The Hormone Reset Method™ Blog

Clinical, science-backed guidance on hormones, metabolism, sleep and long-term energy for women, from dietitian Tina Chagoury.

• Red Meat: Let Us End the Argument Properly: The online argument about red meat confuses three completely different foods. Separate them and the picture becomes clear.
• What an Anti-Inflammatory Diet Actually Means in Practice: The phrase gets used to sell everything. Here is what it means when a clinical dietitian writes the protocol.
• By the Time You Feel Thirsty, Your Body Has Already Started to Struggle: Most people know they should drink more water. Very few know what is actually happening in the hours before thirst arrives.
• You Do Not Rise to the Level of Your Goals. You Fall to the Level of Your Systems.: Most women believe results come from determination and ambitious goals. In practice they come from what you repeat without thinking.
• The First Step Is Not a Diet. It Is a Sheet of Paper.: How do we rebuild the relationship with our bodies? Not with a plan. With an honest inventory of what you already know is wrong.
• Why You Bloat, Retain Water and Sometimes Get Diarrhoea Before Your Period: These symptoms seem unrelated. They are the same mechanism, and it is entirely predictable once you understand which hormones do what.
• “It Is Just Her Hormones” Is Used to Dismiss Something Real: The phrase gets used to end a conversation. The underlying biology deserves a serious one.
• If Fat Will Not Come Off Your Legs, It May Not Be Ordinary Fat: When fat loss happens everywhere except the lower body, particularly the calves and ankles, there is a specific condition worth knowing about.
• What Yo-Yo Dieting Actually Does to Your Body: Down, up, down, up, and each cycle harder than the one before. There is a biological reason, and it is not about willpower.
• After 35, Muscle Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Build: If a woman over thirty five has one hour a week to spend on her health, I would spend it on resistance training. Here is the reasoning.
• When a Teenage Girl Gains Weight Quickly, This Is What I Look For: Girls of fourteen, fifteen and sixteen arrive in my clinic having gained significant weight in a year or two. It is rarely just growing up.
• The Foods to Avoid in Pregnancy, and the Actual Reason Why: Lists of forbidden foods are easy to ignore when nobody explains the reason. The reason is specific, and it is not about nutrition.
• Fertility After Breast Cancer Treatment: What Is Actually Possible: The risk is real and it depends on several factors. What has changed is that the conversation now happens before treatment, not after.
• Nutrition During IVF: What It Can Do, and What It Cannot: A large group of the women I work with are going through IVF at the same time. Here is exactly what nutrition contributes, and what it does not.
• What Is PCOS Actually Doing Inside Your Body?: Being told you have polycystic ovary syndrome without being told what it means is one of the most common experiences in women's health.
• The Insulin Resistance Test: What to Ask For and How to Read It: A normal glucose result does not rule out insulin resistance. Here are the tests that do show it, how to read HOMA IR sensibly, and how to prepare.
• Underactive Thyroid Symptoms in Women, and Why a Normal TSH Can Miss It: Exhaustion, feeling cold, hair loss and weight gain are often blamed on stress or age. Sometimes they are your thyroid. Here is what to look for and what to test.
• IBS in Women: Why Your Gut Flares With Your Cycle and Your Stress: IBS in women often follows the cycle and the stress response. Here is why it flares, how to use low FODMAP properly, what calms it, and the signs that need a doctor.
• High Prolactin in Women: Symptoms, Causes and Why It Needs a Doctor: High prolactin is common and usually treatable, but it always needs a doctor to find the cause. Here are the symptoms, the causes and where nutrition fits.
• Women's Hormones Explained: A Clear Guide to the Seven That Matter Most: Your hormones work as one network, not seven separate problems. Here is what each one does, the signs it is struggling, the tests worth asking for and what helps.
• Which Fruits Raise Blood Sugar? Bananas, Dates, Grapes and More: All fruit raises blood sugar a little. Here is a plain answer for bananas, dates, oranges, apples, grapes, figs, lentils and milk, and how to eat them without the spike.
