Book in one sentence: A functional medicine nurse-practitioner explains why your hormone labs can look completely normal while you feel completely terrible, and what to do about it.
- What Is Is It Me or My Hormones? About?
- Why Your Mood, Your Eating, and Your Hormones Are Running the Same Loop
- What Is Estrogen Dominance and Why Isn’t Anyone Testing for It?
- What Pick Actually Recommends You Do
- Is Is It Me or My Hormones? Worth Reading?
- Books Like Is It Me or My Hormones?
What Is Is It Me or My Hormones? About? {#what-is-it-about}
Picture a woman who has seen ten doctors. Her labs keep coming back normal. She keeps getting offered antidepressants. She’s not depressed, she says. Or maybe she is, but only for one week out of every four, which seems like a different problem entirely. Nobody has a satisfying answer for her.
Marcelle Pick built her career treating that woman. She co-founded Women to Women, a Maine clinic she started alongside Christiane Northrup, and spent decades in clinical practice before writing this book. Her argument, built from patient case after patient case, is that conventional medicine keeps looking at the wrong hormones. It tests estrogen and progesterone, finds them in the “normal range,” and calls it a day. Meanwhile, cortisol and insulin (the hormones that actually run the show) are never checked, never addressed, and never implicated.
Pick is an OB/GYN nurse-practitioner writing from a functional medicine framework. Her tone is warm and direct without being breathless. The book opens with her own story: sitting in a car outside a pottery shop at age 20, too numb to feel anything, unable to understand why her exciting life wasn’t landing. Only later did she recognize it as PMS. That personal grounding gives the book something most hormone guides don’t have: the writer has actually been in the body she’s describing.
The book covers estrogen dominance, adrenal dysregulation, thyroid, mood, weight, cravings, libido, and perimenopause, then delivers a graduated four-week plan for fixing it. What makes it useful for anyone thinking about eating and emotions is that Pick connects the mood-hormone link directly to food behavior: cravings, stress eating, comfort eating, loss of motivation, and the particular misery of doing everything “right” and still gaining weight.
Why Your Mood, Your Eating, and Your Hormones Are Running the Same Loop {#the-loop}
Here’s the pattern Pick describes over and over: a woman’s hormone levels look fine on paper, but two weeks of every month she’s snapping at everyone, craving sugar, gaining weight, and barely sleeping. Her doctor shrugs. She wonders if she’s losing her mind.
She’s not. The cravings aren’t weakness. The mood swings aren’t character flaws. They’re downstream effects of a system running out of balance upstream.
Pick’s central framework is the hormonal cascade. Your body has more than 100 hormones, and they talk to each other constantly. Cortisol and insulin are the dominant voices. When cortisol stays elevated from chronic stress (or poor sleep, or skipping meals, or a life that runs too hot), it suppresses thyroid function, disrupts leptin and ghrelin (your hunger and fullness signals), and depletes the precursors your body needs to make progesterone. Dysregulated insulin causes blood sugar spikes and crashes that trigger more cortisol. Estrogen and progesterone sit downstream of all of this, which is why fixing them directly often doesn’t work.
The mood-eating connection runs right through this cascade. When cortisol is high, your brain craves fast fuel (sugar, refined carbs). Low progesterone pulls serotonin down with it, making cravings worse and emotional regulation harder. Blood sugar crashes after the granola bar you had for breakfast, and your body reads it as an emergency and reaches for the nearest quick fix. This isn’t psychological weakness. It’s biology.
“If you crave sugar, sweets, and starches, that’s partly because of the ways hormones affect your brain’s response to serotonin. Anxiety, depression, and mood swings can likewise result from imbalanced levels of stress hormones, serotonin, and other neurotransmitters, including dopamine.”
Pick’s most useful reframe: you cannot diet your way out of hormonal eating patterns. Restricting calories when cortisol is elevated and insulin is dysregulated tends to make things worse (more cortisol, more cravings, more fat storage). The tractable entry point is blood sugar stabilization, not restriction.
One caveat worth naming: Pick uses the term “adrenal fatigue” throughout the book. Conventional endocrinologists don’t recognize it as a diagnosis, and the evidence base is genuinely thin. The underlying concept (that chronic stress dysregulates cortisol patterns) has real clinical support. The specific term is contested. Read it as “chronic HPA axis dysregulation” if you prefer language with harder evidence behind it.
What Is Estrogen Dominance and Why Isn’t Anyone Testing for It? {#estrogen-dominance}
Estrogen dominance is probably the most practically useful concept in this book. It’s also the one most likely to explain what’s happening when your labs come back fine and you still feel terrible.
Estrogen dominance doesn’t mean your estrogen is high. It means your estrogen is high relative to your progesterone. Both values can sit comfortably inside the reference range while the ratio between them is badly off. High-normal estrogen plus low-normal progesterone produces a recognizable symptom picture: bloating, breast tenderness, weight gain in hips and thighs, cyclical mood instability, heavy or irregular bleeding, and a general sense of feeling overwhelmed that gets worse in the week before your period. Two “normal” numbers on a blood test won’t flag it.
