I was recently sitting with one of my oldest friends ruminating and reminiscing. We have known each other since my early years in New York where we met by accident in a hot tub of all places and have survived every decade and every distance since. She is brilliant, beautiful and talented.

She is also, by almost any external measure, enormously fortunate having lived a life of abundant opulence and wealth and yet she was not happy.

She is also currently fighting a difficult divorce that has already taken ten years leaving her anxious about money for the first time in her life and she looks in the mirror and still does not see what we all see.

I sat across from her and related to the same feelings underneath, one common amongst women trying to feel “enough”. Many of us feel it but choose to deal with it in our own way.

She invested in her appearance, her homes, her wardrobe and the external architecture of a life that looked complete even when it did not feel that way. I invested in my reformer, my gratitude journal, my green juice and my thirty years of increasingly honest inner work.

Different containers: same contents.

We were both, in our own ways, trying to answer the same impossible question: am I enough now? We are never taught that the answer is always yes before the work, before the wardrobe and before any of it.

Peter Crone tells us that we do not choose what we prefer but choose what is familiar.

If what was familiar in childhood was the feeling of not being quite enough — of having to earn love, to perform for approval, to be a certain version of yourself to be safe — then that feeling becomes the baseline your nervous system returns to. You choose partners, jobs, and life circumstances that confirm your story.

My friend and I both learned the same thing from our mothers, in different households on different continents, in ways that were never spoken aloud and never needed to be. We absorbed the decree: you must earn your right to be here it the way children absorb everything silently and without the ability to question it.

Peter Crone asks: who would you be without the story that you are not enough? Who would you be right now, today, if you simply set that story down.

I think you would be free, not free of problems or pain or the ordinary losses of a human life but free of the exhausting project of trying to prove something to the world that was never in question.

I invite you to put it down because it was never actually yours to carry.

Next Tuesday: my father, the Beefsteak and Burgundy Club and why I drink wine every evening without a single gram of guilt.

A note: this post touches on emotional patterns and psychological frameworks. It is offered as personal reflection and is not a substitute for professional therapeutic support. If any of this resonates deeply, working with a qualified therapist or coach alongside your own inner work can be genuinely transformative.

Marjolein

I woke as though a bear was chasing me.

It was an ordinary morning. No alarm, no crisis, nothing in the room that warranted what my body was doing. Every alarm in my nervous system was firing simultaneously. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. I lay in the dark completely unable to calm down, unable to locate a reason for the terror my body was producing with such absolute conviction.

I took myself to the emergency room.

They ran an EKG and fitted me with a cardiac monitor for twenty-four hours. After all of that, all the testing, all the urgency, the conclusion was: panic attack.

I remember thinking: I have never had a panic attack in my life. Why would I suddenly start now, at this age, with no history and no precipitating event?

The answer, which nobody in that emergency room offered me, is one of the most important things a woman approaching menopause can know that nobody talks to us about.

What was actually happening

During your reproductive years your ovaries are the primary producers of estrogen. When menopause arrives and your ovaries retire from that role, your body does not simply accept the loss. It turns to your adrenal glands for back-up.

This is an enormous additional demand placed on glands that are already responsible for producing cortisol, adrenaline and a range of other essential hormones. If your adrenals arrive at menopause already depleted and exhausted from years of chronic stress, insufficient sleep and the accumulated demands of a full and demanding life, they cannot meet this new requirement. The reserves are gone and your system misfires. Cortisol and adrenaline spike erratically and without apparent cause.

What I experienced that morning was not a panic attack but an adrenal dysregulation at the exact moment my body needed a reserve it did not have.

The cardiac monitor was never going to find the cause because it was looking in entirely the wrong place.

The part that still makes me angry

A month after the ER visit I realized I had not had my period and the following month confirmed it. That terrifying morning had coincided almost exactly with the end of my reproductive years.

I had not had a panic attack but had entered menopause and my body had announced it in the most dramatic way it knew.

Women are being told they are having panic attacks every single day. They are being offered anxiolytics and sent home without the one piece of information that would help: your adrenals need support and menopause just made that more urgent than ever.

This is not a fringe idea but physiology. The fact that it is almost never explained to women in perimenopause is one of the great failures of conventional medicine.

What I did

Ashwagandha became my lifeline. Consistently demonstrated in clinical research to reduce cortisol and support adrenal function, it was the most effective intervention I found for restoring equilibrium. Combined with bio-identical hormone therapy recommended by my doctor and a vigilant management of my sleep along with a deepened reformer practice brought me back to myself.

In three independent clinical studies on AeroPilates participants, we measured stress levels before and after an eight-week program of reformer Pilates three times per week. Participants experienced a 58% decrease in measured stress levels.

For context: most pharmaceutical anxiolytic interventions produce effects in the range of 30 to 50% in clinical trials, with significant side effects. The reformer exceeded that range using movement, three times a week, for two months.

That number still stops me every time I say it. Fifty-eight percent. Eight weeks. Three sessions a week. No prescription required.

What to do before the crisis arrives

Perimenopause, which can begin as early as the mid-thirties, is your window of opportunity and the time to build an adrenal reserve before menopause draws it down.

Reduce your caffeine — it stimulates cortisol and delays adrenal recovery. Prioritize good sleep above almost everything else begin adaptogenic herbs — ashwagandha, rhodiola and holy basil support the HPA axis and build the adrenal capacity menopause will demand. Move your body gently and consistently, manage stress as though your hormonal future depends on it, because it does.

I wish someone had handed me this information ten years before that morning in the ER. Consider this me handing it to you now.

