Fertility and the First 1,000 Days

In today's episode, Katy discusses the small but mighty nutrient iodine. She reveals the system in the body that completely relies upon this mineral, and why getting the balance right is SO important, particularly for people with Hashimotos. WAYS THAT YOU CAN GET KATY'S HELP: Fertility and the First 1,000 Days Membership: https://katybradburyhealth.thrivecart.com/fertility-and-the-first-1000-days/ Fundamentals for Fertility online course: https://katybradburyhealthltd.vipmembervault.com/products/courses/view/1130954/?action=signup Book a discovery call to talk through your needs for working together 1:1: https://p.bttr.to/378gAXH More info can be found about Katy on her website: https://katybradbury.com/  Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/katybradburyhealth Email: support@katybradbury.com  Love the show? Don't forget to leave a star rating and a review to share the love and help it reach others who need to hear this!  

Today, Katy makes some reflections on the podcast and her current practice, and discusses how widening out her focus to Women's Health can better serve YOU. During the episode she reveals her brand new comprehensive fertility service, which is designed to be a one-stop shop for fertility support, supporting you to reach your goal sooner than ever. 00:00 Hello, I am Katie Bradbury, a registered nurse, and nutritional therapist. Today's podcast episode is called, why I'm branching away from fertility, and how I can still help you.   00:27 So hello, hello. Welcome to today's episode, I'm really happy to be back for the second week on the trot after having a bit of an extensive period where I was getting quite sporadic with my podcast episodes, and what I wanted to do today, as I alluded to last week is just to come and chat to you, I guess a bit of a behind the scenes chat to just fill you in. Because I know that I've got a number of listeners who are really regular listeners to the show and who really enjoy it. I've had quite a few people get in touch to kind of ask about the absence of episodes when things had slowed down a bit. And I think what I realised is that part of the reason that I hadn't been coming to record the podcast every week is because I was just I don't know, I was finding that there was a resistance there. And usually, when we find some resistance in our lives, it's really worth actually sitting down with that and exploring it a little bit and hadn't had the chance to do that I was just it was just coming under the kind of the excuse, I guess of like, Oh, I've just been really busy. As you know, the summer has been really busy. But then, of course, the summer came and went and I was still putting off doing the podcast whereas actually, it used to be something that really lit me up. It used to be something that I used to really look forward to coming and doing. And I do, I enjoy coming into the studio at the bottom of the garden and making myself a cup of tea and coming and chat chatting to all of you, I really do. And so I was a bit puzzled as to why I was putting things off. And so this is what I'm here to talk to you about today. And I'm going to spend the episode just having a little chat through where I'm at at the moment. So it's a bit of a self-indulgent episode but hopefully, I'll just help you to make sense of things for where I'm at just now. And what it's made me realise is that I need to switch up the way of doing things a little bit. So what I've come to tell you today is just a little bit more info on where I'm going to be going next in terms of the services that I'm offering to you. So don't feel disheartened. Please, please listen on, I'm not saying that I'm packing in my fertility work at all. Very, very different to that. In fact, I'm figuring out a way to make it more comprehensive than it's ever been. But do stick around and listen to the episode I hope that you can join me today in whatever you're doing whether you're out for a walk or cooking or you know walking the dog or doing some chores or in the car or on your commute. Just settle in and have a little listen because I realised actually that I'm coming up to my two-year anniversary of when I set up my limited company Katie Bradbury Health. And although I was practising before that the birth of Katie Bradbury Health was really when I started to put my energy into supporting people in my private practice as opposed to anything else. So um, so that's kind of what my main focus has been for the last two years now.   04:26 My when back then in November 2020. My own fertility journey was still so raw, then actually and I'd, I'd not long had had my second child who I'm, you know, extremely blessed to have had. So she was born in June 2020. And then in November so when I set up as Katy Bradbury Health as I say my own fertility was just really still quite raw in. And for anyone who doesn't know about my own fertility journey that there is a previous episode, I can't remember what number it is off the top of my head, but I'll link to it in the show notes. So if anyone just want to go back and listen to my story, who doesn't already know it do, do go back and listen to that, because I go into the backstory a bit there. So if you're interested, you can do that.   05:33 But I so really still quite raw from my own fertility journey. And what I was determined to do then was help as many people as I could. And so I was at the end of embarking in a year-long programme that specialised or that taught me exclusively about fertility nutrition. So it was really so I was already you know, a nurse, I was already a nutritional therapist, I already specialised in women's health, I'd already got, you know, eight years of clinical experience by then, but this additional year's training was solely on fertility, male and female side, you know, fertility is a is an all-encompassing topic and looking at the underlying causes. And I was really determined, to specialise in fertility and to help as many people as I could, what I didn't realise two years on, is that I would end up holding the space for quite as many people, as I do, and that's an amazing thing, right? You know, I'm, I'm doing what I set out to do, which is helping as many people as I could. But what's happened recently is I've been feeling a little bit depleted. And I think that part of it seasonal, you know, of course, I think as we move away from the summer, that it's natural at this time of year, isn't it for your energy to shift. But part of it is because and this is, this might sound a little bit dramatic, but, hopefully, you can understand and, I will explain a bit further. But part of it is because for every person that I speak to who is struggling with their fertility, and whether that's, you know, an intensive one-to-one client, whether it's people who are in my membership, and that I support as a group, whether it's people in my Facebook group, whether it's people that reach out to me on the DM'S and Instagram, whether it's people who I speak to in this podcast, whether it's people who I indirectly work with, through a company in the states who I do some clinical mentorship for, it's, you know, there's a lot of people out there, and for each of those, and this is I don't mean for this to sound dramatic, but this is just the impact in me. But for a little, for each of those people, a little piece of me goes with them. And it's because it's a topic that I care so much about. It's very, very difficult to be really boundaries and to just leave that behind at the door, right? And so, what happened recently a couple of weeks ago, is I was at a bit of a crescendo, I guess, with quite a few people, you know, these journeys, of course, they ebb and flow, right? And so, sometimes you're up sometimes you're down. And the thing is, it's such a long journey, in a lot of cases, because lots of the people who come to me have actually got some really complex stuff going on. And it's not instantaneous, you know, it takes, can take time. And so the journey can last quite a long time. And then even when, you know, if a pregnancy does occur, it's not always all sunshine and roses, it's then Oh, hang on, we need to wait at least three months now before we can actually relax and then even then it can feel worrisome. So as I say, it's difficult to kind of be boundaries and leave that behind. And whilst I have got a lot better with my boundaries, in terms of I don't know, you know, being very clear in the way that I respond to people. It doesn't, you can't just leave, leave the emotional aspect of that out and so what happened a few weeks ago, is a few, I had a few people in my world who had you know, were coming to a bit of a kind of a crescendo whether that's, you know, they had IVF going on, or they've been pregnant, you know, they got pregnant, but that had a history of miscarriage and you know, there were quite a few people that I was talking to and it was quite intense and I was quite anxious for all of these people and I started in one of my journaling practices, I started writing out a prayer. And I started writing out a prayer for and it started just fit for each of these, I think there were about five people who one of them is a close friend.   10:16 And, you know, it's, it's I, as I said, one of them was like, in and out of hospital whos a client. And so I started writing about this prayer. And in this prayer, I, you know, I was asking for each of these people to get what they say, wanted, I was asking that, you know, that these, these IVF cycles would be successful, or that they, these pregnancies would work out. And I wrote, I wrote quite detailed messages in this in this letter, in this prayer. And then it all started spilling out. And I ended up then starting to think about other people who weren't kind of in this it sense of immediacy, you know, who didn't actively have this stuff going on, but who were still in my world and that I was supporting. And so I just carried on writing. And I carried on writing and writing and writing and pages later. And lots of names and lots of hopes and wishes and prayers later, I and I hadn't even stopped you know, I was full flow and I just realised my goodness, no wonder I'm feeling a bit on edge recently, because I'm holding this, right? And this isn't me being dramatic, by the way, because I have every, I completely know that it's far, far more intense for you than it ever could be for me. But a lot of it is, there's an element of kind of, and again, this sounds very dramatic, but it's just me being completely open, there's an element of, of re-traumatising there, because it's so close to my own heart in that I went through this myself, even though I'm so blessed and thankful to be on the other side of that. These are all feelings that I hold inside me because I've seen them and I felt them. And so I wrote out this prayer, I just realised like, go

Today, Katy discusses the minerals potassium and sodium, with regard to their utmost important functions in the body. Whilst these minerals may not directly be linked to fertility, you'll find out why they are so important for everyone to be thinking about, as well as the reason they are so imbalanced in the modern Western diet. 00:00 Hello, you are listening to Katy Bradbury, a registered nurse and nutritional therapist. Today's podcast episode is called the micronutrient series, macro minerals, part three.   00:15 So that is a bit of a mouthful, the micros and the macros. And it has been a little while since I released an episode. I did mention in the last episode, why some of my podcast recordings have been a little bit more sporadic recently. And it's a lot of it is around perhaps wanting to switch things up a little bit. Now just to give you a little update on where I'm at with that, because I've been getting my thinking cap on for the last few weeks about how I might best address this because I don't want to have fallen out of love with my podcast, you know, this is a passion project, for me. It's something that my listeners really value. And so I've been trying to get my head around the best ways that I can serve you as my listener using this podcast as a platform, whilst also meeting my own needs, frankly, and keeping it as something that I actually really enjoy doing. And I look forward to doing it. So I will come and talk to you probably in the next episode about some of my thoughts around that. But for today, I wanted to just continue and finish off within the micronutrient series that I've been doing. So back earlier, in the summer, I decided that actually it probably be really helpful to talk about some of the micronutrients in a little bit more detail as to their importance for health and well-being and particularly of course, around fertility. So I have been doing that and I've covered the vitamins so far. So if you are a new listener, or you're a regular listener, although my episodes haven't been regular recently, if you are a devout listener, I should say then you might want to go back and just revise some of those because some of those particularly the vitamins that we've been through so far, is really really important to understand in the context of reproductive health. So do go back and give those a listen. But I wanted to cover today the last in macro minerals, if you like which are, I guess four of the main minerals that our body uses. Now, I covered in the last two episodes, magnesium super duper important mineral and as I said in that episode, magnesium is probably the most nutritional therapy if you ask them what their favourite mineral is, and yes, that is a valid question. Most would probably start spouting off about magnesium because it is just such an important nutrient. But today, I wanted to talk to you about two together. And I did talk about calcium, of course last, last episode as well. So do go back and listen to those. But today I'm going to cover sodium and potassium in one go. And that's because it's very difficult to talk about one without the other. And what I think you'll probably learn from this episode, and it's going to be a fairly quick episode actually because the sodium I know that most people are listening to this because they're really keen to hear about the way things might impact their fertility and their reproductive health. Now, there are not really links as such around sodium and potassium directly to fertility. But they are essential, essential minerals for human health. And they are essential because they are involved intricately or inextricably, I should say, in homeostasis. And homeostasis is really the narrow balance that our body needs to be in, in order to stay alive. And so you know, with that in mind, it is, it is important to all aspects of our health. So I'm just going to briefly give a summary today about sodium and potassium and how we might be able to think of them in the context of our health and our diet. So sodium, first of all, is essentially salt, so sodium and chloride together, equal salt.   05:22 And so is one of those things that has had a bit of a bad rap over the years. And it's been, it's hard to the finger pointed at it for, you know, risks of hypertension, which is high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. So we're going to talk about sodium and potassium today in the context of blood, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease risk because it's a really important one to understand. And this might be ringing bells for you, if perhaps if you have high blood pressure or cardiovascular disease running in your family, and it might be ringing bells for you if you've had genetic testing done. And some of the genes have come up for you, which puts you at higher risk of some of those. It might be that you have had a previous pregnancy, where you had issues come up with your blood pressure or had something like pre-eclampsia during pregnancy. And so that might be why alarm bells come up for you at the mention of blood pressure. Um, but sodium is it's an electrolyte. And so what that means and there are other minerals that are electrolytes too, potassium is one of the other major ones. But magnesium and some of the other ones that I have spoken about, and will talk about are also electrolytes. But typically speaking, we talk about sodium and potassium as being some of the key electrolytes in the body. And what electrolyte means is that it has an electric charge, guess what? our bodies need electrical charges, in order to function because we need to be able to create energy. And you know, our hearts, for example, our heart conduction requires electricity, you know it, it requires an electrical charge, in order for it to actually beat. So. So as i say really, really important just in this context of staying alive and maintaining homeostasis. So sodium is an electrolyte it has this electrical charge, and sodium and potassium have this electrical charge at a cellular level. And so every single cell in our bodies has got pumps, essentially. So, so pumps on in and out of the cell, that are designed purely for managing the traffic of sodium and potassium in and out of the cell. Because sodium is mostly supposed to be outside of the cell, and potassium is mostly supposed to be inside of the cell, sometimes they can get muddled up and that balance can get shifted in the wrong direction. So these pumps have to work hard to make sure all the time, that they are in the right place so that they're not causing havoc, because that would be dangerous. So this is what's happening at a cellular level all the time. Now sodium is also linked with fluid balance. And so sodium is connected with our kidneys and our renal function. And it's involved in our ability to wee. And you might, you know, weeing might just seem so fundamental, such a kind of everyday occurrence that you don't really think about. But again, it's an essential part of our health, not just because it's excreting things that we don't want to be in our body anymore. It's one of the modes of excretion alongside pooing and sweating and various other things, but it's and breathing, but it's also maintaining that, that really important fluid balance in the body. So blood pressure and fluid balance, again, are inextricably connected because our blood pressure is, our blood is fluid, right? And so the pressure of our blood in our body needs to be maintained by sodium and also by potassium.   09:54 So sodium, as I say, does get a bit of a bad rap for being responsible you know there's again a massive drive perhaps in the 70s. As this science emerged in the connection between sodium and blood pressure emerged around having high blood pressure and having cardiovascular disease and a high salt diet. So lots of people went full pelt the other way. And this is the same with fat. And this is one of the things that I talk about a lot is the fat piece, we're not going to go into that today. But this kind of this notion that all fat is bad, it's complete rubbish. But that's, that's a topic for another day. But salt got a bad rap because of this association. And so then lots of people ran, you know, the other way, and it's low salt, this low salt that must include salt in my diet. But again, guess what? Salt is really important. So then subsequently, there is a bunch of research that came out, that showed that actually people who had like, low salt in their urine, because that's a marker of seeing how much salt is in the body. Were also at risk of these cardiovascular events and cardiovascular disease and hypertension. So just like with everything else, and I feel like a bit of a broken record here, it has to be in the right balance. So salt, if we think about the typical Western diet, I guess, the take home message here, and I'm not going to start talking about how many milligrammes of salt you should be having, because actually, I think that that kind of information can be really unhelpful. And what that does is adhere to this one size fits all approach for health, which actually just, it just is simply not true. Essentially, I guess what my advice would be to you, if you did want to consider this is just this notion that most people in the Western world, the majority of the salt, the majority of their sodium intake, comes from refined and processed foods, right. And refined and processed foods are laden with refined salt, which is also full of loads of additives and undesirable things. So most people in the Western world would benefit from significantly reducing the amount of processed foods that they're eating. And then so if you move away from processed foods, and move towards whole home cooked foods, then you're naturally going to be drastically reducing your sodium intake, at which point, you can safely be including non refined salt in the food that you're cooking. So, you know, again, it's r

