Infertility is a journey that many women know all too well. Jen Cougill, once a Physician Assistant and now a holistic health coach, joins me to share her struggle with infertility and exactly what she did to get pregnant .
With a focus on hormone balance and gut health, Jen and I discuss the pitfalls of diet culture, the necessity of managing stress, and the need for personalized approaches in women's health.
Jen shares her own journey of infertility to motherhood, the exact things she did to help her body be healthy enough to carry her children, and practical strategies you can start to implement today.
If you want to learn more about working with Jen Cougill, you can do that here!
If you've been listening to the show for a while and know you are ready to take this work even deeper, you can book your free call with me here.
Infertility is a journey that many women know all too well. Jen Cougill, once a Physician Assistant and now a holistic health coach, joins me to share her struggle with infertility and exactly what she did to get pregnant .
With a focus on hormone balance and gut health, Jen and I discuss the pitfalls of diet culture, the necessity of managing stress, and the need for personalized approaches in women's health.
Jen shares her own journey of infertility to motherhood, the exact things she did to help her body be healthy enough to carry her children, and practical strategies you can start to implement today.
If you want to learn more about working with Jen Cougill, you can do that here!
If you've been listening to the show for a while and know you are ready to take this work even deeper, you can book your free call with me here.
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Strong Her Way to Eat, Move and Live. Here we talk all things food freedom, fitness and life transformation, helping you heal your relationship to food, exercise your body and yourself. I am super excited to be bringing you this episode today with Jen. Jen, can you just help me pronounce your last name? This is something I should have definitely asked before I hit record.
Speaker 2:No worries, it's a frequent question, so it is Kogel.
Speaker 1:Okay, jen Kogel I'm so glad that I asked about that, because I probably would have for sure butchered it. Jen is a PA, she has worked in an emergency department, but she is now kind of doing a little bit more holistic health coaching, really focusing on the gut, healing, balancing hormones, and she's going to be sharing with us a little bit about her own infertility journey and how she navigated that. Whether you are going through infertility yourself or that's something that you are walking through, I think you're going to find so much of this conversation useful, because we are going to be talking about stress and hormones and nutrition and really just how the diet mentality and diet culture has really duped women in so many different ways. So, jen, can you just kind of introduce yourself maybe a little bit more? Tell us a little bit about you and who you are, what you do and who you help.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I have worked in the emergency department for over 12 years as a physician assistant and just within this past year, just noticing the gap in conventional medicine as far as being able to really sit down with patients, educate them, give them the lifestyle factors that can produce just so much of the improvement that they're looking for, and just believing in the body's ability to heal itself if we give it what it needs. I've kind of transitioned and I became the CEO and founder of my business that I call Velvair Wellness. It's a spinoff of the Norwegian word Velvare, which is related to their wellness, and so basically now I work one-on-one with busy, ambitious women who are looking to improve their mood and energy, really focusing on that gut health and hormone balance, like you had mentioned.
Speaker 1:I love that I also really love the idea and I know we shouldn't put ourselves in echo chambers but I really do like talking to other people that see that gap and kind of the conventional route in medicine or healthcare or even really like the conventional route in terms of weight loss, which really is kind of rooted in the diet mentality, diet culture which I know we're going to get into. And I am super interested to kind of hear your thoughts on gut health and healing as well as kind of bringing in the hormones. So it is great to have you here with us. So if you want to just kind of walk us through a little bit because I know infertility was something that really kind of played a part in you working on healing yourself and now has impacted what you do with your clients so can you kind of just walk us through a little bit of that infertility journey?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I would say I had kind of established myself in my successful career, had pretty good financial stability, I looked fit and healthy on the outside, kind of was achieving all my goals, and decided kind of next on the list was to start a family. But it just wasn't as easy as I had initially hoped or even planned that it would be. I was on birth control at since a very young age, in high school. I suffered from very heavy, very irregular, very painful menstrual cycles and the easy answer at that point was just to put me on birth control to regulate those. And so I had finally gone off and we decided, my husband and I, that we wanted to start a family. And so I was off of that for a year. We kind of tried I call it trying, but not trying just thought it would happen. And then after that first year, for another year and a half got pretty serious about it. So I was doing the cycle, tracking the ovulation kits, basal temperatures. I started trying multiple herbs and supplements that I was researching online that was supposed to kind of reset my cycle, reset my hormones, promote fertility, but nothing was working. And so finally my OBGYN sent me to a fertility specialist in Scottsdale, arizona, where we were living at the time, and quite truthfully I thought it was going to be my husband. He had some of the risk factors and I was like I just want to, you know, maybe see if it's him. But then of course his stuff came back normal. But of course all of my stuff came back normal too.
