Getting diagnosed with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome can be stressful and confusing. It can be hard to get a full picture of what the condition is and how it affects you in the short window of a doctor’s appointment. Working out what PCOS means for you is a matter of finding out what the right questions are to ask and how to apply the answers to make life better for you.
That’s how we’re looking at PCOS today: through the lens of the questions that will illuminate the condition for you.
Does PCOS Stop You Getting Pregnant?
The short answer to this question is no, which is good news, but doesn’t give you much information on what you can do to improve your chances.
‘How Does PCOS affect your fertility?’ is a better question, and the answer starts to point a way forward for you.
PCOS causes disruption to your menstrual cycle because your body starts overproducing certain key hormones – first insulin, then, as a result oestrogen and testosterone. These three hormones cause the symptoms of PCOS and specifically contribute to the fertility issues that go with the condition.
An even more specific, and even more helpful question is ‘Do you ovulate with PCOS?’. It’s ovulation that PCOS directly affects, causing eggs to remain in the ovaries longer than in a normal cycle, and ovulation to occur sporadically. The hormone disturbance leads to irregular ovulations, and sometimes causes your body to skip ovulating altogether. So the answer to this question is yes, but more rarely, and less predictably.
How Can I Ovulate More With PCOS?
This is the next obvious question, as we move from understanding the problem to looking for a solution. As we discovered, the driver of PCOS is that high level of insulin production, so the best way to ovulate more is to try to reduce insulin production, and you can do that through your diet.
This suggests the question ‘how does your diet affect your insulin levels’ and this leads to looking at the Glycaemic Index. This is a measure of how quickly a food breaks down into sugars in your body. It’s not the sole arbiter of what makes a good diet, but shifting to more foods with a low glycaemic index (that is, foods contain less simple sugars, and which break down more slowly) means you have less dramatic peaks and troughs of sugars in your blood stream and therefore less dramatic peaks and trough of insulin made to handle it.
Controlling your insulin levels can help to boost your general health as well as restore a more regular ovulatory cycle, so this can dramatically your chances of getting pregnant.
