That’s what anxiety is, underneath the word. Waking at the smallest sound thinking something’s wrong. Losing access to a friend’s location on iOS and deciding she hates you. Catastrophizing, getting an unexpected calendar invite from your boss thinking you’ll get fired, never find a job again and become homeless.

This isn’t evenly distributed

About 1 in 3 women will meet criteria for an anxiety disorder in her lifetime, compared to roughly 1 in 5 men.

Part of that is social and psychological, and part is hormonal. Estrogen and progesterone shape the brain’s fear response, and anxiety in women reliably clusters around the moments those hormones move: puberty, the week before your period, pregnancy and postpartum, perimenopause. Sharp drops in estrogen appear to be the vulnerable window.

Not every woman lives this way, but many of us do.

Sometimes it takes small random experiences to catapult us out of our heads and straight back into reality. To remind us that we have a lot to be grateful for and that everything is actually ok.

Below are a couple of examples from this past month that are top of mind.

1. A bird shit on me at the farmer’s market

I walked to the Ferry Building in a bad mood. It was grey out, I felt mopey, stuck deep in my own head.

I went to see Paul, my flower guy, and got a bouquet of dahlias. Then some stone fruit (plums and nectarines). They were perfect that day, a little tart and not too sweet. I started on my regular track back out of the market.

I walked into a vendor with beautiful fig samples.

He hands me one and says “oh, you get a nice big one.” I look down at it, admiring it, about to lift it to my mouth. And then a wet, heavy thud lands across my chest, my arm, and the newspaper wrapped around the dahlias.

A bird had taken a shit on me. A diarrhea, actually. It completely missed the fig.

There was a beat of pure “what just happened.” Everyone else at the sample table looked at me, then up at the sky, then back at me. A guy kindly offered me a wet wipe. I couldn’t help but laugh gutturally.

If a bird pooping on you is good luck, what is diarrhea?

Once I got most of it off me I walked back to Paul and told him what happened. The newspaper around the dahlias had taken a direct hit, so I asked him to rewrap them.

We laughed about it together. He told me I was lucky. Then he handed me a second bouquet, free, and wrapped them both.

As I started walking I noticed a baby snail on the second bouquet.

I walked along the water with him riding the flowers, then set him on the railing and said goodbye before turning to go home. He’s a pest at the end of the day.

I walked into the market carrying something heavy and vague. I walked out with bird diarrhea on my sweatshirt, a bouquet blessed by a bird, and a baby snail. It knocked me into laughter and out of my trance.

2. A walk to the gym

As part of my regular weekday routine I was walking to the gym after work. I noticed a group of people on the sidewalk, gathered around a cyclist who seemed to have fallen. As I got closer I saw there was a little boy on the ground with him who was maybe four years old. I assumed it was his son.

The boy was in a helmet, sitting up, calm, watching the adults hold their phones and call 911. He seemed fine.

The man had no helmet. He was sitting up, shaking, completely unaware of where he was. He stared straight ahead in a kind of trance. His eyes were turning a lighter color. He was not checking on the boy. The bike lay on its side and the two of them were propped against it.

Then the man collapsed sideways onto the pavement.

People were already on with 911, but now it was obvious something was very wrong. I thought I was about to watch a man die on the sidewalk in front of his son.

A few seconds later he pulled a huge gasping breath and flung himself back up to sitting, confused again. There were a lot of people around by then and two women were with the boy. The paramedics were pulling up, so I kept walking.

Walking by this on what felt like a normal weekday afternoon was a shock to the system and a reminder to be grateful for our lives, for the health of our loved ones, because our time here on this earth is limited. I came home and hugged my husband extra tight that evening.

I still think about that man and the little boy in his helmet. I hope they’re both okay.

The takeaways

Paul, the flower guy, was right. I was lucky. Not because of the bird, but because that was the worst thing that happened to me that day.

We are our own worst enemies inside our own heads.

The anxiety and the stress women carry are real and valid, but the narrative we tell ourselves is the reality we end up living.

When enough time is spent in fight or flight, there’s little room left for anything else. Gratitude doesn’t get a slot so we have to actively make one. It’s tough to notice how lucky we are while constantly braced for impact.

Both of these events had the power to interrupt the chatter in my head and force me to be present with what was in front of me. Flowers, kind and helpful people around me, a healthy body that carried me to the gym.

Quick tips for actively getting yourself out of your head:

• Morning and evening gratitude journaling:

  • Listing at least 3 things you’re grateful for in the morning

  • At night listing 3 good things that happened that day

• Repeating a positive mantra or affirmation. E.g. “I trust the universe is working in my favor”

• Breathwork, meditation, and yoga (much more on this in a previous post)

• Talking to someone you trust. Sharing how you feel out loud, in a safe space

Sometimes we need sense knocked into us and sometimes it arrives as diarrhea from the sky.

What’s your “blessed bouquet” story? Share in the comments.

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You can convince yourself of anything. It will lie to you all day and sound completely reasonable doing it. It can be strong enough that you stop feeling pain. I learned that one the hard way, sitting through a vipassana retreat, doing body scan after body scan until a sensation I was certain was pain just dissolved into something neutral. The pain didn’t actually go anywhere, but my brain was able to file it differently.

Turns out the same organ that can talk you out of pain can also be the thing that takes you down. If you believe you can, you will. If you believe you can’t, you are usually right about that too.

That’s why I’ve started paying extra attention to what I am handing it.

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The era of over-optimization

We are surrounded, more than any humans in history, by things engineered to shape our brain chemistry. Phones, gadgets, AI, “scores” for everything. Most of us are running all of that input completely unmanaged.

Let’s take the sleep score, for example. You wake up, you reach for your Oura app or your watch before you’ve had a single coherent thought, and a number tells you how you slept. Except it doesn’t tell you how you slept, but how you’re about to feel about how you slept.

There’s a name for this. Researchers coined “orthosomnia” back in 2017 to describe patients who were convinced their sleep was terrible, not because of how they felt, but because of what their tracker reported. Some of them trusted the device over an actual sleep specialist sitting across from them. A 2024 study of more than 500 adults found that the people who fell into this pattern had measurably worse insomnia than those who didn’t. The anxiety and the bad sleep travel together. And it skews young: the people most likely to wear something to bed report the most stress about their sleep data, by a wide margin.

Tech you buy to improve your sleep can end up making it worse. Ain't that somethin'? Reach for the number before you've checked in with yourself, and your brain starts trusting it over you.

Managing a body instead of living a life

I know this pattern intimately, because I live a version of it.

After my losses, I’ve swung pretty far from my relatively carefree self in the opposite direction. Take this supplement. Do not eat that. Do eat this. Train this way, not that way. Track the cycle. That is toxic, throw it out. All of these choices are defensible and healthy, but it’s important to keep living amidst all of the tracking. Otherwise we begin managing a body instead of inhabiting a life, and there’s a big difference.

Could the occasional glass of wine do more for my soul than it takes from my health? On a health ledger the answer is probably no. The wine’s not doing my liver or gut any favors, and the research is pretty clear on that. Yet an overly audited life with every small joy pre-screened for toxicity isn’t obviously a healthier life. Better lab work, sure, but rigidity has a cost too. Can we build a wearable to track that?

What actually happens to the brain after a pregnancy loss?

Loss is not only grief. For a large share of women, the brain encodes it as trauma. In one prospective study, roughly a third of women met the criteria for post-traumatic stress in the months following an early loss, with meaningful rates of anxiety and depression layered on top. Other work found close to four in ten meeting PTSD criteria three months out. The brain replays the event. It flags anything associated with it as a threat. It reorganizes around what happened the same way it would around any trauma, because to your nervous system, that’s precisely what it was.

I find this freeing rather than bleak. It means the fog and compulsion to control every input were a brain doing its job: trying to guarantee it doesn’t get blindsided again.

What actually helps is time, support, processing the loss instead of burying it, and trusting yourself to handle whatever comes.

Brain food

Everyone’s a builder now. Everyone has a portfolio career, a side project, a thing they’re shipping. The pressure to perform, and to be visibly performing, is constant. The tools that promise to help us perform are frequently the same ones quietly ratcheting up the baseline hum of anxiety, feeding the brain a steady story that we’re behind, exposed, not enough.

What we can feed the brain instead, without giving up the drive to build:

• Stepping outside for a walk

• Exercising

• Breathwork, yoga, meditation

• Spending quality time with loved ones

• Journaling

• Eating whole, seasonal foods

• Asking ourselves questions that prompt gratitude:

  • Am I healthy? Is my family healthy? Do I have people who would show up for me? Am I grateful for where I get to live, for the opportunities sitting right in front of me? Do I get to live near the water? etc.

The brain is the most powerful tool we own, and we often let it run stories that keep us measuring instead of living. The same organ that can dissolve pain on a meditation cushion can also convince us that we’re always a number away from being okay.

The story we practice handing it can be much simpler: you’re healthy enough, you’re good enough, the people you love are here, everything will work out the way it’s meant to.

What's something you've stopped tracking recently, and how’d that make you feel? Drop it in the comments.

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One of the clearest answers is also one of the least glamorous. Nobody tells you that your muscle has an expiration timer. Starting around age 30, you begin losing 3-5% of your muscle mass per decade, whether you notice it or not. No symptoms, no warning text, just a slow leak.

Almost every benefit below shows up now, in your 30s, and the ones that don’t are the ones you’re quietly banking for later. Many of us think of the gym as a vanity project, something for “after,” once the real priorities are handled. But what if it’s actually closer to preventive medicine than to anything cosmetic? And what if the best time to start is years before you’d ever think you needed to?

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The muscle clock

Muscle loss isn’t linear, and it isn’t gentle to women specifically. The slow leak that starts in your 30s turns into a flood later: around menopause, declining estrogen accelerates the loss of muscle mass and strength in a way that isn’t seen in age-matched men. OB/GYN and menopause specialist Dr. Mary Claire Haver describes this as sarcopenia that begins in a woman’s 40s and accelerates sharply with the hormonal changes of perimenopause. Her reframe for patients: exercise to stay strong, not to stay thin.

Here’s why this matters at 32 and not just 52. The muscle you build now is the buffer you draw down from later. Walking into perimenopause with more muscle is like walking into it with more savings. You don’t get to make up for a decade of not investing by cramming at the end. Resistance training has been shown to reverse this exact pattern even in postmenopausal women, which is the good news, but it’s a lot easier to hold onto muscle than to rebuild it from scratch. Your muscle is one of the few systems in your body that gets to renegotiate the terms with age, but only if you show up and load it.

Your bones are listening

Same logic, different tissue. You build most of your peak bone mass by your late 20s, and then the job shifts to protecting it. Roughly 200 million women worldwide have osteoporosis after menopause, and bone mass erodes at 1.5-2.5% a year in the years right after it begins. A fracture from that erosion doesn’t just hurt, it raises your risk of long-term disability and loss of independence.

Resistance training is one of the few interventions that directly counters this. Research on postmenopausal women shows that higher-intensity strength training (working at 70% or more of your one-rep max, a few times a week) meaningfully improves bone mineral density in the spine and hip. Exercise physiologist Dr. Stacy Sims puts it plainly: heavy lifting is good for building bones. Your skeleton responds to load. Lift, and it rebuilds. Sit still, and it doesn’t get the memo to hold on to what it has.

The metabolic case

Muscle isn’t just for lifting things. It’s also where your body handles blood sugar. The more of it you have, the better your body manages glucose, which matters for anyone dealing with PCOS, pre-diabetes, or a family history of type 2 diabetes. The research backs this up: strength training improves the markers doctors use to measure blood sugar control and insulin sensitivity.

But muscle is built from protein, and most women eat nowhere near enough of it. If you’re lifting while eating like a bird, you’re underfueling the work you’re putting in. So what’s the actual number? Here’s roughly where the targets land:

• The old RDA, 0.8g per kilogram of body weight: a floor to prevent deficiency, not a target for building anything.

• Active women, per the International Society of Sports Nutrition: 1.4 to 2.0g per kilogram per day to build and keep muscle. That’s about 0.6 to 0.9g per pound, so a 150-pound woman is looking at roughly 95 to 135g a day.

This is the piece I’m actively working on, and it’s a lot harder than it sounds. Hitting those numbers daily takes real intention, and I’m not there consistently yet. But knowing the number and setting the goal is the first step to closing the gap.

Protein isn’t only a lifting concern, either. It becomes urgent in pregnancy, when your body is quite literally building another human. In her new book 9 Months That Count Forever, biochemist Jessie Inchauspé makes the case that what you eat in those nine months helps shape your baby’s lifelong health, from brain development to metabolic resilience, with protein and specific nutrients doing a lot of the heavy lifting. The research backs the “more than you think” point: studies measuring protein needs directly in pregnant women found the true requirement is far above the old guideline, roughly 1.2g per kilogram in early pregnancy and 1.52g in late pregnancy, versus the RDA of 1.1. The theme keeps repeating: the official minimums were set low, and women in particular have been quietly under-eating protein at exactly the stages of life when they need it most.

Your brain and your batteries

Lifting also does real work on your mood and energy. A meta-analysis in JAMA Psychiatry found that resistance training meaningfully reduced depressive symptoms. It also helps maintain your mitochondria, the cellular power plants that fade with age, which is part of why lifting tends to leave you with more energy, not less.

But won’t lifting make me look bulky? No.

This is the myth that keeps the most women out of the weight room. Building the kind of large, bulky muscle people picture requires high testosterone, and women produce a fraction of what men do. Add in that visible muscle takes years of deliberate, high-volume training and a real eating surplus, and “accidentally getting huge” simply isn’t a thing that happens. What you actually get is the opposite: lean muscle plus less fat, which is exactly what people mean when they say “toned.”

Ideas on how to get started:

• Train 2 to 4 times a week, hitting the large muscle groups (legs, back, chest, core) with compound moves like squats, deadlifts, and rows.

• Use progressive overload: nudge the weight or resistance up over time as your body adapts. This is the part that drives nearly all the benefits above. (Dr. Haver’s own routine is strength training 3 to 4 times a week on exactly this model.)

• Go heavy enough to genuinely challenge the muscle, not just move it around.

• Starting from zero? Two sessions a week with a trainer, a beginner program, or even bodyweight and resistance bands. The floor is lower than the fitness industry wants you to believe.

• If you’re in NYC, the studio I’d point you to is Liftonic (downtown, with locations across lower Manhattan and Williamsburg). It’s built around progressively lifting heavier and keeping muscles under real tension, and the instructors actually correct your form, which is what lets a beginner load real weight safely. A lot of buzzier boutique classes wave three-pound dumbbells around to a great playlist and call it strength training. That’s cardio in disguise. Bonus: because the method builds muscle while dropping fat, it’s also one of the fastest ways to see the change in the mirror.

None of this requires overhauling your life. A few sessions a week, enough protein, and a little patience compound into a body that’s stronger now and far more resilient later. Start before you think you need to.

I’d love to hear in the comments: are you lifting yet? If not, what's your biggest hurdle? Is it the time, the intimidation, the protein, the where-do-I-even-start?

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Halle Berry was told she had “the worst case of herpes” her doctor had ever seen. She did not have herpes. She was in perimenopause, and had been for about a decade without knowing it. She’s an A-list celebrity with access to any doctor in the world, and the system still handed her the wrong answer. She has since become one of the loudest voices in the room, testifying before Congress to fund the research and training that barely exists.

Most of us picture menopause as one specific woman. She’s older, visibly uncomfortable, sticking her head in a fridge through a hot flash and short with everyone around her. That image is doing real damage. It skips most of what actually matters, and it starts far earlier than one would think.

