Understanding Your Menstrual Cycle
A big part of getting pregnant with PCOS is understanding your menstrual cycle and when your fertility windows are.
Knowing how your menstrual cycle works means being informed about the different stages, the hormones involved, and what to expect for women without PCOS.
This article Menstrual Cycle Stages, Phases and What To Expect can help with that.
Although it can be tricky, its important to pay attention to signs youre about to ovulate, so as to maximize your chances of getting pregnant.
Check out Ovulation Symptoms | 10 Symptoms Of Ovulation and When Do You Ovulate? How To Pinpoint Ovulation for guidance on this topic.
Keep track of your menstrual cycles so you can get to know them and identify when ovulation is likely to happen. This can also be useful to see whether changes occur as a result of improving your health or whether you might need fertility treatments down the track.
Take Supplements And Stay Healthy
Caring for your body when you have PCOS is extremely important. The symptoms that frustrate you most will probably be the extra hair growth, acne, or weight gain. But many women with PCOS also lack essential vitamins they need, and this affects their fertility, too.
Start with Vitamin D, as its a great supplement for any woman trying to get pregnant. Vitamin D can improve your chance of conception, but its even more vital for women with PCOS.
The healthier your lifestyle, the less your body suffers from your PCOS, which improves your chances of conceiving.
How To Get Pregnant Fast With Pcos
If youve been struggling to conceive with PCOS, Im BEGGING you to look into this natural method that worked for me and give it a try. I believe this method can help you get pregnant fast with PCOS because it worked for me THREE TIMES.
Following these steps to conceive with PCOS worked for me in just three weeks each time, and each time while breastfeeding.
If you suffer from Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and you are not able to conceive, I truly think its worth trying!
Also Check: What Causes Spotting In Early Pregnancy
Balance Blood Sugar Levels
Your doctor will test your blood sugar levels if youre having trouble getting pregnant. PCOS sometimes leads to high blood sugar levels or type 2 diabetes. This may cause fertility problems.
This happens because PCOS may change how your body uses insulin. This important hormone moves sugar out of the blood and into the muscles and cells where it is burned for energy. PCOS makes your body less sensitive to insulin making it harder for it to do its job.
Balancing your blood sugar levels may help you get pregnant. Eat a healthy diet with more fiber, protein, and healthy fats. Getting plenty of daily exercise and strength training can also help your body use insulin better.
In some cases, your doctor might recommend medications to help balance your blood sugar levels. A common type 2 diabetes drug called metformin makes your body use insulin better to help lower high blood sugar. This can also help you get pregnant with PCOS.
You might need to take metformin in low doses and only temporarily, depending on your blood sugar levels. For best results, eat a healthy diet and exercise regularly along with taking any prescribed medications to help you get pregnant.
If you have high blood sugar levels or type 2 diabetes, its important to check your blood sugar levels with a home monitor every day.
Your doctor will check your blood sugar levels with tests, including:
How To Stay Pregnant With Pcos
If you are pregnant with PCOS, congratulations! Thats wonderful news.
If healthy lifestyle changes have led to conception, we hope this will encourage you to stay focused and committed to remaining healthy during pregnancy.
Your body and your baby depend on you being at your optimal healthy weight, as well as keeping your blood sugar levels within a normal range.
Your baby will develop fast and will rely on you to provide the nutrients needed for this growth.
In the early stages of pregnancy, you might feel really tired and even nauseous. Try to focus on resting, exercising, and healthy eating as much as possible during this stage.
As you move into the second trimester, these early pregnancy symptoms will ease off and you can continue with your healthy diet and exercise, to keep your weight within healthy range and your blood sugar levels stable.
This will reduce your chances of developing gestational diabetes, or other concerns such as preeclampsia. High blood sugar levels and blood pressure are complications that can lead to preterm birth, induction, and interventions such as c-section.
If youre pregnant thanks to a fertility treatment, your doctor and team will closely monitor your pregnancy and your babys development.
If fertility drugs are being used your healthcare providers will make sure their levels are optimal as the pregnancy develops.
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Factors That Can Boost Fertility
Fertility-boosting measures, like changing your diet, taking nutritional supplements, or increasing your physical activity can make your body healthier and help you have a healthier pregnancy. In certain cases, weight loss that’s associated with healthy eating can be an effective tool to help you get pregnant.
For women with PCOS, weight loss and a healthier lifestyle can be of the utmost importance in getting pregnant more quickly. Some studies have shown that women who live a healthier lifestyle have more regular periods and as a result, have increased rates of conception.
Can You Get Pregnant With Pcos
Despite the fear that mayve been instilled in you when you were first diagnosed, there are a hundred good reasons to be optimistic about your chances of getting pregnant with PCOS. While PCOS can be a barrier to this goal, with the right information and support the vast majority of women are able to achieve their dreams of motherhood.
The biggest question in my mind is not can you get pregnant with PCOS. Instead, the question should be how long is it going to take, how healthy is your pregnancy going to be, and will your baby get the best start it needs for a healthy life of his or her own?
