January 28, 2025 • 14 mins
If you've been eating "healthy" but not seeing results, this episode could help you understand the difference between everyday eating and therapeutic eating, and how they impact fertility. Here is what to expect:
- Why traditional diets fail
- Why you shouldn't fear therapeutic eating
- Introduction to the B.P.A. framework of fertility nutrition
- Why you shouldn't worry about those with an unhealthy lifestyle but get pregnant anyway.
Follow me on instagram @dradriennewei
Website: www.adriennewei.com
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Practically Fertile Podcast.
I'm Adrienne Wee, doctor ofAcupuncture and Chinese Medicine
, functional MedicinePractitioner and Functional
Nutritionist.
I specialize in using anevidence-based method, blending
principles of East Asianmedicine and modern functional
medicine to help women optimizefertility and get pregnant.
(00:22):
I believe in a world whereevery woman who wants to be a
mother becomes one.
If you're tired of being toldthat you're infertile and you
want to take the right steps toget pregnant naturally and
quickly, this podcast is for you.
Hey, fertile friend, so good tobe here with you today.
Thank you for spending sometime with me.
(00:42):
I'm really excited to talkabout fertility nutrition.
It's one of the hottest topics,with many, many different
opinions on what you should bedoing and what you shouldn't be
doing.
There's also a lot of confusionaround it and frustration.
You might have changed yourdiet quite a bit and still not
pregnant, and you're justwondering why, and all this
(01:04):
effort seems to have been wasted.
So a couple of things first.
The reason you might not beseeing results is number one
what you're eating, and this iswhat we'll talk a little bit
about in today's episode.
Reason number two is yourdigestive function, which leads
to reason number three possiblenutritional deficiencies if your
(01:26):
digestive function is notoptimal.
We are going to talk a lotabout this in upcoming episodes,
but today what I want to focuson is to give you an
introduction to the differencebetween what I call everyday
eating versus therapeutic eating.
You've probably heard someonegive you advice like just eat
healthy.
(01:46):
But what does that mean?
There are many healthy options,depending on who you ask.
There's eating the rainboweating whole grain versus white
bread, choose lean proteins, gofor olive oil, and you probably
have done all of that.
This is what I call everydayeating.
It's eating for maintenance.
It's general.
It's not meant to target aspecific goal that you have, and
(02:09):
you might find yourself in thissituation you feel like you're
eating so healthily, but nothinghas worked.
On the other hand, therapeuticeating is a more targeted
approach to food.
It's about using nutrition as atool to address specific
concerns like balancing hormones, boosting egg quality or
(02:30):
helping with implantation.
Think of it as a personalizedprescription for nutrition.
Some diets out there you can saycan be classified as
therapeutic eating Mediterraneandiet, paleo diet, intermittent
fasting, keto, intuitive eating.
Each of these diets has prosand cons and they will work for
(02:51):
some people, but not all people.
If you have tried one of thesediets, you might feel
discouraged because again, ithasn't worked.
I think one of the problems isthat it's really hard to
personalize these types of diets.
They are generallyone-size-fits-all.
For example, mediterranean diethas a lot of great principles
(03:14):
and it promotes eatingeverything in moderation.
But that's the thing.
It doesn't specify whatmoderation is.
The definition of moderation isdifferent for everyone.
For some people it might befour glasses of wine per night.
Another person might think twoglasses a week might be
considered moderate.
For this reason, I feel likethe Mediterranean diet could
(03:35):
really be categorized aseveryday eating.
But I know that some people withcertain conditions like heart
disease, high cholesterol, theymight consider the Mediterranean
diet to be therapeutic.
In my honest opinion, I thinktreating heart disease isn't the
same as trying to balancehormones or get pregnant.
Trying to conceive is just amore nuanced process.
(03:58):
Hormones are delicate.
They're affected by manyvariables like environment, diet
, lifestyle, stress, and back inepisode one we talked about how
no hormones work alone.
They're all interconnected,no-transcript.
