How many times have we read something on the internet about women’s health, our periods, our fertility, or one of the many health conditions women struggle with these days… only to walk away without any real understanding of the root cause — only more suspicions that we might have a disorder that needs medical treatment, a supplement, or specific diet to heal?
My guess is that most of you reading this have experienced this, countless times.
And if you’ve been on a health and/or fertility journey for any length of time, then I’m sure you’ve been told a lot of stuff about your hormones. But have you also heard that minerals form the basis for your body’s ability to produce, use, and excrete these hormones? In all my earlier years navigating my own hormonal imbalances and various health issues, I certainly hadn’t! At least, not in any depth beyond an expensive functional doctor giving me a mineral supplement without any context or explanation.
Perhaps, like myself and so many of my clients, you’ve been told that you have a sex hormone imbalance such as PCOS (now PMOS), low thyroid, anovulation, or perhaps you’ve been told that your age is working against you because your hormones are inevitably crashing in your thirties and forties.
But none of these messages we so often get from our healthcare professionals tell us WHY we have these patterns, nor does it give us a clear roadmap for addressing the root-causes needed in gaining our health back.
While hormones absolutely do matter — and all of the hormonal issues we get diagnosed with can and often do play roles in our symptoms – what matters more and often goes overlooked is everything happening upstream of those hormones that’s creating disruptions and symptoms in the first place.
This is where minerals come in.
In my years of working with women as a nutritionist and Trauma-Informed Somatic Coach, I’ve found that mineral deficiencies and imbalances, alongside under-eating and overall stress, are one of the most overlooked metabolic pieces of our overall health and of our fertility.
Despite being overlooked, minerals play a foundational role in how our cells create energy, produce and regulate every hormone, balance our blood sugar, support our nervous system and stress physiology, and, ultimately, create the conditions necessary for conception to be possible without added complications.
When this crucial cellular piece is missing, the experience of basic wellness and conception often feels exhausting and elusive for women who tend to dedicate so much of their resources to health and fertility in the first place.
I’ve seen countless women spend their life savings and their most vital years working around the clock just trying to feel better each day, let alone successfully conceive and navigate postpartum without collapse — all of whom often never get taught anything about their cellular mineral status!
Watching these women struggle and spend excessive amounts of money on health and fertility treatments that don’t work is why I do the work I do now, and it’s the driving force behind this article. You may be in this position yourself, feeling like you’re doing everything “right” while still struggling with irregular cycles, difficult PMS, low energy, anxiety, poor sleep, blood sugar crashes (symptoms you may not even be aware are blood sugar related!), and fertility challenges that don’t seem to have a clear answer.
You may have been told that the solution is to run another lab, get placed on another protocol, or even invest thousands in an invasive medical intervention or fertility treatment… but what if the solution is actually more simple and foundational than all of that?
The challenge I see a lot is that most women are never taught what their cells need as a foundational step for health and fertility in the first place.
Women are rarely taught what minerals are, how they actually work in the body, and why the cellular work I offer, starting with the foundations of food-first, must always come before any hormonal treatments like HRT or IVF, if a woman is expected to sustain good health throughout her life. Unfortunately, there still isn’t a magic pill, ointment, injectable, or medical procedure that can replace the nutritional foundations we must prioritize, even if some women have the resilience and financial resources to keep trying these options for longer than others do.
If our goal is not to merely survive and conceive at all costs and by any means possible, but to set ourselves and our future child up for success in the long haul, then we want to understand and apply these foundations first, beginning now.
Instead of the foundations though, we’re often getting fragmented information through social media posts, generalized nutrition advice we string together or get from our doctors, and isolated supplements marketed as quick fixes for our hormones, ovaries, or various disorders.
We’re taught to think about health and our bodies as separate compartments — as though our hormones, stress levels, fertility, and emotional/spiritual wellbeing can all exist independently from one another and can be tackled separately, regardless of what else is happening in our cells and in our lives.
But all of these components to our health don’t exist independently from one another – they work in an intricate symbiotic web of biochemical, behavioral, psycho-emotional, and bioenergetic processes that make up who we move through the world as, and specifically, who we are as women.
Where our health and fertility is now will inevitably be linked to the rest of our story and even, to an extent, the stories of our mothers and grandmothers. From a bioenergetic perspective – the approach I take that addresses all aspects of our health through the lens of cellular energy production and the patterns resulting from stress physiology – health isn’t simply the absence of symptoms and fertility isn’t simply the right balance of our sex hormones.
From this perspective, health is the ability to produce, distribute, utilize cellular energy efficient to meet our body and lifestyle demands. And fertility is the downstream expression of a body that has enough energy, nourishment, and safety to reproduce without complications.
