An Interview with Fertility Wellbeing Practitioner and the Co-Founder of The Non-Invasive Method, Juliet Owen-Nuttall

Introduce yourself! Share a little bit of what you do. 

My name is Juliet Owen-Nuttall. I am the co-founder of the non-invasive method. I help women over the age of 40 get pregnant without IVF. I kind of coined the phrase ‘Fabulous Fertile and over 40 ’ because many people think that age is a big factor in getting pregnant and it’s not. 

 

Tell us about your journey! What led you to this point? 

I was a career girl, I was a firefighter, I was really focused on making something of myself. And when I got with my present partner, Daniel, he said, “Well, you’re the girl I want kids with”. I was like, Okay, that’s great. I’m just not there yet. I was 35, I said, “I’m not quite there yet”. He was a lot younger than me. He was 28 at the time. So, both of us were kind of we’re not quite ready, but he was like, you’re the one. We had lots of challenges in life. Lots of adventures, and ended up being told at age 41, after a massive infection, after a mental breakdown, after a burnout, being told, I would never have children, I was never going to get pregnant naturally. So, I am trained in Chinese medicine, I went back into my training, and I created a plan because I was in a lot of pain. I wanted to work out what was going on and what led me to this place.

 

As I created a plan to increase my fertility and maximize my chances of a successful pregnancy, I became pregnant at age 44, and gave birth to my daughter at age 45. I realize that we’re told by doctors that it’s not possible. And I thought, well if my body created infertility, it can create fertility.

 

In my research, I realized that this was a big problem that was hitting women who were not ready for children in their 30s. So, I created the non-invasive method. I wanted to help women, particularly high achievers, and people pleasers. 

 

How did it feel when you were told that you would never be able to have kids? 

My natural reaction to many things is shame and blame. I went inward and really blamed myself, I really went into a tunnel, for a good couple of years, of self-blame. I’d also just lost my dad, so I was grieving. But I was also aware that I was grieving something that I hadn’t lost. It was this thing of like, I couldn’t grasp this, this element that there was something that I was missing out on, that I could never grasp.

 

I blamed myself with focusing on my career, I blame myself for all the choices that I made because I realized that all those choices had led me to that point of being told I’d never get pregnant naturally. I think for me, in particular, I’m training Chinese medicine, and even I, who was fully aware of menstrual issues, fully aware of the signals that my body was giving me, ignored the lot, to pursue my career, to pursue big goals. I ignored myself. And that’s what really got to me because I thought, I know this stuff, I’m trained in this stuff, and even I ignored it.  

 

That was where the real self-blame came in. That’s what really led me to believe to think “Hang on a second, but I’m trained in this and I’m ignoring it”. Then what are women doing are we not taking care of ourselves enough. It’s more of a pursuit of career, but we lose ourselves in that pursuit and we lose the fact that we need to take care of ourselves it’s almost like menstrual issues or weakness. 

 

Is that a common thing that you find with your clients who come to work with you as well? Do they experience those same thoughts and those same feelings? 

Completely. It’s almost like they don’t want to focus on themselves because they’re actually afraid. Taking care of themselves has not been the priority because they’re people pleasers, they’re always looking after other people. So, guilt and shame are big on the scale of emotions, because, well, I don’t deserve to look after myself, I don’t deserve to take care of myself, because I need to take care of everybody else. 

 

Can you prove the doctors wrong? Tell us more about that. 

Yes. So, even when I got pregnant, and that I’ve been working very closely with a gynecological unit for a number of years, up until the point when I decided I wasn’t going to go ahead with the surgery that they said I needed. They said I needed surgery. One, because of the pain. Two, because they said everything in my uterus was a mess. There was too much scarring for a pregnancy to take so it was best that I had surgery. And really, the options were a hysterectomy. So, when they found out that I was pregnant, they went crazy. They said I shouldn’t be doing it. I was high risk, my age, and all of my symptoms. It’s bound to be an ectopic pregnancy. It’s bound to not be a good pregnancy. I was absolutely terrified. I think I was in denial because the reaction from the doctors was still so negative. Still so negative about my age still so negative about you couldn’t possibly have done it. It was that you couldn’t possibly have done this by yourself. 

 

Why do you think this is? Why do you think that doctors can be so dismissive of women in their 40s who want to have babies? 

It’s because even doctors are not educated in the importance of our menstrual cycle. Countless women I speak to even women in their 20s, who say to me, I’m just given the contraceptive pill to deal with my menstrual issues. And really, all menstrual issues are hormonal imbalance. And so, doctors are not taught how to manage that. They’re just taught to put a sticking plaster on it. So, I come from the approach of the other end, we don’t put a sticking plaster on it, we investigate what’s going on. We look at why this is happening for a long-time shift. Not only you’re going to get pregnant, you’re also going to shift your health because your menstrual health is a direct indication of your overall health. So, doctors are not trained in that doctors are not trained in any kind of nutrition. They don’t believe that it can change. They just take a snapshot and say this is your birth date, and it cannot change so we’re just going to deal with those and those results, that’s all we’re going to deal with. They don’t believe that that can change. 

Luana Ribeira

Luana Ribeira is a best selling author, international speaker and host of business Innovators Radio.