There’s no doubt that, if you’re significantly overweight, losing weight will do nothing but help increase your odds of conceiving.

It’s been demonstrated in study after study that pregnancy rates are lower in women who are obese – whether that’s women trying on their own or women who are doing IVF.

The reason for that is simple. The hormonal environment in an obese body is overstressed by many different factors, often shifted towards excessive estrogen (which can have negative impacts on ovulation and thyroid function).

The eggs and uterine lining often won’t mature properly in this kind of environment.

But, if you are overweight, you may not have to lose much weight to get to that place where you can get pregnant.

Teresa’s case illustrates this point beautifully. She’d been through 3 fresh IVF cycles when I first met her. All of them had failed. At 38 years old she was starting to worry that maybe she’d never have a child.

Teresa was very obese. She’d had a lot of trouble losing weight, too. While she wasn’t diabetic, she did have mild insulin resistance. People with insulin resistance have a harder time losing weight because their metabolic system is literally slowed down on every level (again, more on that later).

So, I put Teresa on my Sun Cycle Diet and Three Foundations. I also did get her on some key supplements to balance her metabolic system (we’ll get into the supplements in a later chapter).

Over a period of about two months Teresa lost 15 lbs, which for someone her size was essentially nothing… Teresa weighed around 240 lbs before, so that was less than 10% of her body weight.

Yet, on her next IVF, she broke through and got pregnant.

I’ve seen many other overweight patients of mine who’d struggled to conceive both naturally and with IVF end up getting pregnant and having babies after losing a relatively small amount of weight.

Your body knows your “fertile weight,” or its ideal weight for conception, so don’t assume you need to be “The Biggest Loser” to get there.