Excess Matters

Tag: sleep

  • Improving Women’s Health Across the Lifespan by Michelle Tollefson: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: A clinical textbook applying lifestyle medicine to every phase of a woman’s life, from adolescence through post-menopause, with unusually strong coverage of metabolism, body composition, and the perimenopause years.

    What Is Improving Women’s Health Across the Lifespan About?

    Most women’s health books fall into one of two piles. There’s the trade book pile: warm, readable, vaguely motivating, thin on evidence. Then there’s the clinical pile: rigorous, dense, written for clinicians who already know what a HOMA-IR is. Improving Women’s Health Across the Lifespan, edited by Michelle Tollefson, MD, with co-editors Nancy Eriksen, MD, and Neha Pathak, MD, lands somewhere unusual: it’s a genuine clinical textbook that’s also written with a clear position on what’s going wrong in women’s healthcare.

    Tollefson is an OB/GYN and professor of lifestyle medicine at Metropolitan State University of Denver, where she created and directs the school’s Lifestyle Medicine Program. Eriksen is a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Baylor College of Medicine. Pathak trained at Harvard and Cornell and spent years running Whole Health programs inside the VA system. They assembled more than 40 expert contributors to cover women’s health from adolescence through cancer survivorship, applying six lifestyle medicine pillars (nutrition, physical activity, sleep, stress management, substance avoidance, and social connection) at each stage.

    The book’s premise is that the current model of women’s healthcare underperforms. Women are underdiagnosed for sleep disorders, under-counseled on cardiovascular risk, and over-targeted by dieting interventions that the evidence consistently shows cause more harm than they prevent. The book argues for a behavior-first, weight-inclusive approach grounded in the American College of Lifestyle Medicine’s evidence framework. For anyone navigating the intersection of food, body, and health, that framing matters.

    How Does the Book Treat Weight, Dieting, and Body Composition?

    Here’s something you don’t often see in a clinical textbook: the first chapter opens with the statistic that 95% of dieters regain lost weight within one to five years. It doesn’t stop there. Chronic dieting is linked to increased cardiovascular disease risk, eating disorder development, atrophied hunger and satiety cues, and long-term damage to self-efficacy. Weight stigma in healthcare settings (being judged, dismissed, or reduced to a BMI at a medical appointment) is associated with higher mortality, systemic inflammation, and healthcare avoidance, regardless of actual body weight.

    The clinical alternative offered is a shift from weight as the primary health metric toward health behavior quality as the goal. Women who relate to their bodies through what they can do, rather than how they look, are more likely to eat intuitively. Intuitive eating is explicitly cited and supported here, associated with lower BMI, improved blood pressure and lipids, better diet quality, and stronger psychological health. Clinicians are advised to screen for eating disorders and avoid practices known to trigger them (unsolicited weight commentary, caloric restriction recommendations).

    For practitioners, this is a standard to work toward. For patients, it’s a description of the care they deserve and often don’t receive.

    The PCOS chapter is where this framework gets concrete. Polycystic ovary syndrome affects 6 to 10 percent of reproductive-age women and is driven by insulin resistance that fuels hunger, cravings, and emotional eating patterns that women are frequently blamed for as personal failures. A pulse-based diet (lentils, beans, chickpeas) without calorie restriction reduced follicle count, free androgen index, and BMI within 12 weeks in one study, outperforming metformin in speed and degree of effect. The clinical goal isn’t weight loss. It’s insulin sensitivity, regular menstrual cycles, and reduced androgen levels, with weight often improving downstream.

    What Does It Say About Perimenopause and Menopause?

    The menopause chapter is the one that’s hardest to find covered this thoroughly anywhere else. It goes deep on the receptor selectivity model for soy phytoestrogens, which is more technically useful than anything in most consumer menopause books.

    Here’s the short version: whole soy foods (tofu, tempeh, edamame, soy milk) contain genistein, a phytoestrogen that binds estrogen beta-receptors preferentially. Beta-receptors sit in bone, heart, brain, kidney, and lung tissue. Alpha-receptors sit in breast and endometrial tissue. Synthetic estrogens activate both. Genistein’s selective affinity for beta-receptors means it does not stimulate breast tissue the way synthetic estrogens do. In practice, 15 mg of genistein daily (roughly a cup of soy milk plus three ounces of tofu) reduces hot flash frequency by about 50 percent and is associated with reduced endometrial and ovarian cancer risk in large prospective studies.

