Reason For Infertility-The Body fat Connection
Remember the old aphorism: “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are”. After more than twenty years of research connecting fatness and fertility, a new version of the old aphorism could be something like this: Tell me what and how much you eat, and tell me how many miles a day you run or jog or hours you dance, and I will tell you how fertile you are.
For women with too little body fat from dieted too much or exercising too much or both, experience an assortment of reproductive problems. This could be a reason for infertility. Their periods can stop or become very irregular or never started at all. Possibly wanting to have a child but they aren’t able to become pregnant. It just seems that their reproductive system has “turned off”. This is could be because they are too thin.
As doctors have learned more about these super lean dieters and athletes, they have found that the disruption of reproductive ability is not an all or nothing process; the “turning off” occurs in stages. As a woman eats less or exercises more, the deleterious effect on her reproductive system increases. Doctors call this relationship a dose response.
If everything else is normal, women with amenorrhea (absence of cycles) can reverse these disruptions of reproductive ability by gaining weight or decreasing athletic activity or both. The time it takes to resume normal, regular cycles usually depends on how long the cycles have been turned off. The longer they have been turned off, the longer it takes for them to turn on.
What about too much fat? Very obese women are also infertile. So are overfed heifers, sheep, pigs, and mares. When over feeding was reduced in these animals, they became fertile and weight loss restores the fertility of excessively fat women. They are not yet sure what the mechanisms are that cause the infertility attributed to excessive fatness; it is still a relatively new phenomenon in the history of our spices to have so much food that we can become too fat.
If a women’s weight fluctuates up and down, or yo-yos, in the range where she is losing and gaining fat, her brain will also turn off her reproductive ability. To reproduce, the body apparently needs to maintain a steady supply of stored energy. It is as if the hypothalamus can’t figure out who you are when you body composition fluctuates wildly: are you grown up enough to reproduce or are you still prepubertal? This is the disruptive effect of having too little or too much fat.
So, what is a desirable weight for good long term health? What is a desirable weight to maintain fertility? These questions can be answered simply with a combined measurement called the body mass index (BMI).
