Excess Matters

Tag: metabolism

  • The Menopause Metabolism Fix by Cara Metz: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: A fitness coach who went through perimenopause herself lays out a 4-week, 15-minute-a-day program built around the specific metabolic problem that makes menopausal belly fat so resistant to the old playbook.

    What Is The Menopause Metabolism Fix About?

    You’ve been eating roughly the same way you always have. You’re doing some version of exercise. The scale is climbing anyway, mostly at the belly, and nothing explains it. Your doctor hands you a pamphlet about calories in, calories out. The internet offers you conflicting opinions about fasting, seed cycling, and adaptogens.

    Cara Metz wrote this book for that exact moment. She’s a fitness coach who went through perimenopause herself and found that the standard advice stopped working for her body and her clients’ bodies in very specific ways. So she built a program around the actual problem: the metabolic shift that happens when estrogen declines, not the generic “eat less, move more” prescription that predates that shift. The result is a 4-week plan built for deconditioned, time-short women who need something they can actually do.

    One piece of context before you dive in. Metz is not a registered dietitian or endocrinologist. She’s an experienced fitness coach with personal skin in the game. The physiological model she presents is directionally correct and motivationally useful, but it’s a coach’s simplified framework, not a clinical protocol. If you go in expecting a medical text, you’ll find it thin. If you go in expecting a practical, well-structured fitness program from someone who genuinely gets the emotional terrain of this life stage, you’ll find it more useful than most.

    Why Does Menopause Stall Your Metabolism?

    The book’s central argument is that menopausal belly fat is a hormonal phenomenon, not a willpower or calorie problem. Metz explains the cascade this way.

    As perimenopause progresses, ovarian estrogen drops. The adrenal glands (the small glands that sit atop your kidneys) serve as a backup estrogen source, converting androgens into estrone, a milder form of estrogen. This is real physiology. The problem is that those same adrenals are also your primary stress-response system. They’re the ones releasing cortisol and adrenaline when you’re overwhelmed, sleep-deprived, or riding a blood sugar crash. In chronically stressed modern lives, they’re already working at capacity. That leaves limited bandwidth for backup estrogen production.

    When both systems fall short, the body turns to a third source: abdominal fat cells, which can produce small amounts of estrogen. The body then deposits and retains visceral fat around the belly as a hormonal survival mechanism. This is why cutting calories alone doesn’t move menopausal belly fat the way it moved fat in your thirties. Visceral fat is metabolically driven, not just calorically driven, and the intervention has to address the hormonal roots.

    “Simply cutting calories won’t target this stubborn fat effectively. To combat visceral fat, the focus needs to shift from quantity to quality.”

    The direct chain Metz draws (blood sugar instability depletes adrenal capacity, which triggers belly fat storage) is described with more certainty than the research strictly supports. The broad strokes are accurate. The specific cascade is a simplified model. Use it as a framework for understanding why your old approach stopped working, not as a clinical explanation you’d cite to a doctor.

    What Does Metz Actually Recommend?

    Three levers get repeated throughout the book: stabilize blood sugar, reduce stress load, and do the right kind of exercise. Each one is supposed to reduce the burden on the adrenal system and interrupt the belly fat cycle.

    1. The Macro Triad at Every Meal

    Metz’s dietary foundation is protein, fiber, and complex carbohydrates together at every meal. The combination slows glucose absorption, prevents the spike-crash cycle, and (according to her model) reduces the cortisol pulses that follow a blood sugar crash. The approach is additive before it’s restrictive: add ground flaxseed to your smoothie, add lentils to your salad, swap white rice for quinoa. Crowding out tends to work better psychologically than restriction, and she builds the whole dietary section around that principle.

    Phytoestrogens (flaxseeds, soy, legumes, sesame, oats) show up throughout the nutrition recommendations as mild estrogen mimics. The evidence for phytoestrogens in menopause symptom reduction is mixed at best. Soy-based isoflavones have the strongest observational support, mostly for hot flash frequency in populations with higher baseline soy intake. Metz presents them as broadly beneficial without distinguishing evidence levels. Worth including in a varied diet; not a substitute for HRT if your symptoms are severe.