Health and fertility, for cycling women, are reflections of where we are in the survive-to-thrive spectrum.
For women, reproduction is complex and expensive, from start to finish. We’re born with all of the eggs we’ll have in our lifetimes (although an article I just read in Scientific American has me unclear if this is actually true!), but either way, they do diminish over time and get impacted by stress, malnourishment, and low energy states.
Our bodies’ ability to drop an egg each month and the success of that one egg for fertilization depends on a whole cascade of biological, relational, and circumstantial factors. And if ovulation or fertilization doesn’t happen in that short monthly window, then our opportunities for that month are done and our chances get kicked back to the following month.
Our mitochondria – the ancient powerhouses within each cell that powers our whole bodies and demands consistent resources (nutrients & oxygen) to produce this power – are exponentially more vast and demanding within the cells of our eggs than anywhere else else in the human body!
This is for the obvious reason that we’ll be creating a whole new human and growing her for 9 months within us, sharing our vital resources.
This requires A LOT of energy to ensure this can happen efficiently and to ensure everything that comes after birth is possible as well. This is one reason why stress gets more expensive as we get older – we have less eggs to contribute to this monthly process, and the eggs we do have are more vulnerable to the stresses of low energy, low minerals, and overall low safety.
By comparison, male testes produce sperm continuously at a rate of roughly 100 to 300 million per day, beginning in puberty at about 12 or 13!
And, although this does go down after about age 45 for men, men can theoretically still produce fertile sperm well into their 60s and 70s. Men are basically the fruit flies of the sexes, biologically speaking, and it takes a lot more stress and disruptions to their physiology to disrupt their fertility compared to a woman.
This is a big reason why I believe that fighting for a culture where we’re expected to behave exactly like smaller versions of men can be so damaging to our overall health and to our reproductive capacity.
But back to the mineral piece, I want to show you why minerals matter so much for female fertility by looking at four systems that sit upstream of our reproductive capacity and require proper mineral balance to work well:
- Our stress response
- Our metabolic and thyroid health
- Immune functions and inflammation
- Our sex hormones themselves
Once we understand these foundations, fertility will start to make a lot more sense, and we can begin gearing ourselves up to care for the physiological, psycho-emotional, and even relational needs that live upstream of this precious female reproductive capacity.
First of all, what are minerals?
Before we can truly understand fertility, we have to understand at least a bit about how our cells work.
I’m going to get a bit technical for a minute, so if you’re not a health science nerd like myself, please bare with me — I think these details are empowering to know and might offer the additional context to further convince you this topic is worth taking seriously.
Minerals are the nutrients that allow every cell in our body to produce energy, communicate, repair itself, and carry out thousands of chemical reactions every second. Every heartbeat, every breath, every thought, every hormone we produce, it all depends on minerals working symbiotically within our cells on a moment-to-moment basis.
Obviously, minerals exist in nature outside of the human body as well, but within nutrition specifically, minerals are inorganic elements that the body requires from food and natural resources such as water and soil to support essential bodily functions.
From that bioenergetic perspective I already mentioned, we understand that minerals aren’t simply nutrients that prevent deficiency diseases, but are part of the energetic machinery that allows the body to function at all. They’re like the spark plugs that lead to the enzymatic actions and reactions allowing everything inside of us to take place. This is why I often say that hormones are not the beginning of the story—they’re the end result of everything happening upstream within our tissues.
When our body has the resources it needs, hormones get produced in the proper amounts and will naturally function more smoothly.
When those resources become depleted over time, usually as a result of excessive stress and low nutrient intake, the body begins adapting in ways that often show up as symptoms long before we ever think about our fertility. In fact, we can be on the road to infertility YEARS before we ever start struggling with our hormones – simply by draining our vital nutrients that fertility depends upon, such as B vitamins, and minerals like iron, zinc, selenium, magnesium, iodine, and more.
In fact, the birth control pill and other forms of hormonal contraception are known to deplete these nutrients, leaving many women who go off HBC not only struggling hormonal imbalance, but with nutrient deficiencies as well.
Since all medications require nutrients in order to be processed and eliminated by the body, this process of burning through our vital nutrient stores often goes unacknowledged by the medical professionals who prescribe women contraception in the first place. This can lead women to struggle with their health and fertility for years afterward, without knowing that they spent years draining the vital resources needed for fertility, and that they must replenish before they’ll be ready to conceive naturally.
For many modern women such as myself, this process of stress adaptation began in childhood, making our menarche a difficult transition because our bodies were already functioning with deficits before this crucial hormonal shift into womanhood.
Now we’re doing the important work of remineralizing, re-nourishing, and reparenting ourselves as grown women in our twenties, thirties, and forties — providing for ourselves the vital resources that we may not’ve received in our earlier years when it was so needed!
