Latest / Clearly Hormonal / Ep 38: Mother Nature Is a Feminist

Transcript

Ep 38: Mother Nature Is a Feminist · Clearly Hormonal

• 0:02
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Welcome to Reset Recharge, the podcast where women's health takes center stage.
• 0:07
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I'm your host, Dr.
• 0:08
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Komal Patil-Sisodia, a triple board certified endocrinologist and women's health expert.
• 0:13
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: This show is all about empowering you with the knowledge to understand your metabolic health, navigate hormonal changes, and feel confident in the conversations you're having with your healthcare provider.
• 0:24
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Whether you're managing symptoms, exploring treatment options, or just want to feel more in tune with your body, you're in the right place.
• 0:31
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The content shared here is for informational purposes only and should not replace personalized medical advice.
• 0:37
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: If something we discuss resonates with you, please talk to your healthcare provider at your next visit.
• 0:42
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Now let's dive in and help you reset, recharge, and take control of your health.
• 0:52
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Hi everyone.
• 0:53
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Welcome back to season two of the podcast.
• 0:56
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I'm so glad you're joining me today.
• 0:58
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Today's episode is called Mother Nature is a Feminist, and if you listen to episode two of the first season which I titled, mother Nature Is Not a Feminist, you might be wondering, did you change your mind?
• 1:10
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The short answer is yes, and the long answer is that I widened my perspective.
• 1:16
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That second episode of the first season focused on the biological realities of aging, how hormones shift, how metabolism changes, how risk increases, all of that science still stands.
• 1:28
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I was feeling some kind of way about aging, watching the health of so many women decline and my own journey into perimenopause almost a year and a half later both experiencing perimenopause myself and continuing to treat women.
• 1:43
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I want to talk about what that episode didn't fully capture.
• 1:46
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The full arc of a woman's life and the extraordinary resilience, adaptability, and wisdom that arc creates.
• 1:54
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Biology alone doesn't tell the whole story, and feminism at its core is about context.
• 2:00
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Women do not decline.
• 2:02
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We transition.
• 2:04
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Women do not move through life on a straight line.
• 2:07
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We move through eras, childhood, puberty, reproductive years, pregnancy and postpartum for many, perimenopause and post menopause.
• 2:16
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Each era demands a different physiology, a different psychology, and a different identity.
• 2:22
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: From a medical standpoint, yes, hormones fluctuate, muscle mass changes, metabolism slows.
• 2:28
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: But from a human standpoint, something else happens At the same time, we are accumulating experience.
• 2:34
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We are refining intuition, and we are learning discernment.
• 2:38
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Mother nature doesn't ask women to be static.
• 2:41
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: She asks us to be adaptive, and adaptation is one of the most powerful evolutionary strengths there is.
• 2:48
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That is not anti-feminist.
• 2:49
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That is foundational feminism.
• 2:53
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: When we look to other cultures around the world versus how we look at menopause here in the United States, I think a lot of other cultures got it right.
• 3:01
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Over the last year and a half, I felt like there's been such a negative lens on aging and FOMO around potentially not being able to get hormone therapy or not knowing what's safe and what's not safe with the changing data.
• 3:15
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Here's where modern society lost the plot in my opinion.
• 3:18
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: In many cultures around the world, aging women are not sidelined.
• 3:22
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: They're actually elevated.
• 3:24
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: In indigenous cultures, post-menopausal women are often healers and knowledge keepers.
• 3:29
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: In parts of Asia, aging is associated with increased respect and authority, and in matriarchal societies, older women are decision makers, not afterthoughts.
• 3:39
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Why might you ask?
• 3:41
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Because once reproduction is no longer the central biological task, clarity becomes our superpower No monthly hormonal rollercoaster, no pregnancy risk, no societal expectation to be endlessly accommodating.
• 3:54
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Instead, women gain perspective, pattern recognition, emotional intelligence, and in my opinion, mother Nature doesn't remove value from us.
• 4:03
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: She reallocates it.
• 4:06
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The problem isn't biology, though.
• 4:08
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's the modern pace of life, and here's where things go wrong for women.
• 4:12
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Today we are trying to move through ancient biological transitions inside a modern system that never slows down.
• 4:20
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Women are building careers, raising children, managing households, caring for aging parents, caring the emotional labor of the family, and being told explicitly or implicitly that they should have it all, and all at the same time.
