🎧 Episode 15: Aimee Raupp on Fertility, IVF & the Power of Root-Cause Care
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Introduction
In this episode of the WOVA Circle Fertility Podcast, we explore a root-cause approach to fertility, from why "unexplained infertility" is rarely truly unexplained to how integrating Eastern and Western medicine can transform outcomes.
Aimee Raupp, a bestselling author, women's health expert, and licensed acupuncturist with over 21 years of clinical experience, shares why proper diagnostics matter, how two women of the same age can have completely different fertility outcomes, and the foundational role of nutrition, lifestyle, and nervous system regulation in conception.
Whether you're trying to conceive naturally, preparing for IVF, or navigating recurrent loss, this episode offers grounded, evidence-based guidance to help you advocate for the right testing and the right care.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
Why "unexplained infertility" is rarely truly unexplained and how to dig for the root cause
What a thorough fertility workup should include, from thyroid panels to insulin markers and hysteroscopy
How conditions like celiac, endometriosis, and insulin resistance can quietly derail IVF outcomes
Why the "biological clock" narrative doesn't tell the whole story
The role of GLP-1s in fertility, including who may benefit and why dosing matters
The Chinese medicine concept of the "child's palace" and how to prepare your body for pregnancy
Why the modern Mediterranean diet misses what made traditional eating fertility-supportive
How blue light, morning sunlight, and circadian rhythm impact reproductive hormones
Practical nervous system regulation and the question: how much are you giving away versus keeping for yourself?
⏱ Listen time: 51 minutes
🎧 Format: Video & Audio
📍 Best for: Individuals and couples considering or undergoing IVF, those wanting to better understand fertility treatment, and anyone looking for a more informed, balanced approach to reproductive health
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👉 Learn More About Gabie’s Story
Podcast Transcript
Introduction
Gabie: Welcome to The WOVA Circle: Real Talk on fertility, wellness, and trying to conceive. I'm Gabie Peytchev, founder of WOVA Health and fertility educator. This podcast is your community space for navigating the path to parenthood with evidence-based insights, authentic conversations, and genuine support. I'm dedicated to being here with you through every part of your journey.
Today, we have a very special guest, Aimee Raupp. She is a bestselling author, fertility expert, and a passionate advocate for women's health, with over 20 years of experience helping women around the world get pregnant naturally, improve their fertility outcomes, and feel empowered in their bodies. Aimee, welcome.
Aimee: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here and to be with you again.
Gabie: Yeah, me too. I am looking forward to our conversation today. I wanted to first give you a chance to do a proper introduction of yourself. Let me know if I've missed anything. You have so much experience and knowledge, and it's very hard to summarize it in just a couple of sentences. You also recently revised your book. Maybe we can start there.
Aimee's Background and the Revised Book
Aimee: I think that's the biggest update — this book, Yes, You Can Get Pregnant. I wrote the original edition in 2014. I just had the opportunity to revise it, which has been really fun. It was like a 10-year revision. It's just loaded with so much more research and information, and now I have 21 years of clinical experience, my own pregnancies in my 40s. So there's a lot more information and detail in the revised edition. I feel really proud of it. I feel like it's my life's work.
With 21 years of clinical experience, you just learn so much. I'm a huge advocate for women and for getting the right testing, getting to the right root cause of what's behind their fertility challenges rather than these blanket diagnoses without any actual inspection. That's my mission — to educate and empower and get you to ask the right questions and get the right testing done and get the right support so that you can figure this out. And unfortunately, it still is falling on our patients to figure it out, with the help of people like us.
Gabie: Yeah. Thank you for sharing this. What inspired you to even get into that type of work?
What Inspired Aimee's Work
Aimee: I think just patient care, back in the day. It's not what my day looks like anymore. Now I do virtual consults basically with women all over the world kind of all day long. But back in the day, when I was first in clinical practice as an acupuncturist and herbalist, I was seeing upwards of 60 to 70 patients a week in between my clinics.
By nature of what was coming my way, I was seeing lots of hormonal issues, lots of fertility challenges, and just lots of women who were being stripped of their power and being told there was something wrong, and there was nothing they could do about it, and this biological clock, and falling off the fertile cliff.
It doesn't line up with anything I've been taught. I have degrees in biology and chemistry. I have the Western and Eastern side. The reason behind the work I do is that I really always feel called out strongly to question this dogma and this old-school system, where it's disempowering and shaming. It doesn't line up with what we know in the data and the research, what we see clinically. Women have a lot more control than they're told.
