Kristyn Hodgdon
Everything you’re feeling, but didn’t know how to say.
The Podcasts Keeping Me Company Lately
Nobody warns you that your 30s are basically one long lesson in letting go of the plot you had in your head. Mine have included infertility, IVF, pregnancy loss, a chronic illness diagnosis, and three kids who arrived on their own timeline, not mine. I came in thinking if I just did everything right, things would go the way I planned. I was wrong, repeatedly, and somehow that turned out to be the education.
The through line in all of it — grief, IVF, motherhood, the insurance calls that will live rent-free in my brain forever — is that control was always an illusion. You can optimize, advocate, prepare, and still end up somewhere you didn't plan. That's not failure.
What I've found, especially lately, is that the things that actually help aren't the ones that promise to fix anything. They're the ones that keep you company inside the uncertainty, that meet you where you are instead of telling you where you should be. Good information helps. Honest conversation helps. And sometimes, genuinely, a podcast that makes you laugh until something hurts helps more than anything else.
My current queue does all of it (women's health, financial health, the hard stuff, the funny stuff), and I wrote up the whole list here.
Some weeks you need the science. Some weeks you need someone to just tell you you're not alone. Most weeks, honestly, you need both.
The New Cholesterol Guidelines Changed the Conversation — Here's Mine
I was 13 when my grandfather died of a massive heart attack. The kind that doesn't give you a warning, doesn't give you time. One of those moments that rewires something in you — not in a way you can explain at 13, but in a way you carry forward every time the word "cardiology" comes up.
I'm 37 now, which still feels young until you start doing the math.
The American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association just released their first updated cholesterol guidelines since 2018, and a few things stopped me. Screening is now recommended starting at 19(!). Risk assessment begins at 30, and it now calculates your 30-year risk, not just 10, which changes the conversation entirely when you're sitting across from a doctor who thinks you're "too young to worry." For people with a family history, earlier medication is on the table. And there's a new test most of us have never heard of: Lp(a), or lipoprotein(a), recommended once in every adult's lifetime. It's mostly genetic, highly predictive, and almost never brought up unless you ask.
That last part is the one that gets me. About 1 in 4 adults has elevated LDL cholesterol, and most don't know it. Heart disease is still the number one killer of women, accounting for roughly 1 in every 5 female deaths. And yet the default is still to wait, to monitor, to revisit it later.
My grandfather didn't get later. So the next time I'm at my doctor, I'm asking for the Lp(a) test, and I'm not apologizing for it.
Ultra-Processed Foods and Fertility: On Controlling What You Can Control
There's a specific kind of obsession that sets in after enough failed cycles — the kind where you start reading ingredient labels like they contain the answer. I know this because I lived there. Secondary infertility has a particular cruelty to it: you've done it before, your body knows how to do this, and yet. So you find the one thing you can actually control, which is everything you put in your mouth, and you grip it.
I worked with a registered dietitian. I cleaned up my diet in ways that felt both genuinely meaningful and slightly unhinged. I have opinions about gut health now. I became, briefly, a person who read studies for fun.
So when two new ones dropped this week linking ultra-processed foods to lower fertility — women with the highest intake were significantly less likely to conceive; men eating more UPFs took longer to get their partners pregnant — I felt the old reflex. Not guilt, exactly. More like, of course. One more variable to add to the list.
Worth noting: both studies are observational, meaning they show a link, not a cause. Researchers suspect it's not just poor nutrition, but chemicals like phthalates and BPA leaching from packaging (known hormone disruptors) doing damage in the background. According to the CDC, Americans get about 55% of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods, which is a lot of packaging.
Here's what I know, though: I did everything right, and it still took everything I had. The pantry audit matters. It also doesn't save you. Skippy was never leaving my house, and somehow, eventually, it worked anyway.
Ask Clara:
"What should I eat to support fertility?"
It's Everything Shower Season (And I Have Thoughts)
My friend texted me last week: "I just shaved my entire body." I responded: "Wait, I'm literally about to do the same thing." We didn't plan this. We didn't need to. It's that time of year, and somehow our bodies knew it before our calendars did.
If, like me, you're Italian and had a unibrow until you were 14, you know this isn't your average shower. This is the "everything shower" — the full spring production, the fresh razor purchased in advance, the prayer you make it past the left knee.
I've been thinking about this more than usual since watching the America's Next Top Model documentary, which sent me spiraling in the best and worst way. Watching those episodes back, what struck me wasn't the drama; it was how completely unremarkable it all felt at the time. Women being assessed, corrected, and ranked by the inch, all of us at home absorbing it like it was just TV. It wasn't just TV. It was the water we were swimming in, and most of us didn't notice until years later.