    “Whole soy foods are not only safe for women with a family history of breast cancer, they are potentially protective.”

    The one important warning the book does flag: hops-based supplements (found in many menopause products marketed as “natural”) preferentially bind alpha-receptors and carry potential breast cancer risk. Whole food soy is safe. Hops supplements are a different story.

    The perimenopause picture on metabolism is also addressed directly. Estrogen decline affects fat distribution (more visceral accumulation), insulin sensitivity, and sleep architecture. The book connects these dots clinically rather than treating them as separate problems. Vasomotor symptoms that fragment sleep at 2 AM aren’t just uncomfortable. They disrupt the hormonal regulation of hunger and satiety, which is why so many women find that eating behavior shifts during perimenopause in ways that standard dieting advice doesn’t touch.

    Bone health gets its own solid coverage alongside menopause. The calcium-from-dairy assumption is challenged with data: a vegetarian dietary pattern is associated with 34 percent lower fracture risk. Daily soy foods stimulate osteoblasts (bone builders) and inhibit osteoclasts (bone dissolvers), with 5 to 7 grams of soy protein linked to 28 to 37 percent lower fracture risk. Prunes and almonds each have documented bone-protective mechanisms that most women have never heard of.

    Why Is Sleep Given So Much Attention in a Women’s Health Book?

    Because underdiagnosed sleep disorders are one of the quieter crises in women’s healthcare, and the book makes that case with data.

    Women with obstructive sleep apnea present differently than men. Instead of the classic snoring and daytime sleepiness, women with OSA show up with fatigue, depression, fibromyalgia symptoms, and brain fog. The standard screening questionnaires (STOP-Bang, Epworth) were validated on male populations. They miss women at high rates. One-third of overweight or obese women with PCOS have obstructive sleep apnea, and most are never tested.

    The downstream effects are extensive. Sleep deprivation:

    • Increases ghrelin (the hunger hormone)
    • Decreases leptin (the satiety hormone)
    • Elevates cortisol and fasting insulin
    • Impairs executive function
    • Increases caloric intake of energy-dense foods

    That’s a direct pathway from poor sleep to disordered eating patterns, metabolic disruption, and weight change. It’s a pathway rarely discussed in eating behavior conversations, which tend to focus on food choices while ignoring what’s happening at 2 AM.

    CBT-I (cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia) is the evidence-based first-line treatment for insomnia, more effective than sleep medication for long-term outcomes, deliverable online, and typically effective within six sessions. It’s also dramatically underutilized in primary care. If you’ve been told to “practice better sleep hygiene” and given a list of generic tips, you’ve received the watered-down version.

    The book also covers the ACE angle (adverse childhood events), which is rarely connected to sleep in popular health writing. Women with high ACE scores experience sleep impairment that can persist for a decade or more after childhood trauma. It’s not a willpower problem. It’s a biology problem with a history.

    Is Improving Women’s Health Across the Lifespan Worth Reading?

    Read this if you’re a practitioner working with women (OB/GYN, internist, NP, health coach, RD) and want the most comprehensive lifestyle medicine reference organized specifically around women’s health. It’s also a strong fit for women navigating PCOS, perimenopause, or metabolic changes who want the full clinical picture, not the wellness-industry version.

    Skip it if you’re looking for an accessible, narrative-driven intro to women’s health. The book is a clinical textbook and reads like one. Chapter quality is uneven (it has 40+ contributors), and some sections read more like literature reviews than practical guides. Consumer-facing options like Hormone Intelligence (Romm) or Menopause Bootcamp (Gilberg-Lenz) are better starting points for casual readers.

    One caveat: The book predates the GLP-1 medication era. Its behavior change frameworks and lifestyle medicine pillars apply directly to that context (nutritional quality, emotional eating support, strength training, social connection during body change), but the clinical picture for GLP-1 users isn’t addressed. That’s a gap worth knowing before you open it.

    The reader rating reflects the textbook nature of it. Readers expecting a trade book find it dense. Practitioners and serious self-educators tend to find it indispensable.

    Books Like Improving Women’s Health Across the Lifespan

    BookAuthorBest For
    Hormone IntelligenceAviva Romm, MDAccessible, integrative guide to hormonal health across the lifespan
    Menopause BootcampSuzanne Gilberg-Lenz, MDConsumer-friendly menopause guide from an integrative OB/GYN
    The XX BrainLisa Mosconi, PhDNeuroscience of menopause and brain health in women
    The Science of MenopauseJen KayeEvidence-based consumer guide to menopause symptoms and treatments
    Empowering Behavior Change in PatientsBeth Frates, MDClinical behavior change and motivational interviewing for practitioners

  • Stolen Focus by Johann Hari: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: Your attention is not failing because you’re undisciplined. It’s being systematically extracted by forces with a financial interest in keeping you fragmented, and the same forces are driving the modern overeating crisis.

