Understanding Estrogenic and Androgenic Effects

Your body isn’t “working against you”. It’s responding to hormonal changes you were never properly taught about. 🤍 During perimenopause, oestrogen starts to fluctuate. Not just drop — fluctuate. Up one day. Down the next. And that hormonal chaos changes where your body prefers to store fat. Instead of your hips and thighs, more weight gathers around your middle. Your belly feels softer. Your waist thickens. Your clothes fit differently — even if you’re eating the same. 😩 It’s frustrating. And

A new paper found the estradiol level tied to protecting your heart and bones, and the guidelines haven't caught up. Piette and Simon (Gynecological Endocrinology, 2026) lined up serum estradiol from transdermal trials against KEEPS and ELITE. The protective range landed near 60 pg/mL. The twist: the most popular patch dose already delivers about 57. Women and their prescribers arrived there on their own. The honest catch: hormone therapy is guideline-approved for bone (osteoporosis) prevention,

Estrogen dominance is the most overused label in women's health, and stay with me because I am giving you the exact labs to ask for and the 5 step protocol to fix the real problem at the end. Here is the part most clinicians skip. Before you blame estrogen you have to know whether it is actually elevated or simply unopposed. In perimenopause progesterone almost always falls first because ovulation becomes inconsistent, so estrogen only looks dominant by comparison even when the number on your la