We grew up steeped in that: the before-and-afters, the "flattering" cuts, the understanding that our bodies were permanent renovation projects. Now we're in our late thirties, rolling our eyes at all of it, and also blocking off ninety minutes before sandal season to handle the situation.
What can I say — women contain multitudes. You can see exactly how you got here and still need to get your eyebrows threaded every two weeks. Both things, forever.
Somebody Please Tell Me What Products I Actually Need
Somewhere between my postpartum scalp freakout and my third Google search about whether I should be exfoliating or not, I had a realization: women's wellness doesn't have an information problem — it has the opposite problem. There's so much information, from so many directions, with so many conflicting opinions, that by the time you've read enough to feel confident, you've also read enough to feel confused again. Congratulations, you're back at square one, but now you know what "moisture-protein balance" means.
Take haircare: I never thought much about it until my hair started shedding postpartum, and suddenly I was deep in Reddit threads about scalp pH, protein overload, and whether silicones are the enemy or just misunderstood. Every answer led to three more questions. Is this shampoo non-comedogenic, because I also have acne-prone skin and apparently that's a whole separate consideration nobody mentioned? Is my stylist recommending this because it's right for my hair, or because it's what's sitting behind her desk?
Skincare is somehow worse. Should I be exfoliating? With what? How often? Is my barrier compromised or am I fine? Every influencer has an answer and also (conveniently) an affiliate link. Nearly half of Americans say social media has influenced them to spend more on beauty products than they otherwise would, with millennials averaging $2,670 a year on beauty — which makes sense, because the information is designed to make you feel like you're always one product away from having it figured out.
And yet, every time I actually make it to the dermatologist, they tell me CeraVe is fine and I'm doing great. I believe them. And then I open Instagram.
I don't think this is accidental. Women's beauty and wellness spaces have always monetized confusion. The more overwhelmed you are, the more you buy, and the more you buy, the more overwhelmed you get. It's a very elegant trap, and I say that as someone who is absolutely still in it. Godspeed, my friends.
Age of Attraction Got Me (Then My Uterus Had Questions)
Something else you should know: I am, despite my better judgment, a hopeless romantic. I have watched almost every season of The Bachelor. I have cried at the finale. I am not immune to a love story, and I never have been. So when Age of Attraction showed up on Netflix — a dating show where people build connections without knowing each other's ages — I was in, immediately and completely. What I didn't expect was to spend half the show thinking about fertility.
The premise: singles date without knowing how old anyone else is, reveal ages when they're ready to commit, then decide whether to move forward. It's hosted by Nick Viall and Natalie Joy, who have an 18-year gap themselves — which is either genius casting or a lot to unpack over cocktails (probably both).
But then the fertility warrior in me shows up, the one who spent years in waiting rooms counting follicles and learning odds, and she has a different question entirely. When a woman who's 54 is falling for someone who's 27 and they're both all in, nobody on that show is asking out loud — does he want biological kids? Does she know whether that's still possible for her? Because the science is what it is. By 40, about 1 in 10 women will conceive in any given cycle. By 54, that conversation looks very different. Has it happened in the Promise Room, or are they just hoping love will be enough when it surfaces later?
It will surface. I say that not as someone who thinks it's a deal-breaker, but as someone who knows that the gap between a romantic decision and a reproductive one is real, and that reality TV, by design, stays on the romantic side of it.
I sit on my couch knowing what they haven't asked yet, rooting for them anyway.
Photo source: People
Reading Anxiety: Why I Always Need a Book in My Head
Confession: I always need to be reading a book. Not want, need. If I have a story in my head, I can't hear my own anxiety. It doesn't have room. The spiral that would otherwise set up camp between my ears gets evicted by fictional people with fictional problems, which are somehow infinitely more manageable than my own.
Nora Ephron once wrote that reading is everything: that it makes her smarter, gives her something to talk about, and is, in her words, "the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself." That it's escape and the opposite of escape at once. That it's bliss. I've read that quote probably a hundred times, and it still feels like someone finally put words to something I'd been doing my whole life without being able to explain it.
My current read is This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum — part thriller, part slow-burn love story about best friends who host a survival podcast, one of whom disappears, with her own unpublished memoir slowly revealing why. I started it on a Tuesday night and my husband had to physically tell me it was 11:30, which, with three kids under eight, is genuinely not okay.
