You don't feel like yourself anymore.
Something has to change.
ABOUT
Whether you're in perimenopause or menopause, your body is going through a lot. If stubborn weight gain wasn't enough, your sleep may be off. Things that never used to bother you now do. Your focus isn't as sharp. Sometimes your brain feels like Teflon — nothing sticks and you feel foggy.
It's never one clear issue, but more like a collection of small things that add up. And that's what makes it so frustrating, hard to pinpoint, even harder to know where to start.
I know how that feels. I've been there.
It's more than hormones.
There's a lot of focus on "balancing hormones," as if that's the whole story. But what you're dealing with is rarely one thing. Trying to match one symptom with one solution — one supplement, one change — quickly becomes expensive, confusing, and ineffective, because it doesn't reflect how your body actually works.
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Your hormones, your blood sugar, your sleep, your gut, your stress load — they're all in conversation with each other. When one is off, others follow. That's why piecemeal approaches tend to fall short.
I don't look at symptoms in isolation. I look at patterns — how different pieces of your health are interacting and shaping how you feel. Nutrition plays a central role, but sleep, stress, movement, digestion, and daily habits all shape how your body functions. When you step back and see the full picture, things start to make sense. And once things make sense, it becomes much easier to know what to focus on.
MY STORY
My story is probably
not unlike yours.
A few years ago I sat across from a neurologist trying to explain that my brain didn't feel like mine anymore. The fog, the forgetting, the sense that my mind wasn't quite keeping up. She gave it a name — mild cognitive impairment — and when I asked what I could do about it, she said there wasn't much.
I walked out of that office frustrated. And unconvinced.
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What followed was years of digging into the research, into the science, into everything I could find about what was actually happening in my body. Eventually that search led me back to school, where I formally trained in nutrition therapy. Five hundred hours of biochemistry, pathophysiology, hormonal health, digestion, healthy aging, and the ways the body's systems influence each other. It didn't just give me answers. It reframed the questions.
"Five years later, I feel better than I did in my thirties. That experience — and what I learned through it — is the foundation of how I work with every client."
Before this work, I spent years as a financial controller in corporate finance. That background still shapes how I think: I look for patterns, I follow the evidence, and I don't settle for answers that don't add up. I began this work as a certified health coach through IIN, and deepened it considerably through the NTM diploma at NTI — one of the most rigorous nutrition programs available.
Nutrition Therapist Master (NTM) Nutrition Therapy Institute
Certified Health Coach Institute for Integrative Nutrition
MBA SUNY New Paltz
BBA Haaga-Helia University, Finland
Beyond the work.
I live in the Hudson Valley, where you'll find me on a trail, digging in my garden, or experimenting in my kitchen. I'm also finishing a book, a nutrition and lifestyle guide for women navigating brain health in midlife, which is really just the long version of everything I wish someone had handed me five years ago.
-Paivi Grogan
