Erin’s story of healing and her story of how she got pregnant trying diet changes and natural living.
I stumbled across this site (Natural Fertility and Wellness) a few years ago when my husband and I were trying to conceive.
We tried for about a year before going through the standard fertility testing, just to be told that everything checked out fine and they had no explanation for us.
The recommended course of action was fertility drugs. Though they can be beneficial for many, I felt it wasn’t the right path for us without any sort of diagnosis.
What followed was a 2 year journey of discovering a more natural way of living (and healing!).
I started looking at our diet, thinking about where our food was coming from, learning about nutrient-rich meals, researching vitamins, and examining the chemicals in our home. Suddenly, it became very clear to me just how unhealthy our “healthy” lifestyle was.
While we never ate a ton of traditional “junk” food, our diets were certainly lacking the nutrients our bodies needed.
After talking with my husband, we decided to try changing our lifestyle pretty drastically in hopes to be able to conceive. Over the next two years (and with the help of the Natural Fertility Workshop that Donielle ran (info now in now her book Naturally Knocked Up)), we:
- started new vitamins,
- eliminated most of the chemicals from our house by making natural cleaning products,
- started buying organic produce, dairy and meat at local farms and
- worked with natural health practitioners.
I also discovered along the way that I had a pretty major gluten intolerance. What my traditional doctor had always diagnosed as IBS, vanished completely once I eliminated gluten from my diet.
It was amazing to see how much better we felt the more we practiced this new lifestyle.
We had more energy, enjoyed cooking and eating our meals more, and got sick a lot less than usual. What didn’t follow immediately was getting pregnant…but we stayed the course, knowing that this more natural lifestyle would pay off.
In May of 2011, we decided to try conceiving via IUI (intrauterine insemination) at the fertility clinic. Against the doctor’s recommendation, we did the procedure without any fertility drugs. Our hope was that our bodies were in a healthy enough place to have it work without the help of medicine.
They gave us a 3% of it working this way.
But, two weeks later, we got the call that we were in fact pregnant! What followed was a happy, healthy, full term pregnancy and the birth of our son, Matthew (meaning “gift of god”) in February of 2012.
I am so confident that the changes we made in our way of life helped us in finally getting pregnant. It took a little more time and energy, but was so worth it in the end. God’s perfect timing ensured that we not only got healthy, but established a healthy household for our son to grow up in.
Donielle Baker
My son, who is just a few months older, is also named Matthew. Good name. 🙂