Optimizing Body Weight and Prioritizing Iodine for Fertility

Here are two simple strategies to increase the likelihood of conceiving. Your body desires a body weight in a certain range, and iodine supplementation has been shown to increase fertility.

The gulf between what I’ve learned from my constant research and what I have time to write about is growing daily so I thought I’d partially address this problem by tackling readers’ questions at least once a month. That way, I can prioritize what research to cover based on what is most relevant to you.

If you have a question or topic of interest, please leave a comment below.

If you’d like your question to remain anonymous to my readership, you can ask through Substack’s new direct message feature. When addressing your question in a post, I won’t mention your name. I’ll just say: “A reader asked…”

If you want to pose a question that you’d like other readers to weigh in on, a crowd-sourcing endeavor, then use the subscriber chat available on the Substack app. (i.e. anyone else doing ADF and struggling to get past the 22-hour mark and have some tips?)

In keeping with that theme, today’s topic comes from a question a reader asked me a few weeks ago:

I’m wondering if you know of any credible studies/material on the increasing rate of infertility? I have 5 women in my close friends group that are struggling to get pregnant. 3/5 have been very recently diagnosed with endometriosis.

Optimizing Body Weight to Increase Fertility

Fertility is a huge topic that I’ll have to break up into multiple posts. For new subscribers, make sure you check out my two previous fertility posts: Stevia can reduce fertility and on how to reverse PCOS or polycystic ovarian syndrome, the most common cause of infertility.

For this post, I’d like to address how weight affects fertility. I’ll dive into some specific research on endometriosis in a later post.

Note: There are many rare forms of infertility with unknown causes but that is not what I’m seeking to address today. Instead, I want to address how the average woman can increase her fertility.

How Body Fat Percentage Affects Fertility

Two signals can cause your body not to ovulate. The first is the signal that there are not enough calories available to support a baby at this time, and the second is that there is too much weight on the body, which is considered a stress that makes carrying a baby difficult.

The second scenario is accompanied by complicated hormone signaling addressed in detail in my post about PCOS. In brief, excessively high insulin in response to high carb intake disrupts the body’s signaling pathways. Androgens are hormones such as testosterone that are known as male hormones but are present in females in small amounts. Elevated insulin leads to androgens levels much higher than is ideal for a woman. Lowering insulin through lowering carb intake and fasting reverses the cycle and lowers the androgens to healthy levels.

If you are too thin and do not have the amount of body fat that your body deems necessary, this will decrease your chances of ovulating. This varies from person to person. Some people are naturally very thin but since this is caused by genetics and not dieting, they can still conceive. But for others, around 15% body fat or less is often perceived as too low and the chance to conceive will increase when one is at 20% body fat and above.

This is a classic case where more is not better. Because some body fat is necessary to conceive, it does not follow that the heavier you are, the more fertile you are. At some point, excess weight becomes a liability to fertility. Once again, this is a very individual metric, and it has to do mainly with something called your personal fat threshold.

Some people can gain large amounts of weight with few negative health consequences. Others can become metabolically unhealthy even while they are within a normal BMI. This has to do with where your body genetically places excess energy. If you are a person who doesn’t genetically have the capability to store much body fat, you will have to keep your weight in a tight range to keep your fertility from being negatively affected.

For those who gain primarily abdominal fat while still having thin arms and legs, there is much more potential to disrupt fertility than someone who gains fat everywhere or subcutaneously (under the skin). In my post on how to reverse polycystic ovarian syndrome, I tell how Dr. Pateguana had PCOS despite being considered a normal weight. As soon as she lost her abdominal fat by eating low-carb and practicing intermittent fasting, her PCOS vanished, and she was able to conceive. Other women may similarly have abdominal fat that is preventing pregnancy despite having a normal BMI.

Another problem with abdominal fat is that the fat cells send out inflammatory cytokines. These are chemical signals telling the rest of the body all is not well. One marker that one can test is C-reactive protein or CRP. Many of my coaching clients get this marker tested before and after fasting and find it very satisfying to watch their inflammation fall as their weight drops. The body is a sensitive enough system that some low levels of inflammation can be enough to reduce infertility.

Lack of Micronutrients

Even if the body senses there are enough calories around to support a child, it may sense there are not enough nutrients present. This not only applies to someone who is too thin but can just as frequently happen to someone who is heavy.

What causes people to have a lack of essential vitamins and minerals in such a prosperous time?

It’s a combination of ultra-processed foods, depleted soils, the use of chemicals such as glyphosate (aka Roundup) that bind to minerals in the soil so that the plant can’t take them up, mega ag corps who don’t use regenerative farming so are growing foods in dead soils (microbes in the soil are responsible for making many micronutrients), animals fed poor feed so that eggs, milk, cheese, butter and meat are lacking in nutrients, and environmental toxins that raise our need for certain vitamin and minerals that enable detox pathways.

Weston Price, in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, frequently noted how the isolated tribes he visited reserved special foods for women preparing for marriage, for pregnant women, and for those breastfeeding. Although such people are commonly referred to as primitive, their understanding of the human body was far more advanced than the average modern person’s. True, they were lacking in the scientific vocabulary for terms such as vitamin A and iodine, but they figured out through keen powers of observation exactly what the human body needs for reproduction. The principles for building fertility and healthy babies are identical to what I outlined in How to Incorporate Weston Price's Nutritional Principles into Modern Life.

To naturally increase your fertility, follow the steps in that post. Prioritize animal protein, grass-fed raw milk, grass-fed dairy, cod liver oil, bone broth, beef liver, and pastured eggs. These foods signal abundance to your body making ovulation more likely. If you want to conceive, start eating that way today!

While we’re on the topic of nutrients, it can be tempting to run to Walgreens and grab any old prenatal vitamin off the shelf to fix the problem. But consider that some lab-made synthetic vitamins can do more harm than good. The classic example of this is synthetic folic acid which in no way, shape, or form performs the same functions in the body as folate, vitamin B9, found in leafy greens, grass-fed dairy products, pastured eggs, and liver. (Joel Salatin, everyone’s regenerative farming hero, had an egg yolk from his farm tested for folate and it had 1038 mcg of folate. The average egg from a mass chicken farm has 48 mcg.)

Low folate intake increases the risk of neural tube birth defects. Folic acid must be converted by the body into folate to be used and the majority of the population has genetic markers that make this conversion difficult. The folic acid that isn’t converted then blocks the receptors from taking up what natural folate is present. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Please read my post titled Nine Supplements You Probably Don’t Need to brush up on why common things like iron and calcium supplements often do more harm than good. It’s true that the need for calcium and iron is greatly increased during pregnancy. However, it’s easy to get plenty of both of those nutrients through Weston Price foods.

Having said that, I do take specific supplements, quite a few in fact. But I am extremely picky about which forms. I will devote an entire post to supplements specifically for fertility very soon but today I want to zoom in on iodine.

Iodine and Fertility