From Reset to Clarity: Why “Clearly Hormonal” Was Born

Do you ever feel like you’re not getting straight answers about your hormones, your cycle, or your health? You’re not alone. Women’s health has historically been under researched, undervalued, and under resourced, leaving many women stuck navigating symptoms without real clarity or support.

In this episode, Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia (endocrinologist, internist, obesity medicine specialist, and Menopause Society certified practitioner introduces her newly rebranded podcast, Clearly Hormonal, and shares why she made the decision to move away from Reset Recharge. Through a variety of personal and professional experiences in women’s healthcare, she has gained a deep understanding of how the gaps in research and education impact both patients and providers – and why so many women end up feeling dismissed, misdiagnosed, or misunderstood.

Dr. Patil-Sisodia breaks down the systemic issues that have shaped women’s healthcare, why confusion around reproductive and hormonal health is so common, and what needs to change. Her mission with Clearly Hormonal is simple but powerful: to cut through the noise, identify the right questions, and empower women by providing them the clarity and knowledge they deserve.

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Audio Stamps 

01:17 – Dr. Patil-Sisodia posits that women are advocating for themselves to the best of their ability in a healthcare system that has yet to give them a clear framework to understand and address their conditions.

03:40 – Dr. Patil-Sisodia discusses her early experiences withgaps in women’s healthcare when, as a young adult, shewitnessed her mother’s two-year struggle to receive a diagnosis and treatment for a cardiovascular condition.  

05:05 – How the tables turned on Dr. Patil-Sisodia when she became a patient, an experience that heightened her insight into the emotional and psychological struggles faced by women dealing with reproductive health issues. 

10:00 – The medical field has failed to provide physicians with clearly defined processes and protocol for addressing women’s hormonal health.

15:50 – Rebranding the podcast was an intentional and strategic shift stemming from Dr. Patil-Sisodia’s growing clarity around her core audience and evolving goals. 

17:50 – It’s time to reclaim the narrative around the word “hormonal” – it’s not drama, it’s physiology.

Thanks for listening. Find more info about Reset Recharge on the website or Instagram.

