Although maintaining a healthy diet and healthy lifestyle cannot guaranty the success of a fertility treatment, it can have a positive affect on the outcome.  Studies show that couples who ate a nutritional diet and took care of themselves both mentally and physically had a better success rate when going through fertility treatments such as IUI and IVF.

Let me be the first to say, when we were going through our fertility problems the last thing I wanted to hear was one more person telling me to “relax” or “try this type of food or vitamin”.  Everyone always seemed to have an answer or “helpful” hint as to what I should do to get pregnant.  What they didn’t understand was that, whatever they were telling me, I had already either thought about, read about, or tried.

What I wanted to give to you was just some guidelines on how to maintain a healthy lifestyle to increase your chances of success.  It is important for you to know that I’m not telling you that doing these things will guaranty anything, it is just simply guidelines for how to be healthier.  It is important for us to maintain healthy lifestyles no matter how we eventually become parents.

The first thing that you need to realize that now is not the time to diet or try any quick weight loss solutions.  What you are trying to do is to eat a healthy diet.  This means cutting out some foods and adding more nutritional foods to your daily food intake.  Even if you are overweight, when you start to eat a more healthy diet and use good portion control you will lose weight.  Everyone has an ideal body weight based on a height/weight ratio and you want to be close to that to better your chances of success.  Getting there by skipping meals will not help and can hurt your success rate.

You should start taking prenatal vitamins now.  Your body needs certain vitamins to be healthy and to help promote a successful pregnancy.  These vitamins include Vitamins A and E, Calcium, Iron, Zinc, Folic Acid (for women), essential fatty acids and Vitamins C and D (for men).  You can get these nutrients and vitamins from taking vitamins but the best way (and most recommended way) to get them is from eating foods rich in them.  There are plenty of sites online that will offer you tips on which foods contain different vitamins and nutrients.

While there are some foods that you should try to eat to help you stay healthy, there are some foods that can actually harm you by causing infections.  It is recommended that you stay away from deli meats and pre-packaged sandwich meats, undercooked or raw poultry and fish, unpasteurized dairy products particularly soft cheeses and unpasteurized juices.  All of these can contain bacteria that cause infections.

There are other foods and beverages that you should avoid when going through fertility treatments.  These include alcohol, caffeine, raw meats, contaminated drinking water, local water when traveling to another country, tonic water, ginger ale and artificial sweeteners.  You should also stop smoking and avoid using aspirin, decongestants and antihistamines.  Your fertility doctor will probably add to this list.

While it is important to maintain good physical health, you should not overexert yourself during fertility treatments.  It is ok to take a leisurely stroll, but most fertility doctors suggest that you avoid strenuous exercise including running, aerobics and spin classes to name a few.  Over exertion can cause problems with implantation and a successful pregnancy and has also been linked to hyperstimulation of the follicles.

When you are going through the fertility process, it is important to discuss diet, nutrition and exercise with your doctor.  They will more than likely already have a list of dos and don’ts prepared to offer you a guideline on how to maintain a healthy lifestyle and eating habits during your fertility treatments.  In order to help increase your chances of having a successful fertility treatment, it is essential that you follow these suggestions as closely as you can.

Traditionally, IVF patients underwent transfer of their embryos at about day 3 after egg retrieval.  This was considered acceptable and the norm.  We are now seeing more clinics wait until about day 5 to do transfer to allow the embryos to reach what is called the Blastocyst stage.

With the improvement of the media culture in labs, the embryologists are able to sustain embryos longer, allowing them to further divide and reach the Blastocyst stage.  During this stage they are considered to be much stronger and healthier than some of the embryos that were transferred at day 3.  Waiting for a day 5 Blastocyst transfer allows the embryologists to have a better sense of which embryos have the greatest possibility of surviving transfer and implanting.

It makes sense that they are able to better predict the success rate.  The reason for this is that when a pregnancy occurs without the use of IVF, implantation occurs in the Blastocyst phase.  So, if you are transferring embryos that have already reached this stage, they are naturally better equipped for implantation.

Doing a Blastocyst transfer also decreases the risk of having a pregnancy with multiples as fewer embryos are transferred at one time.  Since they are stronger and have a greater chance of surviving, there is no need to transfer more than 2-3 at once.  This also typically leaves more to be frozen if you need to do IVF in the future.

However, typically the longer the embryos are kept in the media in the lab, the fewer there will be that survive.  The reason being is that only the strongest of the embryos will make it to the Blastocyst stage in the lab.  There is not any evidence that, even though the other embryos were not strong enough to make it in the lab, they wouldn’t make it through transfer either.  It is possible that embryos not strong enough to make it to Blastocyst stage in the lab would make it if they were transferred at day 3.  Many clinics will watch the embryos closely around day 3.  If they feel like they are not going to make it to a day 5 transfer, they will go ahead and transfer them earlier to have the best chance of them surviving.

The experience of the embryologist can play a big role in transferring the embryos at the Blastocyst stage.  Talk to your fertility clinic about their Blastocyst success rate, whether or not they tend to do a 3 or 5 day transfer and about the experience of their embryologist.  Most clinics have a preference as to how long they wait to do a transfer and this can vary from clinic to clinic.

Research has shown that transferring embryos in the Blastocyst stage has a good success rate.  However, since so many factors play into how long a clinic might wait to transfer, it is important for you to know that day 3 transfers still have a good success rate if they are good, strong embryos that are growing appropriately.  Blastocyst transfer is fine for some people, but a day 3 transfer might be better for you if your doctor is unsure whether or not the embryos will make it any longer in the lab.