Your Bones Are Disappearing (And Three Simple Things to Rebuild Them)

Osteopenia, bone density, and why most women don't find out until something breaks

You’ve probably never thought about your bones.

They’re just there. Doing their job. Holding you upright while you’re thinking about literally anything else. Your schedule. Your kids. Whether you remembered to move the laundry to the dryer. (You didn’t.)

Meanwhile, your skeleton is quietly changing.

After 40, most women start losing bone faster than they’re building it. And here’s the part that should make you angry: most of us don’t find out until we fracture something.

One in two women will have an osteoporosis-related fracture in her lifetime. Fifty percent. That’s you or me. You or your best friend. You or your sister.

And if that fracture is your hip? There’s a 50% chance you won’t return to the life you had before. Thirty percent chance you’ll die within a year.

I learned this from the amazing Dr. Vonda Wright during my interview with her on my podcast. She’s an orthopedic surgeon who’s spent over two decades studying how women age. She’s not saying these statistics to frighten us into buying something.

She’s saying them because they’re facts. And our doctors ARE NOT telling us this.

How I Found Out

I asked my doctor for a DEXA scan when I was 48.

I’d been reading about osteopenia and perimenopause, and I thought, What the heck, I should probably check. See where I stand. The test itself was nothing. Five minutes. I laid on a table, a machine passed over me, and that was it.

A few days later, the results showed up in my portal. Osteopenia.

I stared at the numbers for a minute, then did what any reasonable person would do: uploaded the whole report to AI and asked it to explain what I was looking at.

The tech who did it had said, “Oh yeah, so many women your age find out they have osteopenia.”

The casualness was the most jarring part- like being told the coffee machine was low on water when I was actually being told my physical infrastructure was thinning.

I kept thinking: if this is happening to so many of us, why did I have to ask for the test? Why isn’t this standard at 40, right alongside the mammogram? We are essentially operating in a massive medical data gap.

What’s Actually Going On

When estrogen starts leaving, your bones lose their referee.

Here’s the simple version: you have cells that break down bone (osteoclasts) and cells that build it (osteoblasts). This is normal. Your bones are always remodeling themselves. But estrogen is the chemical signal that keeps the breakdown in check.

Once estrogen drops, the balance tips. You’re losing faster than you’re replacing.

Dr. Wright explained this during our interview using hand gestures. She made little claw shapes to show how the “clast” cells chomp away at bone. It was somehow both educational and deeply unsettling. I think about those little claws more than I’d like to admit.

She told me she orders DEXA scans on any woman with even one risk factor:

• A mother who’s shrinking

• A fracture after age 20

• History of smoking

• Autoimmune disease

• Steroid use for asthma

And here’s what surprised me most: she’s finding osteopenia in women in their twenties.

Their twenties.

This is not an old woman’s disease. It’s a “nobody thought to look” disease.

The Part That Gave Me Hope

Dr. Wright broke down the math, and that’s when I started feeling like I could actually do something. These interventions don’t just slow bone loss. They can reverse it.

• Hormone replacement therapy: 3 to 7% bone density gain over a few years

• Adequate protein plus collagen: another 2 to 3%

• Weight-bearing exercise: up to 8%

Stack all three, and you’re not managing decline. You’re rebuilding.

Here’s What Actually Works

1. Make your hormone decision. Estrogen isn’t a nice-to-have for bone health. It’s running the whole system. Dr. Wright says to make this decision based on facts, not the fear that was drilled into a whole generation of women from one badly interpreted study. If you haven’t read Estrogen Matters, start there. I read it after she recommended it on the show, and it rewired how I understood my own body.

2. Eat four to six prunes a day. Yes. Prunes. Your grandmother’s snack. The thing you probably associate with regularity and being old. But the research is solid. Annoyingly solid.

A 12-month randomized controlled trial at Penn State found that women who ate four to six prunes a day maintained their bone density and strength. The women who didn’t? Lost both.

Here is the “smart” why: prunes are packed with polyphenols, which are plant compounds that reduce inflammation. Inflammation is one of the key drivers of bone loss. The polyphenols in prunes actually suppress the activity of those bone-breakdown “claws” while supporting the cells that build bone back up.

So you’re calming down the destruction and feeding the construction. From a snack. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t thrilled about adding prunes to my daily routine. But after six months of eating them every day, I actually look forward to them.

They’re kind of sweet. Like a big raisin. Not punishment. Just fruit. I keep a bag in my pantry now. They’re fine. I’m not here for thrilling. I’m here for keeping my skeleton intact.

3. Start a jumping practice. Not walking. Not yoga. Jumping.

Dr. Wright was very specific about this: twenty jumps a day, stomping your feet on hard ground. Your bones need mechanical stress. That is the bio-signal that tells them to get stronger. Light, bouncy jumping doesn’t cut it. You need impact.

“I’m not talking about soft landing jumping,” she told me. “I am talking about stomping your feet on the ground.”

If your knees or joints can’t handle that, a mini trampoline works. NASA puts astronauts on rebounders when they come back from space to rebuild the bone they lost in zero gravity.

If it works for people who’ve left Earth, it’ll work for us.

Your Assignment

Ask for a DEXA scan at your next appointment.

If your doctor won’t order it, find one who will. Pay out of pocket if you have to ($50-$200 generally). It takes five minutes, and it doesn’t hurt. You need to know your baseline. You can’t improve what you haven’t measured.

Then: hormones, prunes, jumping. That’s it. Not complicated. Just not common knowledge yet.

I haven’t had my follow-up scan. I’m planning to get one when I turn 50 to see what’s changed. But I’m not waiting for those results to keep doing the work.

I watched my grandmother shrink. Watched her get smaller and more fragile every year.

We’re not doing that.

Your bones are changing right now, whether you’re paying attention or not. You might as well pay attention.

Love, Alli