What I Did Before Getting Pregnant

The preparation started well before the positive test. This is everything we did, my half and his.

The blood work

By the time a pregnancy test shows two lines, your baby's neural tube is already developing. That's the structure that becomes the brain and spinal cord. So the window where folic acid matters most is largely over before most people even know they're pregnant. I knew because I had been reading about how to prepare myself for pregnancy.

The one most useful thing I did was to visit the doctor and get a round of blood work.

What I got checked

• Iron. I have had low iron levels before, and they had already caused me other problems, so this was the one I worried most about. Pregnancy pushes your blood volume up dramatically, and starting from a low baseline makes everything harder. My doctor and I paid the most attention to this one, and I got mine corrected first.
• General vitamin and mineral levels. Anything that came back low was far easier to fix before pregnancy than during it.

What I ate, alongside the supplements

Supplements were only half of it, the other half was the plate itself. An antioxidant-rich, balanced diet is linked to egg quality: developing eggs are large, vulnerable cells, and antioxidants help protect them from the everyday oxidative stress that damages cells over time. The foods that kept showing up in my reading were berries, leafy greens, nuts like almonds and walnuts, and a generally Mediterranean-style pattern of vegetables, fruit, and whole grains. These were the suggested foods, and I am a vegetarian, so that is what my plate looked like. If you are not, lean meat fits here too. And these had an egg-quality reason behind them, beyond generic healthy eating.

And preparation belongs to both people trying to conceive. His half is further down this page.

The vitamins, before and after

What I took changed in two stages. What matters before conception is different from what matters once you're pregnant.

Before conception: just folic acid

Folic acid is the one nutrient worth starting before trying, for exactly the timing reason above. At this stage it was all I took. A daily prenatal with 400 mcg of folic acid. From my reading, the general range is 0.4–1 mg, ideally starting 2–3 months before conception. Anyone with a previous pregnancy affected by a neural tube defect is usually advised a much higher dose, but only under a care provider's guidance.

Once I conceived: what I took changed

I switched to a prenatal that included DHA, for the brain development that matters more as pregnancy goes on. I also added a separate iron supplement, since the prenatal alone didn't hit my daily target. For reference, from my reading and not a prescription, a typical Canadian prenatal has 16–20 mg of iron and 200–300 mg of DHA per day. DHA crosses the placenta and is used heavily in the third trimester for brain and retina development.

The iron did a number on my stomach, so I added magnesium on top of that, not because it's a headline pregnancy nutrient, but purely to offset the digestive side effect. It worked.

Vitamin D and calcium

Vitamin D and calcium matter too. General guidance is up to 2,000 IU of vitamin D and roughly 1,000 mg of calcium a day. I took vitamin D and calcium supplements as well. But discuss with your doctor what supplements you need, rather than simply following what someone else took.

One caution I came across

Not every "vitamin A" is equal in pregnancy: very high doses of preformed vitamin A (retinol) have been linked to birth defects, which is why many prenatals substitute beta-carotene instead. I checked my own label rather than assuming, worth the two minutes.

His half of the preparation

Preconception prep is a two-person job. There's a real, researched half of this that belongs to him, and it's worth doing in parallel with everything else in this section.

Move, but don't overdo it

Regular moderate exercise is linked to healthier testosterone levels and better sperm motility and shape. The sweet spot in the research is something like walking or jogging 30 minutes, 3 to 6 times a week. No marathon training needed. Interestingly, very intense or extreme exercise (long-distance running, high-altitude trekking) is linked to worse sperm health. Moderate and consistent beats extreme.

Eat like it matters, because it does

A balanced diet is associated with better semen quality. The specifics that matter are fruit and vegetables, antioxidants (vitamin C, vitamin E, zinc, selenium), omega-3s, vitamin D, and folate. It's the same "eat the colourful plate" advice you'd give anyone, except here there's a fertility reason attached to it too. Weight matters alongside diet, carrying excess weight is linked to lower sperm counts, so this is diet quality and a healthy weight together, not one or the other.

What we actually did: dates in milk

Alongside the exercise and the diet, I made him dates in milk, dried dates (kharak), warmed in milk. A traditional preparation, with real research behind it. A few studies link date consumption to increases in testosterone and improvements in sperm count and motility, and animal studies show similar results. Human research is still smaller in scale than the diet-and-exercise evidence above, but it's a genuine, ongoing area of study, and that's why it stayed in our routine.