Episode 119: Finding Fertility with Monica Cox
In this episode, I’m joined by Monica Cox, a Fertility Health Coach, host of the Podcast Finding Fertility, author of “Baby & Me” and creator of #gratedvegbrekkie. Her infertility journey was a 9-year evolution, which led her to overhaul her diet and lifestyle choices.
You’ll hear Monica share:
What her life was like before deciding to start a family
What her 9-year journey looked like - the struggles, the wins and the role autoimmunity played in it
How she’s now a mum to two little boys and she now helps other women create the family of their dreams
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“What happens is when you have a leaky gut, and that’s basically what I had, my gut health was so poor, is that my food particles were getting into my immune system. That was revving up my natural defenses because they were like, “Whoa, what’s that? That’s a foreign invader, foreign invader.” And what it was also doing was when an embryo tried to implant it would attack the embryo, so that’s why I was never even getting pregnant is because my body was like, “Nope. Foreign agent. Out of here.””
Read the Episode Transcript...
Naomi Nakamura: Welcome back to another episode of The Live FAB Life Podcast.
Today we're talking about a topic that 121 episodes in we've never discussed here in the show, and that's on fertility, or rather infertility.
While having kids was never really on my radar, I have had doctors in the past tell me that if having children was on my radar it was something that could potentially be challenging for me. So while I've never personally struggled with infertility, just because having kids wasn't something that I necessarily wanted, it's something that could have been a problem for me. And I know that it's something that many women do in fact struggle with today, in fact, now more than ever before.
Joining me to talk about infertility and to share her story is Monica Cox.
Monica is a fertility health coach. She's also the host of a podcast, Finding Fertility. She's the author of Baby & Me, and she's the creator of #gratedvegbrekkie. Her infertility journey was a nine-year evolution which led her to overhaul her diet and lifestyle choices.
Now Monica story has a happy ending. She's now a mom to two little boys and she now helps other women create the family of their dreams.
You're going to hear Monica share what her life was like before she decided to start a family and then what that nine-year evolution looked like. She's going to share the struggles, the wins and the role that autoimmunity played in it, and then she shares how she now helps other women find fertility.
You can connect with Monica on her website at www.findingfertility.co, also on Instagram at @findingfertility. And as always, you will find links to everything mentioned in this episode over on the show notes at my website at www.livefablife.com/119 for Episode 119. And with that, let's get to the show.
Naomi Nakamura: Hi Monica, welcome to the show.
Monica Cox: Hi, thank you so much for having me.
Naomi Nakamura: I am really, really excited for us to be have you having this conversation because the topic we're going to talk about today is not one that I would normally talk about on the show. It's because it's not something that I've personally experienced. It was never in my plan to have children, but I know that a lot of women in my audience do. I know that this is something that a lot of women struggle with today. So before we get into that, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us what it is that you do?
Monica Cox: Okay, so I'm Monica from Finding Fertility and I help women basically try to explain their unexplained infertility. We really look at it from a root cause issue and not your symptoms or your lady bits. And what I focus on mainly is autoimmune issues because that's what I had. I had unexplained infertility for six years until we finally realized I had high natural killer cells, which is an autoimmune issue. And I personally went down the rabbit hole of what having an autoimmune issue is and what kind of lifestyle and diet that you need to live to feel healthy, and get pregnant for some of us.
Naomi Nakamura: And we're going to get into all of that in this episode. And I love everything you said because, one, I definitely take a root cause approach as well. Autoimmune disease is just so prevalent these days that I actually think there's a lot more people who have it who may not realize that they do or who may not realize that some of the things they might be diagnosed with is actually an autoimmune issue.
Monica Cox: Yeah, 100%, I think auto-immune, the phrase, I mean it does blanket quite a lot of diagnosed and undiagnosed issues out there, but I really believe that it's like the second diabetes. It's going to be a really big issue in the future. And to get this knowledge out there now and really try to help people before they are committed to a lifetime of drugs, that it's super important.
Naomi Nakamura: And like diabetes, there's so many things that you can do with your diet and lifestyle to help manage your symptoms. It may not be the cure all for some people. It might be for others, it might not, but it can definitely make you feel better if you attend to these things.
Before we get into that, why don't we share your story with what happened when you decided to start a family and how did you come to realize that this infertility might be an issue that you're struggling with, or if you already knew beforehand that it might be knowing your condition? I'm not sure which came first here.