Better late than never, I say.
How minerals shape our stress response.
One of the first places mineral imbalances tend to show up is in our stress response, so this is an important first step to understanding our mineral status.
But before we jump into this, I’ll offer the reminder that stress, based on early stress research pioneer, Hans Salye, is the nonspecific response of the body to any demand made upon it — meaning the body reacts in a similar physiological way (his General Adaptation Syndrome) regardless of whether the demand or stressor is positive or negative.
This can explain why I can see similar cellular stress patterns in women who are pro-athletes or high-demand career women as I do with women who have unresolved childhood trauma; the body doesn’t always know the difference between an empowering and exciting source of stress (an energy-demanding career we love) and a disorganized survival-based source of stress (developmental trauma), especially if it goes on too long.
On the surface, these stressors may present very differently and I can’t deny that a successful woman chasing her dreams will likely be much happier than a woman struggling with unresolved trauma. But at the cellular level, these two women can both present physiologies with severe depletion and survival adaptations impacting things like immune functions and fertility.
The definition of stress I shared above is important because it sets the stage for a more broad and bioenergetic view of stress moving forward, and I’ll be using this definition a lot in my work.
We all have finite physiological resources, even if our spirit and our mind has (I believe) unlimited creative resources. If we’re never taught to understand and respect the finite nature of our physiology, we run the risk of pushing ourselves past a tipping point, at which time our overall health and our fertility will inevitably take a hit.
When it comes to our stress physiology, our adrenal glands and nervous system rely heavily on minerals to help regulate energy production, blood sugar stability, and our ability to adapt to the demands of modern life.
Regulation (a term used a lot these days in health circles on the internet) is the process of moving from one demand on our energy systems to another without over-excessive use of our resources and without getting stuck in one energy state for too long.
Stress itself also increases our need for biological resources, as we burn through vitamins and minerals based on our unique individual oxidation rate.
In stress physiology and nutritional frameworks, oxidation rate refers to the speed at which our body burns nutrients to produce cellular energy—a pace that stress and adrenal/thyroid activity can accelerate, thus increasing the depletion of minerals and other nutrients.
In laymen’s terms, the faster we burn through our resources, the more often we need to replace them!
The minerals most central to this process are sodium, potassium, magnesium, and zinc. Sodium and potassium are the key players in our adrenal functions (the sodium/potassium ratio used in HTMA testing, for instance), reflecting aldosterone and cortisol activity in the body.
Whereas sodium drives the body’s stress-response readiness and fluid balance, potassium supports cellular energy and thyroid hormone sensitivity, and the balance between them indicates how well the adrenals are coping with our lifestyles and overall stress levels.
Magnesium, of all our core minerals, is most heavily depleted under sympathetic up-regulation, since it calms the nervous system and buffers the impacts of stress on our tissues, so we use and lose a lot of it throughout our lives. It also supports ATP production, which is the energy source I already described we all rely upon within our cells.
Zinc is consumed during stress as well, supporting hormone production, blood sugar regulation, and the hormonal conversion processes the adrenals rely on to power us through a stressful event. And lastly, calcium also factors in here, often rising in our tissues as a “braking” mineral that slows the metabolism down under prolonged stress, which is why so many of the women I work with have signs of excessive calcium loss and calcium dumping after years of stress.
This calcium builds up in the tissues where it doesn’t belong and is also a key player in why our metabolisms slow down; excess braking even when it’s unneeded.
Essentially, most of what we’ve been taught about metabolism is based around how to burn fat, not how to replace vital cellular resources that get lost, which sets most of us up for inevitable deficiencies throughout our lives, as we work toward maintaining our weight, but little else.
The problem that I see and have even experienced in myself as a woman with a very fast oxidation rate throughout my life… is that many women today are living in a state of chronic output that’s unsustainable for their bodies, and particularly for those (raising my hand here) prone to under-eating at the same time! So, we’re losing vital resources in excess and our intake is often insufficient.
Now take this pattern and repeat it for decades, and you can see why women hit their mid thirties to mid-forties and feel absolutely God awful!
With all this in mind, it’s a reasonable question to ask: is this the inevitability of “perimenopause” or is this accumulated stress and depletion at the cellular level now showing up in an otherwise natural shift in our hormones?
We’re sleeping less, doing more, worrying more, having a lot less deep, safe, intimacy… and to top it all off, we’re often under-eating or relying on stimulants and screens to keep ourselves going. Over time, this creates a pattern where the body begins using resources faster than it can possibly replace them.
This was the story of my own life, so I’m here in the trenches with you, even if I’m a few steps ahead due to my professional obligations and consistent practice.
