Every woman over forty who has tried to fast for Lent has felt it: the body that cooperated at thirty no longer cooperates the same way. The fatigue that arrives by day three. The sleep that fractures in ways it did not before. The anxiety that surfaces on fasting mornings and resists every spiritual explanation she can offer it.

Lent and the Female Body answers the question no other fasting guide has thought to ask: what does the perimenopausal body actually need to fast well, and how does the tradition already know?

Drawing on current research in hormonal biology, sleep science, and nutritional medicine alongside the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Rule of Benedict, and the Ignatian Examen, this book shows that the morning office and the cortisol awakening response follow the same arc, that the Lenten table and the estrobolome require the same foods, and that the forty days the tradition prescribes are exactly long enough to produce measurable changes in insulin sensitivity, cortisol regulation, and contemplative availability.

Five protocols calibrated to the specific hormonal stages of perimenopause and postmenopause. A complete guide to the complications the female body produces and exactly how to adjust for each one. The whole Christian year mapped to the hormonal decades. And a theology of the body that takes the biology seriously because the tradition always intended for the whole self to be brought to the fast.

This is the Lenten guide for the body you actually have.