Mona SharmaCelebrity nutritionist and wellness advocate

Why Women Need a Different Health Strategy

16 May 2025 · 0 min

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Nutritionist Mona Sharma explains that women need 279 extra calories daily during the luteal phase of their menstrual cycle, a fact rarely taught in nutrition school. Many women eat the same way all month and blame themselves for fatigue, when their bodies actually have different metabolic needs across cycle phases.

Questions this video answers

279 calories per day

Mona Sharma and a second speaker labelled 'Speaker A'

Oh, I need to eat more than 279 calories during my luteal phase. Even as a nutritionist, this was never taught to us in school. Had no idea. And here I am in my 40s.
Studies show that you need 279 more calories per day in the luteal phase, which is revelatory for us as women, because often we think, what's wrong with me? I need to eat how I was eating last week. Even if you don't recognize that you're saying last week from the luteal phase vantage point.
The impact of that, I can imagine, for women who tend to keep possibly restrictive diets or adhere to a certain type of hardcore diet, and they wonder why they're still not feeling well. And I think that for a woman, when we get lost in, oh, but this is a diet that I know should be healthy or should help me lose weight or should help me gain more muscle. And yet it could be the one thing that's just out of alignment with how we want to feel.
When we deprive ourselves of calories in the second half of the cycle, we. We trigger all sorts of, you know, neurotransmitter response and cortisol response to compensate for this missing caloric value. In the first half of the cycle, the follicular and the ovulatory phases, you can get away with eating lighter, having smoothies and salads, and, you know, working out more, and you're gonna feel perfectly energized. Then when you cross over into the luteal phase, your metabolism speeds up. Why would it do that? Right, well, remember how I said you3D print that beautiful organelle, Right? So now you need to be metabolizing foods more quickly so that you can actually manufacture that endometrial lining and keep your blood sugar stable at the same time.