Overview

There’s a silent epidemic happening to women everywhere: hormonal balance is being destroyed. Over twenty mil ion of us suffer from polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), fibroids, endometriosis, painful/difficult/heavy periods, and thyroid and adrenal issues. For the first time since their creation, birth control pil s are being used to treat girls under the age of seventeen for endocrine-related concerns. In fact, a key message of this book is that not only are young women suffering similar conditions to their mothers and sisters at an earlier age and with much more intensity, but new conditions are arising that women of older generations have not experienced. Hormone replacement therapy is at an al -time high. One in ten couples is infertile, and hysterectomies are stil the number-one surgery performed on women.

Modern gynecological care can’t keep up with our demands, yet we women are desperate to restore balance, preserve fertility, and maintain youthful hormonal patterns in our bodies.

Hormones affect everything. Have you ever struggled with acne, oily hair, dandruff, dry skin, cramps, headaches, irritability, exhaustion, constipation, irregular cycles, heavy bleeding, clotting, shedding hair, weight gain, anxiety, insomnia, infertility, lowered sex drive, or bizarre food cravings and felt like your body was just irrational? It’s not; it’s hormonal. Yet women remain mystified at their bodies’ seemingly random display of disconnected symptoms, never thinking that they are connected and hormonal y based. Mentioning the word “hormones” usual y elicits blank stares or comments that it’s relevant only to women over fifty. The reality is, hormones influence you in utero, throughout childhood and adolescence, and, most

important, right now as you are reading this sentence. Do you know what your hormones are doing, how you might be interfering with their attempts to stay balanced and keep you symptom free, and if you are dealing with an imbalance, where to begin to get your body and your life back? Your health depends on it.

Many of us have the opportunity to have and do it al —but the downside is that while juggling careers, love, travel, and families, we’re not giving our bodies the support they need to sustain these demands. Current diet and lifestyle trends afflict women with problems related to their reproductive health. These issues affect us in our teens, conception years, and menopause.

I believe that when women’s bodies don’t thrive, we fal out of sync with our lives—out of the zone of possibility, and away from our life’s purpose. And when we’re not healthy and happy, we lose our way.

Too many of us are searching for answers to healing and self-empowerment in the wrong places, with the wrong teachers, and suffering needlessly as a result. What we must do is learn how our endocrine systems function, and how to align our feminine selves with our hormones. This wil help prevent chronic gynecological issues and guide us toward our ful est lives.

So what’s the solution? In this book, I wil explain how easy, logical, and enjoyable it is to stop interfering with hormonal balance, which eliminates frustrating symptoms, and then to proactively care for and maintain this balance with my “five-step system” practice. I’l teach you how to restore your body’s hormone balance and reset its baseline for years of optimal health and happiness. My protocol, the WomanCode method, works across hormonal conditions in two major ways: 1) it addresses the underlying reasons for hormonal imbalance; and 2) it focuses on using medicinal foods and lifestyle changes to sequential y bring the endocrine system back to optimal functioning. Al so you can fix your period, successful y get pregnant, and supercharge your sex drive.

You know how, when everything fal s into place, you feel amazing and opportunities drift your way? I’ve discovered, from both healing myself of PolyCystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS, more on that later) and working with thousands of women at my Manhattan-based FLO

Living Center, that there’s a formula for finding your FLO and for

maintaining incredible hormonal health. Specifical y, it’s my five-step protocol, described in the chapters to come, which uses food therapeutical y and changes lifestyle habits for improved health.

In this book, I teach you to incorporate specific medicinal foods to strengthen the health of the organs of hormone production and balance; help you embrace your exquisitely female self, energy, and life’s purpose; and encourage you to connect with a like-minded community at FLOliving.com. I plan to address women in al stages of their reproductive health—i.e., their twenties, thirties, and forties—

though the younger a woman starts, the better.

