Quinoa? Try pasta instead, preferably white. Eat broccoli in moderation; gorge on buttermilk pancakes. Not kale: quail. What your body really needs is soda, gallons and gallons of it. And no meal is complete without a helping of chocolate. Melt it in a sauce, mix it milk to drink, or if you can think of no other way, eat it straight up for dessert, pinching your nose to mute the decadence. The key thing is frequency and quantity, and if you run out, question your commitment to a healthy, joyful, long-lived life; then consider a substitution of cotton candy or marshmallow fluff.
No nutritionist or health coach ever recommended that advice. Not to me at least, when I was trying to get pregnant and wanting to know how the food I ate affected my fertility. They pushed a healthy diet and told me to avoid the foods you’re always told to avoid.
What frustrated me is that no one told me why. I wasn’t looking for a miracle cure, but if I was going to set aside my baked potato, I wanted reasons beyond the vague ones I half-heartedly heeded already.
So, I asked my relentless questions of health coach Linsey Hurley, who believes for a body to perform in optimal form, you ought to fuel it right. “Diet is important to anyone in a body who wants it to function well,” Linsey said wisely, offering five tips to live (and eat) by.
The first tip? Improve your diet, starting now. Sperm and eggs are made from cells in the body as are the hormones that regulate their development and the changes they undergo during reproduction. The healthier the cells are from the start, the healthier the embryo will be. Like anything built from scratch, a strong foundation is the best kind, so begin nourishing yours today, regardless of whether you want to start trying for a baby next week or next year.
But what to eat? Food digested by our bodies influences the reproductive environment, no surprise there. Eating foods that leave behind acidic traces reduce sperm count and make the vagina unfriendly to reproduction. Aim for a diet of 80% Alkaline Foods and 20% Acidic Foods. Acidic foods include: meat, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and processed foods. Alkaline foods are fruit and vegetables.
And what to avoid? Processed foods aren’t food at all. The digestive system perceives the preservatives and chemicals that make up processed foods as toxins and envelops them in fat as a defense mechanism. That’s why processed foods cause you to gain weight so easily, regardless of the calorie count. One particularly harmful offender is aspartame, a low-calorie sugar substitute that shuts off the mechanism in our brain that tells us when we’re full.
Men, in particular, should skip the beer after work, the coffee before it and any recreational drug use because they lower sperm count, and in both genders, degrade the lymphatic system.
Consider the meat you eat. You inherit the hormones, chemical additives, and nutritionally-devoid food a cow ate when beef is on your dinner plate. In fact, the dose you ingest is doubly as potent and harmful to you because it gets concentrated in muscle, the portion you consume. The solution? Say it for me: pony up the bucks for organic meat. Animals free to roam fields where they graze give you the best possible head start.
Everyone tells you to drink water and here’s why: it’s the solvent that keeps your machinery in optimal form. On a daily basis, drink half your body weight in ounces of this super scrubber. A light-weight who’s 120 lbs ought to drink 60 ounces or 7 and a half cups, minimum. If you weigh 150 lbs, you should be downing 75 ounces a day or just over 9 cups. With all that toxin-flushing, who has time for eating?
If you’re eager for more guidance concerning nutrition-related goal making, you might arrange a visit with a nutritionist or an initial phone call with a health coach, like Linsey, of whom you can ask your own hard-hitting questions.
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Jenn Scheck-Kahn is a local mom and a founder of Journal of the Month and Tell It Slant, which are services for writers and literary journals.
The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the blog contributor’s. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider. Writers may have conflicts of interest, and their opinions are their own.
