A few weeks ago we launched a small anonymous survey at Pace & Phase. Nothing grand — a handful of questions about what women actually struggle with when it comes to their bodies, their training, and all the health data they keep collecting. What came back was more interesting, and a little humbling.

Half of the women who answered had never thought about hormones. Not "thought and dismissed" — never thought about them at all, until a survey asked. These are smart, capable women, most of them in their late 30s and 40s. Their sleep had changed. Their cycles had changed. Workouts that used to work had quietly stopped working. The information exists. It just never arrived addressed to them.
And probably the loudest finding of this survey is the educational gap. So we will keep explaining how hormones connect to a woman's overall health: her training, her food, her sleep, her head.

They are not short on data. They are short on meaning. Almost two-thirds track something: steps, workouts, calories, sleep. Only 14% track their cycle — the one signal that explains half the others. And when I asked about the main struggle, more than half named one of two things: "my cycle and PMS run my month," or "I have all this data and no idea what it means."

What they asked for was smaller than what the industry sells. I asked the women with trackers what their data would need to tell them to be actually useful, and they wrote the answer themselves: "Exactly what to eat today." "How to train today (or rest)." One decision, made with them, and a reason underneath it that fits in a human head. There are plenty of data on one side, guidance close to zero on the other. Of course they want to try the thing that connects the two.

The effort is already there, and so is the money. Nearly 80% of them spend on supplements and vitamins. That market markets aggressively — every shelf promises glow, balance, and a new metabolism by spring — and I quietly hope they are taking what they actually need, rather than whatever was packaged most beautifully. My own rule for that shelf is described here: My five bottles, and their jobs.

Cutting calories is still popular, but is it working?

One woman, following a careful calorie plan designed to lose half a pound a week, wrote:

"I get absolutely starving and ruin my entire meal plan"

That is not a motivation problem. That is a woman working hard inside a plan that doesn't know her.

The other woman ended her answer with a sentence I would put on the wall:

"I learned to not push myself too hard and make healthy living just my normal lifestyle, vs 'I'm on a diet' or a month long course."

She is describing, in one line, the only approach I have ever seen actually work.

That is exactly the approach we take at Pace & Phase: a lifestyle, not a rigid diet. Yes, losing weight does take a deficit — but in real life that deficit is much smaller than the numbers women pull out of random online calculators. Cutting 200 to 400 calories a day goes a long way, with no burnouts and no guilt. The alternative is the familiar month of white knuckles on a huge deficit, and then eating it all back just to stop feeling starved and miserable. This survey is full of women who have already run that experiment.

The survey is still open, and it stays anonymous — if you want to add your voice to it, it's here. Every answer makes the next version of what I'm building a little less of a guess.

These women are not short on effort, and they are not short on data. What they are short on is understanding — and that, at least, can be taught.

— Katya