Speaker 2:And I think that when we talk about the gap in conventional medicine, that's one of the pieces where you hear everything's normal, everything's fine, but there's something underlying, something deeper going on. And so I kind of after that we decided we initially thought we would go through with the fertility treatments, but we went on a week vacation and Belize and after some soul searching, talking between the two of us, we just decided it wasn't for us for various reasons, and so it was kind of back to the drawing board. And I think at that point is when I really went on a journey to what I call kind of heal my body and my soul. And then, just over a year later, we got pregnant with our first son. I did have a miscarriage before our second, which is probably another story for another time, but then went on to have a second healthy son. So it's my husband and I, and I'm a boy mom.
Speaker 1:That is so fun, I do. I mean so I don't know a ton about what kind of contributes to the healthy abnormal periods. I'm thinking just based on what I do know. It's probably something related to hormones and kind of what's happening there.
Speaker 1:The thing that stuck out to me, though, about your story with starting birth control, because I do feel like that is kind of the quick and easy answer right.
Speaker 1:It's like, I mean, if we're talking about health, heavy abnormal sort of irregular periods for young women starting as early as their teens, the answer is let's just do birth control right. And we do see that over and over and over again, kind of in that conventional model of quote unquote, health care is a lot of times it's just going after the symptoms, and if we can take care of the symptoms, then the problem ceases to exist. But that's not really the case. So you know, I think that, as I have a teenage daughter now and I'm kind of looking at that health kind of starting early on, you know, menstrual health and reproductive health earlier and earlier really just wanting to kind of educate the moms that are listening out there that if you are experiencing kind of that irregular period, if your daughters are experiencing that maybe don't just take that first initial answer to get on birth control as being like the end. All be all in the way to fix it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's kind of one of my take away would be to advocate for yourself and to advocate, if you're a mom, for your daughter to kind of ask those questions. You should be having a provider that's willing to engage in that healthy conversation and if not, it doesn't hurt to seek kind of a second opinion about it. And so I think there's so many factors to why cycles can be irregular. One of the other things is just PCOS, and I think I was kind of put in this category of you don't fall into PCOS. Every time I had an ultrasound it was like have you been diagnosed with this? Because it looks like it on your ultrasound. But I was very lean and thin at the time and so lean PCOS wasn't really kind of a scene diagnosis yet and I wasn't yet a PA, I wasn't asking those questions.
Speaker 2:I definitely think exercise and nutrition comes into play.
Speaker 2:I had always been an athlete.
Speaker 2:Exercise spent a lot of my time in movement, kind of transitioned into over exercising when I had stopped playing collegiate basketball as a way to kind of get off that weight that I had gained.
Speaker 2:And then restriction, and I think you talk about the diet culture a lot and it's just one of the issues is most of the time it's super restrictive. I mean, these people go on like crazy 1200 calorie per day diets and that's just not enough for your body to go through its daily functions. Not to mention, I know one of my faults was it's so heavy and big on a lot of times calories over nutrition, and so when I initially started that diet journey back in college it was, or just shortly afterwards, I would reach for that 100 calorie snack, which was basically just you know a processed food, but in my mind I thought it was safe because it was only 100 calories and not to mention, like we had talked about the macro nutrients. I had gotten caught up in that low fat diet and I think just so many of our hormones need that fat and they need the cholesterol to not only synthesize but also maintain those healthy hormone levels which ultimately, through a cascade, produce our, our endocrine help in our endocrine system to produce those reproductive hormones.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you touched on a couple of things. One part of this was kind of in the story that you shared about your journey, and it's the idea of the normal labs right. So again, like when we're kind of looking at conventional, they're looking at like what's normal. But normal doesn't necessarily mean optimal, it doesn't mean functioning, it doesn't mean sort of the standard of health that we should be striving for.