When this level of depletion happens though, survival naturally becomes the top priority within our bodies. And once we’re in a chronic physiological state adapted toward survival, we can’t simply step out of it with willpower alone or a fancy week-long vacation; this is a state where real repair work is absolutely necessary, where patience and slow living is often required, and where you can be sure that minerals will need to play a central role.
Reproduction is NEVER the body’s first concern when survival feels even slightly uncertain for a woman.
And while it’s true that plenty of women have and continue to reproduce in stressful circumstances and in depleted states, this process often comes at a high cost, with pregnancy and birth complications, low-weight and high-needs babies, postpartum illnesses in the mother, and tragedies such as miscarriages and developmental issues.
I’m in no way saying that pregnancy and birth complications are a woman’s fault, but what I am saying is that birth complications don’t happen for no reason; these complications are often the end result of a body that was struggling long before conception ever took place.
The link between stress physiology and infertility is one reason fertility challenges often show up alongside other symptoms such as exhaustion, anxiety, insomnia, blood sugar instability, and feeling like we’re constantly running on empty.
These symptoms aren’t necessarily separate issues—they may all be different expressions of the same underlying cellular depletion and chronic survival states.
How minerals support thyroid function and cellular energy.
The second major system minerals influence in our metabolism (which is really multiple systems feeding into our cellular functions) is our thyroid function, production, conversion, and utilization within the cell. I tend to refer to this as our thyroid pathway.
Every cell in our body requires energy to function, and our thyroid helps regulate how that energy is produced and how it gets used throughout the entire body. But the thyroid doesn’t work in isolation – it depends on a healthy internal environment and adequate mineral availability to do its job effectively, in every step along that pathway!
Energy production happens mainly in the mitochondria, where nutrients from food—glucose, fatty acids, and amino acids—are broken down and fed into the citric acid cycle and electron transport chain to then generate ATP (adenosine triphosphate), our cell’s usable energy currency.
This process requires oxygen along with key cofactors like B vitamins, magnesium, and CoQ10, and it’s regulated by thyroid and adrenal hormones that set the overall pace of our individual metabolic rate.
When this whole process and system runs efficiently, we feel energized, clear-headed, and resilient. We feel like the greatest most high-agency versions of ourselves. When ATP output drops, however, as a result of excess stress, deficiencies, etc, we’ll experience things like fatigue, brain fog, low mood, and poor stress tolerance.
This is because every cell, especially in our brain, depends on a steady supply of energy to function well.
And while drops in energy may get overridden by our fast pace in life, stimulants, distraction, or dissociation… these drops will always be noticed by the brain.
One problem sitting at the root of these symptoms is low minerals and poorly eliminated minerals building up in our tissues and causing energy disruptions, alongside things like poor respiration within the cell (low oxygen intake), low carb diets that lead us into glucose deficiencies, and overall excessive stress levels.
This is one of the reasons why I use Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (HTMA) so much in my practice – because it’s one of the few reliable tools for looking at how minerals are being used (and lost) by our cells. Blood work won’t tell us this since minerals don’t usually hang out in the blood, and what we see in serum tests is more of a snapshot in time around distribution, but not the full picture of what’s leaving the cell and why.
The blood is not a destination for any chemical, but a transportation highway, and many minerals that regulate how the cells use every other nutrient function primarily within the cells in our tissues, not in our blood.
As I mentioned, our thyroid truly acts as a pathway with multiple steps, and minerals support our thyroid function at every stage of the thyroid pathway: iodine and the amino acid tyrosine form the backbone of thyroid hormone itself, while selenium and zinc are required to convert the inactive storage hormone T4 into the active T3 that our cells use for powering everything in the body.
Iron supports the enzyme that builds hormones in the first place, and copper and magnesium assist in regulation and signaling conversions. Finally, T3 can only do its job at the cellular level—driving mitochondrial energy production—when minerals like magnesium, calcium, and potassium are present to support ATP generation and thyroid hormone’s uptake into the cells.
All of this makes thyroid health dependent upon minerals from the production phase on through conversion, and lastly to our cellular use.
Rather than asking whether our thyroid hormones fall within a laboratory range in our blood, which is what we’re being taught to ask by mainstream medicine, in my work, I seek to understand the terrain those hormones are trying to work within; how our cells are working in every step of that pathway.
In my work, I want to know how our body is managing all of its resources, how it’s adapting to our daily stresses, and how it’s producing energy at the level of our cells. And I do this, in part, by looking at women’s mineral levels.
When we support our metabolism at its foundational level in this way, many other systems begin to improve alongside it, with our fertility being a crucial one for cycling women!
How Minerals Help Regulate our Immune and Inflammatory Response
Another major system that often gets overlooked in conversations about fertility is the immune system.
