Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is characterized by irregular periods. Conventional medicine uses birth control pills (BCPs) to regulate your periods and try and prevent wasting your eggs, but BCPs have side effects. And do BCPs really preserve your fertility?
Here’s three natural ways to enhance your fertility with PCOS
#1 Know Your Egg Count
First things first. How many eggs are you wasting each month? The best way to find out is to get a blood test measuring the anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH). AMH measures your ovarian reserve. You see you were born with all the eggs you will have – about a million. By puberty, you have about 300,000 potential ovum left. Every cycle about 300-400 ovum try to become the egg of the month to ovulate. After 35 years of monthly ovulation, most women run out of eggs and go into menopause.
AMH peaks at the age of 25 and falls to nondetectable levels by menopause. AMH levels are less accurate if you are deficient in Vitamin D. It tends to be high in PCOS women as they’re wasting many more follicles with every menstrual cycle. Birth control pills are often prescribed to halt your natural ovulation in an attempt to save eggs. Yet BCP have side effects. And a Danish study recently showed that long term use of the BCP actually lowers ovarian reserve by shrinking your ovaries. If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. Studies show that if you’re overweight, losing that extra body fat will help you save more eggs for future fertility.
#2 Treat Your Underlying Metabolic Disorder
The best way to improve your fertility and reduce your acne, body fat, and systemic inflammation is to do everything you can to reverse your metabolic syndrome associated with PCOS. You see, PCOS is really a metabolic disorder. It’s not just an ovary issue.
Women with PCOS are insulin resistant. For example, they have higher inflammatory markers. And moreover, increased levels of the male hormone, and imbalances in their female hormones. Long term untreated PCOS will lead to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
In my clinical practice, I have found that combining hypothalamic support with supplements to increase insulin sensitivity plus an insulin resistant diet and HIT exercise to be the most effective way to reverse my patients’ insulin resistance, lower their inflammatory markers, help them lose body fat, regulate their periods, and improve their chances of conceiving.
Using Genesis Gold® alone, most PCOS patients’ periods begin normalizing within two to three months. If they follow my full diet, exercise, and supplement recommendations to reverse their metabolic disorder, they usually conceive within six to twelve months.
#3 Use Progesterone to Regulate your Periods and Save your Eggs
Classically, women with PCOS do not ovulate. In other words, if you don’t ovulate, you don’t produce enough progesterone. Therefore, without adequate progesterone, you become estrogen dominant. Estrogen dominance means that your progesterone is too low for how much estrogen you make. All those extra follicles your ovaries waste every month produce lots of estrogen. Yet it’s only if you ovulate that the corpus luteum or little cave left over when you popped out an egg produces progesterone.
Progesterone’s job is to stabilize the lining of your uterus. The corpus luteum only lasts two weeks unless you did conceive. Then the embryo produces HCG -human chorio-gonadotropin- which keeps your corpus luteum alive to produce enough progesterone to keep you pregnant for the first fourteen weeks until the fetal placenta can take over.
PCOS patients suffer from frequent early miscarriages because they do not produce enough progesterone even if they do occasionally ovulate. So, that’s why I prescribe bio-identical progesterone for my PCOS patients to use in the second half of their cycle. Progesterone helps regulate their periods, prevents estrogen dominance, and helps reduce wasted eggs each cycle.
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