**COMPETITION TIME** - listen to the first 10 minutes of the episode to hear about the competition in more detail - or head straight to this link to enter!  00:00 Hello, you are listening to Katy Bradbury nutritional therapist and registered nurse. Today's podcast episode is called The Micronutrients Series, Macro Minerals, Part 2.   00:15 So hello, and welcome to this week's episode, I really hope that you're doing well, I can't believe that we are now in September already. And I don't know about you, but it really feels like the season is changing already. I'm really noticing here in the UK anyway that the nights are starting to draw around now. We've seen a shift in the weather and you know, it's broken, finally. The drought has lifted a bit and we've seen some rain over the last week or so. So it really feels like there's quite a lot of change on the cards at the moment. So I'm feeling quite excited about that actually.   01:14 I'm continuing the episode today with the Micronutrient Series. So if you're a regular listener, then you will know that over the last few weeks with one or two things, intermittently, punctuating it, I've been doing a Mini series or not, not so mini series because there's a lot to cover on micronutrients. So I've covered the different vitamins so far from the fat soluble vitamins to the water soluble vitamins. And now I'm gradually working my way through the minerals. So i've been starting with what we call the macro minerals because there are four minerals that are just of upmost importance for the body when it comes to maintaining homeostasis and really needing to have tight levels, serum levels in the bloodstream of those vitamins so that so that we can stay alive actually so and we measure the macro. The reason I'm referring to them as the macro minerals is because we refer, we measure them in milligrammes or sometimes even grammes rather than micrograms. So we thought that those four would be a good place to start. Now, last week, I covered actually it wasn't last week, which I'll cut I'll come back to in just a moment. But last episode, I covered magnesium. Today, I am going to talk about calcium. And in the next episode, I will talk about the other two together in all likelihood, rather than doing an episode each on potassium, and sodium. So it might not feel like particularly exciting, but actually, feeding your knowledge with information on these micronutrients, and the role that they have to play in the body. Sometimes directly related to fertility and sometimes indirectly related, then it is really important to just help empower you. And to help you understand why some of the principles I talk about are so important. So when I talk about things like the Mediterranean diet, when I talk about things like including a range of, you know, multicoloured, eating the rainbow, and all the different range of plant foods and eating enough protein, and all of these kinds of things i'm not just telling you those things for the fun of it. Part of that is because of the macronutrient content. And part of it is because eating a nutrient dense diet, like the covering the principles that I've just mentioned, will enable your body to get enough of the micronutrients that it's so needs in order to improve your fertility and make a baby ultimately.   04:13 So I wanted to before I actually get started on talking to you about calcium today, because I've got a few things that I wanted to share with you on calcium. I did just want to cover what I touched on very briefly there, which was that I didn't do an episode last week. And indeed, if you are a regular listener, you might have noticed that over the summer. These episodes have been a little bit sparse. They've been a little bit few and far between. Now, I'm going to be perfectly honest with you about this because, you know hopefully, if you have been listening for a little while then we've got to know each other and you know, you know that a lot of what I talk about is around being congruent and being true to yourself. And so I've been sort of making excuses over the summer of you know, or well, you know, it's the summer we going away, we've got this on, and we've got that on. And that's why I'm not recording a podcast episode this week. Actually, if I'm going to be really, really true to myself, a part of the reason that I haven't been recording the episodes as regularly as I have previously, is because in some ways, I feel like I've started falling out of love with the podcast.  Now, that's not because I don't enjoy coming to talk to you, I really, really do, I guess I feel in some ways that I might have lost my mojo with it a little bit and run out of steam. And so when I was thinking about that, because I actually feel sad about that. When I, you know, I've toyed with the idea of maybe stopping doing the podcast. But actually, I do think that would be a real shame, because the feedback that I have had from people is that most of my regular listeners do really love it. I guess how it feels, sometimes, if I'm going to completely put myself in a vulnerable position here is sometimes it feels when you're recording a podcast that you're just speaking to nobody. And I know that I've got some of my regular listeners. And that's great. Most of the people that I know, are my regular listeners are people who are already in other parts of my world. So there are people that I interact and engage with, either in my Facebook group fertility in the first 1000 days, or through working with them directly. So in my group work, like through my previous group programmes, or through my membership, which is also called fertility in the first 1000 days, all through direct one to one work. So I do connect with those people directly. And I'm so grateful to have them in my life, because you know that this is who I do it for right? I do it for you and to connect with you. Because I know exactly how difficult this journey can be. But I guess where it feels a little bit ungratifying is that I know there are lots of people out there that do listen, that I've never spoken to me that have never reached out. And it feels a bit like I'm talking to thin air sometimes in that respect. So what I would, what I was thinking about is, how can I get my mojo back with the podcast? And how can I get your mojo back as well, because you might even be feeling like, oh, you know, you know, it could be better, or, you know, I'd love to get a bit more on board with it or a bit more engaged with it, or even, you know, reach out to me to chat to me for the first time if you haven't before. So what I thought I would do, and I'm going to be running this over the next few weeks is, is do a little competition. And what the competition is going to involve, it's actually very exciting for you, because I'm giving away a huge amount of value in prizes. And is do a do a prize draw. So I'm going to be doing a prize draw. And in order to enter that prize draw, which is going to have hundreds of pounds worth of prizes to give out. In order to enter the prize draw, what I'd like you to do is fill in a feedback form for me. So I've created a Google form. And it's something like 10 questions, they're all pretty straightforward. There's nothing crazy in there, you can really put as much or as little as you want in them, obviously, the more the better. But you know, it shouldn't take you too long to complete. So it's 10 questions, and I'm going to pop the link to it in the episode description. So whatever platform you listen to the podcast on, you should be able to click on the episode to look at the description. And I will add the link there's a few links in there as well of like ways you can work with me and this kind of thing. But I will add in there the link to the competition and to the to the feedback form in order to enter the competition. And what that feedback form is gonna give me is a little bit of a contact with you with my listenership so that I can start to feel a bit more connected to you. Because my aim for this podcast and I hope that this is true and certainly the feedback I have had so far. This is the case for, is I want it to feel like I am sitting in your living room having a chat with you and having a heart to heart that's that is my goal for this podcast. It's also to provide information and empower you and all of the other stuff but you know the reason why I just do it is me talking to you is because I want you to feel connected to me because this is a field that I have committed years of my life too, and I want you to know that I see you and that you are not alone in your journey. So I'm hoping that if you are a regular listener, then you do feel connected to the podcast, you do feel connected to me in some way. And what I will get out of this feedback form is I get to then feel a bit more connected to you and understand you, my listeners a bit better. Now, I do also recognise that not all of my listeners are going to be people that are struggling with their fertility. Some of my listeners might be other practitioners, or might be just people who are interested or just like listening to podcasts or, you know, have a have a passion for women's health. So I really, really want to get a sense of what proportion of my listeners are other practitioners, what proportion are people that are just interested and enjoy listening to health podcasts, and what proportion of my listeners are actually people who are going through this fertility journey, and are benefiting from a bit more directly from the content of the episode. So whatever your status is, in terms of who you are, and why you listen, I really want to hear from you. So as I say, I'll send out the the form, the google form with the questions. And at the bottom of the form, you can enter your email address in order to win one of the three prizes. So the three prizes are, drumroll drrrrrrrrr, I need a little, I need a little pad,

00:00 Hello, you are listening to Katy Bradbury, a registered nurse and nutritional therapist. today's podcast episode is called Micronutrients Series, Macro Minerals, Part 1.   00:27 So hello, and welcome to the show today, I'm really happy to be talking to you again. It's been a couple of weeks. So, if you're a keen and regular listener, you might have noticed that episodes over this time have been a touch sporadic. And that is, by no means a reflection on my desire to come and speak to you. It is just a reflection of how busy this summer has been in being away. And quite frankly, me just not being organised enough to pre-record episodes too, you know, so that I'm releasing them while, while I'm away. So accept my apologies for that. I'm actually going to be getting back on to the micronutrient series, this week. I took a little break from it with the last episode and shared a few strategies in the last episode I recorded a couple of weeks ago on how, how to navigate some of the trickier times some of the trickier points in the road when you are on this fertility journey. So, it just came at a time for me when quite a lot of the people that I was talking to were at a bit of a crossroads with regard to their fertility journey. And I just thought, Look, if I'm talking to a lot of people for whom this is relevant for right now, I'm sure it's going to be helpful for a lot of you. So if you did listen, I hope that you found it helpful. It involved a practical exercise. So please let me know how you got on with that I love hearing from you can always contact me on Instagram @katybradburyhealth or by email on support@katybradbury.com.   02:36 But anyway, without further ado, I'm going to continue talking about micronutrients this week, which for me as a nutritional therapist it is a super exciting topic. And I hope that I've been able to keep your interest in talking. As I have so far I've covered the range of different vitamins. So I've covered the fat soluble and the water soluble vitamins as they pertain to fertility and getting and staying pregnant. So hopefully, what I've shared so far has been interesting and informative. And I'm going to move on now from the vitamins to cover some of the minerals and what I've decided to do is divide it into what we call the macro minerals. And, and then some of that some of the smaller minerals, the trace minerals, so when we're talking about macro minerals, we're talking about the larger minerals, so minerals that we might typically measure in milligrammes rather than microgrammes. And there are four main macro minerals, and they are calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium. So, I'm going to talk to you today, just about magnesium, because if you ask any nutritional therapist, and this may not be a question that you ask people very often, but in my world, it's a fairly common question. If you ask any nutritional therapist, what's your favourite mineral? I can guarantee that 90% of nutritional therapists would say that magnesium is their favourite mineral. And the reason for that is because magnesium is responsible for so, so much in the body.   04:46 At, we're learning more and more about magnesium and indeed all nutrients but I think at last count it was it was, you know, over hundreds of processes in the body that magnesium is associated with. And that's because there are things that directly require magnesium. And there are also things that require magnesium as a co-factor. So a part of the process in, you know, some kind of conversion within the body that requires magnesium to be there. So, and that includes things like hormone production. So, I wanted to talk to you just about magnesium today, I may group some of the other minerals together in future episodes, but magnesium, there is quite a bit to say about it. Now, I'm not going to go into detail about the hundreds of processes that magnesium is responsible for, but I am going to give an overview.   05:44 So one of the first things that we think about when we think about magnesium is its role in energy production. So the unit of energy in the body, so that the currency, if you like, for energy is called ATP. So every cell in your body, every process that happens in your body at any given time, requires units of ATP to be able to work. And so it's, it is just like, as I say, it's the currency for energy in your body. And magnesium is directly involved in the production of ATP. So there's something called the Krebs cycle and the electron transport chain. And they are parts of the energy production process. And they require magnesium. So really, really important. So often, you know, people who are like super tired, super low energy, we might be thinking about magnesium for, for those people. Now, I know that that doesn't pertain to fertility, in the most direct sense, but you know, if we're thinking, as I say about every process in the body, requiring energy requiring ATP, then it's pretty fundamental. One of the things that actually links into that, I'm just going to jump slightly from my intended order of play, if you like. And one of the things that that links to in terms of the energy and ATP is sperm, because what needs to move pretty quickly and in the right direction, its sperm, so ATP, so magnesium has a role to play in the motility of sperm. So if you're, if you or your partner has had their sperm tested, then you'll know that one of the measures of sperm is motility. And that is how efficiently the sperm actually moves because it needs to get to the right place. So magnesium is involved in that process, because those those little guys need ATP, they need magnesium in order to actually get to where they need to go. So that's, that's one consideration.   08:11 Now, the next thing that magnesium relates to, when it comes to processes in the body, involving fertility or things, fertility is a pretty important one. And that is that it is required for a number of steps during the synthesis of DNA, and RNA. So when we're thinking about, again, making a baby, so once we've got a fertilised egg, the thing that needs to happen next is that, yeah, that needs to be the DNA needs to be synthesised, right. So really important for there to be adequate magnesium, amongst other things to actually help that DNA do what it needs to do to actually make that baby. So really important in DNA synthesis its also involved in glutathione synthesis. So glutathione for anyone who is not familiar, is is kind of known as the master antioxidant. So there are lots and lots of different antioxidants. A number of the vitamins that I've spoken about already within this mini series are antioxidants of their own accord. There are other antioxidants as well and I often talk about having a diet rich in antioxidants. And one of the best ways to do that is by eating a whole range of different colours in your fruit and veg because all of the different coloured pigments contain a different type of antioxidant. But glutathione is yeah it's seen as the master antioxidant. And we know that these antioxidants, what they're important for when it comes to fertility is we're really thinking about the health of the egg, and the health of the sperm. Because it's oxidative stress, which can be higher as we age, it can be higher as we are exposed to different stressors, whether they are chemical, whether they're things that we're breathing, you know, air pollution, whether they are like exposure to plastics, whether they are pesticides in our foods. Lots, you know, stress even, you know, actual emotional stress, all of those things can cause oxidative stress and reactions in the body. So, the antioxidants, what the antioxidants do is help to mop up that oxidative stress. And of course, this directly impacts, so the oxidative stress, the level of oxidative stress in the body does have an impact on the health of your sperm and the health of your egg. So if you, you know, if you've got issues with sperm, if you are worried about the health of your eggs, then really important thing to consider.   11:51 Some of the other things that magnesium plays an important role in is, one is methylation. So methylation is something that I talk with my clients a lot about. It is a process that happens constantly in your body in most cells all of the time. And methylation is actually involved in again, DNA synthesis and repair. And it's also involved in the way that we metabolise hormones, particularly oestrogen, but also thyroid hormones and other things. So really, magnesium acts as there are lots of co-factors within the various methylation cycles that have to occur. And magnesium is one of the co-factors along with all of the B vitamins, zinc and a number of other compounds. So really important to consider in the context of methylation as well. And hormone production. So we're already building up a picture, that magnesium is pretty essential across the board, for many of the different things that we might be considering with regards to fertility. Some of the other things that magnesium is involved in so is involved in our, it has a role to play within our kind of absorption process, for vitamin D and calcium. And then some of the other, I guess, less direct things that magnesium has a role to play in. And this is a really interesting one is that magnesium has been linked in the research to systemic inflammation. So I talk about inflammation a lot. It is something that we really want to try and reduce or avoid when it comes to fertility for a number of reasons. If you don't know why, then do go and check out my one of my earliest podcast episodes that I refer back to all the time, which is called the Fire thats stopping you from getting pregnant. It's a really, it's an essential listen if you're trying to get pregnant. So please do go back and listen to that episode, if you haven't already. So systemic inflammation, so there was a study, this is interesting, there was a cross

In today's episode, Katy talks about some of the places she often feels people feeling stuck and unable to know what to do next on their fertility journey. She walks you through a practical exercise to enable you to open up to whatever the future holds. 00:00 Hello, you are listening to Katy Bradbury registered nurse and nutritional therapist. Today's podcast episode is called 'How To Know When It Is The End Of The Road'. 00:28 So hello, and welcome to this week's show. I'm taking a little break from the micronutrient miniseries having wrapped up the conversation covering all of the vitamins from the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K to the water soluble vitamins, C and the various B vitamins. 00:57 Now, I thought I'd take a break - I do want to revisit the micronutrient series and run through some of the really important minerals, because minerals have just as important a role to play for fertility as the vitamins do, particularly some some key minerals. As it's quite a long miniseries, I wanted to scatter a few other topics into the mix as well and I thought that ending the vitamins was a good little opportunity to do that. 01:37 Now, I wanted to talk to you today about how to know when it's the end of the road for your journey. Now before you switch this episode off thinking that either it's not relevant for you, or that it just feels a little bit too bleak and it feels maybe a bit too painful even to listen to an episode like this, please, please give it a chance. Because actually, regardless of where you are on your fertility journey, whether it has felt like a road that is far too long travelled or if you're just starting out the contents of this episode, it's a practical episode today. And the contents of the episode is really to give yourself some warm, nurturing space to actually explore some of these options in a really safe setting and will allow yourself some space to feel what comes up and to explore in writing what some of your options are for the future. So I urge you - even if you're not at a point on your journey where you're thinking it might be time to pack it in - I urge you to listen and to take part and to actually do the exercise with me today because so much of the fertility journey (and I remember this so well from my own) is tainted with fear. And it's tainted with the fear of 'what if it never happens'. And I can remember that that was the thing - that was the thought that was in my mind the entire time for me. And that is a horrible thought to be living with every day. So regardless of whether you feel like you've got a long battle ahead, or you don't know, or you're nowhere near giving up just now, the purpose of this episode isn't to tell you to give up, absolutely not. It's just to have that space to explore.   03:44 So the reason I'm recording this episode is because it has come up as a bit of a theme across a few of my clients recently. They're people, typically, who have undergone multiple rounds of IVF, or they've had losses that have been really painful emotionally. And perhaps they feel like they've got a decision to make. So for a few of them, they've got embryos in the freezer, and they just don't know if they can handle doing it again. I've got a couple of people in that situation. I've got a couple of people who feel like maybe they're just too old now and at what point do you call it a day when when you're getting older and it hasn't happened? So there are a number of people in my world who I speak to, who have got these thoughts running through their head and I thought, if they do, then there's a good chance that you do too, as a listener. Some of the circumstances that you might find yourself in at the moment - I've given a few examples already - you might be tearing yourself apart as to whether to put an embryo (if you've got an embryo) in the freezer, whether to put it in, whether to give it a go or not. It might be knowing whether to invest in one more round of IVF - and that could be because you said the last one was going to be the last one - or whatever it might be. So knowing whether to invest in one more round of IVF. It might be making the decision with your partner to stop actively trying, it might be deciding not to go ahead with a donated cycle and changing your mind. As I say, the circumstances in which you might find yourself are vastly different, but it's such an important exercise, regardless of your situation. This exercise gives you that little chance and that opportunity to actually face some of those fears that you might be living with every day and that you might have lived with for a very long time. What I'd love for you to do today is actually (and I don't know where you listen - maybe you listen while you're doing something else, so perhaps you listen while you're on your commute, or if you're walking the dog or or cooking) and now might not feel like the best time to sit down and do an exercise and by all means just listen along and use this episode as a reflective tool. But if you can give yourself the space to actually sit down and do the exercises that I'm going to walk you through today, I promise you will feel (you might not have the answer) but you will get some clarity and you will have some emotional processing that happens as a result of this, that can just help you with day to day life, of feeling the weight of such big decisions ahead. 07:00 So first of all, I really want you to sit with a question. So we're going do some some deep breaths in a minute together. But before we take the deep breaths, I want you to close your eyes and have a think about what that question might be for you. And it's a 'what if?' question. It's going to be pertinent to your situation - it might be 'what if we don't go ahead with the next round of IVF?'. 'What if we never have a baby?'. 'What if we never give my child a sibling?'. Whatever it is, whatever your biggest fear is at the moment, whatever the question is that's causing you the most turmoil at the moment, I want you to sit with that question: 'what if'. So, whatever comes up for you here, this is your opportunity in a really safe space (because you are safe at the moment listening to this, listening to the sound of my voice) you're absolutely safe, and I want you to sit with whatever feelings come up and whatever feelings come up for you are completely valid. Maybe those feelings are so raw for you right now that it brings up tears straightaway and you might even feel that blubbery 'can't control the tears', and that's okay, let them come. Let those tears come if that is where you're at right now. But it might be that different feelings come up, so we're going to just sit down now, we're going to do some breathing together, knowing that you're safe and knowing that you're going to take the time to do some journaling after this so that you're allowing yourself the space to let these feelings pass through. So it's perfectly safe to feel whatever comes up. So let's do some deep breathing. I'm going to guide you through deep breaths. We're going to breathe in for the count of four, hold for just a moment at the top of the breath, and we're going to breathe out for six. 08:59 If you're listening to my podcast I'll be counting along with you but if you're reading this and doing it yourself at home, repeat the breathing in and out for two or three minutes to relax yourself. 11:41 So just giving yourself a little moment to reflect on whatever feelings came up for you by allowing yourself that time, allowing yourself that space and allowing yourself those breaths, to sit with the question, or those questions, whatever it was that you asked yourself at the start of the exercise. Now what I'd like you to do is get your pen and paper ready because we're going to do some journaling and we're going to ask some questions around what came up, so you might want to press pause after each question (if you're listening to the podcast rather than reading!) to really give yourself the space to answer the question properly. So question number one is, 'what feelings came up for me?'. And when we're talking about what feelings came up for you here, I want you to be really specific, I want you to really get into the nitty gritty of what feelings came up. So if it was a sadness, what kind of sadness was it? Was it a longing? Was it a feeling let down? If you were feeling scared, what was what was the fear? Was it feeling terrified? Was it like a dull feeling in the pit of your stomach? Really trying to get specific on what those feelings were and what those feelings are that are dwelling within you, that you've been living with, potentially for a long time. Get as specific as possible about the feelings. Then question number two, once you've had a chance to talk through and explore some of the feelings that came up specifically, is 'what thoughts came up behind those feelings?' So some of the thoughts - really, really give yourself the chance to sit with this. And if you need to sit down and rewind and do some deep breaths again, to really sit with yourself and allow whatever thoughts they are to come up so that you can write them down, that is fine. Do whatever it takes because what I want for you is to get down, physically on paper, using your hand, what your feelings were and what the thoughts were. And some of these thoughts, as I say, could be surprising - some examples (I'm not putting these thoughts on you by any stretch of the imagination) that could have come up for you might be 'I don't know if I'd be a good enough mother'. 'I've let everybody down'. 'I can't imagine a life without children'. 'I feel so hurt from this journey, I don't know if I can do it any more'. 'I'm scared my partner will leave me if we can't have children'. All of those are really valid thoughts and there are hundreds of other thoughts that might come up for you. Those are just a few examples. So sit with it and give yourself the space t

