Balance Matters: Rethinking Estrogen, Reclaiming Progesterone, Restoring Hormonal Stability

by Kitty Martone

In a world where estrogen has been crowned the hero of women’s health, Balance Matters challenges the narrative—and asks a better what if it’s not about more hormones, but the right balance?

Health journalist and educator Kitty Martone, known as Healthy Gut Girl, shares her personal journey through hormone confusion, dead ends in conventional care, and the discoveries that changed everything. Drawing from years of research and real-world experience, she unpacks the misunderstood roles of estrogen and progesterone—and why so many women still feel unwell despite doing “everything right.”

This book goes beyond surface-level solutions to explore the true foundations of hormone health, including metabolism, thyroid function, liver detoxification, and gut health. It explains why symptoms like hot flashes, anxiety, weight gain, and fatigue are often signs of imbalance—not deficiency—and why simply adding estrogen isn’t always the answer.

Balance Matters is a call for clarity, context, and a return to foundational health. It offers a grounded, empowering perspective for women who are ready to step out of the confusion and finally understand what their bodies have been trying to say all along.

180 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 5, 2026

Reviews

[Mairin Schuman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another (unfortunate) 3-star review for a book with 4/5-star content. It pains me to continue doing this to new books that I want to be able to recommend due to their stellar content! If I were not already familiar with this author's work, I would assume the book was written by Chat GPT based on the formatting. It contains repetitive sentence structure, an apparent aversion to compound sentences, lots of pithy one-liners and "it's not ____, it's ____", a new line for every thought... I could go on. It just reads like a very long Chat GPT conversation instead of a well-edited magnum opus which made for a pretty painful reading experience (that was probably also dampened by my potentially unreasonably high expectations). I hope the author chooses to have an excellent editor help restructure and reformat the book so that readers do not assume this information is from AI instead of the author! If that becomes the case, I will recommend the book more readily, but until then I will continue to recommend her other resources available elsewhere.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so good! I joined Kitty’s fb group earlier this year because of hormonal issues. I was able to balance a lot of that by advice and help in the group. Her book though! It’s like a manual on how to heal! Metabolism, fueling the body, sugar and carbs aren’t the enemy, most of us drastically underestimated good food, progesterone can help balance your hormones.
Well done! I flew through this book and have at least three women I want to loan it to. We are all suffering and long for a way to heal our own bodies.

[Fujmunster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great source of information about hormonal health, potential pitfalls and previously provided misinformation in the women’s health community. Not a great source for fixing any of the pitfalls identified. Estrogen dominance support group on Facebook is a great further resource by this author. Healthy Gut Girl is also by this author.