Neuroplasticity
There is a belief I held for most of my twenties that I no longer hold: that my brain had a ceiling. That the capacity I had was the capacity I got. I know now that this is not how the brain works. Neuroplasticity does not pause for difficult years. And in the female brain, it runs on a hormonal architecture that science is only beginning to take seriously.
Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome
There's something particular about the moment you find out the condition you've been living with was named after a feature it doesn't even reliably have. This week, after 14 years of global collaboration and the voices of more than 22,000 patients and clinicians, that got corrected. PCOS is now PMOS — and the name change is a window into something much bigger than terminology.
Hormonal Headaches
I remember the first time I understood that my migraines had a pattern. Four months of tracking in a notes app, and the dates kept clustering around the same point in the month. Always the days just before my period. Nobody had told me this was a thing — not a doctor, not a neurologist, not the pharmacists I had consulted about whether I was taking too much ibuprofen. I had spent years treating each migraine as an isolated event. A failure of hydration. A punishment for the glass of wine. I had a list of suspected causes as long as my arm, and not one of them said: your estrogen just dropped and your trigeminal nerve is reacting. This is that explanation.
Fat = Fat. Right?
For most of my life, fat was a number. A percentage. A thing to reduce, redistribute, be ashamed of in summer. I had no idea it was an organ — several organs, actually, each with its own cellular structure, its own hormonal language, its own metabolic personality. Brown fat burns. White fat stores. And beige fat, the one nobody mentions, can switch between both depending on the signals it receives. What nobody told me is that women have a thermogenic advantage built into their adipose biology. Until estrogen declines. Then everything changes at once.
Your 28-day Cycle
I spent the better part of my twenties thinking my body was unpredictable. One week sharp and focused, the next week foggy and tender — craving different food, needing more sleep, finding the same social situation that felt easy a fortnight ago now unexpectedly exhausting. It took years before I understood that what I was experiencing was not randomness. It was a programme. A 28-day biological programme that was running, flawlessly, every single month. Nobody gave me a map. So I built one.
Swimsuit Body
There is a specific version of summer dread I have felt every year since I was a teenager. It is not the heat. It is the swimsuit. More precisely: it is standing in front of a mirror and having the number on the scale still running in the background of my brain. What I now understand is that my body was not bigger because of anything I did. It was cycling. And that changes everything.
Cravings & Their Doings
There is a particular kind of afternoon I know well. It is not quite hunger — it is more specific than that. A pull toward something sweet, something salty, something warm. For most of my life I named it by the only word anyone had given me: weakness. It took reading a significant amount of nutritional neuroscience before I understood why the signal never went away. It was not the problem. The translation was.