• Testosterone in Women: What It Does, Why It Rises and What Happens When It Falls: Testosterone is not only a male hormone. Here is what it does in women, why insulin and PCOS push it up, what happens when it falls after 40, and what helps.
• High Cortisol: The Signs, the Causes and What Actually Brings It Down: High cortisol is usually a rhythm problem, not a single number. Here are the signs, the causes, why one morning blood test misleads, and what brings it down.
• Low Progesterone: Symptoms, Causes and What Food Can Do: Progesterone is the calming hormone of your cycle, and it only comes from ovulation. Here are the signs it is low, why it falls, and what food can and cannot do.
• Estrogen in Women: What It Does and Why It Goes Out of Balance: Estrogen reaches far beyond your cycle. Here is what it does, how to recognise it running too high or too low, and what food can and cannot change.
• PMS Symptoms: Why the Week Before Your Period Feels So Different: For a few days every month you feel like a different person. Here is what your hormones are doing in the week before your period, and what makes it easier.
• PCOS Treatment: Why Nutrition Comes First and Where Medication Fits: You were handed a prescription and told to lose weight, but nobody explained what PCOS treatment is actually trying to fix. Here is how it works, and where to start.
• Constipation in Women: Why It Happens and What Actually Works: Constipation is common in women and often accepted for years. Here is why it happens, why it matters for your hormones, what actually relieves it, and when to see a doctor.
• Menopause Symptoms: The Full List, and How Long They Really Last: Hot flushes are one item on a long list. Here is every common menopause symptom, how long they tend to last, and what food, muscle and your doctor can each do.
• Why Am I Bloated? The Real Causes and What Actually Helps: Bloating is one of the most common things women live with and one of the most dismissed. Here is what usually causes it, what gives safe relief, and when it needs a doctor.
• What Wearing a Continuous Glucose Monitor Taught Me About My Own Body: If you had told me six years ago to wear a glucose monitor, I would have called it extreme. Those few months changed how I understand my body permanently.
• Do You Still Need Nutrition Support If You Are on Hormone Therapy?: The short answer is yes, and the reason is that they work on completely different levels of the body.
• The Five Nutrients That Matter Most Before You Conceive: A woman entering pregnancy already deficient in any of these faces a harder road. Two of the five are rarely discussed at all.
• Pregnancy Is a Masterclass in Physiology. Here Is What Your Body Actually Does.: Within months, the body rebuilds its cardiovascular, immune, endocrine, metabolic and even neurological systems. Almost none of it is accidental.
• Does Sugar Feed Cancer? The Honest, Complete Answer: This question deserves a careful answer rather than a frightening headline. The truth is more useful than either extreme.
• Intermittent Fasting Works Beautifully for Some Women and Backfires for Others: The same protocol, two women, opposite results. The variable is not willpower. It is whether the body is in a state to tolerate it.
• If You Are Taking a GLP-1, Nutrition Is Not Optional: These medications work. What determines whether the result lasts, and what you lose along the way, is everything you do alongside them.
• Not Everyone With Insulin Resistance Needs Medication: Insulin resistance has become a diagnosis that leads straight to a prescription. There is a great deal that works before that point.
• Is Dairy Bad for Your Hormones? Mostly, No.: Dairy has become a category people reject wholesale. The processing matters far more than the food itself.
• Detox Juices Are Excellent Marketing and Poor Nutrition: Detox juices are a very effective marketing tool. They are not a health intervention, and done repeatedly they can work against you.
• Iron Deficiency That Never Improves Is Telling You Something: Low iron since childhood is not a personality trait. If supplements are not correcting it, something else is going on.
• Your Hormones Are Repaired at Night. That Is Why Sleep Comes First.: The maintenance of your hormones happens during sleep. Which means the first thing you do to sleep well happens in the morning, not at bedtime.
• Your Gut and Your Hormones Are the Same Conversation: You cannot treat hormones and ignore the gut. One of the body's main routes for clearing used hormones runs straight through it.