I’m 32. I’m writing about this now because the more I learn, the more I see how little any of us were taught. You don’t need to be near menopause to need this. You just need a body that will get there.

We learn that periods start, we learn that periods eventually stop, and the entire decade-long transition in between gets collapsed into one word, “menopause,” or skipped completely.

So here’s the actual breakdown of all three stages, what your hormones are doing in each, and roughly when to expect them.

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The short version first. Menopause is one single day. Perimenopause is the years of hormonal chaos leading up to it. Postmenopause is everything after. Most of what people call “menopause symptoms” actually happen during perimenopause, which can start in your 30s.

Let me get into each.

1. Perimenopause (the transition)

This is the part nobody warns you about.

What’s happening:

• Your ovaries gradually produce less estrogen

• Hormone levels do not decline smoothly. They fluctuate, sometimes wildly, month to month

• Ovulation becomes inconsistent. Some cycles you release an egg, some you do not

When it happens:

• It usually starts in your 40s

• But estrogen can start fluctuating in your 30s, which is earlier than most people expect

• It lasts about 4 years on average, and up to 8 to 10 years for some women

• Reaching menopause before 40 is considered early or premature, and worth raising with a doctor

How you might feel:

• Irregular periods are usually the first sign. Shorter, longer, heavier, lighter, or skipped

• Hot flashes and night sweats

• Sleep problems

• Mood changes, including anxiety or low mood

• Brain fog

• Joint aches

Not everyone gets all of these, and they can show up in any order.

One important thing. Because your hormones are bouncing around, a single blood test in perimenopause often cannot confirm it. Your levels might read “normal” on the exact day you test, even while you feel terrible. This is why diagnosis usually comes down to your age and your symptoms, not one lab number.

2. Menopause (the single day)

Menopause is not a phase. It is one specific point in time.

What it is:

• You have officially reached menopause when you have gone 12 full months with no period

• It gets diagnosed in hindsight, because you only know once the year is up

• By this point your ovaries have essentially stopped releasing eggs and producing much estrogen

When it happens:

• The average age in the US is around 51 to 52

• Anywhere from about 45 to 55 is considered normal

So when someone says “I’m going through menopause,” they almost always mean perimenopause. The day itself is quiet. It is the years around it that do the talking.

3. Postmenopause (everything after)

Once you have passed that 12-month mark, you are postmenopausal for the rest of your life.

What’s happening:

• Estrogen stays low

• For many women, hot flashes and other symptoms ease up over time

• For some women, they linger for years

What to pay attention to:

• Lower estrogen raises the risk of bone loss and osteoporosis

• It also removes some of the heart protection estrogen provided, so cardiovascular risk goes up

• This is the stage to be proactive about bone density and heart health rather than reactive

Why this matters

Knowing the difference between these three stages is basic health literacy, and most of us were never handed it.

When you know perimenopause can start in your late 30s, you stop assuming that sudden insomnia or a mood shift or a skipped period means something is broken. You start asking better questions. You walk into your doctor’s office able to say “I think I might be in perimenopause” instead of listing six unrelated symptoms and hoping someone connects them.

You cannot advocate for something you don’t have a name for.

Did you know perimenopause could start this early? Hit reply, I’m curious how many people learned this the hard way.

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(New here? Catch up on the vagus nerve, lymphatic system, toxins, and breath posts first.)

Today we’re talking about what happens after body literacy. Once you can read your body’s signals, what do you actually do when the system that should be helping you isn’t?

You’re waiting for someone else to connect the dots for you. To notice the pattern across your symptoms. To ask the right follow-up questions. To coordinate with your other specialists.

Stop waiting.

Your doctor is managing dozens of patients this week. They have 15 minutes with you. They’re working within a system that wasn’t designed for what you actually need.

This isn't doctor-bashing. Most clinicians are brilliant, compassionate people who save lives. I adore my doctors. But no one knows your full health picture better than you.

Here’s how to act on it.

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Why our system won’t catch you

A few things to know about the system you’re working inside:

• Medical education has a women’s health gap. Only 5% of global research and development funding is allocated to women’s health, with most of that going to cancers and fertility, leaving conditions like endometriosis, menopause, and cardiovascular disease in women significantly underfunded.

• Healthcare is reactive, not proactive. Our system treats acute problems. It doesn’t prevent them. It puts out fires.

• Diagnoses take years. Endometriosis takes an average of 6.6 years to diagnose globally and 11.3 years in the US. PMOS affects up to 10% of women of reproductive age but often goes undiagnosed for years.

• The preventative care gap is wider for women. You can only get more testing approved after 2 miscarriages. That used to be 3. And even at 2, the criteria are narrower than you’d think. Chemical pregnancies (very early losses before a heartbeat can be detected) often don’t count toward the threshold. I know women who have experienced two back-to-back losses, one chemical and one clinical, and still didn’t qualify for further testing until a third. Standard lab panels get denied because they’re not deemed medically necessary. Peter Attia has made the case for preventative medicine mainstream, but most of the conversation still centers men’s bodies. The gap is even wider for us.

The 5-step self-advocacy framework

1. Research before you go

Know what tests exist for your concerns. Understand what normal ranges actually mean. Come with specific requests.

• Concerned about metabolic health? Ask for a full metabolic panel.

• Thyroid symptoms? Request TSH, Free T3, Free T4, and thyroid antibodies, not just TSH alone.

Don’t show up hoping they’ll figure it out. Show up knowing what you need.

2. Ask for what you want

If your doctor says no to a test, ask why. If the answer doesn’t satisfy you, find a doctor who will run it.

You're not being difficult. You're being thorough about your own health. Studies show patients who actively engage with their care have better outcomes.

It’s okay to break up with a doctor who doesn’t serve you. The right one acts as your partner, not your gatekeeper.

3. Document everything yourself

• Take notes during appointments

• Request copies of all lab results

• Keep your own medical file

There’s a new generation of tools making this easier than ever. More on that towards the end.

When information transfers between specialists, assume nothing carries over. You are the only person who sees the complete picture.

4. Don’t accept band-aids

Before any prescription or procedure, push for root cause analysis.

• Birth control for irregular periods? Ask what’s creating the irregularity in the first place.

• Medication for chronic headaches or painful periods? Investigate triggers.

• Acne breakouts? Dig into the underlying drivers before reaching for the topical cream.

You get the pattern.

Your menstrual cycle is the 5th vital sign according to ACOG. Debilitating pain isn’t normal. Extreme irregularity isn’t normal. These are signals about underlying metabolic, hormonal, or nutritional issues that need attention now, not masking.

Band-aids hide problems. They don’t fix them.

5. Understand the “why” behind every “what”

Before any treatment, procedure, or prescription, ask:

• Why this?

• What are we solving for?

• What’s the root cause?

If you’re seeing multiple specialists, ask how they’re coordinating. Who’s managing the full picture? If the answer is no one, that person needs to be you.

The handshake, not the takeover

Here’s where I want to push back on the doomsday narrative.

There’s a story floating around that AI is replacing humans in healthcare. That technology is making medicine cold. That we’re headed toward a world where a chatbot diagnoses you and no one ever looks you in the eye again.

I don’t buy it. My view on this hasn’t changed since I wrote about it earlier this year. What I see is a handshake. Technology handles the noise so humans can do the thing that actually matters: care.

Used well, AI is the most powerful preparation tool we’ve ever had walking into a medical appointment.

Use AI to:

• Translate medical jargon (lab results, diagnoses, prescriptions)

• Organize your symptoms by system (hormonal, digestive, neurological)

• Generate specific questions for your doctor before appointments

• Understand what tests exist and what to request

Do not use AI to:

• Diagnose yourself

• Skip the doctor

• Replace actual medical advice

The goal isn’t to become a biohacker. The goal is to walk into your next appointment with data, context, and confidence. Let the technology handle the research. You handle the relationship with your care team.

Beyond AI chatbots, there’s a growing ecosystem of tools built specifically for patient-led healthcare. Wearables that surface patterns. Testing platforms that let you order your own labs. Apps that help you organize what’s happening in your body across time. I went deep on the full toolkit in my earlier piece on where AI meets womanhood if you want the breakdown.

The team I’m joining

Kin is a free app that records your doctor's appointments, transcribes the conversation, and gives you a clean summary afterward so you don't forget what was discussed.

The research is sobering:

• Patients forget 40 to 80% of what their doctor said within minutes of leaving the office

• Half of what they do remember is wrong

That’s not a patient failure. That’s a system designed around an assumption about human memory that doesn’t hold up.

I just started at Kin this week as Head of GTM Operations, and honestly, I couldn’t be more excited. If you’ve been following along, you know I believe the future of healthcare is patient-led. The problem Kin is built to solve is exactly the one I've been writing about for months. The role feels like a natural extension of my work here, not a departure from it. I’ll share more soon.

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Become an active participant in your medical journey today.

Don’t wait until symptoms are unbearable. Don’t wait until you’re trying to conceive. Don’t wait for someone else to give you permission to care about your health proactively.

• Schedule that appointment

• Request those labs

• Ask those questions

• Take those notes

• Keep your own records

Your future health depends on the advocacy work you do today.

Have you experienced this in your own healthcare journey? Drop your story in the comments. Your experience could help someone else recognize when to push harder for answers.

Thanks for reading Eggs & Ops! I’ll never gatekeep what I learn.

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The foundational layer of the meditation practice is focusing on and observing your breath. In fact, the first three days of the retreat are focused on just that: the sensation of your breath moving through your nostrils. Imagine how sharp your focus becomes and what you start to notice about your body and mind with this level of attention on breath.

By the fourth day, things in my body started shifting in ways I didn't expect. A shoulder injury I'd been carrying for months started releasing in waves. The tightness in my hips dissolved. My body was letting go of things it had been holding.

As I got the hang of meditation, something else became impossible to ignore. I had been doing yoga for over a decade. Vinyasa, hot yoga, CorePower sculpt classes that are really just HIIT in a hot room. I thought I was doing the work. What I had never actually learned to do was breathe.

This is post no. 4 in the body literacy series. If you missed the first three, you can find the vagus nerve post here, the lymphatic system post here, and the toxins post here. Today we’re talking about the most overlooked tool in body literacy, the one that’s free, available to you right now, and most of us are still doing wrong.

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What HRV actually measures

If you’re dripping in wearables (like most of us are these days) that track recovery like an Oura ring or a Whoop, you’ve seen the term HRV (heart rate variability). You probably know that high HRV is good and low HRV is bad, and that yours fluctuates based on sleep, alcohol, and stress.

What most of us don’t know is what HRV is actually measuring, and why it matters.

HRV is the variation in time between your individual heartbeats. Not your heart rate, which is the number of beats per minute, but the tiny millisecond differences between each beat. A healthy heart doesn’t beat like a metronome. It speeds up slightly when you inhale and slows down slightly when you exhale, and the difference between those two states is your HRV.

That fluctuation reflects how well your autonomic nervous system is doing its job. Specifically, it reflects vagal tone, which is the strength of your parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-digest side of the equation. The high-frequency band of HRV is widely accepted as a direct measure of cardiac vagal activity, which is the polyvagal connection back to post 1 in this series.

Here’s what that means in practical terms. When your HRV is high, your nervous system is flexible. It can ramp up when you need energy and come down when you need rest. When your HRV is low, your nervous system is stuck. Usually stuck in a low-grade fight-or-flight state, even when nothing is actually threatening you. Bessel van der Kolk writes about this throughout The Body Keeps the Score. Chronic stress, trauma, and unprocessed emotion don’t just live in your head. They get encoded in your nervous system, and HRV is one of the cleanest ways to see that encoding.

Low HRV has been associated with anxiety, depression, autoimmune flares, cardiovascular disease, and overall mortality risk. It’s not just a wellness metric. It’s a window into how well your body is regulating itself.

The breath connection

The single most powerful, immediate, repeatable way to influence your HRV is your breath. Exercise builds your baseline over time, but nothing shifts your HRV in the moment like breath. Not cold plunges, not supplements, not red light. Breath.

The mechanism is simple and elegant. When you inhale, your heart rate speeds up slightly. When you exhale, the vagus nerve fires and your heart rate slows down. That natural fluctuation between inhale and exhale is what your HRV is actually capturing. The longer and slower your exhale, the more vagal activation you get, and the higher your HRV climbs.

Researchers have a specific name for the breathing rate that maximizes this effect. It’s called the resonance frequency, and for most adults it’s somewhere around 5.5 to 6 breaths per minute, which works out to roughly a 5-second inhale and a 5-second exhale. At that pace, your heart rate and breath fall into sync. Your vagal tone climbs measurably within minutes.

The science is consistent. A 2022 meta-analysis of slow breathing studies found it reliably increases vagal tone. A study on people with high blood pressure found that slow breathing alone shifted their nervous systems out of fight-or-flight.

In other words, breath isn’t just calming. It’s training your nervous system in real time.

The greatest predictor of longevity

For years, I would show up to a hot vinyasa class, push through 75 minutes of physical postures, sweat, and leave feeling accomplished. I thought the asanas (the physical poses) were the practice. I’d either ignore or half-follow the breath cues, when I remembered, from the instructors. Even though the breath cues came with every physical posture, they were less intuitive for me to follow.

After the meditation course I realized how backwards I’d had it all along when it came to my breath. Why did it take me so long?

In traditional yoga, the asanas exist to prepare the body for breath. The whole point of the physical practice is to make you still enough, open enough, and aware enough that breath becomes the actual medicine. Pranayama, the formal breathing practice, is considered more advanced than any posture. Most of us never get past the cardio-in-a-hot-room version of yoga because most western classes never teach the breath piece at all.

There’s nothing wrong with a sweaty hot yoga class. It’s a workout, and workouts are good. But if you’re doing it because you heard yoga is good for stress and you want to feel calmer, and you’re leaving class tense and breathing off-cue, you’re missing the active ingredient.

The breath piece isn’t optional, and the research is striking. Science journalist James Nestor spent a decade investigating why so many of us are dysfunctionally breathing. In one Stanford-led experiment, subjects who breathed exclusively through their mouths for 10 days developed elevated stress hormones, higher blood pressure, severe snoring, and in one case, sleep apnea. When they switched to nasal breathing, their blood pressure dropped and their HRV increased by more than 150%.

Nose breathing isn’t slightly better than mouth breathing. It’s fundamentally different. It produces nitric oxide, which improves oxygen uptake by roughly 18% engages your diaphragm more efficiently, and activates your parasympathetic nervous system. A 20-year study of 5,200 people found that lung capacity was the single greatest predictor of longevity. Not genetics. Not diet. Not exercise. How well you breathed.

The connection to women’s health

Like everything in this series, the breath piece matters specifically for women.

A few things to know:

Your HRV naturally fluctuates with your cycle. If you wear an Oura, you’ve probably noticed this in your cycle trends. Cardiac vagal activity decreases from the follicular to the luteal phase, driven by rising progesterone. This means your nervous system has less margin during the second half of your cycle, which is why you feel more stressed, more reactive, and less recovered in the week before your period. It’s not in your head. Your physiology is genuinely different.

Chronic stress shows up first in your cycle. Low HRV reflects sympathetic dominance, which means your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is overactive. That axis directly suppresses the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axis that runs your reproductive system. Shorter luteal phases, late ovulation, anovulation, missed periods. I’ve experienced this myself recently, and all of it tracks back to a nervous system that can’t come down.