I hit a point in my career where I was like, "I want to scream it from the rooftops." I actually said that to a friend one night. I was like, "I just want to scream to everyone, you can do this. You can figure it out. Yes, you can get pregnant." And she actually said, "That's your next book," because I had already written one book. And I was like, "Oh, I think you're right. Fertility is where I have to go next." That was in the early 2010s, and that changed everything.
How Aimee Would Redesign Fertility Care
Gabie: How would you redesign pregnancy care if it were within the power of one person?
Aimee: It's a great question. Diagnostics. I would lead with diagnostics. They would have a full thorough panel workup — vitamin D, a full thyroid panel, iron panel, insulin-resistant markers. I think every woman should get a hysteroscopy before she even starts trying to conceive. Just the things I see from that medical side. That would be the Western medical side before we started IVF.
But even prior to that, preconception care. What is our focus? How are you nourishing you? Are you hitting your marks from a dietary, a lifestyle perspective? I would change it so much. I always use the example — if you were planning a wedding, you start saving for it a year in advance. Or you're planning to buy a house, you start saving for it a couple years in advance. Same thing. What are we doing to prepare? Getting off the pill sooner, educating women on their hormones, how they work, how the endocrine-disrupting chemicals are impacting them, sperm health, how that's being impacted. It's not just about the egg. It's egg, it's sperm, it's uterus, it's overall internal environment in the woman's body, and in the man's body, which impacts sperm.
I would reframe it as: there's education, there's these baseline things you need to be doing when you first start trying to conceive. Then before you go to IVF, these are the next baseline things so that we can rule anything else out.
A Real Case: Why Deeper Diagnostics Matter
Aimee: I just had a case. This is an example of the system and how screwed up it is. She's coming to me because she's going through IVF for secondary infertility. I also just hate that word — I would change the word to fertility challenges, hormonal imbalances, things that we can shift back. It's not like it's on or off. This whole fertile cliff — no, there's so much research. No, you don't fall off a cliff at 35.
There's so many things I would change, but this is a great example. She's coming to me, secondary fertility challenges, prepping for another IVF and then a transfer. Simultaneously, she's dealing with this really intense hip issue that she is getting physical therapy for. She was previously an athlete. The physical therapist is like, "I want you to see an orthopedic." He does an X-ray on the hip, and there's severe osteoarthritis. She's 33. Doesn't really line up with her age.
Mind you, she's already been dealing with secondary infertility for over a year. She's already done multiple IVFs. She has one child. She easily got pregnant with this first child at 33. Now she's 37. Not happening. Kind of a classic case.
The hip doctor runs celiac testing on her because he's never seen this amount of bone loss in a woman her age, and he's like, "This has to be autoimmune, or it's probably celiac because it's like a malnourishment." She has celiac disease. Now since changing her diet — just because she has celiac for her hip pain — literally, her next IVF, her outcomes doubled, meaning she got twice as many eggs retrieved, twice as many fertilized, twice as many euploids. All just from a bone doctor finding out that she has celiac, not her fertility clinic.
This is asinine. Why is the bone doctor up on what celiac does to bone health, but the IVF doctor is not up on what celiac does to IVF outcomes? Why is that? It's a lack of education.
Those are the things I would change. We need deeper diagnostics on all of our patients. We need to understand what's going on and why, because there's always a reason. There's no such thing as unexplained infertility. There's always a reason. There's always a root cause. What is it?
"Unexplained Infertility" — A Frustrating Diagnosis
Gabie: Unexplained infertility. That was the diagnosis my husband and I were given. So yes, it is the most frustrating diagnosis, but aren't all diagnoses frustrating?
Aimee: But they're also empowering, I think. Because it's like, "Okay, now I have something I can work with," versus, "I just can't get pregnant, but she can." That is so isolating. That just feels like nothing matters. Or, "Oh, we're just going to blame my age." But then why is my friend from college, who's also 44, just had her third? If it's all age...
I just started Substack, and I'm writing a five-part series on ovarian aging. That's basically the argument I'm making — why are two women the exact same age having different fertility outcomes? It is not just this timeline of our ovarian aging or our eggs running out. It can't just be that. Let's question this basic dogma that has very little data to back it up.