00:02 Hello, I'm Katie Bradbury, nutritional therapist and registered nurse. Today's podcast episode is called The Micronutrient Series - Water Soluble Vitamins - Part Three.   00:15 So hello, and welcome to today's episode. I really hope that you're doing well. I am continuing this episode with the final instalment of the vitamins section of my micronutrient mini series. Now, that might be a bit of a mouthful, and it might not sound particularly exciting. If you're on a fertility journey, and you're new to the podcast, you might want to start an episode that feels more relatable to you in terms of where you're at right now. I've got plenty of previous content, including things such as how gut health relates to fertility, and I've got episodes on pregnancy loss, I've got lots of episodes on nutrition and nutrition as a whole and its' impact on fertility. I've got episodes on stress and impact of disordered eating and vaginal health and sperm power. So lots and lots of things to choose from. If you're a bit of a 'Fertility and the first 1000 days' podcast connoisseur, then this is absolutely the right place for you. And even if you've got an in depth knowledge or an in depth interest in nutrition, then this could be really interesting for you. So the micronutrient mini series, I've been just shining the spotlight on the micronutrients. So the micronutrients, mainly we're thinking about the vitamins and minerals - and there are lots and lots of different vitamins and minerals. I'm slowly working my way through them because I speak a lot about the balance of the macronutrients in terms of carbohydrates, and proteins and fats. I speak a lot about proportions - what sort of proportions on a plate we should be looking at, ideally in terms of those three food groups and how vegetables fit into that as well. But really, within that are these little superheroes, which are the micronutrients and the micronutrients are responsible for hundreds or thousands of processes within the body. That includes for fertility; whether that's to do with hormone synthesis, whether it's to do with egg health, whether it's to do with gene transcription, when we're actually creating a baby, whether it's to do with any kind of chemical messaging within the brain. Each of the micronutrients has a super important role to play and if you've been listening to the micronutrient series, within this podcast so far (because I have already covered the fat soluble vitamins, so vitamins A, D, E, and K, and I've covered most of the water soluble vitamins, so vitamin C, and I gave a bit of an overview of the B vitamins last episode) if you have been listening to that so far, then hopefully you're starting to get an idea of the importance, individually, of some of these nutrients. So it really is a matter of letting no man be left behind when it comes to these micronutrients. I'm hoping that with these episodes, it will help you to reflect on what your current nutrient intake looks like at the moment. I'm not thinking about supplements here; I'm thinking about diet, I'm thinking about what you're what you're actually consuming, because we always need to be thinking about nutrition first, the diet always comes first and the supplements are there to supplement that. So thinking about your own diet and hopefully this might help you, this micronutrient mini series, to identify whether there might be any possible nutrient, even if not nutrient deficiencies then nutrient insufficiencies, like not getting enough for your needs from a fertility point of view. So without further ado - I said last episode that there are quite a few B vitamins, so we've got B1, B2, B3, B5, B6   05:02 B9 and B12, so there are quite a number of them - and rather than shine the spotlight on every single one of them as an individual in each episode as I've done it in the previous episodes, because the B vitamins, as I explained last week, work really well collectively together. That's why they're often found in a B complex in supplements and in vitamin products. And there's a lot of overlap, there's a lot of crossover in the roles they play. So overall, as I said, last week, we're thinking about energy production, we're thinking about gene transcription. And I thought I'd just following last week's episodes, where I gave a bit of an overview on the B vitamins as a whole, I thought I'd just shine the spotlight this week on three of my favourite B vitamins because I do have favourites. And these are ones that I'm often thinking about in the context of fertility, and they're often ones that I'm wanting to ensure are found in adequate amounts for my fertility clients. And I often check their levels of some of these B vitamins using blood testing. So starting from B6, where as I explained last week, about the B vitamins as a whole being linked to energy production and metabolism, and I guess, being quite excitatory in that respect for our cells, B6, although it is involved in energy production, it's genuinely seen as quite a calming micronutrient. And the reason for that is because it's linked in with our neurotransmitter production. And it's specifically it's a bit of an enzymatic precursor to serotonin, which is, you know, it's quite, it's a bit of a happy hormone, I guess. And so, I'm often thinking about vitamin B6. And I'd love to know if this is you, because this is a lot of my clients. And a lot of my clients are really caught up in their head. And that's easily done when you're on a fertility journey, because it's a rough ride, and I get that, but lots of the people that come to me as one to one clients are, and I'm the same I've done a lot of work on this, but my predisposition, is to be quite high anxiety and lots of people are and so if you are typically a bit of an anxious person, and especially if you get anxious or angry even around the time of your menstrual cycle, so you know, in that pre menstrual period, then I'm often thinking about B6 for those kind of clients. And wondering whether their B6 might be either a bit on the low side because of dietary intake, or because they're using it up a little bit faster. And because of that anxiety disposition, so B6, that's why it's one of my favourites because it is quite a calming one and it's often overlooked as well. So B6 in terms of its, of course, it does still do all those other functions around helping to convert food into energy. It helps to make red blood cells as well which is super important. And critically, it helps to maintain and these three super B vitamins if you like these B6, B9 folate and the B12 that I'm talking about today, these all worked together really beautifully these three to help maintain normal levels of homocysteine in the blood. Now homocysteine is an inflammatory marker. So when homocysteine is elevated over time, for various reasons, it can contribute to long term inflammation and it is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease and those big killers in the modern world. Now I know this podcast isn't about kind of cardiovascular disease and overall health. However, if you listen back to my most quoted podcast in the series, which is the fire that stops you from getting pregnant, we can really pinpoint that inflammation and various inflammatory mechanisms over time   09:57 is really one of the key drivers that we want to be minimising, we really want to be dampening down those inflammatory responses when we're thinking about fertility, because when we're thinking about if the body is inflamed for whatever reason, then it's going to be prioritising that, because inflammation is critically associated as far as that on a cellular level with a threat to life. And so our body will always be prioritising the threat to life over reproductive health. So we want to be keeping inflammation in check. And so these three B vitamins work together to actually help recycle homocysteine into another product called methionine, which in turn turns into a product called SAM-e, which is called a methyl donor, which just helps in the methylation process, which is responsible for normal hormone production and general metabolism, detoxification and gene transcription. So all of those things, all of those processes are really important in the context of fertility, the three super B vitamins that I'm talking to you about today, the B6, B9 and B12, they all work together to help to normalise levels of homocysteine in the bloodstream and thus lower inflammation. So good sources of B6 include fish, so things like salmon, tuna, halibut, any kind of fish really, but those three are probably the highest. Poultry - so chicken, turkey, duck, and also nuts. So hazelnuts, walnuts, pistachios, those are all really nice sources of vitamin B6. So to move on to vitamin B9, which is folate, so I do have a whole podcast episode related to folate in a previous one. So this is a bit more of a snapshot of folate, but if you do want to hear more about the importance of folate, and how critical it is for reproductive health, please do go back and listen to that episode. I'll link to it in the show notes. But folate, vitamin B9, you may know it as folic acid. So lots and lots of people do supplement with folic acid and indeed the NHS recommendations of everyone who's trying to get pregnant to supplement with folic acid for at least three months before trying to conceive. And the reason for that is because of this link. And it's actually because of this link to that methylation process that I just mentioned. But how that plays out is, it was found in the research, that people who had lower levels of folate are at higher risk for having birth defects, namely neural tube defects like spina bifida. So as a preventative measure for that the NHS guidelines is to take 400 micrograms of folic acid prior to conceiving to help reduce the likelihood of that, now, that is a bit of a contentious issue. I'm not going to sit here and talk about the debate betwee

00:00 Hi, I'm Katie Bradbury, a registered nurse and nutritional therapist. Today's podcast episode is The micronutrient series, water soluble vitamins part 2.   00:29 So, in today's episode, I'm going to be introducing you to the second set of water soluble vitamins, and that is the B vitamins. I've thought long and hard about how to do this because there are actually quite a number of B vitamins. So there's vitamin B1, B2, B3, B6, B9, and B12, and they all work quite synergistically, so it's kind of difficult to break them down, like the other ones where I've done for the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K, I covered those in an episode per vitamin. And again, with the water soluble vitamins part one, which was vitamin C, I covered that in one episode as well. So the B vitamins are a bit of a funny one, and I've wondered how best to actually present this episode because it felt as though there was too much to say about the B vitamins to do it all in one episode because some of them have particularly significant relevance for fertility. But equally, it didn't really make sense to go through and have a whole episode on each of the six B vitamins. So what I decided to do and I started writing some notes this afternoon about going through some of them, and I was going to group them together. I was going to do in today's episode, I was going to do B1 through B3, or possibly through to B6, and then I was going to do separate episodes on B9, which is folate. I have already done an episode on folate, actually, but it was quite a long time ago now, and I have referred people to it a few times, but I think because it is such an important nutrient for fertility, I think I will do an episode on B9 specifically and then on the B12 as well as that's also another really important one for fertility. But I will tell you what I'm going to do instead, and that is to just give you a general intro today and a general overview as to the B vitamins as a collective, and then in the next episode, I will shine the spotlight specifically on some functions around fertility. So I will shine the spotlight on B9, which is folate and B12, as I said, and the reason I'm going to do it like that is because I don't actually want to spend too long in my husband's studio tonight. And it's absolutely not because I don't want to come and talk to you because I love coming to talk to you. I've been doing it for a long time now, and I am especially full of VAVA voom to come and talk to you because if you're a regular listener, you will know that I took a little break last week when I was on holiday. And it was just delightful. So I'm like full of beans, and I'm raring to go. However, I'm gonna have to tell you this story as any of you who are based in the UK or Europe at the moment will know that we are in the midst of a bit of a heatwave. It's going to be descending in on us a little bit more over the next couple of days, but my husband and I today, as it's Sunday, it's been the weekend, so we've been around the house this weekend. My husband and I today have been adopting the principles in a bid to keep the rooms in the house as cool as possible. If it's hotter outdoors than it is indoors, then the windows and curtains stay closed to try and retain the coolness in the house. If it's cooler outdoors, then we open the windows and doors. So it's Sunday evening now, and we have just got back from my parent's house for dinner. And you know, the air has cooled down a bit, so we're kind of going through the process of opening all the windows and doors. So the studio where I record this podcast which is my husband's music studio at the bottom of the garden, which a lot of you regular listeners will know already, we'd thrown the doors open when we got back, and my husband devotedly set up the podcast for me.   05:07 And then I came in, and I was just sitting here kind of just finalising, well, you know, carrying on with a few of my notes and preparing what I was going to say to you today, and we get quite a lot of mosquitoes around where we live, God knows why we live in the middle of London, well not in the middle, but we live in the East End of London, we don't live near any stagnant water that I know of, we live like fairly close to the River Thames, which is flowing water, I've no idea why there was such an abundance of mosquitoes in our area. And it's so bad that we can't actually leave the windows open at nighttime because we just get bitten to shreds. I'm sitting in the studio and just preparing what I was going to say to you, and the doors were wide open in this bid to keep the studio, to cool it down because my husband has to come and work in here all day tomorrow. And Oh, I noticed a couple of mosquitoes, right. And that's nothing unusual. As I say, we do get quite a few mosquitoes. And I kind of, you know, clapped a couple of my hands to kill them. Sorry, if anybody is a devout mosquito lover, you might want to not listen to the next part. And then I was like, do you know what, like there are quite a few mosquitoes in here now, and I'm in here with the light on, and the door is wide open, so I'm just going to shut the door while I record and then I will leave it open again afterwards to cool the room down. So I closed the door, and then I turned around to look back at the wall. The walls in this room are painted a brilliant white, and it was like something out of a horror story. I just turned around and looked, and they were just everywhere. There must have been about 30 mosquitoes in here just like sat like across the ceiling, and the wall was so just before hitting play on this episode. I've just been on a mosquito massacre. And yeah, my adrenaline was properly pumping. So that's what I've just finished doing. Thankfully, none of them were bloody, so none of them have got me, and I'm hoping that I've got all of them, and then there weren't any sneaky ones hiding. But you know, when you kill them, I'm gonna have to come and clean my husband's walls tomorrow because there are just mosquitoes smeared all over the walls. I feel really bad anyway. So for part of that reason, I don't want to spend too much time in the studio this evening because I don't want to get eaten alive by any, ah! And I've actually just seen one, there, Oh you little sneaky you. So there are definitely still a few lurking about, and they've got their eye on me because I've killed their cousins. So, yeah, that's my little story out of the way.   08:07 What I thought I would do today actually is just have, instead of going through the B vitamins one by one, just give you a bit of an overview about the B vitamins in general because B vitamins are really, really important. For fertility, yes, as for specific parts of fertility. But just generally, in terms of the way our body can function like we could not function without B vitamins. And the reason for that is because the B vitamins are the vitamin that is primarily associated with energy. Primarily associated with our body's ability to actually convert the macronutrients that we eat, so the proteins, the fats and the carbs into actual energy. And so the unit of energy that our body uses at a cellular level to complete hundreds of 1000s of different things is ATP, which stands for, can I even remember what ATP stands for now? It stands for adenosine triphosphate, which, as I say, it's the unit of energy that is used for so many cellular processes across the body, so energy metabolism. So, how many of you have low energy, right? Probably a lot. It's really, really common to have low energy. And I'm not saying that that's because you're deficient in B vitamins, necessarily; although you might be, B vitamins often have a lot to do with it. And so, there are lots of things that can deplete the B vitamins as well. And one of the big ones is the oral contraceptive pill. So that's really significant, isn't it and the amount of clients that I've had that have come to me, and I was in this situation as well, I was on the oral contraceptive pill for probably about 11 years or so before I came off, and I didn't even start to try to conceive immediately when it came off the oral contraceptive pill because I knew it might take a while for my body to regulate again. But one of the things that I would have been depleted in after taking the contraceptive pill for so long would have been B vitamins. So yeah, that's, that's really the overview of the B vitamins. And another really important role that they play is in DNA synthesis. So again, that's one of the reasons they are important for fertility. So those are huge reasons in their own right as to why B vitamins are really some of the first vitamins that we should be thinking about making sure that we have enough of from a fertility point of view.   08:52 Lots of us, as I say, the reason that you might be depleted in them is that you don't have enough of them in your diet. They are widely found, B vitamins are widely, and they're slightly different. Each B vitamin is found in slightly different or is high in slightly different sets of foods. But generally speaking, when we're thinking about the B vitamins, we're often thinking about animal products, right? So we're often thinking about meats, fish, and poultry, but they are found in lots of other things, they're found widely across the food world, but we just might not have quite enough of them to meet our needs a lot of the time. So all the things that I talked about if you're eating a Mediterranean diet, and you're having like your dark green leafy veg, and your nuts and your seeds and your variety of plant foods. And if you tolerate it well, then some dairy, and then there's fish, legumes, beans and also there are some fortified foods as well, that have been fortified with B vitamins.   11:19 So if you are eating that Mediterranean style diet, then you will have a nice amount of B vitamins in your body. And, but they can often become deple

