Monica Cox shares her infertility journey and insights on overcoming unexplained infertility through nutrition, gut health, and emotional well-being.
Timestamped Highlights
00:00 🎙️ Introduction of Dr. Justin Marajian and Monica Cox discussing infertility.
03:15 💔 Monica's struggles with infertility and IVF failures.
10:00 🍏 Importance of nutrition and functional medicine in fertility.
22:30 🧘♀️ Emotional and mindset shifts are essential for overcoming infertility challenges.
35:45 📊 Role of gut health and testing in fertility issues.
48:00 🌱 Recommendations for dietary changes and supplements for fertility support.
55:30 🔍 Common myths in fertility and the medical industry's misconceptions.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: [00:00:00] Hey guys, it's Dr. Justin Marjani. Welcome to the Beyond Wellness Radio podcast. Feel free and head over to justin health.com. We have all of our podcast transcriptions there, as well as video series on different health topics ranging from thyroid to hormones, ketogenic diets, and gluten. While you're there, you can also schedule a consult with myself, Dr.
J, and or our colleagues and staff to help dive into any pressing health issues you really wanna get to the root cause on. Again, if you enjoy the podcast, feel free and share the information with friends or family and enjoy the show. And we are live. It's Dr. Justin, mark Johnny in the house with Monica Cox.
Today we're gonna be talking all about infertility. We'll be talking about Monica's story, and she is a functional nutrition functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner. So she deals with a lot of fertility cases and she even had her own story. So we're gonna dive into all things fertility, we'll connect it to nutrition.
We'll talk about labs and root barriers that could be holding your fertility back. So Monica, welcome to the show. How you doing?
Monica Cox: Good. Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited [00:01:00] for this conversation.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome, me too. Excited to chat with you. let's dive in. So first off, I know you said your story's long.
Why don't you just give us a quick little just summary brief. I know you said you'll, we'll weave it into the conversation, but just talk about some of your kind of fertility challenge outta the gates, if you don't mind.
Monica Cox: Yeah. So you know, just like most women, 27 years old. Regular cycle thought, yep, this is gonna be easy.
And three years later, still not even a hint of one positive pregnancy test. And they just sent me to do IVF. That was the answer.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And
Monica Cox: so I did a round of IVF and it was a complete shambles. we saw nothing. We had very highly fragmented embryos and because my husband's rim was fine, they said, it's you.
You have low A quality and there's nothing you can do about it. And sitting in that meeting, which we lovingly call the WTF meeting, what just happened, I intuitively knew that was complete bs I. I had no knowledge [00:02:00] of functional medicine, how the body works, the endocrine system. gut health, but I just knew that didn't make sense.
It I was only 30. How could I be where I was at? And so they said, do IVF again? And we said, no, we'll just take a break. Yeah. And so we went down the rabbit hole. That is functional medicine. That is, yeah. Changing up your diet and your lifestyle and Sure. We did it for about a year and I saw amazing improvements just like everyone here, right?
You see your health, your gut health, your skin, your sleep, your mood, you know your PMS symptoms go away.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Were you having a lot of those symptoms before? So you had fertility, right? that was your goal, but were there a lot of other health challenges going on in the background that you didn't connect to the fertility?
Monica Cox: With hindsight, yes. But on medical paper, no. Like I did not have a diagnosis. I didn't even have a thyroid issue or anything that they were like a really, a hormonal issue that they were over [00:03:00] worried about. But all the normal and common health issues. Absolutely. Gut health issues, constipation, diarrhea, bloating, PMS, which is US women shouldn't have PMS the way that they tell us we should have it. the fatigue, the brain fog, the joint pain, classic, early symptoms of, autoimmune. But at that time, this is about 15 years ago, like no one was talking about it, and especially not linking it to fertility issues. so fertility, the like, unexplained diagnosis and then the low a quality was my red flag. Hey, something's going on. And I just had enough intuition to be like, this isn't normal. It's just not one of those things. Like a healthy functioning woman shouldn't not get pregnant, especially with like medical assistance. A year passed. I still hadn't seen one positive pregnancy test, so I once again followed my intuition and I found a book called Is Your Body Baby Friendly?
Now, this is not a holistic book. this is a very medical book and it's, one of [00:04:00] the first doctors linking autoimmune blood types different things to fertility. And I found a clinic who was doing the testing, which is still con like controversial to this day. And the. the doctor we saw once he talked me out of it, he said, you're not having reoccurring miscarriages.
This isn't your issue. Just try IVAF again, it's an expensive test. So I listened, and the IVF was a success in that we got healthy embryos. So the one thing they told me I couldn't do was improve my A quality and. Doctors will still die on that hill, that's not possible. And because of my age, a my age was a factor.
And so we made better embryos, but I still didn't get pregnant. I didn't even make it to day 28 on that cycle. And so that's when we demanded that autoimmune testing. Hey, This is not normal. I have been perfect for a year physically, diet, [00:05:00] lifestyle, yoga, mindset. And there it was. I still had high natural killer cells high enough for them to be worried about it. and were you making
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: antibodies at all to the egg or to, to the, sperm at.
Monica Cox: I don't really know. all that we got told was that I had elevated natural killer cells. Yeah. they had seen worse. And with hindsight, mine probably would've been triple, double, quadruple if I would've got that test at the beginning of my fertility journey. but. With that knowledge, I went deeper into the functional medicine site. there was a blog called the Paleo Mom at the time, most people now know her, Dr. Sarah Valentine. And she was saying, Hey, your gut health could be one of the root causes of an autoimmune issue. So I just went double down.
