In this episode of the Natural Fertility Podcast, Dr. Jane Levesque, a naturopathic doctor and natural fertility expert, delves into the intricacies of the two-week wait. Drawing from personal experiences and professional insights, Dr. Levesque offers practical advice on how to support your body physically, mentally, and emotionally during this crucial period. From hydration and nutrition to rest and nervous system regulation, she provides a comprehensive guide to optimizing fertility naturally. Whether you're just starting your journey or have been trying for years, this episode is packed with valuable tips to help you navigate the emotional roller coaster of trying to conceive. Tune in for expert advice and support on your path to parenthood.

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STOP wasting time and suppressing your anxiety. Let's navigate your fertility journey together, so you can feel more confident and prepared for this next BIG chapter of your life. In Fertility 101, you'll join Dr. Jane, the creator of the Maximize Your Fertility Program, to learn how to enhance your fertility naturally. Participate in bi-weekly calls with Dr. Jane and learn alongside a private community of women on similar journeys.

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Every month, Dr. Jane takes on 2 couples where she works with them 1:1 to identify and overcome the root cause of their infertility.

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Key Takeways

06:07 Supporting Nervous System

09:40 Fertility and Hormones

14:14 Supporting Fertilization and Pregnancy

18:22 Fertility and Pregnancy Challenges

27:32 Mental Toughness and Emotional Resilience During Pregnancy

Memorable Quotes

"One of my mentors talks a lot about the microbiome, the reproductive microbiome, and how much it's impacted by the gut microbiome. If we fix the gut microbiome, we're fixing the uterine microbiome or the reproductive microbiome, but not the other way around."

"You shouldn't be doing high-intensity workouts, you shouldn't be doing caloric restriction in the second half of the cycle... doing anything that's overly stimulating can lead to PM's symptoms like mood swings, fatigue, and breast tenderness."

"Pregnancy is a wildly complicated process from everything that needs to happen for ovulation to occur, and then for the sperm to get to the egg and then the sperm to actually fertilize the egg, and then for the fertilization to occur, and then for that fertilized ovum to travel through the fallopian tube and implant itself into the uterus."

Connect With Dr. Jane Levesque

Website - https://www.drjanelevesque.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/drjanelevesque/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/DrJaneLevesque/