Speaker 1:My understanding of what a quote unquote normal lab is is that that's kind of is like you're within the average of the society or like the larger the numbers, the samples that they're taking. But if that sample is by and large kind of unhealthy or under functioning, then really you're just kind of normal within maybe a dysfunctional part of the population, which isn't exactly what we want to be striving for. And so I think you know, if you're listening to this and you're having your labs done and you see that your labs come back within kind of that normal range, I would encourage you to kind of push the provider a little bit more on. What exactly does that mean? You know, what does this mean in terms of like how is my body functioning now, as opposed to like how it should be functioning, if it was functioning at kind of a high or like a fuller, a more optimal, optimal level.
Speaker 2:I suppose, yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. So basically, they draw labs from this collection of women and say you know, between this age and this age, these were normal. But then again, who are we testing? And so I think it's going back to symptoms, and that's something that I really work with on my clients. Is, you know, if you're experiencing those symptoms just because your labs are normal? There's still probably something going on and we need to delve deeper into it.
Speaker 1:And I think the other thing that you said that I wanted to kind of circle back to was mentioning PCOS. I'm certainly hearing more and more and more about PCOS and it seems like more women are being diagnosed with it. But again it's kind of something that sort of the general physician or like the mainstream doctors, they don't really know what to do with PCOS. It seems like it still is kind of this mystery diagnosis and there's not a lot of like clear direction. So I mean, maybe you can kind of speak to that a little bit more and kind of walk me through what that looks like. If your doctor does mention that you might have PCOS, how can you kind of advocate again for yourself? It seems like that's going to be a common theme is advocating for yourself and your health. But also, how did that impact your fertility journey or did it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so PCOS is. One of the main complications is infertility. But before I go into that, I think one of the other things I want to mention is that a lot of times we just get stuck on the infertility. But they're starting to see with PCOS there's increased heart disease later on in life. You're at increased risk of one of kind of the associated factors of PCOS can be insulin resistance and so just with that we're talking about these elevated blood sugars that are wreaking havoc and inflammation on our body, and so it goes beyond just infertility and I think that's another thing that goes back to.
Speaker 2:My story is like if I would have just done the fertility treatments, who knows, maybe I would have gotten pregnant, but I wouldn't have gotten to the deeper answer and I wouldn't have been able to one change my health for myself. But also I always wonder, like, if I'd gotten pregnant, what health and what genes would I have passed, not only to my kids but to my kids' kids? Because we're talking about grandparents passing on genes here when we're getting pregnant and so creating. But I think what is the big factor at PCOS is, or one of the, when people start addressing it is when it comes to infertility, and so a lot of times what is happening is women are not ovulating, and so a lot of the initial fertility treatments like clomid is a big one. But then they came out with Femara because a lot of PCOS women were having resistance to clomid and it just went back to this cascade of having women ovulate, and I think this can be.
Speaker 2:It depends. There's two different sides of the spectrum here. When we're talking about PCOS, we are can be talking about kind of the overweight individual insulin resistance. We're also can talk about lean PCOS, where we're probably addressing that HPA access. So, without going into like too many long science complicated terms, basically we have different hormones that are signaling from our brain to the pituitary gland down ultimately to produce the female hormones that we need, and when we are in a stressed state we can't always produce those. So our cortisol levels are where our cortisol is being produced is along the same access as that. So basically, when we're in that state, our body has a decision to make. Maybe does that progesterone turn into cortisol, or does it turn into testosterone and estrogen, and so we're getting an off kilter of our female hormones when we're in that overstressed state and, as you know, the versions of stress are numerous, whether it's overexercising, under-eating, life stressors, negative thinking patterns.
