Inflammation is a natural and good response in your body to trauma. It’s supposed to happen when you are injured in some way. The issue with inflammation is when it becomes chronic. When inflammation occurs, your cells are secreting pro-inflammatory cytokines that bring in our natural defense cells. These cells contribute to the breakdown of the damaged tissues and then repairing them or allowing new to grow. When inflammation becomes chronic the repair and new growth portion of this healing process either is prevented from happening or can’t keep up with the damage occurring and this is when inflammation goes from a natural and amazing way our body heals to something out of balance and harmful. Inflammation doesn’t just randomly occur in the body there is an underlying cause for it. In order to allow your body to finally heal itself you need to figure out what the underlying cause is and deal with it.
Now that we know how chronic inflammation works let’s take a look at how it can affect your fertility. Chronic inflammation can affect egg quality, sperm quality, the ability to ovulate and implantation. Egg quality and sperm quality are especially affected by the damaging portion of inflammation. Your ability to ovulate is often affected because your body sees the chronic inflammation as an emergency status and often then down regulates your sexual hormones in preference to using energy for dealing with the inflammation response. Finally, if you have good egg, sperm, and ovulate for them to meet it still may not end in successful pregnancy because if the inflammation is affecting your uterus then it will not be a great place for implantation and may even be a cause of early miscarriage.
Some common underlying causes of inflammation are blood sugar dysregulation, gut issues, environmental toxicity, and stress. Let’s take a look how each of these can cause chronic inflammation, starting with blood sugar dysregulation. Your body’s natural response to eating something that contains more carbs than you are currently burning is to send out insulin to remove the glucose from your bloodstream and store it. This is a natural response but when it is asked to do this repeatedly throughout the day as you consume highly processed carbs like donuts, sugary coffee drinks, pizza, and cake, your cells start to get desensitized to insulin and stop accepting it. This leads to your blood sugar continually staying high and your body releases more and more insulin. The constant borage of insulin and glucose causes damage to blood vessels and cells throughout the body thus bringing in chronic inflammation. Unfortunately, the damaging effects of blood sugar dysregulation doesn’t stop there. These huge highs in blood sugar also often end up in huge lows and guess what that means? Cortisol. Cortisol typically is ani-inflammatory but when it is released too often it becomes damaging and inflammatory (womp womp).
Next on our list of root causes is gut issues. There are a few different roots here and you may have issues with one or multiple but typically it’s at least a combination of two. The first is gut permeability. When you have issues with leaky gut this means that the cell walls in your gut lining have holes in them (think about a brick wall missing the mortar in places). These wholes allow food particles to leave the gut and enter the blood stream. Your body naturally sees these particles and recognizes that they don’t belong there and send in the defense cells to fight causing chronic inflammation. The second root is having an unbalanced microbiome. When you have an imbalance in the bacteria in your gut, they can wreak all kinds of havoc causing irritation to the gut lining resulting in…chronic inflammation. Finally, you can be experiencing irritation to your intestinal lining due to undigested food. If you are not eating in a relaxed state or chewing your food properly your stomach doesn’t break down the food enough before it enters the small intestine. The particles of undigested food then move through your small intestine causing damage and irritation which is what leads to chronic inflammation.
Environmental toxins are also play a huge roll in chronic inflammation. Many common products in your home like cleaners and beauty products can contain ingredients that cause damage to your body (check out EWG.org to find a great resource on which products are great and which ones you should avoid). Also, your home and environment may contain things like mold, pollution, and other chemicals like glyphosate (a common weed killer). All of these are highly damaging to your body cause chronic inflammation. Lastly, we have the seemingly unavoidable topic stress. Chronic stress like blood sugar dysregulation causes your body to release cortisol throughout the day which leads to an inflammatory response.
That information may be a bit overwhelming but it is so important to understand so you can take action to address your chronic inflammation. There are a lot of blog posts and articles out there discussing anti-inflammatory diets and supplements. These are great and I highly encourage using dietary changes to help reduce inflammation but it won’t necessarily solve the issue. You must determine your root cause and address it in order to heal. Here are some of my suggestions for addressing your root causes to finally put an end to your chronic inflammation:
- Make sure you are eating a well-balanced blood sugar friendly diet low in processed foods and carbs and high in quality fats and proteins.
- 2-chew your food and eat in a relaxed state.
- If you think you have leaky gut or microbiome issues get tested! Find a functional medical Dr. that can help you order a stool test and navigate the results.
- Remove as many environmental toxins as you can from your home and practice detox supporting practices like eating lots liver supporting herbs (dandelion, cilantro, and parsley), dry brushing, sweating, and exercise.
- Learn how to deal with your stress (check out my freebie here)
If you feel like you need more structured support in healing your body from chronic inflammation you can schedule a free consultation here to see how I can support you.