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Story of Hope: Listen to how this woman got 5 pgs normal embryos at the age of 40 after having no healthy embryos EVER before

I have another BRAND NEW Story of Hope for you! In this video, I talk through a case and share how we got to the root of my patient’s fertility struggles and overcame them.

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PLEASE SEE BELOW FOR TRANSCRIPT OR CLICK ON IMAGE FOR VIDEO

Hello, everyone. How are you? How are you? I am excited to be here. Let me adjust the camera, sorry. With all of you on Facebook, on Instagram. Welcome, I am Aimee of AimeeRaupp.com, and I am the author of all those books up there behind me. I have been helping women, mainly, but I also help couples, and I also help men optimize their health and their fertility. And help them get pregnant faster, help them get and stay pregnant.

And I've been in clinical practice now for 17 years. I've written two bestselling books in the space of fertility, Yes You Can Get Pregnant and most recently The Egg Quality diet. I've also written two other books, Chill Out and Get Healthy and Body Belief. This is one of my favorite times of the month. So every week on Thursdays I get to come live and share something educational with all of you. One Thursday out of every month, I come live and I do a story of hope.

So this one, I went into the archives a little bit on this one because I had another one planned as a more recent story of hope, but left the chart notes in my New York City clinic. And so I didn't feel prepared enough. I like to give you guys the juicy meaty information. So I know so many of you identify with the women in these stories and it gives you hope.

So this one is from a case that I worked with, I guess, not that long ago, in early 2020 and she now has a healthy little bambino at home. And what I always do is I'll kind of run through the timeline, my initial consult, the notes, the follow-up recommendations. And then I like to go into the archive, if you will, and yeah, share stories from the emails too.

So December 29th, 2020. So just a little over a year and change ago, she was 18 weeks pregnant. So it's not that far into the archives. But anyway, I have my list from 2021, which had grown, but the last three weeks of the year we had five pregnancies roll in. And most of it digital now, but some of my clients in 2019 and early 2020, I was actually still taking handwritten notes, because that's the way I used to do it back in the day.

So this woman, she started working with me. Let me just go back here. Her first coaching session with me was in… So she joined my e-course September 25th, 2019. And then her first coaching session with me was February 2020.

Okay. So my Yes You Can Get Pregnant e-course just so you all know is my online program. It's like over 12 or 15 hours of content and I teach it. I taught it live actually this year. And then, I just came in from there. Every week, no matter how long it takes you to get pregnant, you'll never get kicked out of the group. Every week I host what we call a live Q&A/office hours where I just go in and I answer questions and I support my community. And there's hundreds of women in there at this point. And they all really learn to support each other as well.

So this woman joined the e-course in 2019. She came to me. She was 39 years old. She had just had her sixth failed IVF cycle. She had done six IVFs since beginning in November of 2017. So she started this process when she was 36.

She started my Yes You Can Get Pregnant Diet. So mind you, The Egg Quality diet just came out this past summer so it wasn't out. She'd been doing my Yes You Can Get Pregnant Diet since November. So she joined the e-course in September, started doing the diet lead out in my Yes You Can Get Pregnant book in November.

She cut out alcohol, gluten, soy. She was having some dairy. She decreased caffeine. And in her numbers… I know you guys care about numbers. I don't care so much about numbers. Her FSH was good at an eight and her AMH was about a 1.5. It was varying, but was healthy for her age for certain.

And as far as her major symptoms that she was dealing with besides not getting pregnant, she had had polyps. She had some natural killer cells that were determined. She had acne, mild rosacea, depression, fatigue.

And so I'll go through with you what my follow up email to her was, but… Let me just see. I want to just see where my follow up email is, but basically when I met with her what I noticed was some auto immunity. I had asked, too, had she gotten thyroid antibodies checked? At that point she had not. And so I strongly encouraged that she do that.

