Starting a family is never as easy as you want it to be. Finding the right time to even begin is tricky, as is navigating both partner’s allotments of maternity or paternity leave, deciding how to divide the labour that comes with a new child, and of course dealing with horde of friends and relatives with well meant but questionably helpful advice.

We’re here to help take at least one of the hurdles away with some fertility tips to help you conceive and start this exciting new stage of your life.

Predicting Ovulation

One of the most important things for your fertility is knowing when you ovulate, and predicting it, so you know when your next fertile window is.

There are lots of different methods available for you to track and predict your fertility, so you can choose one that suits your personal circumstances. Ovulation predictor kits are useful for many people: working like a pregnancy test, they check your urine for the hormones that drive ovulation and give a simple yes/no answer depending on the hormone levels they detect.

Unfortunately, they get less useful if you have a lower or higher background level of the relevant hormones, returning false positives or false negatives that render them almost useless as a predictive tool. If you have a condition like Polycystic Ovary Syndrome or Hyperthyroidism, which are driven by hormone disruption then you really need a different way.

Basal Body Temperature

Tracking your BBT is a way to predict ovulation that doesn’t rely on hormones. It’s historically quite a difficult system to use, as you need to take your temperature immediately when you wake up, and plot it on a graph to see the pattern of temperature changes across weeks and months of time.

Fortunately, using an advanced fertility monitor takes away a lot of this burden. Specialised sensors can take your core temperature through the night to ensure you’re working with good data, and clinical algorithms can interpret it, to tell you well in advance when you’re likely to be at your most fertile.

Diet and Lifestyle

If you’re trying to get pregnant then there are simple dietary changes you can make to ensure your bodies have the right building blocks to make healthy eggs and sperm. Simply increasing the quantity of green vegetables in your diet supplies a lot of the key vitamins and minerals that make for great reproductive health, as well as the electrolytes that help your menstrual cycle run regularly.