July 15, 2025
How To Prep Your Body For Pregnancy: Podcast Episode #299
Kristin Revere and Vanda Aubrey discuss secondary fertility and pre-conception strategies on the latest episode of Ask the Doulas Podcast.
Hello, hello! This is Kristin Revere with Ask the Doulas, and I am excited to chat with Vanda Aubrey today. Vanda is a functional medicine nurse and board certified nurse coach specializing in hormone health for moms. Through her signature programs, she helps postpartum and toddler moms reclaim their energy, balance their hormones, and feel like themselves again.
Vanda uses a root cause approach that includes functional lab testing, nutrition, and cycle syncing to support lasting transformation. As a mom of four, she understands firsthand the demands of motherhood and is passionate about making wellness practical and sustainable.
Welcome, Vanda!
Hey, Kristin! Thank you so much for having me! I’m very excited for our chat today.
Yes, it’s such an important topic! We’re going to be diving into how to prep your body for pregnancy even if you’re still on birth control.
Yeah, it’s definitely a very important topic and so common that women are on birth control up until the exact time that they want to become pregnant. So that piece is so important because it helps the whole process run smoother. It helps prevent women from falling into an extended time period where they’re wanting to be pregnant but they’re struggling to get pregnant. It’s something that I’m very passionate about.
Yes! And I’ve had clients experience secondary infertility, when it’s been easy to get pregnant the first time, and then they realize that there are some struggles. So I would love to address both those first-time parents planning pre-conception but also families that already have children that may be struggling and looking at different options for getting their body and mind ready for the change.
Absolutely!
So what are your tips?
Well, the first piece that I would give is for anybody, whether you are on birth control or not. The first thing that I always encourage my clients to look at is, are you fueling your body enough? In general, are you consuming enough calories? You can get a little more specific to that to look at, are we getting enough protein? Are we getting enough healthy fats? But the first thing to look at in general is just the calorie intake because our body has to have fuel in order to function optimally, and in order for us as women to be able to get pregnant and sustain a healthy pregnancy, it’s really important for our bodies to feel safe and feel like they’re at the healthiest point, because if our body doesn’t feel safe, then it is trying to protect us, kind of allowing us to not get pregnant.
So that would be the first thing. Then we can get a little deeper. Once we know that we are fueling our body with enough, we can move ahead and look at things that are a little more specific. First of all, we want to examine, how are your cycle currently? So for someone that is not on birth control, I would recommend, if they’re not already familiar with their own cycle, so if they’re not tracking and really paying attention to how many days are there in between my cycles – so from day one bleeding of this period to day one of bleeding of my next period, how long is that window? Because unless you are someone that has intentionally kind of educated yourself on the menstrual cycle and what’s “normal,” we are led to believe that women pretty much all have a 28-day cycle. And actually, a really small percentage of women do follow a strictly 28-day cycle. And that is a problem because based on a 28-day cycle, women would ovulate around day 14. Well, ovulation – you have to know when you’re ovulating so that you can get pregnant because there’s only about six days a month that you are actually fertile and able to get pregnant as a woman. And I feel like that is something that when we are growing up, when we are being taught, especially some of the only education you got about your menstrual cycle and preventing pregnancy came from the traditional school setting – they are, at that age and that stage, just trying to terrify you, and you’re led to believe that you could get pregnant any day of the month, and that’s just simply not true. So I think getting familiar with what your own patterns are is really important so that when you are ready to take the step of beginning to try to become pregnant, you kind of know when you’re ovulating, and through that process of getting to know your own body, you’ll also learn how your body lets you know that you are ovulating. And that looks different for everyone. Some people will experience mild cramping or pain on one side of their abdomen or the other. You can always pay attention to things like cervical mucus and basal body temperature. And then of course, there’s testing options to confirm that as well, ovulation testing, if that becomes necessary.
For the person that is still on birth control, that knows they want to become pregnant within the next six months to a year, even three months, my general recommendation is going to be sitting down and looking at what point you feel comfortable coming off of birth control. It’s really important that you give your body time between stopping birth control and when you get pregnant because it’s likely going to take your body time to reestablish the communication between your ovaries and your brain. And you may experience a period of time – it’s different for everyone. It can be a couple cycles up to several months – of cycle irregularities as that communication is trying to reestablish, and you’re not going to know that until you’re kind of in the midst of it. So if you have very specific plans of when you would like to become pregnant, if you kind of wait too long to transition off the birth control, that can alter or hinder the plans of when you would like to become pregnant.