And also, in my head I was kind of already building the egg quality diet, which is more of an elimination diet for people that I suspect have auto immunity or a lot of inflammation that are impacting their fertility. And so she was following the Yes You Can Get Pregnant diet, which isn't as focused on auto immunity. So what I did was I encouraged her to start to follow the Body Belief diet, which that was the book that came out that I've written about auto immunity, and just see.

Oh my God. Now this is fun. Let's see. Instagram did you lose me? Am I still here? Can you hear me? Sometimes when a phone call comes through the volume goes out. Let's see. Can everybody hear me? Can someone comment? Can someone comment whether or not you can hear me? Cha, cha, chah. I'm going to wait until someone comments that they can hear me. And then… I see hearts. So I'm assuming you guys can hear me, right? Okay. I'm going to go there from that then.

“Can't hear.” Okay. Andy says you can't hear. Team. Aimee, could you guys… No sound. Okay. “Can't hear you.” Great. Let me try this. How about now? Anybody else? Can you hear me now or no? Nada? Anyone? Anyone? I'm going to wait one more second. Can anyone hear me? All right. I'm going to hang up then and come back in since no one's commenting.

“Lost audio.” “Nothing.” Okay. “Nothing.” Okay. Okay. Give me one second, Facebook. I'm sorry. My do not disturb. I don't know what it is with my frickin' phone and this do not disturb. Does anyone else have this issue? My do not disturb is on and a phone call just came through. I don't understand it. Okay, So we're going to go live again here on Instagram and we really hadn't gotten into the story anyway. Okay.

So Instagram, we're back. Facebook, we're continuing. I lost you guys because my do not disturb button doesn't work on the phone and a phone call came through and then somehow it knocks off my volume on the Instagram.

So anyway, we are doing a story of hope. That's how I'm going to leave it. 39 years old. Six failed IVFs. Came to me. In February of 2020 was her first co coaching call with me. She joined my Yes You Can Get Pregnant e-ccourse in September of 2019.

And so, as I was saying, she showed me signs of inflammation and auto immunity in her diet. So she was following the Yes You Can Get Pregnant diet from about November and now I'm meeting her in February. So for three months. So I had her get stricter basically. I'm going to have her get a little more strict.

And then I also asked, can she please get her thyroid antibodies checked? Between IUIs and IVFs, by the way, 10 cycles between February and 2017. So this is her little story to me.

“I have undergone six IVF cycles beginning in 2017. My last one was just in 2020 in February. We were part…” Right, she was affected by a failure at one of the fertility clinics. And she lost three embryos by the way, which is a horrible story. And one that I had never really heard of before.

After that she had failed frozen embryo transfers. And she responded well to the meds, usually produced a good amount of eggs, her AMH and FSH, her thyroid panels all looked good, but she still wasn't getting pregnant. So she's trying to determine, “If we're just on the bad side of statistics and need to keep trying or if I have some sort of autoimmune issue or imbalance of hormones that's preventing successful implantation.” That's how she found me.

“I've been following the Yes You Can Get Pregnant diet since November and taking raw prenatal liver pills, CoQ10. And then she was trying to scale back at work. She does light to moderate exercise. She meditates. She does yoga. She gets acupuncture. And like I said, she's in my e-course. So she has access to me every single week in the weekly Q&A's in the e-course.

She purchased a DUTCH test. She had a hysteroscopy. She had polyps. She was having normal cycles, but then they started acting wonky from the IVFs. She had a 38 day cycle.

So she does have, like I was saying before I lost Instagram, acne, mild rosacea, which, to me, those are flags of like a lot of inflammation, depression, fatigue, significant fatigue though, not just like, oh, I'm going to, when I wake up in the morning, significant fatigue frequently. Often have to nap to get through the day. I usually attribute this to the depression.

She's also developed contact dermatitis and was diagnosed. Was recommended to use a steroid cream. She had done an Everlywell food sensitivity test, which I tend to think are not really useful. I think an elimination diet like The Egg Quality diet or Body Belief is the way to go. And so she's in the process of switching over her diet to following more of my autoimmune diet, which is now what we would call The Egg Quality diet. It Wasn't out yet.

