Ladies on the line, this one's for you.

As it turns out, your uterus isn't actually trying to sabotage you.

“I don’t want to be the woman who can – and did – get down on all fours and scrape the pancake batter off the oven door after having cooked three hundred eggs with a near-constant monologue of ‘fucking fuck of a fuck’ issuing from her lips… that is certainly not the woman I meant to grow up to be either.

It’s possible that working that brunch egg shift at 39 weeks pregnant is badass. Also possible that biting the bullet and scheduling your own labor is badass.

But badass is the last thing I am interested in being. Badass is a juvenile aspiration.” 

— Gabrielle Hamilton

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💛 Good afternoon!

I’m going to get a little vulnerable with you all today. I’ve been struggling with health problems on and off for the last seven years, and recent flare-ups have led me to step back, move more slowly, and not kill myself doing things like, say, writing a weekly newsletter if I’m curled up clutching a heating pad for dear life.

It’s nothing debilitating, not enough to send me to the hospital, but enough for me to struggle through a lot of daily life. It was ultimately the thing that led me to step back from working full-time in kitchens, despite that being the sole aim of my career for a very long time.

It took me years to figure out what the problem was. My symptoms were strange and nebulous: extreme irritability, constant sensitivity, sharp abdominal pain, chronic migraines, constant nausea, and —worst of all — blood sugar crashes severe enough that I’d pass out at random. Perhaps most memorably, one Christmas morning while making hollandaise for family breakfast. When I finally came-to, I was shouting, ‘My sauce is breaking!’ while everyone forced me to lie down. Yikes.

I’d taken blood panels, visited doctors (when I could afford to, as a struggling line cook with no health insurance), and consulted the internet.

The answer never hit me like a lightning bolt. Instead, tiny clues began to click into place. My therapist one day suggested gently that I start tracking my menstrual cycles, because my times of most severe anxiety seemed to coincide with a monthly clock.

The ultimate puzzle piece, though, was working with Dr. Alice Burron of The Health Navigator Group, who also happens to be my badass mother. Her work in healthcare education (and her ability to raise four kids on the prairie of Wyoming with nutritionally dense, balanced, and healthy views on food, eating, and body image) have always made her a better-than-average role model mother.

Around the time I started putting my symptoms together, she’d begun to write her third book. It was a guide to navigating any health issue — a systemized approach to understand how individually unique our bodies are, and how they’re designed to heal.

I took her work — her life’s work in healthcare, physiology, nutrition, and education — and decided to give it an honest try. (By then I was old enough to realize that my mom was cool, and take her advice seriously as a professional!)

My symptoms didn’t seem to be life or death, although they were extraordinarily painful. But I had a roadmap for figuring them out. I started to put in the work, a guinea pig for what would eventually become her book manuscript, and gradually, through the process, everything came into focus.

It turned out I was actively, constantly, sabotaging my body. Daily. Repetitively. Ironically. And the biggest culprit was my deepest passion: working in restaurants.

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This post has nothing to do with whether or not women belong behind the line; clearly they thrive there.

Kitchens are largely made of misfits, men and women alike, a pirate ship of tightly controlled chaos, clear rights and wrongs, and high competition. Although the brigade has often favored men, built on a French military wartime model designed without women in mind, kitchens have increasingly benefited from the presence of strong female leadership.

But that does not mean that we are created equal. The physical needs and demands for women’s bodies differ greatly from those of our male counterparts.

This might not be a popular opinion; I haven’t found anything similar covered elsewhere. Although the crossover Venn diagram of women in the kitchen and women with PMDD seems slim (it’s a section my social media algorithms surprisingly have yet to show me), I’d venture to guess the number of women struggling with the kitchen’s wear on their bodies is very high.

Let’s be clear: kitchen work is physical and strenuous. Burns, cuts, falls, heavy lifting… there are dozens of ways to get hurt in a kitchen, regardless of how you identify. As a baseline, it’s a difficult industry for any body.

Add to that the rarity of proper healthcare (or living wage) and you have a recipe for burnout. Sprinkle in late nights, the craveable adrenaline rush, and late-night habits like drinking and drugs, and it soon becomes apparent that most line cooks are here for a good time, not a long time.

A friend and sous chef of mine was pronounced dead for seven minutes off the side of the road from a drug overdose — and came into work the next day.

So if you’re not in the industry, there’s a little context.

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After five years of exhausting, increasing confusion, I discovered I had PMDD, or Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, exacerbated through the roof times a million thanks to hormonal birth control. This led to other complications involving the ol’ baby box — something I should probably save for a health Substack, no doubt.

Say what you will about Dr. TikTok, but if it hadn’t been for the educators I found online, I would have had a much harder time figuring out what to do or emotionally navigating the journey.

Talking about your uterus, hormones, and birth control preferences is generally not a comfortable conversation in the workplace (although now I have a much easier time with it — thanks to all the male cooks in my life who have been willing to listen), and finding anyone who could relate to the emotional mood-swing piece was… rough at best. (It’s hard to not come across as, well, a crazy bitch.)

