It’s so much to get your head around isn’t it. I know I was just overwhelmed by information and didn’t know where to start. Loads of terminology too. And I’m doing IVF locally so don’t have the added complexities you have @poppymango! I hope knowing you have another cycle ready to start has softened the blow a bit xxx
For me I used ChatGPT to suggest supplements and trawl through all the advice on diet and exercise.
We still have a way to go as we are now in the stage of waiting for a FET but we managed to get 4 good quality blasts to biopsy for PGT-A (out of 6 blasts in total). Of these 2 of the 4 came back euploid and both were top grades and had good IDA scores (the AI scoring our clinic uses). Obviously we don’t know what will happen next but we would continue doing what we are doing if we needed another retrieval as things seem promising so far.
This is a bit long but here’s what we thought was worth doing.
Diet: there is evidence that the Mediterranean diet supports fertility - we pretty much didn’t change our diet as we already eat plenty of fruit and veg and mostly unprocessed foods. However we weren’t strict at all and still ate out regularly, had cake or pastry out etc if we fancied it.
Alcohol: I basically stopped drinking about 6 months before we started IVF (when we started the process of consultations etc) DH didn’t - the evidence we saw suggested heavy drinking impacts fertility but light drinking doesn’t for men. He drinks maybe 2-3 pints a week so we didn’t think he needed to cut that out really.
Smoking: neither of us smoked anyway.
Exercise: we both exercise regularly anyway so didn’t change anything.
Heat: DH has avoided saunas.
Sleep: we made sure we were getting good sleep where possible, seemed like reasonable evidence to support this. I take magnesium glycinate in the evenings which helps.
Plastics etc: we didn’t do anything other than we didn’t heat up or store foods in plastics. We thought this was easy to do and didn’t cost anything. I did look into it but it seemed a bit of a minefield and I didn’t have the energy to look into it properly - so would be interested in what others are doing.
Supplements: we started a few about 6 months before our first cycle when we knew we were heading for IVF.
DH - Wellman Conception Max plus Omegas plus additional CoQ10 (there is CoQ10 in the Wellman but it’s a low dose).
Me - Ovum Time To Conceive plus additional CoQ10 (again the Ovum is a low dose). I took 600mg CoQ10 total split into 3 doses.
The Ovum seemed like a good balance of various vitamins/minerals that show promising evidence. Zita West also do one which is meant to be good.
Our clinic said if there is one thing they recommend beyond a generic healthy lifestyle - it’s CoQ10. There’s promising evidence it improves euploidy rates and embryo quality.
I also took high dose Omegas with a good balance between EHA and DPA but this is because I’m veggie and don’t eat fish so not getting much Omegas from my diet.
Post egg-retrieval I am now also taking a probiotic to support the vaginal microbiome as there’s evidence that pregnancy rates are higher where certain strains of healthy bacteria are present in the uterus and vagina. I thought worth taking to prepare for a FET as unlikely to do any harm and it’s not expensive.
The other thing we did was DH abstained for only 48 hours pre-egg retrieval day as we have seen evidence that shorter abstinence is associated with lower DNA fragmentation.
Hope that’s useful and interested in what others are doing!