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@dr.janelevesque7319

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A lot of the times they stop trying to conceive because they realize how many things are off, whether it's infections that they have or nutrient deficiencies that they have. And they could still try, quote unquote, you're still going to have sex, but you kind of stop worrying about, oh, my God, is this the cycle that I get pregnant? Because the focus becomes solely on you, both you and your partner, to just heal. Pregnancy is a natural process. So if it's not happening or if it's not sticking, something is missing. After having a family member go through infertility and experiencing a miscarriage myself, I realized how little support and education women have around infertility. I wanna change that. I'm doctor Jane Levesque. I'm a naturopathic doctor and a natural fertility expert. Tune in every Tuesday at 09:00 a.m. for insightful case studies, expert interviews, and practical tips on how you can optimize fertility naturally. If you've been struggling with infertility, pregnancy loss, women's health issues, or you just wanna be proactive, prepare yourself for the next big chapter in your life. This show is for you, ladies. Today I want to talk to you about mastering the two week wait. So when you have started, you decided that you've started to try to conceive. There's something that happens, and it's probably the most excruciating two weeks of your life. When you've realized and the ovulation is done, and you've done the deed as many times as you can, and now you just have to wait and see what happens. There's a couple of things that I want to share with you in terms of what you can do physically, mentally, and emotionally to help you support your body physically, mentally, and emotionally, and come through, you know, mastering this two week weight. Because whether it's your first month that you're trying or your third year that you're in this, I find for some of us women, it's really hard to get out of the emotional roller coaster, and it can become really draining, and you can actually stop your life almost entirely because you're just waiting to see if you're pregnant. You're just waiting to see if you're pregnant. And of course, when I work with my couples, they've been at this for a long time. So two years of waiting for every two weeks out of the month is a lot of waiting. And so I want to help you kind of understand how to approach this and how to support your body. Like I said, physically. Mentally and emotionally. And I have a whole other podcast that I'm recording on the first couple of weeks of pregnancy. Because there's a difference when you're waiting to find out if you're pregnant versus when you are actually already pregnant. A difference in emotional and energetic. Energetic shift, and also just some things that you might do differently from a physical standpoint to support your body. So let's go through the do's and don'ts, and we'll kind of start with a physical body of when we're in this two week wait. So when you're in the two week wait, basically from like a physiological standpoint, what's happening is, hey, we want to make sure that the. We create the environment for the egg and the sperm to meet, and then for that ovum one, once it's fertilized, to travel all the way down to the fallopian tubes and then snuggle it way into the uterus. And the implantation happens anywhere between four to six weeks for women. So that first couple of weeks, when we're trying to detect the hcg hormone to see if it has already spiked, that's just from the fertilization of the egg in the sperm. And then it's starting to travel towards the uterus. It's not necessarily in the uterus yet, and it's not, you know, necessarily implanting yet. When you're detecting that HCG, it very much depends on when you ovulate it. And just like as a woman, because I think we have this 28 day cycle in our mind, but in reality, some women will ovulate on day ten, while others will ovulate on day 16 or day 20. So when you're going to be able to detect a pregnancy for someone who ovulated on day ten versus day 16, you know, or even day 20 is going to be different. Like, it's a six day or ten day difference in the ability of the hormones to rise. So while you're waiting, there is the do's and the don'ts. What we want to do, the do's when we're talking from a physical standpoint, what is it that you can actually do for your physical body to support the fertilization and creating this optimal environment for the egg and the sperm to travel and get to the uterus? You want to make sure that you're hydrating really well. I believe in drinking clean water. So reverse osmosis or distilled. And you talk, you hear me talk a lot about distilled. There is the reverse osmosis is still getting out 99.9%. So if you have reverse osmosis, and that's what you have. But then you heard me about distilled, let just know that you're still doing really well. So you want to make sure that you're hydrating, but you need to make sure that you have good electrolytes within that water, especially if you're drinking distilled. It's not the end of the world if you have some distilled water without electrolytes. But for the most part, even if you're drinking regular water, you want to electro, you want to provide the electrolytes and energize that water, because electrolytes are, will help with the communication of the cell. And when we're looking at the process of fertilization, the thing that drives the sperm to meet the egg is calcium channels. So for the sperm to actually get through that first layer of the egg and then to bind onto the egg, egg is highly, highly driven by vitamin D and calcium. So, and then there are sodium