Kristyn Hodgdon
Everything you’re feeling, but didn’t know how to say.
My Workout Routine Has ADHD (And I'm Not Mad About It)
For the past six or seven months, I've been consistently showing up to Pilates reformer classes at a local studio — getting out of the house (a non-negotiable when you work from home in New York in January), finding community, and rebuilding strength after my third baby. It worked. I loved it. I got into genuinely great shape.
And then I got bored.
Did I mention I have ADHD?
This is the part nobody talks about: something can be working, can be good, can be the thing that finally clicked, AND your brain can still tap out without warning. It's not a character flaw. It's just how I'm wired. So instead of forcing it, I leaned in and went back to what's always been my fallback: working out at home.
Here's what I'm loving right now. Fit with Coco for mat Pilates — low impact in the best possible way, the kind where you're shaking by minute ten and genuinely shocked by what 2-lb ankle weights can do. Sydney Cummings when I need someone to actually motivate me, the kind of trainer who makes you feel like you can do one more rep even when you absolutely do not want to. And Madelaine Rascan for strength training with a side of humor — no-nonsense, genuinely funny, built for real life.
All you need is a mat, some weights (or, honestly, water bottles), and a phone. That's it. The barrier to entry is basically nothing, which means the only thing standing between you and feeling stronger is pressing play.
Moving your body is cool. Building strength is even cooler.
Your Brain on Menopause
A few weeks ago, I was at a women's health conference, surrounded by founders doing genuinely exciting work, when I met a team focused entirely on something I hadn't seen anyone tackle so directly before: the cognitive side of menopause. Not hot flashes, not sleep, not libido — the brain. Memory. Concentration. The thing that makes you you.
I understood immediately why it mattered, because postpartum brain fog hit me hard after my third baby. Words disappeared mid-sentence. Tasks that should have taken ten minutes took forty-five. I knew it was hormonal, knew it would lift, but living inside it was disorienting in a way that's genuinely hard to explain to someone who hasn't felt their own mind go slightly out of reach.
That experience made a new study from Northwestern University hit differently than it might have otherwise. Researchers found that estrogen loss affects the extracellular matrix in the hippocampus — the part of the brain responsible for memory consolidation — and that this disruption may be one mechanism linking menopause to Alzheimer's-related cognitive decline, a disease where women make up nearly two-thirds of cases.
For a long time, the explanation was simply that women live longer. But this research suggests the story is more complicated than that — that female brains have spent a lifetime relying on estrogen in ways we're only beginning to understand, and that when it drops, the effects are specific, biological, and real. Not stress. Not age. Not "just part of the deal."
IMHO, it shouldn't have taken this long for anyone to think to look.
Reality Check: Not Everything Is "Hard"
There's a quote from Cheryl Strayed — from her completely wonderful, life-changing book Tiny Beautiful Things — that I keep coming back to: "There is no why. You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding."
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, about how much the words you tell yourself actually matter. Not in a manifestation-girlie, vision-board way, but in the smaller, more stubborn sense of where you choose to put your attention. Spill your coffee at 8 a.m., decide the day is ruined, and it usually obliges. Tell yourself you're lucky, and you start noticing evidence of it everywhere.
I recently came across a video from Natalie Buchoz, a quadriplegic motivational speaker who became paralyzed at 15 after a skiing accident, talking about what it means to wake up every morning and choose your attitude. Not a platitude, coming from her. Just a straight-faced argument that "any problem with a solution isn't really a problem," and that most of us have more than we're giving ourselves credit for.
I've always been a positive person — my friends would probably say to a fault — but I used to wonder if that was just my personality, some genetic setting I lucked into. I don't think that anymore. Infertility, chronic illnesses, losing my best friend at 31: none of it was a gift, except that all of it gave me perspective I didn't know I needed and couldn't have gotten any other way. The hard cards didn't cost me my optimism. They're the reason I have it.
You don't get to choose the hand. But you do get to decide what you do with it.
Queen Ilona Maher vs. The Whoop Guy
By now you've probably seen the clip of Steven Bartlett, host of Diary of a CEO, casually mentioning on a podcast that two glasses of wine — he didn't even get drunk — ruined three days of his life: worse sleep, worse podcasting, missed the gym, all of it dutifully tracked on his Whoop. And look, I understand the impulse to want to understand your body. I wear an Oura ring, and I love it — specifically for cycle tracking paired with Natural Cycles, because after years of infertility and PCOS, that kind of data feels like actually knowing my body rather than being at its mercy.
