Health
The Perimenopause Timeline Nobody Hands You At 38
It can start a decade before your last period, and the first symptoms are rarely the ones you were warned about.
Ruth Alvarez
Health Director · WomenWelly
Ruth Alvarez
Health Director · Manchester
Ruth Alvarez runs WomenWelly's health desk. She has spent fourteen years covering medicine and public health, with a particular focus on the conditions that are under-researched in women — endometriosis, autoimmune disease and the long arc of perimenopause. She reads the study before she reads the press release.
Covers: Clinical research, hormones, preventive medicine
Ruth's stories
15 published
Weight Loss
Why Is Zenday App The World's Fastest-Growing GLP-1 Companion App?
A million people are using a web app to make their injections work harder. What that says about how GLP-1 medication is actually prescribed is the more interesting story.
Health
What GLP-1 Medication Does To Your Menstrual Cycle
Periods returning, cycles shortening, PMS shifting — the changes are common, rarely explained at the pharmacy, and mostly predictable.
Health
Iron Deficiency Is Wildly Common In Women. Here's How To Spot It.
Exhaustion, breathlessness on stairs and a strange craving for ice — the symptoms that show up long before anaemia does.
Weight Loss
Your GLP-1 Stopped Working: A Plateau Troubleshooting Guide
Weight loss stalling after several months is expected, not a failure. Here is the order clinicians work through the possible causes.
Weight Loss
How To Protect Muscle While You're On A GLP-1
Up to 40 percent of the weight lost on these medications can be lean mass. Two interventions change that substantially.
Health
GLP-1s, Fertility And Contraception: What Nobody Tells You At The Pharmacy
Restored ovulation, an absorption issue with the pill, and why the phrase “Ozempic babies” exists at all.
Health
Heart Attack Symptoms Look Different In Women. Doctors Explain Why.
Crushing chest pain is one presentation. Jaw pain, nausea and a fortnight of unexplained exhaustion is another.
Health
The Bloodwork Panel To Ask For At Your Next Physical
What a standard check-up usually includes, what it usually doesn't, and which extras are worth requesting.
Weight Loss
How To Titrate Up On A GLP-1 Without Making Yourself Miserable
Most people who quit do so during escalation. Going slower is usually available, usually effective, and rarely offered.
Weight Loss
Metabolic Adaptation Is Real. It's Also Wildly Overstated.
Your metabolism does slow when you lose weight. The size of that effect is far smaller than the internet believes.
Health
Taking A GLP-1 In Perimenopause, When Your Hormones Are Already Moving
Two things changing your body at once makes it genuinely hard to tell which is causing what. Here is how clinicians separate them.
Health
What Changed In PCOS Care This Year — And What To Ask Your Doctor
Updated international guidance has shifted the diagnostic criteria and quietly demoted a few familiar recommendations.
Weight Loss
Nobody Teaches The Maintenance Phase. Here's How It Works.
Every plan ends at the goal. The skill that determines whether it lasts starts the day after.
Weight Loss
Coming Off A GLP-1 Without Regaining Everything
Regain after stopping is the expected physiological outcome, not a personal failure. Planning for it changes what happens next.
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