Dr. Laurie Terzo, Natural Fertility Specialist

Dr. Laurie Terzo, Natural Fertility Specialist Empowering women and couples for over 25 years to naturally optimize their fertility and take control of their journey.

09/05/2026

Your brain and your ovaries are on the phone all day. And inflammation is the static on the line.

And your ovaries are not the only ones on the line. Your brain is talking to your thyroid and your adrenals the same way, and his te**es are on the same system. When inflammation is high, it jams every one of those lines.

Here is what that does. It quiets the systems you want working and turns up the one you do not. It weakens the signal to your ovaries that matures and releases an egg, and the signal to his te**es and his s***m. It turns your thyroid down, so you make less active hormone. And it does the opposite to your adrenals, driving up stress hormones that push back on everything else.

This is not a theory. Activation of the stress axis alongside suppression of the reproductive and thyroid axes is a well-recognized response to inflammation (Cunningham and De Souza, Immunology Today, 1993), and the reproductive mechanism is still being mapped now (Otsuka et al., 2026).

Your body also gets a little harder of hearing on the other end too. More insulin resistant, more thyroid resistant, so even the messages that get through land softer. It shows up as the tired that rest does not fix, a cycle that will not settle, a drive that is gone.

That is why inflammation is not one more thing on your list to focus on. It is the main thing to focus on for your fertility.

Part two is coming, where I give you the three levers I use to bring inflammation down, the ones I start with in almost every woman and couple.

09/01/2026

A question I am getting asked about a lot is the impact of seed oils on fertility. So here is how I think about it.

Seed oils are the industrial ones, canola, soybean, corn, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed, and they are high in a fat called linoleic acid.

In human studies they did not light up the usual whole-body inflammation markers (Johnson and Fritsche, 2012). The reason I still recommend avoiding them is narrower. Linoleic acid is a fragile fat, and under high heat, or over time in the body, it can oxidize into compounds that may be inflammatory. Eggs and s***m can be affected by that inflammation.

So I would avoid them wherever possible, and I recommend switching over to olive oil or avocado oil, which hold up to heat.

But seed oils are not the fats I recommend against the most. Two others matter more in my opinion.

The first is trans fat, which has the clearest link to fertility of any fat (Chavarro, Nurses’ Health Study, 2007). The good news is that the US pulled the main source, partially hydrogenated oils, from the food supply years ago. So it is far rarer to see in foods than it was. But it has not vanished. A product can hold up to half a gram per serving and still be labeled zero grams, so the real tell is the ingredient list. If you see the words partially hydrogenated oil, it is in there. It still lingers in some packaged baked goods, frosting, and stick margarine and shortening.

The second is oil that has been fried and reused, the vat in a fast-food fryer, where the truly damaged fats live.

And the fat that helps is omega-3. More of it goes with higher quality eggs, stronger embryos, and a shorter time to conceive, and it does the same for s***m (Chiu, EARTH study, 2018). This is the lever.

Send this to someone weighing whether to toss their seed oils.

08/28/2026

You might think a functional medicine doctor might caution you to stay away from Ozempic. I am not going to.

The foundation of my natural fertility work is getting inflammation down and supporting the metabolic environment your eggs and his s***m are maturing in. If a medication moves those same things, it could be worth exploring.

GLP-1s do not directly improve egg or s***m quality. What they can improve is the terrain those cells grow in. Blood sugar, insulin resistance, blood pressure, triglycerides, inflammatory markers. I have watched stalled ovulation start back up in my PMOS patients once that metabolic load comes off with the right support.

But some of the weight lost is muscle, and women have less to spare. On higher doses I also see some people barely eating and digestion slowing.

How you do this matters as much as whether you do it. Lower dose, short term, alongside real food, enough protein, and the anti-inflammatory work. The medication can help move the terrain. Working on the foundations keeps it moved.
Send this to someone weighing it.

08/25/2026

Ten seconds. That is how fast you can get your body out of fight or flight.

Last video: when your brain registers threat it releases CRH, and CRH puts a brake on the GnRH pulse that starts your cycle. Here is what to do about it.

In through your nose. When your lungs already feel full, one more short sip on top. Then all the way out through your mouth, slower and longer than both inhales.

Two of those and your shoulders drop.

This is not “take a deep breath.” It is a specific pattern at a specific dose.

Stanford ran cyclic sighing against mindfulness meditation, five minutes a day for a month. On anxiety, both helped about the same. On mood, the sighing group did better.

And the benefit grew the more days they did it.

You are not removing stress from your life. You are training your nervous system to be flexible about leaving it.

Comment RESET and I will send you the guide.

Study: Yilmaz Balban, Cell Reports Medicine 2023 (PMID 36630953)

08/20/2026

“Relax and it’ll happen” is the least useful sentence in fertility.

But saying that stress has no impact on your health is not useful either.

So which is it.

Researchers followed almost 29,000 adults for eight years and asked two things. How much stress are you under. And do you think it is harming your health.

The difference showed up in the people who answered yes to both. Not in the amount on its own. They had adjusted for smoking, income, exercise, existing conditions, even whether people were already working on their stress. This was observational.

Your body is not responding to what is on your plate. It is responding to how your system reads it.

And that reading runs through your cycle. The signal that starts your cycle leaves your hypothalamus in pulses, and the spacing between them is the message. When your brain registers threat it releases CRH, and CRH slows those pulses down. In 259 women tracked prospectively, LH came down about fifteen percent during their higher-stress stretches.

