LIVE Q & A  with  Sacha Welsh

Full Transcript

Recorded January 20 2021

Hello, everybody.

I believe I am live.

My name is Sasha Welsh and I am a certified health coach specializing in fertility, pregnancy, and postpartum health.

I’m everything holistic. So that goes from nourishment and nutrition, all the way to sleep management, stress management, all the puzzle pieces that affect a healthy fertility journey, a healthy pregnancy, and a healthy postpartum recovery period.

So thank you for joining me today, and I am very happy to be here and I am here to educate you today on your best fertility tips. That always seems to be the topic that most people are interested in. And if you have any questions for me on anything, fertility, even pregnancy or postpartum, I’m here to answer you right now. Just drop it in the chatbox. Otherwise, I will answer as I go on.

My presentation today won’t be too long. We’re going to be talking about top fertility foods that you can have to enhance your fertility journey, meaning just boost your odds of having an easier journey. And also this will help. If you have had struggles, these tips will help you in the future as well.

I thought I would take the time today to go over some fertility tips, rather sorry, miscarriage prevention tips. So we’re going to go over fertility, food, best fertility foods, and your best miscarriage prevention tips.

I know that is a worrisome thing for many couples right now, of course, miscarriages have increased over the decades for various reasons, environment, nutrition, lifestyle habits, lots of things contributing to the risk of miscarriages, but there are things that you can do to prevent your odds. It’s never guaranteed, but to lower your odds, you always want to do that, right. So let’s go ahead and jump in.

So I’m going to just speak and I’ll tell you the points I’m going to cover, and you can take your notes, but I’m very excited to be talking about this stuff. If you would like to contact me, I’ll leave my contact information in the chat box or, and I’ll say it out loud too for replays later, but you can always reach me anytime on Instagram. I’m most active there. So you’ll be able to find me there and ask me any questions that you may not have gotten to ask me on here right now, ask me on there later and I’ll be happy to answer you. So with all that said, let’s go ahead and jump right in. I’m just going to be checking messages here. Okay.

Top fertility foods

So the best thing to do for fertility foods is to make sure that you’re having a nice nutrient-dense and a variety of foods in your diet.

1.) So one of the first things that you can start with is foods that are rich in folate. You may have heard this before through your doctors. Like, you know, a lot of them say start your prenatal pills early because it has a good amount of folate or folic acid in order to best prepare your body for conception. And this is true. But what I want you to also do is eat foods that are rich in folate, because folate, which is the most active form of nutrients and the most natural form of folic acid is man-made and completely synthetic. And can only be found in supplements in supplement form a folate or L-methyl folate is the most active form. And therefore we absorb that form the best.

So we want to look for prenatal pills that have folate or just eat as much food as we can with a high ingredient list of folate in it. So those foods include mainly greens, to be honest with you. So avocados, green leafy vegetables, broccoli, things like spinach and kale. You can find it in citrus fruits as well, like oranges or grapefruit. You can also find it in lentils. Those are really high Folate-rich foods, and you want to do your absolute best to eat as much of those as possible.

So just rotate it throughout your week because it basically prepares our tubes. It contributes to the health of our tubes, but it also contributes to building the blood supply and it helps for protein production. It does a lot more than just the tube health. It really prepares us very well for a healthy conception journey.

It contributes to egg quality, so improves egg quality. It helps with our ovarian function. So really do your best to eat as much folate, fruits, and vegetables. If you’re not a green-person like a salad person or leafy greens or avocado, if that’s just not your thing, which I totally get put it in a smoothie, or maybe get a greens powder, you know how you can get protein powders, you can get greens powders, and that is very helpful for getting your folate needs.

And you can just throw that in a smoothie or you can mix it. They come flavored and sweetened so you can mix it in a cup of water and drink it. And it tastes like juice. So don’t fall short on that because that’s a really good foundation for your reproductive system. So folate foods, No. 1 for fertility foods.

2.) Healthy Fats. You don’t want to fall short on healthy fats. Healthy fats contribute a lot to our hormone production and our hormone balancing hormone imbalance is the leading cause of infertility. There’s a lot to contribute to hormone imbalances in our diet, our stress management, our sleep management, anything that affects our environment, the toxins we’re exposed to on a daily basis, and that goes everywhere from what we breathe in the air, to what we eat to what we sit next to, to what we put on our skin. There’s so much that contributes to our hormones, either helping the production or depleting the production. So healthy fats are gonna be really helpful for our hormone production.

