Preconception Primer

If I were trying to becoming pregnant again, these are the steps I would follow in preparing my body. I'd probably begin this process six months to a year before actually becoming pregnant. It can basically be broken down into two categories: purify and nourish. I would focus first on the "purify" because a vessel can only be filled up with goodness (nourishment) after it has been emptied of the toxins.


Do a Personal Care Products Audit

Hair products, soaps, make-up, all your commercially available lotions and potions... line them all up beside your computer. Now, grab a Sharpie, go onto the EWG Skin Deep website and begin looking up every single product. Every product will receive a rating from 0-10 with zero being the least toxic and ten being the most toxic. Write the rating on each bottle of products. Line them up and decide three things:

1. Decide where your cutoff line is for products that you will no longer use at all. For me it was anything that rated above 5, but everybody will have to make this decision for themselves;

2. Decide what you will continue to use for now, but not replace when the product is used up. Once again, a line only you can draw, but for me, anything that ranked a 4 or 5 was worth using up;

3. Decide the rating for the products you will allow into your life going forward. For me, it was anything that ranked 3 or less.

Do a Pantry Audit

We usually know what foods are serving us and which aren't, although I have had some surprise revelations through my naturopath over the years about what my body was reacting negatively to. For instance, green peppers, strawberries, oranges, salmon are all considered super healthy foods, but for my body, they do not work. A big part of regaining health can be addition by subtraction. If you are in the Calgary area and would like to be put in touch with the man who essentially saved my life (story for a different day), you can contact me and perhaps I can arrange a meeting. He no longer accepts patients except by refe