What to Avoid Before IVF, and What You Can Keep
You don’t have to give up everything.
Most of the rules couples follow before IVF were never the lever, and a few may work against you. This free 6-page guide puts an honest label on each one, from her coffee to his beer night: Keep it, Your call or Avoid, with what the evidence actually says. The list to avoid is short.
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Dr. Lejla Fazlicic, D.Ac., L.Ac. · Licensed in Illinois since 2011 · Fifteen years with couples before IVF
How long is your list?
After a cycle that doesn't work, almost every couple does the same thing: they restrict more. The list of forbidden things gets longer every month. Did you give up…
Some of that was worth doing. Most of it wasn't — and nobody has ever sat down with you and separated the two.
More rules can backfire.
Willpower is not a fertility treatment. An egg does not get better because you suffered more this month. And some of the most common restrictions point the opposite way from what you were told.
Training harder while eating less
Hard training combined with eating less can suppress the hormonal signaling that runs your cycle altogether. This is one of the better-established findings in the whole field — and it runs backwards from the advice you were given. Here, more is not better. More is the risk.
Hormonal SignalingSkipping every dinner
You didn't skip them because you couldn't drink. You skipped them because not drinking invites a question. So the restriction cost one glass of wine — and the concealment cost the evening, then the friendship, then six months of not being in your own life. That isolation is a stress load, not a strategy.
Chronic StressCutting food groups on a hunch
Without a diagnosed reason, there is no good evidence that dropping gluten, dairy and sugar improves an IVF outcome. Doing all three at once usually just means eating less overall — which brings you straight back to the first card.
Under-FuelingWhile you were giving up everything, almost nobody asked him a single question.
A normal semen analysis is not the whole story. It measures count, movement and shape — it does not measure DNA fragmentation (DFI), the integrity of the instructions inside. High sperm DNA damage is linked to lower odds of pregnancy and roughly double the miscarriage risk. It can be a real, checkable problem, and heat, smoking and a handful of other habits load directly on it.
When is DFI worth a look? The signals are specific: a failed cycle when everything looked normal, an early loss, or embryos that looked fine on day 3 and stopped before day 5 — right around the point where the embryo begins reading his DNA. If that is your history, DFI is a fair question to bring to your clinic.
And an honest caveat: DFI is not a standard test, and it is not for everyone. Guidelines do not recommend it for the first workup, and the medical societies genuinely disagree about when it helps. It is for the pattern above — not for every couple. The guide gives you the exact question to ask, and enough context to hold your ground either way.
The guide also gives him his own pages — what's actually worth changing, what was never a problem — and one question about testosterone that has probably never been asked out loud in your house.
An honest label on everything.
The evidence does not support giving this up — and giving it up costs you something real. Your coffee is probably here.
It depends on how much, and on what your clinic has asked of you. Worth deciding deliberately rather than by default.
Genuinely worth giving up. There are only a few of these — and that is the point.
The list of what actually stays given up fits on one page. The list of what you get back is longer.
Get your list back.
Six pages. Five minutes. For both of you.
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Nothing in the guide will tell you that your habits caused a failed cycle. That is a promise.
This page and the guide are education, not medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, and not a substitute for the care of your physician or fertility clinic. Dr. Lejla Fazlicic, D.Ac., L.Ac. · Doctor of Acupuncture · Licensed in Illinois since 2011, IDFPR #198000990.