When autoimmune Paleo started highly focusing on bone broth and organ meat, because at that time there wasn't supplement companies like there is nowadays. I had to do this really organically [00:06:00] and right. The medical system was very much, okay, here's your immune suppression drugs. And because we were using that system with the frozen embryos, I finally got pregnant on my first embryo transfer.
And what were they
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: recommending for immune suppressing medication? Was it like prednisone or was it like a biologic? Prednisone? Yeah.
Monica Cox: Yep. They do a thing called, oh my gosh. I was just talking to a client about what it is. oh, I forget the name. It's like this soy, it's crazy. It's like this soy.
Egg protein mix and it's called an inter lipid, and they hook it up to your vein and you, it has to drip over two hours slowly into your vein to suppress. So yeah, there's some pretty hardcore drugs that come along with it, and a lot of doctors don't like using 'em. And I agree with this because there's no evidence on the effects of these drugs long term.
For pregnancy, because you have to be on them until the placenta takes over that 12 week mark, right? Because that's [00:07:00] your risk of the antibodies, right? Or whatever's going on attacking the fetus because you're still in charge of it. your body thinks it's a foreign agent if you have your immune system on overdrive.
Normally when you're in coherence, when you have that, level of health, your body accepts that for an agent. Hey, this is normal. This is what we want. but I miscarried that pregnancy, no rhyme or reason. it was a missed miscarriage.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so you were on the intra lipids plus the prednisone.
Did they put you on any, like immunoglobulin IV two? No.
Monica Cox: No. Okay. No.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No. Hydroxychloroquine.
Monica Cox: No. Uhuh, no. they might be using that stuff now. I don't know if it was around in my day. And to be honest, I don't really keep up with that stuff now. that's not my job. I'm not a doctor. I do not, prescribe, treat or diagnose. If my clients are working with IVF doctors, that's their job to really get, keyed in on what my job for them is to help regulate the nervous [00:08:00] system, help, really boost the immune system the best way we can. Because of what a lot of people don't understand is that your body still has to deal with these drugs.
Your baby has to deal with these drugs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. And
Monica Cox: so if we're using them, we want to be prepared the best that we can to lower any risk. That these, potential drugs and treatments have on both of our futures, the mother and the babies.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Sure.
Monica Cox: I was really grateful that I had this knowledge while I was using this technology. Because we know with epigenetics, there's sometimes there's no rhyme or reason, right? You could be perfect and issues happen and you could be not perfect and issues don't happen. but as long as you're just, you feel like you are doing the best that you can, you're able to walk forward in whatever kind of way you're going.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. I totally agree. Now, let's talk about some of the things that you did. So you gave me a good overview history-wise, right? You talked about the intra lipids. You talked about [00:09:00] some of the steroids and things that you did. So let's talk about what you did in between that. Did you start to incorporate some of these natural protocols in between? when did these things come in? When did you work on, some of the functional stuff, whether it's hormones, whether it's gut permeability? When did that come into the mix with this whole sequencing of things?
Monica Cox: So after the first failed IVF, that's when we decided, okay, this doesn't make sense.
Like we have to make changes before we go drop another $10,000 on a treatment.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. And so the first one was where you did the intra lipids and you did all the immune suppressant stuff. Is that the first one as well?
Monica Cox: That was the first frozen embryo transfer. So it wasn't after the two failed IVFs that I got diagnosed with that in the first place.
Okay. And the only reason I got diagnosed with that is because I followed my intuition and asked for it, right? Because I wasn't presenting normally. I wasn't the full blown autoimmune miscarriage, thyroid issue, any of that. So I was a very [00:10:00] silent in my autoimmune, probably. I don't wanna say early stages because it was obviously causing a big enough issue to never see a positive pregnancy test for almost five years.
But on paper, medical paper, there was no like red flag. So nowadays when people come in with unexplained infertility, there's more of a like basis of okay, let's look here in my day. No one was looking there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. Alright. So what were the big things that you think were holding you back that you started to address?
And let's just talk about the food. what was your diet like before and what do you think the things were that were instrumental? Like you, you just highlighted like organ meats a little bit ago. I want you to go deeper on some of the food changes you made.
Monica Cox: Yeah. first off, I didn't think I had an issue with my diet.
I wasn't overweight. I wasn't eating McDonald's. I was normal. what people would say normal. I brought, I was eating vegetables, I was eat. Like eating protein. Yeah. [00:11:00] I was making most of my meals at home, but with that radical honesty and really looking at the diet, I had a very narrow.
Like I did not have a wide variety. It, a lot of it was hyper process, right? The breads, the pastas, the canned sauces. I think they still do a really good job. Probably a better job, nowadays. But you were eating, the bars that. Looked organic and healthy, right? you didn't exactly realize that they were Like 43 grams of sugar and had seed oils and gluten hidden in them. so I was just normal. I didn't have a horrific diet. but when I first started, my diet changes it. A lot, it was bringing in a wide variety, eating a, a healthy breakfast, not slamming toast in the car on your way to work.
Actually cooking something, sitting down and eating it before you leave. even just like watching how fast I was chewing and I would get through a meal like twice as fast as my husband. He's slow down. you, your saliva doesn't have ketchup, We need to [00:12:00] catch up to like help that digestion. so just really basic things that we just don't overthink, but could make a really big impact to the gut health. and it worked. Like I said, I saw great improvements, but I had to go deeper than that with what a lot of people, I'm sure I picked up the diet book, I've done this diet and there's.
There's two. there's a few factors. One, it's not the right diet for you, right? It not everyone needs to do paleo or autoimmune or vegan or carnivore. the real. magic is just finding your food intolerances that you are having an issue with right now. foods don't work for you. And finding those, eliminating those.
