‘Have a few kids, that’s the only way to balance your hormones’

I was eighteen the first time I heard it, and I kept hearing it for seven years. Heavy periods, PMS, acne, exhaustion — all normal, apparently. Nobody mentioned that normal and you’ll have to live with it are two different things.

Seven years of appointments. Nobody once looked at the whole list at the same time.

That is, to this day, my favourite piece of medical advice I have ever been given.

By then I already had a list. Periods heavy enough to plan my month around. PMS that took a week out of every four. Acne. Bloating. Mood swings I couldn’t explain to anyone, including myself. Anxiety. A tiredness that no amount of sleep touched. And, somewhere in among all that, a lump in my breast.

Every single item on that list was looked at on its own, by somebody who never saw the rest of it. And every single time, in one form or another, I was told the same thing: this is normal for a girl your age.

Three years later: different doctor, different city, same answers. Different clinics, different countries, the same handful of options handed over as though they were the only ones that existed.

If I’d taken all of it, I’d have a small village by now and — let’s be honest — I’d probably feel considerably worse.

Nobody did. So I went and did it myself, which took the better part of a decade and a genuinely embarrassing amount of trial and error.

The breakthrough, when it finally came, arrived in two parts.

Not a cure. Not a miracle. I’m not going to sell you one of those.

I stopped chasing symptoms one at a time. A dermatologist for the skin. A gynaecologist for the cycle. A GP for the tiredness, who checked my bloods, found them normal and told me I was fine. In my experience, nobody was bringing all of those pieces together. And I’m fairly sure a lot of you will relate. Unfortunately.

So I started having it myself. Not a diagnosis, and not one clever answer — I want to be careful here, because my situation turned out to be genuinely complicated and it’s mine, not yours. What changed was the approach. I stopped asking what would make this one thing go away and started looking at the boring foundations underneath all of it: protein, blood sugar, stress, sleep, movement, the micronutrients I’d been quietly short on for years. That is where things finally started to move for me.

The second part was more boring, and honestly more useful. One of the women we spoke to later put it better than I ever have: “Everything that I take my 70,000 supplements for — it’s just in one.” Knowing what to take turned out to be nothing like actually taking it. I had fifteen bottles, four alarms and a pill organiser I resented, and by Wednesday of most weeks I’d given up on half of it. What I needed wasn’t more information. It was for the whole thing to become one decision, in the thirty seconds I actually had, on the worst morning of the month.

There’s another version of this I hear constantly, and it’s worth saying out loud. There are a lot of supplements out there, and plenty of them are purely marketing. So you may well have been taking the right things already — but if the form or the amount wasn’t backed by anything, you probably didn’t feel much of a difference, and then quietly concluded that supplements don’t work for you.

So SMOODI is built around the two things I could actually control: formulation and consistency. It took eighteen months, a formulation team, and an unreasonable number of rejected recipes.

I’m not going to pretend it’s the answer. There isn’t one. Hormonal health is a dozen things working together, most of them unglamorous, and no drink is going to replace sleep or the conversation with your GP. What it does replace is the shelf.

Here’s how I got there.

It started after a knee surgery

I was an athlete, and then I wasn’t, and somewhere in that year I found the first lump. Benign, thankfully. I asked why it was there.

“Nobody really knows why breast lumps happen.”
“Have kids, it’ll clear out your blood.”

So I had surgery to remove it, because that was the advice, and I was eighteen and I assumed the people saying it knew more than I did.

At the same time I had heavy periods, PMS that took a week out of every month, acne, and a digestive system with opinions about everything. All of it, I was told, was normal for a girl my age.

Between eighteen and twenty-five, this was the list

Nobody ever put that list on one page. I was young. I was a woman. I was stressed. And then my personal favourite: “There’s nothing to be done. It’s just your fate.”

Look at that list again

Eight lines. Eight appointments. Eight separate explanations, none of which ever mentioned any of the others.

Sometimes four seemingly separate problems deserve one bigger conversation.

I’m not saying every tired woman has the same underlying story. I’m saying nobody ever sat down with my whole list and talked me through how the different systems might be pulling on each other. Being told something is normal is not the same as being told you have to live with it.

It took me until twenty-five to work that out, and by then it had cost me considerably more than time.

The part where I hit the bottom

I want to tell you this part, because skipping it is how women end up believing they’re being dramatic. It is also the least useful part of my story, and I’ll explain why in a moment.

At twenty-five I had three lumps removed in one operation. Three incisions. Three wounds. Three scars.

