Excess Matters

Tag: hormones

  • MenuPause by Anna Cabeca: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: A rotating five-plan eating system built specifically for women who are doing everything right and still not losing weight during menopause.

    What Is MenuPause About?

    You’ve been eating well. You cut the sugar, added the greens, maybe tried keto for a few months. It worked, until it didn’t. The scale stopped moving right around the same time the hot flashes started, and now you’re stuck with both.

    MenuPause is the third book from Anna Cabeca, a triple-board-certified OB-GYN who went through early menopause twice (once at 39, once in her late 40s) and built a clinical framework around what actually moved the needle for her and her patients. The first two books, The Hormone Fix and Keto-Green 16, established her core approach. This one is the applied version: five distinct 6-day eating plans designed to rotate based on what your body is currently doing. The point isn’t to find the one perfect diet. The point is that rotating between plans prevents the metabolic adaptation that causes most menopausal weight-loss attempts to stall.

    It reads part cookbook, part symptom management manual. More than 100 recipes are mapped to specific plan restrictions, and a symptom-matching system helps you pick the right plan for right now. If you’ve read Cabeca before, this extends the framework rather than replacing it. If you haven’t, it’s accessible on its own.

    Why the Plateau Happens {#why-the-plateau-happens}

    Most diet books assume the body works the same way at 50 as it did at 35. Cabeca argues that’s the core mistake. She lays out six physiological mechanisms operating simultaneously during menopause, and understanding which ones are most active for you determines which plan to use.

    Estrogen imbalance shifts where fat gets stored. As estrogen falls, fat moves away from hips and thighs toward the abdomen. It also disrupts leptin and neuropeptide Y, the hormones controlling hunger and fullness (an animal study at Oregon Health and Science University found this disruption alone caused a 67% increase in food intake).

    Estrogen dominance coexists with low estrogen in a way that seems contradictory. Environmental estrogens from plastics, pesticides, and petrochemicals accumulate in fat cells as the liver’s clearance capacity declines. The result is relative dominance even as systemic estrogen is technically falling.

    Insulin resistance deepens as declining estrogen impairs the cell’s response to insulin. Every snack triggers a spike. Those repeated spikes, Cabeca argues, are the direct driver of hot flashes, brain fog, and the specific kind of fatigue that doesn’t respond to sleep.

    Low vitamin D follows declining estrogen, because estrogen supports vitamin D production. Low D independently increases fat storage and worsens hot flashes.

    Muscle loss accelerates sharply after 50. Less muscle means a slower resting metabolic rate, and most calorie-restriction diets make this worse by accelerating the muscle loss.

    Cortisol elevation is where menopause meets the decade that also tends to bring aging parents, career transitions, and adolescent kids. Cortisol raises blood sugar, promotes abdominal fat storage, and suppresses the sex hormones the body most needs.

    The practical payoff of this framework: if your dominant issue is autoimmune inflammation, you need a different plan than if your issue is a plateau from standard keto. One diet cannot address all six mechanisms equally. That’s the core design logic of the whole system.

    How the Five Plans Actually Work {#how-the-five-plans-actually-work}

    Each plan runs six days. Plans 1 through 4 are targeted interventions. Plan 5 is the long-term default. The rotation logic is what separates this from a typical cookbook: different dietary patterns produce different adaptive responses, and cycling between them prevents the body from settling into a state where any single approach stops working.

    Plan 1: Keto-Green Extreme

    The most restrictive. Eliminates grains, dairy, eggs, legumes, nightshades, nuts, seeds, and most fruit. What’s left: animal protein, leafy greens, and healthy fats.

    This one targets weight-loss resistance caused by autoimmune inflammation. When the immune system is chronically overactivated (Hashimoto’s, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus), fat cells become physically inflamed and can’t release stored fat. Removing the primary dietary triggers of autoimmune activation is what breaks the cycle. Annie, one of Cabeca’s patients, was having 60 hot flashes a day after surgical menopause. After 2.5 months on this plan: zero.

    Plan 2: Keto-Green Plant-Based Detox

    A fully vegan version of the keto-green approach, using tempeh, tofu, lentils, and legumes as protein. It targets digestive complaints, elevated cholesterol, and cardiovascular risk. Cabeca also recommends it two to three times a year for all women as a gut reset and estrogen detox, regardless of symptoms.

    Plan 3: The Carbohydrate Pause

    Zero carbohydrates. Meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, bone broth. No vegetables, no fruit. This is the plateau-breaking shock protocol, with a hard 12-day limit (without plant foods to buffer the acid load, the all-animal diet becomes acidifying). Zinc from animal protein supports testosterone production; vitamin D from fatty fish supports progesterone. One participant lost 7 pounds in 6 days after a three-week plateau on conventional keto.

    Plan 4: Keto-Green Cleanse

    Six days of liquids only: green smoothies, bone broth, vegetable juices, herbal teas. Targets burnout, post-holiday recovery, and cravings resets. The bone broth isn’t decorative: it provides glutamine (gut lining repair) and glycine (sleep architecture). One participant used it after Thanksgiving and ended up three pounds below her goal weight.

    Plan 5: Carbohydrate Modification

    The maintenance default. Gluten-free grains, legumes, sweet potato, and lower-glycemic fruit reintroduce at 50 to 60 grams of carbs per day, adjusting upward toward 75 to 100 grams if the scale cooperates. Most women live here most of the time, returning to Plans 1 through 4 as symptoms flare.

    The Rule That Matters More Than Which Plan You Pick {#the-rule-that-matters-more-than-which-plan-you-pick}

    Across all five plans, one behavioral rule is repeated more than any other: no snacking. Not even healthy snacking.

    This cuts directly against the advice many women have followed for years (“small frequent meals,” “keep blood sugar stable”). Cabeca’s case is the opposite: every eating event triggers insulin release. Fat cells cannot release stored fat while insulin is elevated. The extended period between meals, especially a 16-hour overnight window, is when insulin drops to baseline. That baseline is what allows fat cells to actually open.

    “Although menopause is natural, suffering is optional. This is what MenuPause is all about.” — Chapter 1

    The logic is straightforward and supported by a solid body of evidence on insulin and fat storage. It’s also rarely presented this directly in diet books, possibly because “eat less often” is a harder sell.

    If you’ve been eating clean, exercising, and can’t figure out why nothing is moving, the no-snacking framework alone may reframe what’s happening.

    Is MenuPause Worth Reading? {#is-menupause-worth-reading}

    Read this if you’ve hit a weight-loss plateau during perimenopause or menopause despite a clean diet. Or if you’ve tried standard keto and stopped getting results. Or if you want a cookbook that matches meal plans to specific symptoms rather than prescribing one universal protocol. The rotation model, the symptom-matching logic, and the practical recipe library (over 100 recipes, clearly mapped to plan restrictions) are the genuine strengths.

    Skip it if you need RCT-level evidence before trying any approach. The metabolic adaptation rationale behind diet cycling is reasonable, but the specific plan rotations are based on Cabeca’s clinical experience, not controlled trials. The alkaline diet framework (the claim that urinary pH is a meaningful proxy for systemic hormonal environment) is contested in the mainstream literature.

    One caveat: several protocols feature Cabeca’s own branded supplements prominently (Mighty Maca Plus, Keto-Green Shake). They’re disclosed as hers, but they’re written into the plans in ways that position them as near-necessary. Worth knowing before you start.

    Books Like MenuPause {#books-like-menupause}

    BookAuthorBest For
    The Hormone FixAnna CabecaThe foundational Keto-Green protocol MenuPause builds on
    The Menopause Diet PlanHillary Wright & Elizabeth WardEvidence-based, dietitian-written menopause nutrition guide
    Fast Like a GirlMindy PelzFasting protocols timed to hormonal cycles; complements MenuPause’s what-to-eat approach
    Eat to Thrive During MenopauseBrandi Givens-HuberPractical, recipe-forward menopause nutrition without the integrative medicine framing
    Women, Food and HormonesSara GottfriedHormone-focused ketogenic approach; similar audience, more explicit about evidence quality

  • Women, Food, and Hormones by Sara Gottfried: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: Keto was designed for men. This is the version built for how women’s hormones actually work.

    What Is Women, Food, and Hormones About?

    Picture this: you and your husband go on the same diet. Same meals, same macros, same commitment. He loses twelve pounds in ten days. You gain two, feel brain-fogged, and quietly blame your own willpower. Gottfried calls this the Keto Paradox, and her core argument is that it isn’t a personal failure. It’s a design flaw in the diet itself.

    Sara Gottfried is a Harvard-trained OB-GYN with 25 years in clinical practice and several previous books (including The Hormone Cure and Brain Body Diet). She’s also, by her own account, a former keto refugee who gained weight on the classic protocol before eventually redesigning it for her own hormonal biology. What’s in this book is the result of those experiments (on herself first, then on hundreds of patients).

    The argument she builds is narrow but solid: the ketogenic diet was developed, tested, and refined primarily on men. Decades of nutrition research excluded female subjects entirely. Dietary prescriptions shaped by that research get applied to women wholesale, without accounting for estrogen cycling, cortisol sensitivity, thyroid function, or the gut bacteria that clear estrogen from the body. Gottfried’s solution isn’t to abandon keto. It’s to fix it for the body that was left out of the original equation.

    Why Does Keto Work for Him and Not for You?

    Gottfried names the specific mechanisms here, which is where the book earns its keep. It’s not that women are just “different” in some vague way. There are four concrete failure modes when women follow classic keto.

    Cortisol spikes. Carbohydrates help regulate the HPA axis (your stress-response system). Cut them completely and many women’s cortisol rises, storing fat rather than burning it. Men don’t experience this the same way because their HPA axis responds differently to carb restriction.

    Thyroid suppression. Aggressive carb restriction can block the conversion of inactive T4 into active T3, the thyroid hormone your metabolism actually uses. The result looks like standard hypothyroid symptoms: fatigue, hair loss, cold hands, slowed weight loss. Women are more vulnerable to this than men are.

    Estrogen recirculation. Here’s the one most keto guides completely miss. Your gut houses a community of bacteria called the estrobolome (their job is to metabolize estrogen so it can be excreted). They need fiber to do that. Classic keto crashes dietary fiber to around 6 grams per day; Gottfried considers 25 grams the floor. When the estrobolome is starved, estrogen gets reabsorbed rather than cleared, and the result is estrogen dominance: weight gain, PMS amplification, breast tenderness, mood swings.

    Inflammation from saturated fat. Some women respond to high saturated fat intake with elevated CRP (a marker of inflammation), driven by differences in gut microbiome composition and how estrogen receptors interact with dietary fat. This doesn’t happen in everyone, but it’s a real pattern that classic keto doesn’t account for.

    “The ketogenic diet has mostly been studied in men and works quite well for them. Women, on the other hand, tend not to do so well on this diet. A man and a woman can go on an identical keto diet and get completely different results.”

    None of these are willpower problems. They’re predictable consequences of applying a male-derived protocol to a female body.

    The Four Hormones That Drive Weight Loss (or Block It)

    Gottfried organizes female metabolism around four hormonal levers. Insulin is the master lever. When it’s chronically elevated, it suppresses every other fat-burning signal in the body, blocks growth hormone, disrupts thyroid conversion, and parks fat preferentially in the visceral (abdominal) region. Her clinical targets are specific: fasting insulin below 5 mU/L, fasting glucose at 70-85 mg/dL, HbA1c below 5.4%.