And then the other thing is bringing in that wide variety. yeah, that's what's really missing in a lot of people's diets. The other thing is that you can have that perfect diet, but if you don't realize that you need to bring things in to maximize healing of the gut lining, [00:13:00] you're not gonna bring that nutrients in.
So a lot of people are on a really healthy diet, but they're not getting the nutrients that they need because their gut lining just isn't at a, point where it can do that for them yet. So that's another missing piece. A lot of people think, oh, I'm just gonna throw in a probiotic and I'm good. what feeds a probiotic? A prebiotic, are you eating prebiotic foods? Probably not because they're not in our normal diet. so are you taking a supplement if you can't get that in? And then the organ meats, right? Like that, that didn't come in till, really. Probably around my first miscarriage and after that I brought them in and I was just hardcore on it. so many people like are like, no, I can't eat that. That's so disgusting. I was like at my wits end, I was like, I'll, what kind of organs were you
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: doing Liver? Were you doing were you doing everything?
Monica Cox: Yeah. Heart, kidney, at that time it was just liver. I would go, okay, I lived in the United Kingdom, so I was really lucky.
Yeah, I would go to the butchers, they would ground the liver, put it in my [00:14:00] mince meat. And so nowadays you can get that here in America, you can buy meat with the, now I eat the kidney, the heart, the liver, in that mince me get it once or twice a week. And I keep telling people, if you wanna save money and you wanna maximize your time, do that for your health.
Get over the grossness of it. Yeah. Because what's worse, dealing with a little bit of grossness, which actually you don't have to deal with because you don't even taste it in mince meat. or dealing with fertility issues again every month again. But you can get it all on capsules today too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They have capsules now, so there's no, it's not even a taste excuse.
So that's cool. So the organs were a big deal. Yeah. Tell me about your gut. Did you do any gut testing to see, was there inflammation? Was there gut permeability? Was there sibo? Did you have any infections? What else? Was going on. Yes.
Monica Cox: in my day over in the United Kingdom, this was 15 years ago, we didn't have that. We didn't have access, even when I did FDN in 2015. Yeah. they're big on testing. I didn't [00:15:00] have access to that and when I did, I was already pregnant. but that is. Essential. You assume
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: some of those things were going on in the background and that some of the diet changes that you were doing helped with that.
I
Monica Cox: had a hundred percent leaky gut. with hindsight, with all the symptoms that I had from a really young age, I was probably infertile at 16, 17. Wow. I was diagnosed with signs of an ulcer at 19. Wow.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: yeah. Do you have
Monica Cox: I don't think so. I never, okay. I never tested for it and my gut issues went away. I never treated it either. So I really, with hindsight what it was, is a pretty crappy, normal American diet from day one. just. that's how our society is. I remember my mom, I'm not gonna buy you Kellogg's corn fla, or, no, the, the Frosties, right? She's no, that has too much sugar.
But she, I was a latchkey kid. She would go to work, we would get the white sugar jar, and there was so much sugar in my cereal bowl. By the end, I was done. I, it didn't dissolve in the milk. so we would like, [00:16:00] Eat spoonful of like milky sugar. So we just had this kind of normal diet that obviously just over time destroyed.
I started drinking, that absolutely obliterated. Red Bull came into the scene in like 19 98, 99, we latched onto that. I just graduated high school, right? And then you, if you get over to the mental and emotional side of it, when I was a senior in high school, I was working a 40 hour work week and doing school, I was type A, I was always on the go, right?
I was an overachiever. I was seeking my worth out of doing. and then you have some mental and emotional stuff from your family and you just put that all together and it's gonna cause. This chaos in your gut. And so yeah, the tangible stuff, the diet, the supplements, the testing, the getting rid of the parasites and yeast overgrowth and all those things, essential, like we are physical beings on a fus physical earth, you have to play that game. But what I found [00:17:00] after having an IVF baby and then getting pregnant naturally at 36, probably about five years into motherhood, I was still perfect. I was still doing my A IPI was still doing liver. I was still doing all the supplements, all the stuff, and I was now hitting a wall with my gut health issues and all the emotional stuff that I suppressed.
My kids started, here you go, mom, here's the gift of motherhood. And they trigger you and they bring out those repressed emotions. And so I think that functional medicine is essential. It gets you to a certain point, but what I'm seeing, what I saw with myself and what I'm seeing with my clients now, and I'm sure you experienced this too.
They're knowledgeable. They know they, they have degrees themselves. They can do PhDs on all the physical things, but when they're not seeing the results, whether just in their normal health or with fertility, that's where we [00:18:00] gotta look somewhere else. Another protocol, another supplement regime isn't going to help them in the way that. we think with our logic brains, our science brains is gonna get us our success that we want long term.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A hundred percent. That makes sense. What's the, psychological technique that you do? Is it the, is its psych? K
Monica Cox: Yeah, so I am trained in psych. KI don't really call myself psych K because I don't follow it.
Precisely here, look, this is the basis of all modalities. Yes. Emotional freedom, tapping, psych, k eye, rapid eye thing. I wouldn't say, yeah, mdr. Yep. You're getting to the core of an emotion, you have that emotion in your body. We know it's there. We feel anger, we feel, frustration.
We feel joy, we feel that. So when you have this underlay of this emotion about an event that probably happened 20, 30 years ago, it's just causing that chaos, right? It's, contributing to your subconscious belief systems, the way you think, the way you [00:19:00] pattern, and it becomes your reality. So when you tap into that motion, when you're finally ready to go, hey.