It was the most painful thing that has ever happened to me. It took more than two years to recover from mentally. Physically I never really did — the scars are bad, and they hurt, every month, on schedule, like a reminder.

Six months later I went for a check-up and they found another one. I was booked straight back into surgery.

Here is the bit I actually want you to take from this: you should not have to get this far before anyone takes the whole list seriously. I did, and it is the single thing I would change. If your version is heavy periods, bad skin, a gut that’s stopped cooperating and a week of every month you write off — that is already enough. You don’t need a scar to earn the bigger conversation.

I’m not proud of the manner. I’m extremely proud of the decision.

I stopped chasing symptoms and started looking at foundations

Which sounds far more heroic than it was. The reality was reading medical journals until two in the morning on a work night. Books. Studies I half understood and had to read four times. Tests I paid for myself. Functional medicine practitioners. A lot of trial, and a genuinely embarrassing amount of error.

What I actually changed was unglamorous. How much protein I was getting, and when. What my blood sugar was doing between meals. Sleep. Stress, which I had been treating as a personality trait rather than an input. Movement. The micronutrients I’d been quietly short on for years, in forms my body could actually use, at amounts that meant something.

Slowly, things changed for me. It took the better part of a decade. It shouldn’t take you that.

And then I noticed something faintly ridiculous

After years of being handed separate solutions for separate problems, I had gone and built exactly the same thing for myself. Protein here. A vitamin there. Another capsule for something else. My morning had become the outpatient system in miniature, except now I was the one running it badly.

Fifteen bottles. Different timings, some with food, some without. A pill organiser I bought and then resented. It cost a fortune, it took up a shelf, and — this is the honest bit — by Wednesday of most weeks I’d stopped taking half of it.

I had a career. I had a life. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of it being my own pharmacist.

I wanted the foundations in one place. One product, built around female physiology rather than a men’s formula in different packaging, at the doses the research actually uses rather than the doses that make a label look busy.

It didn’t exist. So I built it.

Which is what the rest of this page is about. Before I get into it, the practical part, so you don’t have to scroll to the very bottom to find it.

What’s actually in it

SMOODI is one vanilla drink, every morning, in place of the shelf. 25g of protein and the things I’d been buying separately, in one scoop that takes thirty seconds.

I have opinions about every single item in here and I’ll happily tell you why each one earned its place. Nothing is in it because it looks good on a label. If I couldn’t justify a dose, it didn’t go in.

There are a few more things in there — myo-inositol, rhodiola, L-theanine, a kiwifruit complex, artichoke, bromelain, MCT. I’ve deliberately not written a benefit next to those, because in the UK there’s no authorised health claim for them and I’m not going to invent one. They’re in at the amounts used in the research, they’re on the label, and you can go and read about them yourself. That’s the honest version.

The one hormonal claim I can actually make, I’ll make properly: vitamin B6 contributes to the regulation of hormonal activity. That’s the sentence. Anyone promising you considerably more than that is either guessing, or hoping you won’t check.

The one I get asked about most: blood glucose

You don’t have to be diabetic to care about this. If your morning is a coffee, then nothing until half one, then a sudden and very specific need for something sweet at four — that’s a pattern worth understanding, and it’s one of the foundations I mentioned earlier.

It’s why there’s chromium in here, which contributes to the maintenance of normal blood glucose levels. Alongside 25g of protein, which is the other half of not falling off a cliff at four in the afternoon.

I had the vision. That doesn’t mean I had every answer.

I’ve spent enough money being sold things by people with no qualifications to have very strong feelings about this. Having a strong vision doesn’t mean pretending you know everything, so I got the qualifications into the room rather than performing them.

Dr Rumbi Mutenga

GP & Scientific Advisor

Resident doctor in general practice, and a former midwife.

Dr N. K.

GP & Scientific Advisor

Over a decade in practice, and a functional medicine practitioner. For now, she stays behind the scenes.

Rocsi Chereches

Nutritionist & Strategic Advisor

Menstrual cycle nutritionist and TEDx Salon speaker.

Laura Marricks

Holistic Nutritionist & Chef

Le Cordon Bleu London trained. She developed every SMOODI recipe.

Four women with different expertise, different perspectives, and the confidence to challenge mine. Doing women’s health responsibly means knowing when to listen, when to question, and who deserves a seat at the table.

And before any of it was formulated, we had hundreds of conversations with women about what they were actually taking, what they kept forgetting, and what they’d quietly given up on. Two things came up so often I started writing them down word for word.