Speaker 1:So yeah, the under-exercising as well the overeating right. So it's like stress can come in a variety of ways and I think you bring up a good point in addressing kind of the two different kinds of PCOS. So there's the one where it does lead to a little bit more of weight gain, maybe being overweight, having a really hard time getting weight off, but then you can have PCOS that maybe even goes. I don't know if it would be dismissed or misdiagnosed if you're lean, so you don't have maybe kind of like that visual characteristic which again kind of goes. It sort of speaks to the bigger issue of trying to categorize somebody's health based on how they look right. And again that's like a very strong signal in kind of diet culture and sort of that fitness culture. Mentality is that we can tell how healthy or fit somebody is based on how they look. And you can have somebody that looks extremely healthy because they're lean, they don't look overweight, they're living what appears to be kind of a healthy lifestyle. But then internally, whether it's like physical stuff that's happening, the emotional, the mental stuff that's happening, which that was all stuff that I had experienced right, it was like at one point in my life I was kind of the picture of what supposed health and fitness looked like, but was very restricted around food, very strict with my fitness, had a lot of mental and emotional stuff kind of happening and that was kind of creating that stress inside as well. So I think it's just important to really kind of look at challenging what those societal and cultural messages are around what health does and doesn't look like, recognizing that you could be doing what you think is the right or the best course of action for your health and actually be making your health worse in that case right.
Speaker 1:So kind of speaking a little bit more to that over exercising and under eating, you did mention so many people being on these super low calorie diets like 12 to 15 or 1600 calories, and then on top of that they're being told that they need to exercise to burn calories to create this caloric deficit. But, like you mentioned, 12 to 1500 calories for a lot of people isn't even enough to kind of cover the base like metabolic need of the body, let alone then being able to handle exercise on top of that, which can be a stressor, and then all of the other life stress. So it sounds like that was something that was kind of going on for you maybe, as you and your husband sort of started your pregnancy journey where you were trying to get pregnant and that's where you were. So can you kind of walk us through?
Speaker 1:You guys went on this trip, had some conversations, decided that you didn't want to go the fertility route and instead you decided to kind of change some things about the way that you were taking care of yourself. Do you want to? Can you kind of walk us through what that process looked like a little bit?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think I just really went inward. I went into figuring out what it was that was going to nourish my body, and by that it's like hearts on mind. I had worked in the emergency department, which is a very stressful job. I did shift work, which was 12 hours, which kind of threw my circadian rhythm off, and I'd say I've always been someone who is leaned towards the perfectionist side of stuff, which basically produces a lot of anxiety inside your body as you're comparing yourself or ultimately trying to become this impossible version. And so it involved diet changes.
Speaker 2:I instead of kind of focusing on the low calorie, I think I had always kind of gotten into the high protein, so if you're not doing protein, that's definitely key. But that wasn't one of the areas I was missing. It was definitely like those healthy fats. So I started incorporating avocado grass fed butter, which I was. The person that went to the restaurant was like can I have this with no butter, no oil? Like, if you have to use spray, you can use spray Whole milk for people that aren't, you know, have sensitivities to dairy. And my husband jokes is that I had always been into like just egg whites because I was afraid of the fat in the egg and the yolk holds so much nutrition. Like, yes, protein is great, but the nutrition in the egg is coming from the yolk. I mean you have a whole thing that's going to help your brain, plus all these other vitamins and nutrients. And so he laughs that like just the what's the word? I'm looking for the picture, the representation of me starting to eat these whole eggs, were actually kind of helping us developing an egg and an embryo inside of me, and so I think for diet it was definitely integrating those healthy fats Instead of getting into hit.
Speaker 2:And I want to be careful because I still think it's important for women to work out.