    The patient case she uses to illustrate this is worth understanding. A 38-year-old woman (Melissa) came in 30 pounds overweight, with borderline thyroid dysfunction alongside insulin resistance. After completing the Gottfried Protocol, which addresses insulin first, her thyroid function improved without any thyroid-specific treatment. The hormones weren’t separate problems requiring separate solutions. They were one tangled system with one primary entry point.

    Cortisol is the second lever, and it’s where most women’s keto attempts unravel. Women are twice as likely as men to experience chronic stress, anxiety, and depression, which means they’re starting from a higher cortisol baseline. Add aggressive fasting or hard carb restriction to that, and cortisol climbs further. Gottfried’s fasting protocol ramps gradually (12:12 to 14:10 to 16:8) to avoid the cortisol spike that sudden OMAD or extended fasting triggers.

    Testosterone gets its own chapter because most women don’t know they have it in meaningful amounts. It’s actually the most abundant biologically active hormone in women (more abundant than estrogen), and it declines steadily from age 20, reaching about half its peak by 40. Low testosterone shows up as muscle loss, fatigue, joint pain, passive mood, and difficulty maintaining weight. One finding that’s genuinely counterintuitive: both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee lower testosterone in women. The opposite is true in men. Eliminating coffee is among Gottfried’s first recommendations for women with these symptoms.

    Growth hormone rounds out the four. It declines 1-3% per year after age 30, and the decline accelerates with every lifestyle stressor (sugar, poor sleep, stress, sedentary behavior). Women are positioned to recover GH quickly because they produce it in more frequent pulses than men, and anaerobic exercise triggers a disproportionately large GH response in women. A 24-hour fast raises GH by approximately 1,300% in women. Even a 14-16 hour overnight fast produces meaningful elevation. GH is produced primarily in the first 3-4 hours of sleep, which makes sleep quality a direct metabolic lever.

    What Is the Gottfried Protocol?

    The protocol runs four weeks, structured sequentially so each phase sets up the next.

    Week 1: Detox before ketosis. The most unusual element. Gottfried’s rationale: environmental toxins (BPA, glyphosate, endocrine disruptors she calls “obesogens”) are stored in fat cells. When fat burns, they’re released into the bloodstream. Without active liver and gut support, those liberated toxins drive inflammation and contribute to weight regain. Week 1 front-loads cruciferous vegetables, high fiber, MCT oil, and magnesium. Overnight fasting starts at 12-14 hours on non-consecutive days, so the longer fasting window later doesn’t arrive as a shock.

    Days 8-28: Full implementation. The macro formula differs from classic keto in ways that matter. Classic keto runs roughly 10% carbs, 20% protein, 70% fat. The Gottfried Protocol uses a 2:1 ratio (2 grams of fat per 1 gram of combined carbohydrate + protein), with net carbs at 20-25 grams and protein kept deliberately modest at 50-75 grams. The lower protein cap prevents gluconeogenesis from breaking ketosis. Daily ketone testing (goal: 0.5-3.0 mmol/L) replaces vague adherence with actual measurement. Fasting extends to 16:8.

    Day 29 onward: Transition. Net carbs are reintroduced in 5-gram increments every three days while continuing to track ketones. This process finds each woman’s personal carbohydrate threshold (the amount she can eat while staying in mild ketosis). That number is different for every woman and can’t be found any other way. One patient in the book stabilized at 60 grams of net carbs per day, far more than the implementation phase allows, and lost 39 pounds across several protocol cycles.

    Integration: Ongoing. The protocol is designed as a repeatable metabolic reset, not a one-time intervention. Re-enter it when symptoms return, weight climbs more than 5 pounds, or sugar cravings resurface.

    Two sections in the troubleshooting chapter are worth flagging for anyone mid-protocol. Gottfried lists nine plateau-busters in priority order: resistance training first, then food weighing to catch portion creep, L-carnitine, cold exposure, dropping carbs further, and extending the fasting window. She also names seven common derailment patterns (excess calories from calorie-dense fats, alcohol, slow thyroid or adrenal function, constipation, inability to sustain ketosis, severe carb intolerance, and what she calls the “F*ck Its”). Each pattern has a mechanical fix, which keeps women from abandoning the protocol when what they actually need is a small adjustment.

    Is Women, Food, and Hormones Worth Reading?

    Read this if you’ve tried standard keto, followed it closely, and either saw no results or felt worse (more tired, more brain fog, more cravings). Also worth reading if you’ve watched a male partner lose weight effortlessly on the same plan you were both following and never got a coherent explanation for why. The estrobolome section alone is worth the price of admission for anyone with estrogen dominance symptoms (PMS, breast tenderness, bloating, mood swings) that their doctor has chalked up to “just hormones.”

    Skip it if you already have a solid grounding in female metabolic health and are looking for new research rather than a clinical protocol to follow. The conceptual content (the Keto Paradox, the estrobolome, the cortisol-fasting interaction) will be familiar to anyone coming from functional medicine. The four-week protocol itself is still useful, but the book’s value is highest for readers encountering this framework for the first time.

    One honest caveat: the protocol requires real investment. Daily ketone testing, food weighing, macro tracking, a 10-supplement stack during active phases, and ideally lab work. Gottfried doesn’t clearly prioritize which elements matter most when you can’t afford all of them, which is a gap for women with limited time or money. The case studies lean heavily toward 20-39 lb losses, but non-responders and cases requiring adjustment are underrepresented. That’s a fair criticism of a book that otherwise does a genuinely good job explaining why the thing that worked for your husband didn’t work for you.

    Books Like Women, Food, and Hormones

    BookAuthorBest For
    Fast Like a GirlMindy PelzWomen who want fasting protocols mapped to their hormonal cycle across the full month
    Hormone IntelligenceAviva RommA botanical and integrative medicine approach to the same hormonal themes, useful counterpoint to Gottfried
    The Hormone FixAnna CabecaKeto-alkaline hybrid approach for perimenopause and menopause; overlaps with Gottfried on insulin and estrogen
    Eat to Thrive During MenopauseMia HuberPractical nutrition guidance for the menopause transition
    The Menopause Diet PlanHillary WrightRegistered dietitian’s take on eating for hormonal health through menopause

  • The Menopause Reset by Mindy Pelz: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: A practical five-step lifestyle protocol for menopausal women, built around fasting, ketogenic eating, gut repair, detox, and stress reduction (with the gut-hormone connection, the estrobolome, as the book’s most original contribution).

    What Is The Menopause Reset About?

    You’re eating the same food you’ve always eaten. You’re exercising. You’re doing everything “right.” The weight is still going up, the sleep is still a disaster, and you’re crying in the car for reasons you can’t entirely explain. The doctor offers two options: ride it out, or consider HRT. Neither of those answers tells you why any of this is happening.

    Mindy Pelz is a chiropractor and functional medicine practitioner who spent ten years inside her own chaotic perimenopause before writing this book. That’s not a small thing. She came into it already health-conscious, already fasting, already eating cleanly, and still couldn’t sleep or lose weight. The book she wrote afterward is a sequenced five-step protocol that treats menopause as a system-level problem rather than a single hormonal event. The core argument is worth stating plainly: estrogen and progesterone sit at the bottom of the hormonal hierarchy, not the top, and most women (and most doctors) are trying to fix the wrong end of the chain.

    This was Pelz’s first menopause-focused book, written before Fast Like a Girl. It’s shorter and more focused. If you’ve already read her fasting work and want the menopause-specific application, this is where she built that framework.

    The Five-Step Reset: What Pelz Actually Recommends

    The five steps aren’t a menu. Pelz is specific about the order, and the order reflects a biological hierarchy she lays out early in the book. Insulin sits above sex hormones. Cortisol sits above insulin. Oxytocin sits above cortisol. Trying to fix estrogen while chronic cortisol is running the show is like mopping water with the tap still open.

    1. Change When You Eat

    Intermittent fasting is the entry point because it directly reduces insulin, and insulin is the upstream controller of every sex hormone downstream. The immediate feedback loop also makes it the easiest step for most women to feel quickly. Pelz recommends starting at 13-15 hours daily.

    2. Change What You Eat

    The “ketobiotic” framework is ketogenic macros (under 50g net carbs, under 50g protein, over 60% calories from fat) combined with a hard emphasis on plant diversity. Standard keto done without enough vegetables slowly erodes the gut bacteria that process estrogen. The protein cap matters more than most keto books acknowledge. Excess protein spikes insulin, just less dramatically than carbs.

    3. Repair Your Gut (The Estrobolome)

    It’s underrepresented in popular menopause writing, and it gets its own section below. Short version: a specific collection of gut bacteria controls what happens to the estrogen you’re still producing. If those bacteria are depleted, the estrogen can’t be reactivated. Rebuilding them is a two-part process: stop destroying them first, then actively feed them.

    4. Reduce Your Toxic Load

    Menopausal hormonal shifts trigger the release of stored toxins (lead from bones, mercury from tissue) into the bloodstream. Those toxins migrate toward fat and nervous tissue. The hypothalamus and pituitary (the brain areas that run hormone production) sit outside the blood-brain barrier, making them unusually vulnerable. Mood instability, memory difficulty, and anxiety that exceeds what progesterone loss would explain may have toxic load as the upstream cause.

    5. Stop Rushing

    The last step is hardest because it requires restructuring a life, not just a diet. Pelz describes finding her own DUTCH hormone test results showing sex hormones at rock-bottom levels despite having implemented all four previous steps. The culprit was chronically elevated cortisol from an overscheduled life depleting DHEA, the precursor hormone from which both cortisol and sex hormones are made. She quotes the realization directly: “I realized that just because I am a skilled rushing woman doesn’t mean it’s in my hormonal best interest to keep rushing.”

    What Is the Estrobolome and Why Does It Matter for Menopause?

    Most people have never heard this word. It’s worth knowing.

    The estrobolome is a collection of 60+ gut bacterial strains whose job is to metabolize used estrogens and reactivate the beneficial ones. In a woman with a healthy estrobolome, even the declining estrogen production of menopause is partially offset by the gut’s ability to recycle what’s still available. In a woman whose gut bacteria have been hammered by antibiotics, antibacterial products, and processed food additives, the small amount of estrogen still being produced can’t be properly activated.

    The enzyme at the center of this process is beta-glucuronidase. When gut bacteria are thriving, beta-glucuronidase ensures that healthy estrogen gets pulled into the cells rather than excreted. When the microbiome is disrupted, that process breaks down, and even the estrogen you’re still making goes to waste.

    Pelz’s protocol for rebuilding the estrobolome:

    • Stop destroying it first: Eliminate antibacterial soaps and mouthwash, avoid conventionally raised meat (which carries antibiotics), remove synthetic preservatives and artificial sweeteners
    • Feed existing bacteria: Polyphenol-rich foods (cloves, dark chocolate, berries, olives, raw nuts)
    • Fertilize them: Prebiotic fiber from chia, hemp, and flax seeds
    • Add new strains: Fermented foods (sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, kombucha)
    • Target strains: Lactobacillus reuteri and Lactobacillus rhamnosus are the two she names specifically for estrogen metabolism

    The liver matters here too. It’s the second estrogen-processing organ, and it needs the same kind of support: less alcohol, fewer unnecessary medications, more cruciferous vegetables.

