This holiday season, I’ve been reflecting on something much deeper than hormone health. I’ve spent countless hours this year thinking about the broader conflicts that shape women’s health across every decade of their lives. The pattern is painfully familiar: by the time a girl turns 18, she is often placed on birth control that suppresses her hormones. When she’s ready to conceive years later, she may find herself struggling to get pregnant. If she’s fortunate enough to have children, she then enters her late 30s and 40s which is met by perimenopause and the turbulence that hormonal shifts bring. By the time a woman reaches her 50s, her estrogen has plummeted, her brain begins to change, and she becomes increasingly insulin resistant.
On top of this, her mitochondria which are the very engines that power her cells begin to function less efficiently. They produce less energy, fewer steroid hormones, and ultimately impact every aspect of her physical and emotional well-being. It’s no surprise that women face increased risks for autoimmune conditions, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, and the many chronic diseases tied to aging. The truth is, women have been dealt a very unfair hand when it comes to hormonal health, and the system still doesn’t fully support them.
My motivation for creating the 12-Week Metabolic Program was to directly target this issue. And while research on women’s metabolic and hormonal health remains limited, this year gave us a breakthrough. In October 2025, we finally saw research acknowledging that perimenopause is, at its core, a mitochondrial dysfunction issue. For many of us in functional medicine, this validated what we’ve seen for years in clinical practice; women improve when we support mitochondrial health.
Visualizing this dream is one thing, but bringing it to life has been something far more meaningful. I know I still have a long way to go before women’s nutritional needs are fully understood, accepted, and supported. While I celebrate the FDA’s decision to remove the black box warning on hormone replacement therapy, I also know this is only one small piece of a much larger puzzle. True empowerment requires a 180-degree approach. How do we help women get where they want to be? How do we encourage them to speak up, advocate for themselves, and take ownership of their health when symptoms first appear instead of waiting decades?
This year, many of you know I moved my entire practice online. That shift gave me so much freedom to deepen the work I love most. I’ve met clients across continents, cooked with many of you in your kitchens, and shared recipes and conversations that were as fun as they were nourishing. If you’ve ever joined one of my cooking demos, you know exactly what I mean.
In this season of gratitude, I want to thank each and every one of you for being part of my journey whether closely or from afar. Your trust, your stories, and your commitment to your health inspire me every single day.
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