And when I say healthy fats, I’m really pointing to like the omega-3 fatty acids, of course, any form of healthy fat, polyunsaturated, monounsaturated all of those are very good forms, but the fatty acids are extremely helpful for fertility. Basically, it helps improve blood flow to our reproductive organs, which we always want to happen. It promotes ovulation.

So women that experience PCOS where ovulation is a problem. If you want to help promote ovulation, you want to make sure that you’re including a diet that is very rich in healthy fats. It regulates hormones, which I talked about already, and it also increases our chances of eliminating fertile mucus, which we see a few days leading up to ovulation. If you see fertile mucus cause that’s a sure good sign of ovulation and a nice healthy egg. And also it provides a fantastic environment for sperm to swim to the eggs. So we wanted to do our very best to eliminate fertile mucus every month. If we can, every month is different. You may not have it every month. You can still get pregnant without fertile mucus, but it’s just very helpful in the process because sperm loves fertile mucus.

Healthy Fats. What type of foods are those? So nuts, seeds, butter, oils, avocado, oily, fish, eggs. All of those are fantastic foods for healthy fats. That’s no. 2.

3.) I’m just going to talk about this a little bit on his own are seeds. So a variety of seeds and your diet are extremely helpful for your fertility. It’s particularly helpful in regulating our sex hormones. So when we, you know, have our menstruation cycles, the first half of the month, our estrogen is dominant. And the second half of the month, the progesterone is dominant. When we get pregnant, we want our progesterone to remain dominant so that we stay pregnant. Progesterone is extremely important for pregnancy.

A lot of us have a hard time maintaining progesterone production because it’s so easily depleted through our lifestyle, through our diet, through our stress directly depletes our progesterone production as well as many other things. So it’s very important to maintain that in order to maintain a pregnancy low progesterone is a big one of those big reasons for miscarriages or pregnancy complications or whatever it may be PCOS often results in low progesterone.

So that’s something to keep in mind sees a very, very helpful. So in particular, during the first half of your cycle, when your estrogen is dominant, you want to focus on ground flax seeds and sunflower seeds. Those are or sorry, ground flax seeds and pumpkin seeds are very important for the first half of your cycle. So roughly day one to 14. And then this is if you have a 28-day cycle, and then for day 15 to day 27, when our progesterone is meant to be dominant, we want to focus on sunflower seeds and Sesame seeds, those help those productions. And so if you were just eating a variety of seeds in your diet that will contribute greatly to your hormones.

The term for this is called seed cycling. You may have heard of this, if not look it up, read about it. I’m happy to talk about it further if you want. I have talked about it in the past, on my Instagram, and I’m happy to share that post with you, but basically, science has proven that it’s directly related to those two productions of our sex hormones, estrogen, and progesterone. And like I said, progesterone has always been the biggest problem with us because it’s so easily depleted and we need it. If we want to be pregnant, we need it. So seeds, seeds, seeds, seeds, that’s number three.

4.) Calcium. So you may have heard if you’ve been trying to conceive for a while, that dairy is something that should not be eliminated from your diet. I will argue and say, it’s not necessarily dairy that you need. It’s the calcium, the reason why doctors or people say dairy is important in your conception journey. It’s because of calcium and calcium contributes to the activation of the eggs. 

So there are some women that have a problem activating their eggs. And when I say activation, it doesn’t turn it into an embryo. So the sperm meets the egg, therefore forms an embryo. Sometimes an embryo doesn’t happen and can’t be implanted. So there’s a sort of lack of activation there. If an embryo doesn’t happen. So sufficiency in calcium is really helpful for that activation. And calcium is often deficient in many of us because you know, a lot of people are dairy-free and they just may not be putting in enough effort to getting calcium from other sources. I am not dairy-free, but I am low dairy because I have a sensitivity to it. So I just don’t have large amounts of dairy or any rich dairy foods like cream, cheese or sour cream, or yogurt.

It’s like, I can’t eat cows versions of that. I can’t eat goat versions of that, which is also a dairy, but because that’s easier for me to digest, but I can’t digest the proteins as well in the cow’s dairy. So anyway, what I’m trying to say is if you’re a dairy-free person, which is totally fine, you can get pregnant being dairy-free.

You just have to make sure you’re getting calcium from other sources. So tahini like Sesame seed paste is one of the best sources of calcium in the whole wide world. So you want to try and include that in your diet. Dark leafy greens are very helpful for dairy. Nuts and seeds are very helpful for dairy, but you can’t absorb as much calcium unless you have sufficient amounts of magnesium.