So for that reason an everydayeating approach might not work
(04:19):
for you.
If your situation falls outsideof the box, like if you're
suffering from insulinresistance, then eating all the
whole grain bread isn't going tohelp, because bread, at the end
of the day, will spike yourinsulin.
If you're suffering from nothaving a period, then it doesn't
matter how many rainbows you'reeating if the root issue is
(04:40):
that your hypothalamus thinksthat you're in some type of
survival mode.
When I started my career, I knewvery little about functional
nutrition.
What I knew was Chinesemedicine nutrition strategies,
which by default falls under thetherapeutic eating, because
specific patterns of disharmonyrequire specific foods.
(05:02):
But that alone was not enoughsometimes because, for example,
if someone needs to lose weightin order to optimize fertility,
we have to consider caloricintake macros.
If someone's digestion doesn'timprove a diet, we have to
consider food sensitivities andallergies and do testing to see
if gut bacteria is off balance.
(05:24):
So fast forward.
More than a decade I nowincorporate functional nutrition
into my protocols.
The nutrition protocol,specifically, is a step-by-step
way of eating where one stepbuilds on the previous one.
I call it BPA, but it'sactually a good BPA.
It's good for fertility.
(05:45):
I've designed this protocol tobe sustainable, practical and
helps you create long-lastinghabits.
It's highly customizable, alsodepending on your situation.
Also depending on yoursituation.
So the BPA framework it hasreally evolved over the years.
It's integrative, blendingChinese medicine and functional
(06:12):
medicine.
It puts specific parametersaround what you should be eating
and how much you should beeating, and when you should be
eating them, depending on thephases of your cycle.
It also includes specialconsideration for conditions
like PCOS, endometriosis, lowAMH and if you're doing IVF.
What I also love about thisrevamped framework is it can
(06:32):
help anyone, whether you're juststarting to clean up your diet
or you're very advanced andyou've tried many diets before.
I just realized that I have nottold you what BPA stands for.
So BPA stands for making itbasic, making it personal and
making it anti-inflammatory.
Okay, let me just go throughthis framework with you.
(06:55):
The first step is to go for thelow-hanging fruit and make some
easy diet adjustments.
Step is to go for thelow-hanging fruit and make some
easy diet adjustments.
It's very possible to getpregnant even just by making
some small tweaks.
I'm still getting emails fromlisteners of my previous two
podcasts that I hosted thankingme for telling them to stop
drinking cold water, so youdon't need to do a lot sometimes
(07:19):
to get pregnant.
The second step is when we makeit personalized Eating foods
specific to your fertilityarchetype and the phases of the
menstrual cycle and alsosupplements to consider,
depending on your condition andthe protocols inside.
This step is exclusively ours,we call it NutriSync.
(07:41):
And then if this phase doesn'thelp you get pregnant, then we
have to dig deeper.
We look at food sensitivitywhether we need to eliminate
certain foods, even if you'renot technically sensitive to
them.
We will incorporate functionaltesting like a stool test to
figure out if there's a gutbacteria imbalance, and we might
(08:02):
do a nutritional deficiencytest.
And we might do a nutritionaldeficiency test.
This piece of the pyramid isobviously more advanced and
sometimes it might require somefinancial investment.
But that's not where we start.
That's why this is the laststep of the framework.
Before functional medicine,there was Chinese medicine, and
Chinese medicine worked forthousands of years.
(08:22):
So why not try that first andthat's my thinking at least?
Other coaches like to start withfunctional testing, and that's
okay too.
I just feel like you end upspending a lot of money and you
might end up with way too manydata points and then the root
cause doesn't become clear.
Okay, as I'm talking, you mightstart to feel some anxiety
(08:44):
about adopting therapeuticeating.
I've done this for a long time.
I will tell you what you'refeeling is very normal.
There's this general fear abouttherapeutic eating, and the fear
is that it's very restrictive.
It can be if you're following aspecific diet like paleo, keto,
whole30, or the autoimmuneprotocol.