    For women who’ve been told their estrogen is “fine” on a standard blood panel while still experiencing classic estrogen-deficiency symptoms, the estrobolome offers a plausible explanation. The estrogen may be there. It’s just not being activated.

    How Does Pelz Use Fasting for Menopause?

    Pelz was already known for her fasting work before this book, and the fasting section here is more cycle-specific than anything in mainstream fasting literature. She identifies seven distinct fasting styles, each serving a different physiological purpose:

    • 13-15 hours daily: reduces insulin, triggers light autophagy, the entry point
    • 17+ hours (autophagy fast): cellular self-repair; protein must stay under 20g that day
    • 24-hour (dinner to dinner): specifically repairs the gut’s mucosal lining by stimulating intestinal stem cells
    • 3-5 day water fast, twice yearly: reboots the immune system entirely

    One guardrail matters above all others: women who still have a menstrual cycle should never do a fast longer than 24 hours after Day 21. Extended fasting during the progesterone-building phase of the cycle drops progesterone further, and progesterone is already the hormone most at risk in perimenopause. This is absent from virtually all mainstream fasting advice, which is written for a gender-neutral audience. It also explains why some perimenopausal women try fasting, experience worsening symptoms, and conclude that fasting doesn’t work for them.

    The 28-day eating protocol builds on this. Rather than static ketogenic eating, Pelz proposes a cycle that shifts food choices at key hormonal windows:

    • Days 1-11: Ketobiotic eating with chosen fasting style
    • Days 12-14: Estrogen-building foods freely eaten (flax seeds, sesame seeds, edamame, garlic, berries, crucifers)
    • Days 15-21: Back to ketobiotic
    • Days 21-28: Progesterone-building foods freely eaten (potatoes, beans, squash, quinoa, tropical fruits), extended fasts paused

    For women in postmenopause (no natural cycle to track), Pelz simplifies it to 80% ketobiotic and 20% hormone-building foods without calendar timing. The insight underneath the protocol: long-term strict keto suppresses sex hormones if it’s never cycled. Many women see dramatic results from keto at first, then hit a wall at six to twelve months. This is her explanation for why, and the structural fix.

    Is The Menopause Reset Worth Reading?

    Read this if you’re in perimenopause or early menopause, you’ve tried some combination of cleaner eating and fasting, and you’re getting only partial results. The sequenced framework is the book’s real value: not a list of things to do, but an explanation of why the order matters and which upstream lever to pull first. It’s especially useful if you’ve noticed that the approaches that worked at 38 are failing at 50 and want a mechanistic explanation for why.

    The estrobolome section alone is worth the read for anyone interested in the gut-hormone connection. It’s genuinely underrepresented in popular health writing, and Pelz explains it clearly.

    Skip it if you need clinical management for severe menopausal symptoms. This is a lifestyle-first framework, not a substitute for medical care. Pelz doesn’t engage substantively with the evidence base for HRT, and women with serious symptoms shouldn’t use this book as a reason to avoid it. Some of the detox recommendations (chelation, coffee enemas, provoked heavy metal testing) are outside mainstream clinical practice and deserve a conversation with a qualified provider before you try them.

    One caveat: The evidence quality across the book varies considerably. The fasting protocols and estrobolome material are well-grounded. The cycling-eating protocol (Days 1-11, 12-14, etc.) is plausible based on hormonal timing logic, but the RCT support is limited. Read it as an intelligent clinical hypothesis rather than established protocol.

    Books Like The Menopause Reset

    BookAuthorBest For
    Fast Like a GirlMindy PelzCycle-synced fasting in full detail; the fasting chapters here expanded
    Eat Like a GirlMindy PelzPelz’s food and recipe framework for women
    Age Like a GirlMindy PelzLongevity through the Pelz framework for older women
    The Hormone FixAnna Cabeca, DOA keto-alkaline approach to menopause; more clinically conservative than Pelz
    Menopause BootcampSuzanne Gilberg-Lenz, MDA conventional OB-GYN’s perspective; strong counterweight on HRT evidence

  • Hormone Intelligence by Aviva Romm: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: A Yale-trained MD and former midwife maps six root causes behind most women’s hormone conditions and gives you a 6-week plan to address them.

    What Is Hormone Intelligence About?

    Imagine going to your doctor with heavy periods, brutal PMS, fatigue, and cravings that feel like a separate person living inside you. Your labs come back normal. You leave with a birth control prescription and a vague suggestion to “reduce stress.” Aviva Romm has heard some version of this story from thousands of patients, and Hormone Intelligence is her answer to it.

    Romm’s credential stack is worth paying attention to: she spent twenty years as a midwife before going to medical school at Yale. She has practiced integrative medicine long enough to be frustrated by both sides of the conventional/wellness divide. Her argument is not that your doctor is wrong and your herbalist is right. Her argument is that most hormone conditions share a small set of treatable root causes that neither conventional medicine nor most wellness protocols actually address. The book is her attempt to name those causes and give you something to do about them.

    At 592 pages, this is a genuinely dense read. Think of it more as a reference you return to than a book you power through in a weekend. The payoff for the density is specificity: doses, timing, mechanisms, and the actual research behind every recommendation.

    The Six Root Causes Romm Keeps Coming Back To

    Romm builds the first half of the book around a single claim: PCOS, endometriosis, fibroids, PMS, and most other common gynecologic conditions are not random bad luck. They are predictable responses to a specific modern environment. Six interconnected drivers account for the vast majority of cases she sees.

    1. Diet. Not in the calorie-counting sense. The specific dietary patterns that disrupt hormone function include ultra-processed foods that spike insulin, conventional dairy and excess red meat that increase estrogen load, and a general deficit of fiber, omega-3s, and phytonutrients the body needs to produce and clear hormones. Her recommended fix is a modified Mediterranean template with targeted additions (two tablespoons of ground flaxseeds daily, daily cruciferous vegetables) tied to specific mechanisms.

    2. Chronic stress and the HPA axis. When the stress response runs continuously, cortisol climbs and directly suppresses the hormonal cascade that triggers ovulation. This is a documented neuroendocrine mechanism, not a metaphor. Many women with irregular cycles or missing periods are not broken; they are in a chronic stress state that has deprioritized reproduction.

    3. Disrupted sleep and circadian rhythm. The brain’s master clock coordinates the LH surge that triggers ovulation, FSH secretion, and melatonin production. Late nights, irregular sleep schedules, and evening screen exposure disrupt all of these simultaneously. Women sleeping under seven hours secrete measurably less FSH.

    4. Gut health. A subset of gut bacteria called the estrobolome produces the enzyme that determines how much estrogen your intestines reabsorb versus eliminate. Dysbiosis shifts this toward estrogen excess (which feeds endometriosis, fibroids, PMS, and heavy periods) without any change in what your ovaries are producing. This is the chapter most likely to change how you think about hormones.

    5. Environmental toxins. Phthalates, BPA, parabens, and pesticide residues interfere with estrogen and metabolic hormone signaling at concentrations far below what was previously considered harmful. Women carry a disproportionate body burden due to cosmetic use and higher fat tissue, where fat-soluble toxins accumulate. Romm’s detox protocol is practical, not expensive: filtered water, organic produce for the EWG Dirty Dozen, glass food storage, fragrance-free personal care products.

    6. Disconnection from body signals. The sixth root is the one no other clinical book addresses: decades of medical dismissal teach women to distrust their own symptoms. That distrust is not just psychological. Chronic self-doubt is a stressor with real HPA consequences. It compounds every other root cause.

    Why Blood Sugar Is Usually the First Domino

    If you read only one chapter, read the diet chapter. Romm spends considerable time on insulin resistance as the upstream driver for conditions that look unrelated on the surface. In PCOS, insulin resistance is the primary mechanism (not just high androgens), and it is what keeps symptoms cycling back after any treatment that only addresses the surface.

    The mechanism matters here because it reframes what “eating for hormones” actually means. It is not about avoiding carbs or eating clean. It is about stabilizing blood sugar through the composition and timing of meals: protein at every meal, fiber from whole food sources, slow carbohydrates (legumes, root vegetables, buckwheat) instead of refined grains, and fat from olive oil, avocado, and nuts. These choices prevent the insulin spikes that drive androgen production in the ovaries and keep cortisol from compensating for blood sugar crashes.

    For PCOS specifically, the evidence Romm presents for myo-inositol plus D-chiro-inositol is worth knowing about. Multiple randomized trials show effects comparable to metformin for restoring ovulation, reducing insulin resistance, and lowering testosterone, without the gastrointestinal side effects. Spearmint tea (two cups daily) has also reduced testosterone in clinical trials within 30 days. These are not fringe claims. They are findings that most gynecologists do not mention because they fall outside standard prescribing protocols.

    “Our hormone imbalances are not solely individual problems; they are reflective of much larger social and environmental problems that we’re all facing.” – Aviva Romm, Author’s Note

    What This Has to Do With Cravings and Emotional Eating

    This is where the book lands hardest for the ExcessMatters audience. The hormonal chaos Romm describes does not stay in the reproductive system. It radiates outward into appetite, mood, cravings, and the capacity to self-regulate around food.

    Cortisol elevation drives cravings for dense, calorie-rich foods as a biological survival mechanism. Blood sugar instability (from poor sleep, from adrenal dysregulation, from a low-fiber diet) creates real physiological hunger and urgency that willpower cannot override. The gut’s role in producing 95 percent of the body’s serotonin means that dysbiosis contributes directly to the mood dysregulation that makes emotional eating more likely in the first place.

    None of this is an excuse or a way to avoid responsibility. It is a more accurate description of what is actually happening. When cravings feel disproportionate, they often are physiological before they are psychological. Understanding the mechanism is the first step toward addressing it at the right level instead of blaming yourself for failing at something that was never purely a willpower problem.

    Romm does not write about emotional eating directly. The book does not address the psychological dimensions of disordered eating, and it was not designed to. What it does is provide a solid biological foundation for understanding why your body has been doing what it has been doing. That foundation matters. Women who have spent years managing their eating in the dark, with no map of the hormonal terrain underneath the cravings and mood swings, often find that understanding the biology changes something about how they relate to the struggle.

    Is Hormone Intelligence Worth Reading?

    Read this if you have been diagnosed with PCOS, endometriosis, fibroids, or perimenopause symptoms and feel like you have only been offered symptom management. Read it if your PMS or cyclic mood changes are severe enough to affect your work or relationships. Read it if you have a history of unexplained weight resistance, cravings that track your cycle, or fatigue that lab work cannot explain.

    Skip it if you want a fast-start protocol or a specific eating plan without the underlying biology. At 592 pages, the book asks a significant time investment before you reach the condition-specific chapters. Lara Briden’s The Period Repair Manual covers similar ground more efficiently if you have one specific condition and want targeted protocols.

    One caveat: Romm is careful about evidence quality, but the book occasionally moves between well-replicated findings and single-study results without clearly flagging the difference. Readers without a science background may not notice. The supplement protocols in particular mix high-confidence evidence (omega-3s, inositol) with lower-confidence evidence. Use this book as a starting framework, not a final authority.

