Blood sugar regulation is an am important part of the homeostasis in your body and when it’s out of whack it can have some serious consequences on your fertility. There are many causes of blood sugar dysregulation but stress and diet are the most prevalent. Today we are going to specifically focus on diet. Let’s take a look at what happens when we eat a high sugar diet.
We wake up in the morning and we eat cake for breakfast because Kate Spade said so. We feel tired mid-morning so we head to the lounge and grab some coffee and a donut. We work through lunch and around mid afternoon we realize that coffee and donut was so long ago and has worn off and left us feeling shaky, tired, and STARVING. So we head to the café and grab a healthy salad for a late lunch but it doesn’t fill us up and we are still hungry and craving something sweet so we grab a cookie. When you finally get home, you are too exhausted to cook so you order a pizza and eat it while watching T.V.
You may not eat like this every day but some of it may sound familiar to you. I know that I certainly have had portions of this day in my past. What happens when we eat like this is each time, we eat a bunch of sugar or carbs without the addition of protein and fat your body quickly turns it into glucose and it gets released out into your blood. Then when you don’t immediately use that glucose up by exercising you end up with high blood sugar which your body views as an emergency and has to send out insulin to clear it out. This happens over and over again throughout the day. If this process happens often enough your cells start to ignore insulin and refuse to let it bring sugar in, this is how you get insulin resistance and then Type II diabetes. What also happens is that your body is so used to having excess glucose (which is fast and easy to access) to use as energy that it no longer uses fat stores for energy because fat is more work. So now in between meals when your body has shuttled away all the glucose rather than going back and accessing where it was stored as fat it demands more glucose. This is where we see how sugar can affect your fertility. When the body wants glucose to be released from where it is stored it releases cortisol. Yes, the stress hormone cortisol. This then tells the liver to release the stored glucose so you can have your energy back.
Unfortunately, during all of this your body just recognizes that something stressful is going on so it down regulates sex hormone production so it can up regulate cortisol production because they require the same building block to create, cholesterol. Down regulating the sex hormone production can cause many things depending on where you are at in your cycle it can cause your ovulation to be delayed or to even not happen at all or if you have already ovulated it can affect your progesterone production which means your uterine lining won’t be properly prepared for implantation. Also, if your body has developed insulin resistance this comes with other complications like the impaired ability for cells to receive nutrients. One of the most important cells to the fertility process is the egg and if it can’t receive the nutrients it needs then it’s not going to be able to grow properly if it does make it to meet a sperm.
If this has made you feel panicked about eating any sugar, I get it I have felt that way too. As in all things having a little sugar here or there is not going to set this into action. In fact, if your body is well taken care of then it is more than equipped to deal with all sources of energy without going into this stressed out mode of reacting to the fuel we put into our bodies. Even if you are having insulin resistance issues your body can be once again restored to balance so that it can handle all types of fuel. How do you know if you are having blood sugar issues? Check out the list of symptoms below.
If you are having any of the above symptoms, I would recommend lowering your overall carb intake for a period of time and removing all simple sugars from your diet. What I would call simple sugars would be sweets, white starches (white bread, rice, etc. Make sure to keep your carbs complex carbs like brown rice, sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, or winter squashes. I would advise that you do not follow this for very long as we do need carbs as women for our reproductive system to function properly. However, this short-term restriction will help reset our body into using all sources of fuel which is what we want for optimal fertility.