Madison Smith

Peri-maxxing is the belief that every perimenopause symptom has a fix, and that if you use them all correctly, you can avoid the downsides of perimenopause and aging. It borrows from the biohacking playbook and points it at women in midlife: Take supplements to control your cortisol. Use hormone therapy to prevent dementia. Wear a weighted vest to build bone strength. The promise is what pulls us in: if you do this you'll be protecting your health for the long haul. Why it's so easy to buy...

It’s been almost a year since I started on my HRT journey and I can say it’s been fully uneventful. A lot of noise coming out of the meno-sphere makes these hormones sound like miracle drugs, but that's simply not true. I can’t say it was like a giant light switch and suddenly everything in my life got better. There was no big change in my daily experience. But looking back on where I was a year ago versus where I am now I can see there’s been a definite shift. Over the past year I’ve...

I’ve been working with a client who had both sides of her lower jaw reconstructed last year. What’s become most clear to me in our time together is that the jaw surgery, exercises, pt, massage and acupuncture she’s been doing aren’t fixing the problem. The problem isn’t that her jaw was deformed, the problem is that she has years of habits that need unwinding. Subtle habits… Like how she pulls her mouth sideways when talking, or the way she pushes her tongue against the roof of her mouth,...