The Story Behind HeraVita: My Conversation with Terri Batsakis on Bone Health and Midlife

In early July, I sat down with Terri Batsakis to record an episode of The Perimenopause & Midlife Podcast. By the time it was released on 21 September, both HeraVita and my own health had moved on in ways neither of us could have predicted.

We talked about discovering osteopenia at 36, the questions that diagnosis raised, perimenopause and midlife, and what led me to create HeraVita.

But the conversation is less about my story than about what happens when women start asking better questions about their health.

I was 36 when I found out

It started with a set of gym scales.

They were fairly rudimentary, the kind that estimate bone mass alongside weight. My bone mass reading kept coming in below the average for my age. Not once, but every time.

That was enough to make me book a proper bone density scan. At 36, the scan showed I had osteopenia.

The gym scales weren’t a diagnostic tool, and they couldn’t tell me what was wrong. But they gave me a reason to ask a question I wouldn’t otherwise have asked at that age.

I wasn’t an elderly woman worried about breaking a hip. I was a young Mum running a business, and bone health wasn’t something I expected to be thinking about.

The diagnosis stayed with me. So did my family history. My Nanna broke both of her hips in her 60s. Bone health stopped being abstract. There was a family story behind it.

Years later, moving through midlife myself, I began to understand how much can change for women through our 40s, 50s and beyond, often quietly: bone, muscle, body composition, hormones, metabolic and cardiovascular health, strength, mobility, and how we feel in our bodies.

Most women are told very little about those changes until something has already gone wrong.

What if we knew earlier?

That question sits at the heart of HeraVita.

What if women could follow how their bodies change over time, rather than relying on a single number on the bathroom scales?

What if that information helped them have better conversations with the health and movement professionals they already trust?

HeraVita grew from those questions.

The bathroom scales don’t tell the whole story

One of the things Terri and I discussed was how limited the traditional measures of women’s bodies are.

For generations, women have been taught to focus on weight. Lose it. Don’t gain it. Get back to what you weighed when you were younger.

But a number on the scales says very little about what is happening in a changing body. As we age, maintaining muscle and bone matters more. Body composition can change while weight barely moves. Where we carry fat can change. Our shape can change.

That doesn’t mean our bodies have failed. It means we need better information.

That thinking shaped our decision to build 3D body scanning into HeraVita. A HeraVita body scan takes seconds and captures the surface geometry of your body in detail. From those measurements, the HeraVita platform calculates a set of wellness metrics: waist-to-height ratio, body shape and fat distribution indices, estimated body composition including fat mass and lean mass, muscle screening measures, posture and symmetry, and an estimate of bone mineral content.

They are estimates, and we say so plainly. They are calculated from surface measurements, not produced by DEXA, bioimpedance or clinical examination, and they cannot diagnose anything. The bone mineral figure is a population-level estimate, not a bone density measurement.

I know from experience what an estimate is good for. A rough bone mass reading on a set of gym scales is what sent me for a proper bone density scan. A single reading tells you something. A baseline, and how it changes from one scan to the next, tells you more.

Each of these metrics is explained in its own Journal article.

The technology isn’t the point. Understanding is the point.

Evidence before assumption

Another thread through our conversation has become one of HeraVita’s core values: evidence before assumption.

Two women of the same age, height and weight can have very different bodies, histories and health considerations. Rather than assuming what women need, HeraVita is being built by listening, measuring and learning.

That is the purpose of the HeraVita body scan. We are building a picture of Australian women aged 35 and over, not to compare anyone against an ideal body, but to understand the real diversity of bodies at this stage of life, and how they change.

Women aren’t the subjects of that work. They are its founding members.

Women’s health rarely fits in one box

It reinforced something I keep returning to: women’s health rarely fits neatly into one box. Bone health doesn’t exist in isolation. Neither do hormones, cardiovascular health, connective tissue, body composition, metabolism, movement or the symptoms we live with day to day. Sometimes a single symptom only makes sense once you look at the bigger picture.

My own lived experience has made me even more curious about women’s health and even more convinced of the importance of women feeling able to ask questions when something doesn’t feel right.

It also reinforced a boundary for HeraVita.

We are not here to diagnose. We are here to help women understand their bodies better, encourage conversations with qualified health professionals, and contribute to a wider conversation about women’s health and ageing well.

My own experience is the reason that boundary matters. A measurement that prompts a question is useful. A measurement that pretends to be an answer isn’t.

Prevention isn’t about guaranteeing the future

Terri and I kept coming back to prevention.

For me, prevention doesn’t mean believing we can control everything. We can’t. People do everything “right” and still become unwell.

Prevention means having the best information we can, as early as we reasonably can. It means asking:

• What can I understand today?
• What can I strengthen?
• What can I monitor?
• Who should I speak to when something changes?

That is a different conversation from being told to eat less, exercise more and accept decline as inevitable.

It takes more than one discipline

One of the things my own health journey has made increasingly clear is that women’s health doesn’t sit neatly within a single profession.

A GP may see one part of the picture. A physiotherapist another. An exercise physiologist, dietitian, radiologist, women’s health specialist or other healthcare professional may bring another perspective again.

That is part of the thinking behind the HeraVita Circle.

We are beginning to build relationships with values-aligned healthcare and movement professionals who share our belief that women deserve to be listened to, taken seriously and supported with evidence-informed care.

We aren’t looking for professionals who all think exactly the same way. In fact, respectful differences in perspective are important.

We are looking for people who are curious, collaborative and comfortable saying “this is outside my area of expertise”, and who recognise the value of referring to another professional when that person is better placed to help.

For HeraVita, collaboration over silos isn’t simply a phrase. It is one of our core values.

Our hope is that the HeraVita Circle will help create connections between women and appropriately qualified professionals, while also encouraging conversations between disciplines.

HeraVita doesn’t replace a woman’s existing healthcare team, and we don’t diagnose or prescribe treatment.

Instead, we want to help women understand more about their bodies, recognise when something may be worth discussing further, and feel more confident taking that information into conversations with the professionals who care for them.

Because better information becomes much more powerful when it leads to better conversations.

Why HeraVita exists

HeraVita began with clothing, and clothing built on real measurements is still at the centre of what we make. But the more I learned, the clearer it became that those measurements could do more, for the woman they belong to.

That is what we are working towards: information that respects both evidence and lived experience, and women treated as participants in their own health rather than recipients of advice.

We are still learning. We don’t pretend to have the answers. Asking better questions seems a good place to start.

Listen to the conversation

The episode covers my health, the beginnings of HeraVita, and why I think the way we talk about women’s health and ageing needs to change.

Listen to the episode on Spotify

If something in the conversation prompts a new question about your own health, take that question with you to your GP or an appropriately qualified health professional.