ARLINGTON, Virginia (March 15, 2011) — If you're trying to get pregnant, April really can seem like the cruelest month: everywhere you look, big bellies are popping out of their winter hideaways.

If you have been trying to conceive (TTC), there are several natural strategies to pursue before turning to medical interventions, and before the spring sun beckons all those big bellies!

1. Read about your body

Anyone considering pregnancy would be well served by first reading Taking Charge of Your Fertility and Garden of Fertility. The journey really starts here to understand your body’s fertility signs and to get clear on what might be going on with your cycles. These books explain how even light in your bedroom can affect your fertility and a whole bunch of other stuff you will likely not get from a doctor.

If you think of your body in a loving, nurturing way, you will train yourself to be a good parent and be more likely to have your body happy to work with you. Become an expert on yourself and your fertility the way you would a child who had a particular need or condition.

Another great book to read if you are at all concerned about your toxic load is Sandra Steingraber’s Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood. It just might make you want to wait a little longer and detox from medications, environmental pollutants, and unhealthy eating before your body becomes a home (and, later, food source) for a little being.

2. Consider your diet

Nina Planck’s book, Real Food for Mother and Baby, is a wonderful resource to explain how to get the nutrition a preconceptual body needs. The short version: eat plenty of fat from good sources (avocado, coconut, grassfed dairy, wild fish, and pastured eggs and meat), avoid sugar and processed food.

Make sure you are getting enough fat: forget low-fat items that are processed/non-whole food! If you’re vegetarian, think about animal fat/protein sources you might feel comfortable with. If you’ve had a restricted (especially vegan) diet for a long time, consider vitamin and mineral deficiencies. A good health counselor can talk you through this and get you some testing that might give some clues.

Also consider food sensitivities. If you are eating something your body can’t tolerate, it is not in a good place to conceive.

And no matter what, eat lots of organic produce! And probiotic foods.

3. Get acupuncture

This healing modality can help increase circulation, regulate hormones, decrease stress and physical pain and just generally open your body, mind, and spirit up to creating a new life. Look for a practitioner who has experience with fertility issues. Acupuncture can also increase the efficacy of IVF.

4. Get chiropractic

If there is a structural issue in your way, chiropractic might be worth consulting. Perhaps you had a car accident or a fall many years ago , and your hips never quite realigned. Or maybe your neck has a constant problem that is influencing your thyroid or a nerve near your pituitary. Get checked out!

Mercier Therapy has been successful at helping women with fertility issues related to endometriosis, scar tissue and other problems, including helping with postpartum pain from a previous c-section. Dr. Mercier studied a lot of osteopathy to come up with her method.

5. Get energy work

Sometimes there are more subtle nuances at work at the cellular level. Our bodies carry memories of emotions, traumas, events, and sometimes this energy can get stuck. Craniosacral therapy or cranial work with an osteopath can help release some of this energy. 

Other energy modalities that might help include Reiki, chakra healing and crystal healing.

6. Do saliva hormone testing

Blood tests only provide part of the picture on a certain day; they don’t tell you about your whole menstrual cycle. A more comprehensive look at what is going on with your body can be found through a cycle-long saliva test through DiagnosTechs. At 11 different points during your cycle, you spit into a tube, and when you’re done, you send the tubes off to the company that will provide you and your practitioner with a report that shows the arc of your cycle compared to optimal hormone levels. This will show if you have estrogen dominance (too much estrogen related to progesterone), for which you might try using some progesterone cream and you would for sure stop eating or using all phytoestrogens (including soy) and xenoestrogens (including plastic containers). It could show a quick drop in a hormone after ovulation, or a low level throughout, for which supplements might be indicated.

Reproductive hormone issues are often related with adrenal hormone issues, so your practitioner might recommend diet or other lifestyle changes depending on what your profile suggests. There are also panels specifically for adrenal health and other hormone issues that can be done at different points throughout the day to see what your cortisol levels are doing compared to what would be expected.

7. Do yoga

In addition to helping you manage stress and to oxygenate your body with all that great breathwork, yoga can offer therapeutic benefits for a number of conditions. Certain poses, like cobbler’s pose or butterfly pose, are great for bringing circulation to the reproductive system. The Iyengar yoga book, Path to Holistic Health, has several series of poses for different fertility-related issues.

8. Clear your emotional baggage

Okay, this one is a life-long process. But seriously, try to unleash your burden before 1) some of it gets passed on to your baby and 2) you become a sleep-deprived parent. If you are holding a lot of fear or anger, that’s not a good foundation for a new being, and it might be blocking your body from creating one. So free your mind, and the rest will follow. Work with a practitioner who does a meridian tapping technique like Emotional Freedom Technique or Be Set Free Fast, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Or consider hypnotherapy. Mainstream talk therapy is great, too, but adding in these modalities can energetically re-set you in some powerful ways. So can flower essences and essential oils.

9. Laugh, sing, dance (and bellydance!)

Joy is what you want your baby to be born into, right? So cultivate it and inhabit it. Find some old school tunes you haven’t heard in a while, or discover a new artist that you want to sing to at the top of your lungs. Believe in your body’s beauty through dance. There are volumes written about how bellydance in particular can increase fertility — check out some research or just get yourself to a class!

10. Imagine your empowering, orgasmic birth each time you have sex

Okay, this one isn’t so much necessarily going to contribute to your likelihood of conceiving. But if you’ve gotten to think of sex as a chore, well, just imagine how you’ll feel about parenting! Approach sex full-on for its own sake, and imagine — not to stress you out, but just to keep you positive — that each act of intimacy could be the predictor of a birth experience nine months down the line. Ina May Gaskin and others have said that your birth experience mirrors the act of conception. So get in it to win it every time!

Jessica Claire Haney is a freelance writer, editor and tutor. Her writing has appeared in parenting publications and poetry journals. A former high school English teacher, Jessica is mother to a four-year-old son and a new baby girl. She is passionate about holistic health and well-being and is a leader of a chapter of Holistic Moms Network.

Jessica's blog is Crunchy-Chewy Mama, crunchychewymama.com, and her writer's site is jessicaclairehaney.com.

"Like" Crunchy-Chewy Mama on Facebook, and follow Jessica on Twitter @crunchychewy

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