In this Video:
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How can acupuncture help with weight management for infertility
Can I talk about weight management here for a little bit? A lot of times people are concerned with fertility, infertility, and maybe being overweight. Is that something acupuncture can help with?
Acupuncture can definitely help with the cravings, the stress, the cortisol, which can often cause emotional eating. Also, there's something called Candida, which is yeast that is in your guts, and oftentimes if someone's taken any antibiotic in the past, which we all have, and we never knew to take probiotics with it, this yeast can overgrow. Whenever we give a patient a supplement like that, like a probiotic, or a vitamin, we always, always, have them check with their OB before taking it. But, if we can help control that yeast, a lot of times, it gets to the point that people are craving sugar, because they start to clean up their diet, which is going to kill the yeast. There's something called a die-off reaction, and that die-off reaction can be craving sugar, often times intensely.
It's kind of a catch-22. It's like, “I want to lose weight, how come I'm craving sugar; what's the problem?” In two parts to your question; is there a way we can work with that? Absolutely. Do you still have to do the work of eating right and exercising and working with your OB? Absolutely. Do you need to lose a significant amount of weight to help get pregnant? Not necessarily, in my opinion. I've seen people very overweight get pregnant. I've seen people lose five pounds and get pregnant, when they couldn't get pregnant. I have seen people who I have actually told to gain some weight and get pregnant. Again, I'm not a doctor. So there are protocols, and rules, and [the opinion] that you should lose weight before we do this treatment, that's all between you and your doctor. I just don't believe from a Chinese medicine perspective, when you're looking at the whole body, that weight is the determining factor why there's unexplained fertility issue. I think there are other things going on in the body, because we're treating the body as a whole.
That makes sense!