    Books Like Hormone Intelligence

    BookAuthorBest For
    Women Food and HormonesSara Gottfried, MDHormones + weight specifically; more diet-protocol focused
    The Hormone FixAnna Cabeca, DOKeto-alkaline approach to perimenopause hormones
    In the FLOAlisa VittiCycle syncing diet and lifestyle; more accessible entry point
    The XX BrainLisa Mosconi, PhDHormones and brain health; strong on menopause and cognition
    Eat to Thrive During MenopauseStephanie HuberPractical nutrition focus for the perimenopause transition

  • The Perimenopause Solution by Shahzadi Harper: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: A UK menopause specialist and a registered nutritionist make the case that perimenopause starts years earlier than most women suspect, that the symptoms are real and treatable, and that restriction is exactly the wrong response to what’s happening in your body.

    What Is The Perimenopause Solution About?

    You’re in your early 40s. Your weight is doing something new, mostly around your middle. Sleep has gotten strange. Some mornings you wake at 3am, mind racing, no obvious reason. Your appetite feels unreliable, your mood snaps at things it never used to, and the brain that always felt sharp is suddenly foggy. You mention it to your doctor. Your periods are still regular, your bloodwork comes back normal, and you leave with a suggestion that maybe you’re a bit stressed.

    What nobody told you is that you might already be in perimenopause. Not approaching it. Not “too young” for it. Actually in it, years before the hot flashes most people associate with the word.

    The Perimenopause Solution was co-written by Dr. Shahzadi Harper, a UK women’s health physician and co-founder of The Harper Clinic, and Emma Bardwell, a registered nutritionist and member of the British Menopause Society. Both specialize in perimenopause. Both see these women in clinic every week. The book grew out of the conversations they kept having with patients who came in exhausted, dismissed, and convinced that what was happening to them was somehow their own fault, whether from stress they hadn’t managed well enough, weight they hadn’t controlled, or a general failure to hold things together.

    It is a UK-focused book (the prescribing guidance references NHS and NICE, not FDA), but the underlying science travels. If you’ve been puzzling over changes in your body, appetite, or mood since your late 30s and no one has connected those dots for you, this book is likely to feel like an explanation you’ve been waiting for.

    Why Your Body Changed in Your Late 30s (Before You Had a Name for It)

    Here’s the thing most people don’t know: perimenopause and menopause are not the same event. Menopause is technically a single moment, the one-year mark after your last period, average age 51. Everything before that, often spanning four to ten years and sometimes starting in the early 40s, is perimenopause. It is the phase when hormones are actively fluctuating and declining, and it is when the vast majority of symptoms occur.

    The confusion between the two words isn’t just semantic. It’s why a 43-year-old with regular cycles, crushing fatigue, and 3am waking gets told she’s “too young” instead of getting treated.

    Blood tests often miss perimenopause entirely. Hormone levels fluctuate day to day during this phase, which means FSH can read normal on Tuesday and elevated on Thursday. In the UK, NICE guidelines now support diagnosing perimenopause on symptoms alone for women over 45, because the test result is not the diagnosis. The symptom picture is.

    Testosterone is the hormone that falls first. By a woman’s 40s, testosterone levels have dropped roughly 50% from where they were in her 20s, a decline that predates the oestrogen drop most people associate with perimenopause. That fatigue that started years ago, the brain fog, the muscle loss, the flat energy that doesn’t respond to sleep: these are frequently testosterone deficiency symptoms, not character flaws, and not signs that you’re simply aging badly.

    The timeline matters for ExcessMatters readers in particular. The weight changes, the hunger shifts, the mood-driven eating that might have started in your late 30s or early 40s, those weren’t random. They had a hormonal mechanism. Your appetite was not malfunctioning. Your body was changing in a way that had a name, and nobody had given you that name yet.

    What Perimenopause Actually Does to Appetite, Metabolism, and Mood

    Most people know about hot flashes and night sweats. What most people don’t know is that there are over 34 officially recognized perimenopause symptoms, spanning physical, psychological, cognitive, and urinary domains, and only about five of them get talked about. The gap between what women expect and what they experience is where years of misdiagnosis live.

    The weight shift is real and documented. The book is direct about this: perimenopause causes changes to insulin sensitivity and metabolism that increase fat storage, particularly around the middle. Women who gained weight in a consistent pattern for years, then watched it start accumulating differently, are not imagining the change. The mechanism shifted.

    Poor sleep compounds everything. As progesterone drops (one of the earliest declines in perimenopause), sleep quality deteriorates, and the 3am wake window becomes a signature symptom. Disrupted sleep elevates cortisol, which then disrupts progesterone further, which worsens sleep. The book points out directly that poor sleep increases hunger the next day, because of course it does.

    The psychological symptoms are the piece most likely to go misdiagnosed. Menopausal Mood Disorder (MMD) is a hormonal phenomenon characterized by fluctuating (not persistently low) mood, loss of confidence, anxiety, cognitive slowing, and a flatness that women often describe as “not feeling like myself.” It gets misdiagnosed as clinical depression and treated with antidepressants. The authors are unambiguous: antidepressants are not first-line treatment for hormone-driven mood changes. For women who have spent time on SSRIs for symptoms that felt more physical than psychiatric, this chapter is worth reading.

    “When you’re feeling low, you may tend to reach for carbohydrates and other high-sugar foods, so be aware of your personal triggers. Eat nutrient-dense food regularly throughout the day to maintain your food intake and energy balance. Not eating will depress your mood and further suppress the release of those happy hormones.”

    The mood-food loop during perimenopause is not a willpower problem. Low mood drives carb cravings. Carb restriction depresses mood further and disrupts serotonin (90% of which is produced in the gut). The body asking for food is often the body trying to regulate hormones that have lost their footing.

    Why Eating Less Makes Everything Worse

    This is the section most directly relevant to anyone who has responded to perimenopausal body changes by restricting.

    The book’s nutritional framework is built on one central mechanism: blood glucose instability amplifies every perimenopausal symptom. When blood sugar crashes, the body releases cortisol and adrenaline as a stress response. Cortisol disrupts progesterone (described here as the “grounding” hormone). Progesterone disruption worsens anxiety, disrupts sleep, increases irritability, and drives cravings. The resulting cravings, if met with refined sugar or simple carbs, spike blood glucose again and restart the cycle.

    The practical intervention the authors recommend:

    • Protein at every meal to slow glucose absorption and maintain satiety
    • The Key 3 at each sitting: protein, fibre, and healthy fat together
    • No sweet foods as standalone snacks (pair fruit with nuts, eggs with toast)
    • Complex carbs replacing refined ones rather than carbs eliminated altogether
    • A short walk after meals to blunt the postprandial glucose spike

    Note what’s not on that list. Calorie counting isn’t there. Elimination isn’t there. The authors are explicit that very low-carb approaches backfire for perimenopausal women: carbohydrates support serotonin production and calm the nervous system, and removing them entirely raises cortisol, worsens sleep, and compounds the hormonal pressure already present.

    “Perimenopause — a time when your body is undergoing significant adjustments — is not a time for deprivation. No good can come from punishing your body into submission because it doesn’t look or feel like it used to any more. On the contrary, this is a time for positive nutrition — a time for nourishing yourself, filling up on the good stuff and making small dietary and lifestyle shifts that stack up over time. It’s about adding in rather than taking away.”

    The gut layer adds another dimension. The estrobolome (the gut bacteria responsible for metabolizing used oestrogen) means that gut health is directly hormonal health. When the microbiome is disrupted, metabolized oestrogen can be reabsorbed into circulation, adding oestrogen imbalance on top of the fluctuations already occurring. The prescription: 30+ different plant foods per week, fermented foods, prebiotic fiber. Not a detox, not a cleanse, just feeding the microbiome consistently.

    The book’s exercise hierarchy is worth noting too. Resistance training comes first, because oestrogen has anabolic properties and its decline accelerates muscle loss. Muscle loss slows resting metabolism, worsens insulin sensitivity, and accelerates the body composition changes that perimenopause already drives. The authors argue strength training should be prescribed. Walking (second in the hierarchy) is cardioprotective, accessible, and weight-bearing. High-intensity work without adequate recovery raises cortisol and can make symptoms worse.

    Is The Perimenopause Solution Worth Reading?

    Read this if you are in your late 30s or 40s and something has shifted (energy, sleep, weight, mood, cognitive sharpness) and you haven’t found an explanation that fits. Read it if you’ve been told your bloodwork is normal but you don’t feel normal. Read it if you’ve been offered antidepressants for symptoms that feel more physical than psychiatric. Read it if you’ve been restricting food to address weight changes that restriction keeps making worse.

    Skip it if you’re primarily looking for US-specific prescribing guidance (the book references NHS systems throughout), or if you want a deep single-topic treatment of sleep, gut health, or nutrition as standalone subjects. The book covers a lot of ground across 15 chapters, and some sections go shallower than others because of it.

    One caveat: The book is UK-specific in its HRT prescribing detail, and it was published in 2021. The broad science holds, but anyone acting on specific HRT recommendations should cross-reference with current guidance from their national menopause society (the Menopause Society in the US, the British Menopause Society in the UK). Guidelines have continued to evolve.

    For ExcessMatters readers with a complicated relationship to food and dieting: the book contains a fat loss chapter (Chapter 15) that is notably respectful. It names the Health at Every Size movement, acknowledges that not every reader wants to address weight, and frames the nutrition guidance throughout as “adding in” rather than “taking away.” The perimenopausal lens here is useful even if weight isn’t the primary concern, because it explains why the body changes in the ways it does, and why deprivation makes those changes worse, not better. The appetite shifts, the mood-driven eating, the cravings that started in your late 30s are not personal failures. They are a physiological event with a name.

    Books Like The Perimenopause Solution

    BookAuthorBest For
    It’s Not You It’s Your HormonesNicki WilliamsBroader hormone picture including thyroid and adrenals alongside oestrogen
    The Hormone ShiftTamar Gur & Jessica RitchUS-based, covers the full reproductive lifespan including perimenopause
    Hormone IntelligenceAviva RommFunctional medicine approach, more alternative-medicine oriented
    Menopause BootcampSuzanne Gilberg-LenzAccessible, US-focused, integrative approach to the full menopause transition
    The Menopause BrainLisa MosconiDeep neuroscience of oestrogen decline and cognitive health; the science behind brain fog

  • The Happy Hormone Guide by Shannon Leparski: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: A plant-based blogger’s practical system for balancing hormones through cycle syncing, seed cycling, and daily lifestyle changes. Accessible entry-level, but light on clinical evidence.

    What Is The Happy Hormone Guide About?

    Shannon Leparski spent her teens and early twenties cycling through the same miserable loop: severe PMS, jawline acne, mood swings bad enough to frighten her parents, and periods so irregular she went 42 days between them. Doctors offered her the pill. Dermatologists offered her harsh medication. Nobody offered her an explanation for why her body was behaving this way.

