f you had an IVF cycle that did not work, I’m sure you are dying to know why, especially if the doctors don’t have an answer for you.

To be honest, I don’t have a clear answer for you, either.

There’s obviously different reasons why it may not have worked for you, and it certainly is a case-by-case situation. But I can give some insight based on my years and years of experience helping hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of women through their IVF cycles and getting pregnant naturally, and with fertility treatment.

One of the first things that I always ask women when they come to me, and they’ve had a failed IVF cycle is whether they prepared for it or not, and how they prepared for it.

Now, if you didn’t prepare for it beyond what the doctor recommended, please do not blame yourself whatsoever. There’s no fault here.

A lot of times too, the inclination is to maybe be upset with your doctor, but his, or her job, is not necessarily to tell you what to do to prepare for the cycle and holistically to get your body ready for it. Their job is to deliver the IVF cycle. It’s just not in the scope of their medicine. It’s just not the strength of their medicine. It is the strength of holistic medicine, like Chinese medicine. That’s why acupuncture has become, and Chinese medicine has become so mainstream for women seeking it out to support their IVF cycles.

Now when women come to me, when they come to use my online program, Fertility Activation Method, or when they come to me in my clinic to prepare for an IVF cycle, I really encourage them if possible to prepare for three months in advance. And this is because it takes 90 days for your eggs to mature for ovulation.

So what I always remind women is that you can’t get water from a stone, so when you’re using fertility treatment, they’re giving you fertility drugs so that your ovaries will recruit more eggs, ovulate more eggs. But the drugs only have that, whatever is available, to work with. They can’t improve the egg quality. They can’t improve the health of your ovaries, which is really important when it comes to how many eggs that you have available for ovulation. If your ovaries aren’t healthy, if they’re not getting good blood circulation and so forth, if your hormones are out of balance, they’re just simply not going to be able to recruit as many eggs for ovulation.

So the better shape your body and your cycle is before going into an IVF, the better response you’re going to have with those fertility drugs. Same thing goes of course for the health of your uterus. If your uterus isn’t that healthy, and the health of your uterus is not just about whether you have fibroids or you don’t, or polyps or you don’t. There’s more to it than that. So even if your doctor said, “You don’t have any fibroids, you’re good to go”, well how healthy has your cycle been? How healthy has your period been? There’s a lot more things that can indicate the health of your uterine environment. So your uterus has to be healthy enough to receive that embryo and support the implantation and the growth of the little baby, right?

So these things all should be worked on before going into the IVF cycle. Just set yourself up for a better chance of success. Now 90 days, like I said, is how long it takes for an egg to mature for ovulation. So you’re going to have an impact when you use health tools like I teach in my program, Fertility Activation Method, the fertility point activation, nutrition, and wellness tools. When you’re using these, they’re going to influence the environment that your eggs are exposed to during that maturation process. So they’ll be healthier 90 days from now if you’re implementing a health regimen throughout those 90 days. And then it’s cumulative, so thereon after.

Now, not every woman is going to have the luxury of three months, for various reasons. But whatever you do to increase circulation to your reproductive organs, create a better environment for the eggs to mature. Anything that you can do to improve that environment in preparation, no matter how much time you have, you want to make the most of the time that you do have to prepare for that IVF cycle. But I would recommend preparing at least for 90 days before going into the IVF cycle. So that’s one tip.

And another one is, how healthy was your cycle? I touched on this a little bit, but let’s say you had a lot of clots in your period, or let’s say you have really light flow. You only bleed for maybe a day or two and it’s really light. Or, let’s say your cycle’s really irregular. You’re getting your period every 40 days, or one cycle is 32 days, next cycle is 37 days, next cycle is 27 days.

These are all indications that something’s off with your hormone balance, possible with your uterine lining, and these things affect egg quality as well. So the healthier your cycle is, the healthier your fertility is. So even if you’re not getting pregnant naturally, the healthier your cycle is, is a good indication that your body is more ready to respond well to IVF treatment. So, that’s another thing that you can look at if you’re going to go into another IVF cycle. Improving the health of your natural cycle in advance, and then the healthier it is, the readier you are for an IVF cycle.

You also want to consider if you just came off of birth control. A lot of times women come off of birth control, they may not be ovulating regularly. They may have a really thin uterine lining because the birth control hormones actually inhibit blood flow to the uterus. That’s why your period can be so light, and sometimes you might skip it when you’re on the pill. So if you’re just coming off hormones, your body hasn’t been given a chance, or the support it needs to come back into a hormonal rhythm, which is so important for developing a healthy uterine lining as well as the healthy maturation of viable eggs for a viable embryo. So if you just came off of hormones and your fertility was not up to par, and then you were rushed into some kind of fertility treatment cycle, that could be a good reason why you didn’t respond well to that cycle.

I know it takes some patience and it also takes some trust to believe that your body can get back into that rhythm and knows what to do. But it also often takes you giving your body the support that it needs. That’s one of the main things that I teach in my program, Fertility Activation Method, is how to get your body’s cycle back into rhythm.

You also have to consider how healthy your whole health is, not just your reproductive health, not just your period, not just ovulation and so forth. Are you constantly sleep deprived? Do you have a lot of digestive issues? Do you have autoimmune issues? Is your thyroid out of balance? Are you exhausted all the time? You have to consider your whole health because if your body is not healthy enough for pregnancy, then it’s not necessarily going to respond well to trying to force it into pregnancy, or it won’t have what it needs to actually respond well to the fertility drugs.

Another thing to consider is getting second opinion. Maybe you want to try a different approach. Perhaps your doctor really believes in using the highest dosage possible of medication, and your body may just not respond to that. Maybe your eggs just disintegrated by being exposed to such high amounts of medications. Or maybe there’s something that your doctor overlooked. It’s totally normal. It doesn’t mean your doctor’s a bad doctor. Or maybe your doctor is an excellent doctor, but I always encourage women to get a second opinion, or even third opinion, to get different eyes on your case because every doctor’s different. Every doctor has different strengths and different focuses. So they might be able to discover something that the previous doctor didn’t.

So that’s something to consider, and also to make sure that you’ve had all of your other tests. Are your thyroid medications the right dosage, if you have hypothyroidism for example.  Are your levels in the right place to support pregnancy? These are just some of the tips that you may want to consider as you decide whether you’re going to go into another IVF cycle or whether you’re going to try naturally, and what may have contributed to this one not working. But again, I just want to emphasize that it’s not your fault, and I know that you did the best that you could. I know that you put everything into this and that’s why it’s just so devastating when it doesn’t work. So, I don’t mean any of this information to imply that you did not do everything that you possibly could that you knew to do, because I’m sure that you did.

I just want to provide you with some more information that could be helpful for moving forward. On that note, I would like to invite you to my free masterclass: My Number One Fertility Secret to Getting Pregnant Without IVF or Hormones.

However, even if you are going to do another IVF cycle or any kind of fertility treatment, then I would still encourage you to watch this, because all of the information that I give in this masterclass is completely appropriate and applicable to any fertility treatment cycle as well.