and potassium channels. There's zinc, there's selenium. That's involved a little bit further into the fertilization, if you will. But there's a lot of energy and movement that needs to happen. So we want to make sure that we're really, really well hydrated. We also want to make sure that we're eating really nourishing foods during that time. And it's your warming foods, things that are cooked for the most part, things that are really easy to digest. So soups, broths, stews, smoothies, depending on kind of the season and limiting those really cold foods. So if you're in the summer, you're probably going to crave a little bit more raw foods because it's, the weather is hotter, but in the winter, you definitely want to avoid these things because the cooling foods are going to not just cool your digestive tract, but because the digestive tract in the uterus are so like, the digestive system in the uterus are so interconnected. When we create a lot of work for digestion and bring a lot of coldness into digestion, we tend to do that for the uterus. And, you know, one of my mentors talks a lot about the microbiome, the reproductive microbiome, and how much it's impacted by the gut microbiome. If we fix the gut microbiome, we're fixing the uterine microbiome or the reproductive microbiome, but not the other way around. So the gut has a really big influence on what's happening with our reproductive system. So you want to eat a lot of really nourishing foods that are really easy to digest, as opposed to things that are cold, that are, you know, hard to digest, whether it's sugar, whether it's lactose for you. So dairy or raw vegetables and fruits or not fruits, raw vegetables, and maybe an overconsumption of fruits, again, depending on the time of the year. But just things that are easy to digest and things that are very vibrant in color. We want to be eating the rainbow. We want to be providing our body with as many nutrients as possible. And the last thing that you want to make sure is that you rest. And you do practice a lot of nervous system regulation. Now, if you're listening to this, and it's like Doctor Jane has been three years of us trying to conceive, you expect me to do this every cycle? And the answer is yes, ladies, whether you have been trying to conceive for a month or three years, this is what you should be doing in the second half of the cycle to support the hormones and the nervous system because of the fluctuations that we have as women in our menstrual cycle. So if you've been listening to my podcast for a while and I talk about the foods that you should eat throughout your cycle and how to exercise with your cycle, how to biohack your cycle, the way that you treat the first half of the cycle is very different from the way that you treat the second half of the cycle. So these are things that, in general, you should be doing in the second half of the cycle to support progesterone rising and that uterine lining and healthy estrogen rising as well. And then the clearance of those hormones when we're trying to conceive now, the intention is to provide a really optimal environment for the fertilization to happen and then, obviously, for the implantation as well. So it's. It is things that you should be striving to do all of the time anyways, but especially in the second half of the cycle, because our physiology changes in the second half of the cycle. And I see women make that mistake all of the time where they don't change, or they try to keep up with their male partner in terms of exercise, or they're trying to diet in the second half of the cycle, where it's really, it could be quite damaging on our overall hormones, hormone system. And remember, hormones are, they work together. You can't impact inflammation and estrogen without impacting progesterone. And testosterone and cortisol and thyroid. All of these hormones work together, so you should be hydrating really well with clean water and electrolytes, you should be nourishing yourself really well. And when I talk about rest and nervous system regulation, a lot of my patients who come to me, they're so dysregulated working jobs that they hate from ten to 12 hours a day. They're skipping meals. They have, you know, colds that they're catching easily. They have tension, whether it's with their partner or with other family members. They have their hair falling out like they're not exercising or they're over exercising. So that nervous system you're is picking up a lot of stress. And so the last thing your body is thinking about is like, oh, I should get pregnant. And when we look at it from the hormonal perspective again, it's a, we can't make progesterone. We can't make good progesterone level, good progesterone levels in the body. When our cortisol is all out of whack because it's called the cortisol steel, all the nutrients go towards making the cortisol, which is stress, instead of making this progesterone hormone, which, of course, will help us feel more calm, cool, and collected, but also help with support with that implantation and, you know, a healthy pregnancy throughout. So those are the do's. The don'ts is kind of the opposite of that. So we don't want to do anything really high intensity. We don't want to restrict our calories. We don't want to do anything that's really stimulating. If you are doing a bunch of detoxing, like, I get this question all the time, do you stop detoxing in the second half of the cycle? When people are working with me, it's very different what I do versus I'm giving you general advice. So when people are working with me, a lot of the times they stop trying to conceive because they realize how many things are off, whether it's infections that they have or nutrient deficiencies that they have. And they could