    She found one eventually, not through the medical system but through a book. Reading Alisa Vitti’s Woman Code triggered what Leparski describes as a complete reorientation of how she understood her own body. Over the next few years, she rebuilt her cycle from scratch using food, lifestyle changes, and phase-specific routines, and documented what worked in her vegan food blog, The Glowing Fridge. The Happy Hormone Guide is that documentation turned into a book.

    Leparski is a holistic health coach and wellness writer, not a clinician. She is transparent about this throughout. The book is organized around what she calls the Happy Hormone Method, a four-part framework covering blood sugar stability, toxin reduction, gut health and estrogen clearance, and cycle-synced living. Two distinctive tools run throughout it: seed cycling (rotating specific seeds across the two halves of the menstrual cycle to support estrogen and progesterone) and adaptogens (herbs like ashwagandha, maca, and reishi used for stress and symptom support). Both are wellness-world staples. The evidence behind them ranges from reasonable to thin, and Leparski does not oversell it.

    What Is Seed Cycling and Does It Actually Work?

    Seed cycling is the practice this book is most associated with, and the one most worth examining before you decide whether to read further.

    The theory: The menstrual cycle divides into two halves with different hormonal priorities. In the first half (days 1-14, menstrual and follicular phases), rising estrogen is the dominant force. In the second half (days 15-28, ovulatory and luteal phases), progesterone takes over. Seed cycling uses four seeds to support each half:

    • Days 1-14: Flaxseeds and pumpkin seeds. Flax contains phytoestrogens and lignans that support estrogen production while helping clear excess estrogen. Pumpkin seeds are high in zinc, which Leparski says “helps prime and support the production of adequate progesterone in the next phase.”
    • Days 15-28: Sesame seeds and sunflower seeds. Sesame contains lignans that modulate estrogen and magnesium for cramp relief. Sunflower seeds are rich in selenium to support liver detoxification of hormones.

    The honest picture: Seed cycling has a following in wellness circles and an origin in traditional herbalism. What it does not have is robust RCT-level evidence. The proposed mechanisms are plausible, flaxseed lignans do influence estrogen metabolism, and omega-3s from pumpkin and flax have anti-inflammatory properties. But whether rotating seeds on a specific schedule produces measurable hormonal changes in healthy women has not been rigorously tested. One small 2023 study found no significant effect on cycle regularity. Leparski cites the Herbal Academy and a lignans-breast cancer study, not clinical trials on seed cycling itself.

    Worth doing? Probably harmless, and possibly useful as a habit anchor that keeps you eating seeds consistently. Worth treating as a proven protocol? Not yet.

    How Does Cycle Syncing Work in Practice?

    Cycle syncing, the broader framework Leparski builds seed cycling into, has stronger physiological grounding even if the phase-specific prescriptions stay somewhat ahead of the research.

    The four phases of the menstrual cycle genuinely do produce different hormonal environments, and those environments do create real differences in energy, metabolism, recovery capacity, and mood. Leparski structures the book’s second half around a seasonal metaphor: menstrual phase as winter, follicular as spring, ovulatory as summer, luteal as autumn. Each phase chapter covers food recommendations, exercise type and intensity, skin changes, and social energy.

    The most practically useful phase guidance covers the luteal phase (days 15-28), when progesterone rises and PMS symptoms accumulate for women whose hormonal balance is off. Leparski’s recommendations for this phase are specific and well-reasoned:

    • Eat complex carbohydrates (sweet potato, oats, brown rice) to support serotonin production and reduce cravings in the days before menstruation
    • Prioritize magnesium-rich foods (pumpkin seeds, dark leafy greens, dark chocolate) for sleep and PMS reduction
    • Reduce or eliminate high-intensity cardio in the late luteal phase, because it spikes cortisol at the exact moment the body needs progesterone to dominate
    • Use sesame and sunflower seeds from the seed cycling rotation

    For the follicular phase (days 6-13), she highlights rising estrogen’s effect on serotonin and dopamine, making it the natural window for new projects, harder workouts, and social energy. The ovulatory phase (days 14-17) gets the endorsement for maximum-intensity training. The menstrual phase gets a clear prescription: rest, warmth, iron and zinc replenishment, gentle movement only.

    The framework requires cycle tracking as a prerequisite. Leparski covers apps (Kindara, MyFLO, Flo), basal body temperature charting, and dedicated monitors. Women on hormonal birth control do not experience the four-phase cycle, so the phase-specific recommendations do not apply while on it.

    What Else Does Leparski Cover?

    Adaptogens for stress and symptoms. Chapter 5 introduces adaptogens as herbs that “adapt to whatever your body needs help with at the time.” Ashwagandha and maca appear in her ovulation and amenorrhea support list. Reishi appears for period cramps. Rhodiola and DIM (diindolylmethane) appear for severe PMS. These are framed as symptom-specific additions after the core protocol is in place, not replacements for it.

    Blood sugar as the master lever. Leparski identifies unstable blood sugar as the most consistently overlooked driver of hormonal symptoms. Glucose spikes trigger insulin responses; insulin resistance creates a cortisol response; sustained cortisol suppresses ovulation. The practical fix is structural: protein, fat, and fiber at every meal, no carbohydrates eaten alone, no skipped meals, caffeine after food rather than before. Straightforward, applicable immediately.

    The gut-estrogen connection. The estrobolome, the subset of gut bacteria that metabolize estrogen, gets a full explanation here. When bowel transit is slow or the microbiome is imbalanced, estrogen the liver has already processed for excretion gets reactivated and returned to circulation. The result is estrogen dominance: heavy clotty periods, breast tenderness, jawline acne. Cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale) contain DIM, which supports the liver’s estrogen detoxification. Daily fiber, fermented foods, and hydration support the rest.

    Endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Chapter 2 walks through the average woman’s daily chemical exposure, more than 100 synthetic compounds before leaving the house, and focuses the practical guidance on reducing the highest-absorption products first: deodorant and body lotion (left on skin all day), then cleaning products, then food containers. The EWG Skin Deep database is her recommended audit tool. One category per month.

    Reading your period as data. One of the book’s most distinctive contributions is a short guide to interpreting menstrual blood characteristics. Bright cranberry red blood: balanced. Dark purple-eggplant blood: excess estrogen. Very light pink: possible low estrogen. Clots: probable estrogen dominance or impaired clearance. Brown spotting before the first heavy day: often low progesterone from an anovulatory cycle. A free monthly feedback mechanism that updates faster than lab work.

    Is The Happy Hormone Guide Worth Reading?

    Read this if you are already plant-based (or vegan) and want hormone-specific guidance that works within those constraints, most hormone books ignore plant-based eaters entirely. Also worth it if you are new to cycle syncing and want an accessible, organized entry point before moving to denser clinical books.

    Skip it if you have already worked through Woman Code or In the FLO by Alisa Vitti, Leparski credits Vitti openly as her primary source and the conceptual overlap is substantial. Also skip it if you have active clinical conditions (PCOS, endometriosis, clinical hypothyroidism) that need more than lifestyle guidance.

    One caveat: The seed cycling evidence is limited, mostly traditional and mechanistic rather than RCT-tested, and the book’s clinical rigor overall sits at the lower end of the hormone books on this site. Leparski is honest about her non-clinical background and consistently directs readers toward naturopathic and medical practitioners for diagnosis. That transparency earns trust. Still, women who want clinical depth should read Aviva Romm’s Hormone Intelligence alongside this one, not instead of it.

    The book is a good fit as a gentle first book for women who suspect their symptoms are not inevitable, have not yet dug into the cycle syncing literature, and want practical food and lifestyle guidance they can start immediately. Women already deep in functional medicine territory will find limited new material here.

    Books Like The Happy Hormone Guide

    BookAuthorBest For
    Happy HormonesLara Briden / Nat KringoudisNatural approaches to hormone health with more clinical grounding
    Healthy HormonesSamantha KirkpatrickPractical hormone nutrition with stronger evidence base
    In the FLOAlisa VittiLeparski’s primary source, deeper on the Cycle Syncing Method
    Hormone IntelligenceAviva Romm, MDClinician-authored, stronger on PCOS, endo, and thyroid; best companion read
    Eat Like a GirlMindy PelzCycle-aware eating for women navigating perimenopause and metabolic shifts

  • Brain Body Diet by Sara Gottfried: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: If you’ve tried everything and your body won’t budge, Gottfried argues the problem isn’t your willpower. It’s your brain.

    What Is Brain Body Diet About?

    You’ve tracked every calorie. You’ve done the workouts. You’ve tried intermittent fasting, cut carbs, cut sugar, cut basically everything. And the scale still doesn’t cooperate. The standard explanation at that point is uncomfortable: you must be doing something wrong. You must lack consistency. You must, somewhere, lack discipline.

    Sara Gottfried, a Harvard-trained physician and three-time New York Times bestselling author, has a different explanation. The problem is your brain (specifically a brain that’s inflamed, hormonally depleted, and fed by a gut that’s been under siege for years). Her 2019 book Brain Body Diet builds on her earlier hormone work (The Hormone Cure, The Hormone Reset Diet) and extends it into neuroscience. The central claim: your brain and body aren’t a hierarchy where the brain commands and the body obeys. The signal runs both ways. A body in chronic dysfunction (gut dysbiosis, toxic overload, hormonal chaos) doesn’t just receive bad signals from the brain. It actively degrades the brain itself.

    Gottfried came to this not from a textbook but from a fall. In 2015 she fainted, hit her head, and spent a year recovering from a traumatic brain injury. Lying in a dark room, unable to work, she experienced firsthand what she’d been missing in clinical practice: how profoundly body state governs brain function, and how much her “smart woman” approach of just pushing harder had been working against her. That story runs through the book and gives it something a purely theoretical treatment wouldn’t have.

    Why Can’t I Lose Weight? The Brain’s Role in Weight Resistance

    The most immediately useful reframe in the book is also the most counter-cultural one. Weight is regulated by a brain-controlled thermostat (your body weight set point), not by the simple math of calories in versus calories out. When that thermostat is set too high, the brain actively defends it: reducing metabolic rate, amplifying hunger, making the whole effort feel like swimming upstream. This is why calorie restriction works and then stops. Your brain is not failing. It is succeeding at protecting a target.

    What miscalibrates the thermostat in the first place? The four main culprits Gottfried identifies:

    • Gut dysbiosis: bacterial imbalance that drives insulin resistance independent of what you eat. (She cites research showing roughly 89% of people with obesity also have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.)
    • Chronic stress: sustained cortisol elevation that locks the thermostat in a fat-storing state
    • Hormonal disruption: estrogen decline, which governs not just reproduction but metabolism, appetite signaling, and blood sugar regulation
    • Toxic accumulation: endocrine-disrupting chemicals that interfere with thyroid function and insulin signaling

    Her protocol targets these levers rather than calories. Intermittent fasting (starting at 12 to 14 hours, extending to 16 to 18 in the advanced version) resets leptin, adiponectin, and the microbiome. Prebiotic fiber feeds the bacterial strains that govern insulin sensitivity. Removing ultra-processed carbohydrates eliminates repeated insulin spikes. For women in perimenopause, estrogen management is treated as non-optional rather than a last resort.

    One practical note worth flagging: fat-stored toxins are released into circulation when fat is burned. Detox support during weight loss isn’t a wellness add-on in Gottfried’s view; it’s required for the process to work cleanly.