So nuts and seeds will be really helpful for you to meet your magnesium requirements in order for you to absorb dairy. So magnesium and calcium sort of work hand in hand, you kind of need both of them in order to get enough absorption from the former, which is calcium. So for calcium, obviously dairy darkly for greens, nuts and seeds, particularly tahini, Sesame seeds and foods that are rich in magnesium are like Brazil nuts, like any legume, other nuts, hemp seeds, things like that. So don’t fall short on that. 

That’s tip No. 4.  No. 5, there’s 6, by the way. So we’re almost done with the top fertility foods. No. 5 would be, if not, a lot of people talk about this would be;

5.) Royal jelly or raw honey. Most people eat raw honey, and not too many people eat Royal jelly, but raw honey is more common to find, especially in grocery stores. And I mean, raw honey, not any honey raw. These two are great sources of new fertility-boosting foods. It helps with our gut bacteria. We need our gut bacteria to be in line in order to have a healthy reproductive system, a healthy digestive system, and a healthy immune system. All of that contributes to fertility. Honestly, if your gut is out of line, your digestive system may be out of line. Your immune system may be out of line. And the reasons, because that’s all in our gut, are like, what is it? 80% of our immune system is in our gut. 

And without those functioning, well, you’re going to have a pretty hard time having a well-functioning reproductive system. So raw honey, Royal jelly contribute greatly to that as well as other things like probiotics. And it contributes well to our hormone balance. Like I said, hormonal balance is extremely important for fertility and it improves egg quality and quality, the better your egg, the lower chance of miscarrying, the best, the higher chance you have of having a full-term pregnancy. 

So consider putting those. I know I used to add like a teaspoonful in my smoothies to sweeten my smoothie. If I was having like a veggie smoothie, for example, I would throw in a teaspoon of raw honey. And that’s how I would get my daily contribution. Or you can spread it on some toast, add it to your daily beverage. If you’re a coffee or a tea drinker and you like it, sweet. That’s something to consider. 

Last but not least, and many of you have heard of this. If you’ve been struggling for a while, is Maca powder. 

6.) Maca powder is a supplement. You can only consume it in powder form. You can not consume it as the root. That is a root vegetable coming from Peru. And we can only find it in the stores in powder form. And the reason for that is that’s the only way we can absorb it, but it’s extremely helpful for fertility because it contributes greatly to the balancing of our hormones. So management of our stress, because it’s an adaptogen and it has great boosting benefits for men too.

I usually get the couples and the women that I work with to get their husbands or spouses on board to help their sperm motility, their sperm quality Maca has shown to be very helpful for that too. So that’s another supplement to consider, you do need to talk to your practitioner, which can be me. If you want to reach out about the dose that you need for that you, the dose for you and your spouse. And also it is dependent on the individual.

If you have dominance and estrogen, or you have an estrogenic illness like endometriosis or something like that, it’s not going to be helpful for that. Any estrogen-dominant environment will not respond well to Maca. So you do need to talk to your practitioner about that, which can be me if you’re willing to hop on board for, to work with me, but talk to your health practitioner, if you’re interested in including that into your fertility diet. So those are the top six things. So to recap, it’s number one is folate-rich foods, healthy fats seeds, the seeds cycling, calcium and magnesium, raw honey or Royal jelly, and then Maca. So those are my top six food tips.

If there are any questions, let me know, but I’m going to go ahead and jump right into the top tips for preventing miscarriage or lowering your odds for miscarriage. Thank you everyone for saying hi, I’m seeing your hellos. And so hello back. 

Miscarriage Prevention Tips

This is a big one. First of all, we can never guarantee preventing a miscarriage, just like we can never guarantee a pregnancy IVF can guarantee pregnancies, but we can increase your odds of pregnancy, and miscarriage prevention tips can decrease your odds of miscarrying, but nothing’s ever guaranteed. I just want to phrase that before I dive deep into it. 

1.) Miscarriage prevention is one of the best things you can do is prepare for conception.

So it takes three months for our eggs to mature, three to four months. We only ovulate mature eggs and only mature eggs can be fertilized. So it takes about three months for us to develop a mature egg, and then we ovulate it. So you want to start preparing for a conception about at least three months before you’re ready to start trying so that you have a good chance of having a healthy full-term pregnancy and also just getting pregnant.