Transcript

Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia 0:01

Welcome to Clearly Hormonal, the podcast where we stop googling our symptoms at midnight and actually start understanding what's going on in our bodies. I'm Dr. Komal Patil- Sisodia, an endocrinologist, internist, obesity medicine specialist, and a Menopause Society certified practitioner. Which is really just a whole lot of words to say. Hormones are kind of my jam. I've spent 17 years watching women try to navigate their hormonal health without ever having been taught the language for what's happening in their own bodies, and then meeting clinicians who want nothing more than to help them figure it out, but are up against 10 minute appointments in a system that just wasn't built for it. This podcast is my answer to that gap. We'll cover menopause, metabolism, hormones, and everything in between with real evidence, not trends, and without the overwhelm. A quick disclaimer, I'm a physician, but this is education, not personalized medical advice. Take what resonates and discuss it with your own healthcare team. Now, let's get into it and talk about what's clearly hormonal and what's not. Something has been sitting with me for a while now. I've been doing this work for 17 years, and the more time I spend with patients really in the room with them listening, the more I keep coming back to the same thing. Women are trying to figure out their health. They're genuinely trying. They're Googling at midnight. They're bringing printed lab results to appointments. They're tracking symptoms in their notes app because they need someone to take them seriously. They are doing everything right. And they're still confused, not because they're not smart, not because the information isn't out there, but because no one has given them a clear framework to actually make sense of what's happening in their own bodies. And that's what the show is going to do. And I want to start by telling you exactly why I'm here and why I almost wasn't. If you've been with me from Reset, recharge, first of all, thank you. Seriously, you showed up when this was just me at a microphone and a lot of things I needed to get off my chest, and that mattered to me more than you know, and this rebrand is still me. The same doctor, same mission, same deep frustration with a medical system that keeps failing women. Nothing about that has changed. What has changed is that I've gotten clearer about what I'm trying to do. Who I'm trying to reach and what the show actually needs to be to get there, reset, recharge, made sense. When I started it was where I was, but I've grown since then professionally, personally, and the show needed to grow with me. So if you're new here, welcome. You found this at the right time, and if you've been here from the beginning, thank you for growing with me. Let's go. Let me tell you a little bit about who I am and why I'm the person talking to you about this. I am triple board certified in internal medicine, endocrinology and obesity medicine. I'm also a Menopause Society certified practitioner, which is a credential that matters to me a lot because menopause medicine is. Still treated like a niche, and it's absolutely not a niche. It hits every doctor's office. I run Eastside Menopause and Metabolism, which is a direct specialty care practice in Washington state. I opened it about a year ago, but I've been in practice for 17 years and I'm not saying all of this to, you know, list my credentials or try and impress you, but I want you to understand where, what I'm about to tell you is coming from. This is not wellness content, this is clinical experience. Thousands of patient encounters, thousands of conversations that I've had and a pattern that I can't unsee. But honestly, it starts way before any of that. It starts with my mom. In 1998, I was a senior in high school. My mother was diagnosed with heart disease. She was only 42 years old, and it took two years to get that diagnosis. Two years of something being wrong, two years of navigating a system that wasn't built with her in mind. She's an immigrant woman, which added its own layer of complexity to every single interaction she had. And at some point I will record an episode talking about her interactions with physicians that did not have her best interests at heart. And here's the context that makes that two year delay make even more sense. And even as it breaks my heart. At that point in 1998, there were only about five years of meaningful cardiovascular research that actually included women five years. The data to recognize what heart disease looks like in a woman, how it presents differently, how it should be approached differently was barely there. So when the diagnosis finally came, stent technology was still new enough that open heart surgery was the only path forward for her, and that surgery was the beginning of a long health decline for her. I often think about what her life might look like today. Had there been more research, more advocacy, more urgency around women's health 25 years ago. That question is part of why I do this work. It's not abstract for me. And then I became a patient myself. I struggled with PCOS when I was young, and getting that diagnosis was its own fight because doctors were hesitant to. Diagnose young women with really anything. And it was also looked at as purely a reproductive disorder. And we now know that PCOS has many metabolic implications, including metabolic syndrome, which consists of high cholesterol, high blood pressure, weight gain, increased risk for diabetes and heart disease, and weight was always something that I navigated. Because of PCOS, and that's just the reality of that condition. It affects your metabolism, your insulin, your body composition in ways that don't respond to a textbook. Description of what weight loss should look like, but after the birth of my son, it became a different kind of challenge. Postpartum weight in the context of PCOS is its own thing entirely. And I was living it firsthand and somewhere in the middle of all of that, I had to reckon with something that I was not prepared for. As a physician, someone who spent years telling patients that their bodies weren't failing them, that their struggles weren't their faults, that genetics and biology are powerful forces, that lifestyle alone can't always fix. I had to sit with my own version of that truth. My body was changing in ways I could not control through lifestyle alone and accepting. That was one of the hardest things I've ever done. There's a particular kind of humility required in asking for help when you are the helper, and I knew logically, clinically, without any doubt that medicine and science exist precisely for moments like this. I've actually said those exact words to patients more times than I can count. But knowing something and living it are two completely different things. I had to dig deep