    How Does the Gut-Brain Connection Affect Mood and Cravings?

    The gut produces approximately 400 times more serotonin than the brain. It also manufactures melatonin, GABA precursors, and estrogen metabolites. Most people think of the gut as a digestion organ and the brain as the mood organ. Gottfried treats them as one integrated system, and the evidence she marshals for that position is harder to dismiss than wellness culture has made it seem.

    The cascade she describes goes: dysbiosis creates intestinal permeability (leaky gut). Inflammatory signals from the leaky gut enter systemic circulation. They weaken the blood-brain barrier (which degrades in parallel with the gut barrier). Once inside the brain, these signals activate microglia, the brain’s immune cells. Chronically activated microglia impair synaptic function, suppress neurogenesis, and reduce BDNF, the growth factor that governs neuron survival. The inflamed brain then dysregulates its signals back to the body, producing more gut dysfunction and metabolic disruption. The loop feeds itself.

    The most striking evidence she cites: fecal transplant studies in mice. Anxious gut flora transplanted into calm animals produces anxious behavior. The reversal works too. A meaningful fraction of what we call anxiety and depression may originate in the gut, not the brain. Which means treating anxiety without addressing gut health is like treating a smoke alarm without looking for the fire.

    “Your gut harbors an inner world of microbial intelligence. That intelligence informs your emotional state, your mood, your anxiety.” Sara Gottfried, Brain Body Diet

    For cravings specifically, she makes an argument that many people find almost too simple to accept: cravings aren’t a character flaw. They’re neurological signals (frequently from a gut microbiome in dysbiosis, a dopamine system under reward deficiency, or a brain running on inflammatory fuel). They’re information. And information responds to treatment in ways that willpower never can.

    What Is the 40-Day Brain Body Protocol?

    The 40-day structure organizes seven domains of dysfunction that Gottfried calls the “broken seven”: toxic overload, disrupted weight set point, brain fog, addiction and cravings, anxiety, depression, and memory loss. The argument is that these aren’t separate problems requiring separate specialists. They share root causes, and they respond to the same upstream interventions.

    The protocol runs in layers:

    1. Detox (runs the full 40 days as a foundation). The liver’s two-phase detoxification process is supported through food: 11 servings of vegetables daily, with bitter greens at every meal (arugula, dandelion, endive), allium vegetables for glutathione production (garlic, onion, leeks), and cruciferous vegetables for phase 2 support (broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale). Two specific removals get called out as high-leverage: diet soda (documented associations with gut dysbiosis and dementia risk) and triclosan (found in many toothpastes and hand sanitizers; a thyroid disruptor and neurotoxin).

    2. Set point recalibration. Intermittent fasting begins here. So does gut microbiome repair through prebiotic fiber. White bean extract (Phaseolus vulgaris) before higher-carb meals is mentioned as a practical tool for reducing postprandial glucose spikes.

    3. Brain fog, anxiety, depression, and memory protocols layer in afterward, in order of dependency, each building on the foundation the earlier work establishes.

    The 40-day timeframe reflects real biology: meaningful gut microbiome shifts, measurable neuroplasticity changes, and hormonal recalibration all require roughly that window. Whether 40 days is enough for everyone is a different question (the book’s framing is partly a marketing choice), but the underlying sequencing logic holds up.

    The endgame Gottfried describes isn’t the protocol itself. It’s what she calls self-directed neuroplasticity: the deliberate daily practice of activities that keep the brain building new connections. HIIT four times a week (the single most potent stimulus for BDNF), yoga (shown in published trials to outperform standard medical care for depression), deep slow-wave sleep (which activates the brain’s overnight waste clearance system, the glymphatic system), and intermittent fasting (which raises BDNF specifically during the fasted period). The 40 days is the on-ramp. This is the road.

    Is Brain Body Diet Worth Reading?

    Read this if you’ve been doing everything “right” and still feel like your body is working against you. The gut-brain-hormone framework is genuinely useful for anyone experiencing the cluster of symptoms that mainstream medicine tends to treat as unrelated: stubborn weight, brain fog, anxiety, fatigue, persistent cravings. Women approaching or in perimenopause will find the estrogen-as-neurological-regulator argument especially clarifying. It reframes a lot of experiences that tend to get dismissed.

    Skip it if you want a short, tight argument. The 40-day protocol structure means each chapter re-explains the framework before applying it, which produces useful reinforcement for some readers and redundancy for others. The 11-servings-of-vegetables-per-day target will feel aspirational to the point of discouraging for most people. The supplement recommendations are extensive (and, in aggregate, expensive) without clear prioritization.

    One caveat: the evidence quality varies. Some of the strongest claims (the fecal transplant-to-human anxiety translation, the bioidentical hormone reversal of early cognitive decline) push beyond what the current literature can fully support. Gottfried is a skilled synthesizer, but she occasionally treats emerging research as settled. Read with a little skepticism in hand, especially in the anxiety and depression chapters.

    The book is explicitly female-centric, which is both its greatest strength and its clearest limitation. Men will find the gut-brain axis logic and neuroplasticity practices useful, but the hormonal mechanisms are written for women and don’t translate cleanly across.

    Books Like Brain Body Diet

    BookAuthorBest For
    Women Food and HormonesSara GottfriedGottfried’s later, more direct hormonal weight loss protocol; a natural follow-up
    Brain FoodLisa MosconiNutrition for brain health; rigorous, research-grounded, less protocol-heavy
    The XX BrainLisa MosconiFemale brain health and dementia prevention; the neuroscience companion to Gottfried’s clinical framework
    The Autoimmune CureSara GottfriedFor readers whose symptoms suggest autoimmune involvement alongside the brain-body picture
    The Menopause BrainLisa MosconiBrain imaging data on what estrogen decline actually does to the female brain; harder science, narrower focus

  • The Hormone Fix by Anna Cabeca: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: A triple-board-certified OB-GYN argues that menopause weight gain and hot flashes are driven by three upstream hormones (insulin, cortisol, oxytocin), not estrogen, and teaches a practical keto-plus-vegetables plan you can test at home with $8 urine strips.

    What Is The Hormone Fix About?

    You’ve cleaned up your diet, cut the carbs, added more cardio. The scale hasn’t moved. Meanwhile, the hot flashes, the 3am wake-ups, the fog that sits on top of your brain by 2pm are all still there, maybe worse. If that’s where you are, Anna Cabeca wrote this book for you.

    Cabeca is a triple-board-certified OB-GYN and reproductive endocrinologist with over twenty years of clinical practice. She is also a woman who, in 2006, lost her eighteen-month-old son to drowning, and watched her own body respond to that grief by going into premature ovarian failure, gaining eighty pounds, losing her hair, and being told she would never conceive again. She was forty, medically trained, and could not figure out what was happening to her own body. The protocol in The Hormone Fix is what she developed to recover. She reportedly did, including conceiving the daughter she had been told was impossible.

    That backstory matters because it earns the voice. Cabeca writes as someone who worked out these ideas on her own body first, not just her patients’. The central reframe she offers is this: the hormones driving the worst menopause symptoms are not primarily estrogen and progesterone. They are insulin, cortisol, and oxytocin. Get those three into balance, and the reproductive hormones follow. Ignore them, and no amount of hormone replacement fully compensates.

    What Is the Keto-Green Diet and How Does It Work?

    Standard ketogenic eating works for many women, for a while. Fat loss, clearer thinking, fewer cravings. Then something shifts. Mood destabilizes, inflammation creeps back, weight stalls, and the irritability is hard to explain if you’re “doing everything right.” Cabeca’s clinical observation is that this pattern has a cause: strict keto makes the body acidic over time, and chronic acidity drives inflammation and causes the body to hold onto fat as a protective buffer.

    Her own experience confirmed it. She tested her urine with pH strips while eating strict keto and found herself persistently acidic. “No wonder I felt irritable,” she writes. The fix was simple in concept: add a large volume of alkalinizing vegetables (dark leafy greens, cucumber, zucchini, broccoli, asparagus, celery) to every meal, so the diet hits both fat-burning and alkalinity simultaneously.

    The plate ratio is easy to remember without counting anything:

    • 75% alkalinizing vegetables (by plate surface)
    • A palm-sized amount of protein
    • A golf-ball circle of healthy fat (avocado, olive oil, ghee, nuts)

    Two types of inexpensive urine strips, tested each morning, confirm whether the previous day’s eating actually hit both targets. Ketone strips show whether fat-burning is happening. pH strips show whether the body is alkaline (target: 7.0 or above). Both are available at any pharmacy for a few dollars.

    A word of honesty here: the claim that food directly changes your body’s pH is scientifically shaky. The body regulates blood pH within a very tight range regardless of what you eat. What the strips actually measure is urine pH, which does shift based on what you eat. The practical result of chasing alkaline urine (eating more vegetables alongside keto) is genuinely sound. The mechanism Cabeca offers to explain why it works is less solid than she implies. (That caveat doesn’t make the vegetables a bad idea. It just means the “alkalizing” framing is doing more marketing work than scientific work.)

    What the monitoring system does accomplish, regardless of the mechanism, is real. It personalizes a population-level protocol. Some women hit alkalinity easily but struggle to enter ketosis. Others achieve ketosis quickly but drift acidic from too much protein. The strips tell you which problem is yours. They also prevent the maddening experience of following a program while actually missing both of its targets.

    Why Does Cortisol Make Menopause Worse?

    Chapter 8 is raw in a way most diet books aren’t, and it’s also where the clinical framework gets personal. Cabeca traces the physiology of what happened to her body after her son died: cortisol at crisis levels for months, progesterone suppressed, thyroid impaired, visceral fat accumulating, oxytocin depleted. The chapter makes a clinical argument that many women going through menopause during high-stress life seasons need to hear.

    Chronic stress is not a mood problem. It is a hormonal problem. Cortisol and progesterone compete for the same receptor sites. When cortisol is chronically elevated, progesterone cannot get in. The result: progesterone deficiency symptoms (anxiety, poor sleep, mood swings) even when blood levels look normal on paper. This physiological reality is well-documented and almost never discussed in the average clinical encounter.

    The dietary implications are manageable. The exercise implications are harder to accept. Cabeca argues that intense cardio worsens the hormonal picture for women with chronically elevated cortisol, because vigorous exercise is itself a cortisol stressor. Her prescription runs against most conventional fitness advice: reduce intense exercise, replace it with walking, yoga, and gentle strength work, and treat sleep as a medical intervention rather than a lifestyle preference.

    She adds breathing practices, gratitude journaling, and nature exposure, framed not as soft suggestions but as cortisol management tools. These interventions have real physiological effects (slow breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system; gratitude practices measurably reduce cortisol in research settings). Whether the degree of benefit matches the confidence of Cabeca’s prescriptions is harder to pin down, but the direction is right.

    What Does Oxytocin Have to Do With Weight Loss?

    Most people have heard oxytocin described as the “cuddle hormone.” Cabeca makes a bigger claim: oxytocin is a key upstream regulator of wellbeing, and it’s also the one thing conventional medicine cannot prescribe.