I remember standing over thirty pounds of raw chicken with a cleaver in my hand, fighting back tears on an early opening prep shift, counting down the minutes the first line cook would arrive so I could finally pull myself together.

What was I going to say? “Chef, I can’t come in today, I can’t keep my emotions in check and my lower back is in so much pain…”

Absolutely not.

I’d rather lean against the hot oven door for relief and slam a fistful of ibuprofen. Like any good line cook would do.

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🔪

“Whachoo want, white boy? Burn cream? A Band-Aid?”

Then he raised his own enormous palms to me, brought them up real close so I could see them properly; the hideous constellation of water-filled blisters, angry red welts from grill marks, the old scars, the raw flesh where steam or hot fat had made the skin simply roll off. They looked like the claws of some monstrous science-fiction crustacean, knobby and calloused under wounds old and new.

I watched, transfixed, as Tyrone - his eyes never leaving mine - reached slowly under the broiler and, with one naked hand, picked up a glowing-hot sizzle-platter, moved it over to the cutting board, and set it down in front of me.

He never flinched.

— Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

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One of the educators I found and then followed religiously at my lowest was Her Mood Mentor, aka the wonderful Jes — a women’s health educator who helps women reclaim balance in their lives and hormones. It grew increasingly apparent to me that my body was falling apart, and for the first time, I glimpsed that there was something I could do about it.

I was reading her work one night after work in the back alley at 11pm. The pride I felt nightly as the only woman in that kitchen was a killer high. But that night, as I scrolled through an Instagram post about PMDD, I could almost feel my limbs quivering under the weight of collapse.

What did I eat for dinner? I asked myself. A cup of rice with some assorted toppings from the walk-in. A Red Bull. A full deli of soda. Whatever I tasted on the line for quality.

I tried to calculate how many calories that might be. Enough to keep my body fueled? As it turned out, not even close. Not by a long shot.

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A few years (and many full, nourishing meals later) I got the opportunity to talk with Jes herself about what it’s like to be a woman with PMDD working in the kitchen, and other male-dominated fields that require lots of physicality, construction and health care among them.

Her answers, originally supposed to be featured in a piece for a magazine about women who work in kitchens, were so strong and sure that I wanted to keep them for myself. This is the work I’m passionate about, and her answers have stuck with me since our conversation.

I prepped her for our interview with the opening quote above from Gabrielle Hamilton, but there were so many more that could have illustrated the point.

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“[The term ‘badass’] gets put onto women, as what feels like a tarnished 'badge of honor,' or backhanded compliment. Calling a woman — chef or otherwise — 'badass' is a way to signify that she's cool or relevant because she's acting like a man (specifically, an aggressive, swaggering one); that she is only of interest or worth consideration because she's going against whatever 'type' it is she'd otherwise be categorized as because she's a woman. She can't possibly be taken seriously or even close to equal unless she's aping male behavior.”

— Charlotte Druckman, author of Women on Food

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Until now, I thought I'd figured out how to be a woman in this industry. I've been an executive chef for eight years and have a very successful career. I made sure my voice was loud when it needed to be loud and quiet when it needed to be quiet. I followed all the rules, worked really hard, but now I'm staring into uncharted territory.

I'm six months pregnant and have no idea how to prepare for my career as a restaurant owner and mother to a newborn. The mentor pool of successful female chefs who managed to maintain their careers with children is limited. So limited in fact, that I can't think of one from my inner circle. Certainly I know women who are chefs and have young children but they have taken a step back from their careers to find something more amenable to raising a family. In some cases by choice, but in most cases, because there was no choice.

— Erin Smith, for Food & Wine

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"After a couple of months, one of the chefs, a woman, told me she had taught herself simply never to get burned and never to get cut… Like, the badges of hard work and hot ovens were a bit tawdry to her. The real class was in being so good that they didn't touch you. She never lifted a heavy compost bin or a whole lamb or half pig alone, but calmly asked for help. She was never exhausted, never burned, never depleted, angry, dirty. She took care of herself and took care of the kitchen. I liked that."

— Tamar Adler

By the end of the conversation, Jes had left me with a quote of her own, perhaps my new favorite.

“It is a responsibility to the women in the industry who want to be female leaders. The bottom line is, if you want to be a strong leader, you have to be undeniable.

It’s impossible to be undeniable if your body systems are dysregulated because symptoms will, over time, crowd out any of your aspirations. The body is stronger than your aspirations. Your female differences, when you’re aligned and supported, are what make you undeniable.”

But before we get there, to the rock-solid truth, let’s talk a little about what those female differences look like.

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My original thought, when I sat down with Jes, was to compile a list of actionable, practical tips and tricks that could be tapped into right away to build better habits.

Line cooks, like busy mothers of toddlers, don’t have time to take care of themselves, they’re eating meals over trash cans and fueling themselves with caffeine. Sometimes the easiest thing to do can be to hold on to a mantra like, ‘Drink more water!’ when all ingrained habits point to energy drinks as a primary source of hydration.