and talk to myself the way that I talked to my patients first acknowledging that what was happening wasn't my fault. It wasn't something I'd done wrong. It wasn't a failure of discipline or knowledge or will, it was genetics. A hand of cards that I'd been dealt, that I didn't choose and that I couldn't change. What I could do was accept that lifestyle as important as it is, and it is genuinely important, wasn't going to be enough on its own. I needed medical help, and sitting with that as someone who has devoted her career to offering help to others was way more complicated than I expected. The irony is not lost on me. It really isn't. But I've come to believe that the difficulty I had accepting it isn't a character flaw. It's core to the human experience, especially the female experience. We are so conditioned to push through, to optimize, to do more and try harder, and accepting our own biology is something outside of our control can feel like giving up. It's not giving up. It's actually one of the most honest things you can do for yourself. I share this because I want you to know that I understand what that resistance feels like. I felt it and I'm on the other side of it, and then endometriosis. A condition I lived with for years before it was identified. I want to sit with that for a second because I was a physician when this was happening. I had the training. I had the language. I understood the system from the inside, and I still faced a delayed diagnosis. It took me 10 years to get help. I still had to push. I still had to advocate for myself in ways that I shouldn't have had to after my hysterectomy. I remember the specific feeling of realizing what life without pain was supposed to feel like. I felt better three days after surgery than I had on any day of my period in the last 10 years. That's bonkers. I had been living with a baseline that I'd normalized without ever knowing that it wasn't normal, and if I couldn't navigate the system as a doctor, knowing what I know, speaking the language I speak, I kept asking myself, what is it like for everyone else? That's when I knew that seeing patients in a clinic wasn't going to be enough. I had to do something more. What I see every day in practice is this, women who are smart, self-aware, and paying close attention to their bodies, who've left appointments, feeling like their concerns didn't quite land, not because their doctors didn't care, but because the system gives a primary care physician like 10 to 15 minutes to cover everything. Hormonal health is still under-taught in most medical training, and there's generally no roadmap for who's supposed to hold this conversation. It's just been brushed under the rug. These women are not wrong about their symptoms. They're a hundred percent right. Their body is telling them something real, and the tools to interpret it just haven't been there for them or for their provider, really. And that's the gap that I'm sitting in every single day. And that's the gap the show exists to address. I wanted to name this clearly. I want to name this clearly because I think a lot of women feel it, but haven't heard it said out loud first. The care is fragmented. Your gynecologist is manning your cycle. Your internist is managing your cholesterol. Your psychiatrist is adjusting your antidepressant, and the system isn't built for them to see the full picture together. I think this is one of the downsides of. Learning more, which sounds ironic, but honestly, the more we learn, the more specialized we've had to become because it's impossible for any one person to know everything. And when you can't see that full picture together, it's hard to see that the hormones are like the connective tissue. They are affecting everything. Your metabolism, your mood, your sleep, your cardiovascular risk, your bone density, your brain. And when each piece gets managed in isolation, the whole story gets missed. I've had patients come to see me who've seen four different specialists and gotten four different explanations for the same cluster of symptoms because each provider was doing exactly what they were trained to do within their lane. And that's not a failure of those individual doctors. They are doing their jobs. This is a structural problem with how we've organized care and it lands directly on women's bodies. Second. The information that women do get isn't actually useful. Your labs are normal. I have said that countless times I've had it said to me, but okay, normal compared to what? Normal for a 45-year-old woman in perimenopause normal for a 25-year-old. What does the number mean for how she feels? What does she do with it? What do we watch? What comes next? Normal is not a plan and without a plan. Women are just waiting. Waiting to feel worse, waiting for something to become ob, obvious enough that somebody finally takes action. Third, and this is the one that really gets me. There is a fundamental mismatch between what women are experiencing and what gets addressed. I can't tell you how many women have sat across from me and described symptoms they've had for years. Fatigue that doesn't make sense. Weight that doesn't respond to anything. Brain fog, joint pain, sleep that has. Completely fallen apart and when I ask what their previous doctor said, their answer is some version of, they said everything looked fine. And I believe that that doctor looked at the labs in front of them and said what the labs said, but the labs we routinely order aren't always the right ones. The visit length doesn't allow for full conversation, and hormonal health specifically falls in this gap in training that most clinicians never get a chance to fill. You're not making it up, and I want to be really clear about that. The symptoms are real, the gap is real, and that's why this show exists and is being rebranded. And fourth, I need to just say this because I don't think it gets named enough. This is just, this is not just a medical problem. It is a political one, and I know this is going to be polarizing for some, but I wouldn't be being authentic to myself if I didn't say it. When I was in fellowship in 2007, my mentor said something to me that I've never forgotten. Actually, he didn't remember saying it to me either, which is really kind of funny in retrospect. He said that the Women's Health Initiative, the 2002 study that upended hormone therapy overnight and sent an entire generation of women off of their prescriptions, was going to have consequences that went. Far beyond medicine. He said that we were going to take hormone therapy away from the women who marched for Roe versus Wade, that we were not going to give it to the next generation. And that Roe versus Wade would go back to the Supreme Court in my lifetime and it would be overturned. And here's the thing, he was right about all of it. I want you to think about what that means. The same generation of women who fought for bodily