Many of the women I work with struggle with symptoms that, on the surface, may not seem connected to reproduction at all: seasonal allergies, histamine reactions, eczema, chronic gut issues, food sensitivities, autoimmune diagnoses, frequent illness, or a general feeling that their bodies are always “reacting” to something.
From a bioenergetic perspective (which I take in my work), these aren’t isolated problems; they’re often signs that the body is using a tremendous amount of energy simply trying to maintain it’s balance. This is actually one of the systems that I’ve struggled with personally over for years, showing up in histamine “intolerance” and mast cell activation symptoms that range from insomnia and anxiety to indigestion and low moods.
How triggered your immune system is throughout the month will have an immediate impact on your monthly cycle, which is often linked to the painful cramping and digestive upset you might get at the start of your bleed each month. If this goes on long enough, it can and will impact the strength of your overall fertility.
Our immune system is one of the most energy-demanding systems in our bodies. It relies on consistently adequate nutritional resources to keep us safe and protect us from harmful pathogens and everyday toxins, and a healthy balance of minerals is crucial in this process.
Minerals support our immune system so that it can coordinate inflammatory responses, repair tissues, maintain the gut lining, and eventually to shift the body back into a regulated state once an acute threat has passed and we’re safe again.
But in modern life, many women are living under a combination of chronic stress, nutrient depletion, disrupted sleep, possible environmental exposures, and digestive dysfunctions that exasperate all of this.
Over time, these factors can create a pattern where our immune systems remains activated longer and more often than it should, thus increasing the body’s overall inflammatory burden throughout the month.
This matters because inflammation and reproduction are deeply intertwined!
As we’ve already discussed, the female body is constantly making decisions about where its resources should be allocated. If a large percentage of those resources are being directed toward managing stress and chronic inflammation, reproduction may naturally become a lower biological priority.
This is one reason symptoms like allergies, gut flares, skin issues, migraines, or histamine reactions often seem to worsen around certain phases of the menstrual cycle. The systems aren’t separate from one another — they’re actually constantly communicating. Hormones such as estrogen often accumulate in the tissues alongside histamine, thus increasing the symptoms of histamine dominance that we may have during times of higher estrogen or all month long if we have issues clearing estrogen from our bodies throughout the month.
In my practice, I rarely look at hormone symptoms in isolation because I want to understand the bigger picture of a woman’s health that’s impacting her hormones: How is her body managing it’s resources?
I might start by asking questions such as:
- Is there enough energy available for repair, regulation, and reproduction?
- Are there hidden sources of stress or inflammation that may be quietly pulling resources away from a woman’s fertility?
- Is her stress level historically or currently higher than her system can manage without immune responses showing up?
When we begin supporting her mineral balance and reducing the overall burden she may have on her body, many women (myself included) notice that improvements often happen across multiple systems simultaneously — not just in their cycles, but also in their digestion, energy, mood, resilience, and overall immunity as well.
Minerals such as magnesium, zinc, copper, selenium, potassium, and calcium all play important roles in processes like antioxidant defense, mast cell regulation, histamine metabolism, tissue repair, and healthy immune signaling. When these minerals become depleted — or, just as importantly, when they accumulate in the tissues because the body is struggling to use and transport them effectively — our cells can become less efficient at producing energy and maintaining balance.
This inefficient energy production often results in an exaggerated inflammatory response showing up as allergies, histamine intolerance, skin issues, digestive problems, chronic fatigue, or recurring illnesses — all of which can increase our body’s overall stress burden and, again, pull valuable resources away from our precious reproductive capacities.
It’s important to highlight that this hormonal-immunity pattern can happen in any women regardless of whether they’re actively planning on reproducing!!
Your fertility is going to be impacted no matter what, which is why there are links in the research between hormonal birth control and the rise in autoimmune cases in the global female population. It turns out, when we ignore, disrupt, neglect, or shut down our reproductive systems, our cortisol regulation and thus immune functions can and often do take a hit and start acting (not so) funny.
And of course, inflammation doesn’t arise from nutrition alone; chronic nervous system activation and unresolved stress patterns can shape immune function just as powerfully, which is one reason I never separate the physiology from the psycho-emotional side of healing.
But nutrition, and namely, dietary minerals, are key players here!
Now, to a crucial Truth: Our Fertility Is a Reflection of Overall Health
The fourth system minerals influence is the system that most women are actually seeking support with when they come to see me: their reproductive hormones.
As I’ve already outlined, ovulation, healthy menstrual cycles, and pregnancy are all energetically expensive processes for us women. The female body is constantly assessing whether it has enough resources available not only to successfully ovulate with the possibility of conception each month, but for growing and sustaining another human life within us.