This emotion I'm frustrated at this person because they did this. when you feel that emotion and you're ready to release it, which that's what those modalities help you do, that emotion, it's like having a poop. You let it go and then it's not attached to anything. It does. you gave that event a meeting.
A me, right? I just said meaning. so
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: me.
Monica Cox: meaning. There you go. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Meaning, yep.
Monica Cox: And so it's that simple. there's, you don't need this over explanation. it's just that simple. And so when you continuously do that for yourself on all the life events that you were told, that doesn't affect you, like that's not a big deal, your conscious brain can be like, I understand why they did that.
That doesn't affect me anymore. Listen to your body, right? Like I was talking to a client and we [00:20:00] found this, stuck emotion when she was 16 and she was like, I had this friend that she was a narcissist and she did X, Y, and Z. She's oh my God, my heart is pounding outta my chest right now. She's I didn't think this affected me anymore.
And so it's getting radically honest of how your body's feeling and when you're showing up and you can relate to this, to food. When I found out that I was highly intolerant to nightshades, That was a big part of my journey. Oh,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: like potatoes, tomatoes,
Monica Cox: yeah, like the tomatoes, paprika, they would send my gut.
It was always a delay. Really, when you're into this, you can really get to know your body, and so when I. When I went paleo for that year, found out I had the high natural killer cells. I went into a IP and then when I was watching and eliminating these foods that I was eating daily, because most of the time they're good and healthy for most people. I saw my last remaining symptoms disappear within three weeks, which is like a little mucusy kind of thing. Your gut does right. And
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: [00:21:00] exactly.
Monica Cox: when I was getting into the emotional thing, I remember a time when I was pregnant with my IVF baby, and I'm not joking this, I was so hyper-focused on diet because I thought that I would miscarry if I had some nightshades.
And so I ordered a burger without a bun. 'cause I couldn't have gluten without a tomato. 'cause I couldn't have a night shake, couldn't have the french fries. this patty came out with a piece of lettuce and I was gonna spend 20 bucks on it and I cut it open and it had paprika in it. And I just was devastated and I held that emotion and that fear because, I was out with a friend and her parents and I didn't wanna look like, this person who couldn't eat, like there's a piece of meat.
And I just, I took that fear and I internalized it because I ate it. And I was so scared that I was gonna have a miscarriage and I didn't have a miscarriage because I now know the body doesn't work that way. But I did get my symptoms back. I did get my gut health symptoms back within three [00:22:00] days, so I still knew that I, my gut health wasn't to scratch.
I needed those immune suppressing drugs at that time to maintain that pregnancy. And, when I was looking into the emotional ties to food intolerance, it was like, Hey man, that fear is still there. And if I am radically honest, every time I look at salsa, every time I look at this, I can feel that fear in my body.
And so I had to release that. I had to let that emotion go. And so it could be just these little things in life that you don't think are a really big deal, or your conscious brain has been like, no, that's the past. It doesn't affect me. I'm telling you right now, it can.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So what are the steps that you use to release it?
Is it a combination of tapping? Is it incantation? Is it eye movement stuff? How are you releasing it?
Monica Cox: you can go even simpler. Yeah. So first off, I wanna say they all work and it's what you are, where you are in your belief system. How easy are you gonna let this be? Okay. [00:23:00] so you can get into a whole brain state, meaning you connect your left and right brain together because usually they're working separately.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So
Monica Cox: you get into a whole brain state, like a meditation, and you feel that emotion, and either if you're working on a subconscious belief or if you're working on an event that happened, you sit there and you feel it. Let it come up, let it boil.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep.
Monica Cox: And nine times outta 10, if you sit with it long enough, sometimes it takes five seconds, some takes, sometimes it takes two minutes.
You'll just let it go because you finally have just given it the time to be recognized.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay.
Monica Cox: Yeah. And
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: so let's just kind gimme an example. So you're breathing, you're doing a meditation. Let's say you have a stressor. relationship stress, it's bothering you, your kids are triggering you, whatever it is.
Just go through the steps. What does that look like to you? Are you visualizing? Are you breathing? Go through the steps of how you would release something.
Monica Cox: Okay, so if, this is different. If you are in a triggering [00:24:00] situation, it's. You wanna be looking at frequency. Okay, so emotion and frequency are different.
Emotions are the like kind of the note in a course, and they go up and down. They come and then go. You can release 'em, sometimes you hang onto 'em, whatever your frequency is, the melody behind. Okay? The dewy. Okay. Okay. So when you're in a situation and you're triggered. Sure. You have to once acknowledge that I am triggered because my kid is crying over a red Popsicle and not the blue one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay.
Monica Cox: Where's that emotion coming from? Because I know as a conscious adult, he's two, his prefrontal cortex isn't developed. I should not be feeling rage and like I wanna punch him in the face.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Monica Cox: so where did I store that? In my body, right? What memory, and this is advanced stuff, right? a lot of people just aren't gonna be there yet because you have to practice these things. It's like a diet change, right? Like people are like, oh, I beat myself up because I can't do this diet. [00:25:00] you are just so used to living a certain way. You've just gotta be, again, you're gonna fail, start again the next day.
The next day. This is the same stuff with the emotion and the frequency. when you're in that situation, you first just have to sit with it and sometimes you can consciously get a visualization, get a feeling, get a, an intuitive knowing like, hey, that was when my dad, just constantly was like, stop crying over that.
Big girls don't cry, again and again. Now that's gonna be a deep layer. That's not gonna be like, I'm gonna sit and I'm gonna release this emotion. Sure. That's when you wanna be tapping into other modalities, sessions, talking it out, journaling it out, doing, and working on it. Now a belief, right?