Ah, yes. Caffeine. In particular, this is the wheel that keeps the industry turning, the lifeblood of every line cook, coursing through our veins.

Jes is a no-bullshit kind of teacher (my favorite kind) and she firmly and kindly set me straight.

“I really want this to be practical,” she told me. “But we really have to recognize that caffeine is classified as a drug. Bottom line, it’s a psychoactive — the most widely used psychoactive in the world. It blocks adenosine receptors, creating a feeling — a feeling!— of alertness. Not necessarily actual energy production.”

There is no hack to help wean yourself off of caffeine — or anything else, for that matter. Fundamentally, there’s no such thing as a quick, easy, or actionable way to just take better care of your body. It takes work, she reminded me, although it’s within the work itself that the value in understanding yourself lies.

When it comes to caffeine consumption, it turns out some can metabolize caffeine better than others, so mileage may vary depending on your personal background. For myself, I learned that I was walking a tightrope with the amount I was leaning on to get me through the day.

In the female body, caffeine acts as an endocrine-disrupting chemical, impacting our hormone receptors in ways that can look like increasing estrogen levels in the body, “more gasoline on the fire of basic dysregulation.”

The half-life of caffeine, dependent on your genetics, is four to eight hours — so that means if you're working a late dinner shift and you're popping open an energy drink at 6 pm, eight hours later half of that caffeine is still in your system, when you’re wired at home, pacing the kitchen floor.

“Caffeine isn’t the problem,” Jes said, reminding me that coffee had the most benefits out of all caffeine beverages. “It’s more like caffeine starts a cascade of other situations that negatively impact the body. If you're not sleeping, your hormones are going to be dysregulated. And if you're not sleeping because of caffeine, you're just piling on the stress. At the end of the day, if we boil it down, it’s stress and inflammation. Caffeine leads to inflammation through promoting excess cortisol and dysregulating blood sugar balance. It also blocks your body’s ability to absorb essential minerals and other vital nutrients for hormone production — that’s another part of that cascade.”

“It’s not just like, ‘I’m just drinking some Red Bull!’” she said. “This is a really complex conversation when we get into the physiology.”

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If caffeine is truly the tip of the iceberg, the first domino to fall is blood sugar. As an appetite suppressor, caffeine numbs those valuable hunger cues.

You know what else can override hunger cues? Standing on your feet all day, taking no time for proper breaks, and eating sparsely or at irregular times. Double yikes.

This was the biggest culprit in shutting down my life, numbing my desire to eat (and therefore fuel my brain and body) in favor of the job. I was happy to keep crossing items off my prep list, mastering efficiency, cutting out the very essence of myself. I was the first thing to hit the chopping block while everything else took precedence.

“I can keep going!” was my default, go-to health mantra. “I’m fine!”

I was not fine. As I knelt down in the cool shelter of my lowboy on a Friday night, feeling my nerves light up with the sugar and caffeine rush of an icy deli full of soda, I vaguely recall thinking, Thank goodness I have this, this stuff really keeps me going.

I might have rationally had a problem with it, but I assumed since it was temporary, I’d get my shit together someday and take better care of myself.

I’m young, I’m healthy, I said convincingly to my protesting inner self. I’d look to either side of me, to my fellow dudes in the trenches. I had to keep up. This work demands a lot, but I can take it.

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It took years to unpack the damage. Even on a young, relatively healthy body like mine, I was damaged. All of the check-engine indicators were firing on all cylinders. My body was constantly coursing with stress, burning fuel it didn’t have.

I started reintroducing concepts like eating well, sleeping full and long hours, and drinking electrolytes. Stupidly simple things that feel so easy, like such a no-brainer, that I’d been neglecting.

But Jes was right. My mom was right. And ladies, something has got to change in our kitchens — us.

“If you don’t know these things, how can you change your behavior? How can you advocate for yourself? How can you have the respect for your body that’s required to listen to yourself and change so you know when that’s harnessed?” Jes pressed.

When we’re functioning well, fully, and firing on all cylinders, women are unstoppable forces. Have we witnessed this potential yet? Have we harnessed it?

This is the future I want to see in the restaurant industry. Ladies, I want to know what we’re capable of.

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You can find my full conversation with Jes here, I can’t help but geek out, so apologies for the cringe.

I welcome any and all comments on this topic, please share your thoughts!

And if you’re looking for any resources on living a better life through food, read This Plate Will Save Your Life, a Substack that has fired me up in so many ways.

(I’m far from being finished on this subject, so if you’re hoping I’ll stop talking about this particular workplace dynamic, you’re out of luck.)

Have a great week, and with any luck, I’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming this Friday. Thanks for sticking around!

Cheers,

Edit: I use the term “badass” in the best of connotations when referring to my mother, despite the quotes in this article. No Freudian slip here, I’m afraid, just the inconsistencies of my own vocabulary!