    What Is Stolen Focus About?

    Johann Hari noticed he couldn’t finish a novel anymore. His godson had dropped out of school and spent most of his waking hours scrolling through his phone, barely able to hold a conversation. Neither of them could figure out what had happened. So Hari traveled 30,000 miles, interviewed over 250 experts, and eventually locked himself away for three months in a small Massachusetts beach town with no internet access.

    The book that came out of that trip is not a productivity guide. The argument is not “use a Pomodoro timer and put your phone in a drawer.” It is closer to: the world you are living in was deliberately engineered to destroy your ability to pay attention, and blaming yourself for losing focus is about as useful as blaming the mothers of Flint for their children’s lead poisoning and telling them to vacuum more.

    Hari identifies twelve distinct causes of what he calls an attention crisis. Technology designed to hook you is one. Sleep deprivation, chronic stress, poor diet, pollution, and the disappearance of children’s free play are others. Together they represent a systemic assault on the human capacity to focus, one that individual willpower cannot fight alone. For anyone working on their relationship with food, this book lands differently than most. The crisis Hari describes and the overeating crisis share the same root. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

    Why Attention and Overeating Are the Same Problem

    Here is a frame you will not find in most nutrition writing: mindless eating is an attention problem.

    The food industry and the tech industry found the same vulnerability and exploited it the same way. Both designed environments that overwhelm dopamine reward circuitry before the prefrontal cortex can slow things down. Both profit when you act automatically instead of deliberately. Both left you holding the blame for behavior that was, to a real degree, manufactured. As Hari puts it:

    “You are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns.”

    Look at the specifics. When you eat while scrolling, your brain does not register the meal the way it would if you were present (research on distracted eating consistently finds that eating while watching something leads to greater consumption and lower memory of having eaten at all). When you stress-eat after a day of constant task-switching, you are responding to attentional depletion (the prefrontal cortex, which handles deliberate choice, gets exhausted like any other muscle). When you reach for something sweet at 3 pm, it may be a blood sugar crash from the ultra-processed food you ate at lunch, which is itself one of Hari’s twelve causes of the attention crisis.

    The phone-at-dinner habit is not a small thing. You don’t register the experience of eating when your attention is elsewhere, so you don’t feel satisfied, so the urge to eat again comes back sooner. The mechanism is just attention. Its absence costs more than we account for.

    The Causes Worth Knowing If You Struggle With Food

    Hari organizes the book around twelve causes of the attention crisis. Not all twelve map equally to eating behavior, but several are worth sitting with.

    1. Sleep deprivation

    Sleep deprivation is the most direct cause of both attention failure and overeating, and it works through the same pathway. When you are sleep-deprived, your body reads it as an emergency. Cortisol rises. The prefrontal cortex goes offline. Appetite for calorie-dense, high-sugar foods increases because the body wants quick fuel. Professor Roxanne Prichard (a sleep researcher Hari interviewed) explains it plainly: the body interprets sleep loss as a crisis and responds by making you want more fast food, more sugar, more quick energy. You are not giving in when you eat the whole bag of chips after a bad night’s sleep. Your brain was physiologically rewired to want them.

    2. Chronic stress and hypervigilance

    Chronic stress redirects your attention toward threat signals and away from present-moment awareness. In that state, eating often functions as self-regulation. Not appetite, but the nervous system trying to produce a sense of safety it cannot generate on its own. The prefrontal cortex is still offline. The reach for food happens before the question “am I hungry?” can fully form.

    3. Ultra-processed food creating a feedback loop

    Ultra-processed food impairs sustained attention through blood glucose spikes and crashes. The crash creates cravings for more fast carbohydrates. You eat to feel better, feel worse an hour later, reach for something again. Hari cites Dutch research finding that 70 percent of children placed on elimination diets (removing dyes and preservatives) showed attention improvement averaging 50 percent. The brain is, literally, built from food. Depriving it of nutrients while feeding it processed chemicals has measurable consequences in both directions.