    Oxytocin directly opposes cortisol. When oxytocin rises, cortisol falls. When cortisol falls, progesterone receptors open up. On the weight side, oxytocin is involved in satiety signaling and has been shown in animal and human studies to prevent insulin resistance and support fat loss. One 2008 study Cabeca cites found that mice with blocked oxytocin receptors became obese even without eating more food. A 2013 study showed extra oxytocin in humans triggered weight loss.

    “There is a definite physiology behind all this. You’re not going crazy! If you ever experience burnout, emotional disconnection, or withdrawal from things and people you love, it is probably due to cortisol knocking oxytocin down.”

    The behaviors that raise oxytocin reliably include:

    • Twenty-second hugs (below that duration, the oxytocin release is minimal)
    • Sustained eye contact
    • Acts of generosity or service
    • Prayer and meditation
    • Group movement with social components (Zumba, dance classes, group yoga)
    • Sexual intimacy
    • Gratitude journaling

    Cabeca’s framing of these as medical interventions rather than lifestyle suggestions is the book’s most interesting claim. It’s also why the dietary approach alone often fails. A woman eating Keto-Green flawlessly while going through a divorce, caregiving for an ill parent, and sleeping alone has almost no oxytocin inputs. The food cannot compensate for what connection does.

    The oxytocin research is real but still developing. Cabeca applies it with more confidence than the dose-response evidence strictly supports. The twenty-second hug figure, for instance, comes from preliminary research, not a clinical guideline. But the general principle (connection, touch, and warmth measurably affect cortisol and metabolic function) holds up better than it might look at first.

    Is The Hormone Fix Worth Reading?

    Read this if you’re in perimenopause or postmenopause and have tried standard keto, clean eating, or both, and experienced the mood destabilization or eventual stall that many women describe. Also read it if you’ve been told your labs are normal while feeling anything but. Cabeca’s cortisol-progesterone framework explains a lot of that. And read it if you’re already on hormone replacement therapy but want to understand what lifestyle factors might be working against its effectiveness.

    Skip it if you’re premenopausal looking for support with PCOS, endometriosis, or reproductive-age cycle irregularities. Cabeca’s framework is aimed squarely at perimenopause and menopause. Skip it too if you need rigorous dose-response data before adopting supplements. The supplement chapter is thin on that front.

    One caveat: the alkaline science is oversold. The practical instruction it produces (eat more vegetables) is good. The mechanism Cabeca uses to explain why (body pH shifts with food) is not as solid as she presents it. Readers who notice that gap may lose trust in parts of the book that actually earn it. Take the vegetable-heavy eating pattern seriously. Take the pH framing as a useful heuristic, not hard science.

    The practical value here is real. The 16-day plan, the urine strip monitoring system, and the three-hormone framework give perimenopausal and postmenopausal women a coherent starting point that addresses metabolic and lifestyle drivers before (or alongside) conventional hormone therapy. For a lot of women, that starting point is exactly what’s been missing.

    Books Like The Hormone Fix

    BookAuthorBest For
    MenuPauseAnna CabecaCabeca’s follow-up with five different eating plans for different menopause symptoms
    Women Food and HormonesSara Gottfried, MDA similar functional medicine approach with more emphasis on elimination and lab testing
    Fast Like a GirlMindy PelzExtends Cabeca’s fasting angle into a full cyclical fasting protocol for women at all life stages
    The Menopause Diet PlanHillary Wright & Elizabeth WardMore conventional dietitian-led approach; stronger evidence base, less framework-driven
    Eat to Thrive During MenopauseJenn HuberPractical nutrition-forward guide without the keto framing

  • Healthy Hormones by Belinda Kirkpatrick: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: A naturopath with a Master of Reproductive Health walks women through the hormonal root causes of period pain, PCOS, endometriosis, and weight resistance, then gives them a practical diet-and-lifestyle toolkit to actually do something about it.

    What Is Healthy Hormones About?

    You’ve probably been told your painful periods are just part of being a woman. Maybe a doctor ran basic bloodwork, told you everything looked normal, and sent you home with an NSAID prescription. Belinda Kirkpatrick’s opening argument is worth hearing out: period pain is common, but common is not the same as normal. “A menstrual cycle should ideally be free of negative symptoms,” she writes, and the rest of the book is built around proving that’s achievable.

    Kirkpatrick is an Australian naturopath and nutritionist with a Bachelor of Health Science and a Master of Reproductive Health, and she’s been in clinical practice specializing in women’s health for over a decade. She’s not writing theory here. The book reads like a detailed intake session with someone who has heard these questions a thousand times and knows exactly which levers to pull. She covers PCOS, endometriosis, PMS, thyroid health, and fertility, using the same organizing principle throughout: symptoms are downstream of mechanisms, and mechanisms respond to targeted interventions.

    Where this book fits in the crowded hormone-health shelf: less clinically dense than Aviva Romm’s Hormone Intelligence, more mechanistically grounded than Angelique Vermeulen’s Happy Hormones. It lands in a genuinely useful middle range for women who want to understand what’s happening in their bodies without needing a medical degree to follow along.

    Why Your Hormones Are Driving Your Weight

    Here’s something that almost never comes up in weight loss conversations: hormones are not a separate problem from weight. They’re woven into the same system.

    Kirkpatrick maps out three specific connections worth understanding. First, oestrogen excess changes how the body distributes fat (hips, thighs), drives water retention, and creates the kind of persistent bloat that looks like weight gain on the scale. Second, insulin resistance (the most common root cause of PCOS, in her framework) works both directions: excess body fat raises androgen production and worsens insulin sensitivity, while insulin resistance makes fat loss measurably harder. The cycle reinforces itself. Third, cortisol drives visceral fat accumulation and carbohydrate cravings directly, not as a side effect of stress but as a core metabolic function.

    The practical implication isn’t “fix your hormones to lose weight” as some kind of magic shortcut. It’s that if your appetite and weight feel disconnected from your actual effort, the hormonal picture is worth examining. Systems respond better to targeted interventions than to willpower applied to one variable in isolation.

    For women with PCOS especially, this reframe matters. Kirkpatrick’s position (consistent with current endocrinology) is that PCOS is primarily a metabolic condition driven by insulin resistance that happens to express itself through hormonal symptoms. The ovaries, under the influence of excess insulin, produce more testosterone. That disrupts ovulation. Addressing the blood sugar upstream often does more than any hormonal treatment downstream.

    How Does Kirkpatrick Explain the Main Hormonal Conditions?

    Oestrogen Dominance

    The liver clears oestrogen by converting it into excretable forms. The gut then binds those forms to fibre and eliminates them. When either pathway fails (overburdened liver, low-fibre diet, disrupted gut microbiome), oestrogen gets reabsorbed rather than excreted, creating relative oestrogen excess even when the ovaries are producing normal amounts.

    The downstream symptoms of this are recognizable: heavy or painful periods, breast tenderness before the period, fluid retention, mood shifts around ovulation, and difficulty losing weight around the hips. These are not random or mysterious. They’re the predictable output of a specific physiological process.

    What supports oestrogen clearance, according to Kirkpatrick:

    • Cruciferous vegetables daily (broccoli, cauliflower, kale, brussels sprouts) provide compounds (I3C and DIM) that drive the liver’s oestrogen metabolism pathways
    • 2 tablespoons of ground flaxseeds daily for gut fibre and mild anti-oestrogenic lignans
    • Probiotic foods or supplements to maintain the gut bacteria that prevent oestrogen reactivation in the bowel
    • Reducing alcohol, since the liver prioritizes alcohol metabolism and deprioritizes oestrogen clearance

    PCOS

    Kirkpatrick draws a distinction that a lot of women have never heard: a polycystic ovary on ultrasound is not the same as a PCOS diagnosis. The syndrome requires a combination of clinical, hormonal, and imaging criteria. Many women are told they have PCOS based on imaging alone, which is both inaccurate and unnecessary.

    For women who do have PCOS (the syndrome), her framework is direct:

    “The fastest way to regulate your cycle and promote ovulation is by addressing insulin resistance in the ovaries. A low-sugar and low-carbohydrate diet is recommended for women with PCOS.”

    The supporting protocol includes spearmint tea (2-3 cups daily, supported by clinical trials for reducing free testosterone), cinnamon tea (2-3 cups daily for insulin sensitization), strength training as the exercise priority, and practitioner-supervised supplementation with inositol, zinc, magnesium, and chromium.

    Endometriosis

    Endometriosis is oestrogen-dependent: the tissue that grows outside the uterus responds to oestrogen the same way the uterine lining does. Reducing oestrogen load is structural management of the condition, not a lifestyle preference. Kirkpatrick stacks the oestrogen-clearance protocol above with anti-inflammatory nutrition: eliminating dairy, gluten, corn, soy, and sugar; limiting red meat to roughly one serving per week (arachidonic acid feeds inflammatory prostaglandins); and replacing coffee with green tea.

    She’s explicit that this works alongside medical management, not instead of it. Surgery, when indicated, should happen. The dietary approach shapes the hormonal environment that surgery is operating in.

    Stress and the Cortisol-Progesterone Relationship

    Both cortisol and progesterone are synthesized from the same precursor molecule. Under chronic stress, the body preferentially makes cortisol, leaving less substrate available for progesterone. The result: short luteal phases, premenstrual spotting, heightened PMS, suppressed ovulation. This explains why cycles get worse during high-stress periods. Most women have noticed the pattern without ever having a name for the mechanism.

    “High cortisol levels can decrease the production of progesterone and result in a relative progesterone deficiency or relative oestrogen excess. This may exacerbate negative menstrual symptoms and, in cases of severe or chronic stress, even delay ovulation.”

    Kirkpatrick’s response is specific rather than vague. For heavy exercisers especially: reducing high-intensity exercise frequency (bootcamp, running) to no more than 2-3 times per week, because intense exercise raises cortisol acutely and can suppress ovulation. This is counterintuitive and often resisted. She states it directly and explains why.

    What Does the Naturopathic Toolkit Actually Look Like?

    Kirkpatrick’s core nutrition framework is almost aggressively simple: every meal should contain protein, good fats, and something fresh. That’s it. No calorie counting, no macronutrient math. The formula ensures blood sugar stays stable (protein and fat slow glucose absorption), inflammation is managed, and micronutrient needs are met through fresh produce. Carbohydrates exist but they’re accompaniments, not foundations.

    Beyond food, the toolkit has three practical layers:

    Herbal teas as daily protocol. Kirkpatrick organizes teas by mechanism rather than vague “wellness” claims. Spearmint for androgen reduction. Cinnamon for insulin sensitization. Dandelion root and St Mary’s Thistle for liver support. Licorice root for adrenal recovery (contraindicated with high blood pressure). These are low-risk, self-prescribable, and supported by at least some clinical evidence for each use.

    Pathology testing literacy. Most women who go to a GP with cycle symptoms receive a single blood draw without context. Kirkpatrick explains what a useful baseline looks like: Day 3 hormonal panel (FSH, LH, oestrogen, progesterone, androgens), mid-luteal progesterone timed to 7 days before the period (not necessarily day 21), and a full thyroid panel including antibodies. Her key point:

    “Optimal health is what we are aiming for, not just absence of ill health.”

    Falling within standard reference ranges is not the same as functioning at an optimal level. A mid-luteal progesterone of 6 nmol/L confirms ovulation happened; it does not confirm a luteal phase capable of sustaining early pregnancy, which ideally sits above 30 nmol/L.