00:00 Hi. I'm Katie Bradbury, nutritional therapist and registered nurse. Today's podcast episode is called, I'm taking a short break, and so should you.   00:14 So Hello, good evening. I'm saying good evening because I'm recording this on a Sunday evening, as usual. I would love to hear from you, actually, where you listen to the podcast and when I know that I do have quite a few loyal listeners. But I'd love to hear a bit more about where you tend to listen to the podcast, whether you sit down and listen, whether you listen to podcasts in the evening when you're all doing your relaxing, or whether you listen to them on the go, like maybe on your commute to work, or while you're out walking the dog or while you're prepping food. I'd really love to hear where you listen. You can always tag me on Instagram at KatyBradburyHealth.com or do a story and tag me into that story. So that I can hear from you as to when and where you listen, I'd love that.   01:33 But to get on with the contents of the show today. Some of my regular listeners might have been expecting a podcast to start talking about some of the B vitamins today, which is part of the micronutrient series I've been doing. I've been really enjoying it so far, actually. So I've covered fat soluble vitamins, which are vitamins A, D, E, and K. Last week, I spoke about vitamin C, which is the first of the water soluble vitamins. My plan for the next instalments of the series is to run through the B vitamins. However, I've decided to take a very, very short break from the podcast, mostly because I'm going to be away next week, so I'm not going to be here anyway to record next week. I'm just going to share with you why I'm not going to do a proper episode this week and why I've decided to come and talk to you briefly about this instead because I'm pretty sure that lots of you will relate to this. So as I just mentioned, I am going away next week, this coming week rather and in the lead up to me going away, so over the last couple of days, I've noticed that I started feeling quite stressed. I started getting a bit anxious, and I realised that it's because I've got a lot to do still before I go away, and I've had to slot in quite a lot of one-to-one clients; well, I haven't had to, but I wanted to, who were keen to get an appointment in before I went away. And over the last couple of days, like yesterday morning, I woke up, and I found myself being a little bit irritable with my husband. He was like, Oh, what's the matter? You know, he recognised this, he said, What's the matter? And I said, oh gosh, I'm just like, I said, Danny, I'm really sorry if I'm like a bit agitated over the next couple of days, it's because my mind is now starting to ramp up over basically just thinking ahead to the next three days and wondering how on earth I am going to fit in everything that I need to do before I go away, and that's like in terms of sorting out the house stuff, sorting out the washing stuff, sorting out family stuff, sorting out clients stuff, sorting out my stuff, and not even thinking about packing and sorting out who's gonna look after the cat and yada yada yada, making lists and sorting out travel stuff. We've seemingly barely any time to do it, and I was starting to get quite anxious, and I said look, you're just going to have to bear with me over the next couple of days because I might be a bit irritable, so I'm sorry in advance. I started thinking today, again, my mind was wearing with all the things, and I was like, oh gosh, thinking about all the things I had to do and on my list of things to do today, of course, with it being Sunday was to plan and record the latest podcast. And I just thought you know what, I'm going to lead by example here because I'm always saying to people, you need to do what you need to do. And a big, big theme for me over the last six months, so over 2022, has been looking after myself a lot better, being a lot more boundaries, trying to really, really reduce my own stress levels. I've like, implemented some really solid morning routines. I have really started meditating a lot more seriously, a lot more regularly, doing breath work a lot more and really, really trying to buffer my own stress levels. And lead by example, in that respect, and I've had the help of a fantastic coach who I've been working with. And I just thought you know what, sod it, I'm not going to do the podcast today. I will come because I love coming in talking to you each week, but I would just come and do a very quick episode and explain where my head's at.   06:31 A big thing for me is that, with regards to stress and well-being, is that I know from some of the genetic testing that I've done on myself, because I know I'm always talking to you guys about testing, and I do, I've done all the tests on myself as well. So I've done genetic testing on myself, and I know from that, that I have some genes that predispose me to have slow clearance of catecholamines. With catecholamines being some of the big fight or flight response hormones that are produced by the adrenal glands, so adrenaline, noradrenaline, and I clear those slowly. So once they're there, once they're in my system, once my body has had that release of those stress hormones in my body, it tends to, and this isn't always the case, the genes are the gun, and the environment is the trigger, right. But I know this to be true for myself, is that once those stress hormones, once those fight or flight responses have happened in me, it takes me a long time to calm down, and I get really anxious, and I get really jittery. And I know all of these things about myself, and I woke up this morning, I found myself getting anxious and jittery, and I said, you know what, I'm going to pare down wherever I can, I'm going to really take the time to not stress because what I really don't want to do and what none of you should be doing is that classic thing, where you, and I'd love to know if you can relate to this, I know a lot of people that I work with do, is where you go all out, you feel as though, there's thing isn't there, there's almost a cultural thing, even where, if we know we're going to have some time off, which we know we're going away we feel like we need to like work ourselves into the ground before we do. And it's almost; there's almost like a self-worth piece in there. Like, oh, I don't deserve this. I don't deserve to go away, and I don't deserve a break. I'm not worthy of that break, and therefore I must, must, must, must, must, must, must just like almost burn myself out before I go to even vaguely deserve it. And I know that's not true. I know that's not true for me. I know I deserve a break, and I know you do too.   09:06 So I'm here to ask of you today, and I'm going to wrap up in just a second, to use the time that you would usually spend listening to this podcast and thank you, by the way, for showing up and for being here as one of my wonderful listeners, I really, really appreciate you. So what I ask is that you spend the remainder of the time that you would normally be spending listening to me every week, so you know, half an hour or so. Do it today. This time that you've allocated, just spend the next 15 minutes or so doing something that's going to help you slow down. That's going to help you take a break. So whether that's sitting and doing meditation, whether it's just sitting and contemplating, whether it's just going outside in nature and looking at the trees and just admiring what they look like, whether it's maybe even just doing a little bit of meal planning and thinking about how you can next nourish your body, whatever it might look like but something that is really gentle and really nourishing for either your dy or your soul. Just spend that time, spend the rest of the time this week and also, because I'm not here next week, allocate yourself half an hour next weekend, or whenever you would typically listen to the podcast to just do some deep breathing, whatever it looks like for you take that break, because you honestly, you honestly do deserve it. And the repercussions that you get from prioritising yourself and for just slowing down and giving yourself that space, that loving space, are huge. They're golden, actually, and we so rarely do it enough.   10:53 So that's what I've come to say to you today. I would love to hear from you. I'd love to hear what you're doing to hold you accountable. I'd love to hear what you're doing at this time and how you're going to use his time today, now, and also next week in my absence. So that's it; I'm gonna wrap up to give you your space and your time. And I will be back again in a couple of weeks, coming and resuming the micronutrient series to talk to you all about those really super important B vitamins and how they relate to fertility.   11:33 Over and out. Bye bye   WAYS THAT YOU CAN GET KATY'S HELP: Fertility and the First 1,000 Days Membership: Fertility and the First 1,000 Days Membership Fundamentals for Fertility online course: 12-Week Fundamentals for Fertility Course with Katy Bradbury (evergreen) Book a discovery call to talk through your needs for working together 1:1: Practice Better More info can be found about Katy on her website: https://katybradbury.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katybradburyhealth Email: support@katybradbury.com Love the show? Don't forget to leave a star rating and a review to share the love and help it reach others who need to hear this!

00:00 Hello, hello, this is Katy Bradbury, a registered nurse and nutritional therapist. Today's podcast episode is called The Micronutrient Series, Water Soluble Vitamins Part 1.   00:29 So welcome to today's episode. I will cut straight to the chase today as we are moving swiftly through the micronutrient series. If you're a regular listener, you will know that I have spent the last four episodes talking through the fat soluble vitamins, which are vitamins A, D, E, and K, as they relate to both general health but also to fertility. So I'm moving on now, I've wrapped up the fat soluble vitamins, and I'm just gonna spend the next certainly two, probably three, possibly four episodes talking about the water soluble vitamins. And the reason I'm not sure exactly how many episodes this would take is that the B vitamins, so the water soluble vitamins are vitamin C, which is a relatively straightforward one that I'm going to talk to you about today, and then the B vitamins. But there are, in fact, eight different B vitamins. They all work synergistically, which is why they are clumped together. But they are all really important. I don't think I'm going to spend a full nine, sorry, eight episodes go running through the B vitamins. I'm not going to do them with such a fine tooth comb because they are interrelated. But some of the B vitamins do deserve a bit of a spotlight in their own right, for example, B12 and folate B9. So  I think I will probably do it over two, but possibly three episodes, the B vitamins.   02:33 But today, we're keeping it simple, partly because I want to go and watch Glastonbury, and I'm going to go through vitamin C with you today.   02:47 So Vitamin C is a really important nutrient for fertility. It's quite a well known one actually in the fertility sphere. So if you have been on your fertility journey for a little while, if you've been reading up if you've been doing some research if you've been thinking about possibly what supplements you should or shouldn't be taking, then you might have come across or considered vitamin C already. Now, I'm not here to tell you whether or not you should be supplementing with vitamin C, as you know if you are a regular listener, and if you're a first time listener, then I will introduce this concept to you right now, which is that I do not advise on supplements in the podcast. I don't advise on supplements in the podcast. I don't advise on supplements in my group programmes. And that is because it simply would not be appropriate for me to do so because everyone's supplement needs are different. Everyone's stresses and strains on their body are different. And the reasons why you should be taking any supplements are different and unique to you. So I'm not here to tell you whether you should or shouldn't be supplementing with vitamin C, but I'm very happy to tell you that you can get a wonderful amount of vitamin C from the diet.   04:12 So Vitamin C is contained in most plant foods, so it's really abundant in nature. The reason we need to get vitamin C from our food, unlike some other animals, such as dogs, for example, which synthesises their own vitamin C, we do not. So we need to obtain our vitamin C from vegetables and fruits, and plant foods. This is why some carnivorous mammals don't need to eat fruit or vegetables because they synthesise their own vitamin C, so they don't need it, but we do.   04:58 Now we first learned about the importance of vitamin C back in the days when we were doing a lot of sailing. And what was happening when we were doing a lot of the sailing was people getting scurvy. So the sailors were going out for months and months at a time. And after a short period of time, they would, of course, run out of fresh produce because they weren't carrying fresh produce with them. They were relying on tinned preserved foods. Actually, I say tinned. I don't know if they had tinned foods back then, but they certainly preserved foods. But they didn't have refrigeration or anything like we do now. So dried foods, that kind of thing. So they quickly ran out of fresh foods, which meant they quickly ran out of vitamin C, and you can survive without vitamin C for a few months. But once you become truly deficient in vitamin C, it causes scurvy. And scurvy is when your collagen, which is basically responsible for supporting your connective tissue in your body, so your muscles, your joints, etc., start to degrade and even haemorrhage because your blood vessels can't hold themselves together properly. We need collagen inside our bodies. I know that collagen is dubbed a bit of a modern superfood. I know that it's considered in anti-ageing and all of these kinds of things, and absolutely, collagen is important for the elasticity of the skin, and we do produce it on our own because it's really important for holding our muscles and blood vessels and tissues together. But we need to be able to synthesise that collagen from vitamin C. So Vitamin C is really important, we do really need it, but thankfully in the modern day, it's very, very rare that people would actually get scurvy. But nonetheless, we can see how important it is.   05:48 So I've mentioned already, there I've given the game away, one of the main functions of vitamin C, which is the collagen synthesis and kind of working in a cofactor format, I guess, to help with collagen synthesis. It's also really important for brain health. So Vitamin C helps to produce certain neurotransmitters in the brain, so it really supports the nervous system, specifically Serotonin. Serotonin is known as the happy hormone. It's quite calming Serotonin, and it helps to relieve stress and anxiety. So we need vitamin C in order to produce Serotonin properly. We also need great gut health to produce Serotonin properly because the majority of our Serotonin is actually produced in the gut. So that's just a little random side note.   08:31 So neurotransmitter brain health, nervous system collagen, you're maybe starting to get a picture for why some of these things might be important for fertility, but I will expand. The third major function of vitamin C is that it is best known as an antioxidant. So I've spoken already about antioxidants. I mentioned already about the antioxidant properties of vitamin E, and I covered vitamin E and vitamin A as well. There are lots and lots of antioxidants. So lots of phytochemicals, Polyfinos have antioxidant properties that you might have heard of. Components of things like green tea and resveratrol, and I mean there are tones there are tonnes of antioxidants, but Vitamin C is a really potent one. And the lovely thing about antioxidants, or the important thing to remember about antioxidants, I should say, is that it's important to have a mix of both fat soluble and water soluble antioxidants. So when I spoke about vitamin E, that's a great example of a fat soluble antioxidant which is super important for fertility but equally is the water soluble too, so Vitamin C is a really great example of a water soluble antioxidant.   10:06 Now antioxidants are really important for fertility because they help to reduce oxidative stress. So any kind of stress on the body that comes from exposure to chemicals, bad diet, processed foods, anything that our body just doesn't enjoy having and that needs to be processed out of the body, we need antioxidants in order to do that. So factors such as, I'm not a big fan of this term if you know me already, but for want of a better phrase, advanced maternal age, or anyone who's tried to get pregnant in their late 30s into their 40s, you might have been told that the health of your gametes, so your egg health, your sperm health can deteriorate with age. I've certainly done podcast episodes on those things before, so do go back and listen to the podcasts that I've done specifically around egg health and sperm health. But certainly, age, any kind of disease in the body, any unhealthy lifestyle, environmental pollutants, or anything like that can increase oxidative stress in the body. When we have oxidative stress, it can create reactive oxygen species (ROS). So some of you might have heard about that in the context of sperm health, and you can actually look at that and check the levels of ROS in the sperm, but it's the antioxidants, so it's these lovely sources of dietary antioxidants that help to keep that oxidative stress at bay and counter the negative effects of them.   12:09 So those are the main functions of vitamin C, and possibly the most important one around fertility is the antioxidant properties. Again, specifically around fertility, Vitamin C is essential for hormone production and ovulation. It, Oopsy daisy, I just dropped my phone. I'm not going to bother editing that out, so apologies, so it supports the adrenal glands as well. Vitamin C helps normal adrenal function, and if you're not sure what I'm talking about when I say adrenal function, please do go back and listen to the episode I did on the HPOAT axis again if that was complete gibberish to you. Just go back and listen to the episode, and it will all make sense, but really important stuff as far as fertility is concerned. So it supports sperm health and DNA in the sperm. There have been research studies linking vitamin C supplementation with improved sperm motility, sperm count and morphology, and it is also suggested that again, vitamin C supplementation, there has been a study that links it to when taken three months links it to reducing the damage of DNA. Sorry, the level of DNA damage in the sperm, as well. So definitely important for male fertility. For egg and vaginal health, it's a key component in follicular fluid and also a key component for the corpus luteum, which is what is leftover of a follicle. So after a follicle releases an egg, it's the corpus luteum that is left behind, and it's that which is responsible for secreting most of the progesterone in the luteal phase, which is im