Monica Cox: The chicken or the egg, right. I'll give you the cliff notes because I actually had a nine-year journey. I was 27 when we started trying to conceive and I had no issues. Well, I didn't think I have had any issues, no known per se fertility issues, neither did my husband. And we went years of trying and testing, and no one could come up with anything.
Naomi Nakamura: Did you know you had an autoimmune condition at that point?
Monica Cox: No. I thought I was just normal. I thought I had normal issues like IBS. My go-to was my throat. I had my tonsils out, but I kept getting tonsillitis. And yeah, I mean, my gut issues with stools was, now in hindsight, a big thing. But at the time, I just didn't really put two and two together. So yeah, all your classic, normal health issues that your doctor says, "You have IBS, here's this or don't eat raw vegetables," or really brushed over symptoms, so no one was really pinpointing things.
Monica Cox: We went to do IVF and it failed, and we were actually left thinking we couldn't even make healthy embryos. We didn't get any really good ones. And we were told that there was nothing that we could do to improve our situation and just try IVF again and that was that.
Naomi Nakamura: And that's costly, isn't it?
Monica Cox: Yeah, definitely. I guess, I can say fortunate, we actually lived in the United Kingdom for 14 years and we did pay for it ourselves, but it's much cheaper than the average cost over here in America. Because of the cost and because of the doctors saying they weren't going to change anything, not even like one single drug for us, we kind of were like, "Well, that's not good enough. We need to figure something else out."
Monica Cox: And just by a random occurrence, we had a friend going through his own health journey and he said, "You have to change your diet." And we were like, "Well, there's nothing wrong with our diet." We weren't overweight, we weren't eating at McDonald's every night. We were just normal. And he was like, "I'm sorry to tell you, but it has a really big impact."
Naomi Nakamura: What was your diet like then? Because it's probably what most people would consider, I would, guess a healthy diet.
Monica Cox: Yeah. I guess, it was just regular like pastas and breads and canned foods but healthy canned foods, right, like organic spaghetti sauce or organic mushroom whatever. We had vegetables on a regular basis, but I guess it was just kind of your bulk standard carrot, mushroom, broccoli. I would say we were probably like normal drinking habits. We did drink a lot of alcohol, but we didn't drink sodas. We didn't drink energy drinks on a daily basis. I didn't even have a bad candy habit. So yeah, I just didn't think I was eating unhealthy. I just felt I was eating normal or maybe even better-
Naomi Nakamura: Better than the average.
Monica Cox: Yeah, yeah. We started to see a functional medicine practitioner-
Naomi Nakamura: Was that the referral from your friend that-
Monica Cox: Yeah, so that was a referral from our friends, and he basically put me on a paleo diet. That's the easiest way to describe it, and really encouraged me to eat real whole foods at every setting. Breakfast was like a really big thing, I think, for most people to wrap their heads around that it doesn't have to come from a box or be a piece of bread.
We started slowly making those changes and after six months I felt great. I felt better than I ever felt before, but I still wasn't pregnant. We kept going and we decided to do another round of IVF and-
Naomi Nakamura: So at this point, you still didn't know about your autoimmune condition?
Monica Cox: Nope. Uh-uh (negative), so still didn't know. I had read a book, Is Your Body Baby Friendly? And that was the first kind of hint that there might be something going on with my immune system. And we actually sought out a new clinic who did this immune testing. And we showed up and they kind of look you over and they maybe do their own general testing. And the doctor was like, "Well, you're not a candidate for the immune testing because you're not having recurring miscarriages." And so we went with his advice and we didn't do the immune testing.
We did another round of IVF, which was more successful. We now had healthy embryos, which was super exciting, but I didn't even make it to day 28 of my period and I was just devastated. And so we went in and we demanded the immune testing because that was kind of our last ditch, right? We had thrown everything else at it diet wise and we improved our lifestyle. I stopped going out as much, started trying to improve my brain and my thought process and all that. And it came back even on a paleo diet for over a year, I had high natural killer cells.
And so what that means-
Naomi Nakamura: I've never heard of that before. You're the first person I've heard have this and I still don't know. What is it?
Monica Cox: Yeah. It means that everyone has them. Everyone has natural killer cells. They help defend cancer and colds and viruses. But what happens is when you have a leaky gut, and that's basically what I had, my gut health was so poor, is that my food particles were getting into my immune system. That was revving up my natural defenses because they were like, "Whoa, what's that? That's a foreign invader, foreign invader."