autonomy and reproductive rights were then denied access to evidence-based hormonal care because of a study that was later found to be significantly misinterpreted. And then the rights they fought for were stripped away in 2022. Women's health and women's rights have always been intertwined. The research gaps, the dismissed symptoms, the undertreated conditions, they don't happen in a vacuum. They happen in a culture that has. Historically treated women's bodies as secondary, as complicated, and as not worth the investment. That's the larger context of everything I'm going to talk about on this show, and I think it matters that you know it. So why did I call the podcast Reset Recharge in the first place? Honestly. It captured something I was going for at the time. This idea of reclaiming your energy, starting fresh, feeling like yourself again, and there's nothing wrong with that. Those are real things women want and deserve. It's actually what I want, but it didn't really capture what I actually do the, with the name Reset, recharge. It could have been a fitness podcast, it could have been a mindfulness show. It could have been productivity things for burnt out executives. It was warm and fuzzy and optimistic, and it was genuinely mine. But it didn't tell you that I'm a physician who specializes in hormones or that I'm going to talk about perimenopause and lab values and why your testosterone actually matters or that I'm specifically here for women who've been dismissed and it and are not going to accept that anymore. The name wasn't specific enough to find the people who needed it the most. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought about the women who are out there right now searching for answers at midnight who never search, reset, recharge. The clearer it became, the name had to change. So clearly hormonal. I want to break this down because both of the words are doing real work. Clearly, this word is about precision. It's about cutting through the noise, and there's so much noise in women's health right now. It's about evidence over trend. It's about clinical reality over wellness marketing. When I say something on the show, I'm going to tell you why I'm saying it, where it comes from and what it actually means for you. In my opinion, clarity, being as clear as possible with somebody is an active respect. And I know that a lot of providers want to give it. They just don't always have the time or the resources or the visit structure or to go as deep in the conversation that it actually needs to. And this is a show. And this show is a place where we can go that deep. I think you can handle real information and you're going to get it here. Now, second word, hormonal. I chose this word on purpose, partly because I'm an endocrinologist who really didn't love the word hormones, which I realize is hugely ironic because that's literally my job, but. Hear me out. It was because hormonal has been used against women for a very long time. It's been a dismissal. It's been a punchline, like she's just being hormonal, as if your hormones are an excuse or a flaw or something to be minimized. And here's what I know after 17. Hormones are not a flaw. They are a system. They are the reason that your energy, your metabolism, your ability to think through things, your cardiovascular health, your mood, all of it are connected. And when that system is off, everything downstream is affected. And that's not drama, that is physiology. So I'm putting it right in the name because I am done treating it like something to tiptoe around. I'm done being the endocrinologist who doesn't like the word hormones? The tagline for this podcast is Hormonal Health without the confusion, and that's the whole mission. That is what we're going to do here. I want to tell you specifically what the show is going to be because you deserve to know what you're signing up for. We're going to cover hormones clearly explained. I'm gonna try and explain all the jargon that we use on a doctor's office, and I'm not going to assume that you know what all of these things already mean. We're going to talk about endocrinology beyond reproductive health. So, yes, we'll talk about menopause and perimenopause extensively, but hormones don't stop at your ovaries. We're gonna talk about thyroid, adrenal function, metabolic health, insulin resistance, cardiovascular risk, because that's the full picture and that's what your body actually is. And here's what I think is going to be most useful. We're going to talk about what to do. What to monitor, what questions to ask your doctor, what to push back on when the answer doesn't feel right. Not just, here's how your body works, but here's what you do with that information, because understanding is only the first step. What I want for you as agency, I want for you to be able to walk into your next appointment knowing exactly what you need, knowing how to advocate for yourself, and knowing when to find someone else if you're not getting it. That is what clearly hormonal is for. In the next episode, I'm going to zoom out a bit. We are going to talk about something that I think we just don't name clearly enough. The different hormonal eras of a woman's life, not just puberty, pregnancy, menopause, but the actual biological shifts that are happening along the way and why understanding them changes how you think about your health at every age. If you have ever felt like your body has changed and no one has told you it was going to, that episode is going to be for you. Going forward, episodes are gonna get progressively more practical and fun. We're building a foundation right now, and then we're gonna go deep. So stay close. And one more thing before I let you go. Part of what I've been working on outside of the podcast in my practice is thinking about how to make this stuff actually structured for women. Not just more content, not just more information, but a real framework. A way to look at the full picture of your hormonal health and actually know where you stand. I've teased it a little bit on social media, but I'm building a tool called the Midlife Health Compass, and I want you to know what's coming and when it does, I think it's gonna change how you approach your conversation with your doctor. So more on that soon. Alright. That is episode one, and if this resonated with you, if you heard something in there that sounded like your experience, I want you to think of one woman in your life who needs to hear it. A friend who's been told her labs are fine when she knows something's off. A sister who's been brushed off, send it to her, and this is how we change this. You can find me on TikTok and Instagram at @drpatilsisodia. Subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss what's coming next. And thank you for being here, for making the switch with me and for trusting that this is worth your time. I'll see you on the next episode.