The One with Literally All the Plants
This week's edition is brought to you by fancy new face masks, Cincinnati's newest baby rhino (A.J.!!!!!), decaf baby Fiona coffee (Cincinnati's most recent baby hippo!!!), zero exciting news stories in the past seven days, and the start of the third decade of 2020.
Hopefully a shorter one this week, ladies and gents: Just gonna talk about a recent diet shift I've undergone.
The last time I had meat was on Labor Day. My mom cooked me and Ted a traveler's breakfast of bacon, eggs, and potatoes as we headed home from our New Hampshire trip.
It's been a hot minute with (almost) no animal proteins. As someone who has sorta religiously followed a Paleo diet for the past two years, this is...very different.
So. What's up with that?
I decided to try out a veg-based diet for a couple of reasons:
a) Paleo never really worked miracles for me. If you follow Whole30 or other paleo advocates, you'll find that they'll talk about a miraculous-sounding 'tiger blood' stage where, after adjusting to your new anti-inflammatory diet, you'll feel like a million bucks. I...never got there, despite eating paleo on and off (often, extremely faithfully) for two years. I know it's different for everyone, but, even at my best, I still felt constantly tired - even after getting past insomnia. Every meal felt like a rock in my stomach, I bloated CONSTANTLY, and...idk...I was sad a lot?
b) I'd seen plant-based diets work. I can think, off the top of my head, of four friends who had PCOS or fertility issues, went veg, and now have happy families. Again, everyone's different, but that was pretty powerful.
c) I wanted to lose weight, and the fact that I went full Paleo-no-alcohol for three months earlier this year and *gained* weight never quite sat right with me
d) I wanted to try something different. I've tried a lot of variants of diets over the years, but I've never ditched all animal protein.
So. After the aforementioned brunch, I went cold turkey on the protein. Cold soyrizo? Cold sofritas? Whatever.
It's been about four weeks. Hot takes:
Warning #1: The first week sucks.
This is probably standard advice, but adjusting to any new diet or habit is rough. I was a dead woman walking for six days. Super fun. Plus, I hadn't done a ton of research into fun or creative vegan foods at that point (do your research first!), so it really just felt like I was eating sad piles of plants for every snack or meal.
In retrospect, I'm not 100% on how I muscled through that.
Warning #2: Don't fall head-first into "vegan" comfort foods.
Did you know that Oreos are vegan? They totally are. Are they gonna make you feel good? Spiritually, yes. Physically, idk, you do you.
So, the different studies that talk about the advantages of a vegan diet for PCOS (we'll discuss below) frame a vegan diet as a plant-based one. This means: Put down that chicken-free chicken patty....and actually eat some plants.
(Not 100% of the time, obvi. I eat plant-based meat substitutes. They're the best*. But the idea is - no, really, eat your plants.)
Sometime around my second week, I wandered into the Kroger aisle dedicated to vegan fun foods. I went all in...and ended up not feeling super great. Take a look at the ingredient list for those things - they're often full of gluten or weird chemicals, or soy. Soy has a huuuuuuge pro/con list when it comes to fertility and PCOS (good summary here) but the type of super-processed soy found in these products usually errs on the unhelpful side.
*I haven't had real meat in a month. I'm sure they 0% hold up to real meat.
Warning #3: You've really, really gotta know your 'why'.
After that first sucky week, if you can muscle your way through, you'll emerge on the other side feeling smug, confident, and just grateful that you don't feel like crap anymore (hypothetically speaking, obv). There'll be a few days where you traipse around singing "WHEE I'M A VEGAN NOWWWW. SUCK IT, BACON" and everything will seem like sunshine and daisies.
And then your husband will go to Five Guys without you and everything will seem like tornadoes forever.
At that point, you've got to remember why you want to be doing this. It's the whole will-power vs. why-power thing: If you don't have a good reason, you're gonna stop. 100%.
Here's mine.
The Connections between PCOS, Infertility, and a Plant-Based Diet
Many op-eds touting a plant-based diet for PCOS seem to stem from one 2018 review out of the Harvard School of Public Health. Let's go through it together, shall we?
It starts out by saying that infertility sucks. (No, really: "The experience of infertility can exact a significant physical, psychosocial, and economic toll on couples.")
When looking through past studies/evidence to link a good diet to improved fertility outcomes, they noted:
- "Women who had the highest intake of a “fertility diet” comprised of plant protein from vegetable sources, full-fat dairy foods, iron, and monounsaturated fats, during the preconception period, were found to have a 66% (95% CI, 52, 77%) lower risk of infertility related to ovulatory disorders."