The Limits of Specialization and Integrated Care
Gabie: You also talk about the scope of IVF doctors, and it's so tricky because specialists specialize for a reason, obviously. They go incredibly deep in their field, but that also means that it's hard to expect any one expert to understand your whole body. I keep saying it's really impossible. Every specialist brings real expertise, but each one is looking through their own lens. No single lens can capture everything that's happening in a patient going through IVF, for example.
That's why I keep thinking about how to build systems that work with those realities. How do we create integrated approaches that actually support the patient going through IVF? And those who aren't undergoing fertility treatment but trying naturally, how do we change this type of care so it's more connected? We shouldn't expect the IVF doctor to have all the answers. That's not their role. But we can integrate the work with someone like you, with the experts team at WOVA, with someone or a team of experts who sees the rest of the picture that normally is outside of their scope.
Aimee: That's hard because right now the system is just not set up that way. There are some IVF clinics that, like Dr. Aimee, she has a nutritionist on staff. I think that's brilliant.
Either insurance has to start covering people like us. We all have medical degrees. And obviously don't cover the people that don't have medical degrees who are out here giving fertility advice without a medical degree or clinical experience. I'm also very against that, because you're getting advice from someone who has no clinical training. That's also dangerous.
Either start covering us — and some of my girls do, they can get super bills from me for coaching even, which is fascinating, and they'll get some coverage. Or it's education of the medical system. We're talking about nutrition. It's clear. I just wrote the book. I looked at dozens and dozens of research papers in the last decade. The increase in ultra-processed foods, the increase in endocrine-disrupting chemicals, the increase in blue light exposure. Those are all clearly linked to fertility challenges, clearly linked to sperm challenges, clearly linked to miscarriage and implantation failure. We're not guessing. There's correlation, causation. So it's education.
For women out there though, it is still hard. They have to have — a lot of the girls call it their bump squad. You have to have multiple practitioners on your team in order to get to the finish line.
Gabie: And then you have to coordinate all the different pieces of advice yourself and try to piece it all together, and it puts it all on you to understand it all.
Helping Patients Ask the Right Questions
Aimee: It's a lot. Even I find — I was on a bunch of calls this morning. Every one of those calls, in my follow-up email, includes a script that I'm writing for them that they can bring to their doctor to help get their questions answered or get the next test that needs to be done before they do that transfer, before they do another IVF, before they try to conceive naturally after that loss.
They don't even know what to ask, and they're also afraid to ask because the doctor then feels like they're being told how to do their job. So I literally help my girls write a script. Put it in the portal. There's no harm, I always say. There's no harm in sending that email.
No one's sitting and being like, "Okay, so you just had your second miscarriage. We can throw out statistics. At your age, the likelihood of it being genetic, fine. That's fine. But use updated data. Here are the recommended next steps. You could continue trying on your own with this possible result. We could inspect the uterus. This is probably something smart to look at. We could look at sperm. Sperm probably playing a role. You could also consider IVF." Almost lay out all the options versus, "It's clear that all your eggs are bad, and you're only getting older, so you should probably just consider donor eggs and just move on with your life." That's typically what's happening versus, "Is there an autoimmune condition? Is there a sperm issue?"
I don't think that people are out to do harm, but everybody's a bit too busy, and education is fragmented. So no one's getting a clear answer.
Gabie: Yeah, and I genuinely believe that experts are truly trying to help.
Aimee: Absolutely. They're all working toward the same outcome. There are just so many pieces, and they're each looking at it from their own perspective.
Not to underestimate, too, the trauma and the overwhelm that the people going through this journey are experiencing — whether you're in a partnership or just the woman. That's another piece that fragments the intake of information. There's so many things that are said in that appointment that can be missed or misconstrued.
I was just reviewing an embryology report from a previous IVF with a patient, and on day six it had the words MC, which means morula compaction. So it means right before blastocyst. Her doctor never explained that to her. Everything stopped growing at day six. She thought MC meant multicellular — just a quick Google search, I'm not sure where she got that from. She brought it up to the doctor. The doctor was like, "No, nothing made it to a blastocyst." But the doctor didn't break down to her, "But you had 10 morulas at day six," which is freezable if we're not testing. She's 32.