still try, quote unquote, you're still going to have sex, but you kind of stop worrying about, oh, my God, is this the cycle that I get pregnant? Because the focus becomes solely on you, both you and your partner, to just heal? And if you've been struggling with infertility for a while, like I said, I do with my patients what needs to get done in order to get them to the other side, which is a healthy pregnancy. And in order to have a healthy pregnancy, we cannot have infections. We need to make sure that our liver, our gut, our kidneys are working properly. We want to make sure that our toxin load is as little as possible, because, let's be honest, we can't get it 100% down. And then we want to make sure we have all of the right nutrients. This is where the testing is going to come in, right? What's your methylation doing? What are some of your b vitamins? Homocysteine, inflammation, blood sugar, thyroid, estrogen, progesterone, you name it. Then we can get very specific in terms of the support that we need. So even in general, what I teach in the second half of the cycle, you shouldn't be doing high intensity workouts, you shouldn't be doing caloric restriction in the second half of the cycle. And most women will have an increase in their appetite in the second half of the cycle. And they have that because it's a natural response for the body to crave more food, because it's trying to build more lining in, you know, in preparation for implantation. Even if you're not trying, the body's still doing that, right? The body is quote unquote, trying to get pregnant every cycle, which is why we have a menstrual cycle. But in doing anything that's overly stimulating, I find a lot of my women will then struggle with PM's if they don't learn to slow down. What happens is they get a lot of PM's symptoms where their mood is out of control, they're really tired, they have a lot of breast tenderness, a lot of fatigue, really irritable. If we don't take care of ourselves, the body will tell us to slow down. And then we become, you know, this person that we don't really want to become. But we blame it on a period in reality is we need to learn how to take care of ourselves so our hormones are not running us. So those are the do's and the don'ts. When it comes to mastering the two equate, we want to be really nourishing to ourselves and really nurture, nurturing and nourishing, just supporting that second half of the cycle and regulating the nervous system, because, like I said, there's lots going on when it comes to the mental and emotional support. You guys, this is really tricky. And every time that I have started trying to conceive with my husband, when, you know, we are ready to have children, it's this weird switch that goes on because you have sex on a regular basis and everything is fine, and it's. But as soon as you have this intention of like, okay, we're going to try to get pregnant. Pregnant. And then that ovulation window is done. Mentally and emotionally, it's like this thing that happens in your brain where you're just waiting. You're waiting to see and you're hyper aware of all of the symptoms. You're like, I don't think my nipples used to be sore. Does that mean I'm pregnant or my. I think I'm feeling a little bit of bloating. Is this implantation? We really get into our head. So there's a couple things that mentally and emotionally, that I think really helps to address us when we're going through this window of trying to conceive. Now, if you're first trying to conceive versus it's been two to three years, I'm going to differentiate that. So if it's the first little bit, first of all, we want to just journal, meditate, get our thoughts out, and pay attention to what's coming up for us. Why are we feeling super anxious? What are the feelings? Is there a fear that's coming up? Is it a self worth? Issues? Like, I don't say anxiety because anxiety is like, what everybody will feel, but, like, what's underneath that anxiety? Is there a sadness? Is there a frustration? Is there just a discomfort in the unknown and really not trusting your body and not feeling good in it? For every single person, it's just going to be something a little bit different. And I think it's important for you to explore that. I think it's also important to spend some time just with yourself, by yourself, whether it's meditating or sitting in the. Sitting quietly, which essentially is meditating for most people, but sitting alone with your thoughts and like I said, mapping them out a little bit, what is the rabbit hole that you're going down and why are you going down that rabbit hole? Right. What are the things that you're questioning? Again, this is just an awareness exercise, because if you're not bringing this out on paper, it's just happening in your head and it makes you feel pretty crazy versus if you get it out on paper and then you have a supportive network, whether it's your partner, whether it's your girlfriends, your family members, where you can talk through some of this stuff, then it's this acknowledgement that, oh, my God, I'm feeling all of these things. As soon as you talk about it, out loud, there's a sign of relief, like, oh, okay, that felt really good. To get that out, you might need to do that a couple of times to help keep you grounded and help keep you in the present moment. Because a lot of the times when we have anxiety is because we're thinking about the future and the what ifs. And it's really important to practice bringing yourself back into, you know, into the present moment. If this is something that you have now experienced for a year or two years or three years. My advice to you guys is it's not that you can still journal, you can still meditate, you still need to support yourself with positive