And what it was also doing was when an embryo tried to implant it would attack the embryo, so that's why I was never even getting pregnant is because my body was like, "Nope. Foreign agent. Out of here."
Naomi Nakamura: How did they discover that you had this? What was the process?
Monica Cox: It was just a blood test. They can just test your blood.
Naomi Nakamura: It was that simple, huh?
Monica Cox: It was that simple. If we would have stuck to our guns and got the immune testing before that second IVF, we would have... Their protocol is to use immune-suppressing drugs. They use steroids, a treatment called intralipid, which is a mix of soy and dairy, I think. And I was on Clexane as well, which is a blood thinner. But because I had already gotten into diet and lifestyle and I truly believed in it, I felt so much better being on this paleo diet. I started to research a little bit more about autoimmune and hooked back up with my functional medicine practitioner and told him, "Look, We've got this issue here." And he was like, "Well, you should go on an autoimmune paleo diet."
Naomi Nakamura: Which kind of like the paleo diet, but just to the next level.
Monica Cox: To the next like nth degree. Yeah.
Naomi Nakamura: I've done it before. It's not easy.
Monica Cox: No, it's not. It is very restricting. I think the good thing about the autoimmune paleo diet is that you only have to be on it for a little while and then you figure out what your kryptonite is.
Naomi Nakamura: Yes.
Monica Cox: My kryptonite randomly is paprika, which is like, what, paprika? And most people with autoimmune issues, they think they're doing so good being on a certain diet, like a paleo or maybe even a vegan or whatever diet you want to go with. But all those healthy foods that autoimmune paleo diet takes out, those are probably your really high kryptonite ones.
Naomi Nakamura: Yeah, I had the same experience. I wrote down a lot of things that you mentioned here because you talked about IBS and gut issues and leaky gut, and those were all things that I have had that I've talked about and have done many past episodes on it. And I have never wanted children, so I don't know if I would have had these issues. But based upon testing that I have had done along my journey, I think every indication showed that I also would have struggled with fertility issues had that been something I wanted to pursue. The things you talk about IBS, that is so, so, so common.
Monica Cox: Yeah.
And I like, myself, when you think about AIP and autoimmune protocol, autoimmune diet, it is a restrictive diet. And like you said, it's the same thing like something like low FODMAPs where it is meant to be something that is not long-term and the purpose of it is really to use it not just as a healing protocol, but also to help you figure out what your kryptonite, what your body is not tolerant of. And like yours came down to paprika, mine's came down to like black pepper. Whereas I could have done any diet out there and would never, ever, ever have figured that out had I not taken these steps. And it's not to say that I had to avoid it forever, but it had to do a lot of gut healing to then be able to bring that back in.
Naomi Nakamura: I don't want to interrupt you. But I wanted to say that I may not have struggled with fertility, but this is something that was very close to what I struggled with as well and is actually more common than people realize.
Monica Cox: Yeah. And it's just a normal symptom, right?
Naomi Nakamura: It is.
Monica Cox: I mean, I'm grateful for my infertility now because if I didn't stumble upon all this, I would have been really sick, I feel at 45, 50. I would really, definitely been looking at hyperthyroidism or some kind of really major thing. So yeah, and everyone's different. I mean, that's the really hard part about this is that, and maybe why some people don't believe in it or struggle with believing in it, is because it's not a cookie cutter thing.
Naomi Nakamura: No, it's not.
Monica Cox: What works for someone might not work for another person, and it's just really hard to get into people's brain that they have to be super focused on themselves and what they need to do. And AIP and doing the autoimmune paleo diet, like you say, it's just a guide.
Naomi Nakamura: Yeah. So many people have different results from it, but it is a process and something for you to follow, a structure for you to follow. But you're going to get a different outcome than someone else because there is... I don't care if you are an identical twin, there is no one on this earth who is living the same existence as you and who you can expect to have the exact same experience as you.
Monica Cox: Yeah, exactly.
Naomi Nakamura: Continuing on. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you there.