It was just this big line of miscommunication. This IVF cycle happened in January. She still doesn't have closure or understanding of what happened. No one's trying to do any harm, but everyone's too busy to sit down and explain or break things down and help people understand. Why did it stop growing at day seven? They still just want to blame the egg. But his DNA fragmentation was 37%. That probably has something to do with it. She's severely insulin resistant. She had endometriosis that was left untreated. There's so many other reasons. But instead it's, "This will be the last round of IVF we do with you at 33 years old." She's already done five. This will be her sixth, and then you have to move to donor eggs. Mind you, endometriosis and insulin resistance were just discovered. She did five IVFs without this information, and that information was discovered because of working with someone like me.
Gabie: Aye, aye, yai. It's a complex world.
Aimee: It's complex. No one's trying to do harm, but we have to do better. We have to do better.
The Education Gap in Medical Training
Gabie: And it's hard because all of you experts are going through so much education. How much more education can one person want?
Aimee: My brain's about to explode. I have to take time off from seeing clients, honestly, to learn more. A lot of the medical doctors out there — A, the education isn't there in medical school. That's primary problem number one. But primary problem number two is they should have current research around nutrition, around endocrine-disrupting chemicals at minimum, around DNA fragmentation at minimum. What PGT-A testing is actually doing versus what it's not, day three versus day five blasts. Now with AI, this shouldn't be that complicated. Could you spend two hours a week studying some research? That's what I try to do. Then we're ahead of the game.
Gabie: I definitely agree. We should definitely have at least more awareness around — there's research behind it that's helpful. They don't necessarily have to be expected to understand and change nutrition, lifestyle, environment, or anything. If they know who it is, then they can really partner with the right people, the right experts, and provide the integrative type of care for patients.
Aimee: That's right. Or at minimum say, "You know what? It's not my wheelhouse. I don't know enough about it. I know there's been more research coming out. I would recommend X, Y, or Z."
Hope and Change in the Industry
Gabie: I am hopeful. I do continue to see a lot of conflicting advice, you're right, and not everything the experts are saying is always accurate or up to the latest research. But the reason I'm hopeful is because I continue to also see some clinics and doctors who are really trying to stay up to date with the latest research, who are interviewing people like you, like Dr. Aimee on their Egg Whisperer podcast. She introduced a lot of holistic practitioners. I see clinics partnering also and referring out to more specialists like you. I'm super hopeful.
Aimee: Oh, same. It's changing, and it's changed so much. I've been in this space — I always say, before AMH and before PGT-A testing. I've been in this space a long time. It's totally changing. Like you said, Dr. Aimee's a great example, but there's probably 10 of her. I have doctors from all over the world that will reach out, want to have a conversation with me, are open to discussions, love — or just say, "Nutrition's not my wheelhouse, but I want you to read this book." How many doctors have my books in their clinics, which is beautiful and amazing. How many more people are open to reproductive immunology, looking at ovarian rejuvenation techniques like PRP or stem cells or even the peptides.
There's definitely a trend that's happening. But it's not happening at the major institutional places just yet. It might eventually. But those are usually the big guys who are taking all the insurance. Those are the guys that are seeing the volume of IVF patients, and probably half of those patients, if not more, never needed IVF to begin with. They just needed proper diagnostics.
I hope it all changes. At minimum, I want us to start changing the conversation around this biological clock and ovarian aging. I'm on a mission for that.
About the Book and the "Do I Believe?" Question
Gabie: Let's talk about your book. I read half of it, and I look forward to finishing it. It's been so amazing so far. I've learned so much as well.
Aimee: Oh, thank you.
Gabie: There's something you mention. You usually ask the question for clients, "Do I believe I'm going to get pregnant?" or, "Do I believe I'm going to be a mother?" Now, if you ask this question to someone who hasn't struggled for that long, it seems like a typical question — of course, like, why not? But if you've struggled for a long time, it's a heavy question.
Aimee: Yeah. Most will cry, especially when the journey has made them question their ability to do it. Most break down. Then some will say, "Something keeps pushing me here. It's hard to have hope, but there's something in me that I just know. I have to keep digging, or I have to keep trying, or I have to try it a different way."
I even will say — and I think I wrote that in the book, in this revised edition — even if you're here, meaning reading that book or listening to this, we don't need to have like a "hell yes" hope, that yes, this is totally going to work out for me. But the fact that you're here, I think, says that you still have a belief that it could, and you're going to find the reason behind it. You're going to find the thing. I think it's not the thing ever. It's a combination of many things and cumulative impacts over time of many things that really shift the needle.