Her blood looked good. Like I said, her TSH, her AMH was nice. Her FSH looked healthy. So those are all her things.

When we started talking, she had a retrieval. She got six follicles. Four were mature, three fertilized, and she was waiting for them to be biopsied for PGS.

Her skin, she said, “I have a general redness to my skin,” and she has breakouts on a regular basis. Her diet at the time that I'm talking to her avocado, eggs, mayonnaise, fertility smoothie, fish, vegetables, bone broth, protein veg for dinner. Her bowel movement's healthy, every day, but she gets gassy after beans and gluten and very bloated after gluten and dairy.

And let's see, her sleep is good. Her body temperature, she's always cold. Cold hands and feet. That always is a sign to me of not enough blood. We don't have estrogen in Chinese medicine. Blood is kind of what nourishes and makes those follicles and those eggs juicy and healthy. And so when I see a patient that runs cold, and especially cold hands and feet, I automatically think they need more nourishment. They're not eating enough blood building foods like good quality protein, like good quality veggies.

Her period. She gets pretty bad cramps one day before. To me, that's also not a great sign. That's typically cold in the uterus. I'm generalizing here. Cold in the uterus, some stagnation. She's super tired the day before bleeding. To me, that is always a sign of blood deficiency. She has breakouts. She has mood swings.

Cycle day one and two solid flow, decent color red. I always ask the color of the blood. No clots, but some mucus, which to me shows a little phlegm, dampness, stagnation. She just started acupuncture when I met her. And then her period cycle days three to five tapers off. Ovulation. She's not seen any signs of cervical mucus.

She has no allergies, no sinus stuff, no major colds. Her hair can be dry. Her nails peel and crack. But like I said, she has depression. She's been doing therapy. She feels very stable at the moment between meditation, acupuncture, and therapy. She has a strong spiritual practice.

She started trying to conceive at the age of 37 for six months. And then she was pushed onto fertility doctors because she wasn't yet pregnant. And then she went on to have six failed IVFs, but a total of about 10 fertility treatments including some IUIs.

She was exercising five times a week. She was doing her last round of STIM. So we were just waiting. I was waiting to see, did we get any normals, any PGS normals?

Her last round of STIMs they used a pretty high dose of follistim, which I was saying to her that if we don't get good quality, we want to go to a lower dose because sometimes the meds too high can compromise the quality. You guys should all know that. Even if you have good AMH and good FSH, but you're having quality issues, you should look at the medications as well. And if your doctor isn't willing to go lower on the meds, then you should find a different doctor in my very humble yet experienced clinical opinion.

And like I said, her supplements, she was on the vitamin code, raw prenatal. She was taking liver, spirulina, Coq10, and then cod liver oil. And her goal was to get four PGS normal embryos.

So this is all February 2020. So my recommendations to her. I sent her some information on EFT, which is emotional freedom technique, tapping it's also called, to help more with the depression and some of the emotional blocks. I sent her information, because at this point I'm working on The Egg Quality diet. I sent her information on her macros for her fertility, because I wanted her to get like the 50% fat, 30% protein, 20% carbohydrates, but quality carbohydrates.

I gave her my fertility purify eating plan, which was, in essence is now, my Egg Quality diet. So mind you, The Egg Quality diet just came out in June, but I've been literally using it in practice since about 2018. So I had a whole PDF that I would give out to patients. So I give her that.

I asked her to do a food diary for me. I gave her some guided meditations. I talked to her about Spirit Babies, the book Spirit Babies, which I think is super useful. So this is what… Whenever anybody works with me, there's always this very detailed follow up. I went over her supplements.

And yeah, so then we spoke again. So this was her second session with me. So at this point we do food diaries back and forth. She shifts her food diaries. She starts matching the macros. She's really going into the elimination diet, more of like the egg quality diet/autoimmune paleo style diet.