If youre anything like me, once you decide you want to get pregnant, then it needs to happen right when you planned it. Unfortunately, life, sometimes has other plans, as I learned the hard way.
It took me nearly five years to overcome my PCOS infertility and throughout this experience, the ability to stay positive and happy was a never-ending battle. Id see my friends and family go on to have their first, second, and even third children while I was still busy spending thousands of dollars in fertility treatments that only left me in tears. Theres no denying that trying to figure out how to get pregnant with PCOS can be a very unfair, and overwhelming process.
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What Are The Chances Of Getting Pregnant With Pcos
While there are no hard and fast stats on the chances of getting pregnant with PCOS, about 70 percent of women with the condition struggle to get pregnant. This is likely because they arent ovulating, are ovulating sporadically, or don’t have enough progesterone naturally to support a pregnancy in its early stages.
Martha Mckittrick Pcos Dietitian
For over 20 years, Martha McKittrick has been a PCOS powerhouse helping women lose weight, decrease their cravings for carbs and overall PCOS symptoms, and most importantly, get pregnant.
Mamas love her coaching sessions and courses because theyre designed around small, actionable steps .
You can find her on and
Recommended Reading: How To Tell If I M Pregnant
Autoimmune Diseases May Confound The Prospect Of Pregnancy
Women with diabetes or other metabolic disorders are at increased risk of having other conditions that will likely add another layer of complexity to pregnancy, endometriosis, and PCOS. As if having PCOS or endometriosis isnt enough of a challenge, women who have thyroid disorders may face an even more complicated path to pregnancy. Women who have hypothyroidism may find the effort to lose excess weight more difficult, and even subclinical hypothyroidism can interfere with ovulation.9
In exploring the reasons behind your infertility, the experts recommend that you have your thyroid hormone levels checked if you havent already had your blood work done. Its important to work with your doctor to achieve a healthy thyroid function before attempting pregnancy.
Autoimmune disorders like systemic lupus can cause complications for women with endometriosis. Women who are under treatment for lupus usually receive steroids and immunosuppressant agents, which can worsen endometriosis symptoms by reducing the bodys ability to fight the growth of excess endometrial tissue. If you have these or other confounding conditions, youll be in good hand if you work with a team of specialists who can guide you to make decisions that are safest and most sensible for your health and pregnancy goals.
Make Exercise Part Of Your Weekly Routine
Like the right PCOS diet, exercise is another powerful way we can directly improve our reproductive potential without taking drugs .
For example, its been shown that for women with PCOS, progressive resistance training can reduce insulin resistance as well as lower testosterone and free androgen levels .
From what I understand, the way this works is that when we work out, were actually increasing the density of mitochondria in our cells. These are cellular components that power our muscles. More mitochondria in our muscle cells make them more sensitive to insulin, and the more sensitive they are to insulin, the better our hormone balance.
Aerobic exercise is also known to have a powerful effect at improving insulin sensitivity, but whats even more interesting is its effect on inflammation another root cause of many PCOS symptoms and health risks. This too has been well documented by science .
All of this should be of great interest to women with lean type PCOS as much as it is to women with more classical symptoms that want to know how to lose weight with PCOS. By reducing androgen levels, ovarian function is directly improved and this means better baby-making potential, whether or not you are wanting to lose weight.
This is saying nothing for the fact that exercise is one of the cheapest, safest and most effective way to help with stress management the third key pillar to a PCOS friendly lifestyle. Put simply, exercise is awesome for both PCOS and fertility.
Also Check: How Quickly Can I Test For Pregnancy
Can I Still Get Pregnant If I Have Pcos
Yes. Having PCOS does not mean you can’t get pregnant. PCOS is one of the most common, but treatable, causes of infertility in women. In women with PCOS, the hormonal imbalance interferes with the growth and release of eggs from the ovaries . If you don’t ovulate, you can’t get pregnant.
Your doctor can talk with you about ways to help you ovulate and to . You can also use our to see which days in your menstrual cycle you are most likely to be fertile.
Find Out Whether You Are Ovulating
Ovulation is when your ovaries release an egg. If unreleased, then the egg stays in the ovary as a half baked egg . A cyst is an accumulation of many of these, hence the name polycystic ovaries.
You can have polycystic ovaries and still ovulate, the cysts just mean that there have been instances in the past where you havent ovulated.
You can only get pregnant if your ovaries are releasing an egg that can meet with the sperm. Therefore, the other part of the equation is that there needs to be sperm in there before you ovulate. If you are waiting until you ovulate to call your husband/partner/lover for a conjugal visit, then you may have missed the window. The strongest sperm can live for as long as four days inside you, making the days before ovulation vital. An egg dies within 24 hours after ovulation, so keep that in mind too.
A study in my home country, New Zealand, surveyed 80 women seeking fertility treatment. They had all been trying for a baby for more than 2 years. They found that 74% of women had inadequate fertility awareness to get pregnant. This tells me that we might think we know how the birds and the bees work, but in actual fact, we probably need much more education.
