The number on my health checkup report was 35.2%. That was my body fat percentage, flagged in bold with the words “early abdominal obesity” printed beside it. I sat with that result for a moment, then thought about the past couple of months. There had been a small thing I’d noticed and then set aside:…
Intermittent fasting after menopause had never been something I thought I’d need to reconsider — until it stopped working the way it used to. For several years from the time I was 47, the same protocol had run reliably in the background of my days. Sixteen hours of fasting, eating between noon and eight in…
Most mornings start the same way for me: blender out, carrot and apple and celery going in, a spoonful of beetroot powder, a knuckle of fresh ginger. It is a small ritual, the kind that has happened so many times it barely registers as a decision anymore. If I travel and skip it for a…
For most of my 30s, I ran. Nothing dramatic, five mornings a week, two or three easy miles before the house woke up. I liked the routine. I liked that it never asked much of me beyond showing up, and that the number on my watch always told me I’d done something. Then I hit…
I set the watermelon down on the kitchen counter and stood there for a moment, surprised at how much effort the last twenty feet had required. It wasn’t a large one. I’d picked it up the way I always had. Halfway from the garage, my arms had simply run out. There’s a specific quality to…
“How’d the 30-day challenge go?” She asked across the lunch table, her fork halfway to her mouth. We ate together a few times a week, and I’d mentioned the challenge when I started it — a HIIT program I’d found in a fitness book, the kind that promised maximum fat loss in minimum time. Short…
The email came on a Tuesday afternoon. A notification from the health portal: my thyroid follow-up results were ready to view. I already knew what the TSH would say. The week before, I had sat across from my doctor while she pulled up the bloodwork. The nodules (two of them, found at a routine checkup…
“Have you talked to anyone about your estrogen levels?” My doctor’s question took me by surprise. I’d asked something I thought was simple: why my clothes were fitting differently around the middle when nothing else had changed. Same eating patterns. Same schedule. A full year had passed, and nothing I tried touched the softness that…
Quiet weeks, I slept through. Seven hours, sometimes close to eight. I’d wake with something that felt like actual readiness — not dragged out of sleep but arriving at it, like the morning had waited for me. Pressure weeks were the same hours in bed but a different experience entirely. I’d surface at six feeling…
For more than five years, I ate two meals a day and skipped dinner. I counted that as discipline. The hunger by eight or nine in the evening: I counted that as progress. The mothers I knew from school pickups and neighborhood walks talked about weight loss the same way: eat less, skip more, resist…