Speaker 2:So this is specifically speaking to those women that are over exercising or doing hit seven days a week and that's the constant stress that's going on the body and kind of transitioned into more yoga. I was doing a lot of meditation, journaling and just kind of getting into the soul. Something else that was really helpful for me was affirmations. I literally just started trying to speak positive words to myself, because for the longest time I didn't believe any of those things. It was kind of maybe it's a little woo for you, but I would actually like put my hand on, like my belly and my abdomen area, because I think so many of us women we don't love that part about us and you wonder, like, how is your body, how is maybe one blood flow going to get there, but to just positive energy? How is it going to get to your female organs? If you don't love that, if you speak negative words about it or think negative thoughts about it, and so those were kind of the huge factors that I did.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I love that you really kind of looked at it not just from, like a physical standpoint of like, what can I do like physically, like with food and exercise, to kind of heal my body, but it was also looking at what can I do mentally, emotionally and really kind of that soul care, because I think that that is like another piece, that kind of that mainstream model of health care and fitness kind of miss right. It's like we do think that it can just be all of these compartmentalized individual pieces and if we just worked on this or if we just worked on this, then everything you know, everything else would kind of fall into place, versus really taking more of that holistic approach of like, okay, what can I do to kind of care for myself mentally, emotionally, that soul that you know my heart center and you know my body as well? And I do think it's going to be really hard to make any of these sort of changes if you're still operating from that diet mentality right. So if you have fear around specific foods or you know, or macros right, like the fats or the carbs a lot of times are demonized. I think fats are kind of getting a little bit of a break, but still there is a lot of like demonizing of the carbs, you know.
Speaker 1:So if you're kind of demonizing certain foods, if you have fear of foods, if if the fear is gaining weight, then it's going to be really hard for you potentially to dial back the exercise, to start incorporating some of those foods, or even enough food to allow your body to heal, because you're going to be still really stuck in this, like I've got to burn the calories, I've got to be in a calorie deficit.
Speaker 1:You know I'm I don't want to gain weight and all of these different kinds of things. And so I think that's where really like taking a step back and looking at what do I think about food? Right, like what am I afraid of if I did gain some weight? Like what would I make that mean about me? Or what would I be afraid that other people would say. And I think this is the work that typically gets missed when we just start like a new diet or when we, you know, maybe just work on getting fitter. Especially if you're kind of that type A high achiever a little bit you know that perfectionist it's really hard to kind of take more of that like grace approach with yourself to where you can kind of slow down.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think just dealing with that identity factor, because if you are just stuck on trying to focus on the food and the exercise but you don't go inside to who you are, then it's going to be difficult to change because you're ultimately going to go back to that identity. And I think, in the same fact or factor of just dealing with infertility it was like you should be able to get pregnant, you should have a family, and you're not reaching that. And being hard on myself I think that was another thing is like I had finally come to grips with if we get pregnant, great, and if we don't, there's a bigger plan here. And at that point you hear all these stories of like when you stop trying, then you get pregnant. And it's kind of that same factor.
Speaker 2:I think it's not so much that people are stopping to trying, but they're taking that stress off their body and they're just accepting that the future holds for them. And in the same way, at some point you've got to learn to accept yourself, whether you're in that calorie restriction or you don't fit the mold, that you see the pictures on TV, or you're just not meeting all these metrics that people are putting up there. And even this is kind of random, but it makes me think of BMI, like I've always laughed at BMI and like conventional medicine because we help people. You're like overweight when BMI has like nothing to do with the muscle that you have, which helps your longevity, versus like other healthy factors, and just getting down to like what's inside versus what's outside.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the BMI, I really would love to see that pretty much just disappear. I mean, again, you know, when we look at kind of the origins of it, it wasn't even really founded in anything that was like actually medically based, right, it was produced by an insurance company. Again, taking generalizations, right, like looking at people within this certain height-to-weight ratio maybe tend to be like less, have less disease, whereas people here have more disease, but that's like you said, that's not taking into consideration any factors besides your height and your weight, right, it's not looking at your muscle mass. It's not looking at even like different socioeconomic statuses that would contribute to that right, or somebody's inability to have easy access to food or quality places to live and all of these different stressors. So again, yeah, the BMI is really, as far as I'm concerned, it's a pretty invalid, the tool to be using to kind of put people in these little buckets of health. And we saw that several years ago I'm not exactly sure when that change happened. But the fact that it can just be manipulated so much based on what sort of the general population is doing, I think is something else to be alarming. It kind of goes back to normal labs. Well, you're just normal in the average right. Like you are fitting within this specific average population.
