In my early forties I was eating what I thought was a healthy diet — lots of vegetables, “heart-healthy” oils, low-fat everything. I was exercising regularly. And yet I was exhausted, bloated after almost every meal, waking up at 3am drenched in sweat, and struggling to string a coherent sentence together by mid-afternoon.

My doctor said it was just perimenopause. Hormones. Normal. But nothing about how I felt seemed normal to me — and none of the advice I was given actually helped.

So I went back to the research. I spent years studying the science of inflammation, hormonal transition, gut health, and the specific ways that modern processed foods — including many I’d been eating in the name of health — were quietly driving my symptoms.

What I found changed everything. The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t trying hard enough. The problem was that much of what I’d been told was healthy food was, for a perimenopausal woman, actively fanning the inflammatory fire.

I rebuilt my approach from the ground up: real food, minimally processed, with a specific focus on the dietary factors that research shows most directly influence inflammation in women during hormonal transition. Within weeks, the bloating improved. Within two months, I was sleeping through the night. Within three months, I felt — for the first time in years — like myself again.

That experience is the entire reason Real Food Science exists.

Everything published on Real Food Science is researched, written, and reviewed by Stephanie personally. No AI-generated filler, no recycled wellness myths, no advice that hasn’t been stress-tested against the peer-reviewed literature.