HRV may predict fertility outcomes. A study of women undergoing IVF found that reduced HRV was associated with lower chance of pregnancy, and that HRV changes before and after embryo transfer were prognostic predictors of pregnancy outcomes. This isn’t to say breathing alone will get you pregnant. It’s to say that your nervous system state is a measurable input to your reproductive system, and the input you have most control over is your breath.

Yoga and breathwork interventions show real measurable effects on women’s HRV. A recent trial of chronically stressed pregnant women found that weekly hatha yoga significantly improved HRV complexity through pregnancy compared to standard obstetric care. The mechanism here is the breath piece of yoga, not the postures.

This brings us back to trimester zero. The window before conception shapes pregnancy outcomes more than most women are told, and nervous system regulation belongs on that list as a real, measurable variable. A body running on fight-or-flight is not the same body as one that has been allowed to settle. If you’re tracking your cycle, navigating fertility, managing PMS, or going through any reproductive transition (perimenopause, postpartum, post-loss), your breath is one of the most direct levers you have. Worth bringing up with your OB or REI as part of the broader picture, especially if you’ve been told your symptoms are stress-related and offered nothing actionable.

How to actually train your breath

The good news is that breath training is free, takes minutes a day, and works on a timeline you can actually feel.

• Breathe through your nose, all the time. This is the foundational shift Nestor talks about. Daytime, nighttime, exercise (when possible), sleep. If you mouth-breathe at night, mouth tape is a real intervention worth researching. Some people see HRV changes within days.

• Practice resonance breathing for five minutes a day. Inhale for five seconds, exhale for five seconds. About six breaths per minute. Do this before bed, during your commute, anywhere you can sit quietly. The science is clear that even five minutes shifts vagal tone measurably.

• Lengthen your exhale. If five and five feels too slow, try four-second inhales and six-second exhales. The exhale is where the vagus nerve fires. Anything that makes the exhale longer than the inhale is doing the work.

• Hum. The vagus nerve passes through your vocal cords, and humming activates vagal tone through both vocal vibration and increased nitric oxide in the paranasal sinuses. Studies have found humming produces a lower stress index than even sleep.

• Try formal breathwork. Pranayama, box breathing, 4-7-8 breathing, Wim Hof method, anapana vipassana meditation. They all work through the same underlying mechanism. Pick one and stick with it for a month before evaluating.

• Watch your Oura over weeks, not days. HRV is highly variable day to day. The signal is in the trend, not the daily number. Give a new practice four to six weeks before deciding whether it’s working.

The bigger picture

The wellness industry has done an extraordinary job convincing us that the path to feeling better runs through products and protocols we have to buy. Cold plunges, red light therapy, nine-figure brands selling us hydration powder.

Breath is free. It is the cheapest and most effective nervous system tool you own, and it has been sitting inside your body the entire time. You don’t need a class, a coach, an app, or a subscription. You need five minutes a day and the willingness to actually pay attention to what your body has been trying to do all along.

There’s something almost annoying about that. The most powerful regulator is the one we ignore because it doesn’t cost anything. But maybe that’s the point. Body literacy isn’t about adding more inputs. It’s about learning to use the inputs you were born with.

What’s next

Next post in the series: how to advocate for yourself with the medical system. How to start tracking, what to ask your doctor, what tests are worth requesting, and how to actually course correct when you feel stuck.

Before then, I want to hear from you: What’s your relationship with breath right now? Do you track your HRV? Have you tried breathwork and found it helped, or felt like nothing was happening? Drop it in the comments.

If you know a woman who’s been ignoring her body’s signals for too long, send this to her.

Your body’s always talking to you. This series is about learning to listen.

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The scary phrases have penetrated the health space so deeply that we’re afraid anything and everything we touch is going to leave trace amounts of plastic in our genitalia.

That’s a hell of a way to live. Today’s post is for the part of you that wants to do something about it without spiraling.

The wild part is that the science isn't actually a joke. A 2024 study found microplastics in 100% of human testicles they tested. A 2025 Italian study found microplastics in the ovarian follicular fluid (the stuff that surrounds your developing eggs) in 14 of 18 women. The plastic is in there. The question is what to do about it, which is what this post is for.

Welcome to no. 3 in the body literacy series. If you missed the first two, you can find the vagus nerve post here and the lymphatic system post here. Last week we covered the lymphatic system, the network that works around the clock to clear waste and toxins out of your body. This week we’re talking about what your lymphatic system is actually being asked to clear, and why it’s working overtime in a way it wasn’t designed to.

A note before we dive in. I’ve been on my own toxin-reduction journey for about a year, and I can tell you that the path that actually works is slow, steady, and forgiving. You’re not going to detox your entire house in a weekend. You don’t need to. Start where it’s easiest and let the changes compound.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What endocrine disruptors are and how they show up in your body

• Low lift swaps I made that you can borrow

• What I haven’t tackled yet

• Where to start if you feel overwhelmed

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Your body was built for a different baseline

Your body is actually really good at handling toxins. Your liver metabolizes them, your gut eliminates them, your lymphatic system shuttles them along, your kidneys filter them, and your skin sweats them out. The system has been refined over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to deal with a certain baseline of exposure.

The baseline has changed.

In the last seventy-odd years, we've introduced tens of thousands of synthetic chemicals into everyday life. There are thousands of PFAS chemicals alone, the so-called "forever chemicals," in countless consumer, commercial, and industrial products. They're in our food packaging, cookware, clothing, furniture, cleaning products, beauty routines, water, and air. Our bodies are still operating on the original blueprint, doing the best they can with a workload that didn't exist a few generations ago.

What are endocrine disruptors

Quick definition since you’ll see this term everywhere:

Your endocrine system is your body’s hormone network, including your thyroid, ovaries, adrenals, and every gland that produces or regulates hormones. Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that mimic, block, or interfere with your natural hormones.

A few things make them particularly tricky:

• They don’t follow normal dose-response rules. Tiny amounts can have outsized effects, especially during sensitive windows like puberty, preconception, pregnancy, and perimenopause.

• The effects are cumulative. Many small exposures stack up over time.

• They’re often hidden. You can’t see, smell, or taste most of them, and they’re not always required to be disclosed on labels.

Common categories you’ll see referenced:

• Phthalates (often hidden in fragrance and plastics)

• Parabens (in many beauty products)

• BPA and its cousins (in plastics and receipt paper)

• PFAS or “forever chemicals” (in nonstick cookware, water-resistant clothing, food packaging)

• Heavy metals (in some cosmetics, water, and food)

So what does this actually look like in a woman’s body? Endocrine disruption is rarely loud. It’s almost always subtle, and shows up as the things we’ve been taught to dismiss as just normal female experiences:

• Cycle irregularities. Shorter or longer cycles, heavier or lighter periods, worsening PMS, painful periods, mid-cycle spotting.

• Skin and weight changes. Cystic acne along your jawline and chin, stubborn weight gain (especially around the midsection), water retention.

• Mood and energy. Anxiety that spikes around your cycle, low mood, brain fog, fatigue that doesn’t lift with sleep.

• Reproductive health. Difficulty conceiving, recurrent miscarriage, early perimenopause, fibroids, endometriosis, PCOS, thyroid dysfunction.

• Passed down. This is the part that hits the hardest. Endocrine disruptor exposure can affect your child’s hormonal development and may even be passed down for multiple generations. Your toxic burden doesn’t stay with you.

None of these are guaranteed outcomes from any single exposure. They’re the patterns that emerge over years of cumulative load on a hormonal system that was never designed to handle it.

Where the F do I start?

These are the categories where I’ve made the most progress over the past year. Not coincidentally, they’re also the easiest places to start.

1. Fragrance

This was my biggest aha moment.

The word “fragrance” or “parfum” on an ingredients list is a legal loophole. Under FDA regulations, companies aren’t required to disclose what’s in their fragrance blends because fragrance formulas are protected as trade secrets. That means a single product can contain dozens of undisclosed chemicals, many of which are phthalates.

Fragrance is in almost everything:

• Laundry detergent

• Dish soap and hand soap

• Shampoo, conditioner, and body wash

• Lotion, deodorant, and perfume

• Cleaning sprays

• Candles

Yes, this likely includes your new expensive perfume that smells like literal heaven and makes you feel like a goddess when you wear it. No, this doesn't mean you have to throw it away. The goal is to be aware of what you're putting on your body and make informed choices. Maybe save it for special occasions instead of spraying it every morning before work.

The good news is the swap is invisible. Phthalate-free products work the same. They just don’t have the hidden chemical cocktail.

Start with the things that sit on your skin all day (lotion, deodorant) and the things you breathe in constantly (laundry detergent, cleaning sprays).

2. Candles and incense

Speaking of things you breathe in, I stopped lighting candles and incense sticks completely.

Most conventional candles are made from paraffin wax, a petroleum byproduct, and contain synthetic fragrance. Burning them releases volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, and ultrafine particles directly into the air you’re breathing. Some studies have detected benzene and formaldehyde in candle emissions. Incense is even worse for indoor air quality.

If you love the ritual, beeswax candles with pure essential oil scents are a better option.

3. Phthalate-free everything in the cleaning aisle

Once I understood the fragrance loophole, I replaced my entire cleaning lineup one product at a time as I ran out. The swap is invisible and the products work the same.

Switched to phthalate-free versions of:

• Hand soap

• Dish soap

• Dishwasher detergent

• Laundry detergent

• All-purpose cleaning spray

4. Microplastics in the kitchen

This one is so easy it’s almost embarrassing. A few small swaps:

• Stop putting the plastic lid on hot coffee. A 2022 study found that paper cups with plastic linings can release trillions of plastic nanoparticles per liter when filled with hot liquid. Bring your own ceramic or stainless mug, or drink your coffee without the lid.

• Get rid of your Teflon and nonstick pans. Most nonstick coatings are PTFE, a form of PFAS. The EPA has linked PFAS exposure to reproductive effects, thyroid disruption, immune suppression, and certain cancers. Swap for stainless steel or cast iron. Yes, the upfront cost is annoying. Yes, it’s worth it.

• Replace plastic utensils. Plastic spatulas in hot pans are basically asking for leaching. Wood or stainless steel.

• Swap plastic dish sponges for bamboo or natural fiber alternatives.

5. Air quality

Indoor air is often more polluted than outdoor air, especially in newer construction with synthetic materials off-gassing.

• An air purifier in your bedroom is a low-effort win.

• Open your windows for ten minutes a day, even in winter.

6. Mold exposure

Mold is tricky because the source is often hidden in walls, HVAC systems, or old buildings. The body literacy move is to start from the inside out and test what’s actually in your system.

• I tested with Mosaic’s MycoTOX Profile, which measures 11 different mycotoxins in your urine (ordered through a practitioner).

• Function Health also includes mycotoxin biomarkers in their panels and is direct-to-consumer.

If something comes back concerning, the next step is mold remediation, which is a whole topic of its own and worth a real conversation with a specialist. Testing is a low-lift place to start.

What I haven’t tackled yet

This shit takes real dedication, and it’s easy to get lazy or slip.

• Water filtration. Tap water in most American cities contains some combination of chlorine, fluoride, lead, PFAS, pharmaceutical residue, and microplastics, depending on where you live. The fix is a good filter (Berkey, Aquasana, or a reverse osmosis system), and checking your local water quality through the EWG Tap Water Database. One investment that pays dividends every single day. On my list.

• Athletic wear. I love my Beyond Yoga and my Alo. I sweat in synthetic fabrics multiple times a week. I know the research on microplastics shedding from synthetic clothing is real. I’m starting to test some natural fiber alternatives, including organic cotton leggings and merino wool pieces. Merino is genuinely interesting here because it’s naturally moisture-wicking, antimicrobial, and odor-resistant without the chemical treatments synthetics rely on to mimic those same properties. It’s also a renewable fiber. Reporting back once I’ve worn all of them through enough sweaty workouts to have an opinion.

• Cosmetics overhaul. I’ve swapped some products, not all. The clean beauty space is its own rabbit hole and I’m pacing myself.

• Plastic-free everything. I still use some plastic Ziplocs and saran wrap. Working on it.

I also wrote a separate post earlier this year on why I stopped drinking alcohol and cannabis entirely as part of my preconception prep. If that’s where you are in your journey, start here.

It sucks that we have to reverse engineer the safety of products that were sold to us as safe. The fact that we're all running private toxicology research on our laundry detergent is a failure of the system that was supposed to protect us. It’s not fair, but we do it anyway because the alternative is worse.

Body literacy means knowing what’s in your environment, weighing the tradeoffs, and making the best choices you can with the time and money you have. It doesn’t mean perfection.

Don’t spiral. Take a breath and try this plan

If this post made you want to do something but you’re not sure where:

• This week: Pick one fragranced product you use daily (deodorant, lotion, laundry detergent) and replace it with a phthalate-free, fragrance-free version.

• This month: Stop using plastic lids on hot drinks. Blow out the candles. Start thinking about a water filter.

• This quarter: Replace your nonstick cookware with stainless steel or cast iron, one piece at a time.

• This year: Gradually work through your beauty and cleaning products as you run out of them. No need to throw away what you already own.

The compounding effect of small swaps is real. A year from now you’ll look at your home and realize how much has changed without it ever feeling overwhelming.

A few products I use

Many of the swaps I mentioned in this post live on my ShopMy, if you want a one-stop place to browse. These are affiliate links.

A few resources I trust

If you want to go deeper:

• Dr. Yvonne Burkart is a toxicologist and consumer advocate who shares pre-vetted product recommendations on her website. She’s been candid about her own reproductive health journey and how toxin exposure played a role.

• The Environmental Working Group has a free Skin Deep database for beauty and personal care product toxicity ratings, plus the Tap Water Database for local water quality.

• Dr. Shanna Swan is one of the world's leading reproductive epidemiologists and a professor at Mount Sinai. Her book Count Down documents how endocrine-disrupting chemicals are reshaping fertility, reproductive development, and intergenerational health. It's the definitive popular-press book on this topic if you want to go deep on the science.

What's a swap you've made that I missed? Drop it below. I'm always hunting for new recs, and other readers will benefit too.

Thanks for reading Eggs & Ops! I’ll never gatekeep what I learn.

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Those swellings are your cervical lymph nodes doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. When your body detects a pathogen, your lymph nodes near the site of infection fill with immune cells and filter the invaders out of your tissue fluid. That fullness you feel is the system working in real time. Once the infection clears, the nodes go back to normal and you forget all about them.

Most of us only notice our lymph nodes when we’re sick. The truth is they are working around the clock, every single day, filtering everything your body wants to clear out. Toxins, dead cells, hormones, allergens, inflammation. All of it moves through your lymphatic system before it can be eliminated.

Story time…

In 2013, a registered nurse in Texas named Ryan Read was watching an episode of Flip or Flop on HGTV. While the host Tarek El Moussa was on screen, she noticed a small lump on his neck. She didn’t know him and she wasn’t his nurse, but she emailed the production company anyway and told them this wasn’t a joke and he needed to get it checked. He did, and it turned out to be Stage 3 thyroid cancer that had already spread to his lymph nodes. He has been in remission for over ten years now and credits her with saving his life.

This story is a great reminder of just how much our bodies are telling us all the time, in plain sight, if we know what we’re looking at. A swollen lymph node was the signal, and a stranger with the right training caught it. Most of us walk around with minimal body literacy while our lymphatic systems work overtime to keep us going without us ever giving them a second thought.