• Gluten: Who Actually Needs to Avoid It, and Who Does Not: Gluten is inflammatory for most people to some degree. That does not mean the answer is a shelf full of gluten free products.
• The HPA Axis: Why Stress Is a Physical Condition, Not a Mood: When I say stress is affecting your hormones, this is the actual pathway. Stress is an inflammatory, physical state, not a feeling.
• Protein Is the Foundation of Hormonal Balance. Here Is How Much You Need.: If I could change one thing about how most women eat, it would be this. Protein and blood sugar stability are the foundation of hormonal balance.
• The Six Meal Myth: Why Constant Healthy Snacking Works Against You: The little snacks. A date here, an apple there, a biscuit, a handful of nuts. All day long. This is one of the most common patterns I have to undo.
• Creatine Is Not Just for Muscle, and Not Just for Men: Creatine has a reputation problem among women that the research does not support. It matters for muscle, and increasingly for cognition too.
• Hashimoto’s Is Not Just a Thyroid Problem: Treating Hashimoto's as a thyroid problem alone misses most of what is happening. The immune system is part of the conversation.
• Why Collagen Works Beautifully for Some Women and Does Nothing for Others: If collagen has done nothing for you, the supplement may not be the problem. Your internal environment decides whether it can work at all.
• Why Autoimmune Symptoms Get Worse in Your 40s: If your autoimmune symptoms have intensified in your forties, there is a specific mechanism behind it, and it is not a coincidence.
• Perimenopause and Menopause Are Not the Same Thing: Most of what women call menopause is actually perimenopause, and the distinction matters because the two stages behave completely differently.
• How to Read a Body Composition Analysis (And Why Your Weight Tells You Nothing): When I look at your body composition, I can tell what you have been doing. Here is how to read your own.
• Your Liver Can Make Fat Out of Sugar. Here Is How Fatty Liver Starts.: It is not enough to say that eating fat makes fat. Your liver can build fat out of sugar, and understanding how explains a great deal.
• Visceral Fat Is Not Just Belly Fat. It Is an Active Organ.: Fat around your organs is not passive storage. It secretes inflammatory compounds and drives a cycle that is difficult to break once it starts.
• If I Had Six Weeks to Change Your Hormones, This Is Exactly What I Would Do: Not a diet. A sequence. This is the order I would work in, one change at a time, and the reason each week comes where it does.
• Common Is Not the Same as Normal: 5 Symptoms Women Should Stop Living With: Something can be extremely common and still not be normal. These five symptoms are the ones women most often learn to live with, and should not.
• Does PCOS Go Away in Perimenopause? No. It Changes Shape.: Your cycle may change, but the hormonal and metabolic patterns behind PCOS do not simply resolve. In perimenopause they often become more visible, not less.
• Underfed and Overtrained: Why Eating More Can Be What Finally Works: If you eat very little, train hard, and your weight will not move, you are not failing. You may be in the exact state that prevents change.
• 7 Signs Your Blood Sugar Is Not Stable (Without a Blood Test): I talk constantly about keeping blood sugar stable. Here is how you can tell whether yours is, before you ever get a blood test.
• Water Retention Is Not One Problem. It Is Eight.: Water retention has one name and at least eight causes. It is a signal that something in the body is out of balance, and it is worth knowing which thing.
• “I Don’t Feel Like Myself Anymore”: The Perimenopause Symptom Nobody Names: It is the sentence I hear most often, and for years it was dismissed as vague. It is now one of the most recognised descriptions of perimenopause there is.
• How Can You Be Vitamin D Deficient in One of the Sunniest Places on Earth?: It is the question I hear most in clinic. Sunshine and vitamin D production are not the same thing, and the difference explains everything.
• Why Your Weight Is “Blocked”: 11 Reasons a Plateau Has Nothing to Do With Willpower: If your weight has stopped moving, that is not a willpower problem. It is a signal. Here are the eleven things worth investigating before you cut calories again.
• Insulin Resistance in Women, Explained Simply: Insulin resistance is one of the most talked about and least understood terms in women's health. Here is what is actually happening in your body.