Endometriosis can be a debilitating disease and on top of all the symptoms like pain, digestive issues, and fatigue it also often affects fertility. The most common treatment for endometriosis is surgery and this can absolutely be a great approach however sometimes you can’t afford to have surgery right away, you would prefer not to have surgery, or you have had surgery but it didn’t get rid of all your symptoms completely. This is where diet, lifestyle, and other expert practitioners can come into play. You can absolutely improve your endometriosis symptoms and fertility with the tools outlined in this post. (If you would like to learn more about diagnosing endometriosis and surgery for it check out this post here)
Most of the symptoms and fertility issues caused by endometriosis are due to a few root causes: inflammation, gut dysfunction, and stress. In order to mitigate your endometriosis symptoms, you need to figure out which of these is your root cause. In most cases it’s a combination of all three. There is some testing you may want to consider discussing with your doctor to be sure that you are correctly addressing your root causes. To test your inflammation levels a homocysteine blood test may be helpful. For gut dysfunction you may wish to look into hypochlorhydria (low stomach acid), SIBO, dysbiosis, leaky gut, parasites, and fungal infections (these last four can be tested for with a GI Map). To see if stress is having an impact on your symptoms you may want to consider testing your cortisol levels.
If you feel that one of your root cause issues is gut dysfunction (which is highly likely as endometriosis has been found to be strongly linked to gut dysfunction) then you will definitely need to consider changing your diet to help heal your gut. To do this you will need to eliminate any sensitivities. While there are food sensitivity tests out there that can help you determine some of your sensitivities, they don’t always catch all of them. The most accurate way to find any food sensitivities is to do an elimination diet. An elimination diet is when you remove certain foods from your diet for at least 30 days and then reintroduce them one by one to see if you react to each food. When considering an elimination diet there are a few predesigned programs out there like whole 30, GAPS, SCD, and AIP. These can be a great template to start with but if you do not wish to look into one of these programs here are some common food sensitivities that you should consider eliminating. I suggest starting with the least restrictive and then moving into eliminating more if you don’t see any improvement in symptoms by the end of 30 days. Once your elimination period is up it’s important to introduce foods individually for example I would reintro goat dairy at a different time than cow dairy. This may make the reintro period longer but it’s the best way to pinpoint exactly which foods disagree with you so you don’t have to eliminate more than necessary. To reintro a food you will eat it with every meal for two to four days then cut it out again for at least three days before moving on to the next one. During the days you are reintroing the food and the three days between you should look for the following common food sensitivity symptoms: Pain, stiff and/or achy joints, congestion, irritability, depression, diarrhea or constipation, headaches, bloating, heartburn, nausea, anxiety, brain fog, forgetfulness, and/or skin rashes and acne.
Outside of food there are some very important lifestyle factors to consider like stress and household toxins. Both of these can increase your inflammatory load and cause even more pain and also gut dysfunction (yes, it’s all connected). Stress raises cortisol which releases glucagon which raises your blood sugar which in turn increases the release on insulin (because you aren’t necessarily burning off all that blood sugar) and excess insulin creates…inflammation. So when it comes to stress it’s important to reduce what you can by delegating or saying no to more responsibility where possible and then practicing stress reducing activities such as meditation, yoga, walking and moderate exercise, prayer, and even just hanging out with your girlfriends. Another source of stress is undereating and/or over exercising. When trying to heal to reduce endo symptoms and increase your fertility is not the time to be extreme dieting or over exercising (really I don’t think there is ever a time for this). It’s important that you eat enough at each meal that you are not starving before your next meal 4-6 hours later. Also, over exercising or participating in very intense exercise like most spin classes or HIIT classes raises cortisol levels and follows the same chain of events as the stress that you are under at work. It’s best to keep exercise to lower intensity things like yoga, pilates, jogging, and resistance training (body weight and weighted moves). Many of the products that we use for cleaning our homes and for beauty actually contain toxic chemicals because these products are not regulated. The chemicals in these products may be toxic to our livers and some even mimic estrogen and create an imbalance of estrogen in the body both resulting in more inflammation and more pain. (If you want to learn more about the toxic chemicals you should look out for and what products are safe check out this post here)
Finally, there are some other practitioners that you may want to consider adding to your team: 1-A nutritionist/health coach can help take out the stress of attempting to figure out your food sensitivities and pinpointing specifically what is going on with any gut dysfunction. 2- A Pelvic Floor physical therapist has a lot of tools that can help with reducing pain using visceral manipulation and pelvic floor exercises (sometimes pain even after surgery can be the result of muscle imbalance issues left over from when you were in so much pain). 3- A qualified therapist that practices Acceptance and Commitment Therapy can be so helpful in helping you train your brain to better handle pain and in some cases eliminate it. While, these steps will help reduce your endometriosis symptoms and help you improve your fertility it may still be ultimately necessary to undergo surgery but that doesn’t mean implementing these are a waste of time. In the end it takes a multifaceted approach to fully recover from endometriosis. As always, I am here to help. You can leave questions below, email me, or sign up for a discovery call here to discuss how I can support you on your journey to feeling great and optimal fertility!