Episode 13: How to use research to support you in accessing fertility care
Episode Summary:
Let’s look at two ways we can use research to support us in navigating fertility care as a fat person
What to Expect from the Podcast:
Focuses on navigating the complexities of fertility for people in bigger bodies in an anti-fat world.
Explores research, advocacy, and mental health tools to empower listeners in their fertility journeys.
Encourages listeners to question fat-phobic narratives in medicine and build confidence in their body's capabilities.
Highlights:
Nicola's Master's in medical engineering and physics and her experience working in the NHS and accessing complex medical research.
Insight into barriers to accessing research, such as paywalls and elitism.
Evidence that people in bigger bodies get pregnant at rates similar to those in other body sizes.
Research showing BMI-based treatment restrictions are not supported by science.
Lifestyle changes (e.g., diet and exercise) often have no impact on pregnancy rates.
Encourages listeners to ask healthcare providers for evidence supporting their policies.
Using research to counter internalised fat-phobia and build confidence in fertility.
Emphasising the importance of believing in your body's ability to conceive for mental well-being.
Links and Resources
Nicola’s book, Fat and Fertile
Get Involved
Nicola would love to hear from you! If this episode resonates, share your story, ask a question, or leave a review. You can also join the Fat and Fertile Alliance—a friendly space to connect with others on similar paths.
Support the Podcast
If you’re enjoying Fat and Fertile, please share this episode on social or leave a review! Every share helps make this info more accessible to everyone who needs it.
Explore More with Nicola
Support My Work: Buy me a coffee on Ko-Fi to help keep my podcast and free resources accessible.
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Free Resources for Fat Folks: Access a hub of tools designed to support your fat-positive fertility journey, including guides, checklists, research summaries, and my popular Can I Get Pregnant in a Bigger Body? workshop.
👉 Explore all these resources here and take your first step toward parenthood without stigma or shame. I’m cheering you on every step of the way!
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Hey, my lovely Welcome to fat and fertile the podcast. I'm Nicola salmon, fat positive fertility coach and author of the book fat and fertile. I'm obsessed with helping folks navigate getting pregnant in an anti fat world on this podcast, we'll explore the complexities that fat folks face when you want to grow your family. If you want to support this podcast, I would love for you to share it on social media or leave me a review on your podcast app. Are you ready? Let's dive in. You.
Music, hello, my loves and welcome to another episode of fact in fertile I am thrilled to be talking to you today about research. Now, for those of you who don't know I do have a little bit of a research background. I did a master's a long time ago now in medical engineering and physics, which is quite a way away from fertility and the work I do now, but it gave me a really good grounding in looking at research using research papers. It's really like, for a while I worked in the NHS, so really kind of being a part of the big medical systems and structures that we have in our country and, you know, equivalents over the world. So I love to get a bit geeky about the research. And using research, I think can be really valuable, but I think it's really important to acknowledge that it can be really difficult to, first of all, access because there are so many paywalls when it look comes to getting the research, but also like it's a privilege to be able to go to university to get a degree, and to kind of figure out how research works and where to find research, and how to unravel what the research says, because so often it can feel like it's Written in an entirely different language, and that is intentional, because there's almost like this elitism and classism when it comes to research is not easily accessible to a lot of folks. So I love looking at research. I love reading it. I also have to kind of separate it out, because it can feel quite fat phobic in a lot of spaces, because obviously the normal way that we talk about fat bodies in medicine and in research is in a very negative way. And even though I'm doing it from a professional capacity, it can still feel very triggering to see the way that people talk about bodies, but I love digging into it and putting the puzzle pieces together. And one of the results of that is that I've created a lot of research summaries, which are where I've tried to make research really accessible for folks to be able to read, to understand, and, most importantly, to use on their journey to getting pregnant. So I want to tell you I knew this may be really surprising, that there is a lot of research out there that supports the fact that bigger bodies get pregnant all the time. There is so much out there that once you can get past all the layers of fat, bodies are bad yada yada yada. Actually, what they show is that our bodies are just as capable of getting pregnant, of maintaining a pregnancy, and having a healthy outcome for both mum and baby. So I really want to reassure you that the research is out there and that it is there for you to be able to use. So there is research on the ethics of denying care to fat folks to looking at why we use BMI in the first place to restrict treatments and tests around fertility. There is research into fertility treatment such as IVF and IUI, different fertility drugs that are used. There is research into implantation rates and pregnancy rates based on BMI and so much more in between, and the overwhelming majority of it shows that folks in bigger bodies get pregnant at very similar rates to folks in other sized bodies. And one of the most fun ones is the fact that lifestyle. Real, quote, unquote, changes and things like diet and movement. Actually, a lot of the newer research shows that it has absolutely no impact on pregnancy rates. So the research is out there, and I, one of my goals in my work is to make it more accessible to folks to be able to use that research and be able to have it make a positive difference to getting pregnant. So how can you use this research to support you? Well, there are a couple of ways that I recommend to folks to use the data, the research that's out there to have a positive impact. And the first of these is to use it to advocate with your doctor or healthcare provider. So what you can do, first of all, is, if your doctor is coming in with their own policies and protocols around folks in bigger bodies, is you can ask them to provide their own research and their own evidence that backs up their policies and protocols. Now this is really helpful, because it puts the onus back on them to have evidence and research to support their policies and protocols, and many of them often won't. Many of it is based on like their experience, aka their anti fact bias, and when you ask them to, like, show you the evidence and the research, it can often lead them onto questioning as to why these policies and protocols are there in the first place. So we absolutely should put the onus back on our doctors and healthcare providers to have evidence based medicine, because that is what we should all you know that is the standard that they hold themselves to, so they should be adhering to it. But you can also bring your own research into the conversations and use it to argue for different tests for different treatments, and that can be a really helpful way to open a conversation if your doctor