00:01 Hello, you are listening to Katy Bradbury, a registered nurse and nutritional therapist. Today's podcast episode is called The Micronutrients Series, Fat Soluble Vitamins Part 4.   00:15 So Hello, good evening, or at least it's evening, as I'm recording this on a Sunday night as ever here in the UK. I am continuing the talk this week, and I've been shining over the last three episodes, the light; I've been shining the light on a few of the micronutrients. So I've been starting with vitamins as they relate to fertility, so been giving a little bit of background, what they found in various facts about them and the things that can impact the status of those vitamins. Now, you may hear, especially if you're a regular listener, that my voice sounds a bit strange today; I do have a bit of a cold going on. I wondered whether it might be COVID. Actually, I did a COVID test yesterday. Here in the UK, at the moment, COVID is definitely on the rise again. I think it's about one in 40 people have it; we've got a variant of Omicron going around that it's like super duper transmissible. So loads and loads of people are getting it or getting it again at the moment. But I didn't actually test positive, so I think it might just be a run-of-the-mill cold. But in any case, I am grateful for your sake as well as mine that today is going to be a relatively short episode because vitamin K, which is the final vitamin in the fat soluble group of vitamins, which covers the A, D, E and K group of vitamins that I've already spoken about. So vitamin K, there's not a huge amount to say about vitamin K. That doesn't mean it's not really important. It is important, and I will run through some of the reasons for that today. But it's not one that I have to go into a huge amount of detail about.   02:33 So I have already covered in the last three episodes some information about fat soluble vitamins, genuinely the things that can impact the absorption of fat soluble vitamins. So do go back and listen to those episodes if you haven't already. If you are a new listener to the show, then perhaps today might not be the best episode to start with. Welcome if you are a new listener. I'm really, really glad to have you here, but starting with a spotlight on vitamin K perhaps isn't the best introduction to me and to my podcast. So do go back and have a listen to perhaps something that is a little bit more relevant to where you're at on your fertility journey. There are plenty of episodes to choose from. I think we're on episode number, oh gosh, 65, 66 now, so there's lots of stuff. I'm sure you'll find something that's pertinent to you and your situation, and then once you've gone and listened to some previous episodes and you're familiar with me and the way I talk and the way I operate, then you know, come to you come back and listen to these this micronutrient mini-series that I'm doing because it is important. I'm just going to pause to do a cheeky sneeze.   03:53 Hello, I just gulped down a cup of steaming hot lemon and ginger tea before I started recording the episode in the hopes that it might help my voice of it, but I don't think it has, so I will spare you having to listen to me for too long because people normally say I've got a soothing voice, but I think today I sound more like a, I don't know a crocodile.   04:22 So vitamin K. So really, there are two main things that we associate with vitamin K, and you might listen to these two things and think this has got nothing to do with fertility. Why am I even bothering? But the truth is Vitamin K is an important nutrient for fertility, just as every single vitamin is important for fertility. The reason for that is because vitamins, by their very nature, are essential micronutrients, and an essential micronutrient means that we do not produce enough of that nutrient within our own bodies without any help from an external setting, so we need to get it externally in order to actually get enough of it.   05:15 So, with that in mind with that principle in mind, every single micronutrient that I talk about here, every single vitamin that I speak about in this mini-series, is essential. It's really important for the general functioning of our body and, thus, fertility.   05:32 So the main thing that we think about when we think about vitamin K, and you may be aware of this already, is clotting. So vitamin K helps our blood to clot, and we often think about blood clotting as being a bad thing. So blood clots are often thought of as a negative thing. If you're listening to this for fertility, which you probably are, then you might think of blood clots in terms of your menstrual cycle in getting lots of clotting. So you might think, Oh, actually, I already get a clot. So I don't want any more of those things. Or you might be thinking about it in terms of cardiovascular disease and thinking about how blood clotting is a risk factor. And that's absolutely right. It is a risk factor for serious life-threatening diseases. But it's also life-saving. So just like everything, if you've listened to me for quite a while now, then you probably have caught the gist of that. Just because too much of one thing is bad doesn't mean that too little of it is good. It has to be somewhere in the middle. So blood clotting, what would happen if our blood didn't clot, and we got a paper cut, for example, or we nicked ourselves shaving, then our blood might not have the clotting factors, it needs to actually stop that bleed. And so we could, you know, we could end up bleeding out for something really simple, like having a cut. So in that respect, blood clotting is there for a reason. We need our blood to clot in those situations. So blood clotting is really important. And you may be aware of the role of vitamin K in newborn infants as well. So if you're listening to this podcast, and you are pregnant already, or you know you've been working with me, and you're pregnant, or you've had a child already, and you've got secondary infertility, then you may well be aware that most infants, well all infants really in the UK, are offered a vitamin K injection at birth, or a Vitamin K oral solution at birth. And the reason for that is because a small percentage of, it's a public health drive, so a small percentage of babies are thought to have depleted stores of vitamin K. And so as a prophylactic measure is a preventative measure to stop them from or to help prevent those small percentage of babies from having a haemorrhage or being at risk of having a haemorrhage, then the Vitamin K is offered, so it's really quite a potent medication.   08:33 Now, really important to note here the vitamin K because of this, this link with blood clotting, is a vitamin that is that does have interactions with medications and potentially supplements as well. So, for example, lots of people that I work with are taking fish oils, and fish oils are a natural anticoagulant, which means it's a blood thinner. Lots of people, not many of my clients, but lots of people in the UK, in the United States, and in the western world, are on anticoagulant blood-thinning medications. So if that is you, please bear in mind that there can be interactions here, and please always speak to your health care provider if you're concerned about any of this. Always be sure before you supplement with any, even over-the-counter, supplements. Please always make sure that they are safe and suitable for you. So really important for blood clotting. But just in that respect, really important for foetal development as well. So we want our blood flow to be as normalised as possible during pregnancy because there is one way in, one way out in terms of via the placenta and how we actually how our blood supply reaches our unborn child during pregnancy. And so really important during pregnancy and foetal development that our blood is as normalised as possible in terms of how it's made up in terms of its constitution.   10:27 Blood clotting is the main thing that we think of with vitamin K, and the other thing is bone health. And bone health, again, you might be thinking, what has bone health got to do with me? Well, first of all, bone health, again, has got a lot to do with a growing foetus, right. So when you're growing a baby, when you're growing a baby from scratch, you're growing bones from scratch. So we need to make sure that there are enough of all of the nutrients that are helpful for bone health and bone development. Vitamin K is one of those. So certainly, although vitamin K might not directly be associated with egg health and sperm health and all of those other things, the repercussions for newborn babies for foetal development are significant. So we want to be thinking about this stuff now and wanting to be making sure that we are getting an adequate intake of all of these essential nutrients.   11:36 So involved in bone support, vitamin K is linked to our bone mineral density. So lots of people get that done as a reading. They get their bone mineral density measured. And whilst it's true that people, particularly women in their later years, are more susceptible to lower bone mineral density and therefore at higher risk for breaks, fractures, etc. There are certain people in the pre-menopausal years who are also at risk of frequent fractures and bone breaks, etc. So vitamin K may be worth thinking about in those situations.   12:24 The other thing, of course, that we linked to bone mineral density is that it tends to deplete in the postmenopausal years and because it links in with our Hormonal Health, right. So lots of people who struggle with infertility struggle because they have suffered from POI, so premature ovarian insufficiency, or anyone who has been told that they are at risk of going into menopause early. This is certainly something to be thinking about just in terms of your long-term health. So definitely something to consider, as I say no direct links to fertility

00:01 Hello, hello, you're listening to Katy Bradbury, nutritional therapist and registered nurse. Today's podcast episode is called the micronutrient series, fat soluble vitamins part three.   00:29 So hello, and welcome to this week's episode. If you have been following the show over the last few episodes, you will know that today, or in the last few weeks, I have decided to focus back really intricately on nutrition within the podcast. And part of the reason for that is because I really felt as though the spotlight really deserved to be shone on each individual vitamin and mineral as it relates to fertility. So I thought I'd work my way through, really starting off with vitamins and then continuing on to talk about some of my favourite minerals with regards to fertility. And I guess this is really to highlight, ultimately, the fact that a balanced, varied whole foods diet trumps anything else, and if you are getting a balanced, varied whole foods diet, and as I've mentioned time and time again, as a general principle, the Mediterranean diet is the best researched diet for fertility. It's not only because of the macronutrient balance, the proteins, fats and carbohydrate balance within the Mediterranean diet that makes it favourable for fertility. I'm hoping that by shining the spotlight on each of these vitamins and minerals, it can really help you as my listeners to understand some of the real reasons why I might be telling you, like why I bang on about flaxseeds all the time, for example. And you know why there are certain things which I will sound like a broken record about when it comes to making suggestions. And a lot of that is because, through the suggestions that I make through the diet and lifestyle recommendations that I advocate, you are getting the full spectrum of these vitamins and minerals. So I'm starting off with vitamins, and within the vitamins, I'm starting off with the fat soluble vitamins. And this is the third episode. So today, I'm going to be covering vitamin E. There's only one more left of the fat soluble after this. So they are vitamins A and vitamin D, which I covered in the last two episodes. Today we're going to talk about vitamin E, which I'm really excited about. Next week, we'll cover vitamin K, and then I will move on to the water soluble vitamins, which will be the B vitamins and vitamin C, before going on to talk about the minerals. So I'm really excited about this, and it might seem like a boring topic, but I hope it's not. I hope that I've managed to present it in a way that is interesting and relevant for you and where you're at in your fertility journey because I am thinking about these all of these as they relate specifically to fertility and also pregnancy having a healthy pregnancy.   04:00 So vitamin E,  I actually, when I was thinking about what to talk to you about with regards to vitamin E, I had a memory, and I remembered back in my nutrition college days. I wish I had a date for this assignment. I don't know, but it was quite a few years ago, and all of the references that I've used are quite old because I wish I knew when it was, but it was years ago anyway. And I did. We had an assignment in college where we had to create a fact sheet about we had to choose four. We had to choose two vitamins and two minerals, and I suddenly had a flashback to this assignment that I did back in the back in nutrition college, and I was like, I wonder if I can find that assignment anywhere, and I did. I managed to dig it out. And it was really interesting for me to look at this because this was, you know, really at the very start of my nutrition. I mean, I trained in nutrition for three years. And I would say that really it despite that, and I learned so much, I found it incredible, just absolutely incredible. It blew my mind.   05:24 But despite that, it's really only in the years since qualifying in nutrition that I've really learned, like, half as much as what I know now. So if that even makes sense, it's Sunday evening. Forgive me, forgive my ramblings. Anyway, the point being, I was interested to look back at this assignment on what I'd written about vitamin E. Back, I guess, in my really early days, because of this, this was one of the early assignments as well back in the early days of my nutrition studies. Anyway, like it was pretty alright, you know, I gave myself a little pat on the back because it was quite interesting. And one of the really, bear in mind this is before I was really on a fertility journey of my own as well, so I was reading through this, and some of the things that I've highlighted in this sheet are that so that vitamin E, as I've said, already fat soluble micronutrients, its essential. And essential means not that it's essential for life although it is, it's essential in that the body cannot produce enough Vitamin E of its own. So we have to get it from elsewhere; we have to obtain it externally. And so fat soluble, so I've already mentioned just to reiterate, again, the fact that fat soluble vitamins require adequate fat in the diet to actually be transported properly and to be absorbed properly. But also we need to be able to digestively absorb the fats in order to also absorb and transport the fat soluble nutrients, so so really important that if there is any level of fat malabsorption going on in the body, then that that really does need to be addressed. So do go back, and if you haven't already listened to my episodes, my mini-series on digestive health or digestion, please, please do go back and listen to that. Digestion might seem unrelated to fertility, but it's not; it is the backbone of fertility because if you have all of these nutrients in your diet, but you're not absorbing them right, then it's pointless; they're not going to be doing their job correctly.   07:56 So I'm coming back to vitamin E, and it is, so it's got like four or eight actually different components, different types of isomers, they call it in terms of its chemical structure. And it's broken down into two. So you've got tocopherols and tocotrienols, and tocopherols are genuinely the better absorbed in the body. So when we're thinking about vitamin E, generally, then tocopherols are better absorbed than tocotrienols. And when we're thinking about vitamin E, the really the thing that we're really thinking about is antioxidant. And there are a number of antioxidants. Vitamin C is an antioxidant. I will talk about that another time. There are lots and lots of antioxidants. But Vitamin E is one of them. And vitamin E is an important antioxidant because it is a lipid antioxidant. It's a fat antioxidant. So what that means, and the way I like to explain this is that on a cellular level in our bodies, each and every one of our cells, every single cell of the millions and millions of cells that we've got in our body, it is held together by a lipid membrane, and so it's the wall of the cell its the lipid membrane. And lipid means fat, fat and lipid are interchangeable. So we have these lipid membranes in every cell in our body, and the health of our lipid membranes is so important for the rest of our body because that is how everything is transported in and out of the cell all of the time. And that's whether we're talking about units of energy, whether we're talking about electrolytes, whether we're talking about vitamins, whether you're whether we're talking about nutrients. And these transactions are constantly happening, this exchange of things coming in and out of the cell. And it's all via the lipid membrane. And so, we need our lipid membranes to be functioning as optimally as possible. But unfortunately, cells are pretty small, and they're pretty delicate. The lipid membranes can be subject to oxidative damage. And the way I like to think about that is if we think about fats and oils, sometimes you might open a bottle of oil that has maybe been in the cupboard or maybe even left outside of the cupboard for some time, maybe had a lot of exposure to direct sunlight and heat. Maybe you've been open for a long time, and you open that bottle, it's like, oh, like a rancid smell comes out of it. Right. And that is that means that that fat has oxidised that oil has been subjected to oxidation. And it's the same in our lipid membranes. Our lipid membranes can be subject to oxidative stress to damage. Antioxidants, so the fat soluble antioxidants like vitamin E,  like coq10, are great for helping to repair and mop up some of that free radical damage, which, if I'm using terminology that you're not comfortable or not familiar with here, please see it very simply as damage, right damage, and this is helping to mop up some of that damage. So really important, and really important in the context of cholesterol, as well. So again, vitamin E helps to inhibit the oxidation of LDL cholesterol, which in turn can be a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, etc.   08:47 Now, you might be wondering, hang on a minute, Katy. I thought you were going to talk about this in the context of fertility. I absolutely am. And it's really important to remember that when we're thinking about fertility as a symbol, a bit of a clue into what might be happening in terms of the rest of the body and drivers for health and disease. In terms of drivers for health and disease, then we do need to consider all of these things. And so if someone's high risk of cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, and all of these kinds of things, because of the amount of oxidative stress that they're under, then that is naturally going to be impacting their fertility as well. That doesn't mean that someone with high blood pressure can't get pregnant. But it does mean that the more, the more risk factors that a person has for their health in general, then the more you know, in terms of optimising health and optimising fertility, we really would want to be driving these things down driving these risks down, so that your body

