Biohacking was built for men’s bodies, but women are rewriting the rules

For 15 days, Singapore entrepreneur Geargina Tan turned herself into an experiment. She attached a coin-sized sensor to the back of her upper arm, logged everything she ate, watched her glucose levels spike and ebb in real time, then fed the data into Claude to look for patterns. She wasn’t diabetic, and she wasn’t trying to drop a dress size. She simply wanted to understand why certain meals left her feeling energised while others left her drained.

“I run a company, and my energy at 3pm matters more to me than almost anything,” said Ms Tan, co-founder and COO of WTFox.ai. “If I crash every afternoon, that’s a real cost.”

Once she had those personalised insights, she peeled off the $85 sensor. She had never intended to wear it long term; her plan is to use it again only in short bursts when she wants to test something specific. “I kept reading general advice about what’s ‘healthy’ and what spikes you, and I realised most of it is written for an average body, not mine. I wanted to stop guessing and actually see the data,” she said.

For Helen Yang, a mother of three, the motivation is different. “I have three young children, and I want to be there for them for as many years as I can. The best way I know how to do that is to take care of my health today,” said Mrs Yang, who is also co-founder of suncare brand Cheeky.

Her days revolve around habits designed to support long-term health. She’s in bed by 8.30pm and awake by 5.30am. She tracks her sleep every night, starts the morning with coffee alongside creatine, collagen, and supplements, works out most days, follows a mostly ketogenic diet, uses red light therapy and even has a hyperbaric oxygen chamber.

“To me, biohacking simply means doing everything I can to stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible,” she said. “I’m healthier now in my 40s than I’ve ever been.”

Ms Tan and Mrs Yang are part of the growing number of women turning to biohacking to better understand their bodies.

What is biohacking and why does it work differently for women?

Once the preserve of US tech billionaires chasing longevity through extreme measures – we’re looking at you Bryan Johnson and the blood transfusions you get from your teenage son – biohacking has increasingly gone mainstream.

According to Global Market Insights, the global biohacking industry is on track to grow to US$131.5 billion by 2035 from US$28.2 billion in 2025, with the Asia-Pacific region leading the charge.

But what is biohacking, exactly? Strip away the jargon, and it’s simply the deliberate use of technology, biological data or lifestyle interventions to improve health and performance. It spans a wide spectrum. Some biohacks are remarkably low-tech, for example, prioritising sleep, strength training and nutrition. Others involve gadgets and data. Think continuous glucose monitors, smart watches and fitness trackers.

Then there are the headline-grabbers: extreme fasting, red light therapy, cryotherapy, infrared saunas, ice baths, hyperbaric oxygen chambers and intravenous (IV) vitamin drips.

“Imagine your body is like a high-tech smartphone,” said Dr Claudine Pang, a longevity specialist at Asia Longevity. “Biohacking is like finding the ultimate cheat codes, tips and software updates to make that phone run faster, keep its battery charged longer and play games better.”

But as the market floods with new gadgets and trends, the challenge is figuring out what is backed by science and is pure marketing drivel.

“I prefer to think of biohacking as health optimisation rather than hacking,” said Professor Andrea Maier, co-founder and director of the NUS Academy for Healthy Longevity and co-founder of Chi Longevity clinic. “The goal is not to outsmart biology but to work with it.”

Women’s physiology changes the biohacking equation

Much like medicine itself, many of today’s biohacking trends were developed around the male body. But what works well for men doesn’t always work for us.

Unlike men, we experience hormonal shifts throughout our menstrual cycle that influence everything from metabolism and immunity to stress tolerance and recovery. Throw in pregnancy, perimenopause and menopause, and it’s clear that a one-size-fits-all protocol just won’t work.

“Female biohacking should not be viewed as a modified version of male biohacking,” said Prof Maier. “It should be developed based on female biology.”

To biohack effectively, women need to cycle-sync, or adapt their diets and exercise routines to the different phases of their monthly menstrual cycle.

“Some common mistakes we see females making are extended intermittent fasting, high-intensity training to failure, especially at the wrong stage of the cycle, aggressive cold plunging and overusing keto or low-carb diets,” said Dr Pang. Those strategies, she cautioned, can sometimes work against female physiology by disrupting hormones or increasing cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone.

