You can increase your consumption of vitamins and minerals by changing your cooking techniques. Choose softer techniques, so that your food remains nutritious but loses none of its flavour.

Choosing and preparing

Selecting food that contains masses of vitamins is good. Cooking it correctly is much better. Remember that vitamins are susceptible to both heat and light, while minerals are leached out of food by water. To get the full benefit of the nutrients in fruit and plants, stick ‘em in a dark, cool place and use gentle cooking methods — and not too much water. Raw vegetables and salad make a good starter, so long as you go easy on the vinaigrette. Eat at least 2 pieces of raw fruit per day: this is a good way of squirreling away vitamin C and the fiber wanted to prevent bowel difficulties.

Losing minerals

Heat improves flavour; provides help in the absorption of nutrient elements and removes certain toxins. Cooking is a kind of ‘pre-digestion’ that reduces the workload of the stomach and frees critical energy, which can then be put to other uses. But when it’s done incorrectly, it causes minerals to be lost into the water, destroys vitamins and even creates carcinogenic substances (particularly during griddling and frying).

Take your Temperature

Though superseded in clinics by more classy systems, some of the people use their temperature curve to help forecast ovulation.

A stringent routine

Your body temperature curve varies as per your hormonal clock. Ovulation, particularly, causes a rise in temperature in the monthly cycle. Recording the curve enables any disorder in the cycle to be detected. You will need to utilise a special thermometer that helps you to read body temperature very precisely, as the permutations are quite tiny.

When properly interpreted, the temperature curve provides valuable information about ovulation, but you will need to keep a record of the curve for a minimum of three months. All that you need to do is take your temperature every morning prior to getting up, keep a note of it on paper and plot it on graph paper. It’s inconsequential where you take your temperature (mouth, vagina, anal sphincter or under the arm), provided that you keep to the same place, use the same thermometer and do it at the same time each day. Getting pregnant can need this sort of routine.

Temperature variations

Make sure your graph is big enough to allow the temperature variations between 36 degrees and 37 degrees C (96.8 degrees and 98.6 degrees F) to be clearly seen. A word of warning: the results are deformed if you work at night, are extraordinarily stressed, have drunk alcohol the evening before, are suffering from a fever, or if you have recently undergone a course of hormonal treatment (all treatments concerning a base of oestrogens or progestogen, including the pill).

Poppy Schneider is a fertility coach and columnist on subjects like the best ways to get pregnant fast, and popular fertility manuals like Pregnancy Miracle.