Pick identifies the main drivers:
- Chronic stress steals progesterone precursors (cortisol and progesterone share a biosynthetic pathway)
- Insulin resistance promotes estrogen production in fat cells
- Excess body fat is itself a source of estrogen, which creates a self-reinforcing loop
- Xenoestrogens from plastics, pesticides, and synthetic fragrances mimic estrogen and add to the total burden
- Poor liver detoxification means spent estrogen isn’t being cleared properly
One thing Pick says that most books in this genre miss: estrogen dominance tends to get worse in perimenopause, not better. Progesterone drops first and faster as the transition begins, so the ratio tips further toward dominance even as absolute estrogen levels fall. This is why many women in their 40s feel more hormonally chaotic than they did at 35, not less.
The practical answer isn’t necessarily prescription hormones. Daily cruciferous vegetables, ground flaxseed, adequate fiber, and regular bowel movements all support the liver’s ability to clear spent estrogen. Reducing xenoestrogen exposure (glass containers over plastic, filtered water, unscented personal care products) reduces the incoming burden. These aren’t dramatic interventions, but they work on the actual mechanism.
What Pick Actually Recommends You Do {#what-to-do}
The second half of the book is a graduated four-week plan. Pick adds one or two changes per week deliberately, because asking for a complete overhaul on day one is how most plans fail. The core of it:
Dietary foundations first:
- Half the plate is nonstarchy vegetables, one quarter protein, one quarter low-glycemic carbohydrate
- Never eat a carbohydrate alone (always paired with protein and fat)
- Three meals and two snacks, eating within 30-60 minutes of waking
- Daily cruciferous vegetables for estrogen detox support
- Two tablespoons of ground flaxseed or chia daily for estrogen metabolism
- Eliminate sugar, refined flour, gluten, and cow’s milk dairy (at minimum initially)
Lifestyle anchors:
- Seven to nine hours of sleep consistently (Pick frames sleep as a hormonal intervention, not just rest)
- Moderate interval exercise four days a week, not long steady-state cardio (which raises cortisol)
- A daily parasympathetic practice that starts at five minutes of belly breathing and scales to 30 minutes by week four
Supplement foundations for everyone:
- Methylated multivitamin (with 5-MTHF, not just folic acid)
- Fish oil for hormone synthesis and inflammation
- Magnesium (depleted by stress, supports sleep and muscle function)
- Ground flaxseed (lignans for estrogen metabolism)
Targeted additions (for PMS, perimenopause, mood, or cravings) layer on after the foundation is established. Pick is firm about sequence: you can’t supplement your way out of a destabilized foundation.
The most actionable single change: stabilize blood sugar first. Protein and fat at every meal, starting at breakfast, is the intervention with the most downstream hormonal benefit. It quiets cortisol, reduces cravings, and begins to let progesterone normalize. Everything else builds on top of it.
Is Is It Me or My Hormones? Worth Reading? {#worth-reading}
Read this if you’ve been told your labs are normal but you don’t feel normal, especially if mood, cravings, or weight are involved in a way that feels cyclical. If you’ve tried restricting and exercising your way through it and it isn’t working, Pick’s upstream-first framework is a useful reorientation. She’s warmer and more emotionally attuned than most hormone books, and more clinically grounded than most wellness books.
Skip it if you’ve already read Sara Gottfried’s The Hormone Cure or Brain Body Diet, which cover the same framework with more granular testing protocols. Also skip if you’re looking for heavily cited research; Pick gestures at evidence without pointing to specific papers, which is a fair criticism.
One caveat: the book is built on Pick’s clinical practice at Women to Women, a patient population that sought out functional medicine practitioners. Women with severe hormonal disorders, autoimmune conditions, or complex psychiatric histories may need more than this framework offers. Pick acknowledges this, but the book’s optimism about what’s achievable through diet and lifestyle alone can sometimes outrun what the evidence supports.
The reader rating reflects the niche audience more than the book’s quality. For its intended reader, it’s one of the better hormone guides available.
Books Like Is It Me or My Hormones? {#books-like}
| Book | Author | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| It’s Not You It’s Your Hormones | Nicki Williams | UK-based companion; covers similar ground with a sharper tone |
| The Hormone Shift | Tasneem Bhatia | More clinical; useful if you want deeper testing context |
| Hormone Intelligence | Aviva Romm | Broader scope, more research-forward, integrative medicine angle |
| The Perimenopause Solution | Emma Ellice-Flint & Shahzadi Harper | UK clinical focus; strong on perimenopause specifically |
| Rising Strong | Brené Brown | Pairs well if the emotional side of hormonal shifts is what you’re working through |