Excess Matters

Tag: practical

  • The Menopause Companion by Sasha Davies: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: A readable, no-jargon overview of the full menopause transition, written by a health journalist (not a doctor) for women who want one clear starting point before going deeper.

    What Is The Menopause Companion About?

    Picture the stack of menopause books your doctor’s waiting room has never had. One shelf holds thick clinical texts full of mechanisms and dosing tables. Another holds wellness titles promising to “reset” your hormones in 30 days. Sasha Davies wrote something different. She’s a health journalist (her previous books covered artisanal cheesemaking) who partnered with Tori Hudson, ND, a naturopathic physician with nearly four decades of women’s health practice, to produce what is genuinely a companion: warm, organized, honest about what it can’t tell you.

    The book opens with a disarming line that sets the tone for everything that follows:

    “When you ask what menopause will be like, what you’re really asking is a similar but distinct question: What will menopause be like for me? Your question cannot be fully answered with the generalized information we have about physiology, symptoms, and treatments.”

    That’s rare honesty for the genre. Most menopause books imply they have your specific answer. Davies declines to pretend. She explains the physiology, walks through common symptoms, covers treatment options (HRT, non-hormonal options, supplements, lifestyle tools), and then spends a full chapter on something almost no menopause book touches: how to build human support around the transition.

    This is a first-book book. If you’re in your early forties and want a single clear orientation before the fog rolls in, this is a strong candidate. If you’re already deep in symptoms and need protocol-level guidance, it will feel too light.

    What Does the Book Actually Cover?

    Davies organizes the book into three parts, which map cleanly onto the questions most women bring to this topic.

    Part One (What Is Menopause?) covers the physiology without overwhelming. You’ll understand what perimenopause actually means (the transition before the final period, which can last up to a decade), why hormones affect so many systems at once, and why your doctor might be behind on this topic (ob-gyn training has historically given menopause minimal attention).

    Part Two (What Could It Be Like for You?) is the symptom chapter, and Davies frames it well. She presents it not as a checklist you’ll tick through but as a landscape of possibilities, with the explicit acknowledgment that any given woman might experience a few, several, or none of these. That framing matters. The conventional symptom narrative centers hot flashes and cycle changes, which means women whose perimenopause shows up first as anxiety, brain fog, or joint pain often go unrecognized for years, by their doctors and by themselves.

    Part Three (What Can You Do About It?) covers preparation, treatment, and support. This is where Hudson’s clinical voice is clearest, most present in the treatment chapter.

    One idea worth borrowing from the cultural section of Part One: Davies frames menopause as a “three-body problem” (borrowed from physics), where the personal (your body, your symptoms), the cultural (attitudes about aging and women), and the political (healthcare systems, research funding) all interact. A dismissive doctor isn’t just a personal inconvenience; he’s a symptom of a system. That framing helps explain why the same physiology produces wildly different experiences in different women.

    What Does It Say About Nutrition and Weight?

    Honestly: not that much. Davies covers nutrition in the lifestyle section of Part Three with appropriate breadth but limited depth. The basics are there: protein matters more after menopause, processed sugar and alcohol tend to worsen hot flashes and sleep disruption, anti-inflammatory eating patterns are broadly helpful. The weight changes that come with the hormonal shift (especially abdominal fat redistribution) are acknowledged.

    What you won’t find is a menopause-specific nutrition protocol, detailed macros, meal timing guidance, or a rigorous treatment of the metabolic shifts that estrogen decline triggers. Davies is writing a companion, not a diet plan, and she stays in her lane.

    For readers on this site who are managing weight alongside menopause, this book is good background. It won’t replace a more focused resource on the nutrition side (the table at the bottom lists a few that go deeper). But understanding the hormonal context, and understanding that weight changes in menopause are physiological and not a character flaw, is genuinely useful framing even before you get tactical.

    The book also touches on the psychological side of body changes during the transition. Davies uses the concept of solastalgia (the grief of feeling estranged in a familiar place) to name what happens when your body starts behaving like someone else’s. That’s a much more precise description than “mood swings,” and it’s the kind of naming that helps.

    How Does It Handle the HRT Question?

    Better than most popular books, and with appropriate humility. Hudson’s clinical voice takes over for the treatment chapter, and she does the work that many anxious readers need: she separates the actual WHI findings from the cultural panic that followed.

    The short version, as Hudson explains it: the 2002 Women’s Health Initiative study was applied far too broadly. The participants were mostly ten or more years past menopause, many had preexisting cardiovascular disease, and the formulations tested (conjugated equine estrogen and synthetic progestin) are not what thoughtful practitioners prescribe today. Current evidence distinguishes meaningfully between transdermal estradiol and oral estrogen, between bioidentical progesterone and synthetic progestins, and between starting hormone therapy close to the transition versus years later.

