09/17/2026
I've asked myself this question for years, and I finally went looking for a real answer: if so many of us need HRT just to replace the estrogen we lose, why does the body take it away in the first place?
I started noticing it in my own body too. The belly fat that showed up out of nowhere. The muscle that used to bounce back so easily and now doesn't. Every friend I talk to describes some version of the same thing.
There was probably an old assumption that women simply died before menopause even began, so it barely mattered as a life stage. Turns out that's not what the numbers actually show. Women who made it to adulthood have been living well past menopause for a very long time. It's one of the more interesting things about being human: almost no other animal does this. The only other species known to go through menopause are five kinds of whale, including orcas.
The leading theory, though debated, is called the grandmother hypothesis. At some point it became more valuable for an older woman to pour her energy into the children and grandchildren already here rather than have more of her own. Both humans and these whales live in tight, multigenerational families, and evolution reached for the same solution in both of us.
Menopause isn't your body malfunctioning. It's ancient and it's intentional. What's changed is that most of us are going through it without the built-in support system it was designed around, which is exactly why it can feel so much harder than it should.
I wrote the full story, with the research behind it, here: thewellnesshubnyc.com/why-do-women-go-through-menopause