International Women's Day

Reclaiming Authority Over Our Own Bodies

Every year on March 8th, International Women's Day rolls around with its familiar messages of empowerment, celebration, and calls for equality. We see the purple graphics, the inspiring quotes, the corporate campaigns. And while I appreciate the sentiment, I've often felt like something crucial was missing from these conversations.

We talk about breaking glass ceilings, equal pay, and representation in leadership. All vitally important. But we rarely talk about the most fundamental form of empowerment: a woman's right to truly understand and control her own body.

This isn't about reproductive rights—though that's certainly part of it. I'm talking about something deeper. The fact that most women move through their lives profoundly disconnected from their own biology. We don't understand our hormonal patterns. We can't interpret our body's signals. We've been conditioned to outsource authority over our health to systems that were never designed with female bodies in mind.

That disconnection isn't an accident. It's the result of centuries of medical bias, research gaps, and a culture that taught women to distrust their own instincts. And it's time we talked about it.

The Medical System's Female Problem

For most of modern medical history, the default research subject has been male. Clinical trials predominantly used male participants—often exclusively—because female hormonal cycles were considered too "complicated" to account for. This wasn't just an oversight; it was systematic exclusion that shaped everything we know about disease, treatment, and wellness [1].

The consequences are staggering. Women are 50-75% more likely than men to experience adverse drug reactions, partly because medication dosing is based on male physiology [2]. Heart attack symptoms in women are different from men, yet for decades we only taught medical professionals to recognize male presentation, leading to delayed diagnosis and higher mortality rates for women. Autoimmune diseases, which affect women at rates 3-4 times higher than men, remain chronically underfunded and poorly understood.

Even the diagnostic criteria for many conditions are based on how diseases present in male bodies. Women with ADHD, autism, and sleep apnea are routinely underdiagnosed because their symptoms don't match the male-derived profile. Women's pain is consistently undertreated and dismissed—we're more likely to be told our symptoms are psychological or exaggerated, more likely to receive sedatives instead of pain medication, more likely to wait longer in emergency rooms.

This isn't about blaming individual healthcare providers. Many are doing their best within a flawed system. This is about recognizing that the entire foundation of modern medicine was built on incomplete data that excluded half the population. And women are still paying the price.

The Hormone Knowledge Gap

Perhaps nowhere is this knowledge gap more pronounced than in understanding female hormones. Most women can tell you more about their car's maintenance schedule than about their own hormonal cycle. We know when our oil needs changing, but we don't know what our estrogen and progesterone are doing at different phases of our cycle, how cortisol impacts our fertility, or why our thyroid matters for every single system in our bodies.

This ignorance isn't our fault. We were never taught. Sex education focused on pregnancy prevention, not hormonal literacy. Doctor visits rarely include discussions of optimal hormonal health unless something is obviously "broken" by conventional standards. The message has been clear: unless you're trying to get pregnant or you've hit menopause, your hormones aren't worth understanding.

But here's the truth: your hormones orchestrate everything. They determine your energy levels, your mood stability, your metabolism, your sleep quality, your cognitive function, your immune response, your bone density, your cardiovascular health, and yes, your fertility. They're not separate from your overall health—they are the foundation of it.

When you don't understand your hormones, you can't advocate for yourself effectively. You can't distinguish between normal fluctuations and concerning symptoms. You can't make informed decisions about hormonal contraception, fertility treatments, or hormone replacement therapy. You're forced to trust systems and providers who may or may not have your best interests—or accurate information—at heart.

The Biohacking Revolution Women Deserve

The biohacking movement has exploded in recent years, with people taking unprecedented control over their health through data, supplementation, lifestyle optimization, and ancestral approaches. It's exciting. It's empowering. And until recently, it's been overwhelmingly male-dominated.

The standard biohacking protocols—intermittent fasting, high-intensity training, extreme cold exposure, ketogenic diets—were designed by men, tested on men, and promoted without consideration for female physiology. Many of these strategies, when applied without modification, can wreak havoc on women's hormonal systems. Extended fasting can suppress reproductive hormones. Excessive high-intensity exercise without adequate recovery can tank thyroid function. Strict keto without enough carbohydrates can disrupt menstrual cycles.

This doesn't mean women can't biohack effectively. It means we need our own framework—one that accounts for hormonal fluctuations, prioritizes cyclical living over linear optimization, and recognizes that what works in the follicular phase might be counterproductive in the luteal phase.