Next Tuesday: two women, the same wound, different decorating — and what it taught me about shame, self-worth and why inner health is the only kind that truly lasts.

A note: everything I share here comes from my own experience and research and is intended for informational purposes only. It is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor or a qualified healthcare practitioner before making any changes to your medications, supplements or treatment plan. The conversation I am encouraging is one you have with your physician, not instead of them.

Marjolein

A few years ago, my doctor slid a piece of paper across her desk and said, “we needed to talk about statins”.

I looked at her then I looked at the paper and asked her to explain the cholesterol numbers.

She failed so I went home and researched for three days. Needless to share, I did not fill the prescription, and I have not regretted it for a single moment since.

Here is what I learned and what I think every woman over fifty deserves to know.

HDL is your protective good cholesterol and should be high; above 60 is good but above 70 is excellent. LDL comes in different particle sizes and only the small dense variety is dangerous. A standard lipid panel does not tell you which kind you have but an NMR particle size test does, so ask for it.

Your Triglycerides are a far stronger predictor of cardiovascular risk than the total cholesterol and they are driven almost entirely by sugar and refined carbohydrates, not fat. The ratio that matters is your total cholesterol divided by your HDL. Under 4 is healthy and under 3.5 is excellent.

Inflammation is the real culprit, not cholesterol. Cholesterol shows up at the site of arterial damage as part of a repair response so treating it without addressing your inflammation is, as I like to say, prosecuting the ambulance for being at the scene of the accident.

After menopause, your liver increases cholesterol production because cholesterol is the raw material your body uses to make estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. Your ovaries have stepped back, and your liver is compensating so a rise in total cholesterol after menopause is to be expected.

Prescribing a statin to a postmenopausal woman with excellent HDL and healthy triglycerides, purely based on an elevated total number, is one of the most common and least examined interventions in women’s medicine right now.

If you drink a morning smoothie, try adding Amla powder to it, a favorite recipe is amla powder, wild blueberries, ground flaxseed, turmeric, black pepper, almond milk and spinach. The flaxseed provides soluble fiber that directly lowers LDL by binding to bile acids in the gut and carrying them out of the body. The amla, Indian gooseberry, has been shown in clinical trials to raise HDL and lower LDL simultaneously. The turmeric addresses inflammation. Personally, I take 1000mg of amla daily and I am growing the plant in my Todos Santos garden.

I also exercise on my reformer every day but they say that exercise three times a week invreases HDL more consistently than almost any pharmaceutical intervention. Movement is cardiovascular medicine.

If your doctor recommends a statin, please ask these questions first. What is my HDL to total ratio? What are my triglycerides? Has my LDL particle size been tested? What is my hs-CRP? What natural alternatives might we try first?

You are allowed to ask. You are allowed to research. You are allowed to go home and think before you fill a prescription.

Your cholesterol number is not your destiny. It is a data point. Do not let it become your story.

Next Tuesday: the morning I woke up convinced I was having a heart attack — and what it was.

Marjolein

In June of 1997 I walked onto the QVC set in West Chester Pennsylvania carrying a folding Pilates reformer that nobody had ever seen before.

I had developed this home version out of necessity after a serious accident in Santa Fe two years earlier, when I was afraid my body might not fully recover.

The reformer that Joseph Pilates designed had been available for decades but only in professional studios, only with a trained instructor, only for people who could afford both. I wanted it in my living room and I wanted it accessible to every woman who needed what I had found on it — not just fitness, not just flexibility, but the experience of coming home to a body she had stopped trusting.

I had eleven minutes of air time. In eleven minutes we sold out.

I stood in the wings afterward not quite believing what had just happened. The phones were still ringing. The item number was still flashing.

Thirty years later I have sold millions of reformers into homes around the world, conducted three independent clinical studies proving what the practice does for the body and mind, presented on QVC in Italy and the United Kingdom and built a community of women who have rebuilt their backs, restored their bone density, recovered from injury and found for the first time in their lives a movement practice they genuinely love and that genuinely works.

None of it was planned. All of it grew from eleven minutes and the absolute conviction that what had healed me could heal others.

I am writing this first post on Substack because I have a book coming and because the book contains everything I know, not just about movement but about food, about the inner life and about the emotional work that most wellness conversations never quite reach.

It is called Be Lighter: Eat, Move and Feel Your Way to Freedom and it is a lifetime of living, experimenting, failing, recovering and paying very close attention, distilled into something I hope will change how you think about your body and your life.

Every Tuesday I will publish something here. Sometimes it will be science. Sometimes it will be a recipe or a protocol or a specific tool that has made a difference in my own life. Sometimes it will be a personal story — the ones that did not make it into the book and the ones that did, told a little more freely than a publisher might allow.

I will write about manifestation and water fasting, about the night I spent in an orange jumpsuit and about what psilocybin showed me about the men I have loved. I will write about cholesterol and cortisol and the moment I understood that shame is the root of almost everything that holds women back. I will write about my father, who drank a glass of red wine every evening of his adult life and lived to be ninety-nine and a half, and about my little sister Lousje, who spent decades in a world she could only partially hear and who came fully alive the day she could finally hear it properly.

I will write about Opal, who is two years old and reaches for flowers in the garden with a wonder that reminds me every single time that the capacity for joy does not diminish with age. It compounds.

This is what Be Lighter is about. Not a diet. Not a fitness program. Not a set of rules about what to eat or how to exercise or who to be. It is about a life fully lived that gets lighter every year.

I am glad you are here. Pull up a chair.

Marjolein