    2. The Kitchen Closing Rule

    Stop eating three hours before bed. Metz uses 8 p.m. as the default. The logic: late-night eating causes blood sugar to rise and then crash during sleep, which triggers a cortisol release that wakes you between 2 and 4 a.m. feeling tired but wired. That 3 a.m. waking pattern is extremely common in perimenopause and often blamed entirely on night sweats or anxiety. For many women, late-night eating is a significant contributing factor. This is the single most actionable recommendation in the book, costs nothing, requires no equipment, and a meaningful number of women will notice a difference within the first week.

    3. Stress Management as Metabolic Work

    Box breathing (4-count inhale, hold, exhale, hold), 10-minute daily meditations, outdoor walks, and stretching sessions are all framed as metabolic interventions rather than optional self-care. The reasoning is consistent with the adrenal model: anything that lowers cortisol output creates more capacity for backup estrogen production. Whether or not you fully accept the hormonal cascade, the recommendation to build genuine rest into the program structure (not treat it as a prerequisite you should sort out first) is one of the more honest things this book does.

    Is the 15-Minute Workout Concept Legit?

    Yes, and this is the strongest part of the book regardless of how you feel about the hormonal framework.

    Every workout follows the same architecture: five exercises targeting different muscle groups, performed for 50 seconds on and 10 seconds rest, repeated three rounds. Total time: approximately 15 minutes. No gym. Equipment: a pair of dumbbells, starting weight of 2 pounds. Four workout types rotate through the 4-week program:

    • Body Mix: full-body circuit, five different areas in sequence
    • Weights: upper-body dumbbell work (bicep curls, lateral raises, shoulder press, chest press, kickbacks)
    • Body Sculpt: two targeted areas alternating back-to-back (legs/shoulders or triceps/abs)
    • Abs and Pelvic Floor: dedicated core session including pelvic floor squeezes and Ab Breath

    The pelvic floor inclusion deserves its own mention. Most general fitness programs skip it because the results aren’t visible in a mirror and the conversation is still somewhat stigmatized. Metz integrates it as a standard Week 2 component with a plain explanation: declining estrogen weakens pelvic floor tissue, contributing to bladder leakage, painful intercourse, and pelvic instability. For women dealing with any of those symptoms (and a substantial portion of the menopausal population is), this is the most immediately practical section.

    Every exercise comes with a modification. Push-ups can be done from knees or toes. Ab work can be done with head supported or lifted. Metz frames modification as intelligent progression, not failure. That framing matters more than it sounds, because many deconditioned women abandon exercises entirely when they can’t do the full version rather than doing the modified version and building from there.

    The 4-week structure is also explicitly designed around a problem Metz names: most people quit in Week 3. Week 1 contains one workout, one walk, one stretch session, and one meditation. It feels deliberately light. The goal isn’t fitness yet; it’s building the habit of showing up. By Week 4, when the program ramps to four workouts per week, the routine is already encoded. You’re not motivating yourself into a new behavior. You’re maintaining an existing one.

    “How many times have you started a regime all guns blazing and fallen and given up in Week 3?”

    Is The Menopause Metabolism Fix Worth Reading?

    Read this if you’re in perimenopause or menopause, you’ve noticed unexplained belly fat gain, and you want a practical starting point rather than a clinical deep-dive. Also: if you’ve repeatedly abandoned exercise programs because they started too hard, or if you deal with the 3 a.m. wake-up and haven’t considered late-night eating as a factor.

    Skip it if you’re already strength training consistently, if you want rigorous nutritional science with evidence levels cited, or if you’re looking for clinical hormonal guidance (for that, you need an MD author or a hormone specialist in person). Women with significant disordered eating history should note that weight loss and body change are central throughout, which may not fit every context.

    One caveat: the subtitle promises a metabolism fix. What the book actually delivers is a well-designed beginner fitness program built for the specific time and energy constraints of menopausal women, with a simplified hormonal framework to explain why conventional dieting has stopped working. That’s genuinely useful. It’s just not quite the metabolic intervention the cover suggests. Go in calibrated to what it actually is and it’ll serve you well.

