Foreword

I’m board certified in everything that can go wrong with the female body. As I began to practice medicine, I soon realized that when it comes to fertility, there are crucial facts that doctors don’t share with you that are vital to your future childbearing. I call it the fertility gap. The gap became obvious to me as I approached women’s health from a functional medicine perspective, gained twenty years of clinical experience, and was pregnant with my two daughters in my thirties.

The fertility gap is largely unknown and unacknowledged in mainstream medicine, and few women have access to the secrets that could boost their fertility naturally. Until now.

While I haven’t suffered personally with infertility, I now know that I could have done a better job in serving the 20,000 patients that I’ve taken care of in the past few decades. What troubles me most is that many women lose faith in their biology and ability to conceive without high-tech interventions. They stop trusting their body’s innate intelligence. That’s deeply disturbing to me, and my discomfort evolved into a call to action. Witnessing the growing mistrust among my patients and family members as they tried unsuccessfully to conceive, I thought I should write a book about natural fertility. Alas, other books (plus mothering!) got in the way. Fortunately, I’m off the hook because the book I wanted to write is the one you hold in your hands, by Christa Orecchio and Willow Buckley.

Willow received a bachelor’s degree in neuropsychology and completed further studies to become certified in classical homeopathy. She is also a doula and a prenatal yoga instructor. She is fiercely committed to the body’s power to heal itself when provided with proper nutrition and supplementation, having experienced her own body’s innate intelligence during pregnancy and natural childbirth and observing it in her practice. She considers her own two babies as proof of the concepts that are detailed in How to Conceive Naturally.

Christa became a nutritionist after becoming very sick with the problems that conventional medicine failed to address: systemic candidiasis after prolonged antibiotic use, adrenal burnout, and undiagnosed low thyroid function. Functional nutrition saved her life, and she has the type of zeal to pay it forward that can only be called a mission. She was on a path toward autoimmunity and insulin resistance, but reclaimed her life by making food her medicine. Now you can, too.

Like me, Christa came up against the fertility gap in her nutrition practice five years ago. Suddenly, women in their late thirties and early forties started to seek her help after a despairing lack of success getting pregnant with conventional approaches. Together, Christa and these women rolled up their sleeves and got down to the hard work of root cause analysis, healing their hormones, and resetting their microbiome and bodies with cell-to-soul nutrition. As the first cohort of women began to conceive in the first few months of collaborative care, more women were drawn to Christa’s practice.

Juxtaposed with her clinical experience, Christa told Willow (who was preparing for her first pregnancy) that she was increasingly fascinated by natural fertility and lamented the lack of available books that provided a step-by-step guide for women about how to eat before, during, and after pregnancy to ensure a healthy mother and child. Or how to cleanse and prepare the body before conception, which became the nexus of their “five trimester” approach to this important life cycle for women. In health circles, Christa is known as the go-to guru for repairing leaky gut. She has extensively researched and developed protocols for how to set up the microbiome before conception in order to contribute not only to one’s future child but also to future generations due to the genetic impact the state of the microbiome has on conception and pregnancy. Since this concept is still emerging, there are no other books available on the topic. I can tell you from my own understanding of the science that this may be the most important contribution to obstetrics of the decade.

At this point, you may be wondering if the book is full of geeky science, and I don’t want to steer you wrong. I love that you’ll find very practical advice about simple measures such as eating half of a banana with Himalayan pink salt and raw cashews before bed to boost serotonin for natural sleep restoration. You’ll learn how to sew up the holes in your gut by drinking bone broth. You’ll unearth the importance of collagen, pastured ghee, and coconut oil for resetting your hormones. You’ll understand the connection between your gut and liver, and the role of this dynamic duo in your fertility. You’ll get a game plan to fix polycystic ovary syndrome, the hormonal imbalance that affects 30 percent of US women and is the leading cause of infertility. Most importantly, you’ll learn how to shut off the stress response, which I’ve found is at the core of most infertility struggles.

In conclusion, I chose to write the foreword to this important book because of the fertility gap. I imagine that if you picked up this book, you likewise have suffered as a result of the gap between what is offered by conventional medicine and what you most need for natural fertility. This book matters because it’s a practical, easy-to-use guide for how to use food as your medicine for every week of pregnancy and at all times in your life as a woman. Whether you are considering the possibility of a baby in the near future, or you simply want to keep your options open, or you’re a veteran of the fertility wars, this book has the food-based remedies you most need.

Sara Gottfried, MD

New York Times bestselling author of The Hormone Cure