But there's a version of tracking that tips into something else entirely, and as a 90s kid who grew up on Weight Watchers and a side of "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels," I recognize it immediately: the moment data stops feeling like information and starts feeling like a rubric you're failing. Monitoring movement, calories, and sleep scores sends me somewhere I've worked really hard not to go back to, like my nervous system somehow knows that optimization is just restriction in cleaner branding.
Which is why Ilona Maher's recent reel felt like a breath of fresh air. You gained a few pounds, she says, because you went out with the girls and laughed all night, sat around the family table and had your mom's cooking, ate the cake — and left feeling fuller (and more joyful) than you arrived.
As a second-generation Italian-American, I was raised to understand that food is how we say "I love you," and people can contain multitudes: in other words, you can love your Oura ring and love a glass of wine.
The Four-Minute Fertility Conversation Most Of Us Never Got
Earlier this week, my co-founder Abby sent me this article by Dr. Brian Levine, along with a clapping hands emoji. Finally, someone had said it: at least part of the reason so many women and couples are flocking to fertility clinics — and why the "business of IVF" is booming — is because some (not all) OB/GYNs are falling short when it comes to fertility awareness and evaluations.
I lived this. As a teenager, my periods were irregular, sometimes showing up after 60 days, sometimes not at all. Nobody mentioned PCOS (or better yet, PMOS). I was put on birth control, which regulated everything beautifully, and stayed on it for the better part of a decade. When my husband and I were ready to start a family, I came off the pill and waited, but my cycle never came back. No period, no ovulation, nothing. My OB/GYN, to her credit, sent me straight to a fertility clinic — but that's not everyone's story. A lot of women in my position are told to wait and see, give it a few more months, relax. And those months matter in ways nobody warned them about.
Dr. Levine's argument is pointed: insurers reimburse a 15-minute well-woman visit the same whether it includes a real fertility conversation or not. There's no billing code for the four minutes that conversation actually requires, so it doesn't happen. Add in sex ed classrooms that taught us how not to get pregnant but never explained that fertility has a timeline, and you start to understand how a woman can do everything "right" and still end up blindsided.
We were never told the clock was running. We just assumed we had time.
Wait, GLP-1s Might Also Reduce Breast Cancer Risk?
I speak about this so often it probably makes people uncomfortable, but I lost one of my very best friends to breast cancer six years ago, at the way-too-tender age of 31. I also have an ATM gene mutation that gives me a 20% lifetime risk of the disease. Fun, I know.
That's why, when news broke out of the 2026 ASCO Annual Meeting (the largest oncology conference of the year) this week, I had to put my phone down for a second. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania analyzed data from over 110,000 women and found that those taking GLP-1s (Ozempic, Wegovy, that whole family) were up to 30-35% less likely to develop breast cancer than those who weren't. A separate abstract looked specifically at high-risk women and the signal held there, too.
Here's the nuance, though, because it matters (and because I can't not): the main study is observational and retrospective, meaning it shows correlation, not causation. The women analyzed were overweight, ages 45 to 80, which isn't a perfect stand-in for every woman reading this. Researchers are now pushing to launch a prospective clinical trial, which is the gold standard this data hasn't reached yet.
But what I keep coming back to is this: we've spent decades watching women's health research move slowly and carefully while women like Lisa ran out of time. This isn't a green light to start a medication you don't need. And yet — it's news worth paying attention to, and a reason to keep asking your doctor the uncomfortable questions.
I don't need it to be definitive; I just need it to be the beginning of something.
"Strangers" Did More for My Financial Literacy Than Any Expert Has
I finished reading Strangers by Belle Burden over the weekend in one sitting, and damn, did it live up to the hype. I've always been a sucker for a good memoir — Educated and Wild are two of my all-time favorites — but I genuinely can't remember the last time I stayed up way too late finishing a book and didn't regret it the next day.
When I put it down, what stuck with me wasn't the betrayal (though, oh, the betrayal), or even how quietly a life can be dismantled by someone you trusted completely. It was the financial piece. Burden acknowledges her privilege throughout the book, but her story still lands as a warning: even with resources, even inside a marriage, even as the mother of his children, she had no idea what was happening with her own money until it was already gone.
And she's not alone in that. Financial abuse occurs in as many as 99% of domestic violence cases, and it doesn't always look dramatic. Sometimes it just looks like one person handling everything while the other person trusts them to.