And that retrieval that she had just done in February she got… I just want to go over it again here because I have it here. So three fertilized and she was waiting for them to be biopsied. None of them came back as PGS normals. So she was devastated. And so we did not head into a transfer.

So then this is February. So then two months later, March, April, no May, three months later she does another retrieval. Sorry, she does another retrieval in April. So now at this point she's been basically following some version of my diet since November, November, December, January, February, March, April, six months. And she got five embryos to send off for testing. All five came back normal.

So she's now six months older than she was in the last retrieval or, sorry, four months older than she was in the last retrieval. She's now 39 and a half. She wasn't getting normals before. She just started testing. So previous she wasn't testing in any of those FETs that she did between 36 and 39. Then she started testing at 39 and no normals in the February one. And then in April she gets five embryos. All five are normal.

We were full on in the heart of COVID at this point, too. I recommended to do an ERA and an endometrial biopsy before she transfers. She decided to move clinics because they weren't willing. That was the other thing. They changed her meds. Because I had said to her in the February one, I said, “If none of these embryos come back normal, that 450 follistim's way too high. Even though your AMH is great, your FSH is great, way too high.

So she switches clinics. They decide to do… They still did like a 150 and 300 follistim lower dose. Like I said, now she gets five embryos, all five are normal. She's also now been on the diet six months and mind you also she's about to turn 40, 39 and a half.

She loves her new clinic. She says the doctor even hugged her. He was really supportive. And She does a transfer in August. And we talk on October 7th, 2020. She's pregnant six weeks, five days. First time she's ever been pregnant. Now, mind you, this is now assisted reproductive technique number 12, her seventh, no her eighth IVF, and she's now three and a half years older than when she started the process. And for the first time she's pregnant.

Her skin has improved. She switched to my skin care. She's been basically doing the diet for the most part. She added in some foods. We kind of went back and forth on a food diary. We just reintroduced the way I have.

So the elimination diet and the egg quality diet, which I always like to point out to everybody is not a forever thing. You're meant to eliminate. You're meant to stay in phase three for a while while your gut heals, while inflammation reduces, while absorption improves, all the while improving egg quality, balancing hormones, and then you're meant to reintroduce.

So some women, they can have gluten. She can have a little bit of dairy and doesn't have a flare up. That's amazing. Organic, grass fed, full fat dairy is my preference, right? She's learned what grains work for her. She's learned that beans and something nuts to do not work for her. Night shades do not work for her, right? So she… Yeah.

And then, so this is what she says, “To get five PGS normals at 40…” So sorry, she turned 40 between retrieval in February and then retrieval in April. So that's my bad. “To get five PGS normals at the age of 40 on my eighth retrieval is mind blowing.” It's the best she's ever done. And when she started at the age of 37.

So at this point, like I said, she's six weeks pregnant and psyched, psyched, psyched, psyched. And so now she just has some basic food questions. Which is another thing, too, that like once my girls get pregnant, we are there to support them through their pregnancy.

So she wanted to know, can I have a little more chicken? Can I cheat a little bit more? Can I have these collagen peptides? Can I have some caffeine? Can I do acupuncture? Right? All sorts of questions.

We also got into toddler foods, pregnancy foods, which I thought was kind of funny because she was only six weeks pregnant, but she was so… I also told her to stop the CoQ10, remain on the fish oil, remain on the vitamin D, remain on the liver, remain on the prenatal.

So we had that conversation. This is October. Then I hear from her again in December, “Hope you had a lovely holiday. I'm currently 18 weeks pregnant. I'm just so happy. I finally rounded the corner on nausea and fatigue. So I'm getting my energy back.”

And then she never would up using her DUTCH test, so we refunded her on that. And let's see… Yeah, then she sends me another email in January back and forth. And let's see… I wasn't to…

So then, August 19th, 2021, she's happy to due a testimonial. “Prompt me with some questions,” that kind of thing. And she sends me a picture of baby Isabella, who is now four months old.