Female-specific biohacking understands that you can't track progress the same way men do because your baseline shifts throughout the month. It recognizes that stress management and sleep quality often matter more for women than extreme dietary restriction. It values intuition and body awareness alongside data and metrics.

This is the revolution women actually need: not just access to the same tools men use, but tools designed for female biology from the ground up.

What True Body Literacy Looks Like

Imagine if every woman understood her body the way she understands her smartphone. What if you could read your symptoms as clearly as you read text messages? What if you knew exactly what your body needed based on where you were in your cycle, your stress levels, your life stage?

True body literacy means recognizing that headaches before your period aren't random—they're linked to the estrogen drop that happens in the late luteal phase. It means understanding that intense sugar cravings might signal insulin resistance or inadequate protein intake, not lack of willpower. It means knowing that persistent fatigue isn't something you need to just push through—it's your body communicating that something needs attention, whether that's iron levels, thyroid function, or chronic stress.

It means tracking your cycle not just for family planning but for optimizing everything from your workout schedule to your work meetings to your social commitments. It means understanding that the week before your period isn't the time to start a new intense diet or take on a massive project—it's when you need more rest, more carbohydrates, and more gentle movement.

Body literacy transforms your relationship with yourself. You stop feeling like your body is this unpredictable, betraying thing that randomly decides to feel terrible. You start seeing patterns. You develop fluency in your body's language. You become the expert on you.

Reclaiming Our Health Narratives

For too long, women's health narratives have been written by others—predominantly male researchers, male doctors, male pharmaceutical executives. Even when women were included in the conversation, it was often through a lens of pathology: how to prevent pregnancy, how to manage "difficult" menopause symptoms, how to fix what's "broken."

We were rarely asked: What does optimal female health look like? How can we support women's bodies to thrive, not just survive? What do women need to feel vibrant, energized, and powerful in their own skin?

These questions matter. Because health isn't just the absence of disease. It's not just normal lab values or regular periods. Real health is waking up with energy, having stable moods, thinking clearly, moving without pain, sleeping deeply, and feeling genuinely good in your body most days.

Reclaiming our health narratives means rejecting the idea that hormonal symptoms are something we just have to tolerate. It means questioning whether birth control is truly the only option for managing PCOS or endometriosis. It means asking why perimenopause is treated as a disease to be medicated rather than a transition to be supported.

It means demanding better research, better treatment options, and better education. And while we're waiting for the system to catch up, it means taking our health into our own hands with the tools we do have access to: nutrition, lifestyle, stress management, targeted supplementation, and ancestral wisdom.

The Power of Women Supporting Women

One of the most powerful shifts I've witnessed in recent years is women sharing their health experiences openly. Not the sanitized, Instagram-perfect version, but the real, messy truth. Women talking about their PMDD, their thyroid struggles, their perimenopause symptoms, their fertility journeys, their autoimmune conditions.

This matters more than you might think. When women share their stories, other women realize they're not alone. Symptoms that were dismissed by doctors suddenly have names. Solutions that worked for one woman become possibilities for others. Knowledge spreads in a way that official medical channels never facilitated.

We're creating our own knowledge networks. We're pooling our collective wisdom. We're running our own n=1 experiments and sharing the results. We're rebuilding the foundation of female health knowledge from the ground up, woman by woman, story by story, insight by insight.

This is how real change happens—not from the top down, but from the grassroots level, through women refusing to accept inadequate answers and substandard care.

Beyond Awareness: Moving to Action

International Women's Day can't just be about awareness. We've been aware for decades that women's health is underfunded, under-researched, and undervalued. Awareness without action is just performance.

So what does action look like?

At the individual level, it's educating yourself about your own body. Reading, researching, tracking your symptoms, asking questions, demanding answers. It's finding healthcare providers who listen and take you seriously—and firing those who don't. It's connecting with other women to share knowledge and support.

It's refusing to accept dismissive responses. It's bringing data to your appointments. It's getting second opinions. It's trusting your instincts when something feels wrong, even if tests come back "normal." It's investing in your own health education because no one else is going to hand you this information.

At the collective level, it's supporting women-led health research and women-owned health companies. It's advocating for policy changes that prioritize women's health funding. It's amplifying voices of women who are doing this work—researchers, practitioners, educators, advocates.

It's creating spaces where women can learn from each other without judgment. It's normalizing conversations about hormones, periods, menopause, and everything else we were taught to whisper about. It's raising the next generation of girls to be fluent in their own biology from the start.

A Vision for the Future

I envision a future where every woman grows up understanding her hormonal cycle as well as she understands reading and math. Where female-specific health research is adequately funded and prioritized. Where doctors are trained in the nuances of female physiology as thoroughly as male physiology.

