Women’s Health for the Long Run: I Was Told I Was Fine
I didn’t start paying attention to women’s health because I wanted to live longer. I started because people began looking at me differently.
Not judgmental. But concerned.
They would ask, “Are you okay?” or, “Is everything alright?”
It wasn’t subtle. They could see it. I could see it too. My body looked inflamed. Puffy. Like I was retaining water everywhere. I kept thinking I looked like a balloon, tight and swollen, on the verge of popping.
At first, I told myself it was temporary. Normal, given everything I’d been through.
All my life, I’d gone through periods of weight gain and loss. That wasn’t new. What was new was how fast it was happening and how little control I seemed to have over it. Every week, the scale went up. Every single week.
This was happening while I was doing all the “right” things.
I was eating clean. Prioritizing protein. Tracking macros. Logging everything in MyFitnessPal. I increased my steps. I started Zone 2 training. I was consistent. Disciplined. Careful.
And still, the weight kept coming.
That was the moment I knew something was wrong.
Around the same time, I had done everything I was supposed to do medically. Annual physical. OB-GYN exam. Blood work. Follow-ups. Every doctor told me the same thing:
Everything looks fine.
But I wasn’t fine.
When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t recognize my body. My waist kept expanding. My clothes stopped fitting. My body felt foreign.
Later, I would learn this was inflammation. At the time, all I knew was that my body no longer felt like mine.
I gained over thirty pounds in six to eight months! I had never seen that number on the scale in my life. Not even close.
It shattered my confidence.
I didn’t take a single selfie during that period. Not one. I avoided looking at myself naked. I moved through the world hoping no one would comment, while bracing myself for when they did.
And underneath all of it was a quieter fear I didn’t want to say out loud:
Is this it?
Is this aging?
Is this the beginning of a body I’ll never get back from?
Will I never feel sexy or vibrant again?
What made it worse was the loneliness of it.
I wasn’t “sick enough” to be taken seriously. My labs were “normal.” I was functional. Still doing my life. Still performing competence. So the system had no real place for me.
This didn’t happen all at once.
First came the weight gain.
Then the confusion.
Then the quiet panic of doing everything “right” and watching nothing change.
The testing came later, not as a first instinct, but as a last resort, after I’d been told, repeatedly, that nothing was wrong.
That’s when I stopped relying on typical doctors and typical blood tests.
I took charge.
Out of frustration. Out of desperation. Out of a deep need to understand what was happening inside my own body when no one else seemed willing to help me figure it out.
That’s when I turned to ChatGPT.
Not because I thought it would replace doctors but because I needed a thinking partner. Someone to help me ask better questions. To make sense of test results. To identify which markers mattered and which ones were being ignored. To help me decide what to look at next when the answers kept coming back as “fine.”
I didn’t just do basic blood work and call it a day.
I started running my own tests, beginning with Function Health blood work. I established baselines with a DEXA scan, VO₂ max, and resting metabolic rate. I went deeper with advanced cholesterol and sterol testing that showed my body wasn’t absorbing too much cholesterol from food; it was overproducing it at the cellular level.
I did hormonal and stress-axis testing through DUTCH, gut testing with GI-MAP, and followed up with cardiology, fertility specialists, and additional evaluations as new patterns emerged. I compared markers across different health domains. I asked why certain numbers were considered “normal” when they didn’t match what I was experiencing. When results pointed somewhere new, I followed the data.
I wasn’t chasing a diagnosis.
I was trying to understand what was breaking down, area by area, when no one else seemed willing to look.
People suggested GLP-1s early on. I refused because I don’t believe in band-aids when I don’t understand the wound. I’ve dealt with digestive issues most of my life. I knew the side effects. I was scared to make things worse. And I didn’t have a doctor I trusted to guide me properly.
I wanted the root cause. I’m data-driven. I needed to see the full picture before choosing a solution.
The turning point came later, when cardiovascular and liver markers from that deeper blood work flagged something no one else had paid attention to: I was in clear metabolic dysfunction.
When I finally sat across from a cardiologist, after sending him all my results ahead of time, he didn’t start with my weight.
He asked about my cycle.
He asked if my period was regular.
He was the first person to say the word perimenopause out loud.
Perimenopause wasn’t something I’d been educated about by doctors, by family, or by culture. It wasn’t on my radar. And yet, suddenly, it explained why so many symptoms had been treated as isolated or irrelevant.
Around the same time, I was listening, reading, learning, trying to understand what actually happens in women’s bodies during this phase of life that no one prepares us for. I sought out better care. I followed conversations that finally named the intersection between hormones, metabolism, cardiovascular risk, and weight in a way that made sense.
By the time I walked into the YPO Women’s Wellness Summit recently, this journey wasn’t new anymore.
But something shifted being in that room.
Sitting among women who were accomplished, capable, outwardly steady, and privately trying to piece this together too, I realized how much of what I’d learned had stayed locked behind access. Behind money. Behind geography. Behind the ability to keep digging when others simply don’t have the bandwidth.
I’m deeply aware that the access I’ve had o doctors, tests, conversations, rooms like that is a privilege. And I’m grateful for it.
This series is my way of not keeping that knowledge to myself.
Women’s Health for the Long Run isn’t a promise that paying attention will fix everything.
It’s a sharing.
Of what I’ve learned.
Of what I’m doing.
Of what I’m still unsure about.
I’ll write about metabolic health, bone health, brain health, sex health. I’ll write about sleep, food, movement, emotional health, as infrastructure for a life you want to keep living in your body.
Some of this is lived. Some of it is learned. All of it is offered in the spirit of this:
You don’t have to figure this out alone.
If Between Selves has been about noticing the space between who I was and who I’m becoming, this is part of that same inquiry: where the body stops being a background character and starts asking to be included in the conversation.
I’m not writing this to tell anyone what to do.
I’m writing because I know what it feels like to be told you’re fine when your body is clearly telling a different story. When the data says one thing, the mirror says another, and your intuition is left holding the tension alone.
I’m writing because that space between “fine” and truth is where many women quietly live for far too long.
And because I know how lonely that can be.
xoxo💋
Paola
This post is part of Women’s Health for the Long Run—a series grounded in lived experience, careful listening to experts, and shared learning. It is not medical advice.