I got my PCOS diagnosis in 2015, but honestly I had already figured it out on my own by then. I was the person Googling symptoms at eleven at night, cross-referencing everything, building a picture that no single doctor had quite put together for me yet. When the official confirmation came, it was less of a shock and more of a “yes, okay, I knew it” moment.
What the diagnosis didn’t give me was any of the actually useful information. I knew about the ovaries and the cysts and the irregular cycles. What nobody connected for me at the time was the other stuff: the fatigue that a full night of sleep didn’t fix, the brain fog that made ordinary Tuesdays feel like wading through something thick, the insulin resistance that was technically on my results but somehow never discussed in the same breath as the rest of it. That conversation happened in a completely separate room, if it happened at all.
Then in May 2026, PCOS got renamed PMOS (Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome), following a global medical consensus published in The Lancet. The new name finally reflected what a lot of us had suspected for years: this isn’t primarily an ovary problem. It never really was. The metabolic piece was always the bigger story.
So here I am, ten years on from the diagnosis, living in Kuala Lumpur, working full-time in finance, and still figuring most of this out as I go.
The finance part is relevant, I think, because my brain approaches everything like a system. I’m good at identifying where things are actually breaking down versus where people just think they are. I do that well for work. For my own health, the pattern has been less impressive. I read everything, I understand what needs to happen, and then I get so overwhelmed by the gap between where I am and where I should be that I don’t start at all. The all-or-nothing thing is real. So is the executive dysfunction that makes “just do it” advice genuinely useless to me, not because I’m not trying, but because trying looks different when your brain works this way.
This blog is part of me breaking that pattern. Writing things down publicly means I actually have to try them and report back honestly, because otherwise what’s the point. I’m not writing as someone who has figured it out. I’m writing as someone tracking what actually works, what doesn’t, what the research says and how I’m thinking about applying it to a life that doesn’t look like any of the case studies.
My life in KL involves long working hours, ordering nasi lemak for breakfast more often than I should, and a dog named Summer, who also goes by Chumchums or Bobo depending on what he’s done. I got him because I saw his face on a Facebook rehoming post and couldn’t think about anything else until I said yes. I did not plan to get a dog. I definitely didn’t get him for wellness reasons. But he has made me leave the house and move my body every single day without fail, which I did not anticipate and which has mattered more than I expected.
Everything on this blog is personal experience and my own reading of the research. I am not a doctor, a nutritionist, or a health coach, and nothing here is medical advice. I try to cite my sources and not overclaim. If something I write sounds relevant to you, please take it to someone qualified before doing anything about it.
If you’ve been piecing this together yourself because the standard advice never quite fit the life you’re actually living, you’re probably in the right place.
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