Guest: Erika Hewlett, Nutritional Therapist Practitioner & Yoga Teacher at Compassion, Nutrition & Wellness
Connect with Erika Hewlett: Website | Instagram | Facebook
Free Download: Daily Rhythms for Perimenopause Checklist
Topics covered: Perimenopause & menopause, adrenal health, HTMA (Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis), blood sugar regulation, cortisol & stress hormones, intuitive eating, fasting, peptides, circadian rhythm, nervous system regulation, ceremonial cacao
Resources mentioned:
The Body Keeps the Score — Bessel van der Kolk
Rushing Woman’s Syndrome — Dr. Libby Weaver
Cacao Source (ceremonial cacao)
HTMA testing (Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis)
Sachin Patel (breathwork, nervous system, circadian rhythm)
Erika’s upcoming program: Fatigue to Flourish — a three-month program covering minerals, HTMA, nervous system work, and nutrition.
🎵 Music credit:
Intro and outro music: Madre Ayahuasca by Arkawa
Used with permission. More at arkawamusic.com
🌐 Visit www.goddessintraining.online for more tools to support your intuitive journey.
Your Body Already Knows
There’s a moment that happens for a lot of women in midlife. You’re sitting across from your doctor, you’ve just described the fatigue, the weight that appeared from nowhere, the hair in the shower drain, the sleep that no longer restores you — and your doctor looks at your bloodwork and says: everything looks fine.
And you leave the office holding two completely contradictory things at once. The relief of nothing being clinically wrong. And the quiet, insistent voice that says: but something is not right.
That voice is your intuition. And learning to trust it — especially when the data says otherwise — might be one of the most important things you do in this season of life.
This week on Goddess in Training, I sat down with nutritional therapist practitioner and yoga teacher Erika Hewlett, and our conversation kept circling back to this same essential truth: the body is always communicating. The symptoms we’re so quick to pathologize, medicate, or push through are actually messages. Clues. An invitation to pay closer attention.
Erika works primarily with women navigating perimenopause and menopause, and her approach is refreshingly unglamorous. She’s not selling a protocol or a superfoods list. She starts, almost always, in the same place: the nervous system. Because here’s what she sees again and again in her practice — women arriving depleted. Minerals run low, adrenals overtaxed, cortisol chronically elevated, bodies stuck in a sympathetic state they’ve been running in for decades.
The hormonal shifts of perimenopause don’t happen in a vacuum. As the ovaries begin producing less estrogen, the adrenal glands are meant to pick up some of that slack. But if those adrenal glands have spent twenty or thirty years managing stress, trauma, 60-hour work weeks, and the particular relentlessness of being a woman in the world? They don’t have much left to give.
“It all comes back to stress,” Erika told me. And I think most of us know this on some level. We know we’re running too fast. We know we’re not sleeping enough, not eating slowly enough, not stepping outside into actual sunlight enough. We know. And yet.
What struck me most in our conversation was how she reframes the symptoms themselves. Not as problems to be solved or enemies to be defeated, but as signals from a body that is doing exactly what it’s designed to do — trying to come back into balance, trying to get your attention, trying to bring you home.
That reframe is everything. Because when we’re in problem-solving mode, we’re in resistance. We’re at war with our own experience. And that resistance — that fight — is itself a form of stress. More cortisol. More depletion. More of exactly what we don’t need.
What if instead, we got curious?
Erika talks about the way we eat as a microcosm of the way we live. Most of us are eating the same way we do everything else — fast, distracted, standing up, in between things. She suggests something almost radical in its simplicity: sit down, put your fork down between bites, chew your food. Not as a diet strategy, but as a practice in presence. As a way of telling your nervous system: you are safe. You can rest now. This moment is enough.
It sounds small. It isn’t.
We also talked about the way intuition gets harder to access when we’re depleted. How hunger signals get distorted, how cravings stop being information and start being noise, how the body’s wisdom becomes harder to hear under the static of chronic stress. And how, as we move into this transitional time — perimenopause as a threshold, as an initiation — there’s an opportunity, if we’re willing to take it, to start actually listening.
Not just to hunger cues. To all of it. To what we actually want. What we actually need. What we’ve been too busy to hear.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how this season of life has a way of surfacing everything we’ve been outrunning. The unprocessed grief, the deferred rest, the dreams we quietly set aside. Perimenopause has a way of making it harder to keep running. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the hot flashes and the sleeplessness and the inexplicable tears are the body saying, in the only language loud enough to finally be heard: slow down. It’s time.
Erika said something near the end of our conversation that I keep turning over: the body is always trying to come back to homeostasis. Always. No matter how far we’ve pushed it, no matter how long we’ve ignored it, it is oriented toward balance. Toward wholeness. Toward you.
Your body already knows. The question is whether you’re willing to listen.