That's the part that stayed with me. Not the worst-case scenario, but the everyday version: the woman who stopped paying attention because her husband "handled it," who couldn't tell you her own credit score, who'd have to start from scratch if everything changed tomorrow.
I'm not saying distrust your partner. I'm saying know your numbers. Have your own account. Understand where the money lives. SoFi Checking and Savings is a genuinely easy place to start — no account fees, up to 3.10% APY with eligible direct deposit, and something that's actually yours. Member FDIC.
Strangers is a lot of things. But mostly, it's a reminder that financial literacy isn't a backup plan. It's just taking care of yourself.
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They Finally Changed the Rules on Pregnancy Loss
When I was told my 6.5-week IVF pregnancy wasn't viable, I was given a choice I didn't fully understand I was making. My doctor recommended misoprostol — fast, effective, appropriate for how early it was. What she didn't mention was how much I would bleed, and what no one considered was that my history of postpartum hemorrhage made that a whole different conversation. I found out the hard way, in the emergency room, where I ended up having a D&C anyway.
Nobody really prepares you for the physical side of miscarriage. The grief gets acknowledged, eventually, but the decisions — expectant, medication, surgical, each one with its own tradeoffs, each one potentially shaped by a history your doctor may or may not have thought to ask about — those get handed to you while you're still in shock. And then you go home and figure it out.
Which is why the new ASRM guidance on recurrent pregnancy loss felt like something worth celebrating. The definition now starts at two losses, not three, and it includes biochemical pregnancies, a positive test that ends before a heartbeat is ever seen. That change matters because it means more women get answers sooner, including genetic testing of tissue that can tell you why, and more importantly, that it wasn't your fault.
If you've experienced pregnancy loss, our medical advisor breaks down what this guidance means for you practically. Watch here.
The club no one wants to be in deserves better information than most of us got.
Turns Out the Spring Meadow Wash Was the Problem
If, like me, you came up in the early 2000s, you were probably sold the idea that your vagina needed to smell like a spring meadow. Summer's Eve was in every drugstore, "feminine hygiene" was its own aisle, and the message was pretty clear: left to its own devices, your body was a problem that needed fixing. We bought it, literally, for years.
But the joke was on us, because those products — the scented washes, the douches, the anything-that-promised-freshness — were actively disrupting the very ecosystem they claimed to be helping. And it wasn't just the obviously bad stuff. The lubricant, the condoms, the intimate wash that seemed fine — none of it was formulated with any consideration for the vaginal microbiome. Nobody thought to ask. Which, given that only 1% of medical research is dedicated to women's health, tracks completely.
Entirely Well is building something different, the first personal care line engineered around vaginal microbiome science. A lubricant that works with your natural flora, condoms coated with a microbiome-safe formula, and a daily wash that supports the good bacteria instead of stripping it. Products you already use, rebuilt from scratch by a founder who got fed up that the only options were "change your habits" or "take a pill you'll probably forget."
Over 1,000 women are already on the waitlist, and founder pricing closes at launch. Get on the list.
Our bodies weren't broken. The products just treated them like they were.
Love the Perimenopause Movement, Skeptical of the Checkout Cart
I was deep in research for a column about the perimenopause supplement boom when I came across the TikTok trend: women taking Allegra and Pepcid together to manage hot flashes, brain fog, mood swings — the whole constellation of symptoms the medical system spent decades telling us were just stress, or aging, or in our heads. The theory has something to do with estrogen and histamine. Doctors say there's no evidence it works. And yet.
I understand exactly why they're doing it anyway.
I watched a close friend spend two years getting dismissed by her OB — told she was fine, told she was "too young," told it was "just stress." She eventually went to a telehealth platform, got prescribed HRT, and felt like herself again. I think about her every time I see a $50/month perimenopause supplement with a clinical-sounding name and a list of "clinically studied" ingredients, because the desperation that drove her there is the same desperation someone is currently monetizing.
Dr. Jen Gunter recently tore apart one of those supplements and found the evidence behind most ingredients was thin at best. A STAT News piece this week argued the whole perimenopause movement might be medicalizing a normal life transition — that maybe some of this is just being tired and 40.
Both things can be true. The movement gave women language for what their bodies had been doing for years, and the industry that followed isn't necessarily on our side. Gratitude for the conversation doesn't mean handing your credit card to whoever showed up to profit from it.