Rebekah: Hey guys.
It’s Bex here and I am here with the lovely Alisa Vitti in her apartment in New York City,
surrounded by baby things.
Alisa: Yes.
Rebekah: The last time you were on Bex Life, you were not pregnant.
I was not pregnant and we were talking about birth control.
Alisa: Right, and why we should all get off of it.
Rebekah: We didn’t take it and look what happened to us.
Alisa: Well, this was by planning, yes.
Rebekah: And this was by planning too.
Alisa: That’s right.
Rebekah: I’m really excited because I’m 36 and you’re 37.
Alisa: And look at how young and gorgeous we look.
Rebekah: I know.
We are gorgeous!
Alisa: Gorgeous.
Rebekah: Healthy, vibrant.
We are of advanced maternal age.
I can hardly get the words out.
Alisa: Technically speaking, yes.
Rebekah: It’s so gross.
I hate – I don’t even like saying that.
Alisa: I know, I know.
Rebekah: We only advanced in intellect and beauty, really.
Alisa: Amen.
Love it.
Love it!
Rebekah: But a lot of our girlfriends are having babies, having their first babies.
This is your first.
This is my fifth.
I’m not the norm and they’re having trouble and girlfriends our age and girlfriends younger
than us and their men.
Alisa: Yes.
Rebekah: What’s going on?
Alisa: I think it’s a growing and somewhat for whatever reason silent epidemic, this
rise in infertility, both male and female infertility, and what is termed idiopathic
meaning no known cause.
So you go.
You have your checkup.
Everything looks normal.
There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to make the baby.
But you can’t.
In my ten plus years now of working with couples and individuals on their fertility, there
are three reasons that I see that are kind of at the core of why people are not able
to have that reproductive capacity and that fertile window be as big and wide as it should
be, right?
Because you’re really – the whole reason by the way why the pill was such a good thing
back 50 years ago, 60 years ago when it came out was because women were having their eighth,
ninth baby at 45 because there was no way to prevent additional pregnancies and they
were fertile, perfectly fertile well into their 40s.
Now we have women struggling in their mid to late 20s.
So what has changed?
Here’s what I think has changed.
One, we’re being exposed to way more chemicals than we ever have been before.
The statistic that I have just read about is that your grandparents’ generation was
exposed to chemicals over the course of their lifetime that you are exposed to in a 30-day
period.
You’re exposed to more chemicals in 30 days than they were their entire lives.
Rebekah: That’s so scary.
Alisa: And these chemicals of course are endocrine disruptive which means they’re really messing
with your fertility.
So that’s reason number one.
Reason number two is that we are micronutrient deficient in ways that we just are not realizing.
We’re eating like different kinds of diets.
We’re cutting out big macronutrients.
We’re taking away food groups altogether.
Rebekah: Have you been looking at my Instagram?
Alisa: I haven’t.
Rebekah: OK, good.
Alisa: Like cutting – are you cutting things out?
Rebekah: I’m not.
I’m adding a lot of things in.
But …
Alisa: Good, good.
Rebekah: A lot of ice cream.
Alisa: Maybe that could be its own pregnancy food group although cravings during pregnancy
point to underlying micronutrient deficiencies.
Everybody is asking me what kind of cravings I’m having during this pregnancy.
I’m having no cravings because for the year prior to conceiving, I put myself on my own
regime, right?
To really beef up all the micronutrients I would need to do this pregnancy as effortlessly
as possible, right?
So there is this whole micronutrient deficiency that’s preventing us from making adequate
levels of hormones and that’s prematurely aging women, right?
Rebekah: Wow.
Alisa: So there’s this aspect as well and the third underlying cause I think really
has to do with the fact that we’re not living a lifestyle that really allows us to really
be in harmony with our cycles and everything that allows us to be –
Rebekah: How do you mean?
Alisa: Well, I talk so much about a pro-hormonal diet, right?
Eating in a way that syncs up with the different hormonal ratios that you have each month.
So can you imagine if you were optimizing that balance of estrogen and progesterone
throughout the month?
You could have no PMS.
You could get pregnant easily.
Rebekah: I know.
You talked about this in the other video, what you said about PMS, and it’s like I
believe you.
Alisa: Once you learn how to do it, it’s the most – it’s like a no-brainer.
But I think these are the reasons why we’re sort of all struggling now with our reproductive
capacity.
Rebekah: So what can we do?
Alisa: What can we do?
Well, certainly there’s no magic pill that’s going to fix us, right?
There’s no magic bullet.
There’s no pill in a bottle or supplement in a bottle …
Rebekah: We can’t live in a bubble.
Alisa: We can’t live in a bubble and we can’t detox every single day.
So it’s really about a process and it’s about as much time as you can give yourself,
leading up to when you think you really want to be creating a new person, right?
Rebekah: OK.
Alisa: Give yourself as much lead time as you can to prepare your body.
So first and foremost, take out whatever chemicals you can.
Look at what you’re doing to clean up your skin care regime.
Try not to golf so often if you’re a golfer.
Rebekah: What’s happening in golf?
Alisa: Oh my god.
Poor men, they’re all – not to say that only men golf.
But if you have a partner who’s having difficulty with his sperm quality, his morphology, his
motility and he’s a golfer, he’s spending days and days on the golf course in the sun,
sweating, right?