    4. The destruction of mind-wandering

    One of the more counterintuitive causes on Hari’s list is the elimination of mind-wandering. Professor Jonathan Smallwood’s research shows that mind-wandering is not attention failure. It is a distinct cognitive mode in which the brain processes emotion, connects experiences, and consolidates a sense of what you actually want. When every pause gets filled with stimulation (podcast on the commute, phone at every queue, TV during dinner), that function disappears. Many reaches for food when you’re not hungry are bids for sensation in the absence of quiet. The constant urge to snack may sometimes be the body trying to fill a void that used to be filled by thought.

    5. Technology designed to override your intentions

    Social media keeps you in a state of low-level arousal that is incompatible with body awareness. You cannot be simultaneously present with your hunger signals and caught in a scroll. The scroll wins, not because you are weak, but because it was built by teams of behavioral psychologists studying exactly how to make it win. Tristan Harris (a former senior design ethicist at Google) calls it “human downgrading”: the engineering of products that exploit human psychology to maximize time-on-platform at the cost of everything else.

    What Hari Actually Changed (and What It Means for Eating)

    By the end of the book, Hari had made six personal changes. A few translate directly for anyone trying to eat with more intention.

    1. No screens at meals, full stop

    Hari uses a lockbox for his phone during work. The eating version is simpler: no screens at meals, not fewer screens. This is the highest-leverage change in the book for people working on their relationship with food. The research on distracted eating is consistent enough that even modest changes here tend to produce noticeable results quickly.

    2. Ask what you actually need

    When Hari feels distracted, he does not shame himself. He asks what would help him get into a flow state (a state of total absorption in a meaningful, challenging task, which psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified as the deepest form of human attention). The same reframe applies to eating. When you reach for food when you’re not hungry, the question that interrupts the automatic reach is: “What am I actually needing right now? Is it food, or is it rest, or stimulation, or relief from something?”

    3. Protect sleep like a prescription

    Eight hours. Phone in another room. No screens in the two hours before bed. Sleep is arguably the single highest-leverage intervention for people whose eating is driven by cortisol, stress, and blood sugar instability, and it is the one most people treat as optional.

    4. Daily phone-free walks

    Hari walks an hour a day with nothing in his ears. The goal is not the steps. It is restoring space for unstructured thought, which re-sensitizes the body’s internal signals. People who are chronically overstimulated often report they cannot tell the difference between hunger, boredom, and anxiety. Regular phone-free quiet is part of how that signal system gets recalibrated.

    Is Stolen Focus Worth Reading?

    Read this if you have been trying to change your eating behavior and keep noticing that you understand what to do but cannot stay present long enough to do it. If you eat with intention for three days and then look up on the fourth to find an empty bowl you do not remember finishing, Hari’s framework gives you a name for what happened. The systemic framing is genuinely liberating. It removes blame and points toward the right level of intervention.

    Skip it if you are looking for a practical step-by-step system. The diagnosis is rich and well-sourced. The solutions section is thinner, and the call for an “Attention Rebellion” is inspiring but light on mechanics. The three-month Provincetown digital detox is also not a model most people can replicate, and the book leans on it more than it should.

    One caveat worth knowing: Hari has a documented history of journalistic problems (plagiarism and fabricated quotes in his earlier career, which he has publicly addressed). His more recent books are better sourced, and Stolen Focus includes over 400 endnotes. He still has a tendency to present emerging science as more settled than it is, and to bury qualifications from his expert sources. Treat his research summaries as well-organized starting points rather than final verdicts, and follow the citations when the stakes are high.

    The structural framing is the book’s real contribution. We live in a food environment designed by the same behavioral psychology playbook as social media (built to exploit our vulnerabilities for profit) and then told that our failures to eat “correctly” are personal moral failings. Hari makes the case that you cannot mindfully eat your way out of a system designed to prevent mindfulness. But you can build the conditions that make presence possible again: sleep, structure, flow, stress reduction, food quality.

    Books Like Stolen Focus

    BookAuthorBest For
    The End of OvereatingDavid KesslerHow the food industry engineered hyperpalatable food using the same attention-hijacking mechanics Hari describes
    Mindless EatingBrian WansinkThe research on how environment (not hunger) drives most eating decisions
    The Hunger HabitJudson BrewerPractical tools for breaking the reward loop that drives mindless eating
    The Circadian CodeSatchin PandaSleep and time-restricted eating: the science behind Hari’s sleep arguments applied to food
    NudgeThaler & SunsteinHow to redesign your environment so your defaults work for you instead of against you

  • 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