This is post no. 2 in the body literacy series. If you missed the first one on the vagus nerve, you can find it here. Today we’re talking about the lymphatic system, your body’s drainage and immune highway. Learning to read and support it is one of the most underrated forms of body literacy you can build.

What is the lymphatic system?

Your lymphatic system is a network of vessels, nodes, and organs that runs throughout your body, parallel to your blood circulation. Unlike blood, which gets pumped by your heart, lymph has no pump of its own. It only moves when you do.

The system has three jobs. It returns leaked fluid to circulation, it deploys immune cells when something is off, and it carries waste, toxins, dead cells, and excess hormones away from your tissues so your body can clear them out. When you have a bad allergic reaction and your throat feels swollen, that’s the system in action. When you feel puffy, foggy, or generally “off” for no clear reason, that can be a system that is overloaded and falling behind.

The 7 key drainage areas most often referenced in body literacy are:

• Cervical (sides and front of neck, under the jawline)

• Supraclavicular (just above your collarbones)

• Axillary (armpits)

• Thoracic (upper chest, around the breast tissue)

• Abdominal (deep belly, around your navel)

• Inguinal (groin crease)

• Popliteal (behind your knees)

These are where lymph nodes cluster densely and where fluid converges to get filtered. They’re also the places you can support manually with massage and movement. Your body has hundreds more nodes deeper inside, around your gut, chest, and reproductive organs, but the 7 above are the ones you can actually work with on your own.

The connection to women’s health

A few things are worth knowing as a woman.

Your breast tissue is one of the most lymph-dense areas in your body, and more than 75% of the lymph from breast tissue drains into the axillary nodes in your armpit. This is why armpit tenderness or lumpiness is worth paying attention to, and why the conversation around armpit detox exists at all. Tight bras, antiperspirants that block sweat, and a lack of upper body movement can all contribute to sluggish drainage in this area. If something feels off, bring it up with your OB.

Your hormone clearance runs on the same highway. Your liver metabolizes estrogen, your gut helps eliminate it, and your lymphatic system shuttles the byproducts along the way. When any part of that chain is sluggish, you feel it. Tender breasts, heavy periods, mood swings, breakouts, and water retention can all be downstream signals that something earlier in the pipeline is backed up.

And the same goes for everything else your body wants to clear, like alcohol, processed food, plastics, mold, heavy metals, beauty products, allergens, and inflammation from chronic stress. All of it has to pass through your lymph at some point. A sluggish system means slower clearance and more burden everywhere else.

This isn’t fear-mongering. It’s the case for paying attention.

Signs your lymph might be sluggish

Most of these get brushed off as random or stress-related, but they might also be your lymphatic system asking for help.

• Puffiness in your face, especially in the morning

• Tender or swollen breasts that feel disproportionate to where you are in your cycle

• Frequent colds or the feeling that you’re always fighting something off

• Skin breakouts, especially along your jaw and chest

• Bloating and water retention without a clear food trigger

• Brain fog and fatigue that doesn’t lift with rest

One or two of these on their own isn’t a diagnosis, but a cluster of them is worth bringing up with your doctor and worth giving your lymphatic system some daily support.

What you can actually do

The good news is that lymph wants to move. It just needs you to participate, and most of the things that help are free and take a few minutes a day.

• Move every day. Walking, swimming, yoga, and stretching all help lymph circulate, because muscle contraction is what gets it flowing. Even a brisk five-minute walk after meals makes a difference.

• Jump. Rebounding on a mini trampoline is the most efficient way to move lymph, but you don’t need to buy one. I don’t have a rebounder, so I just jump up and down in place for at least a minute, every day. It feels silly the first time and you’ll get over it fast. The vertical motion is what matters.

• Dry brush before you shower. This has become a permanent part of my routine. Use a natural-bristle brush in long strokes toward your heart, starting from your feet and working up. A few minutes is enough. It stimulates surface-level lymph flow and gets your circulation going before you even step under the water.

• Massage the major drainage points. Light tapping or circular massage on your neck, under your jaw, armpits, abdomen, groin, and behind your knees. A few minutes total in that order moves lymph through the major drainage points and feels great before bed.

• Drink water consistently. Lymph is mostly water, and dehydrated lymph is thick and sluggish.

• Use your diaphragm. Deep belly breathing creates pressure changes in your abdomen and chest that help move lymph through the thoracic duct, one of the major lymph reservoirs in your body. The same long exhales from post no. 1 are doing double duty here.

• End your showers with cold. Thirty seconds of cold constricts and then dilates your vessels, which helps both lymph and blood circulation.

• Reduce what your system has to clear. Less alcohol, fewer ultra-processed foods, cleaner personal care products. Not perfection, just less load over time.

• Get a lymphatic massage occasionally. If you can swing it, a session with a trained lymphatic massage therapist (this is different from a regular deep tissue massage) can move things along significantly.

A few things I personally use, in case helpful: (These are ShopMy affiliate links. No fluff, just stuff that’s in my real rotation.)

• Dry brush

• Aluminum-free deodorant (I switch off between both of these):

  • Salt & Stone - the saffron & cedar scent is to die for

  • Curie

    • *Full disclosure, both of these have fragrance, which is technically an endocrine disruptor and something I’ll get into in the next post. They’re the best aluminum-free options I’ve found so far, and I’ve cut fragrance from most other places in my routine. More on that to come.

If you have persistent swelling, hard or fixed lumps, or any node that doesn’t return to normal within a few weeks, please bring it to your doctor. The point of body literacy is not to replace medical care, it’s to know your body well enough to advocate for it.

What’s next

Next post in the series: toxins. We’ll get into what they actually are, where they’re hiding in your everyday life, and how the systems we just covered (your lymph, your liver, your gut) work together to clear them out.

Before then, I want to hear from you in the comments. Have you ever had a moment like Tarek’s, where a small signal turned out to be something bigger? Or one you brushed off and later wished you hadn’t?

If this is the kind of writing you’ve been looking for, subscribe so you don’t miss the rest of the series. And if you know a woman who has been ignoring her body’s signals for too long, send this to her.

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Your body’s always talking to you. This series is about learning to listen.

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He writes about the vagus nerve early and often, drawing on Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory, and once you start paying attention to it, you can’t unsee it. So much of what we talk about in women’s health, from cycle regularity to gut health to fertility to recovery, runs straight through this one piece of anatomy that almost nobody learns about in school.

That’s what I want to write about today, and it’s the first post in a new series I’m starting on body literacy.

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There’s a fluency most of us were never taught, and it’s the language of our own bodies.

Body literacy means being able to read, interpret, and respond to the signals your body is sending you. It’s the difference between noticing that your period has been irregular for three months in a row and actually understanding what that’s telling you. It’s catching that 4am wake-up and knowing it’s your cortisol spiking from a stressful interview cycle, not random insomnia. It’s tracking the texture of your cervical mucus and knowing exactly where you are in your cycle without an app guessing for you.

Most of us weren't taught how the systems inside us actually talk to each other, or how to listen when they do.

Over the next several weeks I’ll be covering the foundational systems most of us were never walked through: the seven points of lymphatic drainage, how toxins and inflammation show up in women’s bodies specifically, the difference between an allergy and a sensitivity, and the simple course corrections that can shift things when you feel stuck.

We’re starting here, with the vagus nerve. Once you understand what it does, you’ll start to see why almost every wellness conversation eventually circles back to it.

What the vagus nerve is and why you should care

The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in your body. It starts at the base of your brain and travels down through your neck, branching out to nearly every major organ on its way to your gut. The word vagus is Latin for wandering, which makes sense once you trace its path. It touches your heart, lungs, throat, stomach, intestines, liver, and reaches all the way down toward your reproductive organs.

About 80 percent of the vagus nerve is afferent, meaning it sends signals from your body up to your brain. Only 20 percent runs the other direction. The majority of the communication happening between your brain and body is your body talking to your brain, not the other way around.

When people say things like trust your gut or listen to your body, they’re pointing at something real and physical. The pathway exists, the signals are being sent, most of us just aren’t tuned in to receive them.

The vagus nerve is the main highway of your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part of your nervous system responsible for rest, digestion, and recovery. When it’s functioning well, you can come down from a stressful day, digest your food properly, sleep deeply, and regulate your emotions without spiraling.

When it's not functioning well, the opposite happens. You stay in a low-grade fight or flight state. Your digestion gets sluggish. Your sleep gets shallow. Your immune system over-responds. You feel anxious or numb, sometimes both at once.

This is what van der Kolk keeps returning to. Trauma, chronic stress, and unprocessed emotion live in your head and your nervous system. The vagus nerve is one of the main pathways where that storage happens, and it’s one of the main pathways where healing happens too.

The connection to women’s health

Here’s where it gets specific to us.

Vagal tone, which is just shorthand for how well your vagus nerve is functioning, ties directly to a lot of what women come into this newsletter trying to make sense of.

Your cycle is one of the first places a dysregulated nervous system shows up. When you’re in chronic stress, your body prioritizes survival over reproduction. That can look like a luteal phase that suddenly got shorter, ovulation arriving late, spotting where there wasn’t any before, or a period that goes missing for a month or two with no other explanation. Researchers have documented this loop between stress hormones and reproductive hormones repeatedly, and there’s also evidence that vagal tone itself shifts across your cycle, dropping in the luteal phase as progesterone rises. Translation: the second half of your cycle is when your nervous system has the least margin. If you’re already running hot, that’s when you’ll feel it most.

Your gut and your hormones are running on the same wire. The vagus nerve is the highway between your brain and your gut, and your gut is where a huge amount of your estrogen gets processed and cleared. When your vagus nerve isn’t working well, your gut function takes a hit, and when your gut takes a hit, your hormones get noisy. Bloating that won’t quit, PMS that feels disproportionate, skin breakouts that track with your cycle. A lot of this lives at the gut-vagus intersection.

Inflammation is the quiet through-line. The vagus nerve has a built-in anti-inflammatory function. When it’s strong, it dampens inflammation across your body. When it’s weak, inflammation runs higher in the background. That’s the same inflammation that shows up as worse PMS, autoimmune flares, painful periods, and trouble with fertility.

If you’re trying to conceive or healing from a loss, this is the foundation. A body stuck in fight or flight is not a body that feels safe enough to make a baby or to mend. This isn’t woo, it’s how the system is wired. Calming your nervous system isn’t a nice-to-have on the fertility journey, but the floor it’s built on.

What you can actually do

The good news is that vagal tone isn’t fixed. You can train it, and the tools are simple, free, and don’t require a wellness subscription.

• Lengthen your exhale. Breathe in for four counts and out for six or eight. The exhale is what activates the parasympathetic response. Research has shown that even five minutes of slow breathing measurably increases vagal tone.

• Splash cold water on your face. Or hold an ice pack to your cheeks for 30 seconds. The mammalian dive reflex stimulates the vagus nerve directly, and the effect is fast.

• Hum, sing, gargle. All of these vibrate your vocal cords, which the vagus nerve passes through. There’s a reason chanting and singing show up in nearly every spiritual tradition humans have ever come up with.

• Spend time with people who feel safe. Co-regulation is a real physiological event. Time with humans, pets, or anyone who lets your shoulders drop tones your vagus nerve. Isolation does the opposite.

• Move slowly on purpose. Restorative yoga, walking without your phone, gentle stretching. The point isn’t the workout, but signaling to your nervous system that the threat is over.

• Ask about it at your appointments. If you’re working with an OB or an REI on irregular cycles, recurrent loss, unexplained infertility, or stubborn inflammatory markers, ask about nervous system support as part of the broader picture.

What’s next

Next post in the series: the seven points of lymphatic drainage, what they do, and why most of us are walking around with sluggish systems we don’t know how to support.

Before the next one drops, I’d love to hear from you in the comments: what’s one signal your body has been sending you that you’ve been overriding? Mine was a 4am wake-up I kept blaming on caffeine until I realized it was something else entirely.

If this is the kind of writing you’ve been looking for, subscribe so you don’t miss the rest of the series. And if you know a woman who has been ignoring her body’s signals for too long, send this to her.

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Once you join, your world shifts. The way you walk through it will never be the same. Some of what follows will only make sense to women who have lived it, which is part of what makes the experience so isolating in the first place.

If you’ve been there, I hope this makes you feel less alone. If you haven’t, I hope it gives you a window into what someone you love might be carrying.

The Equinox employee

I signed up for an Equinox membership while I was pregnant. I told the memberships guy because I would eventually need to pause the membership. Then I had the loss. Over the following months, my belly was not growing, and I dodged him every time I walked in, hating that I even had to think about it. I internalized confusion he might not have even had.

The family BBQ

Family members will keep asking when you’re going to have kids. They mean well, but it still lands like a punch. If you get fed up with the questions, you can tell them the truth. Something like “I will have a baby once I’m able to hold onto a pregnancy” usually ends the conversation. If it makes them uncomfortable, that’s on them.

Mother’s Day

You love your mom, and you love celebrating the mothers in your life. You also go to bed that night wondering if you will be one of them by the next Mother’s Day. Both things are true at the same time, and it’s exhausting.

Pregnant women in the wild

You see them everywhere. At work, on the street, at the grocery store. The gym locker room is the one that gets me every time. It’s an intimate space, and you find yourself imagining what it would feel like to be in her skin, because that was supposed to be you.

Pregnancy announcements

Social posts come at you constantly, and each one stings in a different way.

My second pregnancy was very likely twins, but it was too early to know for certain. A few days after passing at home, I was back in the office. A coworker walked in, clearly pregnant, and announced she was expecting twins.

I nearly blacked out, cried, and threw up all at once. After congratulating her, I excused myself, went to the bathroom, cried a little, took some deep breaths, and went back out to finish my day.

If this hits home, just know these moments happen. You’re allowed to be happy for your people and devastated at the same time. Both things are true.

Your body keeps the secret

For weeks after the fetus stops developing, your body can still feel pregnant. Sore breasts, nausea, all of it. The hormones don’t exit on a schedule. Anything can set you off as your system recovers, because it’s still raging and restabilizing.

I remember being on a winter trip in Jackson Hole with my friends, talking to my belly as if the baby was still growing in there. At that point, it wasn’t, we just didn’t know yet. Your body keeps the secret for a while, and you keep believing it.

Carrying what’s no longer there

You know what it’s like to have a no-longer living being inside of you. There’s no clean language for this. It’s excruciating in a way that’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t felt it. Your body is holding something it cannot release on its own timeline, and you walk around knowing.

The medical paperwork

In any appointment that follows, you’re now counted as having had one, two, three pregnancies, even if they all ended in loss. It’s strange to say out loud for the first time, and it stings every time after.

Your mom friends, in a new light

You see what they do differently now. The love and appreciation go deeper. You understand the cost of what they are carrying in a way you didn’t before.

You might make your friends jaded

If you’re open about your experience, your friends who are about to start trying might absorb some of it. They’ll go in with their eyes more open than they otherwise would have. That’s not all bad, but it is worth knowing.

The rabbit hole

If you start asking why this happened, you will find how fractured the world of women’s health is. You will learn that so much of fertility health is just overall health, tied to the foundational layer of sleep, stress, exercise, and diet. You will learn things you wish you’d been told years ago. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

The underground community

You will find yourself in conversations with women you have known for years who have been carrying their own losses quietly the whole time. These are some of the strongest women you will ever know. Women who have carried what you have carried, and kept going. Your appreciation for women, in general, grows in a way that is hard to describe. The community you find on the other side of this is close-knit, generous, and full of hard-won wisdom. It is one of the most beautiful things to come out of something so hard, and it should not be so underground.

