Kristyn Hodgdon
Everything you’re feeling, but didn’t know how to say.
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.
Disclosures:
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SoFi does not charge any account, service or maintenance fees for SoFi Checking and Savings. SoFi does charge a transaction fee to process each outgoing wire transfer. SoFi does not charge a fee for incoming wire transfers, however the sending bank may charge a fee. Fee policy is subject to change at any time. See the SoFi Bank Fee Sheet for details at sofi.com/legal/banking-fees/.
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.
So This Is the Sandwich Generation
I should start by saying: my parents are nowhere near "old." They had me when they were 20, so if you do the math, they're barely old enough to be grandparents — and yet they have five grandkids under the age of seven.
But last week, my dad had a pretty intense back surgery, followed by a whole slew of complications, and needless to say, I now completely understand, deep in my soul, why someone coined millennials "the sandwich generation."
Taking care of aging parents and little kids at the same time is not for the weak.
No one prepares you to see your dad, usually the most animated person in any room, pretty much completely out of commission. I brought my two older kids over to my parents' house for lunch, trying to keep things calm and quiet. He was resting on the couch in a neck brace. On two separate occasions, a different child tried to scale the couch directly behind him. All I could do was shake my head, and physically remove them from his vicinity, one at a time, like a very tired bouncer.
Not to mention it's Maycember: the term for how May is basically the new December if you have school-aged kids — end-of-year performances, teacher appreciation, sports finals, all arriving at once, without the twinkle lights or the eggnog to soften the blow. @themillennialsandwich on Instagram gets it.
Thankfully, my dad is most likely going to be fine. But to anyone dealing with a family health crisis while also juggling small children at home, I see you.
May the odds be ever in your favor.
Crying After Sex Is More Common Than You Think
I have never once, in my 37 years of life, cried after sex. Not after good sex, not after bad sex, not after the kind that genuinely moves you. It just hasn't happened. So when I sat down to write about post-orgasm tears, I assumed I was writing for a pretty small group.
Then I found the numbers.
According to a 2015 study published in Sexual Medicine, 46.2% of women have experienced post-coital dysphoria (crying, sadness, or anxiety following otherwise satisfying sex) at least once in their lifetime. Nearly half, which I had to read twice to believe.
Here's what makes it more interesting than just an unexpected cry: it's not always emotional. During orgasm, your brain floods with oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphins. And then it's over, all at once. That shift can trigger tears that have nothing to do with how you feel about the person next to you, or whether the sex was good. Your nervous system just ran a sprint, and the body doesn't always know what to do with that.
My co-founder, Abby — sharp, unflappable, someone who has never once been at a loss for words (in the best way possible) — told me she cries after sex about 50% of the time. She'd never said it out loud to anyone except her husband. Which is kind of the whole point: something this common somehow never makes it into the conversation, not even between women who talk about everything.
Ask Clara:
"Why do I feel so emotional after orgasm?"
Women Are Half the Country (Fund Us Like It)
May is Women's Health Month, which sounds celebratory... until you look at the numbers underneath it.
Seven to ten years. That's the average time it takes to get an endometriosis diagnosis. Not because endometriosis is rare — it affects roughly one in ten women — but because for decades, medicine wasn't actually built with women in mind. Women were excluded from clinical trials to "protect" potential pregnancies, which meant dosing guidelines, treatment protocols, and diagnostic criteria were built almost entirely on male bodies. We were, as Binto's founders put it, "treated as small men, or not treated at all."
So many of us have lived this. We've sat in offices describing symptoms that were waved away. We've watched loved ones spend years fighting for diagnoses they deserved on day one. I have an autoimmune disease — women are up to four times more likely than men to develop one — and I can tell you firsthand that 'apparently we just didn't study that enough' is not a satisfying explanation.
This month, Rescripted is partnering with Binto to do something about it: a petition calling on the NIH and Congress to mandate proportional research funding for conditions that primarily affect women. It takes thirty seconds. The problem took decades to create.