My Story: From Processed Foods to Purpose

Hi, I'm Tammy Fogarty, RD, PhD—a registered dietitian, nutrition professor, researcher, and, most importantly, a woman who discovered that everything I thought I knew about my own body stopped working in my late forties.

For more than 25 years, I've helped people improve their health through nutrition. I thought I knew exactly what to do when my body started changing. Instead, I found myself asking the same questions so many women ask:

Why am I gaining weight when nothing has changed? Why am I waking up exhausted? Why isn't my body responding the way it always has?

Then life threw me an unexpected curveball.

At 47, I was diagnosed with Lynch syndrome—a hereditary condition that significantly increases the risk of several cancers and runs throughout my family. Between that diagnosis and the perimenopause symptoms I was already navigating, my doctors and I decided that a full hysterectomy was the best option. Overnight, I went from perimenopause into surgical menopause.

Most women experience menopause as a gradual transition. Mine was more like someone flipped a light switch. One day my hormones were there. The next day, they weren't.

Even before surgery, perimenopause had already started rearranging my life in small, ridiculous ways. I spent months negotiating with my own bedsheets—foot out, foot in, foot out again—trying to regulate my temperature at two o'clock in the morning. Fat started collecting under my bra strap in places I didn't know fat could collect. And the brain fog wasn't the harmless "Where are my keys?" kind. It was loading the dishwasher, immediately turning around and unloading it, putting dirty dishes back into the cabinet, then standing in my kitchen wondering if I had actually just done that.

I laugh about it now...but at the time, it was frustrating, confusing, and honestly a little scary.

That was the moment I stopped brushing everything off as "just getting older."

I began hormone therapy, and for me, it was life-changing. After surgery, my treatment was adjusted again, and I slowly began learning what "normal" looked like in this new body. Every woman's experience is different, and hormone therapy isn't the right choice for everyone, but I believe every woman deserves accurate, evidence-based information so she can have informed conversations with her healthcare provider.

I won't sugarcoat it: figuring out what my body actually needed, instead of what I assumed it needed after 20+ years of old habits, was frustrating and slow, and there were plenty of days it felt like two steps forward, one step back. I had to let go of the idea that my body should respond the way it did when I was 30. The eating habits, workouts, and routines that had always worked suddenly weren't enough. As a dietitian, that was incredibly humbling.

So I did what I've always done—I dug into the research.

I studied what happens when estrogen declines. I learned more about changes in muscle mass, metabolism, fat storage, insulin sensitivity, sleep, stress, and recovery. Then I started testing those strategies on myself, making small adjustments until I found an approach that actually worked—not against my body, but with it.

Along the way, I entered what I jokingly call my "No Era."

I say no to extra work when my body needs rest.

I say no to social plans when a quiet evening serves me better.

I say no to habits that leave me feeling worse the next day.

And yes, I often say no to happy hour and yes to yoga, because these days alcohol steals my sleep, and my body's favorite happy hour happens in the gym.

Here's what surprised me most: none of those choices feel like deprivation anymore.

They're strategy.

Once I understood what was happening inside my body—the hormonal shifts, the metabolic changes, the importance of preserving muscle—those decisions became easier. I stopped blaming myself and started working with my biology instead of fighting against it.

Today, my mission is built on that same shift: help women understand the specific hormonal and metabolic changes happening in their bodies, and give them a structure that actually accounts for those changes—not the one that worked in their twenties.

That's exactly why I created The Reset Routine: a 90-day program built around what actually happens to a woman's body during perimenopause and menopause—the drop in estrogen, the shift in fat storage, the loss of muscle—and the specific nutrition and movement strategy that responds to it.

Your strategy just needs to catch up to your physiology. That's the work.