What stays

I feel I’ll be forever changed by pregnancy loss, no matter how much time passes. Only those who have lived it can fully understand it. The blow is so low it has taught me more about myself, and more about the resilience of the female body, than I ever realized was there.

If you are in it right now, you are not alone. The club is bigger than you think, and quieter than it should be.

If any of this resonated, or if you have your own moments to add, I would love to hear them in the comments. The list gets longer, and the club gets a little less quiet, every time one of us names something out loud.

Thanks for reading Eggs & Ops! I’ll never gatekeep what I learn.

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I didn’t know this until recently, and I was stunned. I had spent years rotating through ibuprofen for headaches, injuries, and the occasional hangover. Nobody, not my doctors or the internet, ever mentioned that NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug) can delay or prevent ovulation entirely. You can bleed on schedule, feel like you had a normal cycle, and never actually release an egg.

I learned this from Dr. Natalie Crawford, a reproductive endocrinologist whose work I have been deep in this year. Below are ten facts from her that we all deserve to know about our reproductive health. Most of them I wish we’d learned in middle school sex ed class.

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1. You can have semen without sperm

The fluid is one thing, the cells inside it are another. Around 1% of all men, and roughly 10% of infertile men, have azoospermia, meaning they produce normal-looking semen with no measurable sperm in it at all. Even when sperm are present, count, motility, or concentration can be low. The volume is not the test, the cells are.

2. Cervical mucus is doing real work

It is not a hygiene issue. Cervical mucus is the medium that helps sperm survive and travel through the female reproductive tract to reach the egg. That is why it changes throughout your cycle and gets thinner and stretchier around ovulation. Your body is literally rolling out a runway.

3. Ovulation is your fifth vital sign

Ovulation does more than make babies. It’s the only time your body produces meaningful progesterone, and a successful ovulation means your hypothalamus, pituitary, and ovaries are all communicating correctly. The progesterone and estrogen that come with an ovulatory cycle protect bone density, brain function, breast tissue, and cardiovascular health. As Canadian endocrinology professor Dr. Jerilynn Prior puts it, women benefit from 35 to 40 years of ovulatory cycles not just for fertility but to prevent osteoporosis, stroke, dementia, heart disease, and breast cancer.

Here’s the catch: you can bleed on a predictable schedule and still not ovulate. Anovulatory cycles look normal from the outside, which is why cycle length is step one, but ovulation tracking is the real read. If your cycle is irregular, very short, very long, or absent altogether, that’s actionable information. Ask your OB or REI to actually look at it instead of writing off variation as normal.

4. Your fertility window is shorter than you think

Once an egg is released, it can be fertilized for about 24 hours. Sperm can survive in the female reproductive tract for up to 5 days, though most last 2 to 3. That makes the fertility window about six days each cycle, with the highest probability of conception in the two days before ovulation and the day of ovulation itself.

5. You had the most eggs you’ll ever have before you were born

Peak egg count happens around 20 weeks gestation, while you are still in your mother. At that point you have somewhere around 6 to 7 million eggs. By the time you are born, that number is already down to 1 to 2 million. From there you lose eggs every single day for the rest of your reproductive life. Your mother's health during her pregnancy with you affected the reserve you started with. Yours during a pregnancy will affect your daughter's.

6. You need acute inflammation to ovulate, and NSAIDs block it

Chronic inflammation is bad, but acute inflammation is necessary. When a follicle ruptures to release an egg, that rupture is an inflammatory event. NSAIDs (ibuprofen, naproxen, aspirin) suppress that response, which can delay ovulation or prevent it from happening that cycle. In one prospective controlled study, ibuprofen delayed ovulation in 85 percent of women who took it during their fertile window. You can still bleed and feel like you had a normal cycle when no egg was released. Dr. Crawford's guidance for women trying to conceive is to confine NSAIDs to your period only, when ovulation is not on the table.

7. Stress can cancel ovulation entirely

Major lifestyle changes, acute stress, sleep loss, undereating, and overtraining can all delay ovulation or trigger an anovulatory cycle where no egg is released at all. The clinical name for the more severe version of this is functional hypothalamic amenorrhea, and it accounts for roughly a third of cases of secondary amenorrhea in reproductive-age women. This is not woo. It is your hypothalamus deciding the conditions are unsafe for reproduction and pulling the brake. Sleep, food, and stress management are not just lifestyle accessories when you are trying to conceive. They’re inputs.

8. IVF does not drain your egg reserve

Every cycle, your body recruits a cohort of eggs, and only one (usually) matures and gets released. The rest die off that month regardless. IVF stimulation rescues the cohort that would have died anyway. It does not dip into your lifetime reserve.

9. IVF is not an insurance policy

Success rates are real, and they decline with age. Treating IVF as a backup plan you can lean on at 42 is one of the most expensive misunderstandings in modern fertility. It’s better framed as an investment in your fertility journey, not a guaranteed rescue.

10. The reason IVF isn’t covered by insurance isn’t just financial

Some countries cover it. The US largely does not, and the reason is partly logistical and partly ideological. Embryos created in IVF that go unused raise questions that are legal, religious, and personal. Are they considered life? Who decides what happens to them? Donation, destruction, and indefinite storage all carry weight. Women I’ve talked with in online communities bring up the existential side of this frequently. That’s your DNA sitting in a freezer somewhere. There’s no version of this conversation that’s purely clinical.

Dr. Natalie Crawford is a reproductive endocrinologist who has had four pregnancy losses of her own and who uses her platform to push for honest, evidence-based fertility education and reform. She is one of my newly acquired heroes in the women’s health space, and her work is some of the clearest I’ve come across.

If you want the full conversation with Dr. Crawford that covers this post’s topics (along with many others) listen here:

None of this is just about getting pregnant. Cycle health is health. Your hormones are telling you something about your bones, brain, immune system, energy, and mood every single month. That matters whether you are trying to conceive, trying not to, or just trying to understand what your body is doing. We have spent generations treating periods as something to manage and ovulation as something to track only when a baby is on the table. Both are worth more than that.

If anything in this post made you think “I wish I knew this sooner,” tell me in the comments, and share it with the women in your life who would’ve wanted to know.

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The technique is called Vipassana, taught in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. Ten days, no phone, no talking, no eye contact, no communication with other students. You sit for about ten hours a day, on a 4am to 9pm schedule, and observe the sensations in your body without reacting to them. The premise is simple, even if the execution is not. Everything that arises in the body also passes. If you can train yourself to observe the most uncomfortable sensations without flinching, and the most pleasant ones without grasping, you slowly stop being run by them. Goenka calls this the law of impermanence. Most of the work is learning to feel what is actually happening in your body instead of the story you are telling about it.

I went in carrying more than I knew. I want to tell you what I came out understanding, because I think it belongs in the conversation we are having about women’s health, and specifically in the conversation about what to do before the next attempt.

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What I brought into the silence

Vipassana had been on my list for almost a decade. The first time someone told me about it, by word of mouth, I knew it was something I’d eventually do. I wasn’t yet ready, but a mental seed was planted.

Years later, on one of my first dates with my husband, he told he’d done a Vipassana retreat. That was the day I learned the hummingbird story I’ll get to at the end of this post. It was the moment I understood how deep and spiritual he was, and the hummingbird has meant something to the two of us ever since.

So Vipassana had been a through line for a long time before I actually went. What finally tipped me into doing it was a season that asked for it: a career change in motion, a fresh year following one marked by two miscarriages, and a growing obsession with women’s health that was clearly turning into a calling. The undertow I wrote about a month ago was pulling me somewhere, and ten days of silence was part of where it was pulling me.

I wanted to graduate this season as a more regulated, more whole version of myself. I knew the retreat was part of that, and I knew I was finally ready to surrender to it.

What I didn’t expect was that the silence would teach me something about fertility that no clinic, supplement, or lab panel ever has.

Craving and hope feel almost identical

By day 8, I noticed what I hadn't been able to see in my normal life. Most of what I had been calling hope or positive manifestation was actually craving. I had been visualizing my husband and me cuddling up with our toddler, a dream backyard with fresh blooms I'd cut every morning for the bouquets in our home, the dream outcome for my career transition, and all of those images had quietly turned into a form of suffering. Goenka calls this sankhara, the deep groove we carve into ourselves through repeated reaction around craving or aversion. I had gone in expecting my aversions to be the things that rose to the surface, but most of my blockages turned out to be cravings. And they had been bogging me down for a long time.

Hope and craving can feel almost identical from the inside. They use the same language, they picture the same outcomes, and they occupy your mind with the same images. The difference is what they do to your nervous system.

Hope can sit still and lift you up. Craving will slowly drown you.

Throughout my fertility journey, I had been gripping for so long that I had stopped being able to tell the difference between the two. Ten days of silence made it visible. The thing I wanted most was the same thing keeping me dysregulated, and a dysregulated body is not what any woman should walk into trimester zero with.

The animals were data

On day 3, I felt something hit the top of my head while meditating in the hall. I thought I had imagined it. By that point I was deep into the practice and feeling all kinds of tingling sensations across my body, so a tap on the crown of my head was easy to write off. Then I looked down and saw a caterpillar on the floor right in front of me. Half in disbelief and half in awe, I realized it had fallen from the ceiling and landed on me. I scooped it up, brought it outside, and came back to keep meditating, chuckling quietly to myself the whole way. Of all the moments and all the heads in that hall, this little caterpillar had picked mine. The hall, filled with sixty students, had multiple sets of doors designed to keep out sound and insects. I have spent enough time in BizOps to know what the probability of that actually happening looks like. In my normal life, I would have hardly noticed. In the silence, I felt every bit of it.

A few days later, in the woods behind the residential cabins, I came around the top of a hill and almost walked into a family of three deer. There were two parents and a fawn. They didn’t run, they just kept eating moss. I stood there long enough to commit them to memory before they wandered off. I had been coming to that hill every day to look up at the tallest trees, where the sky opened up and the sun shone through. There, I'd do my best thinking, talk to my grandparents who've passed, and daydream about the family my husband and I are trying to build. A family of three appeared in the precise configuration I'd been picturing, on the exact hill where I'd been picturing it. I was attuned enough to recognize what I was looking at.

On day 7, a butterfly flew toward me from across a clearing, landed on a plant directly in front of where I was sitting, and opened its wings. The coloring matched the jacket I was wearing. It stayed for what felt like a full minute. In any other context, it would have been a quick moment I hardly acknowledged. Inside the solitude, it was a full event and I felt it stay.

When you take a body that has been running on waves of cortisol, screens, and grief for a while and you put it inside a forest with no inputs for ten days, the body starts noticing things again. The noticing itself is the medicine.

The female body is the original impermanence teacher

Goenka’s central teaching is anicca, which translates roughly to impermanence. That everything changes, and every sensation arises and passes. The whole technique is built around using body sensation as proof of this, so that the mind eventually stops gripping at the pleasant ones and recoiling from the painful ones.

Sitting with this daily, I arrived at a thought: women don't need to be taught that everything changes. We already know this at our core.

Our bodies do not need to be convinced of impermanence. We bleed it, we ovulate it, we grow life, and we lose life, and we grow life again. The menstrual cycle is a forty year course in arising and passing. Pregnancy is impermanence with stakes. Pregnancy loss is impermanence at its most brutal. Postpartum is impermanence you carry in your own reflection.

Meditating in that hall, I realized the female body has not needed to be taught this. It has been living the lesson all along.

Trimester zero, in silence

I have written before about trimester zero, the window before conception that shapes pregnancy outcomes more than most women are told. The list usually includes folate, iron, blood sugar stability, gut health, sleep, alcohol, and environmental toxins. All of these matter before the positive test, not just after.

Nervous system regulation belongs in the trimester zero conversation, not as a wellness platitude, but as a real variable. Chronic stress affects the HPA axis (the body’s central stress response system), which affects every reproductive hormone downstream. A body trying to conceive while running on fight or flight is not the same body as one that has been allowed to settle.

I’m not going to tell every woman to go sit a ten day Vipassana retreat. It’s intense, it’s not accessible to everyone, and there are gentler interventions that move the same dial. What I will tell you is that the question of whether your nervous system is regulated belongs in the same preconception checklist as your AMH, your TSH, and your iron panel. It’s data, it’s actionable, and it’s rarely on the list.

After my losses I was unbalanced. High highs and low lows. It took real work to get back to feeling stabilized, and this retreat was a powerful reminder of how available that stabilization is when I make space for it. That work is part of a fertility journey, not separate from it.

The hummingbird

My husband did his own ten day Vipassana years before I did mine. While he was there, he found a dying hummingbird on the outskirts of the pagoda. Unable to save the poor thing, he buried it the next day. He told me that story early in our relationship, and it stayed with me. I bought him a journal with a hummingbird on the cover that first year of our relationship. I did not think much of it at the time, but he kept it.

On day 9 of my retreat, the last day of full silence, I couldn’t nap during my usual nap window, so I got up and walked toward the only patch of flowers in the woodland area. A hummingbird appeared above the flowers and stayed there. I had been hoping I would see one when I first arrived, then I had forgotten about it entirely. It only came after I let it go.

When I finally got my phone back at the end of the retreat, there were a stack of texts from my husband waiting for me. He had been sending one almost every day, even though he knew I did not have my phone. One of them was about a hummingbird. He told me the rest over the phone when I called him. The same morning I saw mine, he had been sitting on the couch in our reading nook at home, and a hummingbird had hovered just outside the window, looking in at him.

His vipassana, his buried bird, the journal I bought him, my retreat, my hummingbird, his hummingbird, on the same morning, while neither of us could tell the other.

Sometimes the thing we want most shows up when we finally let it go, and so does the version of it we didn’t even know to ask for.

If you have your own hummingbird story, I’d love to hear it. Drop it in the comments.

Thanks for reading Eggs & Ops! I’ll never gatekeep what I’ve learned on this journey.

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Above you, windsurfers catching air. Below, flower gardens spilling color. Further down, the ocean, so blue and so far it barely seems real. Behind you, the mountain. Green, lush, wild, enormous. The kind of nature that makes you feel small in the best possible way.

I was there with my husband and one of his closest friends. We all shared a level of peace and relaxation that day. The kind you only feel when on vacation, completely unplugged, ready to explore, observe, and take it all in.

We were technically homeless at this point in time, my husband and I. We had just left New York, and weren’t yet settled back in San Francisco. We were in between cities, in between homes, in between versions of our lives. We had made the decision to move back to be closer to family, to slow down, to start trying.

We were in the middle of everything and the beginning of nothing yet.

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The chameleon

After exploring the grounds, I almost stepped on a chameleon on the way back to our car.

He was tiny. Perfectly hidden in the green grass, invisible until he wasn’t. I don’t know what made me look down at that exact moment as I was crossing the grassy hillside. I just did.

I freaked out a little. Not because I was scared of him, but because anyone could have stepped on him in that open field and he would have had no idea it was coming. So I picked him up, stared at him in awe, showed my husband and our friend, had a photoshoot with him (of course). Then walked him over to a nearby tree and set him on a branch where he’d be safe.

Then we drove home.

Somewhere on that trip, I got pregnant. Whether it had already happened by the time I was in that field, I’ll never know. But new life was either just beginning or about to. The window was open, and I didn’t know any of it yet.

That Maui trip and particular afternoon hold a lot of meaning, and what happened when we returned home changed me in ways I’m still mapping.

The pregnancies, the losses, and the grief that doesn’t leave but continues to change shape. The slow, humbling process of realizing how little I actually understood about my own body, about fertility, about what women are never taught and somehow expected to just know.