You can do this right now, or your listeners can do this. Take a deep breath and repeat this out loud. I am worthy because I am me. So how does that land in your body? [00:26:00] A hundred percent of my clients was like, are like, that's cheesy. That's weird. Why? I'm worthy because I am me. And I sit there and go, what if a five-year-old said that to you? What if a little girl said that to you? I'm not worthy because I'm me. Of course you are. Of course you are. So why is the 30 5-year-old going, oh, that's weird. Oh, I can't say that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: What
Monica Cox: is that in your body that is telling you that? That it's not safe to be worthy because you are you?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay?
Monica Cox: And so with that one, that's a subconscious belief. So you can go in and you can sit there and say, I'm worthy because I am me. I'm worthy because I am me. And you'll usually feel something switch in your body. Now the key is with ever changing these emotions and these frequencies, you gotta show up in real life.
This is where the science comes in. The neurons that fire are wired together. So you change an emotion, you change a belief, you change a frequency, whichever way, whichever modality you have to show up and prove [00:27:00] to yourself that new reality is true. So if you go back and you're, not eating the way you know you should eat, right?
You've just spent a lot of money with yourself. You've gotten the testing, you know what you need to do, and you're not doing it because you don't think you're worthy of whatever, of, health, life. a baby, like a lot of people don't believe they're worthy for a baby, right? Sure. so you need to show up for yourself again and again.
Your consistent actions create your evidence. And so when you need to have the belief that healing can be this simple. Two, you have to show up consistently for yourself and not, get into these belief systems that like, I can only heal when I'm on a holiday in Tahiti or in a breath work session, or when I'm being perfect with my diet.
No, it's in the mundane, it's showing up for yourself every time and being that radical honest, oh, why did that guy who cut me off trigger? why do I feel like I wanna ramble with my [00:28:00] car? what is that? And so you're breaking it down and then going in. And so when I first started learning this, like absolutely not, I think I thought I had to be like, like in this perfect meditation and I have to do this. the more you're just like, no, I can change this. No, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna do this. And just getting real. Did it work? Do you feel different? And if you didn't, then you weren't ready to shift that. Or maybe you d need a different modality, or maybe you need to dig a lit little bit deeper, right? If you wanna go, I'm, something about motherhood and you wanna explore that. there's gonna be some like, probably deeper layers than just being like, I'm worthy to be a mother. you might have to break that down and clear some of the stuff that comes before that. So that's the, my rant on how you do it. Okay. So it can be simple,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: so it's important to address, the subconscious stress or triggering there behind the scenes.
That makes sense. what other. Myths that you hear out there in regards to fertility. conventional medicine [00:29:00] really puts no emphasis on nutrition. Very little emphasis even on supplementation. some are starting to say, oh, maybe coq ten's good for egg quality. But that's still few and far between today and the diet recommendations have been hard, for a long time.
Especially when you're like, oh, like low fat or low cholesterol. But those, that's the building block that you need to make the hormones you need to be. Have high fertility. So talk about kind of some of the myths out there and talk about some of the deficits that you see on the IVF kind of repro si from mainstream medicine.
Monica Cox: Yeah. the biggest one is age. they have that fear factor on you that your, the number of birthday candles on your cake is more important than cellular health. As soon as you're
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 35, you're geriatric.
Monica Cox: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And obviously that puts an enormous amount of pressure on a woman and it's just.
It's just sad because they then get pressured into doing more IVF. a lot of my clients, I have a client right now who, had one miscarriage, she's geriatric, and then they pushed her to IVF. It failed [00:30:00] multiple times. she's now a nutritionist because she studied all this stuff.
Correct. And I said to her, you never had fertility issues. You had a miscarriage. And your body was just asking for a little bit more, but instead of going down, this path and being very confident that your body can heal and you just needed to give what you need. You went this path with medical assistance, not doing anything to improve your cellular health.
And what people don't talk about is that IVF can actually damage your fertility more because you're not capable, you're detox. Pathways aren't capable of detoxing all the drugs and the treatment and showing up. It's like a full-time job. So your cellular health actually lowers. Sometimes after fertility treatment because you're not supporting yourself in the first place.
And so a lot of women get sucked down this path of again, you know I all the time, oh, you just got your period even though you just had a horrendous miscarriage, or you had a failed IVF. You got your period. Let's go. You're fine. Let's do it again. Let's do it again. [00:31:00] And so this constant just going and going is actually damaging our fertility health more.
And then we really subconsciously believe because, we have, the proof is not working, so it's never gonna work naturally. I'm never gonna be able to do this. So age and treatment, I think is one of the biggest lies that the industry is Is promoting. the other thing that I see is I'm also seeing
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: lots of women today, even the younger women with very poor fertility just because of nutrition being terrible for a long time and lots of xenoestrogens and hormones in the food, in the environment, in the water, in the plastic.
So we're in this hormonal soup that it, it can impact even young folks. So even if you think you're younger, that you're on the right track. maybe not.
Monica Cox: that was me, right? Yeah. Like I was infertile by my teenage years.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Monica Cox: And absolutely. And we're just, it's just getting worse. it was one in eight when I was going through it.
Now it's one in six and we're going into this huge [00:32:00] epidemic and now we have fertility, IVF clinics that are, for profit. And so we are, it's a billion dollar industry. We're up against this wall because women think they're time poor. They don't realize their fertility is innate.