(09:06):
These diets are very hard tostick to and most people cannot
stick to them for life, with theexception of a few friends that
I know that are still doingpaleo but the majority of us,
it's very hard to do these typesof diets forever.
So I want you to put this fearaside.
If you're wondering if the BPAframework can work for you, I
(09:28):
didn't design this framework tobe restrictive.
I designed it to give youoptions and the freedom to
decide when you want to move tothe next level.
I also want to share with yousomething that I teach inside my
online course.
So whatever diet plan you endup going on, this method will
(09:48):
help you and give you aguideline on what moderation
looks like.
So I want to teach you mymethod for calculating the 80-20
rule Specifically what doesbeing compliant 80% of the time
look like and what does theother 20% look like?
This method is very, verysimple.
(10:09):
Take the number of the mealsyou're going to eat during the
week.
For most people it's 21 meals.
If you're doing intermittentfasting it'll be 14.
But please make sure thatyou're doing the intermittent
fasting correctly.
I see people fast but then theycram in tons of junk food,
sugar, calories, fat in the nexteight hours that they're eating
(10:31):
.
That's not the right approach.
Anyway, figure out how manymeals you're eating.
Then simply multiply that by20%, which gives you about four
meals if you're on a 21 mealplan, or three meals if you're
on the 14 meal plan.
That doesn't sound so bad.
Right, during the week you canindulge three to four times.
(10:55):
That's your weekend social life.
So you don't have to feeldepressed that you might have to
give up hanging out withfriends, that you can have a
glass of wine and a piece ofcake.
Many of my patients, though,they tell me that once they
start the BPA protocol, theyfeel so good that even when they
can indulge, they choose not to.
But at least you'll know thatfour times a week you can let
(11:21):
loose a little bit, you don'thave to be so restrictive, and I
hope that makes you feel alittle bit better.
And again, you can apply thismethod to whatever diet plan
that you plan to be on.
Now, before I wrap up, I want toaddress something that comes up
very frequently, and that isthis resistance to making any
types of change because someoneelse ate like crap and got
(11:43):
pregnant anyway, and that lifedoesn't seem fair.
First of all, if you feel thisway, it's normal and the fact
that you're not pregnant rightnow it's not because you're
doing something wrong.
Secondly, you hear about thesekinds of stories because they're
the exception, not the norm,for the same reason that we
(12:03):
don't ever hear about theself-made millionaires next door
, but we hear about the personthat hits the $2 billion lottery
.
And the last thing is, insteadof focusing on how life seems
unfair, let's think about whatwould happen if you were to
commit to making the necessarydiet changes.
When you reduce inflammationbefore you get pregnant, you can
(12:27):
expect a healthier pregnancywith lower risks of serious
complications.
You can expect a healthier babywith higher birth weight,
better cognitive development,less risks to developing
allergies and certain chronicdiseases.
We know this because there's alot of studies that have been
done on what's calledepigenetics.
(12:49):
It's the study of how our genesbecome turned on or off,
depending on the environment,depending on the person's diet,
lifestyle, stress level, toxinexposure, and it doesn't just
determine what happens to usonce we're born.
The influence of epigeneticsstarts in the uterus.
We can influence ouroffspring's future health, so
(13:14):
one way to think about this isokay.
Maybe it takes you longer toget pregnant, maybe you need to
make some changes to yourlifestyle, but this is your
chance to give your baby thebest possible start in life.
This will also improve yourchances of getting pregnant for
a second, third or fourth timeor more, so the choices that you
(13:35):
make right now can have animpact in the future, sometimes
just not always obvious.
All right, fertile friend, Ihope you found this episode
helpful and perhaps had a fewaha moments.
If you're confused about whatto do or if you're struggling
with staying on track, that'swhat I'm here for.
You can reach me severaldifferent ways.
(13:57):
You can email me at info atadrienneweecom.
You can follow me on Instagramat Dr Adrienne Wee, or you can
actually send me a messagedirectly through the podcast.
