Remember 5th grade health class? Pads, tampons, cramps, done.

But what if your gym teacher had told you this: your period isn’t just five days of bleeding. It’s a map of your body’s hormonal changes. And if you learn to listen, you’ll discover a different set of superpowers every single week of your cycle.

That’s the foundation of cycle syncing — and it’s what we’re diving into today.

In this episode, I’m breaking down:

• Why so many of us high-achieving millennial moms are burned out and disconnected from our bodies
• How diet and fitness culture has been wrecking our hormonal health
• The difference between the male 24-hour cycle and the female 28-day infradian cycle (and why it matters)
• The four phases of your cycle — menstrual, follicular, ovulatory, and luteal — and how to align food, fitness, and energy with each one
• What cycle syncing actually looks like in real life (yes, including naps and Gilmore Girls marathons)

This isn’t about doing more. It’s about finally listening to your body — and discovering that your hormones aren’t the enemy, they’re the instruction manual.

✨ Grab your free Cycle Syncing Map — the fridge-friendly cheat sheet that breaks it all down for you 

🎧 And make sure to hit subscribe — cycle syncing will be a recurring theme on this show, and you’ll want to come back to this episode again and again.

Remember TRL after school, low-rise jeans that never passed the squat check, and crying through Titanic in theaters (every single time)? We were unstoppable in our 20s—CrossFit at dawn, cocktails at midnight, living on four hours of sleep and audacity. Then we became moms… and suddenly our gold-star perfectionism turned into exhaustion, anxiety, and maybe even a late-in-life ADHD diagnosis.

Now? Our bodies aren’t letting us “just push through” anymore. The gray hairs, the 2 a.m. doom spirals, our hormones losing the plot—welcome to perimenopause, the era nobody prepared us for.

I’m Stacey Hutson—wellness chef, health coach, mom of two, and former cohost of the Mother Plus Podcast—and this is The Next Phase Podcast. Each week I’ll bring you the wellness tools and the woo practices that help us navigate perimenopause with more energy, more clarity, and a lot more fun.

Subscribe now so you don’t miss the first full episode—because if we do this right, our 40s might just be the best years yet.

Welcome to The Next Phase Podcast! I’m Stacey Hutson—wellness chef, health coach, mom of two, and former co-host of the Mother Plus Podcast. This show is for millennial moms who are staring down a season of life we never thought would actually come: perimenopause.

If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking things like:

• Why don’t I have any energy anymore?
• Is it just me, or did my body change overnight?
• Can I balance my hormones naturally, without hormone treatment? 
• Wait… am I really old enough for perimenopause??

Then you’re in the right place.

In this first episode, I’m sharing why I started The Next Phase, what you can expect each week (think wellness meets woo, science meets soul, and a lot of honest conversations about our capacity), and how we’re going to figure this out together—without shame, confusion, or feeling like you’re completely alone in it.

This isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about creating space for the questions—and finding a better way through this next phase of life.