Speaker 1:And I wanted to circle back.
Speaker 1:Like you said this a while ago, but when you and your husband had decided not to do the fertility treatment, for you that was a decision because it was like, okay, we might do the fertility treatment, we could get pregnant, but did we really resolve sort of the underlying issues potentially that were maybe contributing to me not being able to get pregnant in the first place?
Speaker 1:And I wanna highlight that for a couple of reasons. One, I think, like not to demonize fertility treatment or birth control or whatever it's like if you wanna do these things, but also looking at maybe it's just looking at, okay, if I did these things and it sort of solved the symptom, like the fertility treatment in this case is getting pregnant. Also maybe looking at what else could I be doing to support my body, to support a healthy pregnancy, and also the children you had mentioned, and I think you were kind of alluding to the science of epigenetics, when you're like, what genes would I have maybe passed down to my kids or that were passed down to me from my grandparents, right, it sort of is that genetic expression genes being passed down, but also recognizing that we have a lot of power, a lot of influence in what genes are being expressed, which ones are turned off and on, based on lifestyle, based on our patterns of thinking. Do you have anything to add to that or anything to speak to?
Speaker 2:No, I think that's great, just as far as like not taking the band-aid approach. I had done a post on this a while ago. It just had come to me. We actually had a line break in our front yard and it's like for the summer, we just would see this little bubbling water to the top and we didn't know what it was. We thought maybe it was just a sinkhole, so my husband kept throwing sand on it and next, four months later, our whole yard is flooded and the whole ground under the concrete sinking in.
Speaker 2:And it was just like the perfect analogy to like you can keep trying to put stuff on top of it or try to do the easy band-aid approach, but ultimately it's gonna bubble up and it's the thing of it can be hard now and likely be a little bit easier later on, or you can try to take the easy path now and it's gonna be hard later on. I think one of the things that gets kind of thrown around in the media as well is like you see these lives and you think everything should be easy, but the fact is like work goes into play, like to change takes work, and so you just seem to be willing to kind of put the work in to get down to that root cause. It's not easy, but on the other side the reward is immense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it really does kind of speak to the kind of the instant versus the delayed gratification, and I have not been through infertility treatment so I definitely don't know what that experience is. I would imagine that it is full of twists and turns and is probably not like taking, you know, like that's not like taking the easy way out. So please don't hear that from Jen or from me, because I imagine, like working with women and having friends that have gone through different infertility things, that it is not something that is easy. Like you said, it can be incredibly painful to be in this place of what's wrong. Why am I not getting pregnant? Like this is something I should be able to do as a woman and we can start to really feel like there's something wrong with us or we're broken somehow because we're not able to do this thing. That seems like it's supposed to be this like easy, natural part of being a woman. But I think you know what I'm hearing Jen say is that if this is a route that you're gonna go with the treatment, like also look underneath and try to figure out okay, what can I do again to kind of support my body, to support this baby and things like that and I think just kind of in all areas of life maybe, looking at like, am I just looking for symptom management? Am I just kind of putting a bandaid on something that's eventually gonna show up, kind of like the broken pipe or water line in your guys' front yard, right? It's like it was kind of giving those little symptoms and signals that something wasn't right, but it was easy to just sort of dismiss it until you had this huge problem.
Speaker 1:And I had heard somebody say this a couple of weeks ago and it really stuck out to me where it was like she was saying something about your health. Isn't like it's easy to not think about your health or to have like so many other problems that you kind of put your health on the back burner until you have like a health crisis. Then that becomes like the only problem that you're thinking about, right? So it's really easy to just kind of keep putting off the exercise or the stress management or getting more sleep or improving your nutrition or whatever that is, until, like, your face with some sort of a health crisis and then that becomes the only thing that you're thinking about, that you're trying to solve and that you're dumping money into, and I know, working with a lot of my clients, there can be a lot of guilt or feelings of selfishness for kind of prioritizing their own healthcare or taking time for themselves, and I always just like to encourage.