There should be a button thatsays send us a text above the
podcast episode description.
Once again, thank you so muchfor spending your time with me
(14:18):
today.
Until next time, take care ofyourself and your amazing body,
and remember you're one fertilecycle away from getting pregnant
.
Thank you.
Welcome to the Practically Fertile Podcast.
I'm Adrienne Wee, doctor ofAcupuncture and Chinese Medicine
, functional MedicinePractitioner and Functional
Nutritionist.
I specialize in using anevidence-based method, blending
principles of East Asianmedicine and modern functional
medicine to help women optimizefertility and get pregnant.
(00:22):
I believe in a world whereevery woman who wants to be a
mother becomes one.
If you're tired of being toldthat you're infertile and you
want to take the right steps toget pregnant naturally and
quickly, this podcast is for you.
Hey, fertile friend, so good tobe here with you today.
Thank you for spending sometime with me.
(00:42):
I'm really excited to talkabout fertility nutrition.
It's one of the hottest topics,with many, many different
opinions on what you should bedoing and what you shouldn't be
doing.
There's also a lot of confusionaround it and frustration.
You might have changed yourdiet quite a bit and still not
pregnant, and you're justwondering why, and all this
(01:04):
effort seems to have been wasted.
So a couple of things first.
The reason you might not beseeing results is number one
what you're eating, and this iswhat we'll talk a little bit
about in today's episode.
Reason number two is yourdigestive function, which leads
to reason number three possiblenutritional deficiencies if your
(01:26):
digestive function is notoptimal.
We are going to talk a lotabout this in upcoming episodes,
but today what I want to focuson is to give you an
introduction to the differencebetween what I call everyday
eating versus therapeutic eating.
You've probably heard someonegive you advice like just eat
healthy.
(01:46):
But what does that mean?
There are many healthy options,depending on who you ask.
There's eating the rainboweating whole grain versus white
bread, choose lean proteins, gofor olive oil, and you probably
have done all of that.
This is what I call everydayeating.
It's eating for maintenance.
It's general.
It's not meant to target aspecific goal that you have, and
(02:09):
you might find yourself in thissituation you feel like you're
eating so healthily, but nothinghas worked.
On the other hand, therapeuticeating is a more targeted
approach to food.
It's about using nutrition as atool to address specific
concerns like balancing hormones, boosting egg quality or
(02:30):
helping with implantation.
Think of it as a personalizedprescription for nutrition.
Some diets out there you can saycan be classified as
therapeutic eating Mediterraneandiet, paleo diet, intermittent
fasting, keto, intuitive eating.
Each of these diets has prosand cons and they will work for
(02:51):
some people, but not all people.
If you have tried one of thesediets, you might feel
discouraged because again, ithasn't worked.
I think one of the problems isthat it's really hard to
personalize these types of diets.
They are generallyone-size-fits-all.
For example, mediterranean diethas a lot of great principles
(03:14):
and it promotes eatingeverything in moderation.
But that's the thing.
It doesn't specify whatmoderation is.
The definition of moderation isdifferent for everyone.
For some people it might befour glasses of wine per night.
Another person might think twoglasses a week might be
considered moderate.
For this reason, I feel likethe Mediterranean diet could
(03:35):
really be categorized aseveryday eating.
But I know that some people withcertain conditions like heart
disease, high cholesterol, theymight consider the Mediterranean
diet to be therapeutic.
In my honest opinion, I thinktreating heart disease isn't the
same as trying to balancehormones or get pregnant.
Trying to conceive is just amore nuanced process.
(03:58):
Hormones are delicate.
They're affected by manyvariables like environment, diet
, lifestyle, stress, and back inepisode one we talked about how
no hormones work alone.
They're all interconnected,no-transcript.
So for that reason an everydayeating approach might not work
(04:19):
for you.
If your situation falls outsideof the box, like if you're
suffering from insulinresistance, then eating all the
whole grain bread isn't going tohelp, because bread, at the end
of the day, will spike yourinsulin.
