IVF and IUI preparation

Start here: the ninety-day window

If you are preparing for IVF or IUI and want one organising idea, it is this. A follicle takes roughly ninety days to develop through to ovulation or retrieval. Anything you start in the final fortnight before a cycle will not change the eggs in that cycle. Anything you start three months out might.

That single fact sorts most of what gets sold for IVF preparation into things worth doing early, things worth having on the day, and things that are neither.

It also means that if your retrieval is next week, the honest answer is that supplements are not the lever any more. Rest, turning up, and asking your clinic your actual questions are.

What is worth starting ninety days out

Your clinic's protocol comes first, and it overrides everything on this page. Fertility clinics often have specific instructions about which supplements to take and which to stop, and they are working from your bloodwork rather than from general advice.

A prenatal, if you are not already on one. Not because it improves retrieval numbers but because a transfer may work and the neural tube closes in the first four weeks. Folic acid needs to already be there.

CoQ10 has the most credible evidence in this category, and it is narrower than the marketing suggests. The trials are largely in people with diminished ovarian reserve or poor response to stimulation, not in the general population. If you are heading into a cycle, particularly if you have had a poor response before, there is a reasonable case for it. If you are a good responder, the expected benefit is much smaller than the shelf talk implies. Ubiquinol is the more readily absorbed form.

A word on everything else. The IVF supplement market is large and mostly unevidenced. Be particularly wary of anything containing ashwagandha or other adaptogens, which are not recommended in pregnancy and which you may still be taking when a transfer works.

Read something substantial rather than something reassuring. It Starts with the Egg is the book most reproductive endocrinologists are relaxed about patients reading, because it engages with the actual literature rather than promising outcomes.

What helps on injection days

Stimulation involves injecting yourself daily for roughly ten days to two weeks, usually into subcutaneous fat in the abdomen or thigh. Most people find the anticipation harder than the needle.

Cold and vibration genuinely reduce injection pain, and the mechanism is not placebo. It is gate control, where competing sensory input dampens the pain signal before it registers. A vibrating cold device applied just proximal to the site for a few seconds before and during the injection is a well-established technique in paediatric and adult phlebotomy, and it transfers straightforwardly to self-administered fertility injections. If you are needle-averse, this is the single most useful thing on this page.

Rotate sites. Repeated injection into the same spot produces bruising and lumps that make subsequent injections harder.

Let the medication reach room temperature if it has been refrigerated. Cold fluid stings going in.

Why a planner earns its place

This is the part of IVF nobody warns you about: it is an enormous administrative burden delivered during an emotionally terrible period. Multiple medications with different timings, doses that change on short notice after a monitoring appointment, injection windows measured in hours, and a stream of instructions delivered by phone while you are at work.

People do not forget doses because they are careless. They forget because the protocol changed on Tuesday and the new instruction arrived by voicemail.

A dedicated planner does two things a phone does not. It gives you one place where the current protocol lives, so you are not scrolling a text thread to check tonight's dose. And it gives you somewhere to put the rest of it: what the monitoring showed, what you want to ask next time, and how you are actually doing, which the clinical process has no room for and which matters later when you are deciding whether to go again.

Surrogacy and donor journeys carry a heavier version of the same load, with legal and financial tracking on top, which is why that has its own planner rather than a section in a general one.

IUI is a different thing, and lighter

IUI involves either no medication or mild oral stimulation, monitoring, and a timed insemination. No retrieval, no anaesthetic, usually no injections beyond a possible trigger shot.

The ninety-day logic still applies to egg development, so a prenatal early is still sensible. Most of the injection-day and heavy-tracking apparatus is not needed. If you have been offered IUI, the useful preparation is understanding your success rate per cycle, which varies enormously with age and diagnosis, and agreeing in advance how many cycles you will do before reassessing. That conversation is worth more than anything you can buy.

What to stop, and when to ask rather than read

Ask your clinic before starting or stopping anything, including things sold as natural. This is not a disclaimer for its own sake. Supplements can interact with stimulation protocols, and your clinic is titrating medication against your bloodwork.

Ask them specifically about: any adaptogen or herbal blend, high-dose antioxidants, anything affecting clotting, and whether they want you on anything additional before transfer.

Call rather than search for: severe abdominal bloating or pain, rapid weight gain, breathlessness or significantly reduced urination during or after stimulation. Those can indicate ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which is time-sensitive and has no product answer.

Everything on this page was chosen by Mindy Motta, FNP-C, who works in women's health and writes everything published here.