There are lots of other reasons, not just as simple as the egg is lots of other reasons you want the sperm to swim fast. You want your environment to accept sperm, lots of things, and contribute to getting pregnant, but a healthy egg is one of them. And the best way to do that is to prepare at least three months in advance. And the way to do that is to plan. So a liver cleanse. So, you know, when our liver feels taxed, which is easily taxed through the diet and environment that we live in, you know, toxins that we eat, toxins that we consume in our bodies or breathe in or any type of toxin can tax our liver. 

And so it’s nice to prepare three months in advance and try to do you talk to your liver as much as you can because a taxed liver is going to have a real hard time setting your body up for conception. It preparing for consumption helps to balance your hormones. You want to balance your hormones when you’re ready to start trying so that you can decrease your odds and miscarriage and have a healthy egg. You also, I’m just reading my notes here. Fertility cleanses are also really helpful for women that have been on birth control.

So if you’re going off birth control, of course, you can get pregnant right away. If you’re lucky, if you have a good ovulated egg and a good sperm environment, etc., etc, you can definitely get pregnant right away, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes your body needs to figure out its rhythm and sometimes you need to cleanse your body.

Cause birth control is very taxing on our reproductive system. Of course, you know, keeps us from ovulating. So we want to be able to fertility cleanses are most helpful for women to have been on birth control, or if you’re exposed to daily toxins or you have a poor diet drink, a lot of alcohol smoke, things like that. Those are going to be really helpful.

So if you do all that, you want to start preparing at least three months in advance, and prepare for conception is one of your best bets to decreasing your odds of miscarrying. That’s tip number one. 

2.) Eating a healthy diet. So everyone knows is like, Oh, eat healthily. And hopefully, I can get pregnant, but why do you need to eat healthily? Well, nourishing your body with healthy foods creates a hospitable environment for most of the baby. And it’s that simple. It’s really the nourishment that we’re looking for here. Nourishing foods for your reproductive system is what’s going to help to get you pregnant. Your diet has an impact on the health of your eggs, your hormone balance, creating a healthy placenta and creating a healthy reproductive system. All of that is influenced by our diets. So that’s why healthy eating is important for conception and decreasing odds of miscarrying. Another thing is building a healthy foundation. 

3.) Building a healthy foundation. So by this, I’m just referring to building optimal health. So take the supplements that your body needs support in. You know, it’s hard to fulfill everything through diet, so supplements, nothing wrong with taking supplements, especially if you live in a climate. Like I think most of us are joining from Canada where there’s a fall, winter, spring, and summer supplementing with vitamin D in the fall. Winter and spring months are extremely helpful because we’re not getting our good dose from the sun like we do in the summer. 

Vitamin D is sorry. Sunlight is the best form of vitamin D. We can absorb. This is why people get sick less than in the summer. Vitamin D is huge for our immune system. And like I said, our immune system needs to be functioning very well in order to have a healthy functioning reproductive system. So supplementing with vitamin D studies have literally shown that women that have been sufficient in vitamin D miscarried less, vitamin D acts as a hormone in our bodies. It is a nutrient. Once we consume it and absorb it, it acts as a hormone. 

So you really want to make sure that you’re taking vitamin D supplements, talk to your practitioner about how much is right for you. So those depend greatly on where you live and the color of your skin, believe it or not.

So definitely talk to you and your practitioner about that, but highly recommend vitamin D as a supplement to support your foundation. And then, of course, we’ve got fatty acids. So taking fish oils or Omega 3 fatty acids are extremely helpful in this journey as well. It helps with our blood flow and hormone production. Like I mentioned, it helps the pregnancy to progress very well.

It helps with the implantation period. So if you’re not eating oily fish twice a week minimum, which honestly, most people do not do. Then you want to consider taking fish oils. Again, you need to talk to your practitioner about the dose that’s right for you. So there’s lots of consideration with building your healthy foundation, but don’t be afraid of supplements, but you do need to talk to someone about it because there are various per person. 

You can even get testing done to see how much you need. So there’s that another thing is, if you’ve heard this, there’s a herbalist out there that has created a fertility massage. This is most helpful for women that have really dark, heavy clotty periods, or if you have endometriosis or PCOS or other conditions that affect the blood flow.

If you sit at a desk for a long period of time, and I’m talking about like, you’re not getting up every hour and walking around, you’re glued to your desk for a long period of time, a fertility massage may be helpful. There is an artery that is in our left leg I believe that connects directly to our uterus. And so we want to make sure there’s good blood flow happening there.

