Restoring Balance: An Integrative Approach to Women’s Health Through Nutrition, Lifestyle, and Systems Biology

What if “normal” isn’t healthy?

Too many women are told their symptoms of fatigue, hormonal chaos, anxiety, digestive issues, inflammation, or autoimmune flares are normal despite feeling anything but well. Restoring Balance offers a powerful, evidence-informed alternative to the conventional model of women’s healthcare that too often overlooks root causes and lived experience.

Written by a mother-daughter duo—Alexia Soteropoulos, MD, a functional and integrative health practitioner, speaker, and women’s health expert, and Paula Soteropoulos, MS, a biotech entrepreneur, venture investor, and women’s health advocate—this book blends medical science, systems biology, and real-world insight to help women understand why their bodies feel out of balance and how to support healing from the inside out.

Rather than chasing diagnoses or relying solely on prescriptions, Restoring Balance reframes women’s health through a holistic lens, one that considers hormones, nutrition, stress, trauma, immune function, environmental exposures, sleep, and lifestyle as interconnected drivers of well-being. The authors explore why women are disproportionately affected by autoimmune disease, bone loss, chronic inflammation, and hormonal disruption and why popular health trends and one-size-fits-all solutions often miss the mark.

Compassionate, practical, and deeply empowering, Restoring Balance will give readers:

• a clear framework for self-healing grounded in nutrition, movement, sleep, and emotional health

• insight into toxins, endocrine disruptors, and detoxification pathways

• guidance on integrative and complementary therapies

• practical strategies for restoring balance at every life stage

• a forward-looking vision for improving women’s health in medicine and the workplace

Written for women seeking clarity and agency in their health journey, Restoring Balance also speaks to clinicians, employers, and leaders invested in advancing women’s care. The book offers a grounded, evidence-informed perspective on what becomes possible when science, lived experience, and prevention work together. With the right conditions in place, the body’s capacity to heal, adapt, and thrive is not an exception but an expectation.

ALEXIA SOTEROPOULOS, MD, IHP, is a Functional and Integrative Health Practitioner, culinary coach, and speaker focused on helping people reclaim their health. She earned both her undergraduate degree in psychology and her medical degree at Tufts University. With training in conventional medicine and holistic modalities—including culinary medicine, Ayurveda, and herbalism—she offers a personalized, root-cause approach to wellness. Her passion was sparked by her own journey through chronic symptoms that conventional medicine couldn’t resolve, fueling her mission to empower others to go beyond symptom management and restore balance. Today, she guides clients to uncover the underlying causes of gut, hormone, energy, and mood challenges. Dr. Soteropoulos is the coauthor of She Thrives: 22 Stories of Navigating Health, Hormones and Healing.

PAULA SOTEROPOULOS, MS, is a visionary leader in biotechnology and a passionate advocate for women’s health. With more than thirty-five years as an entrepreneur, executive, and venture investor, she has focused her career on advancing innovative therapies for difficult-to-treat diseases and personalized medicine. She has served as CEO, chairman, board director, and advisor, founding and leading companies that have brought transformative treatments to patients worldwide. Alongside her work in biotech, Paula is deeply committed to addressing the long-standing gaps in research and innovation for women’s health conditions such as endometriosis, breast and ovarian cancers, and autoimmunity.

She mentors and advises emerging femtech and women’s health companies, championing investment, advocacy, and solutions that bring greater equity and impact to healthcare.