    Environmental oestrogen reduction. Kirkpatrick treats this as structural, not optional. BPA from plastic food containers, synthetic fragrances in personal care products, pesticide residues concentrated in animal fats: these add to the body’s total oestrogen processing load. She recommends implementing changes gradually over months (swap plastic containers for glass, choose fragrance-free cleaning products, go organic on animal products first) rather than attempting an overwhelming overhaul.

    Is Healthy Hormones Worth Reading?

    Read this if you have cycle symptoms you’ve normalized (painful periods, PMS, irregular cycles, persistent bloating), if you’ve been given a PCOS or endometriosis diagnosis and want to understand the dietary and lifestyle picture, or if your appetite and weight feel disconnected from your effort and you haven’t looked at the hormonal layer yet.

    Skip it if you’re looking for a clinical textbook with systematic review citations (try Aviva Romm’s Hormone Intelligence instead), or if you need a structured weight loss plan rather than a hormonal health framework.

    One caveat: This is a 2017 book from an Australian naturopath, and some of the supplement dosing ranges are wide enough that self-implementing without a practitioner is genuinely tricky. Kirkpatrick is consistent about directing readers toward naturopath supervision for complex cases, which is the right call. The book is strongest as a primer that gives you enough clinical literacy to ask better questions, not as a standalone treatment protocol.

    Books Like Healthy Hormones

    BookAuthorBest For
    Hormone IntelligenceAviva RommDeeper clinical coverage with stronger research citations; better for complex cases
    Happy HormonesAngelique VermeulenLighter and more accessible; less mechanistic detail than Kirkpatrick
    The Happy Hormone GuideShannon LeparskiPlant-based lens on cycle syncing and hormonal nutrition
    The Hormone ShiftTasneem BhatiaPerimenopause and midlife hormonal transition; picks up where Kirkpatrick leaves off
    Women Food and HormonesSara GottfriedHarvard-trained OB/GYN with stronger research backing on oestrogen, cortisol, and weight

  • The Hormone Myth by Robyn Stein DeLuca: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: A health psychologist dismantles fifty years of flawed PMS research, pharmaceutical manipulation, and cultural mythology to argue that hormones are not, for most women, the cause of emotional instability, and that believing they are has real costs.

    What Is The Hormone Myth About?

    Picture the last time you felt frustrated, tired, or short-tempered around someone. Now imagine the response was: “Are you on your period?” The conversation stops. Your point goes unheard. The biology explanation short-circuits everything else, and nothing you were actually responding to gets addressed.

    Robyn Stein DeLuca, a clinical health psychologist at Stony Brook University, spent years in the research literature on exactly this dynamic. What she found was a significant gap between what the science says and what most people believe. Psychologists have known since the early 1990s that women’s emotional stability, measured rigorously over time, is comparable to men’s. That finding has been replicated. It is not obscure. And almost no one knows it.

    The Hormone Myth covers the full arc of women’s reproductive life: menstruation, pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause. At each stage, DeLuca traces the myth’s origins, examines what the actual research shows, and follows the money. Her argument is not that hormonal conditions don’t exist. It is that the real conditions affect a minority of women, and the culture has been applying that minority’s experience to everyone, for reasons that have more to do with profit and ideology than with science.

    What Does the Science Actually Say About PMS?

    The short version: the founding PMS research was built on methods that would not survive peer review today. Five specific failures show up repeatedly across the studies that established PMS as a widespread condition.

    Retrospective reporting. Women were asked to recall past symptoms instead of tracking them in real time. Memory is systematically inflated by expectation. When you prime someone to look for symptoms, they find more of them on recall than they documented at the time.

    No diagnostic standardization. Researchers eventually catalogued over 150 possible PMS symptoms, with no agreed severity threshold and no standard timing window. When your criteria include 150 possibilities, finding the condition “everywhere” is not a discovery. The resulting prevalence estimates ranged from 5% to 97% of all menstruating women (a range that wide is functionally useless).

    No control groups. Most foundational studies recruited women who already identified as having PMS, then confirmed they had PMS symptoms. Without a comparison group, you cannot establish that the symptom rate is elevated. You don’t know the baseline.

    Homogeneous samples. The research was conducted almost entirely on white, middle-class, Western women, then applied universally. PMS symptom reporting varies across cultures in ways that a purely biological condition should not.

    Single-cycle measurement. A genuine syndrome requires cyclical recurrence. Most founding studies assessed one cycle.

    When researchers applied rigorous standards (prospective daily tracking, standardized criteria, multi-cycle confirmation, functional impairment thresholds), the condition refined to PMDD: a real diagnosis affecting 3-8% of menstruating women. Not 50%. Not everyone. A specific minority. The myth applies the minority’s experience to the whole population, and that universalization is where the harm concentrates.

    “A large body of scientific research says that fluctuating reproductive hormones don’t play a major role in women’s mental health, because when women’s emotional stability is measured by the frequency and severity of mood swings they experience over time, it is in fact similar to the stability of men. Surprised? Here’s the kicker: psychologists have known that since the early 1990s but it is probably news to you.” — Robyn Stein DeLuca

    Why Do We Still Believe Hormones Control Women’s Moods?

    A finding this significant should have reshaped the cultural narrative by now. It has not. DeLuca’s most interesting chapter asks why, and the answer involves three separate mechanisms working together.

    The nocebo effect. The nocebo effect is the clinical term for what happens when expecting a negative experience makes it more likely and more severe. Girls are primed to expect menstrual misery before they ever menstruate, through tampon company pamphlets distributed in elementary school, puberty books that describe menstruation as an emotional rollercoaster, and jokes treating menstruating women as irrational. By first period, a girl has absorbed hundreds of messages, from authoritative sources, that she should feel terrible. Research confirms this priming has measurable effects. Expectation of a symptom generates some portion of the symptom. The aggressive negative framing of every stage of women’s reproductive life is not neutral information. It is partly a self-fulfilling loop.

    The pharmaceutical industry. DeLuca documents the manipulation in detail, and the details are not flattering. Robert Wilson’s 1966 book Feminine Forever argued that menopause is an estrogen-deficiency disease and all women should take manufactured estrogen for life. Widely read, excerpted in Vogue, and influential enough to shape a generation of medical practice. What readers did not know: Wilson’s research was funded by Ayerst Laboratories (maker of Premarin), who helped write the book, funded his promotional tour, and secretly purchased enough copies to maintain its bestseller status. The narrative that menopause is a disease was not a scientific finding. It was a marketing campaign. When Eli Lilly’s patent on Prozac expired, they rebranded the same drug as Sarafem in pink-and-lavender packaging for PMDD, then marketed it to the general PMS population (far larger than the 3-8% for whom clinical justification existed). The company that defined the disorder funded the approval research and sold the treatment.

    Social utility. The myth also serves a function for individual women, which makes it harder to discard. Invoking PMS provides a socially acceptable explanation for anger or frustration that would otherwise draw social sanction. “I’m sorry, I’m PMSing” allows a woman to express an emotion without threatening the cultural expectation of perpetual pleasantness. It is a rational adaptation to an irrational environment. The cost is reinforcing the myth that enables the limitation.

    What This Means If You’re Trying to Fix Your Eating

    This is the counterpoint that earns The Hormone Myth a place on this list alongside the hormone-optimization books. A significant portion of the weight and eating advice aimed at women is built on a hormone-first premise: fix your hormones and fix your eating. DeLuca’s work complicates that premise in ways worth sitting with.

    Take postpartum depression, where the hormonal framing is especially pervasive. Health websites and pregnancy guides almost universally attribute postpartum depression to the drop in reproductive hormones after delivery. DeLuca examines the research: comprehensive reviews over twenty years fail to show a clear causal link between hormonal changes and postpartum depression. The actual evidence-based predictors are social and structural:

    • Prior history of depression or mental illness (the strongest single predictor)
    • Inadequate social support
    • Unequal distribution of childcare and domestic labor
    • Relationship conflict
    • Financial stress
    • Inadequate maternity leave
    • The “motherhood mystique” (the belief that motherhood is natural and easy, which makes difficulty feel like personal failure)

    Hormones are not on that list as primary drivers. Telling a struggling new mother to balance her hormones is sending her toward an intervention the research does not support, while the actually modifiable factors go unaddressed. The same logic applies to eating. If what looks like a hormonal problem is actually a stress problem, a sleep problem, or a life-circumstances problem, no hormone protocol fixes it.

    DeLuca’s menopause research tells a similar story. Studies that gave women symptom checklists found symptoms (because that is what you measure when you only measure negative outcomes). Studies using open-ended methods found a consistent set of positive themes: relief from menstruation and contraception anxiety, increased assertiveness, clarity about what matters, a renewed sense of self-permission. Population-level data consistently shows that most menopausal women report good mental health and life satisfaction. Only 10-15% have symptoms severe enough to warrant treatment. The dominant narrative of menopause as catastrophic decline does not describe most women’s experience. It describes a minority’s experience and a pharmaceutical industry’s business model.

    None of this means hormonal conditions are not real or that no woman needs treatment. It means the relationship between hormones, mood, and eating behavior is considerably more nuanced than the hormone-optimization genre suggests. Reading DeLuca alongside books like Hormone Intelligence is the honest approach: take the real biology seriously without outsourcing the full explanation to biology.

    “Much of our cultural perception about menopause and aging in women was established, promoted, and maintained in order to make a profit. This is the ultimate abuse of our capacity for myth-making.” — Robyn Stein DeLuca

    Is The Hormone Myth Worth Reading?

    Read this if you have been consuming a lot of hormone-optimization content and want the skeptic’s counterpoint. If you have ever had your anger, exhaustion, or dissatisfaction attributed to your cycle when the person saying it was not interested in what you were actually responding to. If you are approaching perimenopause and the content you’re finding is alarming you in ways that feel disproportionate.

    Skip it if you are looking for treatment guidance. DeLuca tells you what to think about hormone claims, not what to do about your hormones. Those are different books, and this is firmly the former.

    One caveat: The book is a corrective argument, which means it sometimes leans hard in one direction to counter the weight on the other side. Readers with clinically significant PMDD or severe perimenopausal symptoms may occasionally feel their experience is being minimized rather than correctly contextualized. DeLuca is careful about this distinction in most chapters (PMDD is real, she says repeatedly; it affects a minority), but not always. Treat it as a calibration tool, not a verdict on your own experience.

    At 272 pages, it moves fast. The appendix on spotting junk science is worth the read on its own terms, a practical checklist for evaluating any health claim you encounter.

    Books Like The Hormone Myth

    BookAuthorBest For
    Hormone IntelligenceAviva RommThe affirmative counterpart: integrative medicine approach to actual hormone optimization
    It’s Your HormonesGeoffrey RedmondEndocrinologist’s clinical take on when hormone problems are genuinely the cause
    The Science of MenopauseJen Gunter & OthersEvidence-based menopause guidance that holds both the real biology and the cultural mythology
    Is It Me or My HormonesMarcelle PickIntegrative approach; useful to read alongside DeLuca for a fuller picture
    The Menopause ManifestoJen GunterOB/GYN takes apart menopause myths while honoring real symptoms; closest in spirit to DeLuca