    Books Like The Menopause Metabolism Fix

    BookAuthorBest For
    The Menopause Diet PlanHillary WrightMore rigorous nutrition science; RD author covers same territory with stronger evidence base
    Lean and StrongLauren HillisStrength training focus for women 40+; deeper resistance training detail
    Strong CurvesBret ContrerasComprehensive lower-body and glute-focused program; for women ready to go beyond beginner
    Women Food and HormonesSara Gottfried, MDDeeper clinical hormonal science; same concerns about estrogen and belly fat, MD-level evidence
    Eat to Thrive During MenopauseDr. Susan HuberNutrition-first approach from a physician; complements Metz’s exercise emphasis

  • The Power of Hormones by Max Nieuwdorp: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: A practicing endocrinologist walks you through every major hormone in the human body, from insulin to oxytocin, and shows why they cannot be understood in isolation from each other.

    What Is The Power of Hormones About?

    Picture the standard medical model of your hormones: a tidy diagram of glands, each one producing its own molecule, each one working in its lane. The thyroid does thyroid things. The pancreas does pancreas things. The adrenals do adrenal things. Clean, separate, manageable.

    Max Nieuwdorp, a professor of internal medicine at Amsterdam University Medical Center, has spent twenty years watching that model fail his patients. His book is a correction. The endocrine system is not a list of glands. It is a communication network, and nothing in it operates alone. Estrogen affects cortisol. Cortisol suppresses the hormones that govern ovulation. Gut bacteria determine how sensitive your cells are to insulin. Stress disrupts thyroid conversion. That chain of influence is not theoretical. It is the reason a hard year can derail your menstrual cycle, a course of antibiotics can trigger months of metabolic disruption, and a sleep deficit can make weight loss feel physiologically impossible.

    The book covers everything: insulin, cortisol, thyroid, growth hormone, testosterone, estrogen, oxytocin, leptin, ghrelin, GLP-1. It moves through the human lifespan from conception to old age, organized as narrative history as much as science (the discovery of insulin, the cortisol story, how the contraceptive pill changed society). Nieuwdorp is not a wellness influencer extrapolating from mouse studies. He is a working clinician who has also published research on fecal microbiota transplantation and insulin sensitivity, and the distinction shows on every page.

    Why Insulin and Cortisol Matter More Than You Think for Weight

    For readers on a weight or eating journey, two chapters stand out: the ones on obesity and hunger, and the one on stress.

    Insulin: blessing and curse

    Nieuwdorp describes insulin as “both a blessing and a curse.” That is not a throwaway line. Insulin is essential to life (without it, glucose cannot enter cells and you die). But in chronic dysregulation, the same molecule becomes a driver of fat storage, systemic inflammation, and metabolic disease. Insulin resistance is the pivot: when cells stop responding to insulin’s signal, the pancreas compensates by producing more, and chronically elevated insulin promotes fat storage while blocking fat breakdown. The body cannot easily access its own stored energy.

    What makes the insulin chapter useful for this audience is that Nieuwdorp connects it to eating behavior, not just blood sugar numbers. The gut’s own satiety hormones (GLP-1, CCK) are released in response to food and normally help the body regulate intake. When insulin signaling is chronically disrupted, that whole feedback loop becomes less reliable. Hunger signals stop reflecting actual caloric need. The relationship between what you eat and how satisfied you feel gets decoupled.

    Cortisol and the cascade it triggers

    The stress chapter does something most popular health books skip: it shows the precise mechanism by which chronic stress becomes a weight and eating problem, not just a mood problem.

    Chronically elevated cortisol suppresses GnRH, which lowers FSH and LH, which shuts down ovarian production of estrogen and progesterone. It also impairs the conversion of inactive T4 to active T3 in peripheral tissues, compounding any subclinical thyroid dysfunction. It promotes leptin resistance, making the brain less able to detect that you have enough stored energy. It disrupts sleep architecture, reducing the deep sleep during which growth hormone is released and tissues repair.

    Nieuwdorp’s clinical example is not exotic: a high-achieving woman with twelve-hour workdays, five gym sessions per week, four to five hours of sleep, absent menstruation, and labs that read as normal. The treatment is not a hormone prescription. It is more food, less exercise intensity, and more sleep. The hormones are not malfunctioning; they are responding correctly to the load the system is under. Stress reduction, adequate calories, and sleep restoration are hormone therapies, whether or not anyone frames them that way.

    How Does Your Body Defend Its Weight Against You?