If you're suffering from nothaving a period, then it doesn't
matter how many rainbows you'reeating if the root issue is
(04:40):
that your hypothalamus thinksthat you're in some type of
survival mode.
When I started my career, I knewvery little about functional
nutrition.
What I knew was Chinesemedicine nutrition strategies,
which by default falls under thetherapeutic eating, because
specific patterns of disharmonyrequire specific foods.
(05:02):
But that alone was not enoughsometimes because, for example,
if someone needs to lose weightin order to optimize fertility,
we have to consider caloricintake macros.
If someone's digestion doesn'timprove a diet, we have to
consider food sensitivities andallergies and do testing to see
if gut bacteria is off balance.
(05:24):
So fast forward.
More than a decade I nowincorporate functional nutrition
into my protocols.
The nutrition protocol,specifically, is a step-by-step
way of eating where one stepbuilds on the previous one.
I call it BPA, but it'sactually a good BPA.
It's good for fertility.
(05:45):
I've designed this protocol tobe sustainable, practical and
helps you create long-lastinghabits.
It's highly customizable, alsodepending on your situation.
Also depending on yoursituation.
So the BPA framework it hasreally evolved over the years.
It's integrative, blendingChinese medicine and functional
(06:12):
medicine.
It puts specific parametersaround what you should be eating
and how much you should beeating, and when you should be
eating them, depending on thephases of your cycle.
It also includes specialconsideration for conditions
like PCOS, endometriosis, lowAMH and if you're doing IVF.
What I also love about thisrevamped framework is it can
(06:32):
help anyone, whether you're juststarting to clean up your diet
or you're very advanced andyou've tried many diets before.
I just realized that I have nottold you what BPA stands for.
So BPA stands for making itbasic, making it personal and
making it anti-inflammatory.
Okay, let me just go throughthis framework with you.
(06:55):
The first step is to go for thelow-hanging fruit and make some
easy diet adjustments.
Step is to go for thelow-hanging fruit and make some
easy diet adjustments.
It's very possible to getpregnant even just by making
some small tweaks.
I'm still getting emails fromlisteners of my previous two
podcasts that I hosted thankingme for telling them to stop
drinking cold water, so youdon't need to do a lot sometimes
(07:19):
to get pregnant.
The second step is when we makeit personalized Eating foods
specific to your fertilityarchetype and the phases of the
menstrual cycle and alsosupplements to consider,
depending on your condition andthe protocols inside.
This step is exclusively ours,we call it NutriSync.
(07:41):
And then if this phase doesn'thelp you get pregnant, then we
have to dig deeper.
We look at food sensitivitywhether we need to eliminate
certain foods, even if you'renot technically sensitive to
them.
We will incorporate functionaltesting like a stool test to
figure out if there's a gutbacteria imbalance, and we might
(08:02):
do a nutritional deficiencytest.
And we might do a nutritionaldeficiency test.
This piece of the pyramid isobviously more advanced and
sometimes it might require somefinancial investment.
But that's not where we start.
That's why this is the laststep of the framework.
Before functional medicine,there was Chinese medicine, and
Chinese medicine worked forthousands of years.
(08:22):
So why not try that first andthat's my thinking at least?
Other coaches like to start withfunctional testing, and that's
okay too.
I just feel like you end upspending a lot of money and you
might end up with way too manydata points and then the root
cause doesn't become clear.
Okay, as I'm talking, you mightstart to feel some anxiety
(08:44):
about adopting therapeuticeating.
I've done this for a long time.
I will tell you what you'refeeling is very normal.
There's this general fear abouttherapeutic eating, and the fear
is that it's very restrictive.
It can be if you're following aspecific diet like paleo, keto,
whole30, or the autoimmuneprotocol.
(09:06):
These diets are very hard tostick to and most people cannot
stick to them for life, with theexception of a few friends that
I know that are still doingpaleo but the majority of us,
it's very hard to do these typesof diets forever.
So I want you to put this fearaside.