people and, you know, relationships. But you're probably in the stage of the game where it's time to get some help because you don't have to wait for six months or a year to have to get help, but most people do because the conventional system tells you to. And I've been really passionate about talking to you guys that you do not have to wait. And the best thing that you could do is actually get proper testing and, you know, learn how to detox, optimize your gut, optimize your liver, optimize your hormones, optimize your nutrients before you even think about conceiving. Because minimum amount of time you want to give yourself a three months, but really it takes six to nine months and for some a year and even longer depending on what it is that's going on. And so when, by the time people get to me, it's like they've been through a lot and we have to reverse the damage of some of the things that they have done. And also now, you know, when somebody meets me in their thirties versus 35, it's just because you've stopped trying to conceive in between that time doesn't mean that your health got better. Maybe it did, but a lot of the times things have actually regressed because, you know, let's, let's face it, fertility doesn't get better with age. So I think it's important to journal, it's important to meditate, it's important to support, to find a supportive network, but it's also important to find a practitioner that's going to help you make sense as to why you're not getting pregnant. I'm a big believer in that pregnancy is a natural process and if it's not happening, something is missing. And, and saying that pregnancy is a wildly complicated process from everything that needs to happen for the fertilizer, like first of all, everything that needs to happen for ovulation to occur, and then for the sperm to get to the egg and then the sperm to actually fertilize the egg, and then for the fertilization to occur, and then for that fertilized ovum to travel through the fallopian tube and implant itself into the uterus and then the uterus and the endometrial tissue to not reject it because let's face it, it's foreign DNA. So then we can have a proper, you know, like embryogenic development. And embryogenesis can occur to me sometimes I wonder how we're even all here, because it is a wildly complicated process, but it is something that our bodies are built to do, and so we have to understand why your body in particular is not doing it. And I can almost guarantee you if you're not involving your partner, there's something going on, on your partner's side as well that's really, really important to address. So finding that practitioner that's going to stand behind you and find you answers and lay out a roadmap is really, really critical. Here are the things that you don't want to do. You do not want to be scrolling, googling, and researching whether it's early signs of symptoms or how do I know if I'm getting scary or my God, you guys, I don't. I have had a couple of patients who are. They have, I think it was like four to 8 hours on average. Now, I know it's a big gap, but four to 8 hours on average with their screen time, and that is like, while they're working and that is just searching google and I'm like, you, we have to take your phone away. Like, I've literally had to take some of my patients phones away. Their partners helped me because it's like you're driving yourself nuts and you're feeding into this anxiety, looking things up that are just so irrelevant, and they're throwing you into a whole negative rabbit hole that essentially you don't have any control of right now. Like, it's the wait and see period. And all you can do is just support your body and make sure it has the nutrients that it needs for this period right now to make it, you know, the best option. But googling and just searching things aim, like, endlessly is probably one of the worst things that you could do. So if you could set some boundaries in terms of how much screen time you're allowed to have, and then what is it that you can actually search? Like I said, I've had to have the partner really had to help because obviously I couldn't be there to hold this patient accountable because there was like an addiction to just researching this stuff. And, I mean, she was just going crazy. She was driving herself nuts. I don't want you to take early pregnancy tests or, you know, all these. I see women, oh, my boobs are sore. I should pee on a stick. These are early detection tests that can really throw you in for a loop. I've had people who've had early detection of pregnancy and really great HCG levels at the beginning that then stopped doubling all of a sudden and they miscarried. And then I've had the HCD levels that were not detected at the beginning of the pregnancy. Like it took the full, they had to miss their period and wait for two days to actually do the test and then get a positive pregnancy test. And then the HCG was kind of slow and not doubling, and then all of a sudden it went. Everybody is so different in terms of how their body is going to respond to the pregnancy, to the implantation. And I think, you know, because it's such a highly emotional state, there's some marketing and companies out there that really take advantage of that, whether it's, you know, all the excessive alleged strips, peeing and trying to figure out when you're ovulating without actually paying any signs and without paying any attention to the signs and symptoms that you are getting as a woman, that if you're ovulating or not, and then the same is coming with pregnancy tests. Like, you need one pregnancy test to confirm in pregnancy, maybe two. One pregnancy test. You don't. When I see women buying them in bulk at Costco, I'm just like, stop doing that. You