Stem Cells
I fasted past 72 hours once. My back hurt the whole way through, and afterwards it felt like a different back. That sent me into the stem cell literature, where the real finding turned out to be stranger than the supplement ads: your repair crew does not fade slowly. It collapses at around seventy. And in the female body, one of the hormones maintaining it withdraws two decades earlier.
Perimenopause II
The hot flush in a meeting is public. Everyone watches. The three in the morning has no witnesses, so nobody counts it. Between forty and fifty-six percent of women report insomnia symptoms in the transition, and one in four meets full diagnostic criteria. This is what is happening in those hours, why progesterone leaving is the part nobody explains, and why the treatment with the strongest evidence behind it is almost never the one you get offered.