The fertility wellness industry chewed me up and spat me out

here's how I put myself back together

If it’s chewing you up too, or ever did - let this be a beginning of a dialogue.. with me, with self, with other.

How much I ever choose to share in my body of writing on infertility has been an ongoing enquiry, a trying on of different layers of vulnerability, taking them off, testing the waters.

How I write this today, will probably be different to how I would choose to write it another week. We make sense by telling our story not once - but many many times. The evolution of the story contains a medicine, narrator as seamstress to the fibres of our lived experiences. I may well write this again, or in different ways, or include other things. But, today is today, and here is the telling.

I write this in the hope it can act as stepping stones for others who might find themselves lost in the plethora of fertility advice that’s available at the touch of our fingerprints.

Because lost we often become.

I write this in relation to infertility (a label I identify with, please replace this with another, as and if you need) but I could, just as easily, write something similar in relation to chronic illness, menstrual disorders, peri-menopause, sleep dysfunction and so on. That’s how the wellness industry works, it is all encompassing and always there with a solution in one hand and a ‘please pay here’ in the other.

It feels important to state that I live and work in the tides of wellness culture. I teach yoga, burn my (ethically sourced) palo santo, take flower remedies and drink cacao - and I enjoy these things. I make green smoothies and buy expensive supplements because I like to do that. I ‘think’ they make me feel better. But these days I flirt with wellness, my red flag radar set at ‘sensitive’, vigilant even.

This is not intended as a critique of practices that any reader enjoys and has a positive relationship with. You do you. This is about a relationship with wellness that becomes rigid, addictive and impossible to put down - a lived experience that is the antithesis of wellness. It’s written with my story as the informant. But it’s a story I hear echoed over and over again the stories of my clients and IG followers, the archetype of ‘the riddle’ setting the scene.

When something feels ‘wrong' with our bodies, we stand at a vast crossroads in terms of how we proceed.

Fertility challenges might come with physical symptoms or diagnoses. They might also come with absolutely none. Where we go next is a curious thing; an entanglement of biography, tendency, social construction, the communities we align with and the vulnerability of being someone desperately wanting a solution, yesterday. There will always be plenty of people ready and waiting to give us their versions of what they think we need.

Rarely does a day go by where I don’t see fertility equated with ‘health’ on my social media feeds, feeds where I follow fertility related accounts that are multiplied by algorithm suggested posts and people. There are countless versions of the same message that; your fertility is in your hands - you need to do more of x, you need to do less of y - and I can show you how.

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It’s messy, finding our footing. We can know, in broad brush strokes that there are things that it might be prudent to do less of if you’re trying to conceive. There are things we might like to look at, lifestyle wise, once the decision has been made to TRY. There are so many things we can equate with ‘fertility enhancing’ and, when the months roll by without the outcome we’re seeking; we probably try them.

When I say ‘we’, I let’s pause and be curious about the gender bias at play.

In a group of women in conversation, all with IVF on the horizon, talk might focus on ‘the prep’ that they’ve done. No one will say, I feel I'm good, I'm ready, I have done enough, I am enough.

(Though someone might say fuck it, I haven't done enough, I'm past caring).

What constitutes ‘prep’ and 'enough' varies, but the list to tick off can be long.

Diet (of which there are many, conflicting, approaches)

'Clean' living and low tox (not my terms)

Supplements

Acupuncture

Reflexology

Herbs

Yoga

Etc

I try to imagine a group of men talking and the conversation being the same. Or even similar. I can't. Can you? And yet, statistics tell us that around 50% of infertility is male factor. We know this. And yet we somehow unknow it too. This said, I want to recognise that over generalisation is always fraught with problems. Whilst this is how things appear to me does not mean I get to disregard how wellness culture can play out differently.

There’s increasingly unrealistic body ideals for men, too, like superhero culture. The biohacking, tech-bro diet culture has that same foundation of body ideals, denigrating conventional medicine and lionizing individual approaches - Christy Harrison

I ruffle feathers when I suggest that a lot of fertility advice is BS.

It irks the practitioners that herald their holistic practice ‘success rates’ and write Instagram posts like this.. ‘another incredible pregnancy success with a client I worked with closely for three months’. Credit that they can’t possibly claim with accuracy, but do.

It irks people investing in nutritional plans or new approaches.

I care more about this.

It is never my intention to diminish the practices that bring comfort or a semblance of control or heightened wellbeing. I also can’t say that a course of holistic treatment will have no impact. I can’t say that because there is usually very little evidence either way. That’s difficult. But, ethical practitioner integrity isn’t.

How it unfolded for me

If we were to look at the entanglement of mine, we would see that I arrived at an abandonment of any kind of birth control wildly unaware that getting pregnant was not necessarily easy. I had a history of disordered eating in my teens that had seen me hospitalised and that had required years of treatment. I had made an excellent recovery; and that had taken a lot of ‘doing the work’.

I share this seldomly and deliberately haven’t labelled this disorder here - it is a curious thing to be framed as an ‘ex’ something and how much gets written onto a person by others because of something that has ceased to be. I am not an ‘ex’ anything. I am me now.

But I digress.

I was ambitious, career driven, high functioning with a tendency to anxiety and whilst I don’t love the title, a classic ‘Type A’. There was little I hadn’t been able to achieve with hard work and determination and, after just two negative pregnancy test results, I hit the ‘fertility forums’ to discover a whole new world of information as to how one might increase their chances of getting pregnant. In the next two years, I tried it all. I bought all the books. I placed the responsibility of conceiving in my hands and effort levels, my inner good girl running the stage.