00:00 Hello, you are listening to Katy Bradbury, registered nurse and nutrition therapist. Today's podcast episode is called The Micronutrients Series Fat Soluble Vitamins Part 2.   00:15 So in today's episode, I am continuing to talk to you about micronutrients. So, over the next few weeks, I will be covering the full spectrum of vitamins and minerals that are associated with fertility for lots of different reasons. And I just thought it might be a nice idea, as I explained last week, to go through these micronutrients in a bit more detail and give a spotlight to each and every one of them. And that's not to say that we should get fixated on any particular one of these micronutrients. It's more just to aid your understanding of why a varied diet, a nutritious diet that is full of different plant foods and all the different colours of the rainbow. And a varied diet generally, because it's not all just plant foods, is really, really important for fertility. So without further ado, I'm going to talk to you about vitamin D today.   01:45 Vitamin D is a really well known micronutrient; it's a really well known vitamin when it comes to fertility. And this is one that actually fertility clinics will often test. And if it's found that your vitamin D levels are subpar, then it may be that you need to go away and improve those levels before you have your fertility treatment. And that's because there's a wide body of evidence now that talks about this. So I'm going to talk to you today about what vitamin D is and what it does in the body. I'm going to give a brief review of some of the evidence in relation to fertility. And we're going to talk about things that can impact our vitamin D status and how we can improve it. So vitamin D, as I started last week with vitamin A, so I'm currently running through the fat soluble vitamins. So vitamin D is one of the fat soluble vitamins. That means that it needs adequate fat to be able to be absorbed and utilised. So unlike water soluble, which are water soluble, the fat soluble vitamins need adequate fats. So if you have an issue with either not having the right kind of fats in your diet or not absorbing your fats very well, then it may be that your vitamin D levels are depleted.   03:24 So vitamin D for fertility. So the role of vitamin D in general, so probably most of you are aware that vitamin D is the sunshine vitamin, right? We are able as humans to synthesise our own vitamin D via the skin using sunlight using UVB rays. So once the UVB rays hit our skin, we are then able to synthesise vitamin D and use that vitamin D. There is some vitamin D in some foods, but you couldn't really get enough vitamin D from diet alone. It's not just about the foods you eat. We do need that sunshine to help us along.   04:20 So vitamin D is really important when we're thinking about bone health because it helps us absorb calcium, so it's like a bit of a lock and key mechanism in our ability to absorb calcium. The reason that's really important in terms of hormones and fertility is because it is really important for foetal development, right so you got to actually be able to produce the bones that will be the skeletal structure for your baby. We need to have enough vitamin D. It's also really important in those early years of rapid rowth, rapid rowth! Of rapid growth in childhood development. So it's a really important one for children and adults alike. And when we're thinking about the ageing process and getting older, we know that vitamin D is really important for bone health and preventing osteoporosis and these kinds of things. So really important actually across the whole lifespan.   05:24 Vitamin D is immune modulating, so it supports the immune system. And it really got quite a name for itself over the last few years in relation to the COVID pandemic. There was lots and lots of stuff coming out about how important vitamin D was in its role in our immunity and about it possibly having a protective factor against the severity of COVID. It's also important in the context of autoimmunity. So it is thought to be immune modulating and so having a good vitamin D status is really important in the context of autoimmunity as well. Lots of the clients that I have come to see me do have autoimmunity, more often than not with the thyroid, but in other parts of the body as well. Blood sugar regulation and metabolism generally. So vitamin D does have a really important role to play is thought to be, so people who have obesity and diabetes etc., are thought to have lower vitamin D status. And then it is also thought to have a key role in sex hormone synthesis. So sex hormones, male and female, need vitamin E tut vitamin D to be able to produce properly. And we do also know that all of our reproductive organs, all of our reproductive tissues, male and female, have vitamin D receptors within them. And that goes to show that vitamin D must be really important within those reproductive organs. Otherwise, they wouldn't have vitamin D receptors.   07:34 So lots of different things, lots of different roles that Vitamin D plays in the body. And within the context of fertility alone, there's been a lot of research into vitamin D. It is one of the biggest and most well researched vitamins that there is actually, and it's almost vitamin D almost ought to have a hormonal effect because a hormone is a chemical messenger, and vitamin D, such as the importance of vitamin D. That is, it is akin to being a hormone in of its own right.   08:14 So vitamin D and fertility. So there have been a number of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. So these are really, you know, there's really widespread data available in this in the scientific literature, you know, looking at certain samples of 1000s of 1000s of people. So, findings from the research suggest that it's, it's mainly looking, by the way, the research mainly looks at vitamin D status. So there haven't been that many randomised control trials where there's been an intervention of a certain dose of vitamin D being given versus a control group where the vitamin D isn't given to see whether that might impact things. And part of the reason that I think randomise, sorry, yep, randomised controlled trials aren't necessarily, ran RCTs randomised controlled trials are seen as the gold standard when it comes to medical research when it comes to scientific research in general. However, they do have their drawbacks. In this, in a case like vitamin D, I think it's more powerful, too. And we could, of course, association does not always equal causation. But what we're seeing time and time and time again in the literature is that vitamin D status, so people who have low levels of serum vitamin D, so low levels of Vitamin D in their blood are more likely to have this whole host of complications with fertility complications with pregnancy complications with their health in general. So that really speaks volumes. And where it becomes difficult to say, Okay, well, let's then do a randomised control trial is because all sorts of things can impact people's vitamin D status. And the dosages are going to look different for everyone. So I don't know that we can necessarily say, Okay, well, guess if we supplement everyone with this amount of vitamin D, then we're going to solve all the fertility problems in the world because it's just not that simple in bodies and more complex than that. But what we do know, as I say, to come back to my original point about the research, is that these observational studies on 1000s and 1000s of women do say that people who are women who have deficient or insufficient vitamin D status are more likely to have or sorry. So women who have insufficient levels compared with women who have good levels of vitamin D in the blood. So, women with good levels, or replete levels of vitamin D is quite a nice way of putting it, have more live births, more positive pregnancy tests, and more clinical pregnancies. So that's really interesting. Across fertility clinics, all of those measures are higher in women who had adequate vitamin D levels. And there's been lots and lots of research that has found similar. There has been some research to say that women who have really quite a low vitamin D below 50 nanomoles per litre might be more likely to suffer from early pregnancy loss.   12:33 There are some studies that observe an association between vitamin D status and AMH Anti-Müllerian Hormone, which is one of the indicators of egg reserve. Vitamin D status is also connected with conditions medical conditions that we know impact fertility, such as polycystic ovary syndrome, PCOS, and endometriosis. So, really lots of lots of ways in which vitamin D impacts female fertility or is associated with female fertility. And then there is also research now quite a bit of research associating vitamin D again, vitamin D, low vitamin D levels, with low serum testosterone, for men, and in their sperm quality as well.   13:38 So that is really interesting, isn't it, that across the male and female spectrum of fertility, vitamin D status is associated quite strongly and quite robustly with poor outcomes in terms of or good outcomes depending on the status for fertility. So undeniably a really important nutrient for fertility or a really important vitamin for fertility, I should say, because we don't always get it from our food.   14:14 So things that can impact vitamin D status, like why might someone's vitamin D status be low? Well, we know that it can be used for all sorts of things in the body, as I already described. So it may be that at different points in our lifespan, we use up more vitamin D than others. Things such as our genetics play a role. So we have a gene called the vitamin D receptor gene, the VDR gene, and that is involved in the methylation process, which I've spoken about on the podcast before. And it really is the vitamin D receptor gene, having a genetic variant on that

00:00 Hello, you are listening to Katy Bradbury. Nutritional Therapist and registered nurse. Today's podcast episode is called 'Is the Fertility and the First 1000 Days Membership Right for You?   00:28 So, hello, hello, good evening. I'm coming to you from the studio at the bottom of the garden, as you will probably know by now if you're a regular listener. Unfortunately for me, I am also joined by a rather large moth in the studio this evening and, put it this way, I'm not the biggest moth lover. They used to really freak me out, actually. Does anyone else get a bit freaked out by moths? I think it's the erratic nature of the way they fly, like they're just a bit all over the place, putting you on edge. They're a bit unpredictable. Anyway, I think he's settled down a bit for now. So  I've got a special guest today, it's the moth!   01:27 So I wanted to come and talk to you today about my fourth coming membership, which is the same title as this podcast 'Fertility and the First 1000 Days'. I am really, really excited about finally getting this membership up and running. It has been in the pipeline for a very long time. Yeah, I would say even the best part of the year. It's been something that I had the idea of more or less a year ago. The idea was that the people who first joined my group programme would have something to flow seamlessly into if they wanted to. It didn't quite happen that way. As a business owner and someone who works part-time and has my own responsibilities, lots of you will know that I was fortunate enough to come out the other side of my own difficult fertility journey and now have two very small children, it's been a bit of a juggle this last year, as my business has grown and I've had the pleasure and the honour of supporting more and more of you. It's been wonderful, actually and hand on heart, I love helping people like you so much that it was really the best decision I ever took to do this. But the membership has taken me a while to get set up partly because I've had lots of things on my plate and juggling lots of things. Partly just because I wanted to get it right, and it takes a lot of work to set up something like this and a lot of figuring out what the best way is going to be to actually make it the best possible service and the most effective one. So I can finally say that I'm about ready to open the doors. I have mentioned this before, I think I mentioned it a while back in December because I was hoping to open the doors earlier on in the year, and for a number of reasons, there was a bit of hold up. But I wanted to talk to you about five reasons why this membership could be ideal for where you are on this journey right now.   04:40 So five reasons, so first of all, and I haven't said exactly in this episode, what the membership actually is going to be? Hopefully, me explaining these five reasons is going to help to shed some light on it. Of course, I'm more than happy to answer any questions. So if you get to the end of this episode, you're like, okay, cool. Katy, I understand the reasons why this sounds like it could be just the ticket for me, but I'm still not exactly sure what it is or how to do it; then just drop me a message. I will also make sure that the link to sign up is available in the show notes because the plan is to get started this week. The first ten people to sign up for this membership will get it at a reduced price, which I'll talk about in a moment. And then after that, it will go up to the full price, so there's a really big incentive there to shift and to try and bag one of those first ten spots, and quite a few of which have not been taken because I haven't opened the doors yet, but quite a quite a few of which have gotten names put to them, shall we say.   06:07 So anyone, reason number one that it could be just the right thing for you is that it is practical. So this membership is really set up to be for the busy person because I know that so many of you are busy. If that is you, thank you for actually taking the time to be a regular listener to this podcast. I really do recognise that and appreciate that you come back each week and listen because I know that it's time-consuming. From what I've heard back from most of you, you get a lot out of it, so I'm really glad about that. But really, it's an honour to yourself that you do come back and give yourself this time each week to listen to this podcast, so that's a little side note, so thank you. So it's for the busy person it's not filled with reams and reams of information, so it's a bit different from my 12-week programme. Some of you listening will have done my 12-week programme already, some might have heard of it or considered doing it, and by the way, that 12-week programme I've switched up the way I deliver that now and that is actually now available as a stand-alone package as like a do it yourself. So it's something that you can move through their six taught modules, and you move through it in a do-it-yourself manner. That is now available for just £149. I wanted to make it really, really accessible. So I do have that for people who want to really sink their teeth in and learn all about those fundamentals for fertility. But the membership, the 'Fertility in the First 1000 Days' membership, isn't like that; it's different to the 12-week programme in that it is super duper Practical, not full of reams of information. It's got a few sections, really, really practical. So it's got a section on nutrition, a section on stress, a section on moving your body, and a section on toxic load and how to reduce your toxic load. And it's got a section on functional testing for fertility, so all of the info is designed to pack a punch. It's not lengthy. It's a mixture of content of videos and stuff like that,  some PDFs etc. Still, it's all focused on taking action to ensure that you are shifting your body into a state of becoming more fertile by the day. Hence, it's really practical, and it's all about taking action. There is, of course, a little bit of learning in there, but it's largely about the action taking.   09:28 Now, whilst it is going to be, just a caveat that, whilst it is going to be focusing on getting your body more fertile by the day, what I'm not promoting here, just to be very clear, because if you know me already, you will know that this is not what I'm about. I'm not promoting a quick fix here. Yes, I want it to be action-taking. Yes, I wanted to have as much impact as possible for the least amount of time. However, Every fertility journey is very, very different. And sometimes, there are lots of complex layers and reasons as to why you might be struggling. And that looks different for everyone. So all of the complex layers and the reasons are different for everyone. So whilst it's designed to pack as much of a punch as possible. I'm still not promising a quick fix. You know, it's about unravelling, breaking the chain in as many places as possible, and really just working to build up your fertility. What that means is to improve the chances, and everything around fertility is a game of odds. There are so so so so many factors that can increase the odds of you getting and staying pregnant. There are so so many factors that can decrease the odds of you getting and staying pregnant. So what we are doing in this membership is working every single day to increase those odds. But for some people, it will take longer than others. So it is practical action taking, but it's not a quick fix.   11:19 Number two, reason number two, it's affordable. So one of the biggest blocks that I get and I get a lot of inquiries, talk to a lot of people, and talk to a lot of you. And one of the biggest blocks I get from people is money is the financial side, and I get it because it's an investment working with me one-to-one and getting that expertise. And lots of people are doing things like saving up for IVF and having other treatments, etc., that are costly. And so I really wanted to be able to provide something that is really, really great service for people who might not be able to afford one-to-one support. So it's affordable. It's a fraction of the price that it is to work with me one-to-one. But the brilliance, the joy of it, is that if that is you. You are saving money or having to pay out for IVF or other treatments. This membership will increase the chances of IVF working and decrease the need to even resort to IVF. So it's low cost, and you get a lot of bang for your buck. So you know, if money has been a barrier to you being able to work with me in the past, then this really could be your chance.   13:02 It's supportive. Number three, it's supportive. So the big thing about this space that I'm creating is that it's not just a membership area online. So it's got the online library, where you get your login, and you can access all the tools or the practical things under those different sections that I mentioned already, the nutrition, the moving your body, the stress, the reducing toxic load and the functional testing. So there's loads of practical stuff in different mediums and modalities. But the really big thing about this membership is it's supportive. And what I mean by that is that we meet every single week in a group setting to run through everything, and that is what I'm all about, right? It's creating a space that is for you, that is open and nurturing and trusting and non-judgmental. And it really is going to be a place for you just to honour your journey, whatever that looks like for you. It's a place to share the realities, celebrate the wins, and be held through those toughest moments.   14:31 Now, feedback from anyone that has worked with me in a group setting before, because my 12-week programme used to be run in a group setting, so the feedback from that has always been overwhelmingly positive from that group model of working and anyone who has worked with me whether one to one or in a gr

00:00 Hello, you are listening to Katy Bradbury. Nutritional Therapist and registered nurse. Today's podcast episode is called 'Is the Fertility and the First 1000 Days Membership Right for You?   00:28 So, hello, hello, good evening. I'm coming to you from the studio at the bottom of the garden, as you will probably know by now if you're a regular listener. Unfortunately for me, I am also joined by a rather large moth in the studio this evening and, put it this way, I'm not the biggest moth lover. They used to really freak me out, actually. Does anyone else get a bit freaked out by moths? I think it's the erratic nature of the way they fly, like they're just a bit all over the place, putting you on edge. They're a bit unpredictable. Anyway, I think he's settled down a bit for now. So  I've got a special guest today, it's the moth!   01:27 So I wanted to come and talk to you today about my fourth coming membership, which is the same title as this podcast 'Fertility and the First 1000 Days'. I am really, really excited about finally getting this membership up and running. It has been in the pipeline for a very long time. Yeah, I would say even the best part of the year. It's been something that I had the idea of more or less a year ago. The idea was that the people who first joined my group programme would have something to flow seamlessly into if they wanted to. It didn't quite happen that way. As a business owner and someone who works part-time and has my own responsibilities, lots of you will know that I was fortunate enough to come out the other side of my own difficult fertility journey and now have two very small children, it's been a bit of a juggle this last year, as my business has grown and I've had the pleasure and the honour of supporting more and more of you. It's been wonderful, actually and hand on heart, I love helping people like you so much that it was really the best decision I ever took to do this. But the membership has taken me a while to get set up partly because I've had lots of things on my plate and juggling lots of things. Partly just because I wanted to get it right, and it takes a lot of work to set up something like this and a lot of figuring out what the best way is going to be to actually make it the best possible service and the most effective one. So I can finally say that I'm about ready to open the doors. I have mentioned this before, I think I mentioned it a while back in December because I was hoping to open the doors earlier on in the year, and for a number of reasons, there was a bit of hold up. But I wanted to talk to you about five reasons why this membership could be ideal for where you are on this journey right now.   04:40 So five reasons, so first of all, and I haven't said exactly in this episode, what the membership actually is going to be? Hopefully, me explaining these five reasons is going to help to shed some light on it. Of course, I'm more than happy to answer any questions. So if you get to the end of this episode, you're like, okay, cool. Katy, I understand the reasons why this sounds like it could be just the ticket for me, but I'm still not exactly sure what it is or how to do it; then just drop me a message. I will also make sure that the link to sign up is available in the show notes because the plan is to get started this week. The first ten people to sign up for this membership will get it at a reduced price, which I'll talk about in a moment. And then after that, it will go up to the full price, so there's a really big incentive there to shift and to try and bag one of those first ten spots, and quite a few of which have not been taken because I haven't opened the doors yet, but quite a quite a few of which have gotten names put to them, shall we say.   06:07 So anyone, reason number one that it could be just the right thing for you is that it is practical. So this membership is really set up to be for the busy person because I know that so many of you are busy. If that is you, thank you for actually taking the time to be a regular listener to this podcast. I really do recognise that and appreciate that you come back each week and listen because I know that it's time-consuming. From what I've heard back from most of you, you get a lot out of it, so I'm really glad about that. But really, it's an honour to yourself that you do come back and give yourself this time each week to listen to this podcast, so that's a little side note, so thank you. So it's for the busy person it's not filled with reams and reams of information, so it's a bit different from my 12-week programme. Some of you listening will have done my 12-week programme already, some might have heard of it or considered doing it, and by the way, that 12-week programme I've switched up the way I deliver that now and that is actually now available as a stand-alone package as like a do it yourself. So it's something that you can move through their six taught modules, and you move through it in a do-it-yourself manner. That is now available for just £149. I wanted to make it really, really accessible. So I do have that for people who want to really sink their teeth in and learn all about those fundamentals for fertility. But the membership, the 'Fertility in the First 1000 Days' membership, isn't like that; it's different to the 12-week programme in that it is super duper Practical, not full of reams of information. It's got a few sections, really, really practical. So it's got a section on nutrition, a section on stress, a section on moving your body, and a section on toxic load and how to reduce your toxic load. And it's got a section on functional testing for fertility, so all of the info is designed to pack a punch. It's not lengthy. It's a mixture of content of videos and stuff like that,  some PDFs etc. Still, it's all focused on taking action to ensure that you are shifting your body into a state of becoming more fertile by the day. Hence, it's really practical, and it's all about taking action. There is, of course, a little bit of learning in there, but it's largely about the action taking.   09:28 Now, whilst it is going to be, just a caveat that, whilst it is going to be focusing on getting your body more fertile by the day, what I'm not promoting here, just to be very clear, because if you know me already, you will know that this is not what I'm about. I'm not promoting a quick fix here. Yes, I want it to be action-taking. Yes, I wanted to have as much impact as possible for the least amount of time. However, Every fertility journey is very, very different. And sometimes, there are lots of complex layers and reasons as to why you might be struggling. And that looks different for everyone. So all of the complex layers and the reasons are different for everyone. So whilst it's designed to pack as much of a punch as possible. I'm still not promising a quick fix. You know, it's about unravelling, breaking the chain in as many places as possible, and really just working to build up your fertility. What that means is to improve the chances, and everything around fertility is a game of odds. There are so so so so many factors that can increase the odds of you getting and staying pregnant. There are so so many factors that can decrease the odds of you getting and staying pregnant. So what we are doing in this membership is working every single day to increase those odds. But for some people, it will take longer than others. So it is practical action taking, but it's not a quick fix.   11:19 Number two, reason number two, it's affordable. So one of the biggest blocks that I get and I get a lot of inquiries, talk to a lot of people, and talk to a lot of you. And one of the biggest blocks I get from people is money is the financial side, and I get it because it's an investment working with me one-to-one and getting that expertise. And lots of people are doing things like saving up for IVF and having other treatments, etc., that are costly. And so I really wanted to be able to provide something that is really, really great service for people who might not be able to afford one-to-one support. So it's affordable. It's a fraction of the price that it is to work with me one-to-one. But the brilliance, the joy of it, is that if that is you. You are saving money or having to pay out for IVF or other treatments. This membership will increase the chances of IVF working and decrease the need to even resort to IVF. So it's low cost, and you get a lot of bang for your buck. So you know, if money has been a barrier to you being able to work with me in the past, then this really could be your chance.   13:02 It's supportive. Number three, it's supportive. So the big thing about this space that I'm creating is that it's not just a membership area online. So it's got the online library, where you get your login, and you can access all the tools or the practical things under those different sections that I mentioned already, the nutrition, the moving your body, the stress, the reducing toxic load and the functional testing. So there's loads of practical stuff in different mediums and modalities. But the really big thing about this membership is it's supportive. And what I mean by that is that we meet every single week in a group setting to run through everything, and that is what I'm all about, right? It's creating a space that is for you, that is open and nurturing and trusting and non-judgmental. And it really is going to be a place for you just to honour your journey, whatever that looks like for you. It's a place to share the realities, celebrate the wins, and be held through those toughest moments.   14:31 Now, feedback from anyone that has worked with me in a group setting before, because my 12-week programme used to be run in a group setting, so the feedback from that has always been overwhelmingly positive from that group model of working and anyone who has worked with me whether one to one or in a gr

