Unlearning Fertility Wellness Culture
Where do we even begin?
If you are new to my Substack you can read some of my thoughts on Fertility Wellness Culture here.
About eighteen months ago, I held a thirty minute webinar entitled ‘It Starts With The Egg; An Antidote’. It was my most attended and requested webinar of the year. I’ll include it here at the end, behind the paywall, should you wish to watch it and hear my story which is actually the origin story to what has become The Antidote.
My messaging is really born from my personal experience of trying to ‘cleanse’ my lifestyle to solve the equation of my infertility. My experiences of TRYING didn’t begin on a blank page. They were a continuation of the biographical story of my life. There was backstory.
The backstory was thirty two years old. There were subplots of Type A personality (horrible phrase, but a shortcut that makes sense to people I think), disordered eating, orthorexia, being a teenager in the diet culture ridden nineties and so many other relational human things. That’s my story. We all have a story and we can’t divorce it from how we experience our infertility and the inner dialogue that comes along for the ride.
The messaging of the fertility wellness industry is potent.
To a large extent, the industry messaging come from a starting point of viewing us through a deficit lens. It sees our bodies are depleted, unbalanced, our egg factory run down and ineffective and, if we invest - in all the ways - and try, try, try, golden eggs (because the finger points at eggs so much more than sperm) are ours for the taking.
And the difficult thing whenever I write about this is this- some changes we make to our lifestyle will probably make us feel better. Getting more sleep, upping the food that makes us feel good, quitting smoking, drinking less, getting our steps in, bring it on (in an 80/20, kind to ourselves way). But the millions of ultra nuanced details, the omission of whole food groups, the relentless lack of moderation and balance in the books we read… it’s an impossible ask and there isn’t ever a finish line.
No one writes about what happens to our nervous system months and years of eating restrictively and being stripped of the oxytocin nurturing pleasures we once had. Three years into TTC I was the sickest I had ever been digestively and anxiously, on what could have been perceived as an impeccable diet. Except, for me, it wasn’t.
The Timeline of our Efforts
The journey into the deep down depths of fertility wellness culture follows a common pattern. We start changing a few things we might adjust. We buy supplements, perhaps we buy some ovulation sticks, maybe go and have some acupuncture, we buy some books on fertility nutrition. We up our game. When nothing happens, there are increasingly more things we fold into (or omit from) the cauldron. There are endless things the insta reels tell us to try. And buy. So we do.
For some, they buy the thing and they actually do get pregnant. There is no way to correlate those two things, but the correlation often happens anyway. For me - nothing I tried or spent money on got me pregnant. I kind of loved those glass Zita West vitamin jars though because they felt so luxe that they must be doing something.
Somewhere circa four years on, after a particularly spendy month on all the wellness things and none of the fun things, my period came and with it, so did my RAGE. This is where my unlearning began. I burnt all of my fertility books in a ceremonial bonfire, whilst drinking cider. I began again.
The exact science of what makes an egg, a sperm, their union and all that follows to make a small human.. it remains the ultimate mystery. It’s a riddle that leaves us feeling unable to steer the ship, control the variables and get the win we so desperately need. So of course we fall down the rabbit holes of things we can control. And we can fall a long long way down.
So how do we get out?
We almost need to reach a point of burn it all down outrage. Or it might arrive as a grey, lost in the maze fog. However the turning point arrives, you’ll know when it does. Maybe reading this is the ignition.
We get to choose what works for us. In a world where we are saturated by millions of contradictory words trying to tell us how to be, there are things we know. We know friends who do none of the trying stuff, who drink like fishes conceive ‘because he looked at me’. You might not feel able to burn it all down. But you might choose to buy a sourdough loaf and see if it feels right and good to eat it. Or to not repurchase some of the supplements. Wellness rebellion can feel sweet, if we can unbuckle ourselves from guilt and blame that was written onto us.
The intuitive eating movement was a tonic for me and a vehicle to unlearn and reframe. I have directed to
before and will no doubt again. It’s a rich place to begin your rebellion. I talk about all of this more in my webinar. And as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, or support you at a 1:1 level.