Welcome back to the As a Woman podcast. I'm your host Dr. Natalie Crawford, and today we have a very special bonus episode for you.

This is a fertility Q&A where I answer your real nuanced questions about your hormones, your cycle, and your reproductive future.

Today's questions span the entire fertility spectrum, from planning ahead in your 20s to preparing for conception with a partner,

understanding how supplements or endo might impact ovulation in your journey.

These are thoughtful, vulnerable questions that so many of you are asking.

And my goal is to give you clarity, answers grounded in science,

and practical guidance that you can use right now.

I am really thrilled to introduce you to Emily Whitlock, who is the behind the scenes of Natalie Coffers. So if you've ever

interacted with us on social, we both play a role there. But Emily has been huge and helping

the content reach more of you. And now she's taking one for the team, joining us today,

answering questions. Hi. Thanks Emily for being here. Of course. Always happy to help. I love it. So Emily has filtered through tons of the questions that you guys have asked. And M, tell us which ones we're going to dive into. Okay. So the first one is about the future of her fertility. So she says, hi, Dr. Natalie. My name is Avery. I'm 23 years old. I don't want kids yet, but I definitely do in the future. I'm wondering how best I can prepare my body so that my fertility is at its best when I am ready to have kids eventually. Oh, I love this question. And honestly, this is so different than when I was this age. I remember being in med school here in Austin and out of Starbucks with my friends. And we were trying to talk about what field we wanted to go into of medicine.

And we had this whole discussion about what we should do about our fertility in the future.

And the answer then was nothing.

I guess we just will hope that we'll be ready to find a partner and have kids at the right time.

But really, we've pivoted our thoughts on this.

And it's something that you and I talk about a lot.

And so I love this question.

I would say number one is that it's really important to know your cycle.

Your cycle is providing a lot of information about your body, not just cycle day one, but is it coming regularly? Are you having spotting in the ludial phase? When are you actually ovulating? Because these little red flag warning signs that your body gives you now in your early 20s are things that you can investigate and work on well before you want to get pregnant. So the first thing you can do is just get to know what your normal is because if you don't know what's normal, how do you know when things go abnormal?

Number two is going to be check your ovarian reserve.

Even though you're young, your AMH should be fine.

This is a simple

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