That pathway does not check where the threat came from. Your circumstances, or what you tell yourself about them. Same route.

So the piece you can get your hands on is the same either way. Not the amount of stress that lands on you. How fast your body comes back out of it.

That part is trainable. That is one place I’ve found focusing on creates a positive impact for fertility.

Part 2 is how.

Keller, Health Psychology 2012 (PMID 22201278) - Schliep, Epidemiology 2015 (PMID 25643098)

08/18/2026

When your cycle day 3 FSH comes back high, these are the first three places I look. All three change how your brain and your ovaries talk.

Your ovaries are half of this conversation, and their health matters. But the half I look at first is your brain.

The signal leaves your hypothalamus in pulses, and the spacing between those pulses is the message your pituitary reads. That pulse generator is a sensor. It reads a lot. These three are where I start.

Fuel. When energy availability drops below a threshold, LH pulse frequency falls. Under-eating, or training hard without eating for it, is your body deciding whether there is enough food coming in to ovulate.

Stress. Sustained stress releases corticotropin-releasing hormone, CRH, the first hormone in your stress response, and it puts a direct brake on that same pulse generator.

Thyroid. This one travels a route most people have never heard. A low thyroid drives TRH up, TRH drives prolactin up, and prolactin shuts GnRH down.

Fuel. Stress. Thyroid. That is what I am looking at before anyone tells you your ovaries are done.

08/14/2026

A high FSH isn’t your ovaries giving up. It’s your brain turning up the volume.

Unlike AMH, which your ovaries make, FSH doesn’t come from your ovaries at all. It’s made by your brain. It’s the signal your brain sends each cycle to grow and mature your eggs. When your ovaries need a louder nudge, your brain turns up the volume and FSH reads higher. A high number is your brain doing its job, not your body quitting.

And that signal shifts. The same woman can read high one cycle and lower the next. In a 2017 study in JAMA of women aged 30 to 44 with no history of infertility, a modestly high FSH did not lower the chance of conceiving within six cycles (PMID 29049585). A very high, repeated number is a different conversation. But one high reading is a snapshot, not a sentence.

Your brain and your ovaries are in constant conversation, and that conversation answers to more than your age.

Follow for part two, where I show you what supports it.

08/11/2026

Two miscarriages, and the answer was in his test. Nobody had looked at him past one.

She came to me after two losses. She had had a recurrent miscarriage workup. His side was one semen analysis, and it was normal. Count, motility, morphology, all fine.

Here is what a semen analysis does not measure. The DNA inside the s***m. And that is what the s***m is there to deliver, an intact set of instructions.

So a s***m can move well, look normal, and still carry damaged DNA. The egg repairs some of that. Not all of it. When too much gets through, an embryo can start and then stop.

I added a s***m DNA fragmentation test to his workup. His came back very elevated. That was the piece nobody had looked at.

We worked on both of them. Blood sugar, inflammation, the terrain on his side and hers. His fragmentation was a big piece of this puzzle, and s***m rebuild about every 74 to 90 days. Four months later, they conceived.

This is one case, and no test predicts an outcome. But the research is there. A 2019 systematic review in Fertility and Sterility (PMID 31056315) pooled 13 studies and found men whose partners had recurrent pregnancy loss carried measurably higher s***m DNA fragmentation than fertile controls. The authors were clear that the studies varied and larger prospective work is still needed. It is still not a routine part of most workups.

A normal workup after a loss does not mean nothing needs support. It means the short list came back clear.

Comment AFTER and I will send you the list of what I look at after a loss, for both of you.

08/07/2026

The fear that you’re running out of eggs may be built on almost nothing.

You’ve heard it. You’re born with all your eggs, millions of them, and most die off before you’re even born. It’s the science under “your clock is ticking.”

That whole idea traces back to a single study from 1963 that counted only two ovaries. Two. And in the sixty years since, no one confirmed it.

Now a new review in Human Reproduction Update (PMID 41453395) has re-examined it, and it does not hold up. A developing baby girl has far fewer eggs than previously thought. Not the millions in the textbooks. And the number does not fall before she is born. It is higher at birth, close to double. The dramatic “egg die-off” we were all taught was never verified.

This is about counting eggs, not making new ones, and eggs still change with age. What it challenges is a number that was treated as settled science and never actually checked.

This went unquestioned for sixty years for one reason. No one took the time to look closer. So what else, especially as women, are we still accepting as final that we have never stopped to question?

08/05/2026

Stop letting a doctor use a low AMH to tell you a donor egg is your only option.

A low AMH is not a verdict on whether you can have a baby. AMH reflects egg quantity. It tells your doctor how many eggs might respond to IVF. That is what it is for. It does not measure the quality of the egg you release this month, and it does not decide whether you can conceive naturally.

This is not my opinion. Across three studies, including a meta-analysis of 11 studies and more than 4,000 women, a low AMH did not lower the chance of conceiving naturally. One 2024 study said it in plain words. Ovarian reserve is “unremarkable to natural conception,” and physicians “should be aware of this concept to avoid inappropriate counseling and undue clinical decisions.”

Read that again. The people who study this are telling doctors to stop counseling women with this number.

A low AMH is information about supply. It is not an emergency, and it is not the end of your story. The studies are below if you want to read them yourself.

Follow for part 2.

Studies:
Steiner, JAMA 2017 (PMID 29049585)
Lin, Frontiers in Endocrinology 2021, meta-analysis (PMID 34721287)
Galati, Arch Gynecol Obstet 2024 (PMID 39340554)

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