Monica Cox: No, it's okay. There's a lot of little tangents in my journey. We found that out. I went autoimmune paleo and my one symptom I would say, which I didn't even realize it was still a symptom, was I had some poo issues and it went away within three weeks going autoimmune paleo. And I think it happened that quickly because I did all the hard work with paleo. I cleaned up a lot of the stressors and inflammation, and it was just these few little stressors like I was hammering tomatoes and peppers and paprika and all these healthy foods because they were supposed to be healthy.
Naomi Nakamura: But all those nightshades.
Monica Cox: Yeah, man, they do not work with me. With our new knowledge, we went and we did a frozen embryo transfer. We used the autoimmune paleo diet and we used immune suppressing drugs. And I did get pregnant for the first time ever, and this was almost six years into our journey. Unfortunately, I did have a miscarriage, but we kept going and we did another one and our first son was born. And so we were super excited and we kept... I felt great. I had an amazing pregnancy. We had a beautiful healthy baby, and we had two embryos left in the freezer so we always plan to go back for them. I got pregnant again with them. I was going to have twins. Beyonce was pregnant with twins. The stars were aligning, and unfortunately I had another miscarriage. And so that was that for us.
We were super grateful that we were walking away with a beautiful baby boy. I was going to ever for be changed by my diet and lifestyles changes that I made and I was super grateful for them and I kept them up. And two months after my miscarriage and eight years after we started trying to conceive, I got pregnant naturally and we have a second son from that.
Naomi Nakamura: Wow. That is amazing.
Monica Cox: Yeah. So obviously I was super convinced now by diet and lifestyle. And to be honest, I spent the first four months of my pregnancy really angry because there was a fix for my unexplained infertility. There was an answer. I'm not going to say that it was an easy fix. It is hard to do the diet and lifestyle changes, but I didn't have to go through IVF. We didn't have to spend tens of thousands of pounds, dollars. We didn't have to go through all that heartache. There was an answer. There was a cure, if you want to call it a disease.
I had to do a lot of mental work of going, "Okay, you went through this journey and now what are you going to do with it? You're going to shine the light of how important diet and lifestyle is. Not only for every day general health, but for fertility issues as well."
Naomi Nakamura: Wow. Yeah, I've come to the same conclusion, and I think all of us do who do the work that we do is that our journeys are what lead us to this work. But at the same time, they're also what let us do this work.
Monica Cox: It's very bittersweet.
Naomi Nakamura: It is, and there's a lot of, I guess, power in the hindsight of it. You help other women. Now tell us what it is that you do now.
Monica Cox: Yeah, so I just really focus in on what's going on in their body. We look at everything from the past to what's happening right now, what they're experiencing, what their normal symptoms are, and we really link that back into building a protocol for them to start where they need to start. Like I say, don't advise anyone who has not made any diet change just to go full autoimmune paleo and just work it up until then. We look at your gut health. We see if there's any parasites. And yeah, we can do functional testing alongside of that about food sensitivity tests, your hormone tests. We just try to build a really big picture.
And well, I rarely look at what's going on in your lady bits because most of the time your fertility issue has nothing to do with that, and that's where maybe the doctors fall short is because they are highly trained at knowing the ins and outs of those areas. But the root cause, especially with unexplained infertility, has nothing to do with those areas. We really tried to pinpoint that.
Naomi Nakamura: I know a lot of the focus for women who struggle with infertility is on hormones. And yes, they are a part of the female reproductive system, but we have so many hormones in our bodies and I always like to ask the question about, "Okay, if you have hormonal imbalances, I have hormonal imbalances, and I'm sure we all have them at different points in our lives depending on what's going on, how do we get that way?"
And really it comes down to the things that we do every single day. It's the foods that we eat, it's the amount of sleep that we get. It's the things that we expose ourselves to. It really comes down to these things that you're talking about. And when you take a really good hard look at them, they become a lot manageable, I guess. You could say that it's not this surmounting thing where you, yes... I'm not against conventional medicine because there's a time and a place for it, and it played a role in your journey as well, but there's so many things within our own power that we can do for ourselves.
Monica Cox: Yeah. We're just so, and I was completely, disconnected to how we're eating and how we're living and how our body's going to react. Our ancestors did not live like this. Our ancestors did not have the thousands of different chemicals and fake food that we just take for granted and we don't think anything of.
