Why listening to your body may be the missing piece

Over the past year or so, I've noticed something from my own experience and those of women I work with.

Women have never had access to more information about their health. We can track our sleep, heart rate, blood sugar, exercise, and recovery. We can measure hormones, analyze our microbiome, explore food sensitivities, and order an almost endless number of laboratory tests. As a restorative nutrition practitioner, I value many of these tools. They can answer important questions and truly help us make better decisions.

But information doesn't always lead to understanding. And it's often not enough of the picture.

Sometimes the breakthrough comes from a pattern that no wearable, app, or lab report could have uncovered on its own.

This might look like noticing how your body responds differently to the same food depending on when you eat it. Or realizing that feeling stuck weight isn't always a sign to push harder. Sometimes it's your body's way of asking to be nourished, rested, and supported before it can heal.

Many women are surprised to discover they've become so disconnected from their hunger cues that they don't recognize they're hungry until they're shaky, irritable, lightheaded, or suddenly ravenous. By then, blood sugar may have dropped too low, making it much harder to make thoughtful food choices.

These are often things a wearable cannot tell us. They're things we discover when we begin paying closer attention to the quiet signals our bodies have been sending all along.

These insights come from recognizing patterns, becoming curious about what they might mean, and using science to help make sense of them. It's not about choosing between evidence and intuition—it's about allowing each to inform the other.

That, I think, is one of the most important skills we can cultivate as we move through menopause and beyond. Not collecting more data and protocols, but becoming more tuned in to the signals our own bodies have been offering us all along.

More about the science…

The scientific explanation for what we've been talking about is interoception -  our ability to perceive and interpret signals from inside our own bodies.

Hunger, fullness, thirst, muscle fatigue, a racing heart, digestive discomfort, the sense that something simply isn't right. It's sometimes called our "inner sense," and it shapes how we regulate appetite, respond to stress, and recover from exercise. The challenge is that this sense isn't fixed — it shifts with what's happening in our bodies and brains.

Take the gut, for example. The gut and brain are in constant conversation through the vagus nerve, spinal pathways, hormones, immune signals, and even compounds produced by our gut microbes. Together, these form what we call the gut-brain axis—a sophisticated communication network that helps regulate digestion, appetite, stress responses, and much more.

Interoception is how we perceive that conversation. It's why we can recognize the uneasy feeling in our stomach before a stressful meeting, notice that eating too late leaves us uncomfortable, or realize that a rushed meal feels different from one enjoyed at a slower pace. The signals are always there; interoception is our ability to notice and interpret them. Yet many women spend decades learning to override what their bodies are trying to tell them

Aging has also been shown to decrease interoceptive accuracy. But ...subjective awareness of bodily signals may compensate for that decline in raw accuracy,  meaning... the instinctive sharpness may fade a bit, but the skill of paying attention and trusting what you notice seems to matter more, not less, as we age.

And...a recent review found interoception reduced in women with higher symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, and emotional dysregulation — meaning some women have a harder time hearing internal signals to begin with, which can make hunger, stress, and fatigue harder to catch before they build up.

That's why I believe one of the most valuable skills is becoming a better observer of yourself — whatever your starting signal strength happens to be. Science can give us framework but our own bodies provide context. The most meaningful health decisions come from learning to trust both.