    Davies does not tell you what to take. Neither does Hudson. What the chapter gives you is the vocabulary to have a real conversation with a provider rather than a reflexive refusal or reflexive acceptance. That’s the correct scope for a companion guide.

    The supplement section is similarly useful for its restraint. Davies doesn’t present a menopause supplement stack. She notes that black cohosh has reasonable evidence for hot flash relief in some women, while many other widely marketed products have little to none. In a category full of expensive supplements sold on anxiety, that kind of honesty earns trust.

    Is The Menopause Companion Worth Reading?

    Read this if you’re in your early-to-mid forties and want a clear, readable orientation to the menopause transition before symptoms become acute. Also a good pick if you have a partner or family member who wants to understand what’s actually happening and how to help without being dismissive.

    Skip it if you’re already in acute perimenopause and need protocol-level guidance on symptom management, or if you want depth on HRT research, neurological mechanisms, or nutrition science. This book will point you toward better resources for all of those, which is one of its better qualities.

    One caveat: Davies is not a clinician. Hudson provides the medical grounding, but the book is written from a journalist’s perspective. That’s mostly a strength (it’s readable, it doesn’t overwhelm), but readers who want clinical rigor will hit the ceiling quickly. The reader rating reflects this split: readers who wanted a light introduction tend to love it; readers who wanted depth tend to feel it stops short.

    For a first book on menopause, especially one that covers symptoms, HRT basics, nutrition, mental health, and support in a single readable volume, this is a solid choice.

    Books Like The Menopause Companion

    BookAuthorBest For
    Menopause BootcampSuzanne Gilberg-Lenz, MDMore clinical depth on HRT and treatment options
    The Science of MenopauseSarah KayeEvidence-based deep dive, less conversational
    The Natural Menopause MethodKaren NewbyNutrition and lifestyle-first approach
    Unlock Your Menopause TypeHeather Hirsch, MDPersonalized symptom framework by type
    The Menopause BrainLisa MosconiNeuroscience behind every symptom Davies describes

  • Food Rules by Michael Pollan: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    The book in one sentence: Seven words of folk wisdom that outperform decades of nutritional science: eat real food, mostly plants, not too much.

    What Is Food Rules About?

    Imagine you walked into a grocery store without a single opinion about nutrition. No fear of fat. No loyalty to protein. No idea what an antioxidant is. You’d probably just buy some vegetables, some fruit, some bread, some meat, and go home. You’d be eating better than most Americans.

    Michael Pollan spent years researching nutritional science for his earlier book In Defense of Food, and what he found, paradoxically, was that the deeper he went, the simpler the picture became. His conclusion: nutrition science is roughly where surgery was in 1650. Very promising. Interesting to watch. But not something you want to organize your eating life around. The people who benefit most from dietary complexity are not eaters. They’re food manufacturers who reformulate products around the latest scare, pharmaceutical companies treating the diseases that result, and media outlets with an endless stream of conflicting findings to report.

    Food Rules is Pollan’s direct response. A 140-page pocket book. Sixty-four rules organized around seven words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Many of the rules aren’t even his. He solicited them from readers, folklorists, grandmothers, and doctors across three continents. A single post on the New York Times “Well” blog yielded 2,500 submissions. The book is less a personal argument than a curated record of what generations of human eaters figured out before anyone had a nutrition degree.

    What Does “Eat Food” Actually Mean?

    The first section’s title sounds almost condescending until you spend ten minutes in a grocery store. The problem is that most things in the supermarket are not food in the way your great-grandmother would understand the word. Pollan calls them “edible foodlike substances”: engineered products built from corn- and soy-derived ingredients, chemical additives, and preservatives that no ordinary person keeps in their kitchen. They’re designed to push evolutionary buttons (sweetness, fat, salt) at intensities that don’t exist in nature.

    The rules in Part I are filters for telling food from non-food. You don’t need to memorize all of them. Several lead to exactly the same place:

    • The great-grandmother test: if she wouldn’t recognize it as food, it probably isn’t
    • The five-ingredient rule: more than five ingredients signals heavy processing
    • The pronounceability test: if a third-grader can’t read it and you wouldn’t cook with it yourself, you don’t want a food company cooking with it either
    • The health claim inversion: the louder the health claim on the package, the more skeptical you should be. The healthiest foods in the store (fresh produce) don’t have packages
    • The rot test: real food eventually decays. Something that survives in a bag for three years has been processed into something bacteria won’t even bother with

    “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”

    That’s Rule 19, a pun that earns its place by being genuinely useful. Pollan says pick whatever handful of rules stick and let them become second nature. You don’t need all 64. You need three or four that feel memorable enough to run on autopilot.