It's important to tune in and remember what your why is. You get on the hamster wheel of fertility treatments and searching and all the things, and you lose sight of it. You're just doing it to do it. You forget that at some point, you lost the ability to be naive on how to grow a family. So tune back into this vision of the why and do I believe and at what level, what's blocking my belief, how aligned are my partner and I if I'm in a partnership.
It's so easy to lose yourself, like you said, and to lose the hope and not know why you're doing all the things you're doing. But if you slow down enough and ask yourself the question — I must believe on some level because I am here. Is it covered by everything else?
Gabie: We're made to believe that we're really different. Young age, we're trying to protect ourselves, and it's usually comes as a huge shock.
Aimee: It's a defense mechanism, too, of "I don't want to believe because I'm too scared to be let down." And I always say, "But you're here and you're trying, so there's a little bit of believing."
I have all sorts of cases, and I've definitely seen the eight, 10, 12-year cases. Those cases — they're kind of just walking around like a deer in headlights for probably the first seven months of the pregnancy. Not real until the baby's in their arms. I always say, "And that's okay. You don't have to believe until that baby's in your arms if you don't want to." It's a shock. It's like PTSD. It really is.
Personalized Approach: What Works for One May Not Work for Another
Gabie: Aimee, you also talk about personalized approach, how people are really different and what works for one person might not work for another person. Can you give some examples of something was super helpful for a couple or for a woman, but it's not probably the best step for another couple, another woman?
Aimee: Right now, all the talk of the GLP-1s. I can do Western, I can do Eastern, I can do all the things. I could also talk about intermittent fasting, or keto for fertility. If you don't have the proper testing done — Vitex is another good one. It could totally backfire on people with cortisol adrenal issues. Even primrose oil, same thing. I don't touch it at all. It can make so many people estrogenic. You have to really know your case. DIM, calcium D-glucarate — that can backfire. DHEA can backfire.
The right person, amazing. I just had a call. Her testosterone's low. She wants to add in DHEA. I was like, "So theoretically, yes, DHEA will help boost testosterone, but you can have high DHEA and low testosterone. That could be a different picture. It's more of an absorption or an adrenal conversion type of issue. We take DHEA, it will worsen things. So no, you can't take it. You have to get the blood test, and then I will tell you whether or not you take it."
Chinese herbs — randomly taking Chinese herbs from some online site where you can take a quiz... I'm an herbalist. I will customize a formula. One 44-year-old with irregular periods does really well with one formula. One 44-year-old with irregular periods, a completely different formula. If you didn't do the proper diagnostics from a Chinese medicine perspective, you could screw them up.
So many things — not just one thing. And a lot of that is not in the textbook. Even primrose oil on paper should be the best thing for an estrogen-deficient woman. Yes, she should take that. It's not the right thing for a lot of women. You don't know that until you — I know that because I prescribed it early in my practice, and I started to see, and I paid attention. You've got to pay attention to your clinical data. I paid attention time after time. One day I was like, "I'm not recommending this anymore, and I don't actually know why. I just know I've seen too many of this." Migraines, irregular periods, all of a sudden spotting, ovarian cysts. I was like, "That's it. I'm pulling this out and not recommending it anymore. We're going right to fish oil." I'm not even doing borage anymore. I've just pulled it altogether. Then now, years later, I understand. DIM is the same thing. DHEA, same thing.
Every time I post about stuff like this on social, I get a handful of these natural practitioners just coming at me. They are just so angry that I said it. I was like, it can't be in everybody's protocol. That just tells me you don't know what you're doing. You're just throwing shit at the wall and hoping it sticks.
Gabie: You need to write a textbook as your next project.
Aimee: I'm going to start a mentorship program. That's my next thing. And it'll be private. You have to join it in order to get this information.
GLP-1s and Fertility
Gabie: You talked about GLP-1, and because it's such a popular topic at the moment, let's talk about it. Do you think it's safe for someone who's trying to get pregnant? What do you think about GLP-1?
Aimee: My first two Substacks that came out are on GLP-1s and fertility. It's a part one and a part two. I think for the right case, it's amazing, honestly, and at the right dose. I am not a prescribing physician, but I get to watch a lot, and I love research, and I'm a nerd.
Listen, insulin resistance, inflammation, immune signaling are all huge issues when it comes to unexplained fertility challenges or even explained. If we have a PCOS girl, for instance, or an autoimmune girl, endometriosis girl — that's what GLP-1s are addressing, these three things. It's not weight loss. You've got to read the research to understand that. It's about mitochondrial function.