You're not broken. It's not broken. Your fertility is innate. If you have all the working bits, you don't have a physical structural issue and you don't have a genetic issue that cannot be influenced by functional medicine. You have a cellular health issue. You don't have fertility issues. Okay.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay.
Monica Cox: Now, whether that be a cellular health issue in your gut, in your thyroid, we gotta look at where the root cause is, right? But fertility isn't separate. They've done a really good job to make you believe that your eggs sit in this like weird, box shape, oval shaped thing called your ovary.
And that the only thing that affects it is your birthday, right? it's, let's just bring common sense back to. [00:33:00] Our health, your egg is one of the biggest cells in your body. It is absolutely affected by the rest of your body and the inflammation that's going on. Your endocrine system. your brain is literally connected to your ovaries, right?
We're all connected, and your fertility starts in your brain. And I like to think of it as a fountain. It starts, it comes down, and it comes back up with a reverse fountain, right? Go with me. and it's always doing this. And so if you have something above your fertility not working correctly, then that's where you wanna hyperfocus on and find the right path for you. what's the right diet? What's the right supplementation? Do I need detox pathways? do I need to check for things? Do I have these things or am I just So type A. Over controlling white knuckling and stressing out about how I'm going to get to my ultimate goal instead of just taking a step back.
I don't know if you have clients in your practice that you see where you're like, let's just [00:34:00] pretend here it is. This is your answer. I just need you to do it for three to six. And then about three, four months, it's not working and they're like, ping, I need something else that didn't work. I gotta go. I gotta go.
I gotta find something else. I gotta find another specialist. I gotta find this. And they're just continually running this pattern. That's why the frequency and the pattern work is so important because once you find someone you trust. And you're like, Hey, you've got the knowledge. I'm gonna trust you.
You're gonna get me on the right path. If I feel something's a little bit off, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have a great relationship with you so I can, I trust you. I say, Hey, this doesn't feel right. Can we find something different? And then it's taking a big breath in and saying, okay, I'm gonna walk this. And it's the mundaneness and it's the boringness of healing that most people.
Start freaking out about, they don't have that control. It's not tangible. Where IVF supplements, diet, tangible, I'm in [00:35:00] control. I'm doing this. Where the women I work with now, they know that stuff. I'm getting them to a point where they can feel safe in their nervous system to go, okay, yep, I'm on the right path.
I'm doing this and I'm gonna slow down because a lot of people don't realize that you're gonna say you're gonna take those same hyper controlling patterns into motherhood, and motherhood is not gonna be what you think it's gonna be or what you thought it was gonna be.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you're working on a big mindset shift.
That makes sense. That's important. Trying to get people to. de-stress or focus on the things that they can control and not what they can't control. That makes sense. Trying to release any triggering emotions. That makes sense. What's next though? What are some of the foundational nutritional things or supplements that people should be taking if there's a fertility case?
And again, I get it's gonna be individualized for each person, but what are you finding as like low hanging fruit that people are missing?
Monica Cox: Yeah. just going back to what we were saying in the beginning, you. Find your food intolerances [00:36:00] that,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: so food allergens cut out the big food allergens, right?
Monica Cox: Yeah. you bring in that, Do you recommend an
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: elimination diet out of the gate or do you rec, do you do food allergy testing?
Monica Cox: it depends on what the client wants, right? So sometimes elimination diet is a little bit tedious and And stressful. so getting a high quality, test one that is much more than just IgG is really supportive. that will just tell you what you need to know right now. And the thing is that food intolerances change. they don't stay the same. So I've run several mrts on the same person and they're different every single time. And it's not because it wasn't correct the first place, it's because your gut microbiome is changing all the time.
So therefore it can be tolerant to something your environment changing. So you gotta be really careful. I had a client once say, that they were told. They took this test and they're like, that's it. I can't have avocado the rest of my [00:37:00] life. I am absolutely living proof that is not true.
Now if you have something that is like genetic, then maybe we're talking about, something like an IgE kind of reaction,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: right? Yeah. Happy pen test stuff.
Monica Cox: Yeah, so I think it's just really important if you're focusing on the physical stuff that you find what's right for you. You do it for a time. I think that's what a lot of people are missing. I've done this for three months. It hasn't worked well. How long did it take you to get to where you are now? Three decades. So three months might not be long enough. So giving it time, just being confident. But yeah, I mean you can do elimination diet. but I think a lot of people struggle with that because they're like, I have eliminated it.
Sometimes they need that. Physical proof. So just make sure you're getting high quality. You're not just getting from target the Yeah, the test that we're,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: yeah, so we're improving food quality, right? If we have gut permeability issues, if it says, pull out this food, but you eat a new food with. Leaky gut or gut permeability, you'll eventually [00:38:00] develop immune issues with that food.
So that may be a moving target as you're fixing the gut, right? And getting the gut healed. are you focusing on really good fat, really good proteins? I know you mentioned organ meats, things like that. So you want the cholesterol, you want the good fats, the fatty acids, the a, d, and K.
You want the good protein. What else? What else are you looking at? PCOS is one of the biggest major cause of infertility and there's insulin resistance, blood sugar swings with that. How are you dealing with that component?
Monica Cox: Yeah, I'm, it comes down 'cause I don't wanna sit here and say oh, you need to have the sweet potato and the avocado and the blueberries And the, and all these things that, get thrown at you. Sure. it really, I like, I know you want me to say like certain things, but it's really just find your food intolerances and then everything that you're not intolerant to bring in that diversity, bring in that wide variety. Yeah. The fact, how do you deal with blood
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: sugar stuff?