PCOS, premenstrual syndrome (PMS), fibroids, cystic ovaries, depression, thyroid issues, adrenal fatigue, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), amenorrhea, dysmenorrhea, unexplained infertility, low libido, acne/rosacea/eczema, weight problems, human papil omavirus (HPV)—a lot of weighty medical terms to describe a lot of serious and chal enging conditions. How can one protocol prevent and treat so many different “castaway conditions”? In WomanCode, I’l break down the answer in a way that’s so simple, you won’t remember a time when you didn’t talk and think in your code. As you read, you’l learn what I discovered in the early years of my practice: that hormones seek balance and when you disrupt the endocrine system that governs them, you’l present with a symptom, then another, then another, until you have a condition. The conditions that women exhibit might be different from one female to the next, based on your genetic predisposition and lifestyle factors, but focusing on the symptoms and/or the conditions is less valuable than addressing the underlying causes. By going to the root cause of endocrine disruption and treating it properly, we can actual y trigger the endocrine system to get itself into healing mode and start functioning the way it was intended. That’s because there’s an order and logic to how your endocrine system works. Once you gain a deeper understanding of how your hormones work, which won’t remain a mystery much longer, you’l know what you need to do for your endocrine system to enable it to perform much better than it does today.

WomanCode wil also serve as a touchstone for gynecologists, endocrinologists, and IVF specialists who want to “prescribe” the

WomanCode method to patients as a complementary and integrative solution. To raise standard gynecological care, women and gynecologists must begin to col aborate where they can. I believe that medicine of the future is going to be a hybrid form—one in which people take greater responsibility for their own health instead of relying exclusively on doctors to make them better when they get sick. In this new hybrid, people wil seek out a stronger understanding of how their bodies work and what they need to do to take care of themselves on a day-to-day basis. When medical issues arise, they can reach out to a team of wonderful practitioners in a variety of different specialties for guidance. Patients wil know where they need to go to get the right information and won’t expect one practitioner to have al the answers—and, most important, they’l know how to listen to their bodies to guide them toward finding the solutions they need.

I believe that this new relationship between gynecologists, patients, and FLO Living can change the paradigm of women’s healthcare. Most women know very little about our hormonal biochemistry, and as a result, we’re making choices about our menstrual care, fertility, and libido that have long-term negative repercussions. Among even the smartest women I know, Sex Ed was the first and last time they formal y learned anything about their bodies, periods, and hormones; the rest has been picked up from magazines and friends.

I envision the new paradigm as a pyramid supporting each individual woman who sits on top benefiting from al that support while taking an active role in her healthcare. She visits her doctor regularly for exams, blood work, and checkups. Her doctor is open-minded to and supportive of al the ways in which she is experimenting with foods and supplements to feel her best. She is letting go of her passive relationship with her body because of al of the nutritional support and holistic health coaching she is receiving from FLOliving every day between her regular doctor visits. She’s on top of her symptoms, on top of her nutrition and self-care, and on top of her health.

Final y, WomanCode’s mission isn’t limited to making our endocrine systems sing. After working with hormonal y imbalanced

women for ten years, I’ve learned that getting healthy for health’s sake is not a big enough game for us to play—at least, not for the long term. When you’re healthy and feeling wel , you have the energy to move in the direction of your dreams and to create the life you want to live. That’s why I’m so passionate about helping women: when your endocrine system is working at its best, you’re more excited about yourself and about life. This, in turn, leads you to attract greater opportunities, enjoy moments of creative expression, and connect more intimately with others. That’s when you’l feel the ful ness of your power, your life-force energy, and your ful est potential. WomanCode, the book, embodies the key elements of the WomanCode message and reveals a powerful solution to healing the silent epidemic of hormone imbalance. WomanCode offers the promise of a healthier, more vital, more inspiring tomorrow—one in which you can relate to your body in a new way and connect with your very best life.

I’ve had the privilege to bear witness to so many women using my approach and reclaiming their health. In the ten years since opening the FLO Living Center, I’ve worked with women on five continents; I’ve had a doctor cal asking me what I had done to their patient so that an ovarian cyst that was operable completely disappeared; I’ve seen fibroids shrink, endometriosis kept at bay, anxiety and depression lift; I’ve watched women lose hundreds of pounds; I’ve seen so many women get pregnant after IVF failed; I’ve helped women transition off the Pil without having pre-Pil symptoms return; and I’ve helped women recover their energy and uncover their passion and purpose in life. I absolutely love my work and the women I get to work with and I’m so honored and excited that I get to share this process with you. This is my journey, it’s your journey, and it’s time for a new conversation and a fresh start for an area of women’s health that has long been unappreciated.