Absolutely. I was just going to say, really understanding your body and your cycle is step one, and you also talked about nourishment and what you can do to fuel your body. What else do you suggest?
If you kind of have those pieces already dialed in, and you are either looking to just be at your peak when you want to become pregnant, or maybe you’ve already started trying and you’re not getting pregnant – we can dig deeper with things like functional testing to really see specifically where your body is at and where you might need some specific supports. So there are two functional tests that I like to do with my clients. We can talk about Dutch testing first because that is specifically hormone related.
With a Dutch test, you are going to be able to look at your estrogen levels, your progesterone levels. We get to look at your cortisol, which is your stress hormone, and a lot of other things, as well. It’s a huge report that you get. But the reason that I like this test is because yes, you can go a traditional route with your doctor and get bloodwork done to test your hormones, but that blood draw, when you go to the lab and get that done, is only looking at that one specific point in time, whereas with a Dutch test, you are actually doing it with dried urine samples throughout a 24-hour period, and I’ll give a caveat to that. There’s a variety of different Dutch tests that you can run. That is the most common one I use with my clients, but there are other options where you can actually track your cycle for an entire cycle. You would collect these dried urine samples at multiple days throughout a month up to, like, 35-ish days.
But that allows us to see the hormone fluctuations throughout a period of time and also lets us know how your body is metabolizing your estrogens. And the way – not to get too into the weeds with that, but the way that your body metabolizes your estrogens is really important because it can lead to certain types of symptoms. There’s three different pathways, and one of them is the best way. I kind of always explain it like a green, yellow, and red stop light type thing. One is the green pathway where you want your body sending the majority of your estrogen. Then we’ve got the middle pathway where it’s like it’s fine if it’s going there, but we don’t want the majority of it there. And then we have actually a more prolific pathway that, if your body is sending the majority of your estrogen down that route as it is metabolizing it, it can be dangerous for you long-term for things in fertility and estrogen-related cancers later on in life.
So having all that information helps us know, number one, what’s the balance between your estrogen and your progesterone. Do you have enough progesterone, because you have to have progesterone in a sufficient amount to get pregnant and maintain a healthy pregnancy.
The other test that I like to run that is super beneficial is called an HTMA test. This is a hair tissue mineral analysis, and it’s done just using a very small sample of your hair. It allows us to see your mineral levels and also your heavy metal levels as well. So the hormone test, the Dutch test kind of tells us what your hormone levels are, but then the HTMA test can give us the information as to why your hormone levels might be what they are. So marrying both of those pieces together gives me the opportunity to create a plan for someone that’s truly customized to exactly what their body needs.
And what I’ve found with the women that I work with is transitioning off of birth control can be a really sometimes troubling time, and there is a lack of knowledge that – it’s just like things are not being shared with us. Women do not know and they’re not educated on the fact that being on birth control is actually a depleter of our nutrients, minerals, and vitamins. So they can come off of birth control thinking that they’re in a healthy state because maybe they’re someone that really does prioritize working out and eating healthy, and they think they’re doing all of the right things, but then for the past several months or several years, however long they’ve been on the birth control, that birth control has secretly in the background been depleting them of really important nutrients. And as I stated before, our body has to feel safe in order for us to get pregnant. And when we’re in a very depleted state, our body doesn’t feel safe.
That makes sense.
So a lot of the recommendations that we can walk away from testing with can be – it’s going to be a combination, really. It’s going to be lifestyle changes. So we’re going to have conversations about how much are you eating, what types of foods are you eating, what are you doing for your movement, what do your sleep habits look like. And then we’re also going to get into those really specific supplement recommendations because I think the standard recommendation for everyone who wants to be come pregnant is, go on a prenatal, and take a prenatal for – some people will tell you for a year before you get pregnant, for six months, for three months before you get pregnant, and then take it all throughout your pregnancy. I’m not saying that that’s the wrong piece of advice, but it is a very blanketed piece of advice, and if that is all that you’re doing, you’re not able to get that customization piece for what your body specifically needs. The formulation, depending on the prenatal that you’re taking, you might be getting too much or too little of a certain mineral.
