Healer Q&A: Revolutionizing holistic fertility with Dr. Aumatma Simmons
The following interview is a transcript excerpt from The Heallist Podcast episode. Listen to the full audio version or watch the video below and subscribe to get notified of new episodes.
Fertility is often seen through a narrow medical lens, but in truth it’s a reflection of the body’s deeper wisdom. In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Aumatma Simmons, a double board-certified naturopathic endocrinologist and founder of Holistic Fertility Institute, about rethinking what it means to struggle with conception.
Together we explore how nourishment, rest, detoxification, and emotional healing can restore balance and open the path to conception. At its core, this conversation is about trust—listening to the body, honoring its signals, and reclaiming power on the fertility journey.
The Holistic Approach to Fertility
Dr. Aumatma Simmons: I think that really the healing and the holistic approach can come in on all levels. For me, it starts way before we think about having babies, and if we can create that mindset of, "hey, I'm going to do what I can do, what's in my power to do to optimize my body to prepare it for future fertility, then I'm going to live a better life", because everything that you will do in order to get fertile will also help you feel amazing in your body.
Anytime we shift into survival mode, anytime we're in fight or flight, anytime we are feeling unsafe in our bodies, the wisest thing that our body chooses to do is shut off reproduction, and it's doing it as a protective mechanism. Right, if it's not safe. If there's a lion chasing me, I probably shouldn't be pregnant right now - that through evolution, it never made sense for us to be able to reproduce in times of distress.
When we say holistic, I want to ground it down: fertility is one of the places where our body absolutely needs every other part of it to function optimally before it kicks back reproduction online. And we've found amazing technology to overcome and make up for the fact when it's not working. But we really have to rethink how we think about the technological options that we have; I'm not saying they're bad. They're amazing and I've seen them do really incredible things. But it's often as a compensation rather than get to the root of why your body thinks it's not safe. Why is it in survival? And if we can shift you out of that, most of the time reproduction will kick back online.
Body's Wisdom and Life Adjustments
Dr. Aumatma Simmons: When shame or guilt or the self deprecation arises in the fertility journey, I want to offer a reframe: it is not because of you that your reproduction is shut off. It is your body trying to protect yourself and your future child. And if we can flip from that shame to gratitude, because it knows, even though I didn't tell it. It's just happening because your body wants the best for you as well as your future generation.
So we really can repurpose this natural feeling that comes up like, “something's wrong with me”, “I'm broken, something's off,” just knowing that this is not a good time–and there are hundreds of tests that we can do that can prove or support what your body is saying. That awareness helps to open a line of thinking and query that can really uncover for us what is happening under the surface and put science behind it, rather than some woo-woo idea.
So with the number of people that get diagnosed with “infertility”, we're not looking deep enough if we're saying that someone has unexplained infertility. I had a 28 year old female and on the surface everything looked great, even her hormones look great on the surface and doctors were telling her it's her age, but they've been trying to get pregnant for three years. To me, I'm not understanding. We did the blood work, and her cortisol is at the bottom of the barrel, almost non-existent. And I said to her “Have you had a really tough life? You're so young, yet your cortisol reserves look like you're 60.”
She starts crying, “How did you know that?” And then she goes into all of the traumas that she's experienced and I'm there weeping with her. Her reproduction is shut off. Her body is craving someone to just pay attention and restore her reserves before it goes on to have a child. Having done this for 20 years, there's so much that I have seen that brings me to this awe that our bodies know better than we do about when it's the right time, what's the right thing for us. Our body is making these decisions without our brain being involved.
Foundations for Fertility Health
Dr. Aumatma Simmons: Some easy things people can do to support their fertility holistically, and the foundation is something that everyone can do all the time. It doesn't matter what age you are, it doesn't matter if you're trying to get pregnant right now– all of these things will help support the foundation so that either you're living more vitally or you're getting closer to being fertile, whichever it is that you desire.
First, food. Everyone talks about food–eat a balanced, varied, colorful, anti-inflammatory diet, and most of those things you can do on your own is eating lots of fruits and vegetables, more vegetables than fruit: 7 to 8 servings of vegetables, 1 to 2 servings of fruit is the ideal. And then, getting adequate protein: not skipping the complex carbohydrates. As a woman, you need unprocessed carbohydrates, like a baked sweet potato or carrots in a lentil soup or some potatoes into something. Those carbohydrates are really going to serve hormone production, specifically progesterone.
A lot of women go into deficiency of progesterone and don't realize that it's coming from their diet. They're missing out on this core food group that our bodies need specifically to produce the pro-life hormone called progesterone. Anti-inflammatory foods–usually the highest inflammatory foods are going to be dairy, soy, gluten, and sugar. Minimizing and or excluding them from your diet is perfectly fine.
The next piece of that foundation is going to be water intake, and a lot of people forget that water. Our bodies are mostly water, we need water to actually get hormones to where they need to go. So absolutely essential that we're hydrated.
The third foundation is sleep, and sleep is probably the fastest way to fertility. If we can get good, high quality sleep that is restorative, meaning you don't wake up multiple times through the night, you are asleep and in deep sleep states. We'll be tracking their sleep cycles. It's amazing to see this data, and it's such good feedback. It's perfectly fine to help document what's happening with the sleep and help address sleep issues.
Usually, a couple of hours before bed, screens are going to throw off the production of melatonin, so you're going to get lower quality sleep. The melatonin, ideally internally produced that hormone, is going to be the most potent antioxidant for our reproductive system. Healing and restoring reproduction is happening while we sleep with this hormone. One of my favorite things to do is get people to sleep more, and it's not always easy.
Empowering Your Fertility Journey
Dr. Aumatma Simmons: A lot of holistic practitioners come out of training and specialize in fertility. In some ways it's a good thing, because they can help support. When I talk to most of them, they're actually doing preconception care, which is helping support people to optimize their body before they get pregnant and before they even start trying. Fertility is a little more nuanced and has a lot of layers and it's almost like specializing in 15 things as part of fertility, because you have to be able to do all of these other things really well. You have to get to all the root causes. You have to be really good at getting to the root cause and then you have to be able to help, support and navigate that person through whatever the root causes are, and ideally you're doing that in a very short period of time, because they only have so much time before they need to get pregnant.
A lot of people will say “I'm talking to five other people and I'm going to try to figure this out. What are you going to use to figure out who's the right person? Logic? Whoever's the least expensive? There isn't a good framework to make these types of decisions. What I would like you to do is take away all the logic. Just put it aside 20 minutes and sit with yourself, sit with each other, get into the heart space and see what your intuition wants you to do. And your intuition will guide you to who the right person is. Because the reality is there's so many different ways and lots of practitioners and so many amazing people. You just need to find the one for you. And when you find that one, you will know.
