The unfortunate thing with modern dietary options is that you can eat what you perceive as a “balanced” diet and still be undernourished—not calorie-undernourished though, but micronutrient-undernourished. That’s the sneaky gap between what your body actually needs to run hormones, repair DNA, and mature eggs—and what your fork delivers between meetings and espresso shots.
Two-thirds of women of reproductive age worldwide are short on at least one essential micronutrient (Stevens et al., 2022), which admittedly can be a very long list (there are ~30 essential vitamin and mineral micronutrients). That’s a problem if you’re trying to conceive, freezing eggs, or starting IVF—because the so-called “little” nutrients do the heavy lifting. An egg takes about 220 days to mature, with a particularly sensitive ~71-day sprint before ovulation.