00:01 Hello, you are listening to Katy Bradbury, nutritional therapist and registered nurse. Today's podcast episode is called What can we learn from our ancestors about fertility?   00:28 Hello, and welcome. It feels really strange actually coming to you today. I am recording the episode, would you believe, on a Saturday, not a Sunday, which is very bizarre. It doesn't make a difference to you because I will still be releasing on Sunday night, as usual, but I just found myself with a spare moment. And I was feeling really pensive. I've just been into my Facebook group and done a live video there. And I thought now's a good time to come and talk to you on the podcast. So here I am.   01:11 Welcome. As usual, I'd love to hear from you. I absolutely love hearing from my listeners. So if you're a regular listener and you haven't given me a rating or a review yet, please do take just a minute and do that. That would be absolutely amazing, not just to give me a massive confidence boost but to help the people who really need to hear this to actually help it reach more people. So if you're a new listener, then welcome to you too.   01:52 I wanted to talk to you today about a topic that is very close to my heart, actually, because it was something that first sparked my interest many years ago. Back, back, back when I was a teenager and I'd finished my A levels, I'm going to give you a bit of backstory here. I was a teenager, and I was finishing my A-Levels sorry, I hadn't finished them. I was finishing them. And we were at the point where we were applying for university. And I knew I definitely wanted to go to uni. That wasn't the issue. The issue was, oops, of course, turn my phone on silent, okay. The issue was that I didn't know what I wanted to study. Now, I knew I was definitely interested in things. And I knew that I was interested in particular things, but I couldn't quite put my finger on what. I already knew that I was ultimately interested in people. I love people. I love connecting with people. I just find people; I find humanity just incredible, actually. And I find it fascinating. And I find all of the multifaceted layers of what it is to be a human being just so interesting.   03:40 I always have done, and I was doing my A levels that I chose at my A levels which I thought would really quench my thirst for everything I just said about my kind of quest to know and understand more about humanity. And I chose for my A-levels, two have my A -levels anyway, I chose psychology and sociology thinking yeah, brilliant, like, understand the human mind. Understanding humans at a social level like that is going to be great. I'm going to love it. I didn't! I actually hated studying psychology and sociology. And I think that part of it was maybe that I didn't connect with my teachers that well, I did with a few of them, and part of it was just the time in my life. You know, I was a teenager, I was looking for more. I was questioning things. I just wasn't satisfied with it. But one of the big things that bugged me about psychology and sociology was this whole piece around everyone theorising everything and people being on one side of the fence or the other. So you've got different types of psychologists, and they will argue with each other, right? It's the same with philosophers. They all argue with each other. And they will say, No, no, no, no, no, no is this way, my way is the right way. Of course, you know, a bunch of old men. By old men, I mean, like, olden times, men. And they all just were waving their flags and trying to get everyone on their side. And to the point where it just blinkered their views, they started to try and explain the whole world through their narrow lens of the theory they'd come up with. That's just not right. It's just not right. And I got so annoyed with that. And I was like, can't people see that this is just wrong, like, the world is more complex than that. And people are more complex than that. And there's a bit more nuance here, guys, like, come on.   06:08 So, and I realise I'm being a bit long-winded in my introduction here, but it's important to give the backstory. So I didn't know what I wanted to study. I was like, 'there must be something, there must be something that is to fire up my interest. And that is going to be about what I want it to be about'. We went to a sample lecture. We went to our local university, which I'm from East London, so it was the University of East London. And we have a little open day thing there as part of a college trip to the University of East London. And they very kindly put on a load of sample lectures for us to help us decide on our subjects. And so we were looking, we could do four or five different seminars, I think, in the day. And I was looking on this piece of paper at the list. And we had to tick the boxes for the ones we wanted to attend. And I was looking down this list, and I saw a word that I'd never seen before, and it was anthropology. And I was like, Oh, right. Okay, I've never heard of that before. I have no idea what anthropology is. I tick that box because I don't know what I want to do. Let's tick the box and go and see what anthropology is about.   07:27 I went to this seminar on anthropology. And honestly, my jaw was on the floor for most of it, and I came away thinking bloody hell, like this, this is what I want to do. This is the missing link for me. This is what I've been looking for. This is incredible. And that's what I did. Now, I remember the lecture I went to; they were ultimately trying to sell the University of East London. They were trying to get us on board with UEL because that was their uni. And, of course, universities are all money-making establishments now. But they were talking about their particular course. And the fact that their course was special because their anthropology programme was biological and social anthropology combined. And this was special because there are only a handful of universities in the country that did those two together.   07:29 And I realised that I had to do a combination of biological and social anthropology because doing social anthropology alone, which I guess is more the traditional type of anthropology that a lot of people think of when they think of anthropology, was just not going to be enough for me, I needed it to be more comprehensive. It was going to be just a little bit too sociological, but with different cultures, if I did just social anthropology, so I went on a quest. I didn't particularly want to go to UEL because I wanted to go away for uni and live away from home etc. And the University of East London was on the doorstep for me. I did apply there, but I didn't choose in the end, so where I went to Durham. That was the polar opposite of on the doorstep because that was 300 miles away on the other side of the country, right up in the northeast. So off I toddled to Durham University. I spent three years studying biological and social anthropology, and I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And that was my first foray really into understanding the world through the lens that I now understand the world.   10:05 And a significant part of that lens, a significant part of how I view the world, is through an evolutionary lens. Because we are animals, just like any other animal on the planet, we're not just like any other animal on the planet, we're very, very different. We're very unique from any other animal, but we are mammals, and we are primates Aad our bodies, our current human body, what we look and how we present now, in our current form, hasn't changed a huge amount, right? It hasn't changed a huge amount in the last 20,000 years. And that's not very long in evolutionary terms, 20,000 years. But one of the main reasons for that is because we, instead of having to, so the thing about evolution is that animals or any organism, any living thing, has to adapt to its environment physically, right. And so animals are incredible, like mind-blowingly, adapted to their environment. If we look at the finches in the Galapagos Islands and we look at all the different characteristics they have, each one of them is just beautifully suited to the environment in which they live. And, and that's beautiful, that is symbiotic with nature. And that's the way it's meant to be for them. But humans are very interesting because our brains are so big for our body size, right? So we got a lot of brainpower, and we developed this prefrontal cortex in our brain, which is the real thinking brain. So we're able to have abstract thought, we have complex communication skills, arguably, most of us anyway. And, you know, we're really quite incredible beings. And what we started to do as humans was, instead of our bodies having to adapt to the environment, we started changing our environment to suit us. So that's how eventually, we came from being cavemen to living in small societies and building huts and then starting to work the land a bit and starting to use tools and working together. And then the agricultural revolution, farming, and then the world just changed, you know, we took over. Because we didn't need to be in a set environment anymore, we could change our environment. And that is so powerful.   13:21 However, there is a mismatch, and although we have been very, very clever in being have changed our environment, in a lot of ways, our environment has changed so rapidly, in the last, well, certainly in the last 20,000 years. But even in the last 100 years, even in the last ten years, five years, our environment has changed dramatically. And that looks very, very different from the world in which we developed biologically. And so there is a mismatch between that kind of natural world, living in small bands of people living in a natural environment, compared to the way we live now. And so the pressures and strains on us are very, very different now.   14:18 Now, the reason I'm talking to you abo

0:01  You are listening to Katy Bradbury, a registered nurse and nutritional therapist. Today’s podcast episode is called “Five Lessons Learned from Attending the Fertility Show Live.” 0:14  So hello, hello. I can’t believe it’s been a week already since I last spoke to you. So I hope that you have had a lovely week, wherever you are and whatever you’ve been doing. I thought I’d come and do a very special little episode today, and this is actually the second podcast that I’ve recorded this week, not for one of my own, but I was a guest expert on another person’s podcast this week which was wonderful. If you don’t already know it, and if you are one of my listeners who has got a current eating disorder, or has had an eating disorder in the past, then her podcast is called ‘Bulimia Sucks’, and her name is Kate Hudson Hall. She was absolutely lovely, and it was a real pleasure to go and talk to her this week all about eating disorders in relation to fertility. So it was a really lovely, warm conversation, and I believe it’s the 20th of June that the episode is going to be released. So I will put it on all my platforms, and hopefully, you can enjoy listening to that as well. 0:33  But for this week, I wanted to come and share some lessons with you because I have been at the Fertility Show in London, Olympia, and it’s been a really long weekend. Actually, it’s been a really long day today. I am exhausted, and I actually felt like just going to bed. I was like, no, I will go and record this podcast because, on the way home, my mind was buzzing from all the wonderful people I spoke to and who I connected with. It was just such a lovely event to attend as a practitioner. Myself and some of my colleagues from the fertility nutrition centre had a stall. So we were lucky enough to be able to speak to all sorts of different people and also to be able to have a wander and connect with some of the other incredible people and services that are out there. I spoke to loads of people, I learnt loads of things, and I just wanted to come and share with you five of the lessons that I learned from attending the fertility show. 3:32  So the first lesson was, and I did already know this but talking to so many people in such a short space of time really, really just reminded me that no two stories are the same. There are so many different journeys and stories through fertility out there. And oh, it was incredible talking to some of you. I was honestly so struck by the resilience and openness and the strengths, I guess, of everyone I spoke to. I spoke to people from all different types of IVF journey, so a lot of the fertility show does have IVF exhibitors. So a lot of the talks, etc., are very much geared around IVF, which I will come on to one of my later points. So lots of the journeys were around IVF and all sorts of journeys from people who had had multiple rounds of IVF that hadn’t worked, so lots of people who were really feeling like they were struggling with implantation and people who had embryos in the freezer at the moment, and we’re kind of questioning what their next steps should be. I spoke to single women who were getting sperm donors. I spoke to women in their 50s who were getting egg donors. It was just incredible. It really, really was, and people were just so open and willing to share their story and happy to be listened to, I think, actually. So it was wonderful. I absolutely love connecting with people on this topic. I know that it can be a really difficult and unfortunate journey for a lot of people. Still, I really do love connecting with people who are on different journeys. I just think it’s incredible. I really do. So that was my first lesson, and as I say, it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t a new lesson. It was something I definitely already knew. But it was just wonderful to connect with so many people in so many different stories. 6:32  The second lesson, and this is sliding into the nutrition talk now, is that so many people are low in Zinc. So at our store, we were doing some zinc testing. Now, it’s not the most rigorous Zinc testing. We weren’t doing serum, and we weren’t doing blood testing or anything like that. But what we were doing is using a solution, a zinc solution, it’s called Zinka test, and you can use it to check to give an indicator of what your zinc levels might be doing. Zinc is really commonly deficient, or people often have insufficient levels of Zinc and magnesium as well. There are two minerals that, although they are widely found in the food world, we often find that levels are quite depleted. So like levels are, especially for things like magnesium, levels are depleted in the soil because of our farming practices in the modern world, not allowing the soil time to replete its nutrients. So the knock-on effects of this are quite big. And also, lots of people don’t have a particularly nutrient-dense diet these days. So we were doing the Zinc testing. It’s a little solution, and it’s quite fun. You swirl it around in your mouth, and depending on what taste you get in your mouth after swelling around in your mouth, it gives an indicator of what your zinc status might be. And the very vast, vast majority of people had insufficient levels of Zinc. I think I did one or two people where their levels seemed like they were probably pretty good. And most other people are not that great. There was no one who, so with this zinc test, if you taste nothing at all after you’ve switched it around in your mouth, then that is an indicator that you’re zinc level may be quite depleted. So there wasn’t anybody that said they couldn’t taste a thing, but there were quite a few people who weren’t really getting much through. So the good news is, is that the zinc tests that we were doing actually gave everyone that was taking a good old dose of Zinc, so at least they came away having had some, but I do think that that was really interesting and absolutely testament to how lots of people who really feel as though like you know they have a pretty good diet or they take certain supplements or whatever might still be depleted in Zinc and other nutrients. This isn’t a call for everyone to go and start supplementing with high-dose Zinc by any stretch of the imagination because it has to be tailored to you. We had to be very cautious about, you know, just going all-in with supplements, but it was certainly interesting. 10:00  And that leads me to my next point. So lesson number two was that many people are low in Zinc. Of course, Zinc is a really important nutrient for reproductive health, so it’s a really great one for sperm health. It’s well researched for the health of sperm. But it’s got many, many processes in the body, including being enzymes and cofactors, for all sorts of different things. But it’s also a really important nutrient for the immune system. And we know that when we’re thinking about things like inflammation, being a driver for struggles with fertility, that very much links in with the immune system. So Zinc is a really important nutrient. It’s not. I know I’m joking about it that many people are low in Zinc, but actually, that means we need to think about this, right? It’s just a nutrient. It’s not nothing. It means we really need to be thinking twice about what we’re doing and thinking about whether nutrient deficiencies could be playing a role in your fertility issues. So that was number two. 11:27  So number three, kind of leading on from that point, really, lots of people are taking supplements that are completely inappropriate for their needs. Now, we were not able to really discuss supplements in much detail today because our regulatory guidelines say we can’t just dish out supplement advice willy-nilly. It has to be tailored to the individual. And if you go back and listen to one of my previous episodes, I’ll double-check the number as I talked to you so that I can tell you which episode it is, but I did do an episode recently on prenatal’s it was called ‘Which Pre Natal Should I be Taking’, and the take-home message from that episode was, not to tell you which prenatal you should be taking, unfortunately, as much as I would love to, it’s episode number 44. But the take-home message really from that was they aren’t all created equal. And what is suitable for one may not be suitable for another, and the quality of some of them, even some of the more popular brands, isn’t that great? So some of the more popular brands, even though they are quite expensive, and everyone else takes them and that what might be what is recommended on the NHS or whatever else might not be that great for you to be honest, because the levels of the nutrients in them might not be great, they might not be that absorbable. They might not be in forms that are appropriate to you, and they may contain things that aren’t suitable for you, or they may not contain enough of things that you need more of. So when we’re thinking about supplements, and the vast majority of people that I spoke to, who were taking a lot of supplements, when I asked them, ‘Okay, so you’re on this big list of supplements whose told you to take them?’ the vast majority of people were not taking these supplements under the guidance of a skilled and knowledgeable practitioner. They were taking supplements, and I don’t. By the way, if this is you, please don’t feel as if I’m pointing the finger. I’m just saying that there’s a lot of misinformation out there, and it is a really complex web of information. So all the people that came that chatted to me who were taking lots of different supplements were all bright, intelligent women who were clearly spending a lot of time doing research, and, you know, reading up on these things, and that’s great. That is, you know, that is incredibly empowering. But it has taken me years of training to get to my current knowledge of what is suitable for people and why. And my recommendations for supplements will always be

