This story is the final installment in a three-part series on women’s hormone health. Catch up on the first two stories here.
For years, women have been told that exhaustion, stubborn weight gain and restless nights are just the cost of doing it all. But mounting evidence — and the lived experience of women who have reached a breaking point — suggests otherwise.
Hormone health isn’t a niche wellness trend; it’s a foundational system that helps govern sleep, metabolism, mood and disease prevention, yet it remains fragmented across medical specialties and is often overlooked until symptoms become severe.
Ashley Arata, an integrative health practitioner and founder of Ashley Cruz Arata Wellness, helps women understand the signals their bodies are sending before they compound into bigger problems and offers steps to take toward reclaiming balance.
Was there a lightbulb moment when you figured out what was going on with your own hormone health issues? I never realized that our gut was so important to how all of our systems in our body function and how important it is to regulating your hormones as well.
Your gut helps convert thyroid hormone. And so for me, that was my aha moment: ‘Oh, I have been to every specialist on Earth at this point. I'm now in this new world and I've never looked at my gut.’
Have you noticed any recurring themes in your clients’ experiences? Every woman I work with is trying to be everything to everybody all the time, and it is exhausting them to a level of complete chemical depletion … We need to have a conversation with women everywhere, not just about this topic and learning about root-cause medicine and balance, but actually finding balance in life and what is realistic.
The good news is they don't have to totally collapse and burn down their lifestyle for them to get better. But it is about making sure that if you are going to continue living that way, that you are supporting your body in the right way.
Between sleep, diet, exercise, what do you put the most emphasis on? If your body isn't able to recuperate as it is supposed to through the process of sleep, nothing else in the body gets better. Sleep is always priority No. 1. Most women just want to lose weight right away and they're like, ‘Oh I don't need a lot of sleep, I function on five hours,’ and I'm like, ‘Nope, time out. We'll talk about the weight loss after, but sleep has to be priority one if you want your body to lose weight, if you want to feel better.’
Nutrition is always No. 2. I truly believe that food is medicine, especially with the rising rates of colon cancer that we see right now in people under 40.
Exercise is always No. 3. Surprisingly, most women fight me on this when we start working together, but I actually have most of my clients stop working out when we start working together. I just want them to walk, stretch, do yoga.
— Story by Cambrie Juarez
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