    How Does Pollan’s “Mostly Plants” Advice Actually Work?

    Part II of the book is where the science is clearest, even though Pollan barely uses the language of science. One finding in nutritional epidemiology holds up across dozens of studies and populations: plant-rich diets dramatically reduce rates of chronic disease. Countries where people eat a pound or more of vegetables and fruit per day have cancer rates roughly half those of the United States. The mechanism is still debated. The association is not.

    “Mostly plants, especially leaves” does not mean vegetarianism. Pollan is clear about this. Near-vegetarians who eat meat a few times a week are as healthy as full vegetarians. Traditional diets worldwide have always included some animal food. The goal is simply to reverse the typical Western plate: plants become the main event, and meat becomes a flavoring or accent rather than the center of gravity. Thomas Jefferson recommended this in his letters (“use meat chiefly as a flavor principle”) and got there without a single nutrition study.

    The other ideas in this section cluster around food quality. A few worth holding:

    • Eat animals that have themselves eaten well. Pastured meat has a meaningfully different nutrient profile than factory-farmed. The quality of what an animal ate ends up in you.
    • Eat sweet foods as you find them in nature. Whole fruit comes packaged with fiber that slows sugar absorption. Juice strips that out. The processing changes the health effect, even if the sugar content on the label looks similar.
    • “Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.” Rule 39. Nothing is forbidden; there’s only a requirement that you do the work. French fries didn’t become America’s most popular vegetable until industry removed all the friction of making them.

    Why Does How You Eat Matter as Much as What You Eat?

    Part III is where the book gets counterintuitive. The argument is that the context of eating has health consequences independent of what’s on the plate. Eating in front of a screen, eating alone, eating quickly, eating in your car: all of these are associated with eating more and faring worse, regardless of food quality.

    The most striking evidence comes from cross-cultural convergence. Multiple independent food traditions landed on near-identical guidance about stopping before full:

    • Japan: hara hachi bu (eat until 80% full)
    • Ayurvedic tradition: 75%
    • Chinese tradition: 70%
    • A German proverb: don’t fill a sack completely
    • A French construction: you say “I have no more hunger” rather than “I am full”

    Satiety signals take up to 20 minutes to reach the brain. If you eat until you feel full, you’ve already overshot. The convergence of independent cultures on that narrow range (67–80%) is not coincidence. It’s the same insight discovered separately because it actually works.

    A few more practical rules from this section:

    • Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored. Pollan’s “apple test”: if you’re not hungry enough to eat a plain apple, you’re not physiologically hungry.
    • Eat at a table. Not a desk. Not a car. The distraction of screens and movement consistently correlates with eating more.
    • Try not to eat alone. Social meals self-regulate. The pace slows, conversation interrupts, and social awareness moderates portions in ways willpower doesn’t.
    • Treat treats as treats. Nothing is forbidden. The problem isn’t birthday cake. It’s that food manufacturers engineered a world where every day feels like a birthday.

    The book closes with Rule 64: “Break the rules once in a while.” The Oscar Wilde addendum Pollan quotes (all things in moderation, including moderation) is the philosophical foundation of the whole thing. The everyday default matters. The occasional exception does not.

    Is Food Rules Worth Reading?

    Read this if you feel overwhelmed by dietary information and want a reliable, low-overhead framework you can run without tracking, counting, or reading nutritional research. Good for people who’ve cycled through diet plans and want something they can maintain for life. The anti-puritanical tone is genuinely calming for anyone with food anxiety.

    Skip it if your relationship with eating is primarily driven by emotional or psychological factors rather than informational gaps. Pollan assumes that knowing better leads to eating better, and for many people (especially those dealing with stress eating, binge patterns, or emotional eating) that’s not the main obstacle. Food Rules gives you the “what.” It doesn’t help with the “why.”

    One caveat: this is a short book of one-liners, not a science book. Pollan explicitly says so. If you want the evidence behind the rules, read In Defense of Food first. The rules make more sense with the argument behind them.

    Books Like Food Rules

    BookAuthorBest For
    In Defense of FoodMichael PollanThe long-form argument behind Food Rules — read this for the historical and scientific context
    The Omnivore’s DilemmaMichael PollanWhere the food on your plate actually comes from — the diagnostic to Food Rules’ prescriptive
    Mindless EatingBrian WansinkThe science of how environment shapes how much you eat without your awareness
    The End of CravingMark SchatzkerWhy engineered foods hijack appetite — the neurological case for Pollan’s “edible foodlike substances” argument
    Eating MindfullySusan AlbersThe psychological tools for Part III — the “how you eat” layer that Food Rules gestures at but doesn’t develop