If you’re sitting on, if you’re sitting down a lot, that’s going to affect the blood flow to that artery. So we want to make sure that we’re not missing out on that. So fertility massages, look it up on YouTube, just type in self-fertility massage, and you’ll see the benefits of that. It has to be done at a certain time of the month.

It’s not recommended after the ovulation period, and it’s not recommended when you’re on your period. So it’s a small window in the month when you have to do it. But it’s very helpful for women with dark heavy periods, then that sit down most of the day, and women with endometriosis or PCOS. 

And last but not least, if you’re one who’s had recurrent miscarriages, two or three in a row, you may want to consider some herbal remedies. I am not an herbalist, but I recommend talking to one or talking to your natural path or even your doctor. I’m not one to tell you what to take, but I am one to suggest looking into it.

If recurrent miscarriages are something that you’re susceptible to, some herbs can be very helpful, for example, women with PCOS have found that to be helpful with progesterone production and promotion of ovulation. So consider that if you’ve been struggling with miscarriages in a row, one miscarriage, and then a pregnancy is different, but like miscarriage, miscarriage, miscarriage is something totally different than having one-off miscarriage. So consider herbs. If you’ve unfortunately been one of those women that has recurrent miscarriages in a row.

So those my miscarriage tips, I hope you guys found this to be very helpful. I’m looking at your questions now. I just really went on, but I’m looking at your questions now. So I see one is, 

Would all of these vitamins and minerals help if someone is nursing? (25:42)

Totally. You can totally take these while you’re nursing, especially fatty acids and Omega-3. My goodness is that helpful for nursing? It helps literally with the production of the fat in your breast milk. So, Omega-3, totally. Vitamin D, totally very safe. Wallner saying, I don’t know if there’s anything else I mentioned. Herbs are not recommended for breastfeeding. So I won’t recommend that, but like general vitamins and minerals are totally safe in a breastfeeding period.

How does canned tuna fit into the weekly fish requirement? (26:18)

You can have canned tuna. Now, the only thing about canned tuna is just to watch your mercury intake levels. Usually, there’s more mercury in whitefish in white tuna, like albacore tuna, your, the absorption of mercury depends on your weight. So if you’re on the lower weight side, then you may want to consider having canned tuna, like maybe once every two weeks or once every 10 or 11 days, because it is all dependent on your weight. So someone who is 200 pounds can have more tension in it than a person who weighs like 120 pounds, for example. So canned tuna is, I’m totally fine to have. I recommend it. You just have to know your weight limits for that.

I’m just leaning over to plug in my computer. Cause I just thought the pop-up that my battery’s dying, but I’m still here. So any other questions that anyone has? You’re welcome. I see your thank you’s. In terms of how to reach me. Give me one second. While I plug my computer in, I’m gonna let you know how to find me on Instagram.

I am posting tips all the time on fertility, pregnancy postpartum, and you’re able to reach me better if you have any more questions that come up later on. So I’ll put it in the chatbox and I’ll also say it here. My Instagram page is Welsh, welsh_wellness. That’s my Instagram page and I’ll type it into the chatbot chatbox here as well.

Instagram is @welsh_wellness. I also have YouTube videos where I give much more lengthy tips on how to improve your egg quality, balance your hormones, or recognize implantation systems, lots of lengthy videos, like How to find the right prenatal pill?, what you need to look for exactly. Lots of tips on there. So you can find me on YouTube, just search welshwellness. It’s too complicated to put the link here. So just search welshwellness on YouTube, and you can search welshwellness on Facebook as well to find me there. I’m not as active on Facebook. I kind of just linked my Instagram, right? I would have Facebook, but if you don’t have Instagram, you’ll get all my Instagram posts on Facebook with all the tips and tricks that I put there.

So yeah, I’m also on TikTok. You guys, I like to post some fun videos of tips as well. And my following on TikTok is growing much faster than any other platform. So you can check me out on TikTok too. I’ll show you how to find me if you’re into that. And I put my talking here as well, which is sashawelshwellness. All one word, no underscores or anything. So I’m at the end of my presentation. If there are no more questions, which there doesn’t seem to be. 

Thank you very much for having me. Thank you for joining and we will chat soon. Thank you for saying thank you. And we’ll chat soon. You know how to reach them. Now you can ask me questions anytime, but give me a follow. I would love to talk to you guys further. 

Everybody Have a great day!