There's something reliable about fiction that I haven't found anywhere else. Not podcasts, not TV... those leave too much room for my brain to wander off and catastrophize. A really good novel requires just enough of me that worry can't find a foothold, and the part of my brain that would otherwise be composing worst-case scenarios gets handed something better to do with itself.
I've been doing this since I was a kid reading under the covers with a flashlight, long after my parents told me lights out — and if it's a coping mechanism, it's the one I'd pick every time.
Reader, I Cried: The IVF Cancer Study We've Been Waiting For
If you know me IRL, you know I have the kind of health anxiety that comes from knowing too much. Not spiraling-at-2am anxiety, but the specific, well-researched kind that accumulates when you work in women's health, carry an ATM gene mutation, have a history of infertility, three IVF babies, and a best friend who died of breast cancer at 31. I'm not being dramatic. I'm simply a woman who's done the math.
For me, "preventative health" looks like annual mammograms, a breast MRI every six months in between, and a standing appointment with low-grade dread every time a result takes longer than expected to populate in the patient portal. It's manageable — it's just always there, slightly beneath the surface. So you can imagine how it felt to read this.
A new study in JAMA Network Open analyzed nearly 418,000 women who underwent fertility treatment and found that their overall invasive cancer rates were comparable to the general population. Reader, I cried a little.
To be fair, it's not a complete all-clear: uterine and ovarian cancer rates were modestly higher in some groups, and researchers believe that likely reflects underlying conditions like PCOS and endometriosis rather than the treatments themselves. Still worth a conversation with your doctor. But the headline finding — that IVF doesn't appear to raise your overall cancer risk — is going in the file I keep of things that help me sleep at night.
Because here's what nobody warns you about fertility treatment: it doesn't end when you get the baby. The what-did-we-do-to-my-body question follows you into the next chapter, asking itself whether you invited it or not. A study like this one doesn't answer everything, but for the first time in a long time, the math feels slightly more in my favor.
Is the "Soft Girl" Era Making Us Soft?
There's a video circulating that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. It's a critique of the "soft girl" era — the aesthetic of candles, nervous system regulation, protecting your peace, saying no, slow mornings, and the general pressure to do less of anything that might cause discomfort.
And the question it asks is a good one: in our collective rush to calm down, are we losing something?
I'll be honest. I've been fully enrolled. I traded HIIT for Pilates. I drink my coffee before breakfast in the morning to avoid cortisol spikes. And I do think a lot of it is legitimate — women in particular have spent generations absorbing stress that was never ours to carry, and learning to set it down is not weakness.
But there's a version of this that has gone sideways.
When "protecting your peace" becomes a reason to avoid hard conversations, hard work, hard feelings — when the nervous system becomes a permanent excuse rather than something you're actually healing — that's just avoidance. And somewhere along the way, avoidance got a really good PR team.
Pushing through hard things isn't the opposite of healing. Some things are just supposed to be hard (ahem, parenting), and you don't find out what you're made of by opting out of them. The soft era, taken too far, quietly tells women to shrink... just in pastel, with a red light mask on.
We can regulate our nervous systems and still be in the arena. Some of us don't have a choice.
What Christina Applegate's Book Made Me Google
As someone with an autoimmune condition (hi, Hashimoto's, the gift that keeps on giving), I'm obsessed with the research connecting what happens to us emotionally — especially early in life — to what eventually shows up in our bodies.
I came across this Norwegian study while listening to Christina Applegate's new memoir, You with the Sad Eyes. She trauma dumps — freely and without apology — and somewhere in the middle of it, I couldn't stop thinking: what if these things aren't separate stories?
Turns out, researchers are asking the same question.
The study followed nearly 78,000 women and found that childhood sexual or emotional abuse was associated with a significantly increased risk of developing multiple sclerosis. Women who experienced sexual abuse had a 65% higher risk. Those exposed to all three types of abuse (sexual, emotional, and physical) had a 93% higher risk.
The body keeps running a stress response that was never supposed to be permanent, and then everyone acts surprised when it shows up as something.
Women are already underdiagnosed and underbelieved in medicine. Add a trauma history, and suddenly symptoms become anxiety, stress, and "have you tried therapy?" The idea that the stress response to trauma could be a biological MS risk factor doesn't just tell us something about the disease; it tells us something about why women's pain gets dismissed for so long.
Most of us have spent years wondering what our bodies were trying to tell us. Some of us are still finding out.
Ask Clara:
"When does MS typically show up in women?"