Where women don't spend years suffering with undiagnosed conditions because their symptoms don't match male-derived criteria. Where treatments are tested on women and dosing accounts for hormonal fluctuations. Where perimenopause and menopause are supported with the same resources and attention we give to other life transitions.

Where the default assumption isn't that women's symptoms are psychological, exaggerated, or hormonal in a dismissive way. Where pain is taken seriously and treated appropriately. Where women are believed when they describe their own experiences.

Where pregnancy and postpartum care extends beyond the immediate medical concerns to support women's complete physical and mental recovery. Where we don't expect women to bounce back immediately and suffer in silence when they don't.

This future is possible. But it requires all of us—individually and collectively—to demand better, to educate ourselves, and to refuse to accept the status quo.

The Art of Female Health

This International Women's Day, I'm not just writing about these issues. I'm doing something about it.

After years of research, personal experimentation, and conversations with hundreds of women about their health journeys, I've poured everything I've learned into a comprehensive guide that I wish I'd had years ago.

"The Art of Female Health" releases today.

This book is everything I wanted someone to tell me when I was struggling with hormonal symptoms, feeling dismissed by doctors, and desperate for answers that made sense. It's the guide to understanding your body that you should have received in health class but didn't. It's the friend who validates your experiences and then hands you practical tools to actually improve them.

Inside, you'll find:

• A complete education in female hormonal health—from menarche through menopause—that's accessible, empowering, and actually useful

• How to interpret your body's signals and symptoms, moving from confusion to fluency

• Biohacking strategies specifically designed for female physiology, not adapted from male protocols

• Nutrition and lifestyle approaches that support hormonal balance without deprivation or extremes

• How to navigate the medical system effectively, advocate for yourself, and find practitioners who actually listen

• Cycle-syncing strategies for optimizing everything from productivity to exercise to nutrition

• Evidence-based natural approaches for managing PCOS, endometriosis, PMS, PMDD, perimenopause, and more

• The truth about hormonal contraception, fertility, and reproductive health that you deserve to know

• How to support your thyroid, adrenals, gut health, and detoxification pathways

• Specific protocols for different life stages and health situations, with real science backing them up

This isn't a book that treats female health as a niche topic or an afterthought. It's a comprehensive manual for understanding, optimizing, and reclaiming authority over your own body.

I wrote this because I was tired of seeing women suffer unnecessarily. Tired of the knowledge gaps and medical gaslighting. Tired of watching brilliant, capable women feel betrayed by their own bodies because no one ever taught them how those bodies actually work.

You deserve to feel good in your body. You deserve to understand what's happening inside you. You deserve answers that make sense and strategies that actually work. You deserve healthcare that sees you as a whole person, not a collection of symptoms to medicate.

"The Art of Female Health" is my contribution to changing the narrative around women's health. It's my way of passing on everything I've learned to women who are exactly where I was: frustrated, confused, and determined to find a better way.

This International Women's Day, don't just celebrate women's achievements—invest in your own health empowerment. Because true equality starts with understanding and controlling your own body.

The revolution isn't just about boardrooms and ballot boxes. It's about every woman becoming the expert on herself. It's about collective knowledge-sharing that fills the gaps left by inadequate medical education. It's about refusing to settle for feeling less than optimal in our own skin.

Your body is not your enemy. It's not randomly malfunctioning. It's communicating with you constantly, using a language you were never taught to speak. Learning that language changes everything.

Welcome to the art of female health. Your body has been waiting for you to listen.

"The Art of Female Health" is available now. Get your copy and join thousands of women reclaiming their health, their power, and their bodies.

References

[1] Holdcroft, A. (2007). Gender bias in research: how does it affect evidence based medicine? Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 100(1), 2-3.

[2] Zucker, I., & Prendergast, B. J. (2020). Sex differences in pharmacokinetics predict adverse drug reactions in women. Biology of Sex Differences, 11(1), 32.

[3] Hoffmann, D. E., & Tarzian, A. J. (2001). The girl who cried pain: a bias against women in the treatment of pain. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 29(1), 13-27.

[4] Mauvais-Jarvis, F., Merz, N. B., Barnes, P. J., et al. (2020). Sex and gender: modifiers of health, disease, and medicine. The Lancet, 396(10250), 565-582.

[5] Liu, K. A., & Mager, N. A. (2016). Women's involvement in clinical trials: historical perspective and future implications. Pharmacy Practice, 14(1), 708.