I have spent over two and a half decades as a nutritionist and health educator, helping people read food labels, navigate supplements, and make sense of conflicting health advice. I have done hundreds of media segments on wellness and spent my career thinking carefully about the body. I thought I understood mine.
Then perimenopause hit, and I had no idea what was happening to me.
The hot flashes and night sweats were debilitating. My sleep fell apart in ways I couldn’t predict or control. Anxiety crept in from nowhere, and I gained weight despite doing everything right, eating well, exercising, and managing stress. I kept waiting for a clear explanation, a moment when it would all click into place. It never came. Not from my mother, not from my training or schooling, and not from the healthcare system.
That experience changed the direction of my work entirely.
The Problem Isn’t a Lack of Information
If you search “menopause symptoms” right now, you will find thousands of articles, podcasts, and advice columns. Menopause is having a moment, and in many ways, that is a good thing. But here is what I kept noticing: women are more informed than ever, yet many still aren’t getting the answers they deserve.
Women are being told their symptoms are a natural part of aging, or stress, or something to push through. They are still sitting in doctors’ offices feeling dismissed, leaving with more confusion than they walked in with. Part of the problem is scale; there are over 103 possible symptoms associated with perimenopause and menopause, affecting sleep, mood, metabolism, digestion, brain function, and the nervous system. Most women have never been taught this, not in school, not at home, and often not by their doctors, because nutrition and lifestyle are simply not central focuses in traditional medical training. Therefore, women are left trying to connect dots that no one gave them.
What I Wanted to Build
After my own experience, I started asking women what they actually needed, and the answer was almost always the same: “I want to understand what is happening to me, and what I can do about it.” Not a clinical textbook, not a rigid protocol that adds more things to feel guilty about, but something that made the whole picture make sense and then gave them something real to do with that understanding.
That is what I set out to create with my book Nourishing Menopause: Powerful Nutrition & Lifestyle Strategies to Feel Your Best.
The book starts with the bigger picture, how shifting hormones during this stage of life create a cascade of changes across nearly every system in your body. Once you see the connections, so much of what felt random or inexplicable starts to make sense. The weight gain, the mood swings, the 3 am wake-ups, the brain fog, these are not separate problems. They are related and manageable. From there, the book gets practical: how to eat in a way that supports your hormones, how to move your body differently than you did in your thirties, how to support your nervous system and your sleep, and how to think about supplements with a critical eye. Every recommendation is grounded in research and written for real life.
What I Wish Someone Had Handed Me
This book is not a replacement for good medical care, and if you are struggling, please talk to your doctor. But I also know from my own experience, and from thousands of conversations with women, that many of us walk into those appointments without the vocabulary to describe what we are feeling. We leave without knowing what questions to ask, then go home and Google in the dark because something still feels off and we cannot name it.
Nourishing Menopause is the resource I wish I had been handed at the start of all of this. Bring it to your appointments, use it to ask better questions, and share it with a friend who keeps saying she doesn’t feel like herself anymore but can’t explain why.
You’re Not Imagining It
If your body has changed in ways you cannot explain, if you’ve been told it is just stress, or if you’ve tried everything and still do not feel like yourself, I want you to hear this: you’re not imagining it, you’re not overreacting, and you’re not alone. Right now, more than a billion women around the world are navigating this same transition, and most of them were never given the tools to understand it. That is what this book is trying to change, one conversation at a time.
Nourishing Menopause: Powerful Nutrition & Lifestyle Strategies to Feel Your Best is available here.