I started Eggs & Ops because of what I learned in that gap. Between what I thought I knew and what turned out to be true. Between who I was before and who I became after.

That trip to Maui was the last before my life as I knew it quietly changed.

Realities that coexist

Here’s what I’ve learned about chameleons since then:

They don’t change color to hide, that’s a myth. They change in response to light, temperature, emotion. It’s an internal shift made visible on the outside. They also see the world unlike any other animal. Both eyes move independently as they take in two realities at once.

That’s exactly what the years after that trip taught me to do. To hold two things at once without one canceling the other out.

This is something nobody tells you about fertility, about loss, about healing. That grief and growth coexist. That you can be moving forward and still feel the weight of what you lost on a random Tuesday. That a hard day is not a setback. That rage and tenderness can live in the same body, sometimes in the same hour. That healing is not linear and it is also not a contradiction.

Women are not taught to hold complexity in our own stories. We are taught to resolve it, to get to the other side, to be better now. But some things don’t resolve, they just become part of how we see.

That gap, between what the textbooks say and what women actually live through, is the whole reason Eggs & Ops exists. We are not taught to read our own bodies and are handed a version of the story that leaves most of reality out.

Learning to see both at once is its own kind of transformation.

And I think about the in-between. The chameleon is the animal of transition that doesn’t belong to one color or one place. It lives in the shift itself. Of course it found me on that hill, on that specific afternoon, in the middle of the biggest in-between of my life.

It wasn’t a promise or a warning, but a marker.

This is the beginning. You just can’t read it yet.

These moments show up small and hidden, blending into the ordinary, waiting for you to slow down and look at exactly the right moment.

Lately I keep finding them. A chameleon in Maui, a ladybug landing when I needed it most, a rainbow out of an airplane window. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the more I’ve tuned into my body and my health, the more I notice what nature is quietly saying.

I’m going to keep writing these as they find me. If this resonates, let me know in the comments. I’d love to know what signs have shown up for you, and whether you knew what they meant at the time.

Thanks for reading Eggs & Ops! I’ll never gatekeep what I’ve learned on this journey.

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I had a D&C for my first loss. It stands for Dilation and Curettage, the medical name for what most of us think of as a surgical abortion. What I didn't know, until my OB explained my options to me after we couldn’t find a heartbeat, is that it's also the standard procedure for miscarriage management. Same surgery, very different circumstances.

Here’s what I knew about abortion growing up: the videos they showed us in middle school sex ed. A woman undergoing a procedure in her doctor’s office in emotional and physical pain. The association with unwanted teenage pregnancy, shame, consequence. I remember watching and thinking: I will do everything in my power to never need one.

What those videos never showed me was that a D&C is a standard medical procedure. It’s used for miscarriage management, not just elective termination. You go under anesthesia, wake up with cramps and it’s done. That your OB, the one who has held your hand through the hardest moments of your life, is the one performing it. That you are safe, cared for, and not alone.

I always thought if I ever needed one, I’d choose misoprostol instead. After going through both, I can tell you that a D&C can be gentler on your body and your mind than I ever imagined. The misconceptions I carried into that experience made it harder than it needed to be.

That’s what this piece is about. The things women are never told, and the things we believe instead.

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Myth #1: PCOS means you have cysts on your ovaries.

It doesn’t. The name is one of the most misleading in women’s medicine. PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, is actually a hormonal and metabolic condition. The “cysts” referenced in the name are typically immature follicles, not true cysts. You can have PCOS with no cysts at all. You can have cysts with no PCOS. The name has caused decades of confusion and misdiagnosis, and it’s long overdue for a rebrand.

Myth #2: Birth control regulates your hormones.

It actually suppresses your hormones entirely and replaces them with synthetic ones. Many women spend years on the pill, the patch, or the ring with no idea what their actual cycle looks like underneath, masking symptoms of conditions like endometriosis, PCOS, thyroid dysfunction, and low progesterone that might otherwise be caught earlier.

Coming off birth control can feel like meeting your body for the first time, physically and emotionally.

I speak to this in more detail on ’s podcast:

Myth #3: An irregular cycle is just how some women are.

Sometimes, yes, but usually it’s a signal. Your period is considered a vital sign by many practitioners. Cycle length, flow, pain levels, spotting, PMS severity. All of it is data. Irregular cycles can point to hormonal imbalances, thyroid issues, under-eating, overtraining, chronic stress, and more.

Read my full post here about periods as windows into your overall health.

Myth #4: Fertility falls off a cliff at 35.

The research behind this statistic is largely based on French birth records from the 1600s. Modern data tells a more nuanced story. While fertility does decline with age, the dramatic “cliff at 35” narrative has caused enormous amounts of unnecessary panic and does not reflect what we actually know about reproductive aging today.

There's also a fixation on egg quantity, how many you have left, how fast that number is dropping. What gets far less airtime is egg quality. A smaller reserve of high quality eggs can matter more than a larger reserve of poor ones. Age affects both, but quality is often the more important variable and it's almost never the first thing discussed.

Myth #5: Fertility is mostly about the woman and her eggs.

Male factor infertility accounts for roughly half of all cases. Sperm quality, motility, morphology, DNA fragmentation. These matter enormously and are still wildly under-screened in standard fertility workups. If you’re doing fertility testing, your partner needs to be tested too.

Myth #6: IVF will work if you need it.

IVF is a remarkable tool and also a deeply misunderstood one. Success rates vary dramatically based on age, diagnosis, clinic, and protocol. It is not a guarantee or a backup plan. It is an intervention with real physical, emotional, and financial costs. Going in with clear expectations matters.

Myth #7: Miscarriage is caused by something you did.

The stress, the workout, the glass of wine before you knew, the heavy thing you lifted.

In the vast majority of cases, early pregnancy loss is caused by chromosomal abnormalities that were present from fertilization. There is almost nothing you could have done. The guilt women carry after loss is one of the cruelest parts of an already devastating experience.

Myth #8: Eat whatever you want while you’re pregnant. You’re eating for two.

No. What you eat during pregnancy, and in the months before, shapes your baby’s development in ways that go far beyond calories. Blood sugar regulation, protein intake, micronutrient density. This stuff matters from the very beginning.

Which brings me to trimester zero, the window before you even conceive. Most of what determines a healthy pregnancy starts before the positive test. Folate, iron, blood sugar stability, gut health. The prenatal conversation should start months earlier than it usually does.

Myth #9: Once you have the baby, you’re out of the dark.

Labor is hard. It can also be dangerous, complicated, and traumatic in ways that deserve to be taken seriously. But for most women, what comes after delivery is the part nobody prepared them for. The physical recovery, the identity shift, the hormonal crash. The sleep deprivation and the isolation.

Postpartum depression and anxiety affect far more women than are ever diagnosed. The “baby blues” are real but they’re not the whole story. And the pressure to feel grateful, to appear calm, to be okay now that the baby is here, keeps so many women from asking for help.

’s new podcast, Tell Me I’m a Good Mom, is one of the most honest things I’ve listened to on this topic in a long time. She’s figuring it out in public, in real time, and I applaud her for it.

This list is not finished. Honestly it probably never will be. Women’s health is full of gaps between what we’re told and what’s actually true, and I plan to keep closing them one myth at a time.

If there’s something you believed for years that turned out to be wrong, I want to hear it. Drop it in the comments.

Thanks for reading Eggs & Ops! I’ll never gatekeep what I’ve learned on this journey.

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Women’s health shouldn’t feel this isolating.

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I did not go expecting a fertility lesson. I came back with one anyway.

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Before we talk about dairy, let’s talk about what most people are consuming

If you have swapped whole milk for oat milk or almond milk, you are probably not doing your body the favor you think you are. Most commercial oat milks and almond milks are built around the same core lineup of additives:

• Canola or sunflower oil

• Added sugars

• Emulsifiers like sunflower lecithin

• Gums and thickeners used to mimic the texture of fat

Most commercial almond milks are also mostly water, with a very small amount of actual almond. If a plant-based milk is your preference, Malk is one of the few worth buying: almonds, water, and salt. That is the whole ingredient list.

I was a non-dairy milk consumer for years. It wasn’t until I dove into health and wellness research last year, during my own fertility journey, that I converted. When I did, I went straight to whole milk - specifically Straus.

Whole dairy milk from a quality source is one of the most complete foods available to women, particularly during the preconception and fertility window. A cup of whole milk provides about 8 grams of complete protein, 30% of your daily calcium needs, and meaningful amounts of vitamins A, D, B12, and phosphorus. The fat matters too. Vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat-soluble, meaning your body needs dietary fat present to absorb them. Low-fat and non-fat dairy removes the vehicle those nutrients travel in. Research suggests full-fat dairy may actually support ovulation in ways that low-fat versions do not.

Straus Family Creamery is the standard to look for:

• Organic, pasture-based herds in Marin and Sonoma

• Gently pasteurized, not ultra-pasteurized

• Not homogenized, so the cream floats to the top

• No gums, stabilizers, or additives of any kind

It is what whole milk is supposed to look like.

How to read a dairy label

We are trained to scan for certain words. Organic. Farmstead. Raw. Pasture-raised. Donna made a point I have not stopped thinking about: the real question is not whether something carries the right certification. It is whether your body can actually break it down.

Donna feeds her Jersey cows mostly fermented grains and brewer’s yeast from local breweries. Where corn does appear in the feed, it is steamed first so their digestive systems can actually process it. The logic tracks directly through to us: animals digest what they are built to digest, and we digest their products better when those animals have eaten appropriately for their bodies.

So what do you actually look for at the store? Here is how to read what the labels are really telling you:

• Pasture-raised and grass-fed are the two worth paying attention to first. They tell you the animal lived outside, grazed on real food, and was not confined in conditions that compromise both its welfare and the quality of what it produces. This is not sentimentality. How an animal lives directly affects what ends up in your glass. Grass-fed dairy contains significantly higher levels of CLA and omega-3 fatty acids — one large study found grass-fed milk had 147% more omega-3s and about 52% less omega-6 than conventional milk. When cows eat fresh green grass, Donna told us, you can actually taste the sweetness in the curd.

• Organic is worth the premium, but understand what it covers and what it does not. It tells you the cows were not given synthetic pesticides, antibiotics, or growth hormones, and that they ate certified organic feed. What it does not tell you is whether they had meaningful pasture access, what specifically they ate, or how the milk was processed. Organic is a floor, not a ceiling. Use it as a baseline, not a final answer.

• rBGH-free sounds reassuring but is narrower than it looks. Recombinant bovine growth hormone is one synthetic hormone used in conventional dairy farming to increase milk production. A label that says rBGH-free only rules out that one hormone. Others may still have been used. Organic certification prohibits all synthetic hormones, which is why it is a more complete standard if hormones are your concern.

• Ultra-pasteurized is worth actively avoiding. Most milk is pasteurized, which is fine. Ultra-pasteurized means it was heated to a much higher temperature to extend shelf life for long-distance shipping. That process degrades proteins and some heat-sensitive nutrients. If the carton says UHT or ultra-pasteurized, put it back. Look for gently pasteurized instead.

• Not homogenized is a quiet signal worth noticing. Homogenization mechanically breaks fat globules apart so cream does not separate. Non-homogenized milk leaves the fat structure intact, which some research suggests may be easier to digest. If the cream is floating to the top, that is a good sign.

• The ingredient list is the simplest check and the one most people skip. Whole milk should have exactly one ingredient: milk. If you see carrageenan, gums, stabilizers, or anything else, that is a processing flag regardless of what the front of the package says.

Full fat, minimally processed, from an animal that grazed on something real and was raised with care - and with an ingredient list short enough to read in five seconds. That is the filter.

What your gut actually needs

Your gut microbiome is one of the most underappreciated players in fertility health. Estrogen is metabolized and recirculated partly through a process in the gut involving what researchers call the estrobolome, a collection of gut bacteria that produce enzymes capable of reactivating estrogen so it can re-enter circulation. When the gut is in dysbiosis, meaning microbial imbalance, this recycling process is disrupted, which can contribute to estrogen levels that are either too high or too low. Research linking gut dysbiosis to conditions like PCOS and endometriosis is now robust, though the direct line to fertility outcomes is still being studied.

Fermented dairy products from quality sources are among the most bioavailable foods for gut support. Kefir, fromage blanc, and aged cheeses like what Donna produces contain live cultures and short-chain fatty acids that feed beneficial bacteria. The fat content matters here too: gut barrier integrity depends partly on adequate dietary fat.

Goat’s milk is generally easier for most people to break down enzymatically. The fat globules are smaller and the protein structure differs slightly from cow’s milk, which tends to make it gentler on sensitive digestive systems. If you tolerate cow’s milk poorly, goat dairy products are worth trying before writing off dairy entirely.

The A2 protein profile is also worth knowing about. Most conventional dairy cows produce a mix of A1 and A2 beta-casein proteins. When A1 beta-casein is digested, it can produce a peptide called beta-casomorphin-7, which some research associates with digestive discomfort and inflammation in sensitive individuals. A2A2 cows produce only the A2 variant, and many people find it significantly easier to tolerate. If you have chalked up dairy discomfort to lactose, the protein type might actually be worth investigating first.

Stress runs downstream

Donna mentioned something that landed harder than I expected. When cows are stressed, they excrete cortisol. That stress response measurably shows up in their milk, and research confirms calmer cows produce more milk with better composition. How animals are handled matters as much as what they eat. Cows that are moved slowly, milked in calm environments, and are not crowded or subjected to extremes produce measurably different milk than those who are not. When you are sourcing dairy, it is worth asking whether the farm’s practices are ones you can actually learn about, not just claimed through a label.

Separately, we know from extensive research that chronic cortisol elevation in humans disrupts the hormonal signaling involved in ovulation and cycle regularity. The connection between animal welfare and your hormones is not direct causation, but the underlying principle is the same: stress has downstream metabolic and hormonal consequences that compound over time. We spend a lot of energy managing our own stress levels for fertility reasons. It is worth at least being thoughtful about whether the food chain is adding to that load in ways we are not tracking.

You don’t need a farm to make your own butter

You can, in fact, make your own butter. You don’t need a cute dairy girl dress, your own cows and a giant churning station, though that does sound cute AF.

The quick one (mason jar)

1. Pour one cup of heavy cream into a mason jar with a tight lid.

2. Shake vigorously for 10 to 15 minutes. You will pass through whipped cream and then watch it suddenly separate into butterfat and buttermilk.

3. Pour off the buttermilk.

4. Rinse the butter under cold water while working it with a spoon to press out any remaining liquid.

5. Add a pinch of flaky salt.

The fancy one (KitchenAid)

Cultured butter has a deeper, slightly tangy flavor because the cream ferments before churning. It is what you get at good restaurants and what we make at home.

1. Mix one cup of heavy cream with two tablespoons of full-fat buttermilk in a jar. Cover loosely and leave at room temperature for 12 to 24 hours until it thickens and smells slightly tangy.

2. Pour the cultured cream into a KitchenAid with the whisk attachment. Start on medium, increase to high. It will go through whipped cream, then grainy, then suddenly break - butterfat clumping, buttermilk pooling at the bottom. About 5 to 7 minutes.

3. Pour off the buttermilk (save it for pancakes).

4. Add a few tablespoons of ice cold water, mix on low to help release remaining liquid. Drain and repeat once more.

5. Add a generous pinch of flaky salt and mix briefly.

No fillers, no preservatives, and a flavor that will make you understand immediately why sourcing matters. The difference in taste is the difference in what went into the animal.