Is this physiological home we’ve been building for our future child ready and livable now… or does it need more resources?
Despite what we often get taught in this culture of synthetic hormonal solutions, sex hormones don’t actually exist independently from the rest of our bodies; they’re deeply connected to our cellular energy production, stress adaptation, blood sugar, thyroid health, and the availability of nutritional resources we have within us at any given moment.
When our female system is constantly adapting to stress or struggling to maintain adequate energy production – whether it be from under-eating, nutrient deficiencies, poor breathing, or fast oxidation – reproduction may become a lower biological priority, and thus, our hormones can start acting weird and causing us real problems.
The most common patterns that show up in women with low reproductive priority tends to be:
- Irregular cycles or amenorrhea (loss of cycles)
- Difficult PMS, with symptoms such as bloating, cramping, water retention, insomnia, anxiety, depression, fatigue, IBS, headaches, skin breakouts
- Absent ovulation, which can show up as anovulation on tests and/or it can show up in our lived experience as low libido, low temps, vaginal dryness, fatigue during mid-cycle
- Month-long hormonal symptoms, such as estrogen-dominance that impacts other systems like digestion and mood
- PMOS (previously PCOS) symptoms such as high androgens, skin breakouts, head hair loss, and hirsutism
- Difficulty conceiving or early-term miscarriage
As you can see, there are quite a lot of common experiences with hormonal imbalances and are so widespread that most woman reading this will have either some of the symptoms herself or know women who have these symptoms.
This is why I firmly believe that fertility should be viewed as a reflection of our overall health, and not something we only need to care about if and when we want to get pregnant.
This will still be true whether we’re trying to become pregnant now, planning for motherhood later in life, or simply wanting to feel more connected to the rich wisdom of our female bodies.
Our menstrual and ovulatory cycle can become one of the most valuable pieces of feedback our body offers us if we learn how to care, listen, and respond effectively!
Now, take a minute to consider your own hormonal arc, beginning in childhood, on through your menarche, and into your sexually active years, right up until now:
What were you taught about your body? What were you taught about your hormones, fertility, nutrition, your period? Were you prepared for the self-care and self-attunement that is required of us to be walking the earth as a healthy cycling woman?
The sad reality is that most of us have moved throughout life in female bodies we rely heavily upon to carry us through all kinds of experiences – the vessels by which we manifest our minds and souls’ many purposes – without being taught even just the basics of how our reproductive system (and thus our overall health) works.
There has been a lot of grief in this understanding for me, having been raised by a single father and growing up as estranged from my own body’s agency as I was from my own mother.
But this is a widespread problem far beyond my personal story, and the truth is that most women I know and many of my clients over the years didn’t know anything about ovulation until they were ready to conceive! This, of course, isn’t their fault because most women grow up in a culture that treats their periods like a curse to be addressed with Midol and hormonal contraception.
And most of us certainly weren’t taught that remineralizing could actually improve our overall health, lower our monthly symptoms, and increase our chances at conceiving naturally, even as late mothers!
I believe that while there is real grief in realizing that we weren’t taught what we needed to know earlier in life as to make life easier and healthier as women, there is always agency to be found in learning what we need to know now and using it to the best of our abilities when we can.
So What Do We Do About It Now?
As I’ve made clear in this article, I view remineralizing as one of the foundational pieces of improving women’s health and fertility, and I believe this process begins by looking backward before we can move forward.
None of our health patterns developed overnight, and our mineral status certainly didn’t either. Through a thorough intake process and Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis, I help women explore not only their own health history, but often aspects of their maternal history as well since we come into this world having inherited our mother’s mineral status and even our grandmother’s.
This process gives us a much deeper understanding of the patterns that may have shaped where they are today, and I believe it’s important to understand that our health didn’t begin with us, but that our future child’s health can.
From here, we can begin looking at the bigger picture of our health journey and the current patterns that might be impacting our crucial things like our oxidation rate (rates of resource loss), nutrient absorption, and our overall nutrient status on a day-to-day basis.
Many of the women who choose to work with me have nervous system patterns similar to my own that tend to drive their rates of mineral loss up, lower their overall appetites and absorption, and disrupt crucial processes that live upstream from sustaining strong fertility. I’m intimately familiar with these patterns because they’ve driven my own health journey in so so many ways, and I also know that they can’t be bypassed with quick-fixes or bandaids.
I also believe we must remember that nutrition never exists in isolation from the rest of our lives.
The ways we respond to stress, the safety and intimacy of our personal relationships, our daily circadian rhythms and exposure to light and darkness, the demands placed upon us in our work and careers — these will all influence how our bodies use and conserve our vital resources, including and in particular our core minerals!