need one pregnancy test. And if your period comes, the new period comes, just wait for it to actually come. And I know some of you are like, I'm not patient enough. Well, you should learn how to be patient. You should learn how to do that, because this entire process is going to take a tremendous amount of patience and tremendous amount of discipline and mental toughness, if you will, and emotional resiliency. And if we cannot make these two weeks without going haywire and jumping on the emotional roller coaster, it's going to be really difficult. It's not impossible, but it's going to be really difficult to go through the pregnancy, the labor, and then the, you know, postpartum period when we don't have any of this discipline around our emotions and, you know, our mental toughness. And this is why I encourage journaling I encourage counseling and therapy so you can understand why anxiety is there in the first place. And what else is it triggering? It's like I've told you, you know, oh, hey, we started trying, and now all of a sudden, I can feel this desire to go off the deep end to start research. I can feel that desire. Like, it's so. And I choose not to feed into it. It literally is a choice. That's how I felt, especially with my last pregnancy. I was like, I choose not to do this. And instead, what I'm going to choose to do is just to be present and listen to my body. And truthfully, I knew I was pregnant, number one, because I was wearing an oura ring. And if you're doing basal body temperature, you could. The spike in progesterone will be just a little bit higher than what it is in just a menstrual cycle. So if you're doing basal body temperature tracking or even if you're wearing an aura ring, you could see the temperature spikes just a little bit more. And that usually can detect that pregnancy. And we can see, you know, that it will continue to stay high versus it'll start to dip around. Day 26, 27, 28, like I said, versus it's just stays up. Day 28, 29, like, there's just no signs of the period. And so I remember knowing when my body was pregnant, and also I remember, like, the cycle before that that I thought I was pregnant, but I was, and I was so confused. There was so much going on that I didn't have a time to be present, and then I had the miscarriage. And then when I said I was going to do this again, I was just going to be present and respect my body, and I'm not going to feed into all the anxiety. And then when I got pregnant, that, you know, the third time that was successful, it was a very different experience. And so that's what I. I would love for you guys, is to not feed into this crazy anxiety searching, whatever, you know, whatever this is, these two weeks are triggering for you and to really just be present, because at the end of the day, if you're not pregnant, this cycle, you just did a really great job taking care of yourself for two weeks. And it might sound crazy, but for some women, that's like the most amount of time that they spend taking care of themselves. Because you're so used to to go, go, go, and your job is demanding and your relationships are demanding, with your mom, with your dad, with your siblings. I can't tell you how many of my patients have siblings that they're taking care of. Like they're actually supporting them financially or they're supporting their parents financially. And it's like they're just so spread out, so stretched out, you know, really thinly stretched out that there's no room for anything else. And so being able to reflect on that and say, hey, can I make these two weeks about me? And ideally, of course, we're going to take care of ourselves in the first half of the cycle as well. It's going to be slightly different. But mastering this two week weight, we need to nourish ourselves. We need to hydrate. We need to just slow down and regulate that nervous system and then journal, meditate, connect, stay present, maybe even get some therapy. Those are, you know, the pieces that, like I said, I've implemented and they felt really great when I was pregnant my last time, but also that I teach my patients to implement. Because if you've been at this for three years or five years or however long, we need to get to the root cause and we need to understand what your body's trying to tell you. And so researching things and continuing to scroll and just be manic about what's happening, because don't get me wrong, there's panic that comes in. This is the time to say, hey, I think I need some help. And that's, I think is a very valid statement, is, hey, I think I need some help. And that's like you do, because if you didn't need any help, then you would have it figured out already. And we want to be, you know, strategic about our next steps. So I hope you guys found this helpful. The next episode, I'm going to talk about what to do in the first couple of weeks of pregnancy because like I said, there's a couple of different things that are happening. You now have confirmed that you are pregnant, but how do we support ourselves and help to calm down some of the anxiety? So that's going to be next episode. Thanks so much for tuning in, and I'll see you guys next week. Thank you so much for listening. To read the full show notes of this episode, including summary timestamps, guest quotes, and any resources that were mentioned on the episode. Visit drjanelevesque.com forward slash podcast. And if you're getting value from these episodes, I'd love it if you took two minutes to share it with a friend. Rate and leave me a review@ratethispodcast.com. doctorJane the reviews will help with the discoverability of the show. And who knows, I might share your review on my next episode. Thank you so much for tuning in and make your fertility journey, your healing journey.