The first two weeks of your month, you feel like yourself. Then ovulation passes and someone else moves in: sore breasts, bloating by dinner, mood swings, broken sleep, and a period that arrives heavy or painful. If you have brought this pattern to an appointment and been told your hormones look normal, this episode explains the piece that conversation was missing.

In this episode, Rachel explains estrogen dominance, one of the most common hormone patterns in women's health, and why it is a ratio problem rather than a single high number. Estrogen and progesterone are meant to work like two kids on a seesaw. The seesaw tips the same way whether estrogen got heavier or progesterone got lighter, and the most common version of this story is not high estrogen at all. It is normal estrogen sitting on top of a low progesterone that was never measu ...