As an agency-focused women’s health advocate, I believe that it’s our personal responsibility to become familiar with these patterns in ourselves.
The women whom I see experiencing the greatest progress in their health and fertility tend to be the women who commit themselves to understanding their own stress physiology and unique pace pace in life.
For many of us, this means the subtle ways we push past our boundaries, disregard our limitations, and invest in relationships that don’t always meet our psycho-emotional needs for safety. An emotionally safe woman will always use her resources more efficiently than one who is anxious, mis-treated, repressed, and lonely.
And finally, in this sacred work, we practice patience.
Healing and replenishment is rarely about finding the perfect supplement or the perfect protocol or the perfect food in the perfect amount of time. That kind of thing is great for marketing, but horrible for the actual human experience. More often than not, true progress with our health and fertility is about consistently creating conditions in our lives and bodies that allow our whole selves to feel nourished, supported, and safe over time.
And then building a strong foundation of trust with ourselves – potentially after years of repeatedly breaking trust – through consistency in how well we nourish ourselves, how we talk to and about ourselves, and how we live out our daily lives.
This patience isn’t always sexy or exciting or something we can make a viral meme or reel about, but it’s this day-to-day consistency with our consumption choices, our thoughts, and our behaviors that leads to the improvements that so many women I’ve worked with have experienced.
These kinds of improvements show up in things like painless periods, softer luteal phases, increased libidos, clear ovulation, deeper sleep, improved moods, positive pregnancy tests, and healthy babies in our arms… are what’s possible when we treat our bodies with the respect and care they need through the ritual of daily replenishment.
When we improve the foundations and keep these foundations in sight with our choices, our fertility often improves naturally.
And of course, we do want to focus on getting in the right amounts of magnesium, calcium, potassium, sodium, copper, zinc, selenium, iron, iodine, phosphorus, and more, but we’ll only know what the right amounts are for our individual bodies if we get tested. I didn’t go into how we go about doing this because, honestly, it’s less important in this article than the reasons we need the minerals in the first place, and what’s often standing in our way!
The protocols I create for women seeking to address their mineral status are honestly the easiest part; living our lives differently and changing our underlying pace is where the rubber truly hits the road.
Now you might be wondering: how long does it take to remineralize?
I get this question all the time, and it’s understandable to want a straightforward answer, especially since we’ve been taught to believe that healing, in all its forms, is a linear process we can place a clear time-frame on.
But the honest answer is that it depends.
Every woman’s story is different. Age, health history, accumulated stress, trauma, nutritional status, and available resources in the present will all influence her unique process of remineralization. Many women begin noticing shifts in their energy within weeks, and hormonal improvements may begin appearing within the first month or two.
More significant changes in a woman’s overall health and fertility may often become more noticeable around the three-month mark, and beyond. The goal isn’t to rush the process, the goal is to consistently create the conditions that allow healing and restoration to occur organically over time.
I think an important underlying component to this is to increase the agency we feel in our own abilities to care for ourselves and to understand what our female bodies need from us.
This agency requires connection, attunement, trust, autonomy and a belief in ourselves as beings who can heal and change in response to our own choices.
When it comes to fertility, I also believe that a healthy experience of our own sexuality and all the relational elements involved in reproducing is also an important factor that doesn’t get as much attention from fertility experts as it should.
I’ve had countless women (especially those with a history of trauma) come to me over the years, seeking improvements in their health and fertility, while simultaneously avoiding sexual intimacy and pleasure like these were chores they had to get through!
Obviously, these kinds of aversions run deep and can be complex, as female sexuality often is. I’m not criticizing the women who show up this way, and a lack of sexual desire is information to be taken seriously. What’s important to keep in mind is that our sexual appetite is one feature of our fertility and our overall vitality during our reproductive years, and it’s intimately linked to our hormones, nervous system, and nutrient status.
If we have unmet core needs that underly our lack of sexual appetite or safety, these needs may need to be addressed if we want to conceive naturally and carry to term.
Connection, attunement, trust, autonomy and heart-based sexual development: these are core needs we discuss in my complex developmental trauma work that every human, with or without trauma, has, and may have disrupted if we’re chronically unwell or have C-PTSD.
So, you can ask yourselves:
- Do I feel connected: to myself, my body, my sexual organs, my ability to be well, and my partner if I have one (or my ability to call in a healthy partner)
- Do I feel attuned: to myself and those closest to me in the sense that I can read my own body’s signals, give myself what I need, and ask for support from others in meeting these needs?
- Do I trust: myself and my body to take care of me, to be OK even when I don’t feel well? Do I trust those closest to me? Do I trust that its OK to make mistakes or to have nutrient deficiencies or symptoms without it being catastrophic?
