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How to Boost Fertility, Without Weight Loss

27/4/2017

So, I'm planning to have another baby.

Whilst some women shy away from telling people about their conception plans, I'm a massive over-sharer with an excitable soul! So what better way to revise my fertility nutrition basics in preparation for polishing up my own baby making equipment, than to share this information with you too.

I figure that since I've now had one kid, I have a little bit more personal experience to refer to than I did a couple of years ago, BC (before child).

Nowadays, I also have more professional experience working with women of all sizes who have worked with me to improve their fertility - some "overweight", some "normal weight", some a little "underweight" as far as medical BMI ranges go - and nearly all have been able to fall pregnant by focussing exclusively on their HEALTH.

This experience flies in the face of the advice of many doctors, scientists, and health professionals that "overweight people just need to lose weight" in order to fall pregnant.

So before we dive into my fertility boosting essentials that I work on with clients who wish to conceive, it's really important that you understand one important thing. This is so important that it's actually the first of the fertility-boosting tips I want to discuss. To fall pregnant, you must...

'Blood moon' - slaying the diet mentality

25/4/2017

'The Way Of The Sword' by Ric Nagualero

Do you watch what you eat?

Do you spend all day thinking about and planning your meals?
Are you "careful" with your food choices?
Do you have rules and judgement around food?
Do you try to make the "best" or "healthiest" decision every time you eat something?
Do you struggle with weight concern, emotional eating, binging, and/or food obsession?

If so, you might want to take a look at your personal diet mentality.

Diet mentality, or diet thinking, leads to dieting behaviours. And dieting behaviours build a cage around a person that places serious limits on their capacity to live and enjoy a rich, full, and meaningful life.

If there was ever an opportune time for us as individuals to slay our own private diet mentalities and weight biases - and for us to collectively dismantle the very diet culture that it stands upon - NOW is the time.

The next new moon falls on Wednesday, April 26th. This mid-autumn moon cycle is known in many parts of the world as the Blood Moon or Hunter's Moon. And it is the perfect time for you to put this diet thing to bed, for good.

Read on for 7 hard-core (but realistic) ways to slay that MF beast that is the diet mentality!

Detoxification: so NOT about juice fasts & colonics

21/4/2017

When you hear the word "detoxification", what springs to mind? Juice fasting and colon cleanses? Coffee enemas and starvation? Health spas and slimming teas? For years, this is what I thought when I heard that oh-so-sexy-sounding word, and practised, much to my body's distress.

For the vast majority of people, these things are totally unnecessary - and they can actually set a person up for disordered eating and eating disorders.

When it comes to optimising your body’s detoxification processes, just doing a 3-day juice fast or a colonic – then going back to your normal diet – won’t cut it. It’s time to understand how our bodies really work, and what you can do to gently detoxify every day.

3 types of diets to watch out for

18/4/2017

"It's not dieting, it's a lifestyle change."

Sound familiar? Let's clear something up. Dieting – whether a fad, old school diet, a “detox,” or a “lifestyle” – is not just a verb; it’s an entire way of thinking that pivots on the intention of losing or controlling weight. It is both an individual mentality, and a cultural paradigm.

So let's be super clear: Dieting is any approach to food and eating that is centred around weight loss or weight control.

The roots of dieting are diet mentality, and diet mentality is fertilised by diet culture. And no matter how abusive dieting is to our bodies or our minds, millions of people continue to cling to it.

It can be easy to think you're not dieting, even if you are. So here I'll list three main types of diets so you know what you're looking for when it comes to slaying that diet mentality.

The problem with "Strong is the new skinny"

11/4/2017

Nowadays it's hard to dodge those stupid memes about the new skinny. You know, the ones proclaiming that,

"Strong is the new skinny."

Or

"Fit is the new skinny."

Or even

"Curvy is the new skinny."

As if we needed yet another standard to live up to replace skinny! #facepalm

Whilst thin may no longer be (quite as) in, we are now seeing a migration towards the fit ideal.

The fit ideal, or even the fit-with-curves ideal, are new ideals that are frequently celebrated and portrayed as "real". As in "real girls have muscles" or even the seemingly more inclusive (but clearly far less inclusive when said aloud) "real girls have muscles AND curves."

In all honesty, this new fit ideal is just another unrealistic and painfully limited aspiration of beauty - albeit disguised as health - that excludes the majority of women while pretending to accommodate them.

We really may as well be saying "SPIKY, SCALY, HERMAPHRODITIC, AND WITH RAINBOW DNA is the new skinny." It would be just as "inclusive".

When will we all just make peace with the fact that women come in a million different shapes, sizes, sexual orientations, colours, degrees of ability and disability, and body compositions, and that ALL of these bodies are OK?

By slightly shifting a narrow standard of beauty that places pressure on women to conform, with no regard given to which of the billion different and natural body types an individual was born with, we see the same obsessive, compulsive, unhealthy thoughts and behaviours that "the old skinny" standard generated - restrictive dieting, compulsive exercise, dangerous overtraining, and yes, body hate.

11 "I'm not dieting" diets

7/4/2017

Rice is traditionally eaten with every meal in South East Asia, including breakfast. No carb-fearing in Laos!

"I'm not dieting - I'm doing this for my health."

Everyone knows that diets fail about 95% of the time. If you don't know it statistically, you've probably experienced it personally - that crushing weight rebound after the initial euphoria of weight loss.

The fact that dieting sets people up to fail is spreading, and old school diet programs such as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig are becoming less popular.

FIST PUMPS! The old school dieting industry is on the decline! This is indeed cause for celebration.

But whilst I hear plenty of people declaring "I've given up dieting," a closer look at their eating habits and food beliefs says otherwise. They may no longer be doing weekly-weigh-ins or counting calories, but the dieting thoughts remain.

Casey's blog

How to Boost Fertility, Without Weight Loss

'Blood moon' - slaying the diet mentality

Detoxification: so NOT about juice fasts & colonics

3 types of diets to watch out for

The problem with "Strong is the new skinny"

11 "I'm not dieting" diets

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