Perimenopause, Decoded: Wholist Featured in Babble’s Perimenopause Cheat Sheet

 

“EVERY VAGINA DESERVES ESTROGEN.” I had a room full of women shout that back at me at Babble’s Balance event this spring, and it’s still one of my favorite moments of the year. So when Brooke Amidei and Erika sat down to write up everything they learned from hosting those events, I was thrilled, and only a little biased, to see WholistRx show up in it.

How We Got Here

Brooke and Erika spent the last five months the way a lot of us have spent our own perimenopause: reading everything, interviewing everyone, and dragging their girlfriends along to figure it out with them. Their Balance events brought together a genuinely great lineup of hormone health experts, and I got to be one of the doctors in the room.

They just published the recap: a genuinely useful, no-nonsense perimenopause cheat sheet. WholistRx is included as one of their recommended clinics for their Utah and Idaho readers, which we’re honored by. Go read the whole thing.

What Consistent Care Looks Like at WholistRx

Since Brooke mentioned us, let me be clear about what WholistRx is and isn’t. WholistRx is our sister practice, not a division of Wholist. It’s a different business from Wholist, on purpose, because medical care and coaching need to stay in their own lanes.

WholistRx is Flourish Forward Rx, my telehealth “consistent care” membership for whole-woman midlife, menopause, and metabolic medicine, now available to residents of Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Utah, and Kansas (we’ve grown since the last time some of you checked). Here’s how it works:

  • Giving you the time to go deep. A 60-minute initial consult where we get through your full history, your symptoms, and the whole picture, instead of trying to cram midlife into a rushed annual visit.
  • An integrative plan, personalized to you. Hormone therapy options when they make sense, targeted labs, nourishment and movement strategies, sleep and mood support. Built around your biology and your real life, not a protocol.
  • Ongoing physician access. I’m the “doctor in your pocket” for the questions that come up between visits, and your care keeps evolving as your body and symptoms do.
  • A real education in your own biology. In-depth course modules that walk through what’s actually happening in your body during this transition, the science underneath it, and what to do with it. Not a PDF handout. The kind of understanding that means you’re making decisions with me, not just following instructions.
  • Community and monthly live Q&As. A private space with other women in the same era, plus monthly live sessions with me to work through whatever is coming up.

If Brooke and Erika’s cheat sheet has you thinking about hormone therapy, that’s a WholistRx conversation if you’re in one of those five states (or a conversation with whatever great provider you find near you).

My Favorite Parts of the Cheat Sheet

What I do want to talk about here, on the coaching side, is everything else the cheat sheet gets right:

  • The hormone quick-reference chart. Erika built it for herself, and it’s genuinely one of the more useful plain-language breakdowns of what estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone are each doing in your body that I’ve seen outside a textbook.
  • The bone health section. It’ll make you want to go lift something heavy today, not next year, once you see how much bone density you can lose in the perimenopause window alone.
  • The case for vaginal estrogen. Low absorption, real prevention against UTIs, no reason for most women to be scared of it. Deserves to be shouted from more rooftops than just a Boise auditorium.
  • The section on finding a provider. Practical, honest about the cost, and it doesn’t pretend the search is easy. They also pointed readers to our free resource on the questions to ask your provider, which is exactly what I’d want you walking into that first appointment with.
  • The postmenopause section. If you’re already past it, they linked our guide on what that stage actually is and why care still matters. Being postmenopausal doesn’t mean you missed your window.

The Piece I’d Add

Here’s the thing I’d add, and the reason I think about hormones and habits as one conversation instead of two: whatever you and your provider decide about hormone therapy, it works better when there’s a foundation underneath it. Hormones can change what your body is capable of. They don’t automatically change your sleep routine, how you’re eating, how you’re moving, or the mental loop that says you should be able to just push through this by willpower.

That’s the piece Wholist builds, in the Weight Wellness program and beyond: the daily rhythm, the biology literacy, and the skills that make whatever you’re doing medically actually stick. Not instead of your hormone therapy. Not against it. Underneath it.

Go Do This

Thank you, Brooke and Erika, for doing the homework so the rest of us don’t have to start from zero. This is exactly the kind of woman-to-woman advocacy this stage of life needs more of.

Dr. Heather

Share This