the dose and the form matter more than the brand.
Supplements do different jobs at different points: what you take while preparing is not the same as what you need in pregnancy, and after birth is different again. There is a general standard to start from, and it is a shorter list than most people expect. Beyond that, the dose and the form usually matter more than the brand, because the same mineral in two forms might behave quite differently once it reaches your gut. Testing is what shows which of the rest you personally need.
- What changes between preparing, pregnancy and after birth
- Which forms tend to be absorbed, and which mostly aren't
- Which tests show what you need beyond the standard list
Mark this area on the wheel and what to read on it appears under “Where to start”, below.
Lifestyle
Sleep, movement and stress might move your hormones as much as what you eat, and sometimes more.
Short sleep, hard training and a long stretch of stress might each affect your cycle. Eating well does not always make up for them. This is also the area most often dismissed with “just relax”, which helps nobody and tends to make a woman feel blamed. It is more useful to work out which of your sleep, your training and your stress is worth looking at first, and which of the three you could change this month.
- Training that leaves you more tired than it should
- The three a.m. wake-up, and what often sits behind it
- How much sleep and stress can move a cycle
Mark this area on the wheel and what to read on it appears under “Where to start”, below.
Environment
What you're exposed to at home and at work is the part nobody thinks to ask about.
Nobody asks what you clean with, what you cook in, or what goes on your skin every morning, so it rarely comes up at all. The amounts are small and the exposure is daily, and some of these compounds appear to interact with hormones. You don't have to replace everything you own. A few changes, like the pan you cook in most days, usually make more difference than the rest, and it is worth knowing which those are before you spend money.
- Pans and plastics, and what is worth replacing first
- The products you put on your skin every day
- What is worth changing, and what you can leave alone
Mark this area on the wheel and what to read on it appears under “Where to start”, below.
Where to start
Every area you've marked, lowest first. Everything else is on the blog.
Nothing marked yet. Mark an area on the wheel above and what to read on it appears here.
Your fertility rests on more than one part of your health at once, and knowing what those parts are tells you where to put your effort.
You can't change what nobody measured. What to ask for, and what the number actually means.
This is a time for eating enough, not eating less.
What you need before pregnancy, during it and after birth is not the same, and the dose and the form matter more than the brand.
Sleep, movement and stress might move your hormones as much as what you eat, and sometimes more.
What you're exposed to at home and at work is the part nobody thinks to ask about.
Nothing written on this yet. It's coming.
Go through it with other women.
All six areas, taught live and in order over several weeks: what the standard tests leave out, what to ask for, and what to change in food, supplements, sleep and what you're around every day.
It's taught live to one group, so places are limited and they go to the waitlist first. Join and you'll get the dates the moment they're set, and the chance to book before anyone else.
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New this month
You're not overweight, so no one checked your blood sugar
Slim, active, eating well, and still not ovulating properly. Blood sugar is one of the first things skipped in women who don't look like they need it checked.
Preparing for a healthy pregnancy: the part the checklist skips
Preparing for pregnancy is more than folic acid. Why the two to three months before you conceive matter, and which tests are worth asking for beyond the basics.
Your blood tests came back normal, but one number was never checked
You feel tired, foggy, or you're trying for a baby, and you've been told everything looks normal. There's a fair chance one quiet marker was never on the panel.
I've lived “everything's normal.”
I'm Lauza, DipNT (CNM London). I teach women who aren't getting pregnant where to look next: what to ask for, and what to do with the answer.
I spent fifteen years trying to have a baby, and heard “unexplained” for most of them. What finally changed things was preparing properly first, with everything I'd learned in my training — the groundwork the standard tests never cover.
Nobody laid this out for me at the time, so I've written it down. I teach the framework; you apply it to your own body.
A letter every Sunday.
Each week I write to help you understand your body and leave with one small change you can actually make. It comes in a fixed shape: three small ideas, two things worth your attention, and one question to sit with. Five minutes on a Sunday, and now and then a bit of news. Unsubscribe any time.