0:02  Hello, you are listening to Katy Bradbury, nutritional therapist and registered nurse. Today's podcast episode is called the Self Love Episode. 0:27  Hi, welcome back if you're a regular listener, and a very warm welcome to you if you are a brand new listener. I am sitting in the studio as usual at the bottom of my garden. I'm recording this episode today because if you are a regular listener or if you happen to listen to last week's episode, last week was called The Love Episode. It was really all about love in the context of partner relationships. The impact that some of the things around a fertility journey can bring to a partner relationship in terms of some of the challenges, and then I guess giving some tools and things that you might want to focus on and work around with regards to some of those things. Now, when I recorded the episode last week, I was well aware that there was a portion of people that were being excluded from that episode because it was all about partner relationships. I think I mentioned a few times across the episode that if you are someone who is not in a partner relationship who is trying to conceive or planning for pregnancy, then you might have felt a little bit left out. I was thinking about that after I recorded the episode last week. I was like, aww, I know for sure that the majority of people that I do and have worked with have been in relationships. Still, I had this little niggle, and I was it did leave a proportion of people out. Low and behold, the very next day is a stark reminder of this fact, I had a call with someone who was a prospective client, and she'd been on my radar for a little while. I was aware of her and her situation. I didn't know her new situation because previously when we last spoke, she was in a relationship. But we spoke last Monday, so literally, the day after I recorded the episode last week, and we spoke the next day. She told me, I haven't had an update for her for a while, Katy. Since we last spoke, my partner and I have split up. It wasn't right for us but what I've decided to do is to go it alone. I really want to be a mum, and I'm going to go down the donor sperm route, and it's happening. Can you help me? Let's do this, let's prep for this IVF cycle that I'm gonna have; I'm super pumped, and I'm honestly so excited for her, and I'm delighted to help her actually on this journey. I'm so so excited. It just reminded me; that the timing of it was impeccable because I just recorded this episode all about partner relationships. As I say, whilst the majority of people that I work with are in partner relationships, there was a part of me, when I recorded the episode last week, was like, Oh, just something didn't quite sit right. Then I had that call, and I was like, "oh man, yeah," there are probably quite a few people that did listen to the episode last week that were a bit like ", oh!" 4:33  Now, of course, not every episode is going to be right for every person. What I did want to do today was come back and talk about self love. Because, of course, Self Love is the way that we feel about ourselves generally and is a huge part of the fertility journey, and oh my goodness, it can be a roller coaster, can't it? Honestly, I think that my relationship with myself deteriorated. That was the thing I think for me that just snowballed and deteriorated when I was struggling with my own journey. That was the thing that then started causing the panic attacks and started causing this really acute stress and anxiety. I cannot tell you the amount of people that I work with who come to me saying, Katie, I feel like my body is broken. And that's just so sad, isn't it? Like, how upsetting is it to feel that way about your own body about yourself, because then it brings in the entire rhetoric, it brings in so much negative self chatter. It can really snowball quite quickly. So that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk about self love is because this relationship with our bodies can be really difficult on this journey. And we also often take it upon ourselves, and let's face it, and please don't get me wrong, there are so many partners out there that are super supportive and just wonderful. But more often than not, as women, we are the ones who take it upon ourselves when we're undergoing some kind of fertility journey and bear the brunt of the responsibility. On top of that, layered into that, is the fact that it's cyclical, right. So assuming that you do have a menstrual cycle, whatever that looks like for you. You could just take a battering, right? Like every time your period comes, it can just feel horrific. It's almost like, and I'm working on the assumption that there is a monthly cycle going on here. But every month, it's just like, bam, you're not pregnant, bam, you're not pregnant, bam, you're not pregnant, and it can just feel like waves crashing over you that can just get worse every time. Then if you're someone who has an irregular period, which lots of the people that I work with do, and I did, I don't anymore. Still, I did. Some months, my cycle would be like 26 days and then other months, it'd be like 66 days, and it's just like, What the hell is going on? I just couldn't understand why my body was letting me down so much, and I felt like such a failure. Then for people who don't have a menstrual cycle, that brings a whole new tier for things as well because it's just like, hang on a minute, like, how am I supposed to get pregnant when I'm not even cycling. There are lots of different ways and tiers that this can present as. I'm not trying to put words on you, and I'm not trying to describe your own experience because it is different for everyone. But these are common themes that I see across the majority of people that I work with. On top of that, all of that, the feeling like your body's broken and you don't know what's going on, the confusion, the feeling of let down. And also that linking into your very essence of femininity and womanhood. You could also just feel like you've lost yourself because, on a journey like this, you can end up having thoughts and feelings that just don't feel line up with who you thought you were. When I say that, I'm really referring to feelings like jealousy and bitterness when it comes to other people, right? Because you don't go through this journey in isolation. You go through it in the context of a person in a friendship group with family and within society. There is no way that you can go through this journey without knowing someone that gets pregnant or having someone in your periphery that gets there before you do. That can elicit some really horrible thoughts and feelings that you don't even recognise, like hang on a minute; that's not me, what is going on here? Which are all normal, by the way. All normal thoughts and feelings. 10:04  Then tiered on that, I've already mentioned this sense of womanhood and that kind of like, it can feel like that very essence of your femininity isn't working for you. And then for some people, for example, who've had ectopic pregnancies, or who've had tissue or even organs removed as a result of endometriosis, for example, that can exacerbate that even further, right, if you've had endometrial tubes taken out. That can have a huge impact on your sense of self with regards to Fertility as well. If you are overweight, and you're told that that's to blame, or you're underweight and told that that's to blame, this is completely tied into our bodies and the way we connect and relate to ourselves. 11:10  It's just so easy to get caught up in that it's so easy to get caught up in those waves of emotion and the negative self-chat, and that can take over. For me, it did, it took over, to the point where eventually it was running the show, and I could barely function. Actually, I really struggled. I don't want that for any of you, and a huge part of my work now is not just the nutrition, not just the lifestyle, but actually providing some of that emotional support as well. 11:51  Another thing is that many of you, many of the people that I work with, I see focusing on the negatives. I did this as well, and I'd still do this. This is my natural tendency that I've had to do a lot of work on and continue to do work on, but many of you I see focusing on the negatives, even when there are positives to be drawn. So for me, for example, I'm the type of person, and I know so many of you are as well, where you can achieve something, you can meet a goal, you can do something that you hoped you would do. And instead of celebrating that, your mind just automatically goes to the next thing or why that thing wasn't as good as what it should have been. As I say, it's just this constant negative self-chat that can really, really take over. 12:49  In the episode today, I just wanted to remind you of something that I say time and time again, but it's always worth being reminded of. And that is that fertility is a game of odds. And while there are certain conditions and certain imbalances in the body that can impede those chances of having a baby, it does not mean that there is no chance. It's very rare that someone in my sphere comes to me, and ive just said there's just no chance is not going to happen. So it's a game of odds. And if it's a game of odds, then we need to be focusing on improving those odds, right? If the odds are 100 to one, it's difficult to count the odds Exactly. But we know the things that can be done to improve those odds and to make it more likely. And I started using the analogy here; that's really not great for me because I don't know what 100 to one means in 10 to one means is 10 to one better than 100 to one, I don't know 10 to one. Yeah, I don't know. So I've used a terrible analogy there. So you can definitely laugh at me. But regardless of my knowledge of it 10 to one and 100 times, it's still a game of odds. We want to be in whichever direction that is in. We want t

0:00 Hello, you are listening to Katy Bradbury, nutritional therapist and registered nurse. Today's podcast episode is called 'The Love Episode.' 0:27  Hello, hello, hello. It feels like ages since I've spoken to you all, actually. I missed last week's podcast as I warned you that I might do if you're a regular listener on account of being away on holiday. For any of you who follow me on my socials at Katie Bradbery Health or are in my Facebook group' Fertility and the First 1000 Days', you'll probably know that I've been away and seen some of my pictures and stories etc. So we had a lovely holiday. I actually recorded the episode before last before we went away, so for me, it feels like ages since I've spoken to you, although for you, it might not feel as long because I've released the pre-recorded episode while I was away. It actually feels really funny recording this because my ear on the flight; we were away for nearly two weeks, and on the flight out to Spain, I don't know if this has ever happened to you, but my ears popped really, really badly on the flight on the landing. And sometimes it can feel a bit uncomfortable for a day or two; this has actually lasted the full holiday. I don't know what I did to my ear. But it was quite painful for a few days, and then it's felt like I've been underwater ever since, but only in my right ear, so it's quite disconcerting. I've got used to it now, and it's a lot better than it was, but coming back to the studio and hearing my voice amplified a little bit through the microphone is a bit weird for my ear. So hopefully, it doesn't sound weird to you. But one of the reasons I was away on holiday, and again, anyone who follows me or knows me might already be aware of this, is because I went to one of my best friend's weddings. Her name is Holly, and she has married a Spanish man. So Holly is one of my oldest and dearest friends from university. And she moved to Spain temporarily, quote-unquote, about seven years ago, so quite a while. She moved out to Codabar, and she decided she really wanted to learn Spanish and the best way to do that was to go and live in Spain for a year. She went out there to go and teach English, and she loved it so much, and I think this sun, the whole lifestyle there, I think was just for her, and she never came back, much to our dismay. And then she met a lovely Spanish man called JC and they just got married. So we're really, really happy for them. It was a beautiful day. 3:39  The reason I'm telling you all of this is that going and being at the wedding; I haven't been to a wedding for a while actually obviously COVID, this wedding itself was meant to happen, I think it was it was rescheduled twice due to COVID. Quite a few of our friends got married at similar times a few years back, and then obviously COVID happened, so there were no weddings, and so it's been ages since we've been to a wedding, and it was such a beautiful day. It really was; I'm getting a bit weepy just thinking about it. But it really was a wonderful day. It was interesting attending a wedding having been married because my partner and I got married in 2015, so we will be celebrating our seventh wedding anniversary this year, which is crazy. It's really nice going to a wedding as someone that's been married for seven years because when they were saying the vows, and by the way they formally did their signing of the papers a couple of days before and so the ceremony that we had was purely ceremonial, and it had some of their loved ones. So JC's sister and my friend Holly's brother said lots of wonderful things. And of course, the father of the bride did a speech, and they said a few vows to one another, as well. And it was just really lovely seeing all of those wonderful things that are said at weddings, with such hope and such sincere meaning. It was really nice. 5:39  I wasn't sitting next to my husband actually, because I was a bridesmaid, so I was sitting next to one of my other wonderful friends, Sarah, but it was really nice to come together with my husband after the ceremony was done and just, I don't know, we're not very romantic people, generally speaking, but it was just, we got quite gushy, and it was quite sweet because it made us remember what it felt like to be married and to get married, and it made us, all of those things that they say it's not just about the wedding day, it's about the marriage, and it's about how you navigate all of these things together. In the time that my husband and I have been married, we have been through the journey of infertility and come out the other side of it, thankfully. And we now have two girls, and it made us reflect a lot on everything that we've been through and the fact that we still stand side by side, despite plenty of bumps in the road, as all relationships have. It inspired me to come and do an episode with all of you just to talk about love because I think one of the things about when you are on a fertility journey, that is regardless of whether it's a first child or subsequent child, assuming that you are in a relationship, and I'm not wanting to exclude anyone that's not in a relationship in terms of the general content of my podcast, because, of course, lots of the things that I speak about with regards to fertility are still applicable to you if you're not in a relationship, but still wanting a baby. But this particular episode is applicable for people who are in that relationship and who are going through the journey of struggling with fertility together because it can put a hell of a lot of strain on a relationship. And there are so many ways in which you can do that. And I just wanted to reflect a little bit on some of those things today, really, and also to give a little bit of practical, not advice, because it's different for everyone, and I couldn't possibly kind of advise you on your situation. But what I wanted you to get from this episode is to come away feeling a bit like lovey and gushy in the same way that I did after my friend's wedding, and just maybe having that new appreciation for your partner, or you know that new kind of sense of love and respect for them. 8:33  What I'd really like you to do for this episode, and I don't know where you listen to the episode, whether it's while you're out and about or in the car or on your headphones while you're out walking or running. Or if you do it while you're doing something else, like making dinner or whatever it might be. But if you do have the opportunity to do this, during the episode, or to come back and do it, it's better if you do it during, because otherwise, it turns into one of those things where you say you're gonna come back to it and you never do. So if you do have the opportunity to do this right now, I'd love for you to grab a pen and paper, and I'm going to just have a little chat with you about a few things. Towards the end of the episode, I'm going to get you to just write a few things down and to pause me talking and to just time yourself to do a couple of really brief written exercises. 9:26  So, thinking about this wedding day and lots of what came up in the vows and the speeches and everything that was the rhetoric that was coming up time and time again was, you know, the things that really matter, in a marriage or in a relationship are things like laughing together and being compassionate and caring for one another and being respectful even when you want to throttle them. I guess those are the things like, are you laughing with your partner? And I know that was certainly one of the things in mine and my husband's relationship that I was just so grateful for, and continue to be so grateful for, is that we do laugh, we share a great shared sense of humour, and we laugh together, about so many things. That's super important for us. But also, it can be just things like, how well do you know your partner's goals and hopes and dreams? And vice versa? Are you standing by each other sides while you work towards achieving those goals? Now, of course, that can feel really strained when you're on a fertility journey. But I guess another layer to that understanding and mutual respect for one another is knowing that things won't stay the same in any relationship. Regardless of whether you're going through fertility struggles or anything else, things won't stay the same; things will always change, and any hardship in a relationship presents the opportunity to change and grow together. In my field, in my work, I've worked with couples in lots of lots of different circumstances. At the moment, I work primarily with couples who are trying to conceive, but I've worked with couples who are expecting children and couples who have recently had children. Within that journey, I see the full spectrum, I see partners who are fully engaged in the process, thinking about my current work supporting people on their fertility journeys, and doing investigations and using nutrition and lifestyle to get to the root causes of infertility, and I'd address those imbalances that can cause infertility. I've worked with couples who are fully engaged in the process, I've worked with couples who are like, yeah, working with me as a pair attending appointments together, doing things together, whether that's exercising together, or meal planning, or,  meditating together and really using this journey as an opportunity to be with one another and stand by each other.  12:37  I've also worked with couples where the partner has been sceptical of the work that I'm doing and hasn't wanted to be involved. I've worked with couples where the partner has been disengaged in the fertility journey. I've also worked with people who have been in relationships where the person that I'm working with feels like they've done so much inner work on their journey, like meditation and counselling, et cetera. and is moving forwards in a way that respects, and doing so much inner work and the p

Hello, I'm Katy Bradbury, a qualified Nutritional Therapist, Private Health Visitor and qualified nurse. I have worked in Women's Health, Maternal and Children's Health for many years. Today's podcast is called "Five Examples of this S**t Working". In this episode, I run through some examples of clients struggling with their fertility in different ways (including PCOS, endometriosis, IVF support, low egg count, hormones imbalances, gut issues, and inflammation) who have worked with me in either 1:1 or a group programme. The examples show specifics of how our work together has created tangible results. Due to confidentiality, I am not sharing anyone's real names, so all the names are fictional for the purpose of the episode. The examples and background are factual.   00:00: Introduction 01:26: A group programme success after nearly giving up 03:00: Sharing stories from people at different stages Samantha's Story 04:40 One of the first participants in the group programme 06:30: An A-type personality and FULLY committed 09:36: Successful first IVF and expecting twin Emma's Story 10:00: One of the first participants in the group programme 10:19 12-week Fundamentals for Fertility – what is it? 12:10: Our new Monthly Membership waiting list 12:54: Hormonal imbalances, digestion issues & emotional trauma, and she was convinced she would need IVF 13:48: Digestion mini-series 15:00: Testing 15:58: Became pregnant naturally, even before her first IVF session Sian's Story 16:22 1:1 client with PCOS and was under a fertility clinic 17:19: Unfortunately, Sian suffered a miscarriage after electrical stimulation 18:10: Now has a four-month-old daughter Deborah's Story 18:37: Success but not that has resulted in a pregnancy 19:41: Over 40 years old with a list of health issues, including a miscarriage and failed IVF 21:05: 1:1 client with a lot of testing but both her and her partner are committed 21:45: Recent scan showed 4-5 follicles in the left ovary and 3-4 on the right ovary Sarah's Story 23:11: Group programme participant, three rounds of IVF, which did result in some fertilization but no pregnancy 25:04: Round 4 of IVF and 9 out of 10 eggs fertilized, triple the fertilization from previous rounds 26:37: Currently in her two-week wait – we wish her the best 28:46: IVF is gruelling 29:30: Even though the 12-week Fundamentals for Fertility programme is a group session, it is still tailored to you 30:48: Today's episode is to celebrate all my clients 31:20: This S**T does work 33:41: A confession from me 35:20: Please leave a review or stars LINKS MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST: Membership Waiting List Episode 51 – The Digestive Series Part 1 WAYS THAT YOU CAN GET KATY'S HELP: Fertility and the First 1,000 Days Membership: Fertility and the First 1,000 Days Membership Fundamentals for Fertility online course: 12-Week Fundamentals for Fertility Course with Katy Bradbury (evergreen) Book a discovery call to talk through your needs for working together 1:1: Practice Better More info can be found about Katy on her website: Katy Bradbury | From fertility to the first 1000 days Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katybradburyhealth Email: support@katybradbury.com Love the show? Don't forget to leave a star rating and a review to share the love and help it reach others who need to hear this!