In that token, yeah, maybe everybody could benefit from it. However, girls that are already — they're not insulin resistant, so insulin, fasting glucose, A1C, not high. They're not even in healthy range. They're in low range. So low leptin, low insulin, low glucose, low A1C — you can see it, like a 4.6, a 4.7. It's going to backfire. That's going to put them into more of a fight or flight freeze state, energy deprivation state.
For most of our girls — and you only know that if you're doing blood work. A lot of doctors are not doing blood work on any of the patients they're prescribing GLP-1 to. Maybe A1C. Even still, I just had one. Her A1C is a six, and the doctor was like, "I don't think you need it." And I'm like, "Did you look at her numbers across the board?"
I think they're smart. Not a doctor, but watching what's going on, I think the dosing can be too high for a lot of people. I think you can really move the needle with staying at the starting dose and even taking it not every week. Again, I'm not a doctor, so don't go and do that on your own. Please get medical advice. But what I see — I see the markers changing in girls who are microdosing the GLP-1s prescribed by a doctor. Some doctors are prescribing the microdosing. More and more doctors are seeing that the high dose, first of all, we get dramatic weight loss. A lot of our girls, we don't need that. We're not trying to do that. That's going to shock the body. Some girls need it, sure. But I don't think high BMIs are a deterrent to pregnancy. A lot of times lower BMIs are more of the concern in my opinion.
You take less and less frequently, and you can see the markers shift. You see all the inflammatory markers, all the blood sugar markers. Even some of the endometriosis markers. Things are shifting. Ovulation happens more consistently at an earlier time. They're retrieving more eggs. It's definitely being used by more and more fertility clinics. Endometriosis docs are recommending it, and not for weight loss — this is not what we're thinking. It's these insulin-resistant girls or inflamed girls.
When I talk about that in the Substack, it's this triangle. It's inflammation, insulin resistance, immune signaling, and they all basically feed off of each other and feed to each other. A lot of the work we already do, we're addressing that. We've always been addressing that. These things can, in certain cases, get us there faster. So I'm not opposed to it. It's just, is it right for that case?
Gabie: Do you believe that if we don't do the GLP-1 and really cut out foods, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, update the lifestyle — that this is going to have similar effects to the medication?
Aimee: It's totally — lifestyle, one thousand percent works. It just takes longer. In a perfect world — the older I get and the longer I do this and the more heartache I see, my main goal is efficiency now. Or at minimum, giving everyone the options. I can fix your insulin resistance and your thyroid and your vitamin D and all your things. It's going to take me nine-ish months. Some people are like, "I'm down with it."
I had a call the other day. We'll go on a GLP-1, and I was like, "Great. We don't have to." It just came up in conversation. I actually didn't even recommend it. I just was looking at her blood work, and I was like, "You're definitely insulin resistant." And she was like, "And I'll never go on a GLP-1." She's in the nutrition world, functional nutrition. I was like, "We don't have to. We can figure this out. It might take us a little bit longer, and you are 46, and you want to have this child." Can we meet in the middle? We have to weigh it all out.
But absolutely — and they're not allowed to skip anything, and we're still working on sperm health, and we're still doing all the right testing. I just hope we'll get there faster.
Gabie: It's still hard to tell if you're taking the medication and following these recommendations — which one's working?
Aimee: You can see it. I have some people that are so open to it, really dialing it in. They're on continuous glucose monitors. We know what their sugars are. We're checking labs every two to three weeks. They get to take a lot less of the GLP-1 and space it out, and they get there just as quickly if not quicker than people who are just doing the standard.
If you want to really succeed at getting off the GLP-1 at some point, if you're doing it for the right reasons and you wanted weight loss and then you want a successful reentry to life without a GLP-1, the lifestyle is the most imperative piece.
Preparing the Child's Palace
Gabie: In your book you talk about preparing your child's home. Can you talk about that?
Aimee: In Chinese medicine, the word for uterus actually translates to "child's palace." I always loved that. In my first book, Chill Out and Get Healthy, there was a chapter called Preparing the Palace, and that was all about fertility. That chapter then became the first edition of Yes, You Can Get Pregnant.