    The obesity chapter is where Nieuwdorp’s book earns its place on the shelf for anyone who has ever felt like their body was working against them during weight loss. Because it is, and he explains exactly how.

    Ghrelin is the primary hunger hormone, produced by the empty stomach. It drives hunger, stimulates dopamine release (creating food-seeking behavior), and enforces the hypothalamic weight set-point. In people with obesity, ghrelin stays elevated even when there is plenty of stored body fat, while the hypothalamus has become resistant to leptin (the satiety signal from fat tissue). The result: persistent hunger that does not reflect actual caloric need.

    When caloric restriction is sustained, the body mounts a three-part defense:

    1. Ghrelin rises (driving more hunger)
    2. Resting metabolic rate drops (burning fewer calories at rest)
    3. Spontaneous physical activity decreases (conserving energy without conscious awareness)

    That is not a failure of willpower. It is an adaptive physiological response executing a defense strategy. The set-point the hypothalamus is defending is not a number you chose. And it is not one you can override through discipline alone.

    “Ghrelin concentrations paradoxically decrease after gastric bypass surgery, despite the stomach being empty more of the time.”

    That one sentence reframes bariatric surgery entirely. Bariatric surgery works (and produces durable results) not primarily by restricting food intake, but by resetting the hormonal thermostat. GLP-1 receptor agonist medications work the same way: they mimic the gut’s own satiety hormones and shift what the hypothalamus is defending. Neither is “cheating.” Both are working at the level where the problem actually lives.

    What Makes This Book Different from Other Hormone Books

    A lot of hormone books on the market are written by functional medicine practitioners, coaches, or journalists. They tend to focus on a subset of hormones (usually estrogen, progesterone, and thyroid) and emphasize protocols: what to eat, what to supplement, what to test.

    Nieuwdorp is none of those things. He is a practicing endocrinologist with a research background, and this is a medically rigorous hormone book written for a general audience in a way that very few are. A few things set it apart:

    Historical narrative. Each hormone chapter is partly a history of how that hormone was discovered (the story of insulin’s discovery in 1921, the cortisol experiments, the early testosterone research). It grounds each concept in the actual scientific process and makes the mechanisms memorable.

    The full spectrum of hormones. Most hormone books skip oxytocin, growth hormone, ADH, parathyroid hormone, and the gut peptides. Nieuwdorp covers them all, which matters because the interactions are the whole point. You cannot understand why stress disrupts your period without understanding the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and its relationship to GnRH. You cannot understand why your gut matters for metabolic health without understanding GLP-1 and its relationship to insulin sensitivity.

    Calibrated caution about self-treatment. Nieuwdorp writes: “It’s clear that you can’t replace or even simulate the body’s own functions by administering hormones. Playing around with hormone preparations yourself can also be dangerous, especially without medical supervision.” For a book that could easily have pitched the opposite message, this is worth noting. The endocrine system’s complexity is precisely why hormone intervention requires clinical oversight.

    What it does not offer is a protocol. Nieuwdorp is more interested in mechanism than prescription. Readers who want the “what to do” alongside the science will need companion books. The related books table below has suggestions.

    Is The Power of Hormones Worth Reading?

    Read this if you have been told your labs are normal while feeling anything but, you want the actual mechanistic explanation for why weight loss gets physiologically harder over time, you are using a GLP-1 medication and want to understand why it works, or you are someone who thinks in systems and wants the full picture before making any decision about your hormonal health.

    Skip it if you want a step-by-step protocol, a supplement list, or a dietary framework. Nieuwdorp is a scientist, not a health coach, and the book reflects that completely.

    One caveat: The density is real. Some chapters (the history sections especially) move slowly, and readers who want a quicker route to the weight-relevant material can focus on chapters 5 (obesity and hunger) and 6 (gut and metabolism) without losing much. The payoff for reading straight through is the cumulative sense of how deeply interconnected every hormone system is, and it requires patience to get there.

