So, first a quick note: this book is very similar to the popular bestseller “The Galveston Diet”, not just in content, but all the way down to its formatting. Some Amazon reviewers have even gone so far as to suggest that “It’s Not You, It’s Your Hormones” (2017) brazenly plagiarized “The Galveston Diet” (2023). However, after carefully examining the publication dates, we feel quite confident that this book is not a copy of the one that came out six years after it. As such, we’ve opted for reviewing the original book.

Nicki Williams’ basic principle is that we can manage our hormonal fluctuations, by managing our diet. Specifically, in three main ways:

• Intermittent fasting
• Anti-inflammatory diet
• Eating more protein and healthy fats

Why should these things matter to our hormones? The answer is to remember that our hormones aren’t just the sex hormones. We have hormones for hunger and satedness, hormones for stress and relaxation, hormones for blood sugar regulation, hormones for sleep and wakefulness, and more. These many hormones make up our endocrine system, and affecting one part of it will affect the others.

Will these things magically undo the effects of the menopause? Well, some things yes, other things no. No diet can do the job of HRT. But by tweaking endocrine system inputs, we can tweak endocrine system outputs, and that’s what this book is for.

The style is very accessible and clear, and Williams walks us through the changes we may want to make, to avoid the changes we don’t want.

Bottom line: this book is aimed at peri-menopausal and post-menopausal women. It could also definitely help a lot of people with PCOS too, and, when it comes down it it, pretty much anyone with an endocrine system. It’s a well-evidenced, well-established, healthy way of eating regardless of age, sex, or (most) physical conditions.

Click here to check out It’s Not You, It’s Your Hormones, and take control of yours!

How often in life do we make a suboptimal decision that ends up plaguing us for a long time afterwards? Sometimes, a single good or bad decision can even directly change the rest of our life.

So, it really is important that we try to optimize the decisions we do make.

Professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein look at all kinds of decision-making in this book. Their goal, as per the subtitle, is “improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness”.

For the most part, the book concentrates on “nudges”. Small factors that influence our decisions one way or another.

Most importantly: that some of them are very good reasons to be nudged; others, very bad ones. And they often look similar.

Where this book excels is in highlighting the many ways we make decisions without even thinking about it… or we think about it, but only down a prescribed, foreseen track, to an externally expected conclusion (for example, an insurance company offering three packages, but two of them exist only to direct you to the “correct” choice).

A weakness of the book is that in some aspects it’s a little inconsistent. The authors describe their economic philosophy as “libertarian paternalism”, and as libertarians they’re against mandates, except when as paternalists they’re for them. But, if we take away their labels, this boils down to “some mandates can be good and some can be bad”, which would not be so inconsistent after all.

Bottom line: if you’d like to better understand your own decision-making processes through the eyes of policy-setting economists (especially Sunstein, who worked for the White House Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs) whose job it is to make sure you make the “right” decisions, then this is a very enlightening book.

Click here to check out Nudge and improve your decision-making clarity!