In Chinese medicine, the palace is — we call it an extraordinary organ, because it has extraordinary powers. That makes me emotional just even saying that. It's an extraordinary organ. How does your palace look? Has anyone looked at your palace? What kind of blood flow is it getting? Is it a fertile ground? Is it receptive?
In Chinese medicine, the heart and the uterus are so interconnected, and the heart is the governor of all of our emotions. There's a channel that connects the two, the Bao Mai. The uterus is so much more than just the place to house the pregnancy. It is the garden of life. Our emotions impact it. Of course, our lifestyle impacts it. We like the palace to be warm. I always picture it like a beautiful grassy meadow, with this tall green grass swaying. That's your lining, your trilaminar lining. The sun's out, it's nice and warm. Who wouldn't want to burrow up in there and get cozy for 10 months?
That's what I always loved about Chinese medicine — the connection, the spiritual emotional connection to every organ, every disease state. Really looking at that. It gives women something to think about and work on versus this is out of my control and things are just going to get worse as I get older.
Gabie: What are your top recommendations for how we can prepare that child's palace? How to make it warm, cozy?
Aimee: Acupuncture. I love acupuncture, so I'd say acupuncture is great. Castor oil packs, Mayan massage, Chinese herbs, warm tea, warm cooked foods, bone broth, blood-building foods. We love nourishment for the child's palace — lots of good quality nutrient-dense protein. We love organ meats, beets and berries, all of these engendering nourishing foods.
I always think about the emotional connection. It's really important. I kind of see the Bao Mai as a channel that runs between the heart and the uterus, and you want it open and filled with light and everybody communicating. What happens with trauma or stress, I always see it as kind of putting these nicks in it or maybe starting to block it somehow. So it's about working through that, releasing, or at minimum grieving and accepting. That then allows more peace and joy to penetrate the child's palace.
I hate when people are like, "I was told I have emotional blocks and that's why I'm not getting pregnant." I don't think that that's fair to say to people because how could you not have an emotional block when you've been trying? How could you not have trauma from this? Instead of blaming them, it's more like — this is a serious situation you're in. This is hard. You should have some trauma. Let's figure out how we can process it and express it versus, "Take my course to discover your emotional blocks."
Nutrition: Mediterranean Diet, Then vs. Now
Gabie: In your book, you do a deep dive on nutrition. What I like that you differentiate is between the modern Mediterranean style diet as we know it versus the traditional, and what is really missing. If you look online, for example, and you're asked, "What is the Mediterranean style diet?" you get a very general sense of eat more seafood and vegetables and fruits and whole grains and legumes, and that's about it. I feel that this is such a narrow summary. There's way more that we need to discuss, including how we need to integrate variety in every single macronutrient, but also bone broths, organ meats — a lot of these things that we don't think are so important for our fertility, and yet they are.
Aimee: You see a salad with salmon. That's all you see. You see a salad with salmon and avocado. Olives maybe. It's a limited view.
Gabie: So much more diversity.
Aimee: Diversity and variety, and that's the key. It's seasonality. From the standard American diet to the Mediterranean diet — dramatic improvements, so I'm down for that. If that's what we're recommending, people go from ultra-processed foods to more of Mediterranean style. But then they're still probably getting that at some sort of healthier fast food place where I'm getting the salad with the salmon, and we're not thinking about food preparation. Obviously the oils they're cooked in, the quality of the food, the timing of the meals.
The Mediterranean lifestyle and diet — a lot of it has to do with consuming nature as well and things in season and when we eat, and we're eating community style. Some Mediterranean cultures have very late dinners. But you're kind of eating with the sun, it feels like. There's this sense of community, sense of locality and seasonality, fresh, fresh, fresh ingredients.
That part is missed when they're talking about women who followed the Mediterranean diet. What does that even mean? Those studies are always like she's just checking a box on a survey. What's your diet mostly like? Is it standard American? Is it Mediterranean? Is it vegetarian? Who is even defining this for these people when they do these studies?
If we really break it down — and credit where credit is due, Real Food for Fertility by Lily Nichols. She was the one who really started that conversation about Mediterranean then versus now. We're colleagues, and when I was writing this book, it was inspiration because I had been so supportive of Real Food for Fertility when it came out. Of course I'd read it. It's such a great way she puts it. They're missing very key elements of that style of eating and the lifestyle that goes with it.
Gabie: It's all connected. In many cultures, they sit down and eat for hours. They don't quickly sit down.