    Books Like The Power of Hormones

    BookAuthorBest For
    It’s Your HormonesGeoffrey RedmondReaders who want clinical depth on female sex hormones specifically
    The Hormone MythRobyn Stein DeLucaReaders skeptical of hormone-blame narratives; a useful counterweight
    Thinking, Fast and SlowDaniel KahnemanFor readers who like dense, evidence-heavy science books on how systems shape behavior
    The XX BrainLisa MosconiBrain imaging data on what estrogen loss does to cognition; extends Nieuwdorp’s perimenopause chapters
    Hormone IntelligenceAviva RommThe protocol-forward complement: where Nieuwdorp explains the mechanism, Romm prescribes the intervention

  • 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

  • The Hormone Boost by Natasha Turner: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: A naturopathic doctor who spent decades managing her own thyroid disease and PCOS maps six fat-loss hormones and shows why most diets fail at the hormonal level before they ever fail at the calorie level.

    What Is The Hormone Boost About?

    In 1993, Natasha Turner came home from work crying, unable to process what people were saying to her, convinced she had a neurological disease. She was gaining weight fast. She was sleeping sixteen hours a day and still exhausted. Doctors had been missing her hypothyroidism for years because she appeared slim. When her TSH finally came back above 25 (optimal is under 2), she started treatment and felt like a different person within a week. That experience became the lens through which she built her entire clinical practice.

    Turner is a naturopathic doctor based in Toronto, a three-time bestselling author, and founder of Clear Medicine Wellness Boutique. The Hormone Boost is the third book in her Hormone Diet series, and it’s the most practical of the three. The core argument is simple: most weight loss failures are hormone failures, not willpower failures. Six hormones drive fat loss directly, and the behaviors people adopt to lose weight (severe calorie restriction, long cardio sessions, skipping sleep) are often the exact behaviors that suppress those hormones.

    The book covers nutrition, exercise, sleep, and supplementation through a hormonal lens. Turner does not write like an academic. She writes like a clinician who has heard thousands of patients describe the same frustrating experience: doing everything right and getting nowhere. That familiarity gives the book its usefulness.

    The Six Hormones Turner Wants You to Optimize

    Turner’s “fat-loss six” are testosterone, growth hormone, thyroid, adiponectin, adrenaline, and glucagon. Each gets its own chapter. Each chapter explains what the hormone does, what suppresses it, and what restores it. A few stand out as genuinely clarifying.

    Thyroid is the gate, not just a piece of the puzzle. Thyroid hormone increases cellular sensitivity to every other hormone in the stack. When thyroid function is low, even a good testosterone or cortisol profile underperforms because the cells can’t respond to it. Turner targets TSH under 2, with free T3 toward the high end of normal. Standard care flags TSH above 4.5 as hypothyroid. For anyone who has been told their thyroid is “fine” while dealing with fatigue, weight gain, hair loss, and brain fog, that gap is where this book lives.

    Growth hormone requires architecture, not supplements. GH is released during deep sleep in total darkness, in a window that lasts about thirty minutes. Eating within two to three hours of bedtime prevents the core temperature drop that triggers the cascade. Light in the bedroom prevents melatonin release. Chronic stress suppresses GH directly. Turner’s data point on fasting and GH is striking: a twenty-four-hour fast produces roughly a 1,300% surge in women. That’s not a supplement effect. The conditions are behavioral, and most people are accidentally preventing GH release every night.

    Adiponectin rewards you more the more you have to lose. Adiponectin is produced by fat cells but paradoxically burns fat by improving insulin sensitivity. The inverse relationship between adiponectin and body fat creates a useful reframe: the exercise dividend is proportionally larger at higher body fat percentages. Key boosters include omega-3 fatty acids (14-60% increase in some studies), fiber with every meal (60-115% increase), and green coffee bean extract before exercise. Food composition and timing matter here beyond calorie math.

    “A total lack of carbs can cause physical stress and elevate levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which can in turn lead to loss of muscle tissue and an increase in abdominal fat. Without carbs, testosterone plummets, leaving our libido flat and our muscles depleted.”

    Turner returns to cortisol in nearly every chapter because it suppresses almost every fat-burning hormone at once. High cortisol increases reverse T3 (which blocks thyroid), drops testosterone and DHEA, suppresses growth hormone, and drives carbohydrate cravings. The primary causes in her patient population: aggressive calorie restriction, cardio sessions over one hour, and insufficient sleep. The pattern is worth sitting with: the things people do to lose weight are often the things making weight loss harder.