How do you deal with the insulin resistant stuff and the PCOS stuff, IO s. Are you trying to put people lower carb or focus more on lower glycemic stuff? How do you approach that? [00:39:00]
Monica Cox: Yeah. the funny thing is I don't really deal with that because I hyperfocus my, the way I talk to people. If someone is really dealing with a, like a lot of PCOS stuff, I really send them to other people who PCOS is their. So I don't actually work with a lot of people with PCOS. I work with a lot of people who have autoimmune or they're dealing with subconscious stuff. But yeah, if you're dealing with insulin resistant stuff, I think it's, once again, what works for you. Because if you say, go keto, go on this. sure. Low it might not work for them. What type of PCOS do you have? There's several types of PCOS, so figuring that out is really important for women. getting natural sunlight, getting into the rhythm, right? I think that's a really big thing that people miss with the insulin resistance is what's the precursor to that? Are we waking up? Are like, do you wear sunglasses all the time or do you have contacts? Do you have prescription glasses? You might think you're seeing the sun, but are you looking for through glass? [00:40:00] So are you walking outside? Are you getting back into a natural rhythm? Correct. Are you over exercising if you have insulin resistance, right? are you just like a gym rat and go and go. That's a big issue, right? So it's not necessarily just the food, it's really just a whole holistic lifestyle.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But what about lifestyle changes to avoid toxins? we know plastics are a big deal. We know going organic and getting away from the organic chlorines and the glyphosate and these type of things can be a big deal.
We know. Conventional animal stuff's gonna have a lot of hormones. We know that can be a stressor on your hormones. What's your take on that? What kind of changes do you make in that area?
Monica Cox: I'm I, to be honest, I think that's basic 1 0 1, I started doing this 15 years ago. If you are not on board.
With the things that you can control in your environment, your laundry soap, your,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: it's one-on-one. But I see patients with these issues all the time. They come in, they got feres sense in their, whatever. Those has phthalates in it. They still have a glass, a, a plastic water bottle or they're like, oh, it's BPA free, but it's really just BPS, which is just as bad.
Monica Cox: Yeah. It's [00:41:00] really hard for me not to be just Bull right here. If you are still doing those things that are the, one of the easy things to do, that is below diet, I think you have all the chemicals that you have in your environment. Super easy to do. That is like a non-negotiable.
If you are dealing with these horrendous issues that are forcing you to use medical assistance or, having every single month just be. Tears of, just heartache after heartache. If you cannot get rid of your fabrice, if you cannot get rid of, the chemicals in your laundry and all that, that's maybe where we need to go with the subconscious. what is going on there? let's make a list. So
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: let's make a list. So you got the laundry stuff, you got thee. What else? what's the checklist you're gonna go through with someone comes in where you're at least double checking to make sure these things are addressed? What's that look like?
Yeah.
Monica Cox: the candles, right? Oh yeah. The scented candles. yeah. The, for both your laundry soap, your shampoos, your makeup, Anything in your bathroom, [00:42:00] your Your kitchen area, your laundry area, your car. Do you have those crazy scented car? yeah. a little trees that hang from the dashboard, whatever, that we grew up in the eighties with.
Awesome. Yeah. yeah. In my course there's a checklist. I'm not, I gotta plug in my computer real quick.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep.
Monica Cox: I like, I'm not being funny, but those aren't the people coming to me anymore. They have done all that stuff. and so they're go on the internet, you can Google checklist for, fertility, causing chemicals.
What is there, and there are so many resources now that. it's the easiest thing you can do for your facility. The other easiest thing, which I still get reamed about when people just think I'm crazy, water, are you doing the best to filter your water at whatever capacity? Not the bri of water filters.
Correct. you need some heavy duty ones or, wherever you need to go. And people are filter people. That's crazy, right? what are you talking about? It's just water. Do you know how [00:43:00] many chemicals are in your water? Look it up. There's a database. On the internet of what your area puts into your water, do you have fluoride?
Is that an issue for you? are you gotta be looking at these things, especially before you start jumping into working with, expensive, high. Functioning health coaches or you don't wanna be spending your time on that stuff. Come on, we're we gotta get better than that, we gotta go to the next level.
Because when you get into the diet, that is gonna be really difficult for a lot of people. I know that there was no way if I would've found out at the beginning of my journey that I had to go full auto main paleo for a certain po amount of time that I would've done it from out of the gate. I needed that time to, integrate better habits. you walk into the grocery store in my day, there was no gluten-free aisle. You weren't subsidizing. Correct. those things like you, [00:44:00] you could not sh you shopped in 10% of the grocery store.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct.
Monica Cox: And so that mindset alone, if you can gi give yourself the grace of okay, I'm once a week, I'm gonna take three products and I'm gonna change 'em out, and I'm just going to, this is just going to be the easy part of my journey because the diet is going be d more difficult for some, especially if you like to go out, especially if your family's not on board your social occasions, those are the stuff that you are gonna have to deal with. so yeah, sorry, let's go a little bit deeper into what we need to do for these fertility issues because yeah, it breaks my heart that there are still women out there dealing with this, that don't know 1 0 1, get the chemicals out of your life.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, exactly. What else? any last things that you think are important that you wanna address?
We talked about the organs too. any other big supplements you wanna highlight before you go into anything else that you find was helpful for you or helpful with patients you're seeing?
Monica Cox: No, I talk [00:45:00] my clients off of the supplement list, they come to me with 2025 supplements. And once again, supplements can be supported.