For Ms Tan and Mrs Yang, the most useful biohacks were the ones that fit their own bodies.

While some biohackers swear by extreme cold plunges, Ms Tan has deliberately stayed away. “It raises my cortisol and that tends to work against my body rather than for it,” she said. “Instead of forcing a protocol because it’s trending, I listen to my body. If something works for me, I keep it and make it regular. If it doesn’t, I step back and leave it out of my life.”

The 15-day glucose monitoring experiment has changed how she eats. She now starts with vegetables, follows with protein and leaves carbohydrates and sweets until last. If she’s having a particularly carb-heavy meal, she’ll sometimes drink diluted apple cider vinegar beforehand. Afterwards, she’ll go for a short walk instead of sitting down immediately.

“None of these cost anything, which is the part I like,” she said. “Knowing how my body actually responds gives me freedom, not restriction.”

Mrs Yang too relies greatly on how her body feels. Like many wellness enthusiasts, she tried her hand at intermittent fasting because it seemed to be everywhere, but it didn’t work well for her. “Recent research suggests that fasting often affects women differently than men, and that was certainly my experience,” she said.

Today, she works with both a physician and a TCM hormone specialist to tailor her approach. “I don’t think women should automatically follow the same protocols (as men),” she said. “Health is incredibly individual.”

Biohacking interventions that have real evidence behind them

With so many gadgets and trends out there, it is remarkably easy to blow a lot of money trying to buy your way into good health. But when you ask the experts what actually moves the needle, the answer is surprisingly low-tech.

“If I could keep only one intervention for the rest of my life, it would be exercise, particularly resistance training,” said Prof Maier.

Muscle, she explained, is increasingly recognised as one of the body’s most important organs for healthy ageing. Strength training improves metabolic health, insulin sensitivity, bone density, mobility, cardiovascular health and physical function while slowing the muscle loss that accelerates during perimenopause and menopause.

For women in their 40s, the experts recommend 15 to 20 minutes of resistance training two or three times a week. “(It delivers) the highest biological return on investment,” said Dr Pang.

Sleep comes a close second.

Fitness and sleep trackers can be useful for identifying long-term trends, researchers say, but be careful with achieving a perfect score. Some people develop what is called “orthosomnia” – becoming so anxious about optimising sleep that they actually sleep worse.

The same principle applies to heart rate variability, another metric increasingly tracked by wearables. “It can provide useful information regarding recovery, stress and autonomic nervous system function,” said Prof Maier. “However, it should be interpreted as a trend over time rather than a daily score that dictates behaviour.”

Continuous glucose monitors fall into a similar category.

For healthy people, both experts see them as educational tools that can help people understand how sleep, stress, exercise and different meals affect their glucose responses. The danger comes when users begin viewing every temporary glucose rise as a failure or start avoiding otherwise nutritious foods because of the numbers on their phone. “Data should inform behaviour, not control it,” Prof Maier said.

As for the more social media-popular end of the biohacking spectrum? Both experts see some promise in medical-grade red light therapy, particularly for skin health, wound healing and reducing inflammation, but caution against home devices that could be poorly calibrated and cause damage.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy – which involves breathing in concentrated oxygen – is a growing trend in wellness clinics. Research has shown some promise in improving skin ageing and treating chronic migraines, and it has also been associated with better sleep quality.  Cryotherapy and ice baths may help some individuals recover after exercise, but there is little evidence they meaningfully extend lifespan.

And if there is one category experts would happily skip? Intravenous vitamin drips. “There is no good evidence and frequently far cheaper and safer oral supplementation alternatives,” said Dr Pang.

Prof Maier is equally sceptical of any intervention that promises dramatic longevity benefits without robust clinical evidence. “My general principle is simple,” she said. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

The most powerful upgrade available to most women right now isn’t a gadget, a drip or a protocol someone optimised in a lab. It’s knowing your own body well enough to know when the trending advice doesn’t apply to you. That, it turns out, is the biohack nobody is selling.