    Why Strength Training Is the Centerpiece

    Turner’s workout protocol is three days of strength training, two to three days of walking or interval work, and one or two days of yoga. Each modality has a specific hormonal rationale. Strength training uniquely raises DHEA and testosterone. Endurance training alone does not produce the same effect. Interval training spikes adrenaline and growth hormone. Yoga lowers cortisol and improves insulin sensitivity. Walking raises adiponectin. Even music during exercise matters (independently raises serotonin and dopamine, per the research she cites).

    The over-one-hour caveat is the single most practical piece of advice in the exercise section. Sessions exceeding sixty minutes drop thyroid hormone for twenty-four hours and spike cortisol. A two-hour cardio session that feels productive is creating a hormonal environment that works against fat loss for the rest of the day. Turner recommends circuit training (no rest between exercises) as the highest hormonal return for time invested.

    For women losing weight who want to preserve or build muscle, this is the most relevant chapter in the book. The argument for lifting heavy isn’t aesthetic. It’s endocrine.

    What to Do With Carbs (Turner’s Answer Is Not What You’d Expect) {#what-to-do-with-carbs}

    Turner challenges the low-carb consensus directly, and her argument holds up better in 2026 than it did in 2016. Complete carbohydrate elimination raises cortisol, crashes testosterone, depletes serotonin (which requires carbohydrates for synthesis), and suppresses thyroid conversion. That’s the hormonal profile for fat storage, not fat burning.

    Her alternative is specific:

    • Protein at every meal (25-35 grams per sitting)
    • Starchy carbohydrates only at dinner (supports serotonin and melatonin production without spiking daytime insulin)
    • No starch at breakfast (a high-protein, no-starch first meal sets dopamine and glucagon levels for the entire day)
    • Fiber with every meal (raises adiponectin and slows glucose absorption)

    The breakfast recommendation is the one worth testing first. Turner argues it resolves afternoon cravings and energy crashes more reliably than any other single nutritional change. The mechanism is the dopamine-glucagon combination from a protein-heavy morning: it sets the hormonal tone before anything else has a chance to disrupt it.

    “When we cut calories drastically, we cause stress on our bodies, which increases our cortisol, which sabotages all our efforts. This stress hormone causes our appetite for comfort foods to surge, is associated with belly fat… and slows down our metabolism by suppressing our thyroid hormone.”

    One piece that’s less visible in the summary version: gut health is where Turner starts the whole program. Ninety percent of serotonin is made in the gut. T4 converts to active T3 in the gut. The preparation phase before any targeted hormone supplementation begins with gut repair (daily probiotics, fiber, magnesium at bedtime, IgG food sensitivity testing). The rest of the protocol works better when this foundation is in place.

    Is The Hormone Boost Worth Reading?

    Read this if you’ve had the experience of doing everything right and not losing weight, or if you suspect subclinical thyroid dysfunction and keep being told your labs are normal. Also worth reading if you’ve been doing chronic cardio and wondering why it’s stopped working.

    Skip it if you want a simple meal plan without the mechanistic explanation behind it. The hormone-by-hormone architecture is dense, and readers without some prior health literacy may find it overwhelming rather than clarifying.

    One caveat: Turner’s supplement protocol is aggressive and references her proprietary Clear Medicine product line throughout. The conflict of interest is worth naming. Many of the most impactful interventions in the book (protein timing, strength training, dark sleep environment, gut health) require no supplements at all. The behavioral framework is strong. The supplement section should be read with more skepticism than the rest.

    The book has aged well. The functional medicine framing that felt niche in 2016 has since become mainstream, and the gut microbiome research Turner cited has largely held up. Her core argument that weight loss is a hormone optimization problem rather than a calorie math problem has found an unexpected validator: GLP-1 medications work precisely by correcting hormonal signaling, not by restricting calories.

    Books Like The Hormone Boost

    BookAuthorBest For
    The Hormone FixAnna Cabeca, DOMenopause-focused hormonal reset with more attention to estrogen and progesterone
    Women Food and HormonesSara Gottfried, MDKeto protocol adapted for women’s hormonal cycles
    Strong CurvesBret ContrerasStrength training program with the research on muscle-building for women
    Lean and StrongShannon HillisResistance training + nutrition specifically for fat loss without chronic cardio
    Hormone IntelligenceAviva Romm, MDBroader hormonal map with deeper focus on reproductive hormones and root causes

  • Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    The book in one sentence: Gary Taubes argues that fat accumulation is driven by insulin, not calories, and that the “eat less, move more” model has failed for 50 years because it misidentifies the cause.