And this one, from a woman explaining why she’d had to learn all of it on her own:

She’s right. I hate that she’s right.

“Fine. But protein powder tastes like a punishment.”

I know. And I genuinely don’t understand why the industry decided you only get two options.

Option one: it tastes like a bag of sweets, and you’re drinking sugar with a nice label.
Option two: the formulation is excellent and you force it down every morning like medicine.

Who decided those were the choices?

If I’m asking you to drink something every single day, it has to be something you actually want. So a Le Cordon Bleu trained chef developed the recipes, and we kept reformulating and rejecting them until I was happy to drink it myself.

It doesn’t taste of beef. It doesn’t go gritty. And if it turns out not to be for you, I’d genuinely rather know — tell me, and I’ll pass it to the person who reformulated it eleven times.

Yes, £85 is more than a protein powder. It isn’t a protein powder.

If I looked in your supplement drawer, would I find these?

Most of it went out of date before it went into me, which is a very expensive way to feel guilty.

A pouch is £85 and lasts the month. One drink, thirty seconds, and the one I’m fairly confident you won’t forget.

Simple isn’t less effective. Simple is just something you can keep doing.

What the first month actually looks like

I’m not going to tell you it’s a quick fix. I don’t believe in those and I’m not about to start selling them.

The questions I’d ask, if I were you

“I’ve tried supplements. They didn’t do anything.”

Most likely you took underdosed versions of the right things, inconsistently, because the routine was designed by someone who has never had a Tuesday like yours. Dose and consistency are most of it. That’s what this is built around.

“Is this another influencer wellness brand?”

I spent ten years as a customer of that industry before I built anything, so I understand the suspicion completely. The branding is fun. The formula isn’t. Every ingredient is in there because it does a job, at a dose the research uses.

“Where does the beef protein come from?”

Grass-fed. I chose it because it gives a complete amino acid profile that most plant proteins don’t, and because it mixes without going chalky. If you’d rather not drink beef protein, I completely understand, and this isn’t the product for you.

“Can I take this alongside my medication, or my condition?”

Ask your GP or pharmacist first — genuinely, not as a disclaimer. I can tell you exactly what’s in it and at what dose, and it’s all on the label, so you can take that with you. What I can’t tell you is how it sits with your prescription or your history. Not intended for anyone under 18, or if you’re pregnant or breastfeeding.

“Has anyone other than you actually used it?”

Around a hundred women have been drinking it while we tested and reformulated, and their feedback is the reason the recipe changed as many times as it did. What I don’t have yet is a wall of five-star reviews, because this is the first batch at any real scale — and I’d rather tell you that than borrow somebody else’s.

“When does it arrive, and what if I change my mind?”

It’s dispatched from the UK — delivery timings and the returns terms are both on the product page, and your standard UK consumer rights apply in full. If something turns up wrong, reply to the order email and it comes to me.

“What if I stop taking it, like I stop taking everything?”

That’s the honest question, and it’s the one the whole product is built around. I stopped taking six things by Wednesday, every week, for years. One drink, thirty seconds, in the slot where breakfast already goes — that’s the only version I ever managed to keep.

Reasons you’ll either buy this, or absolutely not

If any of that makes you uncomfortable, we probably won’t get along. And that’s okay. I didn’t build this to tell women what they want to hear. If you’re here for evidence over hype, welcome.

Three types of women are reading this right now

What people who aren’t me have said

Two of the hundred or so women who drank it while we were still reformulating.

The first batch is 300 pouches, and then we have to make more

Three hundred. One production run, tested — and then a gap while the next one is made. It isn’t a marketing decision, it’s honestly just how much we could make properly the first time.

Which creates an awkward problem, because 300 doesn’t go very far. When they’re gone the page will say so, and I’d rather tell you that now than have you find out in a fortnight.

No subscription, no tiers or points or app. One pouch, one price, and you buy the next one if and when you want it. And if you’re not sure, don’t order — I’d rather you waited than bought something you weren’t convinced by.

I spent seven years being told my symptoms were separate problems and one unfortunate personality. They weren’t.

You shouldn’t need a crisis, a diagnosis or a scar before you decide that feeling awful every month deserves your attention. Don’t wait until you’re in a surgical gown to start asking the harder questions. I did, and I’d very much like you not to.

I can’t give myself that decade back. I can build the thing I wish I’d had while I was in it.

A pouch is £85 and it lasts the month. That’s the whole ask.

Anyway. That’s the pitch. I did warn you I’d talk about this more than anyone asked me to.

— Simona