I had acupuncture, I took supplements. I encouraged and sometimes nagged my partner to take his. I stopped drinking coffee and alcohol. I quit the gym and hot yoga. I saw a homeopath who told me to go on a ketogenic diet, an iridologist who told me to cut out dairy and a herbalist who viewed a raw diet as the answer.

Food groups are wildly demonised in fertility advice. And anyone with a ‘delicate’ relationship with food is at risk of being sucked into the riptide. Christy Harrison in The Wellness Trap ( a useful counter balance read ) observes that wellness culture doesn’t come with a health warning or any caution about the risks of restrictive diets. We’re left to find that out for ourselves.

And then I got sick.

Somewhere along the way, my body decided it didn’t like my new, fluctuating diets of omission. I wasn’t restricting calorie wise and I was enjoying trying new approaches. It felt like I had a handle on something solid when all of our test results came back as ‘unexplained, keep trying’. But, I developed IBS, eczema all over my hands, dry skin and palpitations. I couldn’t sleep.

At the time, I had no idea what was wrong and the search to feel better got confusingly caught up in the search for an answer to our fertility mystery. I was able to see that the very diets that were supposed to be making me feel vibrant and fertile were doing the exact opposite. What I wasn’t able to do was step away from the muddled merging of several nutrition approaches. My range of perceived ‘safe, fertility friendly’ foods became smaller and smaller.

Inevitably, I suppose, I had a brief relapse with my eating disorder. It doesn’t feel good to write that, but it was what happened. A blurring of dietary control and old patterns when nothing felt within my control - it felt both soothingly familiar and an alarming undoing of how far I had come in my relationship with joyous eating. Ten years on, I’m puzzled at how obvious it was that my nervous system was sending me very clear messages of feeling neither safe or in abundance - I simply couldn’t see it.

I can see now, that I had raging, high functioning anxiety. This was interpreted by one practitioner as ‘leaky gut’ and there were all manner of other pseudo diagnoses I got along the way. I was too ‘cold’, too ‘deficient’, too ‘metal’, ‘too thin’, ‘too vatta’ and sometimes there was talk of possible parasites, allergies and intolerances. No one observed the thousands of bodily things about me that worked beautifully. I was seen only as a walking reproductive system that wasn’t working.

(Speaking of ‘parasites’, I took a lot from this article; ‘You probably have a parasite’: Neoliberal risk and the discursive construction of the body in the wellness industry)

In a quest to understand how I got so very very lost in the maze, I have found comfort in the litany of critique there is to be found for so many of the wellness mythologies that exist - hence my use of the term ‘pseudo’. This is my viewpoint - it might not be yours. But there’s a lot of grey area in so much of this arena and this is how I have chosen to make it make sense. For any conceptual, possible ‘theory’ we are given about our health, there will always be counter arguments we can turn to to weigh up our own position.

So, how did I find my way out?

The shorthand version is that I sought help.

I invested in more therapy and EMDR for traumas that are another story for another day. I burnt my fertility books (true story). I re-cultivated my relationship with foods that had served me very well prior to the TTC chapter- hello sourdough bread with butter. My digestive issues gradually went away along with the other bodily expressions that had surfaced. We can make of that what we will, given that I want to remain curious and open about cause and effect.

A crucial discovery was the intuitive eating movement, notably Laura Thomas to whom I owe more than she will know. Her latest piece on fertility supplements is a good place to start;

A Nutrition Thing: Is Your Supermarket Prenatal Supplement Really "Total Crap"?

For every Medical Medium out there, there are voices of reason, scientific evidence and balance - the nourishment we didn’t know we needed. Finding our team of counter balance is the breadcrumbs away from the gingerbread cottage. Deciding we might need professional support of a different kind - a kind that looks after our mental health - can be powerful, if we can go there.

Then I got angry.

We are surrounded by the message that there is an answer to infertility that lies in the things we consume and the lifestyle we create. It’s alluring. It offers quick fixes in three month packages, often costing four figures sums we can’t really afford. It also feeds into our wider inhabiting of not doing a good enough job.

It will find us when we emerge from our fertility years, shapeshifted, a yellow disc we push into our arm as we poo out blue muffins. It’s there in the subtle shaming of ‘my cousin tried Chinese herbs and managed to avoid IVF’; as if IVF itself is a toxin, not a valid medical response to a valid medical issue.

What happens when you do try out all alternative modalities, try all the diets, take all the supplements and you don’t ever get the outcome you’re seeking? How do we reconcile this with the narrative that holds us responsible for our fecundity? What do we do with that? It’s not easy to hold our heads up high in realms of wellness and diet culture when we’re positioned in this way.

We do get to do this though.

Fertility is not solely reserved to ‘healthy humans’ (however we deem this to look).

Infertility does not equal ill health.

The fertility wellness industry positions us to forget this, to not heed the cognitive dissonance in the fertile population we see every day that tells us fertility is mysterious and a lot about luck.

The voices that nudge us towards shame, blame and feeling lesser are noise that we need to de-amplify. Unfollow, hide, mute and rebalance them with the voices that see you as the unique physical creature that you are, in a body that works in millions of perfect ways. We can read ‘it’s not your fault’ a thousand times. And we can also choose to believe it.