    What Is Why We Get Fat About?

    Imagine you’ve spent years trying. You tracked calories. You cut fat. You ate smaller portions and went to the gym five days a week. And you still couldn’t keep the weight off. The official explanation (“you’re doing it wrong, try harder”) starts to feel less like advice and more like an insult.

    Gary Taubes wrote this book for you. A science journalist who has won the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society Award three times (the only print journalist to receive it more than once), Taubes spent over a decade inside the primary research literature on obesity before publishing Good Calories, Bad Calories in 2007. Why We Get Fat is the shorter, more accessible version of that work. Same argument, fewer footnotes, easier to read in an afternoon.

    The argument, plainly stated: you don’t get fat because you eat too much. You get fat because of what you eat, specifically foods that spike insulin, which then signals your fat tissue to store and hold. Overeating and inactivity are not causes of obesity. They are effects of it, or at minimum, responses to the same hormonal dysregulation. Taubes calls this a reversal of the arrow of causation, and it changes everything about how to think about treatment.

    The book arrived at a moment when the public health consensus on obesity was near-total and its record was not good. Worth reading in that light.

    What Does Taubes Say About Calories In, Calories Out?

    He doesn’t say thermodynamics is wrong. That matters, because critics sometimes frame his argument that way. The first law of thermodynamics (energy is conserved) is correct. If you gain fat mass, you have taken in more energy than you expended.

    What Taubes says is that this observation explains nothing useful about why it happens or how to stop it.

    Saying “you gained weight because calories in exceeded calories out” is like saying a room got crowded because more people entered than left. True. Completely unhelpful if you want to know why, or what to do about it.

    More importantly, the two sides of the equation are not independent. Cut your food intake sharply, and your body responds: metabolism slows, body temperature drops, lethargy increases, hunger intensifies. The Women’s Health Initiative enrolled nearly 50,000 women and had 20,000 of them cut roughly 360 calories per day for eight years. Average weight loss: two pounds. Average waist circumference went up. By the arithmetic, they should have lost over 30 pounds in year one. The body compensated at every turn.

    “Of all the dangerous ideas that health officials could have embraced while trying to understand why we get fat, they would have been hard-pressed to find one ultimately more damaging than calories-in/calories-out. That it reinforces what appears to be so obvious — obesity as the penalty for gluttony and sloth — is what makes it so alluring.”

    The caloric model also carries a moral weight that Taubes finds both unjustified and damaging. If obesity is a failure of energy balance, and energy balance is a matter of choice, then the obese are to blame. Taubes argues this conclusion is wrong, cruel, and gets in the way of actual treatment.

    How Does the Carbohydrate-Insulin Model Work?

    Fat tissue is not a passive storage container that fills up when calories overflow. Fat is constantly flowing in and out of fat cells, driven by enzymes and hormones. Two players matter most:

    • Lipoprotein lipase (LPL): activated by insulin; pulls fat from the bloodstream into fat cells
    • Hormone-sensitive lipase (HSL): suppressed by insulin; releases fat from fat cells to be burned

    When insulin is chronically elevated, LPL is in overdrive and HSL is shut down. Fat moves in. It doesn’t move out. The rest of the body, denied access to stored fuel, registers this as energy deprivation. You get hungry. You get tired. Not from laziness or weakness. From a hormonal signal that says “store, don’t burn.”

    The foods that drive insulin highest and fastest are the most fattening ones:

    • Refined flour products: bread, bagels, pasta, cereals, crackers
    • Liquid sugars: soda, juice, beer, sweetened coffee drinks
    • Starchy vegetables: potatoes, corn, white rice
    • Sugar in all its forms (with fructose, processed by the liver, producing a separate set of problems around insulin resistance and triglycerides)

    Non-starchy vegetables (leafy greens, broccoli, cucumber, cauliflower) barely move the needle. They are fibrous, digested slowly, and produce modest insulin responses. For practical purposes, Taubes says, they are not fattening.

    The reversed arrow

    Taubes’s most counterintuitive claim is also the one with the most supporting evidence. He cites George Wade’s rat experiments: female rats whose ovaries were removed became obese rapidly. When food was restricted so they literally couldn’t overeat, they still fattened. Instead of overeating, they became sedentary. The fat accumulation was primary. The behavioral changes were compensation.

