Getting pregnant is rarely as simple as you’d like it to be. Even if there are no medically diagnosable challenges to your fertility, your best laid plans rarely survive contact with the all too complicated real world. If you’ve got a plan for when you want to give birth, then making it work requires understanding the processes in your body that determine when you can get pregnant and predicting when you have the best chance at success.
Understanding fertility, ovulation and the menstrual cycle is important whether you’re planning to conceive or not. Knowing more about your own body and why it does what it does is always an asset: it helps you feel more comfortable in your own skin, and always means you’re more alert for when thins deviate from the norm, which could be a vital symptom of things going wrong!
The key to getting pregnant when you want to is recognising which factors maximise your fertility and building your plans around them. Some things you can do pro-actively to boost your chances, like altering your diet, others require you to wait, and know your body, so you can take action at just the right time.
Fertile Window
Your body is fertile for a surprising small window of time in each cycle. Your body spends far more time preparing to get pregnant, and recovering from those preparations than it does actually able to become pregnant.
It’s only for a few days around the time you ovulate that intercourse can actually result in a pregnancy. Sperm can survive in the human body for three to four days, and when a mature egg is released from the ovaries, it’s fertile for between twelve and twenty-four hours. That gives you a four to five day window in which the two can intersect, and you can become pregnant. Tracking your ovulation, whether it’s with an app, a fertility device or a ovulation test kits helps you identify this window and time your attempts to conceive for when they have the best chance to succeed.
Diet and Lifestyle
Maximising your chances at pregnancy means giving your body everything it needs to regulate the hormone processes driving your monthly cycle. Ensuring your diet has lots of leafy green vegetables gives you a boost in the key electrolytes your body uses to control hormones, as well as the important vitamins and minerals you need to stay healthy!
Increasing the amount of moderate exercise you do, cutting down on drinking and cutting out cigarettes altogether also gives you a big boost to your chances to conceiving. Give you body the best chance to get pregnant by preparing it, and then trying for pregnancy at the time when it’s most likely to succeed and you’ll find you’re able to follow through on your plans!