What we put in our bodies is shaped long before it reaches us. The soil, the grass, the grain, the animal’s lived experience, the processing method. It all matters.

You don’t have to source perfectly. You just have to understand the variables well enough to make better decisions when the options are in front of you.

I’ll never gatekeep what I’ve learned on this journey. If you want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee here ↓

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Today is my last day at the company I joined at 23 years old. It’s also my 32nd birthday. In exactly two weeks I will sit in silence and meditate for ten days at a Vipassana retreat.

The timing is not a coincidence.

The two things that actually matter

Gad Saad writes in The Saad Truth About Happiness that there are two decisions that determine the quality of a life more than almost anything else: choosing the right life partner, and finding meaningful work. Not just pleasurable or impressive work, but the kind that gives you a sense of purpose you can feel. (Listen to Saad speak on these decisions below, if you’re curious!)

I use my own version of this as a gut check. If I were at the end of my life looking back, what would have made it feel full?

One: that I loved and was loved by my true person. My husband is that. That box has been checked for a while and I do not take it lightly.

Two: that my work gave me meaning. That I felt passionate about what I was building and went to sleep at night feeling like my days had a point.

That second box has been quietly unchecked for longer than I admitted to myself.

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The art of the managed life

I am good at forward motion. I suspect a lot of you are too.

When I felt stagnant at work I made internal moves. New role, new challenge, new thing to learn. It worked well enough to keep going. And outside of work, life kept handing me real and beautiful things to pour myself into. I moved to New York, earned my MBA, got married, traveled a ton. I built a full, fun, busy life.

What I understand now is that I was also using all of it. Not consciously, but the momentum of big life events is very good at drowning out a quiet gut feeling you are not ready to face. You don't notice the undertow until you're already being pulled.

The next chapter was going to be motherhood. I could feel it. A new identity to grow into, a new purpose to organize around. Something that would finally make everything feel complete.

It got taken away from me twice.

For the first time in years, there was nothing left to hide behind. Just me and the question I had been deferring.

What the losses actually asked of me

I want to speak directly to the women reading this who are in their fertility or motherhood journeys.

Grief has a way of getting specific on you. You think you’re grieving one thing and then you realize you are grieving several. The loss itself, the future you had already built in your mind, and sometimes (if you’re willing to follow the thread all the way down) something older than that. A need that was already unmet before any of this started.

I’m not saying the losses were a gift. They chewed me up and spit me out. I’d not wish them on anyone.

What I’m saying is that they asked me a question I needed to answer, and I’m glad I finally heard it.

What a year of real work looks like

This is not a glow-up story. It’s more like an excavation.

Therapy, to start to understand what was actually underneath. A career coach, to get honest about what I actually wanted. Slow and intentional yoga that taught me to sit in stillness when all I wanted was to outrun everything.

I started walking outside without headphones, journaling at 5am, connecting with nature in a new way. Not because anyone told me to, but because the quiet was finally giving me something back.

I cut my hair off, began writing publicly. I launched Eggs and Ops to make women’s health a less isolating and confusing place. Started building Dita, an app for women navigating loss, as a solo founder with no roadmap.

None of it was linear, but all of it was necessary.

What is actually possible in a year

A year ago I was at my birthday celebration, one loss in, doing the work but not yet the deep work. Today I am a different person inside what still looks, from the outside, like the same life.

Same husband, same city. Different everything else.

If you are in a hard year right now and cannot see what it’s building in you, I want to offer you this: the depth of the excavation determines the quality of what gets built on top of it. The harder you’re willing to look, the more that becomes possible.

You do not have to have it figured out. You just have to be willing to stop running.

What comes next

I leave my company today with genuine gratitude for 8.5 years of real growth. And I leave knowing it is time.

Dita is being built live. Eggs and Ops is climbing. Vipassana is in two weeks. I am being very intentional about what I pour myself into next, because I finally know what I am pouring toward.

There’s fear and uncertainty. But this is the most alive I’ve ever felt. A year is a long time, and more can change than you think.

Happy birthday to me.

A window (roughly three to six months before you even start trying) where what you eat, how you sleep, what you put on your skin, and how hard you push yourself in the gym is quietly shaping the eggs you’ll one day ask everything of. I didn’t know this until I was already deep in a fertility workup, wishing someone had handed me a guide twelve months earlier.

This isn’t new information. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the American Academy of Pediatrics have formally recommended preconception care since 1983. A federal expert panel declared the preconception visit potentially the single most important health care visit…in 1989. Forty years of clinical consensus, and many of us are hearing about it for the first time.

That’s the gap, this post is your guide.

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Why this window matters

Egg maturation (folliculogenesis) takes approximately 90 days, which means the egg retrieved or ovulated this cycle started developing three months ago. The cellular environment it grew in (how well-nourished, low-stress, toxin-free) is already baked in.

That’s the metabolic soil concept I keep coming back to. You can’t force a harvest, but you can spend the months before planting conditioning the ground.

Same goes for sperm. Sperm regenerate fully every 64-74 days, which means your partner’s lifestyle choices right now are literally building the genetic material he’ll contribute. This is a two-person protocol.

Start here: your medical baseline

Before supplements and swaps, get your data.

• Ask your OB or REI (reproductive endocrinologist) about a full hormonal panel (AMH, FSH, estradiol, TSH, vitamin D, fasting insulin) and a pelvic ultrasound for antral follicle count.

• If you have any history of irregular periods, prior losses, or unexplained symptoms, ask about a sonohysterogram (SIS). It's a saline infusion procedure that maps the interior of your uterus and can catch polyps, fibroids, post-D&C scar tissue and structural issues that a standard ultrasound misses entirely. I had one, and it was so worth it - I wrote briefly about my experience here.

• Have him get a semen analysis. It is non-invasive, takes twenty minutes, and gives you information that could shape everything. One in three fertility cases involves a male factor, so test early.

What goes in

I’ve already written about the nutritional and supplement foundation for this in The soil and the seed: the mitochondrial science, antioxidant foods, and supplement stack. Start there if you haven’t read it - it’s the companion piece to this one.

The short version: you’re building cellular energy and reducing oxidative stress. Density over restriction, consistency over perfection.

One specific callout to trimester zero: zinc for him. Oysters are the most bioavailable source, but pumpkin seeds, grass-fed beef, and lentils work too. Sperm quality is far more responsive to nutrition than most men realize, and zinc is one of the most well-researched nutrients for motility and DNA integrity.

What comes out

Environmental toxins, specifically endocrine disruptors, are the category most conventional fertility conversations skip entirely. They don’t announce themselves. They accumulate quietly and interfere with hormone signaling over time.

I overhauled my kitchen and cleaning cabinet during this period. The swaps aren’t dramatic but they matter: synthetic fragrance, nonstick cookware, and most conventional dish soaps are worth reconsidering. I documented everything I actually use or trust here on my ShopMy. (Affiliate links - Purchases through them help support Eggs & Ops, at no cost to you. I only link to things I actually use and trust.)

If your cycles are irregular

This deserves its own section because irregular cycles are one of the most common things women quietly normalize, and one of the most informative signals your body sends.

An irregular cycle isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s data. It can point to elevated cortisol, blood sugar dysregulation, thyroid dysfunction, or insufficient caloric intake, all of which affect your ability to conceive. If you’re heading into trimester zero with unpredictable cycles, that’s where to start paying attention.

The good news is that the trimester zero protocol is largely the same protocol for cycle regulation. Specifically:

• Cortisol is the main lever. Chronic stress and overtraining both keep cortisol elevated, which suppresses the LH surge needed for ovulation. If your cycles are long, irregular, or missing, the first questions to ask yourself are: how hard am I training, how well am I sleeping, and how loaded is my nervous system on a daily basis?

• Blood sugar stability matters more than most people realize. Even subclinical insulin dysregulation, well short of a diabetes diagnosis, can disrupt the hormonal cascade that drives a regular cycle. Prioritizing protein, fat, and fiber at each meal, and reducing refined sugar and ultra-processed foods, supports the kind of blood sugar stability that keeps your hormones communicating clearly (hello organic whole milk, goodbye oat milk!)

• Undereating is underdiagnosed. Women who are training hard and eating “clean” are sometimes eating too little, and the body responds by deprioritizing reproduction. If you track food and regularly come in under your needs, that’s worth addressing before you start trying.

The practical moves: trickle in more lower-intensity movement throughout your week (walking, yoga, weights are my go-to), protect your sleep as a non-negotiable, eat enough, and reduce the sources of chronic stress where you actually have control. Most women who do these things consistently see their cycles normalize within one to three months.

If you’ve made these changes and your cycles remain irregular, ask your OB about getting your thyroid and fasting insulin tested. Both are common and treatable drivers that often go undetected until someone thinks to look.

How your body moves and rests

I was doing too much high-intensity cardio and not enough recovery. The shift was moderation, not elimination: more walking, yoga, and weightlifting + fewer runs, HIIT classes, and tennis sessions. Still doing all of it, just with more recovery built in. Combined with the nutrition, sleep, and stress changes I made, my cycles were regular within three months.

Sleep is not a lifestyle preference in this context. It’s when cellular repair happens, when melatonin peaks (melatonin is also an antioxidant that concentrates in follicular fluid), and when cortisol resets. Protecting your sleep in trimester zero is a direct fertility intervention.

Stress is harder to name and harder to fix, but I’d rather acknowledge it honestly than hand you a breathing exercise and call it a day. What helped me was slowing down my mornings, reducing my news intake, and being more selective about what I said yes to. I now protect my 5am routine of journaling, reading, and morning sunlight walks at all costs.

You can start today

You don’t have to have a diagnosis, a plan, or even a firm timeline to begin treating this window with intention. Trimester zero is not a medical designation, but a decision to show up for yourself before you have a reason to.

The body keeps score, so give it something worth counting.

If this landed for you, share it with someone who’s in the window. I’d love to know what you’re doing in your own trimester zero - reply and tell me.

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I was walking home yesterday in one of those moods where everything feels like it’s lining up. Sunny outside, just got matcha with a friend talking about Vipassana and trusting the universe, an interview that morning that felt right in my body and not just my head. The kind of afternoon where you’re not waiting for anything because being in it is already enough.

And then a bug flew straight into my left cheek.

I tried swatting it away, took off my sunglasses, and there she was. A tiny ladybug sitting right in the lens, just hanging out, unbothered, looking up at me like she’d been there the whole time.

I giggled out loud on the sidewalk like someone who has completely lost her mind, in the best way.

I let her crawl onto my finger and stood there for a moment, and suddenly I was four years old again. Standing in the front yard of my parents’ old house, a ladybug making her way across my small hand, the whole world feeling like peace and love and something I didn’t have a word for yet. Innocence, maybe. That specific okayness that children carry before they learn to be afraid of what comes next.

The ladybug landed in the lens I see the world through, and then she took me all the way back to a child who didn’t need a reason to be at peace.

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God’s little cow

Russian was my first language. The language I was born into, the language of my earliest self. In Russian a ladybug is called божья коровка, which translates literally to “God’s little cow”. In Russian folklore they are holy and heavenly insects, carriers of good luck, sacred creatures that belong to the divine and arrive bearing something from it. I didn’t know any of that as a little girl standing in that front yard, but I think some part of me felt it, the way children feel things they don’t yet have words for.

Spiritually, ladybugs are said to represent divine timing, little messengers reminding you that everything you’ve been manifesting is already in motion, even if you can’t see it yet. And I am in one of those moments where a lot is happening at once: leaning into what comes next for our family, making a career change, stepping into an early founder life, exploring more deeply this creative and spiritual side of myself that has been asking for more room. All of it unresolved and equally exciting. Into the middle of it all lands a creature whose entire message is: trust that it’s already happening.

And then there’s this: completely independently, without knowing about my ladybug adventure, my mother-in-law gave my husband two small ceramic trays to bring home to me, each one decorated with a ladybug. Prior to this moment, I’ve never received anything from her with a ladybug on it. She is one of those deeply intuitive people with a high EQ who acts as a vessel, feeling a pull toward something and following it. She wasn’t just giving me a ladybug gift. She was part of the greater message without knowing it.

The cherry on top: I have been quietly obsessed with cows lately, and I’m choosing to spend my 32nd birthday on a dairy farm near Tomales Bay. No party, just a beautiful day in nature. I planned this before I knew the etymology, before the ladybug, before any of it. God’s little cow had apparently been trying to get my attention for longer than I realized, I just didn’t know how to read her yet.

On being in the middle of things

If you've been reading this newsletter for some time, you may remember the rainbow above the clouds I saw after my second miscarriage. The moment that started all of this for me, and lately the current has been running strong.

I find myself writing about the in-between a lot, and I don’t think that’s an accident. A fertility journey still unfolding, a career transition in progress, and in a few weeks I leave for Vipassana (a ten-day silent meditation retreat with no phone, no talking, no reading). It’ll be just me and my mind and the slow work of learning to observe both without running away from either.

Here is what I want to tell you, especially if you’re in your own version of this: I am having the time of my life.

I used to treat the in-between like a waiting room, something to white-knuckle through on the way to the real thing, the positive test, the job offer, the answer, the part where everything finally made sense and I could exhale. But the signs have been teaching me something different, because they don’t tend to arrive at the destination. They arrive in the in-between, in the airport terminal, on a hiking trail, on the walk home from an interview you don’t have results from yet, and in the moment you take off your sunglasses to find a ladybug looking back at you.

The little girl in the front yard wasn’t anxious about where the ladybug was going to go, wasn’t trying to hold it forever or make it mean something. She was just there in the warmth, completely present with a small beautiful thing on her hand. I stood on that sidewalk in SF and I was her again, not in spite of everything I’ve been through but because of it. Because the grief, stillness, sobriety, and mindful yoga I used to hate have all been building toward exactly this: the capacity to be fully inside a moment that isn’t asking anything of me except to notice it.

What I want for you

This is what I want for you, especially if you’re waiting on something right now.

The journey everyone talks about, the “it’s about the journey, not the destination” thing that used to sound like something people said to cope, turns out to be real. Not as a consolation prize, but as the actual thing. The destination, when you reach it, will be one moment. The journey is all of the moments. The ladybugs are in the journey, and you can only receive them here, in the middle, moving through your ordinary Tuesday with your heart open.

Your body knows this already. It has been sending you signals your whole life, in your cycle, in your gut, in your heart. The question, as always, is whether you’re still enough to let them land.

I’m still learning. But yesterday a ladybug flew into my sunglasses on a Tuesday afternoon, and I was four years old, and the whole world was okay.

I'd love to hear, have you had your own version of this? A moment so perfectly timed it stopped you in your tracks, a sign that found you exactly when you needed it, something small and ordinary that cracked you open a little. Share it in the comments! I think we all need to be reminded that the universe is a lot more conversational than we give it credit for.

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No context needed, he knew exactly what it meant. My period had come back, regular, on time, for the first time since my miscarriage. We treated it like a win, because it was one.

That moment felt worth sharing. Not because it is a funny anecdote, but because it represents something all women should know: your cycle after pregnancy loss is a clinical signal, your partner is a resource, and your fertility journey does not have to be something you carry alone.

This post covers what to actually expect from your cycle post-loss, and how to build a partner dynamic that makes the whole process less isolating.

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Your period is one of the clearest windows into your overall health.

Cycle length, flow, luteal phase length, presence of ovulation - these are not just fertility metrics. They reflect thyroid function, cortisol levels, nutritional status, and hormonal balance. ACOG has formally recognized the menstrual cycle as a vital sign for exactly this reason. If something is off systemically, your cycle often shows it first.