    “We don’t get fat because we overeat; we overeat because we’re getting fat. It’s a simple but critical inversion of cause and effect.”

    If that’s true, then the whole framing of “lack of self-control” as the cause of obesity is backward. The hunger and inactivity that accompany obesity may be biological responses to fat accumulation, not the choices that produced it.

    A note on where the science stands now

    Taubes published this in 2010. Since then, carefully controlled metabolic ward studies by NIH researcher Kevin Hall have found that when protein is matched and calories are closely tracked, low-carb and low-fat diets produce similar rates of fat loss. The insulin response differs, but under strict conditions this doesn’t translate to dramatically different fat loss.

    This doesn’t mean low-carb diets don’t work. In real-world settings they often work better than low-fat approaches, likely because of reduced hunger and fewer cravings. But it does suggest that the carbohydrate-insulin model, as Taubes presents it, overstates the hormonal driver and understates other factors: food reward and appetite regulation in the brain matter too. (Stephan Guyenet’s competing framework, which Taubes dismisses too quickly, deserves its own read.)

    Hold the model as a powerful lens, not the final word.

    What Does Taubes Actually Recommend Eating?

    The practical protocol in the book comes from Eric Westman’s Duke University Lifestyle Medicine Clinic. It is not complicated:

    Remove entirely:

    • All added sugars, all grain and flour products
    • Starchy vegetables (potatoes, corn, white rice)
    • All liquid calories (soda, juice, beer, sweetened drinks)

    Eat freely:

    • Meat, fish, poultry, eggs, full-fat dairy
    • Non-starchy vegetables, leafy greens

    Do not count calories. Do not restrict portions of permitted foods. Eat when hungry, stop when full. Target under 20 grams of net carbohydrates per day in the early phase (ketogenic territory).

    Taubes frames this as less restrictive than it sounds. The foods coming out are nutritionally thin (white bread, pasta, soda, candy). The foods staying in are nutrient-dense. Hunger often decreases once insulin comes down, because the metabolic signal shifts from “store everything” to “burn what’s available.” Many people report the cravings diminish within a week or two.

    The hard part is that Taubes presents this as permanent, not a temporary diet. The hormonal environment that drives fat accumulation returns if you return to refined carbohydrates. That’s a real ask, and he doesn’t minimize it.

    Is Why We Get Fat Worth Reading?

    Read this if you’ve done calorie-restricted diets and found them unsustainable or ineffective, especially if you’ve been told the failure is your fault. Read it if you have metabolic syndrome, prediabetes, or carry most of your weight in your midsection. Read it if you want to understand the biology behind low-carb approaches rather than just being handed a food list.

    Skip it if you’ve already adopted a low-carbohydrate eating pattern and are looking for guidance on maintaining it. Skip it if you’re primarily interested in the psychological and emotional dimensions of eating. Taubes has almost nothing to say about that side of things. Skip it if you want a balanced review of all current obesity science.

    One honest caveat: Taubes writes like a prosecutor, not a judge. He is marshaling a case, and he does it well. He also dismisses competing theories too quickly (the food reward model, above all), and presents the carbohydrate-insulin model with a confidence that subsequent research has not fully justified. The science has moved since 2010. Read The Hungry Brain by Stephan Guyenet alongside this one if you want the more complete picture.

    Still, as a corrective to the shame-based “eat less, move more” narrative, and as an explanation of why insulin matters in fat metabolism, the book holds up. For many readers it lands as a genuine relief: not an excuse, but a better explanation.

    Books Like Why We Get Fat

    BookAuthorBest For
    The Hungry BrainStephan GuyenetThe strongest competing theory: how the brain regulates appetite and why hyperpalatable food short-circuits it
    The Obesity CodeJason FungExtends Taubes’s insulin argument and adds intermittent fasting as a practical lever
    The End of OvereatingDavid KesslerFood industry engineering of hyperpalatable foods; complements the food reward model
    Why We Get SickBenjamin BikmanDeep dive into insulin resistance as a root cause of metabolic disease
    Food RulesMichael PollanPractical eating principles from a different angle; short, readable, reaches similar conclusions