Educating yourself on how to detect the signs of ovulation is your first step. You can find this out by measuring your temperature and cervical fluid. Lisa at Fertility Friday has a great podcast about how to do this.
Also Check: How To Get Pregnant After Iud Removal
How To Cope With Pcos
My name is Robert Lahoud, I’m a fertility specialist and reproductive endocrinologist, and I work as the clinical director at the IVF Australia North Shore Clinic.
How to cope with PCOS on a day-to-day basis. First of all, there are several symptoms that are associated with PCOS. One of them may be excessive facial and body hair. This is called hirsutism, and the symptoms obviously can be quite difficult to manage. In the short-term, we recommend cosmetic treatments such as electrolysis and laser.
Long-term hormonal preparations, such as the combined oral contraceptive pill, and anti-androgens such as Spironolactone and Subrata acetate are very good options that managing this condition, you do need to see a specialist or your GP about this to get these medications prescribed.
In regards to irregular periods, and these are very common in patients with PCOS, and they’re related to irregular or absent ovulation and these can sometimes be very heavy, painful and unpredictable, which makes life very difficult. Often we use hormonal treatments like the combined oral contraceptive pill to change this. And this is really important because it can also reduce the long-term risk of cancer of the uterus, which is slightly increased in women with irregular periods. So this is, again, you probably need to see your specialist or GP about this to have this treatment started.
Understand What Fertility Treatments Cant Do For Pcos
The downside of fertility treatments is that they do nothing to address your underlying PCOS diagnosis theyre more of a clever way to get around the problem for the purposes of having children. Just like how taking the pill solves irregular periods, fertility treatments are another band-aid solution that may help you get pregnant in the short-term but do not benefit your pregnancy or your health beyond that.
This comes back to what I said before. Working on your diet and lifestyle in addition to fertility treatments not only improves your chances of success, but it also means that when you do get pregnant, youll be more likely to have a healthy PCOS pregnancy. Itll also improve breastfeeding which will support the long-term health of your baby.
The risk of your PCOS getting worse after pregnancy is also a major concern that I see regularly through my PCOS support group.
This is why I get so many moms taking part in my free 30-Day PCOS Diet Challenge. Because its also not uncommon for unwanted hair, and PCOS acne to get worse, and many women will struggle with their weight even more following childbirth.
Women that dont get the help and support they need to adopt a PCOS friendly lifestyle will also often find themselves back to square one when theyre ready to have another baby.
This short summary hardly does justice to the transformation Katrina undertook so for anyone interested, you can read her entire story here.
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Update Get Pregnant With Pcos :
Since initially writing this post, Ive gotten pregnant two more times using the exact method below.
One of those pregnancies ended in a heartbreaking miscarriage at 7 weeks. Im now 28 weeks pregnant with our rainbow baby who is due almost exactly one year after we found out we were pregnant with our precious lost baby.
Each time, I got pregnant 3 weeks after starting this routine.
Stories Of Pcos Pregnancy Success
If your goal is to get pregnant with PCOS, it can be inspiring to hear stories of other women with PCOS who went on to conceive successfully. Check out these pregnancy success stories if you want to be amazed!
Medically Reviewed by Katerina Shkodzik, M.D., OB-GYN
Dr. Katerina Shkodzik is a certified OB-GYN with a special focus on reproductive endocrinology and infertility issues. She has been practising since 2015.
Dr. Shkodzik completed her residency program in the Department of OB/GYN at the Belarusian State Medical University and fellowship program in the Department of Gynecological Surgery at the Medical University of Bialystok, Poland.
Dr. Shkodzik is extensively involved in digital health projects providing her medical expertise and integrating of cutting edge technologies in medical science and clinical practice since 2018.
Dr. Shkodzik has participated in several studies focused on PCOS, endometriosis, menstrual cycle characteristics and their abnormalities based on big data of digital health in collaboration with leading universities.
She believes that paying special attention to women’s health is a crucial step to improving the world we live in.
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/6do Fertility Drugs And Treatments Help
Women with PCOS are often put on drugs. Medical studies have shown that 80% of women with PCOS who are treated with various fertility assisting drugs and treatments conceive within six to twelve-period cycles. However, age and pre-existing health complications can have a role to play here.
The type of drugs you are being put on can help manage the root problem which is making it difficult for you to conceive. For example, metformin, a common medicine used to treat PCOS regulates blood sugar and hormonal functioning. Birth control pills and patches can help regularize conception. They may also reduce the chances of miscarriages for high-risk women.
Some women with severe complications are also advised to go for therapies and fertility treatments. IVF can help. However, do remember that it’s an expensive and lengthy procedure. For some, it can take repeated cycles and years of IVF treatment to help conceive naturally.
Women also undergo ovulation procedures. Less-expensive and easier alternative, intrauterine insemination is where high concentrates of sperm are inseminated inside the body to fuse with the egg. In more complex cases of PCOS, making use of egg donors, or opting for surrogacy or adoption may also be recommended. It also depends on an individual’s choice.