or your fertility professional isn't willing, or isn't, you, know, keen on supporting you through the bigger body and always, I recommend finding fertility professionals who are really open, who are really, really Want to support you. But sometimes that isn't a position that we're in. Sometimes geographically, we can't find the doctors or the healthcare professionals that are going to help us or financially. There are so many different factors that come into play when looking for providers, and sometimes we just don't have a lot of choice. So being able to use research, being able to bring those things out can be a really helpful way to open up that conversation and to really influence the care that you're getting. So I have loads of different research summaries that break down the research into really easy to understand, digestible, really useful ways for you to be able to take this in and say, like, this is a summary of the research. It's sourced. It has all the references so that you know, I wouldn't recommend you go and read them, because often they have quite fat phobic language involved in them. But if you wanted to, you absolutely can, and your doctor would be able to go and look up those resources as well. And so I have a free one that you can download, which I'll link to in the show notes. All around like the ethics around denying folks care based on their BMI, but I have so many others that are in a lot of my courses, so things like pregnancy risks for folks in bigger bodies, looking at IVF and IUI in bigger bodies? A lot of like research, evidence based fertility ideas. So lots of different examples, and at the moment, until Sunday, the 18th of Feb. So if you're listening to this podcast, when it comes out, I have a really great bundle that I'm offering at the moment, which is four of my different courses for 25 pounds or $35 so you can grab all of these different research summaries, which are broken down into really easy to understand language that you can use to take in print out and take with you to your next healthcare appointment. So that is one way that we can use research. We can use it to influence the care that we receive, to advocate for ourselves with the doctors. That the other one is to use it to support our own mental health and to support the arguments that often go on in our own brains around getting pregnant in a bigger body. Because if everybody is telling you that it's really hard to get pregnant in a bigger body, but it's dangerous to get pregnant in a bigger body, then, of course, it's going to be really difficult to maintain that challenge to that narrative, right? Like when everybody around you is telling you that this is the reality, it's really difficult to. I argue with that sometimes. So this is when research can be really, really helpful.
What I do with my research summaries is I break it down into easy to understand concepts so that you can fully understand it, and then you can use those concepts and those ideas that is supported with references to build trust in your body's capability to get pregnant, you can use this to as evidence that your own evidence bank to have those arguments in your brain and to counter all the things that you might have heard your doctor say in appointments, or that your friends and family telling you you can have this solid evidence that your body is capable of this, and that treatments are effective for you, and that there is a great chance that you'll be able to get pregnant in your body. The reason that this is so helpful is that if you don't believe that you are capable of this, then you are going to take different actions in the real world compared to if you believe that you are capable. So if you imagine that you totally, totally believe and have the facts to back it up, that you are capable of getting pregnant, you are going to talk to yourself in a different way. You are going to show up in the world in a different way. You are going to make different choices, and those are the things that are going to have such a positive impact, not only on your fertility, but on your mental health as you're navigating this, on your day to day life, and you are absolutely deserving of feeling confident and resilient through this process. So if you want to grab some of those courses that I mentioned, I want to share a little bit more about what they are. So it's called the fat fertility bundle, and it's going to be available until the 18th of Feb. It contains four of my favorite courses. There's fat fertility 101, which is like the Starter Guide to Getting pregnant with confidence in a bigger body. We dive into biology, basics, menstrual cycles, how to track your cycle. We'll debunk some of the myths surrounding fertility in bigger bodies, and really look at different weight neutral approaches to supporting your fertility. There's another workshop called Evidence Based fertility for fat folks, which has a massive resource in it, 10 page PDF with research and resources towards to supporting you through this, with looking at myths surrounding dieting and weight loss advice, looking at evidence based practices to support your fertility. Then there is a course on how to navigate the waste obsessed fertility system, which is all about advocacy skills. So we walk through different advocacy skills that we can use to support us in accessing care and getting tests and getting treatment and really looking at how we can support ourselves and our mental health through that too. And then finally, how to feel excited about getting pregnant in a bigger body? This is about really shifting that narrative around, like the hardness that it can sometimes be able to navigate this and really look at building on our capacity for our bodies, capacity and resilience to go through getting pregnant. So if you want to grab this bundle, you can absolutely come and get it. The link will be in my bio on Instagram. You can just send me a message. If you want to get this, I'll pop it in the show notes as well, but it's going to give you all the research and resources you need to support you on your journey, and you can grab them now until the Sunday 18th, Feb, for 25 pounds or $35 instead of the usual 200 pounds, which is what these courses normally cost. And you'll have all the time you need to be able to work through these programs to have a positive impact on navigating getting pregnant. I hope this has been helpful. I can't wait to see how you use research to support you as you navigate getting pregnant in a bigger body. Come and tell me how you're getting on I am on Instagram at Fat positive fertility. I would love for you to DM me and let me know how you use research, how you're going to use research to support you. And yeah, I can't wait to see you in my chat. See you soon. Take care. Thanks so much for joining me today. For fat and fertile, if you want to learn more about how to have a fat positive facility journey. And I'd love for you to check out my book fat and fertile, how to get pregnant in a bigger body. It's available everywhere via Amazon, so just search in your Amazon store for fat and fertile, or click in the link in the show notes, see you next time you.
Get Involved: Nicola would love to hear from you! If this episode resonates, share your story, ask a question, or leave a review. You can also join the Fat and Fertile Alliance - a friendly space to connect with others on similar paths.
Support the Podcast: If you’re enjoying Fat and Fertile, please share this episode on social or leave a review! Every share helps make this info more accessible to everyone who needs it.
Apologies for any typos - transcribed by https://otter.ai - it can make mistakes! If you need clarification on anything - please get in touch!