Absolutely. But what many people are doing in a fertility journey, they're using them as tangible reassurance. I'm taking my supplements like a good girl, so therefore it should be. Working. We are addressing the underlying, root cause of what's going on first. I will not put, I, I will not put you on any supplementation until we know, I like running the Biome FX gut health test, so I can see what your gut microbiome's doing, and I can see what your gut functioning is doing. That's when I'm going to use supplementation to target exactly what you actually need to boost. I'm gonna bring in the wide variety of food and do the elimination with the food the better. let's do that. So we're not spending so much money on supplementation and feeling like we're doing something right.
Like I ask my clients when they're using, [00:46:00] their group of people and they maybe have acupuncturist or herbalist, and they're like, okay, this is what they've put me on. And I say to them, all right, follow your intuition. I want you to wake up every day, and I want you to practice your intuition in what your body is telling you.
Do you need that supplement every single day? Because probably not. There's probably days that you do wanna boost up with a little bit more supplementation, and there's probably days where your liver is like, can we please just stop on the supplementation because I've gotta deal with this stuff too.
So supplementation for me is, once again, I'm not gonna sit here and say this, and this. If you really can't eat organ meat, take that supplementation. Okay. That would be, that's. The most biodiverse food that your body knows exactly what to do with it. It gets to the where we want the most healing to happen. but what I really want women to know is like it's gotta be this radical responsibility for yourself. You didn't choose [00:47:00] this. You didn't ask for this, but you're here. Okay. And the only person who is going to get you out of this is you. So finding that person like yourself or like me, that has the knowledge, so you're not, throwing darts in the dark, But trusting yourself that, Hey, I trust this person. I'm gonna stick to this and I'm going to give myself grace. Healing doesn't happen overnight. Now what we are up against as functional, Health practitioners is that IVF and these medicines. And these treatments, and these drugs can give you results like this.
They know. They know at the end of the treatment whether or not they're gonna have a baby. I've had a client say to me, I just wanna know. And our job is the healing. And healing is giving you the time to sort your stuff out. As someone who has been through the thick of this, who has a 10-year-old, now I am telling you that healing doesn't stop when you see the two.
Pink lines. There is another journey during pregnancy. There is [00:48:00] another journey during postpartum. a lot of, we are seeing an epidemic in, pregnancy health, in postpartum health in our children's health, and I don't wanna put pressure on us women, but is we, were given the gift of life. We are the providers.
So we have to take that responsibility and say, I'm gonna do the best that I can because I know it matters for my law. Longevity in form of the future of our children. We know epigenetically, it gets turned off after three generations. What we're not talking about is you can turn it back on after three generations.
So why don't you start giving that gift to your child that they're the first generation. We're gonna turn back on that gene that got turned off by grandpa, right? Or like I got turned off by grandma, right? And we're gonna start giving our children the health back. And that starts with fertility.
That starts during pregnancy. And unfortunately, yes, the sperm matters more than people are talking about, [00:49:00] but once that sperm is helps creates that embryo, it's the woman's job to really support the health longevity. Mental, emotionally and physically of our children, and so give yourself grace.
Give when you're in the thick of this fertility journey. Just know that you can possibly define it when you're done. I'm so grateful for my journey because I was given time to sort my health out. I know that my kids would've been dealing with a lot of issues we see in our children. Now. If I would've just pushed IVF, I would've never got pregnant with just IVF alone.
I had to improve my cellular health. But if I didn't. Continue with the knowledge. I just, where would I have been? And with my health, I would've, anything else definitely been. Yeah, that makes sense. Give any
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: other specific things you wanted to highlight? you hit a lot of the mental emotional stuff, which is great and I think that's a very important component.
Is there anything else specific that you wanted to highlight that, that are just things that people don't think of outside of the things that you already said and any [00:50:00] last. Kind of parting words on that?
Monica Cox: Yeah, I think we talked about it before. Your fertility is not separate from your whole body. if your doctor, it's all connected. Yeah. It's all connected. So if your doctor's telling you, oh, your thyroid looks a little bit off, but don't worry, it's in a range, right? Your thyroid's off.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So are you testing, so are you looking at thyroid? Are you testing hormones? Are you looking at adrenals?
Are you looking at all these things together?
Monica Cox: Oh yeah,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: absolutely. When you're assessing,
Monica Cox: yeah. Yeah. and the thing is too, is that testing is great, but you have to remember testing is a snapshot of time. And that's of your past, not of your future. So I, my clients come to me with all the testing.
They've done all the testing. And so they're like, my test results say, and I'm like, remember, that's your pass, not your feature. Yeah. So if you wanna use test results. You want to use them consciously and once again, not as a tangible thing, not something you're controlling. Because if you're still white knuckling, if you're still like in this grip of things, but you're doing everything right and your test results aren't improving, look at why you need to test every three months.
And [00:51:00] if you have a real thyroid issue, you're testing with your doctor that's different. I'm saying when you're like going on the improvement, look at your body, look at how you feel. Are you feeling better? Is your skin flow? Are you sleeping better at night? Look at all those little wins and start adding that up and going, yeah, what my, what we're doing is working.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. very good. Monica's website. Anyone listening is finding fertility.co. We'll put the link down below, so if you wanna reach out to Monica for support on that front. The link will be right there for you guys. Anything else? Monica, nice chatting with you. Anything else you wanna highlight?
Anything else important? Yeah,
Monica Cox: no, I'm good. Just everyone be graceful. It's a difficult journey and your fertility is innate and most people will get there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. And I, you highlighted on the female side, on the sperm male side. Yeah. You have to do all the same things, nutrition wise, avoiding the toxins.
Those are all foundational. It takes two for sure. All right. Excellent. All right, Monica. Nice chatting with you. Have a good day.
Monica Cox: Yeah, you too. Thank you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thank you.
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