And now mind you, she also still has four PGS, normal embryos on ice from that retrieval in April. Oh I'm happy that this inspired some hope for all of you guys. And then baby Isabella now at this point is about eight months old, which is an amazing story. And yeah, so there we go.

I'm trying to see if I have any other emails from her. No. So you know, not super straightforward. Obviously, she'd been on the path for quite some time, which is devastating and way too long. Eight retrievals is shitty. But to be 40, when you started the process at 37 and your eighth retrieval was your most successful, I think speaks volumes for the work that she's started doing when she started reading. .

She read Yes You Can Get Pregnant. She started implementing it. She joined my e-course. She was getting support. She was using me in the weekly Q&A's, using her community. Then we coached one on one. I tweaked her diet even more. Tweaked her supplements even more. And we really started working just on the mindset stuff more than ever.

She just did two coaching sessions with me. And that's back when I used to do two packs. I don't do that anymore, but my coaches do and I have an amazing team of coaches and I meet with them every single week and we go over cases. It's just, that's how I've had to grow is I've had to hire other people because I can't clone myself, but they're amazing. And they've all been working with me for quite some time and they're brilliant in their own right.

But then that retrieval that she did after basically doing the program six months. Really she was in the program eight months, but I think really committed to everything for six months and overall it was a very healthy person come mean to me to begin with, right? But adjusted meds, adjusted clinics.

Then gets five embryos sent off. All five come back normal. And the first transfer works. Whereas she had done six transfers before meeting not a single one took. Not a single transfer took. So we did a biopsy and we did an ERA, and we really worked on making that uterus and her child's palace much more hospitable. And here she is now at the age of 41 with an eight month old.

“When you say eight IVFs, does that mean eight retrievals and embryo transfers?” So it's a good question because I don't have it exactly cleared out in the notes, but she definitely did at least six retrievals before she met me.

I think six was the February one and then seven retrieval… Let me just see. No, no, no, no, no. No, she did eight retrievals. So she didn't transfer every time. I think she did eight retrievals and six transfers and the sixth transfer is the one that took.

But eight retrievals, yes, between the ages of 37 and then 40. And her age 40 retrieval was her best retrieval, which again goes against what we're told.

And I really want to push that on you guys that you can get better with age. Your numbers will decline, sure. Maybe you're reserve declines. Fertility does go down as we get older, I'm not saying that, but quality doesn't have to. And health and quality are interdependent. So to remember that, right? Just because reserve maybe goes down, you're not out of the game.

And here's a woman that, you would think eight retrievals, what is she insane? She keeps doing the same thing? But she didn't. She completely changed her diet. She completely changed her lifestyle. She got the right support. She was working on her mental and emotional health, right? She went to therapy. She was doing meditation. She's doing acupuncture. She's doing tapping. She's getting my support. She's getting the community support and the community I've created. And her eighth retrieval is her most successful one. I think that's fascinating.

So there you have it. And yeah, there's another story of hope for the books for you guys.

Okay. I will see you guys later. And thank you so much, Instagram, for your patience with that hiccup with the phone. And yeah, you guys have a beautiful day. I'll see you next week. Okay? Ciao.

END TRANSCRIPT

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About Aimee Raupp, MS, LAc

Aimee Raupp, MS, LAc, is a renowned women’s health & wellness expert and the best- selling author of the books Chill Out & Get Healthy, Yes, You Can Get Pregnant, and Body Belief. A licensed acupuncturist and herbalist in private practice in New York, she holds a Master of Science degree in Traditional Oriental Medicine from the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine and a Bachelor’s degree in biology from Rutgers University. Aimee is also the founder of the Aimee Raupp Beauty line of hand-crafted, organic skincare products. This article was reviewed AimeeRaupp.com's editorial team and is in compliance with our editorial policy.

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