- Do I feel a sense of healthy autonomy: confident and safe enough in myself to navigate the world as a sovereign being, or do I find myself running from doctor to doctor, practitioner to practitioner, diet to diet, supplement to supplement, always seeking an outside answer?
- Do I feel connected to my heart while engaging sexually? Do I feel connected to my sexual self without shame or blocks? Do I enjoy sexual pleasure and sexual connection, alone or with another?
The cells in our bodies know if we have a lack of connection, attunement, trust, safe autonomy, or a love/sex split. Our cells know things in a way that runs much deeper than our conscious mind comprehends.
And If we don’t enjoy the sexual process so crucial to health, fertility and conception, our cells also know and act accordingly. What’s more, if we’re stressed out from unmet core needs, this will always impact our eggs and overall reproductive capacity.
So, expecting strong fertility without the foundational safety of core needs being met — without strong libido — isn’t being fair to ourselves.
Bringing It All Together
Now that I’ve made it clear that remineralizing our cells is one (but not all) of the foundational steps to improving both our overall health and fertility, I hope that you can walk away from this article feeling more clear around where your health might be needing more of your attention.
After reading this, you now know that fertility sits downstream of many of the systems that minerals help regulate in the first place.
You know that what’s often left out of even the remineralizing conversation with doctors – if it happens at all – is everything that influences our choices to remineralize sustainably and to trust the process of self-care on our own unique timelines.
You also now know that when we support our stress response, improve our overall metabolic functions, and create better cellular energy production with minerals and lifestyle choices, we’re also creating a stronger foundation for healthy hormones and reproduction to happen naturally.
There is big business these days in pushing our fertility agendas onto our bodies before they’ve gotten what they need to fruit properly for us.
But, to me, this work isn’t about forcing our bodies to fruit on demand for us, regardless of how desperate or stressed about our timeline we may be. And it’s also not about chasing symptoms or pathologising ourselves.
The internet will teach us to do this inadvertently through its many targeted ads and posts, but the real work is is treating our whole selves in ways that enhance our sense of health and overall life experience as women.
And lastly, this work is about understanding our bodies at a deeper level and learning to see our symptoms as communication rather than malfunction.
We’ve been taught to view our body’s messages, especially the most unwanted and unpleasant ones, with fear and reaction. Again, this is great for marketing, but really bad for working with our bodies and learning to listen to her messages that show up as unwanted symptoms. This fear we often approach healing with doesn’t actually connect us to our personal agency, which is why so many of us have cycled through endless supplemental and dietary protocols, and still don’t know what the f-ck we’re doing!
I’m here for you because I’ve been through it all, and I’ve learned to be an advocate for women’s bodies, even when they’ve lost hope in their bodies themselves.
Ready to Explore Your Own Mineral Status?
If you’re ready to take a deeper look at the foundations of your health and fertility through the lens of minerals, I invite you to explore my HTMA consultations, the only single consultations I offer.
In these one-off sessions, we go over your health history, your current health, and what your mineral patterns are saying about your cells and overall metabolic systems. I create a thorough document that includes a mineral-by-mineral analysis alongside a protocol you can implement and use as a reference moving forward.
As a one-off investment, this is the most accessible way for women to access my work and get a sense of the power remineralizing can have on every area of their life, fertility included!
And since HTMA testing is rarely utilized by doctors and fertility experts, it’s a perspective and piece of data you likely won’t find at many of the professionals you’ll hire for fertility support.
For those of you seeking more ongoing support, my coaching container, Nourishing The Mother, is specifically designed for women seeking to build their bodies (and entire lives, really) into the biological homes that their future babies will be growing within.
This container is also for women who are already mothers and seeking to replenish and rebuild their foundations, not only for themselves but for their children. This container is also for women who are on the fence about children, but are still seeking to understand themselves through the lens of fertility and set themselves on the right track, should their paths take them into motherhood in the future.
This is the kind of support I wish I’d had in my twenties and early thirties when I was so fixated on my health, but treating my whole reproductive system like an afterthought!
I firmly believe that fertility is an incredibly empowering lens through which we can view our health, regardless of what path we’re on, because our fertility (so different and more complex from that of a man’s) is an intrinsically female path, and focusing on this inevitably means remaining devoted to enhancing our female biology, regardless of particular outcomes.
If this work calls to you, then together, we can assess your own unique mineral patterns, your health history, and your lifestyle factors that form the arc of your personal story, building upon your HTMA results to create a individualized path toward greater vitality, metabolic health, hormone balance, and strong fertility!
And in parting, please remember that your fertility journey isn’t just about your hormones; it’s about creating a body that feels truly and consistently nourished, supported, and safe enough to thrive. I’m here for you whenever you’re ready.