I heard Chris Kresser say one time, "Now the millenniums are the canaries in the coal mine." It's that generation that are coming up with these issues and these diseases, and we've just taken it for granted because our epigenetics has been so good before, our grandparents, our great grandparents. And you see them like, "Oh my grandma's smoked and drink Dr. Pepper her whole life." It's like, "Well yeah, because she was born with really good genetics." She's damaged that stuff down, and then your mom probably did a little bit and then you did a little bit. All of a sudden it's like boom, you are dealing with this big issue, and we just need to figure out like where it's come from.
Naomi Nakamura: Yeah. If you think about it, I'm in my forties and when I was growing up, autoimmune was not a thing.
Monica Cox: No, no. Right.
Naomi Nakamura: Diabetes was starting to be a thing. Autoimmune was not a thing. Infertility in women in their twenties and thirties was not a thing.
Monica Cox: No. Uh-uh (negative).
Naomi Nakamura: And so we really have to look at the macro picture and think, "Okay, why are these things happening now? What has happened in the past several decades to bring these things on?" Not just in the US, but they're happening everywhere and it's becoming an epidemic.
Monica Cox: Yeah, massively. And it's a really uphill battle trying to inspire people this. Because as hard as IVF is, IVF is not a walk in the park. It is much harder to deal with your habits and your lifestyle and not be tempted by you walking to a food store and you literally can maybe buy like 20 items if you are doing an autoimmune paleo diet. To have to deal with all of that, I get it and I know where people come from when they want to just go down the conventional side and use medication.
But the true reality of it is that if you do not take care of your health issues, especially if you're trying to get pregnant, you have a high chance of passing those issues on to your children. You have higher risks during your pregnancy. It snowballs. And that's my big mission now is that it's getting women pregnant is the icing on the cake. It is really encouraging them and inspiring them to realize that their health issues have a very big play on the rest of their life and their children's life.
Naomi Nakamura: Well, yes. And imagine if your autoimmune condition had continued undiagnosed, where would you be now these years later?
Monica Cox: Yeah. I really don't even want to think about it in the sense that I had to change my diet to even get healthy embryos, so there had to be some kind of changes there for me. But for some women, just using IVF and the immune suppressant drugs can result in a baby, but I don't think I would have had the physical and the mental strength. I think that might be a big part of why women feel so stressed as new mothers and postnatal depression is that all their health issues... Just when we talk about hormones, like when you are pregnant and after you have your baby, your hormones are like crazy. So if you're not supporting them and taking care of them, they can just go... We hear a lot about postpartum depression, but there is postpartum rage. That is a real thing.
And yeah, I always say to my followers that I'm a better mother because of this. I just don't think I would have had the mental or physical capacity to be the mom I really wanted to be. And yeah, I just feel like having two boys, my husband's line of the family actually has prostate cancer, so I feel very confident that I'm giving my boys a leg up. I'm not getting rid of the prostate cancer, that is genetic in them. But I, through my diet and lifestyle before they were created, I've given them a better chance of maybe not ever getting symptoms of it. Or if they do get it, having a better chance of fighting it off.
Naomi Nakamura: Yeah. Because it's like a three-legged stool. Yes, we do have our genetics but we have the environments that we live in and then we also have our diet and lifestyle. If you maybe can't manage all... We can't all be lucky with the genetics, but we can address the other two.
Monica Cox: 100%. Yeah, you definitely have to work with what you're given. But to know that you have that power, it's priceless. It really is.
Naomi Nakamura: It really is. How can people connect with you because you have so much to offer, especially women who want to get pregnant. Whether they may be finding challenges with it or not, how can people connect with you and learn more?
Monica Cox: You can find me over on the website at findingfertility.co and I have a really big Instagram presence. I interact, that's where the community is and I'm there answering questions and making a fool of myself over there, and that's just at findingfertility as well.
Naomi Nakamura: And we will link to those in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on and for sharing your story. Like you said, it's bittersweet but with a happy ending.
Monica Cox: Yeah, my pleasure. Anytime.
Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Nutrition Health Coach. She helps passionate, ambitious high-achievers who are being dragged down by fatigue, burnout, sugar cravings, poor sleep, unexplained weight issues, and hormonal challenges optimize health, find balance, and upgrade their energy so they can do big things in this world.
Through her weekly show, The Live FAB Live Podcast, programs, coaching, and services, she teaches women how to optimize their diet, support their gut health, reduce their toxic load, and improve their productivity, bringing work + wellness together.
Naomi resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and can often be found exploring the area with her puppy girl, Coco Pop!
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