Absolutely. And sometimes through that testing, you can find out that you are getting, as you said, too much of a particular mineral or vitamin, and that can be a negative as far as conception goes and also just general health. So I love that you pointed that out. You mentioned sleep and that being a priority. I’d love to chat more about fitness and sleep.
When we sleep, that is when our body is able to give us restoration. It’s not just about sleep and the energy that we wake up with in the morning. There are a lot of internal processes that our bodies are going through while we’re sleeping. We do a lot of our detoxing while we’re asleep, and we actually do a lot of our hormone creation while we are sleeping. So if you are either not getting enough sleep, or the sleep that you are getting is very disrupted, meaning you either can’t get into a deep sleep or you’re being woken up a lot throughout the night, those processes don’t get to be fully carried out as they would if you were getting a full seven to eight hours of sleep each night. And then on the fitness side of things, exercise is kind of a double edged sword sometimes because there’s definitely a balance there between what is enough to keep us healthy and keep us active and mobile, and then sometimes we cross that line of actually, the amount or maybe the intensity of exercise that someone is doing is serving as a stressor on the body and the body may or may not be in a place that it can handle that amount of stress.
That makes sense. Sometimes people are so focused on a fitness plan that it does affect their health. I’m glad you address that, as well. So the mental aspect of pregnancy – you had mentioned the cortisol levels and stress, for example. What do you talk to your clients about as far as their mental health pre-conception?
People will commonly hear me say that we don’t always have control over our stressors. Things are going to happen that are out of our control, and we can’t do anything about that. We’re going to encounter stressors. So I focus instead on how we can handle stress and how we can respond to stress and support our body to be stress resilient, since it’s not something that we can avoid. For anyone that is coming into motherhood, it’s going to be stressful, so having those tools are really important, and that looks like what works for you to help destress. Like, what works for me to help me deescalate and not feel stressed or to be able to handle a stressful moment is not the same thing that’s going to work for you. So a big step that I typically take with my clients is I teach them about all of these different tools, and I encourage them to give all of them a shot for several days or a week or so at a time and experiment and then find out what it is that really works for you. So for me personally, I find that journaling is a really calming thing for me. If I can sit down and I can just brain dump everything that I’m worrying about or thinking about, that works really well for me. I like to do it right before bed. If I get out what is in my brain onto paper, it’s so much easier for me to be able to fall asleep and not lay there thinking, like, gosh, I’ve got to remember to do this, and I can’t forget this tomorrow. I know that I’ve written it down and I’ve got it taken care of.
Some other things that I really like to do: within the last year or so, I have been dabbling with EFT tapping, which is a woo thing. It’s a tapping practice where you are tapping on certain points of your face and body. It’s almost like a form of acupuncture without any needles or anything. You’re just using your fingers to tap on the body. And as you’re doing it, you’re talking yourself through different affirmations and beliefs that you’re either trying to get rid of or establish. And then I love to spend time outside going for walks and just kind of being in nature. So those are the three big things that I have in my personal toolkit that I know I can use at pretty much any time to help me not feel as stressed when I’m in a really stressful time. And like I said earlier, it’s important that everyone kind of figures out what that is for them because there’s so many different options and tools for how you can manage your stress.
Exactly. And you primarily work with women, but what advice do you give your clients as far as the partner’s role in conception?
Oh, that’s such a great question because I think it’s very important to call that out. I’m so glad that you brought this up because it is both parties’ responsibility when it comes to fertility to make sure that they are taking care of themselves. I think that there is a stigma sometimes that gets attached to women in terms of infertility or just struggles to get pregnant, and it’s not always the woman’s fault or a female hormone related issue that’s causing that inability to get pregnant. It’s very important for the men in the situation to also be doing a lot of the things I’ve already talked about. Are they eating enough? Are they eating quality foods the majority of the time? How are their stress levels? How are their sleep levels? Because all of those things that impact a woman and her hormones and her egg health are also going to affect the male hormones and the sperm health.
