The Optimised Woman

The main premise of the book is that if we 'Women' can tap in to our menstrual cycle, we can have a more successful, fulfilled, creative and balanced life.

It does offer some good guidance, making us look at what happens within our bodies over the our monthly cycle and how it can affect us and how we can use it to our advantage in our home and working life, what we should expect and how to plan around our monthly cycle so we can utilise the various stages to our advantage.

The book breaks down the cycle into four distinct phases and explains what abilities that phase offers, what doesn’t work during this phase, things to look out for, and strategies to use, what goals you should set yourself, and what challenges you should expect during each of the four phases. It does all feel positive and familiar, you can see the points she is trying to make and I do agree with them. There is also a very detailed daily plan to follow so you know what to expect at each point through each of the four phases even when transitioning from one phase to another. She has covered everything in this book to do with your monthly cycle.

Though it does have a few flaws - it only really covers women who still have a monthly cycle. Anyone who is going through or is post-menopause, there is nothing for you here! Similarly for anyone who can’t identify the start of their cycle due to using hormone patches/injections or the Coil, might struggle to use this book, since if you can’t identify the start of your cycle you may struggle following the plan.

But to be honest it is no different to any other self help book, fully of rhetoric, full of 'if you do this you will get', promises that if you follow the book you will get everything you want; it’s simple, just use the plan and everything will work. This book just uses a different slant to other books of this genre.

You don’t need a book to know how your monthly cycle affects you. If you actually paid attention to yourself for any period of time you’d know when you feel energised and get things done, when you feel more creative or reflective, expressive or emotional. You could do everything the book says yourself without the need to refer to this book, if you paid attention to yourself, learnt  about yourself and your cycle you would probably learn a lot more over the course of your cycle than you could ever learn from this book.

There again, if you’re the kind of person that needs a book to tell you about yourself and you want to know more about your monthly cycle and how it can affect you and how you can harness it and you can get past the rhetoric, then this is a book for you.

Robyn