He’s exposed to – those lawns don’t look like that on the golf course by accident,
right?
The pesticides that they use are pretty gnarly.
So anywhere you can, reduce your exposure.
Rebekah: Cleaning products.
Alisa: Skin care products.
Rebekah: Your food especially.
Alisa: And go organic certainly.
But then from a specific food standpoint, I’m going to talk about two key macronutrients
and then I want to talk about three herbs that I love.
Rebekah: OK.
Alisa: OK, first thing is hormones are manufactured from amino acids.
If you’re not eating some form of protein that your body can digest, that your body
can digest – some of us think we can just digest pea protein.
Maybe you can.
Maybe you’re not.
If you’re not getting the hormonal results you want, and you’re doing that, you may
need to vary –
Rebekah: Try something else.
Alisa: Yeah.
So really look at the amino acids you’re taking in because all your hormones are manufactured
from that, period, end of story.
I don’t care what else you’re doing.
Second thing is you need good quality, essential fatty acids for those hormones that are made
to actually be transported around your body through the blood stream.
Rebekah: Anything that has fat in it, I’m a fan.
Alisa: Right?
Rebekah: Oh, yeah!
Alisa: Avocados, coconut oil, good olive oil, sunflower seed butter.
Rebekah: OK.
Alisa: Delicious.
Anything you can do to get these types of super clean essential fatty acids in the diet
is great.
So there are two kinds of food groups I really want women to focus on because these are the
ones we tend to go low on.
Rebekah: We avoid because we’re afraid of calories or …
Alisa: Right.
Rebekah: … things like that.
Alisa: Right.
But if you do it right –
Rebekah: Not me, but …
Alisa: If you do it right, it doesn’t end up having you gain weight.
In fact once you get your hormones balanced, your weight naturally stabilizes where it
should be and that’s kind of a nice relief.
The three herbs that I love really address some of the underlying reasons why your endocrine
system might not be working.
So, the first one is cinnamon.
So that’s a spice.
You can think of it as an herb or a spice.
That helps stabilize your blood sugar which allows ovulation to happen on a regular basis.
If you’re messing with your blood sugar all day, ovulation is going to start to become
erratic and then despite all your best efforts to have all the sex, it’s just not going
to work out, right?
Rebekah: You didn’t hear my creation story.
My three attempts of getting pregnant.
Thank goodness it happened the first month because the third time I was sleeping.
So cinnamon on ice cream.
Alisa: Cinnamon everywhere you can get it, cinnamon tea.
The next herb that I really love is Vitex.
Vitex is an herb.
It’s one of the oldest herbs on the planet.
Rebekah: Never heard of it.
Alisa: Also known as Chaste Tree Berry and it is a really amazing herb because it’s
one of the only herbs that works on the pituitary gland which is located in the middle of your
brain and this gland is sort of the master communicator to all the other glands in the
endocrine system.
So it really has this indirect effect of boosting progesterone levels.
So oftentimes one of the side effects of premature hormonal aging due to micronutrient deficiencies
that we manufacture less progesterone because we start perimenopause sooner and we do it
faster.
We go through it faster.
So progesterone, getting that level up, Vitex can really help with that.
The third herb that I really love to help again with the whole process of ovulation
and all your hormonal balance is ashwagandha.
It’s an adaptogens that helps the adrenals respond to stress because when cortisol levels
are high, this other key hormone called DHEA becomes suppressed and DHEA is another hormone
by which we manufacture progesterone and you need all the progesterone you can get to maintain
a pregnancy.
That’s often the problem why there are miscarriages and things of that nature.
Rebekah: Ashwagandha sounds like a female warrior battle cry.
Alisa: It’s a good thing.
Rebekah: I think we should just all run around screaming “Ashwagandha!”
Alisa: It’s a – you know, it’s –
Rebekah: On the rooftops.
Alisa: We should scream it.
We should take it because it really helps us just chill out in the face of all the low
grade stress that’s happening day to day.
Like, oh, I got to get here.
I got to do this.
That’s like low grade stress.
If you have big, big stress, it’s a different story.
Rebekah: Then you come and meditate with me.
Alisa: That’s right.
You need to pull out the big guns.
But for the low grade day to day stress that we’re all just not even conscious of because
our brains are able to adapt to it, but our adrenals are not, the ashwagandha is fantastic.
Rebekah: These were amazing tips.
We got a lot more than I thought we were going to but there’s so much more to learn.
Alisa: Yeah.
Rebekah: So this is what you’re going to do.
You’re going to go to FloLiving.com.
You have amazing programs there.
Alisa: Yes.
Rebekah: You have amazing information.
Alisa: Yes.
Rebekah: You also have a beautiful book WomanCode.
That’s going to set you straight in all different areas of your life and everything
is going to be linked in the video description below.
FloLiving.com, congratulations.
Alisa: Thank you.
Rebekah: I’m so excited because we’re both having babies.
Alisa: I know.
Play dates.
Rebekah: And we’re going to smoosh them on camera very, very soon.
Alisa: Someone just gave me this for a baby shower gift and I am in love with my new mascot.
This is an ovary and a fallopian tube in case you weren’t sure.
Rebekah: Yeah.
Alisa: Super cute.
It’s going to go in the crib, I think, for sure.
Rebekah: Oh, every baby should cuddle on over it.
Alisa: At least mine should.
Rebekah: See you guys.