PCOS = an ovulatory disorder. Interesting that dairy's in there; I'll probably use that as an excuse to eat cheese later (and regret it).
For specific foods and nutrients, they noted:
- Women who followed a plant-based diet naturally had higher levels of folate, a super important ingredient for a healthy kid.
- Red meat is negatively associated with some early stages of human development.
- Higher omegas in diet = better chances of pregnancy.
- Findings on dairy were mixed, but one study did indicate that if you're gonna do dairy, make sure it's full-fat, for fertility purposes.
- There were some findings indicative of an adverse effect of sugar for women hoping to have kids.
- Findings on alcohol and caffeine were also mixed.
The paper goes on to talk about BMI (tl;dr - obesity is a risk factor for infertility) and how diet guidance should be something that OBGYNs talk about with infertile couples prior to taking drugs and etc.
Anyway.
Take from that what you will. I'm feeling better, so I'm going to see where this vegan trail leads for a sec. (And that whole 66% lower risk of infertility bullet above seems...like I'm going to download that paper next to figure out what's up.) (Spoilers: I did, and it's here, and it basically confirms that, of the thousands of women the team followed, the ones who tended to follow a diet that included more veg than animal protein were 66% more likely to have success with their ovulatory disorders.)
It's working out for me. That doesn't mean that it's going to work out for everyone.
So, to be clear, I don't know if I'm planning to be plant-based forever. (Well, okay, if we're going 'forever', then, I'm definitely not planning on this for the rest of my life.) As with most things, I'm planning on trying this out as long as I see good benefits. When we put together our [cue trumpets] Battle Plan, it'll probably surface as some kind of most-of-the-time recommendation, because it does seem to be working (for me, personally) better than Paleo.
In the meantime, I could see myself adopting some kind of "eat-vegan-during-the-week," "have-a-real-burger-on-Saturday" kinda thing. But. I haven't tried meat again, yet. I know (unfortunately) that if I try to have some dairy, my body instantly acts like someone tried to hit me with a baseball bat. Same goes for gluten. I don't think I can claim a legitimate allergy in either case, but I feel awful afterward, so I need to avoid as much as I can...at least, if I plan on being a human the next day.
Truth be told, I'm a little scared that I've done that to meat, now, too. If I try having some tuna in a few weeks, am I going to feel sick for a couple days after? I hope not. But now, I don't know.
Yesterday I was putting together my grocery list, and I realized I'd written "meat-free meat, dairy-free yogurt, and gluten-free bread" down. At this point, I'm just buying piles of chemicals and plants that to shovel down other piles of chemicals and plants with. It's a little sad.
But I feel better? So....?
AS A HEADS UP:
The next three posts are going to get a little intense.
NEXT WEEK, Ted's taking the reins to discuss the paperwork and payments associated thus far with our attempts to get pregnant (and, dude, we are VERY aware that we have *only just started*). He's already started working on it, which is v impressive; as a rule, I only begin drafting these posts after postponing as long as I can throughout Sunday morning. Definitely worth a check-in.
AFTER THAT, I'm going to be coming in hot with a female 👏 fertility 👏 is 👏 not 👏 a 👏 problem post. The recent news stories about surgeries without consent were probably overhyped for click-ability. They're also very super not okay, whatever may have happened. We'll discuss in as much detail as I can muster. (I promise not to start that one the day it goes live.)
THEN, we'll be taking a *slight* detour from specifically infertility-related stories to talk about ... vaccinations. (This post will go live the week before the election, FYI.) I'm not going to pretend to be an expert, but I did work in Big Pharma for a handful of years; and, spoiler alert, there's a lot of news about vaccinations going around that should have everyone's Spidey Senses tingling. Let's discuss.
AFTER EVEN THAT, just in time for November and the basket of kittens that's going to be, we'll go back to our normal infertility programming. (We'll have had a follow-up with our Napro, probably some sperm analysis results in, a comprehensive ranking of the Agatha Christie specials on Prime, and other goodies to talk about.)
If these kinda topics aren't your cup of tea, DON'T GO ANYWHERE! Well, except my Insta: @rrcorgan. I am woefully, horribly, terribly bad at Instagram. Buuuuuuuuuut in order for my *career* to go, like, anywhere, I've realized that my socials need to be, like, not dead. So! Apologies in advance for when awkwardly staged, forced Stories of me making my bed (or whatever) show up in your feed ... gonna use this heavier-blog-post month as an incentive to work on some lighter content for my IG, haha.
Regardless, we'll be back soon with PWB stuff. In the meantime, take it easy, and stay safe.