Aimee: Not in front of their computer shoving food in their mouth.
Gabie: Exactly. In five, 10 minutes without realizing what they're putting in their mouth, not enjoying the food.
Aimee: The joy factor is huge. Food is nourishment, food is celebrated, food is a prized possession. It's not something we just take for granted and pick up in a to-go line.
Resistance to Simple, Foundational Recommendations
Gabie: In the recommendations you provide, do you see any resistance from people who are trying to conceive? Sometimes I feel that when you say more sun exposure — 15, 20, 30 minutes a day is really going to help, getting some fresh air — some of these recommendations feel simple, and they don't implement them because they're simple, even though they're effective.
Aimee: People don't take it seriously. I have to drill it in. I'm like, "The nature part is serious." What I've been doing now is sharing research about blue light exposure. Blue light exposure at night raises FSH. That'll get any woman to get outside for her morning sunlight. Any woman on the journey, she will make morning sunlight important because now she's like, "Wait, there's research showing blue light exposure at night raises FSH?" Yes, there is.
Getting back in touch with nature — I talk about that even in the first edition of Yes, You Can Get Pregnant because I talked about Chinese medicine. We say a woman who lives in accordance with the Dao, as in the Dao De Ching, should be able to conceive until the age of 49. She's in her fertile window until 49. What does that mean — in accordance with the Dao? It means she's following the seasons. She's expressing her emotions. She's getting enough sleep. She's limiting her stressful situations. She's nourishing her body. She's slowing down. She's tuning in.
The nervous system, circadian rhythm stuff that everybody talks about now, all the biohacking — that is the basis of it all. If you want to really do what you can do to optimize mitochondrial function, that's it. It's that stuff that feeds the energy of the cells.
To me, it's the foundation. It has to be there. I see it in my girls. They're just waiting for me to tell them what supplements to take. I just had one of my calls. I was like, "So how are you doing with the screens at night?" "I haven't..." And she's like, "I just really want to know about the supplements and the child." So I have to have the same conversation, and I was like, "This stuff matters." She was like, "What can I do for my testosterone?" I was like, "Weight training. How are you doing with the nighttime?" She was like, "Admittedly, I'm on my phone until I go to bed." I was like, "Did you do any of the..." "Oh, no." That's the adrenal picture, guys. Anybody who's talking to you about cortisol or adrenals — get your morning sunlight. Let your body know it's nighttime when it's nighttime. Stop tricking it. You're confusing the signals.
Gabie: I agree.
Nervous System Regulation for Fertility
Gabie: I know we can talk forever. I love learning from you, but we're also out of time. What does nervous system regulation look like in a fertility context, in practice?
Aimee: Nervous system regulation, what does it look like for a fertility client? Getting morning sunlight before morning screen time. Sleep. Sleep is the most underrated medicine. Getting to bed before 11, sleeping seven to nine hours. Processing your emotions — feeling them, expressing them. That's so big for the nervous system. Checking yourself — how do I feel today? How am I feeling in this moment? What is my plan to nourish myself today? What does that look like? Am I still thinking about that conversation I had three days ago with so-and-so, and is it still on my mind? Tuning back in. That to me is how we regulate ourselves. Where am I? What am I carrying from yesterday or the past with me into today? You have a choice there.
Sure, I love things like singing in the shower and really enjoying cooking, listening to fun music while you're cooking, and dancing. Embodiment, I guess, is really what I would say it is. Slowing down to feel. And a question I always pose is, how much of yourself are you giving away versus keeping for yourself?
Gabie: I love that. Thank you. That's amazing. How much are you giving versus keeping for yourself? We give so much away. Especially women — we give away so much from ourselves.
Aimee: Yet we expect our body to just automatically do the thing that is, honestly, the biggest job a human body can do — to make a human. You can't be so depleted.
Gabie: Thank you, Aimee.
Aimee: You're welcome. Thank you so much.
Closing
Gabie: If you found this episode helpful, please subscribe. Subscribing helps you stay connected to more support like this as you move through your own journey.
One of the struggles during my own fertility journey was that I felt the care I was receiving, while amazing, was very fragmented. Oftentimes, I had to find the right experts, and I had to piece it all together. I had to collect the advice between experts who weren't communicating to each other. At WOVA, this is very different. You actually work with a coordinated team of seasoned professionals across nutrition, lifestyle, emotional wellbeing. They work together and they help you on your journey.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.
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