It is important to understand that success with fertility may be tied to getting to a healthy weight and then staying at a healthy weight. For many women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) who want to have a baby, their excess weight often gets in the way of their fertility and can be a tough problem to tackle.
Once a woman becomes overweight or obese her body is no longer efficient in using the excess body fat for energy and it decreases her fertility. It then becomes more likely she will have a harder time getting pregnant or may not be able to get pregnant at all. Fertility is usually positively affected by losing excess weight. Just 5% loss of extra body weight can get a woman on the road to better health all around, and it improves fertility too. A baby becomes much more likely as she loses the extra pounds.
For some women with PCOS the difficulty with getting pregnant and having a baby is strongly tied to what is happening with their blood sugar. Uneven blood sugar is often at the core of these fertility problems.
Uneven blood sugar is caused by eating too many sweets, grains, starches or other carbohydrates at any one time. When a woman does this, her body wants to go into fat storage mode and at a certain point the body's response to sugar becomes abnormal and the insulin is no longer as effective at getting energy into the body's cells.
So in a way the body thinks that it is not getting enough energy to begin and continue a pregnancy. A woman's body is highly sensitive to whether she has enough energy of the right kinds to sustain her pregnancy. Being pregnant takes a lot of energy. So anything that interferes with the body being able to access that energy in a normal healthy way will also interfere with conception, staying pregnant, and carrying a baby all the way through to birth.
Another fertility problem when the average blood sugar remains too high for too long over a period of time is that it causes problems with blood flow in the body's tiny blood vessels where all the exchange of nutrients and waste happen. When blood sugar is too high this leads to a process where extra-large particles made up of sugars bonded to proteins form in the blood. These extra-large particles can really slow down the blood flow in these tiny capillaries and can interfere with conception and maintaining a pregnancy.
If a woman wants to improve her fertility in the face of PCOS weight loss issues, it becomes extremely important for her to keep her blood sugar in a healthy range and avoid those blood sugar spikes. Regulating blood sugar and losing PCOS weight should lead to improved chances with fertility success and having a baby.
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