“We’re very blessed in Singapore because we have many options for doctors so I saw all kinds – mainstream doctors as well as ayurvedic and TCM practitioners,” the 42-year-old said.
“I found a nutritionist in Singapore who sent my samples to a laboratory in the United States. I spent thousands of dollars on this whole process and at the end, I just got a piece of paper with a bunch of numbers that said ‘perimenopause’.
“Obviously, I freaked out as I had never heard of this word; I thought it was the end of the line,” she added.
Hurtado’s nutritionist built a plan for her, involving “nutrition, supplementation and exercise”. She lost 8kg in eight months and found the whole process an “eye-opener”. She also searched online for trends on the word ‘perimenopause’ and found that it wasn’t talked about much.
She had previously worked at Adidas APAC for a decade, where two of her key roles were process optimisation and looking at trends, so she immediately wondered what could be done to improve this scenario for women. One route was to dive into entrepreneurship and make a difference.
PROVIDING A BETTER PICTURE OF HORMONAL SHIFTS
Hurtado was working at a local women’s health startup at that point and she got connected with her now co-founder, Dr Sarita Kumble, a biochemist in her early fifties who had experienced her fair share of perimenopause woes. Dr Kumble hails from India and lives in the United States.
“She told me that she would be in the middle of her pitches and, all of a sudden, she’d get hot flushes and nobody would understand as she was the only woman in the room,” Hurtado said.
“She wanted to make it better for women and felt that, as older women, we should be able to help the next generation of women.”
The two women put together a list of medical experts they wanted to work with. Among them was Joe Dunbar, a scientist in London and former elite athlete who is a specialist in saliva testing, working mostly with high-performance athletes.