This is especially true after pregnancy loss. Getting your period back, and watching it regulate, is not just a fertility checkpoint. It is your body telling you something real about its recovery.

Most people are not told what to expect after a miscarriage. You leave the hospital or clinic with a follow-up appointment and not much else.

Here is the clinical reality: your first period typically returns within 4 to 8 weeks, but this varies based on how far along you were and how your hCG levels return to baseline. Your cycle may be irregular for several months before it stabilizes, heavier or lighter than usual, longer or shorter. That is normal. It does not mean something is wrong.

What your body is doing is recalibrating. After a pregnancy, even an early one, your hormonal system was activated and then abruptly shifted. Progesterone drops, hCG clears, and your hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axis has to re-sync. For some people this happens quickly. For others, it takes time.

My cycle was long (44-50 days average) and unpredictable for about three months. Each time my period was late, my brain went somewhere unhelpful. Each time it arrived, I felt something unexpected: relief, and then quietly, gratitude.

What you are watching for is a return to your baseline pattern, whatever that looked like before. If you were tracking before your loss, this is where that data becomes genuinely useful. If you were not, now is a good time to start.

Signals worth paying attention to:

• Cycle length trending back toward your personal baseline

• Luteal phase of at least 10 days (a luteal phase shorter than this is a clinical marker for progesterone insufficiency and worth flagging with your provider)

• Ovulation returning, confirmed via basal body temp and cervical mucus tracking (more details on this in my previous post)

• Period flow returning to your pre-pregnancy norm

If you are 3+ months post-loss and still seeing significant irregularity, or if your cycles are consistently very short or very long, bring it to your OB or reproductive endocrinologist (REI). Per ACOG, most providers will recommend waiting until you have had at least one normal cycle before trying to conceive again, but that guidance has evolved, and the evidence for waiting longer than that is less clear-cut than it used to be.

Even if you are not actively trying to conceive right now, tracking your cycle after a loss gives you something concrete to do when everything else feels out of your control.

It gives you data, a feedback loop, and something to talk to your partner about that is not just grief.

That last part matters more than it sounds.

Fertility and pregnancy loss are almost universally framed as the woman’s experience.

The appointments, the tracking, the testing, the emotional labor of it all defaults to her.

This is both unfair and inefficient.

Your partner cannot carry the pregnancy or experience the physical loss. But they can be operationally involved in a way that significantly reduces your load and builds genuine shared investment.

Here is what that actually looks like in practice.

Share the data, not just the feelings. When my cycle came back, I started sharing my tracking data with my husband the same way I would share a project update. Here is where I am in my cycle. Here is what I am watching for this month. This was not clinical coldness, it was giving him something real to hold onto. He could follow along. He knew what questions to ask and stopped feeling helpless.

Give them a job. Partners often want to help and don’t know how. Be specific. Ask them to track supplement refill dates, remind you to take your basal body temperature, research a question you do not have bandwidth for, or simply know your cycle phase so they understand why a Tuesday night matters differently than a Saturday.

Loop them into appointments. Not every appointment, but the ones where information is being delivered. Having a second set of ears changes how much gets retained and processed. My husband caught questions I forgot to ask twice.

Let the celebration be shared. The toilet text became a funny joke, but underneath it was something real. He was invested in this signal too. When my cycle came back regular, it was not just my win. We both felt it.

The operational stuff is important, but if it feels like a medical protocol neither of you will sustain it.

Here is what actually works in our house, and a few things worth stealing.

Stardust. This app sends your partner real-time notifications about where you are in your cycle and how you are likely feeling. Not in a clinical way, in a heads-up-she-might-want-quiet-tonight way. My husband gets a read on where I am before I even have to say anything. It removes the emotional labor of having to explain yourself in the moment.

Put your cycle on the dashboard. Literally. We added my cycle phase as a widget on my car display, so every time I get in I get a quick visual reminder of where I am. It sounds small but it keeps me anchored to my own data without opening an app every morning.

Let food be part of it. My husband loves to cook, so we lean into this hard. Each phase has different nutritional needs and different ways your body feels, so meals have become part of how we track together.

During my luteal phase, everything gravitates toward warm, grounding, and sweet. Naturally sweet, specifically. There is something about dates when you are luteal: they are high in magnesium (which supports progesterone and eases cramping), rich in natural sugar your body is actually asking for, and genuinely satisfying in a way that feels almost medicinal. My husband makes a homemade tahini date ice cream in our KitchenAid that I cannot overstate. I also keep frozen dates stuffed with nut butter and sea salt in the freezer at all times during this phase. Do not question it, just make them.

He also brings me a freshly made rice krispie treat from Whole Foods every cycle. I did not ask for this. I would never ask for this. I want to kill him for it every time and also it is the best thing that has ever happened to me.

The period tea protocol. For cramps specifically, I have landed on a blend I now make every cycle. Steep together, add honey if you want, pair with a heating pad and a foot rub.

• Rose petal — anti-inflammatory, supports estrogen balance, genuinely calming

• Red raspberry leaf — tones the uterus, traditionally used to ease cramping and heavy flow

• Ginger — strong anti-inflammatory, helps with nausea and pain

• Chamomile — muscle relaxant, reduces prostaglandin activity (the actual cause of cramps)

• Mint — eases bloating and GI discomfort, cooling relief

When your partner is cooking for your luteal phase or getting a Stardust notification before you have even had to say “I am tired today,” the whole thing starts to feel less like a medical project and more like something you are actually doing together.

A lot of people dread their period during a fertility journey.

Especially post-loss, it can feel like another month of nothing, another reminder. I understand that, and I’ve felt it.

But I would offer a different frame. After my miscarriage, getting my period back, on time, regular, meant my body was working. It meant something had recalibrated. It was evidence of recovery.

Your period is not a failure signal, it’s data. In the months after a loss, it can actually be one of the more encouraging things your body does.

Track it, share it, and celebrate it if that is what it earns.

And text your husband from the toilet if you want to. He can handle it :)

If you are in the post-loss window and not sure where to start:

• Start tracking your cycle now, even if you are not actively trying

• Use a combination of cervical mucus and basal body temperature for the clearest ovulation picture (LH strips work too, but not my fav approach)

• Note cycle length, flow, and any mid-cycle symptoms each month

• Share your tracking with your partner, even a quick weekly summary

• Flag anything that looks significantly off from your pre-pregnancy baseline with your provider

• Give yourself at least 2 to 3 cycles before expecting full regularity

You don’t need to have it all figured out, and you definitely don’t have to be doing it alone.

If you have been through this, I want to hear from you. Did your cycle take a while to come back? Do you have a partner who showed up in a way you did not expect, or one you had to teach? Drop it in the comments. These are the stories that do not get told enough, and they matter to someone reading this right now.

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400 million wearable devices shipped last year.

35% of U.S. adults are now wearing a health tracker on their body.

If you’ve ever Googled a symptom at 2am, uploaded a lab result to an AI, or checked your Oura Ring before your morning coffee, you already know that we are living in an entirely different era of health management. And women’s health is finally starting to catch up.

The handshake, not the doomsday takeover

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to.

There’s a narrative that AI is replacing humans. That technology is making healthcare cold. That we’re headed toward a world where a chatbot diagnoses you and a robot performs your surgery and no one ever looks you in the eye again.

I don’t buy it.

What I see is a handshake. Technology handles the noise so humans can do the thing that actually matters: care.

Let me give you an example. Abridge is an AI platform used by over 250 health systems that listens to doctor-patient conversations and automatically generates clinical notes. Before tools like this, doctors spent more time typing than listening. 35% of healthcare professionals say they spend less time with patients than on admin tasks, and another 45% say it’s about equal. That’s not a care problem. That’s a paperwork problem.

When you remove the paperwork, you get presence. You get a doctor who’s actually hearing you. That’s what AI does at its best. It doesn’t replace the human element. It removes everything that got in the way of it.

Where women stand (and why it matters more for us)

I want to be direct about something.

Women’s health accounts for just 5% of global healthcare R&D funding. Only 15% of venture capital goes toward it. Women are 35% more likely than men to skip or delay medical care, and over 40% of women who avoided care said it was because of how a provider treated them. On top of that, we pay $15.4 billion more annually in out-of-pocket healthcare costs than men.

The system was not built for us. And it’s not fixing itself fast enough.

So we fix it ourselves. Not by becoming our own doctors, but by showing up with data, with questions, and with the kind of preparation that makes our 15-minute appointment actually count. Technology is how we do that.

Your tech toolkit: pick your entry point

I’m not here to tell you to buy everything on this list. I know it can start to feel like we’re all walking around as human Bluetooth speakers at this point, between the rings, the watches, the patches, and the apps pinging us every five minutes. But the beauty of where we are right now is that you don’t need all of it. You need one entry point that meets you where you are. Here’s how I think about the spectrum.

This post contains affiliate links. Purchases through them help support Eggs & Ops at no cost to you.

Level 1: wearables (passive data collection)

You wear it. It learns your body. Low effort, high insight.

Oura Ring is the gold standard right now for women’s health tracking. Their ovulation prediction algorithm, trained on over 42 million nights of data, is more than 96% accurate. A peer-reviewed study found it detected 96.4% of ovulations with an average error of just 1.26 days, compared to 3.44 days with the calendar method. That’s three times more accurate than counting days on your phone.

In 2025, they added pregnancy tracking with week-by-week insights and a perimenopause check-in feature that generates a downloadable PDF of your symptoms and biometric trends that you can literally hand to your doctor. They also now give you 12-month period and ovulation predictions, and the updated algorithm works better for irregular cyclers and women in perimenopause. If you’ve ever been told your cycle is “irregular” and left it at that, this is the kind of tool that gives you actual patterns to work with.

Natural Cycles pairs with Oura and is the only FDA-approved contraception app, offering hormone-free birth control through temperature tracking.

And then there’s Apple Watch, which is the most mainstream entry point with heart rate monitoring, cycle tracking, blood oxygen, and fall detection. If you already have one, you’re already collecting data. Use it.

Level 2: testing platforms (proactive data ownership)

You test. You track. You own your numbers.

Function Health gives you access to 100+ lab tests for $499 a year, covering heart, thyroid, hormones, metabolic markers, autoimmunity, and more. That level of testing could cost up to $15,000 elsewhere, and it includes AI-powered insights and clinician reviews. You retest every 3-6 months to track changes. This is the “don’t wait for your doctor to order tests” approach where you get the data, bring it to your appointments, and lead the conversation.

Eli Health just launched the Hormometer, a saliva-based hormone test that gives you results in 20 minutes through your phone with no blood draw and no lab visit. Their cortisol test is available now, with progesterone and testosterone in pre-order. Third-party validation shows over 90% accuracy against lab standards, and at $8 per test with a subscription, this is hormone tracking at the cost of a latte. For anyone doing IVF or trying to understand their cycle, this could change the game. They’re developing estradiol testing next, which could reduce the need for repeat blood draws during fertility treatments.

Clair Health is brand new and worth watching closely. It’s a wrist-worn wearable that tracks estrogen, progesterone, LH, and FSH continuously and non-invasively. Founded by Stanford grads, it uses 10 sensors and AI models trained specifically on female physiology, and early validation shows 94% accuracy in cycle-phase classification.

Their co-founder said it best: “Women have been making health decisions with almost no hormonal data. Imagine managing diabetes without ever checking glucose.” That comparison should make you angry. And then it should make you curious.

The wearable ships later this year at $299 with a $10.99 monthly subscription, and all data processes on your phone rather than in a data center. Privacy-first by design.

Level 3: AI tools (active research and preparation)

You ask. You research. You walk into appointments armed.

ChatGPT Health launched in January 2026 as a dedicated health space within ChatGPT where you can connect medical records, Apple Health, Function Health, and other wellness apps to get personalized responses. It’s not for diagnosis. It’s for understanding your lab results, preparing questions for your doctor, and making sense of information that used to require a medical degree to decode. Over 230 million people already use ChatGPT for health questions weekly, and this just makes it smarter about YOUR health specifically.

Flo Health is the leading AI-driven women’s health app covering every stage from first period to menopause. If you’re already tracking your cycle in an app, make sure the app is actually working for you and giving you insights, not just a calendar.

Levy Health uses AI to analyze patient data and lab results for fertility clinics, reducing time to diagnose from years to weeks. If you’re in the fertility space, ask your clinic if they use tools like this. If they don’t, ask why not.

Rescripted’s Clara is a new AI tool built by a coalition of seven women’s health startups, including Midi Health, Proov, and Teal Health, pooling their content to give women science-backed answers in one place instead of contradictory Google rabbit holes.

The framework

Here’s how to actually implement the AI and tech in your day-to-day.

Use it to:

Translate lab results into plain language. Organize symptoms before an appointment. Generate specific questions for your doctor. Research conditions and treatment options with credible sources. Track patterns your body is showing you over time. Prepare for fertility consultations with real data. Understand how your cycle affects your sleep, energy, and training.

Do NOT use it to:

Self-diagnose. Replace your doctor. Make treatment decisions without professional input. Spiral into anxiety over every data point. Skip the human conversation entirely.

The goal is not to become a biohacker. The goal is to walk into your next appointment with data, context, and confidence. Let the technology handle the research. You handle the relationship with your care team.

Companies worth watching

A quick revisit of the companies we discussed doing interesting things at the intersection of technology and women’s health:

Abridge provides AI clinical documentation that gives doctors back the ability to be present with patients, and is used by 250+ health systems.

Function Health offers 100+ lab tests for $499/year with comprehensive testing that puts data ownership in your hands. Now integrated with ChatGPT Health.

ChatGPT Health (OpenAI) is a dedicated health AI space where you can connect your records and apps. Launched January 2026.

Oura Ring provides cycle tracking, fertility insights, pregnancy monitoring, and perimenopause check-ins with 96%+ ovulation accuracy.

Clair Health is building the first continuous hormone tracking wearable for estrogen, progesterone, LH, and FSH from your wrist. Shipping late 2026.

Eli Health offers instant saliva-based hormone testing with cortisol available now and progesterone and testosterone coming Q1 2026 at $8 per test.

Natural Cycles is the FDA-approved contraception app that pairs with Oura Ring.

Flo Health is an AI-driven women’s health app covering every life stage.

Levy Health brings AI to fertility clinics and cuts diagnostic timelines from years to weeks.

Rescripted + Clara is a coalition of 7 women’s health startups powering one AI Q&A tool.

My honest take

I’m not sure how much technology should even be involved in this.

Part of me thinks our grandmothers had the whole thing figured out: have kids younger and skip the birth control. Listen to your body because you didn’t have a screen telling you what it was doing. End of story.

But we don’t live in that world anymore. Most of us aren’t having kids at 22 and aren’t fueling our bodies with the whole, nutrient-dense foods that truly support fertility anymore. Many of us spent a decade on hormonal birth control before we even started asking questions about our cycles. We’re navigating fertility later, with less information, in a healthcare system that wasn’t designed to help us be proactive.

So this is how we take back control. Not by rejecting technology and not by outsourcing our health to an algorithm, but by using every tool available to close the gap between where the system is and where we need it to be.

The best AI isn’t replacing what makes us human. It’s removing everything that got in the way.

I’d love to hear from you: How are you using technology or AI in your fertility or health journey? Are you all in on the data? Skeptical? Somewhere in between? What tools have actually made a difference for you?

Drop a comment, I genuinely want to know.