Speaker 1:It's like you are kind of the hub of your family, right, like my husband. He gave me this picture several years ago and I was like, wow, that was like that's a really good way to describe it. As the women of our families, we're kind of the CEO, right. So it's like we're running everything. We're kind of making sure the household is doing what it's supposed to do, kids are getting where they're supposed to be, and so we do carry a lot on our plates, whether we want to or not, and we can certainly involve and enroll other people to help, but at the end of the day, I think just being a woman like part of our brains just don't shut off with that. So it really is important to prioritize taking care of you, because when you're in good health you're gonna be in such a better position to make sure that your family is also healthy and is taking care of themselves as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and just being able to kind of instill those habits at a younger age, or even, like you mentioned, if moms are wondering about birth control, like just being able to kind of get some skin in the game early and kind of just promote that within their family.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it might require having a little bit of unhealthy or not unhealthy, scary conversations that we want to shy away from right, but I think you know it's an opportunity to really like open the door, have some conversations and again it's modeling for your kids to advocate for their own health, right like I think in our culture around medicine and doctors and things like that.
Speaker 1:Doctors have been given kind of this great, you know this pass that they're just experts and everything, when the reality is they're not right. It's like they are maybe experts and some things. I will definitely obviously give credit there, but when it comes to like nutrition and weight and even hormones and things like that, you know that's something that is definitely going to be like. They're given very little bits of education, very little bits of information, and it's only if that doctor or that care provider chooses to dive deeper into those things that you have that expertise. So you know, I tend to be a little bit more skeptical when it comes to that. Definitely want to cheer everybody on to. You know, don't be afraid to ask questions or do some research for yourself so that you can really advocate for yourself around infertility, the hormones, your menstrual cycle, healthy and sustainable weight loss and things like that.
Speaker 2:And I think, just kind of coming from that conventional world, we're trained to know and study disease but we're not really trained to know and study health. So like the actual amount of time that we're spent learning on specific nutrition or different exercise, which I think between kind of nutrition, exercise and mindset or the, probably the three things we don't really hit in school are three of kind of the biggest things that we can do to improve our health, and so it just goes back to that concept of kind of being focused on sick care versus health care. So I think it's huge if you have any other questions that way. Like you said, the amount of knowledge on it that you can have access to is endless. But I know it can be hard and overwhelming to because then you hear all these conflicting things. So it's finding someone that you feel like you can trust and can relate to you and maybe kind of walk you through that like a health coach or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is a huge one. I do feel like for every point that you find you're going to find a counterpoint, and so it definitely can be overwhelming. And that's where finding somebody that has some experience or maybe has a little bit more expertise or that can actually help you kind of sift through some of the information out there. I generally like to kind of give both sides of the argument right and it's like well, some people are saying this and some research is showing this. You know, you're really only going to know what works for you when you kind of test that model out and just see. It's like am I getting better or am I getting worse? Right, and you know, that kind of takes us being willing to challenge a little bit of the diet mentality, the quick fix. We want it to be easy to really be able to take a slow, a slower approach, a more scientific right. It's like let's just run it as an experiment, let's just try, let's try it for a few weeks, let's see what you notice will come back to the drawing board and then we can make some tweaks based on the results that you yourself got. I think that's another big point that really drives me nuts with, in kind of the diet and fitness culture is that if it worked for me, it's going to work for you, and you know I tell people all the time I'm like you and I could be on the same exact nutrition plan, we could be on the same exact workout program, and we're going to have wildly different results. Right and again, though, we can go back to thinking or something wrong with us or we're broken somehow because I did what so and so told me to do. My body doesn't look like what her body looked like, you know, after she did it. So I think you know again it's some of the things I'm hearing is question sort of advocate for yourself, I'm really afraid. I always want to help and sort of encourage and empower people to be good consumers of information. So look at differing viewpoints right, think critically through some different things, come up with questions about each side of the argument and whether you take that to your coach, whether you take that to your physician and naturopath. You know. Whatever route you do, then you're kind of coming in maybe feeling a little bit more confident about what's going on, because you have some questions, or you maybe you've been able to kind of think through some things a little bit and I loved how you mentioned in traditional healthcare you're really look, you're really trained to kind of look at disease, and I think it was when I was pregnant, maybe with my first, who's now 16.