So it’s great to have those conversations with a partner and come up with a holistic plan before going the route of going to a fertility specialist, so seeking out a program like yours would be the first step, correct?
Yeah, for sure.
Let’s talk through more about your program and your specific offerings for our listeners and doula clients.
Of course! I have a one on one coaching program where I work with women for 12 weeks. That includes both the Dutch testing and the HTMA testing. We get those results back and then when we’re in that waiting period of, like, you’ve taken your tests but we’re waiting on the results to come back, we hone in first on those foundational pieces that I’ve mentioned, things like nutrition, movement, sleep, stress, learning more about your cycle. And then when we get the testing back, we do the customization pieces and we know exactly where you need to focus your attention, which supplements are going to be helpful to bring on board. And then that is carried out over our remaining weeks together. And they have me available to them to ask questions and tweak things along the way because sometimes there’s more tweaking and more customization that needs to happen.
Do you offer specific coaching outside of the program that you offer?
I have two additional packages or options. One on one, of course, is best for the person that really wants basically me in their back pocket. But then I have a small group that I also run. We only do HTMA testing in that program, and it runs for about four weeks. And then at the end of the four weeks, you have the option to get continued support if you need it for longer, access to me for longer. And you still get the customized recommendations and a care plan, but it’s just from the HTMA testing. Dutch testing is not included.
And then for someone that just wants to get an HTMA test as their very first starting point, I have a package for that too where you get just an HTMA test. I kind of tell you what the test is showing. I give you a few recommendations, and then you have five days of texting support with me to ask any follow up questions.
Excellent! I knew you had multiple offerings, so it’s great to educate on that. Any other tips for our listeners?
We said we wanted to talk about secondary infertility, and I don’t know that I spoke to that specifically. So I wanted to come back to that for a second. We talked about how birth control depletes nutrients. When we’re pregnant, we are giving a lot of our nutrients to baby. We are literally growing a human. We’re creating organs. And that is very taxing on our body. That’s why it’s really important to maintain your own nutrition throughout pregnancy. So women lose around 10% of their own minerals during pregnancy, and then of course you have this stressful event on your body when you are giving birth, and that’s regardless of how you give birth. And then for women who choose to breastfeed, that mineral loss is going to continue, maybe at a slightly lower rate, but it is going to still continue. Many of my clients are like myself and they have had kind of these back to back pregnancies and breastfeeding journeys, or at least that’s what they would desire to do. And sometimes we do get into that secondary infertility where, like you said earlier, it is maybe easy to become pregnant with the first baby, but then the second time, ready to try to get pregnant, you kind of go into it, thinking this is going to be similar to last time, but then you might go months and months without being able to get pregnant, and you’re kind of stumped as to why that’s happening and what might be causing that.
And of course, there’s many reasons that can happen. But one of the reasons can be that your body is simply in a depleted state from pregnancy and breastfeeding, and you just need to do a little bit of replenishment and then will go on to be able to get pregnant again.
That is so important to address. I know with my own pregnancies being back to back, I made sure to see a functional medicine doctor and a naturopath, and it helped so much, being a breastfeeding mom and an advanced maternal age state, to make sure that everything was balanced.
Absolutely.
So how can we connect with you, Vanda?
I hang out on Instagram a lot. You can find me @wellnesswithvanda there. My website is Wellness with Vanda. And then I do have a free secret podcast that I can share where I go just a little deeper on a lot of these same topics. I have an episode in there where I do a case study of one of my own HTMA tests. I have a case study where I walk through a client that did both Dutch testing and HTMA testing. We talk about some of the misconceptions, when doctors are telling us, oh, everything looks good; you’re normal, and then on the functional side of things, how that can not be true. The episodes are really short and bingeable. I think you can listen to the whole thing in under 30 minutes.
Excellent! And then you do have a podcast that is not private and has a lot of great content.
Yeah, it’s the Wellness with Vanda Podcast. I typically put out an episode a week on Tuesdays, and it’s a great place to come and learn more.
Thank you so much! I appreciate you sharing all of your wisdom in relation to preconception. Thank you, Vanda!
Thank you so much for having me, Kristin! I enjoyed this, and I appreciate you.
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