If you're wondering if the BPAframework can work for you, I
(09:28):
didn't design this framework tobe restrictive.
I designed it to give youoptions and the freedom to
decide when you want to move tothe next level.
I also want to share with yousomething that I teach inside my
online course.
So whatever diet plan you endup going on, this method will
(09:48):
help you and give you aguideline on what moderation
looks like.
So I want to teach you mymethod for calculating the 80-20
rule Specifically what doesbeing compliant 80% of the time
look like and what does theother 20% look like?
This method is very, verysimple.
(10:09):
Take the number of the mealsyou're going to eat during the
week.
For most people it's 21 meals.
If you're doing intermittentfasting it'll be 14.
But please make sure thatyou're doing the intermittent
fasting correctly.
I see people fast but then theycram in tons of junk food,
sugar, calories, fat in the nexteight hours that they're eating
(10:31):
.
That's not the right approach.
Anyway, figure out how manymeals you're eating.
Then simply multiply that by20%, which gives you about four
meals if you're on a 21 mealplan, or three meals if you're
on the 14 meal plan.
That doesn't sound so bad.
Right, during the week you canindulge three to four times.
(10:55):
That's your weekend social life.
So you don't have to feeldepressed that you might have to
give up hanging out withfriends, that you can have a
glass of wine and a piece ofcake.
Many of my patients, though,they tell me that once they
start the BPA protocol, theyfeel so good that even when they
can indulge, they choose not to.
But at least you'll know thatfour times a week you can let
(11:21):
loose a little bit, you don'thave to be so restrictive, and I
hope that makes you feel alittle bit better.
And again, you can apply thismethod to whatever diet plan
that you plan to be on.
Now, before I wrap up, I want toaddress something that comes up
very frequently, and that isthis resistance to making any
types of change because someoneelse ate like crap and got
(11:43):
pregnant anyway, and that lifedoesn't seem fair.
First of all, if you feel thisway, it's normal and the fact
that you're not pregnant rightnow it's not because you're
doing something wrong.
Secondly, you hear about thesekinds of stories because they're
the exception, not the norm,for the same reason that we
(12:03):
don't ever hear about theself-made millionaires next door
, but we hear about the personthat hits the $2 billion lottery
.
And the last thing is, insteadof focusing on how life seems
unfair, let's think about whatwould happen if you were to
commit to making the necessarydiet changes.
When you reduce inflammationbefore you get pregnant, you can
(12:27):
expect a healthier pregnancywith lower risks of serious
complications.
You can expect a healthier babywith higher birth weight,
better cognitive development,less risks to developing
allergies and certain chronicdiseases.
We know this because there's alot of studies that have been
done on what's calledepigenetics.
(12:49):
It's the study of how our genesbecome turned on or off,
depending on the environment,depending on the person's diet,
lifestyle, stress level, toxinexposure, and it doesn't just
determine what happens to usonce we're born.
The influence of epigeneticsstarts in the uterus.
We can influence ouroffspring's future health, so
(13:14):
one way to think about this isokay.
Maybe it takes you longer toget pregnant, maybe you need to
make some changes to yourlifestyle, but this is your
chance to give your baby thebest possible start in life.
This will also improve yourchances of getting pregnant for
a second, third or fourth timeor more, so the choices that you
(13:35):
make right now can have animpact in the future, sometimes
just not always obvious.
All right, fertile friend, Ihope you found this episode
helpful and perhaps had a fewaha moments.
If you're confused about whatto do or if you're struggling
with staying on track, that'swhat I'm here for.
You can reach me severaldifferent ways.
(13:57):
You can email me at info atadrienneweecom.
You can follow me on Instagramat Dr Adrienne Wee, or you can
actually send me a messagedirectly through the podcast.
There should be a button thatsays send us a text above the
podcast episode description.
Once again, thank you so muchfor spending your time with me
(14:18):
today.
Until next time, take care ofyourself and your amazing body,
and remember you're one fertilecycle away from getting pregnant
.
Thank you.
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