Speaker 1:I mean, that was maybe when the Ricky Lake birth documentary came out and something that really stuck with me in that was that doctors are trained to kind of be looking for the problem. They're trained to be looking for sort of the emergency. In other cases, like there's no sort of emergency when it comes to like giving birth right, it's like for the most part it's a pretty natural process. Our bodies know what to do. That doesn't mean that things don't go sideways. That's maybe when to have kind of a medical intervention. But a lot of times doctors, maybe even subconsciously or inadvertently, end up causing these, you know, crises, because that sort of is the mode that they're trained in. So if it's going too slow, let's do the pitocin, okay, well, we have to, you know, do a C section and things like that, whereas if we could just again kind of kind of trust the body, allow the body to do what it's supposed to do. So I think you brought up a really interesting point with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when I finally, when we got pregnant, I had told one of our OBGYNs at the hospital that I was going to do a midwife and oh boy did I get an earful on how unsafe that was. And we ultimately ended up doing like a midwife in the hospital just in case complications did arise. But it's like you've seen a lot of bad stuff. I understand, and you are trained to look for that stuff, but, like you said, it can just let the body do its thing for the most part.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. That was the route we ended up going. We had midwives that delivered in the hospital and thankfully I was able to have my midwives both times because I was like, please, jesus, do not let me get stuck with one of the OB's, partially because I didn't really know them. So I felt like there was that rapport with the midwife. But, yeah, going that route for us kind of felt like we had both of our bases covered, like okay, the midwife is going to be maybe thinking a little bit more of the way that we are let's wait to do any sort of intervention unless we absolutely have to. But being in the hospital it was like okay, but if in the event that something does happen, we don't have to go through the stress of me getting transported and you know all those different things. So I think, whatever you end up deciding for yourself again, you just kind of have to think that through and make the decision that seems the best for you and your family.
Speaker 1:Well, jen, thank you so much for this conversation.
Speaker 1:I think that you shared so much just around, not only your journey, your expertise, but I think what I love the most is that it's like, no matter who I talk to, it always kind of comes down to the same things, right.
Speaker 1:It's like kind of moving out of the diet mentality around food is really going to help you make, I would say, better choices around food in terms of being able to eat you know the whole egg, or having you know the whole milk or different things like that, because you're not going to be so freaked out about the calories and the gaining the weight. But really what I'm hearing is it's looking at ways that we can reduce our stress or kind of manage it and keep it a little bit lower, whether it's mental, emotional or physical stress. It's eating more kind of whole foods. So again, you know, it's not that we don't ever have processed foods or highly processed foods, but just really looking at maybe the quality of the nutrition that's coming in most of the time, not over exercising, not overstressing the body with a ton of restriction, bringing in kind of that mental and the emotional health components as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was a great conversation.
Speaker 1:I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you so much, Jen. If people are listening to this and maybe they're kind of walking through their own sort of infertility journey and they want to learn a little bit more about working with you, where is the best place for somebody to connect with you?
Speaker 2:So on Instagram I am at Velvner Wellness, which is V-E-L-V-A-R-E Wellness, or I just got my website up, so it's officially up and it is at wwwvelvnerwellnesscom.
Speaker 1:Perfect, we will have those links in the show notes. I know for me I always like hear people rattling it off, but I never remember it or I definitely have to go back to the show notes. So we'll have Jen's contact info in our show notes. Please do go follow her at Instagram, check out her website if anything that she was talking about today really resonated with you. So thank you so much for spending your time with us today and sharing your expertise. Thank you, everybody that is listening or watching this. Hope that you guys all have a lovely rest of your week and until next time.