• 4:35
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: But biology was never designed for constant output.
• 4:38
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It was designed for cycles, rest, reflection, consolidation.
• 4:45
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I want to leave you with one interesting thought.
• 4:48
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Perimenopause and midlife are not design flaws.
• 4:51
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: They are built-in checkpoints.
• 4:53
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Mother nature isn't punishing women.
• 4:55
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: She's asking us to pause.
• 4:59
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: So here's your invitation to reframe midlife a little bit.
• 5:02
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Yes, your muscle mass declines more easily.
• 5:05
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Your sleep changes, your metabolic risk increases.
• 5:08
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: But here's the reframe.
• 5:09
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I want everybody to think about.
• 5:11
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: These changes force us to stop outsourcing our wellbeing to hustle culture.
• 5:16
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: They demand intentional movement instead of overexertion nourishment instead of restriction, boundaries instead of burnout, advocacy instead of dismissal.
• 5:26
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Midlife is where women can no longer survive on depletion, and that's not weakness.
• 5:32
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That's Biological wisdom.
• 5:34
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We are so susceptible to hustle culture and how we need to be doing everything perfectly all at once.
• 5:41
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I just want you to take a moment and think about these signals that your body is sending.
• 5:46
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Maybe it's to be able to put those boundaries up for yourself to say no to things, to be able to actually focus on what it is you enjoy in your life instead of what everybody else expects of you.
• 5:59
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I want to emphasize that rest is not quitting, it's strategy.
• 6:05
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Rest in general, when we look at it, has been framed as laziness, especially for women.
• 6:10
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: But in reality, rest is metabolic regulation.
• 6:13
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: When we are able to rest, our blood pressures are better, our blood sugars are better, all because our cortisol levels come down rest is hormonal signaling where our hormones reset to their normal circadian rhythms.
• 6:26
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Rest is nervous system repair where we are not feeling strung out.
• 6:31
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We're actually able to get our thoughts in a row because we're able to reflect and that reflection is not stagnation, it's integration.
• 6:39
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's us being able to put together all of these different things that are happening in our lives, pay attention to our symptoms, pay attention to what our bodies are trying to tell us.
• 6:49
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Mother Nature didn't forget women after reproduction.
• 6:52
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: She just gave us a different assignment.
• 6:55
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: So what do you think?
• 6:57
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Is Mother Nature a feminist?
• 6:59
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: In my opinion, if feminism means honoring cycles, instead of forcing everybody to be the same, valuing wisdom alongside productivity, recognizing that power changes form and not magnitude, then yes, mother Nature is a feminist, but she's not a gentle one.
• 7:17
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: She's the kind that demands adaptation, self-respect and truth, and now the task is not to fight biology.
• 7:25
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: But to align culture with it, and that means redefining success beyond constantly having to be productive and have high output.
• 7:35
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We need to normalize rest and recovery.
• 7:38
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We need to create healthcare conversations that honor women and we need to reclaim aging as expansion and not erosion.
• 7:46
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: As I close out this episode, I want you to remember that the goal isn't to battle our biology anymore.
• 7:52
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's to build a culture that actually works with it.
• 7:55
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That looks like letting go of the idea that worth equals nonstop productivity.
• 8:00
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It looks like treating rest and recovery is normal and not as something you have to earn, and it looks like having honest healthcare conversations that respect women at every stage of life.
• 8:11
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And finally, it looks like seeing aging not as a decline, but as growth, you're not past your prime.
• 8:18
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: You're stepping into a phase that values wisdom over hustle, and that kind of depth is where real strength comes from.
• 8:26
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: This season, my goal is to bring you episodes that help you navigate all of the different parts of your life that are being affected by all of these hormonal changes, and to really get a better understanding of all of the different eras of life that women go through.
• 8:44
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: If this conversation sparked a question, reflection, or even discomfort, I'd love to hear from you.
• 8:50
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Visit resetrecharge.com, head to the contact page and share what came up for you.
• 8:57
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Future episodes will continue to unpack women's health through a lens that is scientific and nuanced, and most importantly, human.
• 9:05
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Because Information is power and wisdom is knowing how to use it.
• 9:09
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I'll see you on the next episode.