I have mixed feelings about this book.

The book is long and full of information. A lot of the information was great, I agree with most of it, and Northrup is surprisingly holistic for an MD.

But, the book was very bloated. I agree with most of her nutritional/medicinal opinions, but a lot of the book was also about how certain emotions can cause certain symptoms. I definitely believe that stress and attitude affect our health, hormones, etc., and can cause symptoms. But I have a hard time accepting that extremely specific emotions can cause specific symptoms. I really don’t think this has been proven and the book did not prove it to me.

I’m sure a lot of her talk of emotions can help a lot of people. I’m sure her advice will help people and many will resonate with it - whether or not it is true that x emotion caused y symptom. I just didn’t enjoy all the emotion talk - the book was overall way too feminine for me.

I understand this book is for women and I shouldn’t be expected to enjoy the emotional discussions, but as a health advisor I tried to understand the protocols she’s recommending, and I am not convinced that the “past traumas” and emotional programming we have are THAT important to health.

I don’t use any type of emotional coaching in my nutrition business. But, I do believe that if someone needs emotional help, they will get a better result if they fix that. I’m not dismissing emotions but this book was a bit much for me. A lot of the case studies she shared were women who worked on their nutrition AND emotions, and did other healthy things (like exercising more). It is very hard to tell what value the emotional work actually had - I believe the nutrition/lifestyle changes are responsible for most of the improvements reported.

If this book wasn’t over 800 pages I wouldn’t have such a problem with some emotional theory being included. But she had a lot of legitimate information to explain, and adding in so much emotional stuff made it a very long and bloated book. It could have easily just been 2 separate books and I wouldn’t have read the emotional one.

Despite all this, a lot of women would probably appreciate this book.