AGING FEARLESSLY

Feminine Power and Resilience

Tall, blonde, and long-limbed, Jurich, 46, has the rested glow that midlife women in this city spend real money pursuing. Her obsession with women’s longevity didn’t appear out of nowhere. She grew up a self-described “type A from age four,” devouring biographies, grinding through elite club sports, and pushing herself to the breaking point by 18. She graduated from Stanford University in the wake of the dot-com boom, day-traded stocks, joined a venture firm, and co-founded Sunrun at 27.

She started a family and pumped breastmilk between IPO roadshow meetings. By her forties, her arm throbbed from searing nerve pain. After she stepped away from her CEO role, surgeons told her the degeneration in her neck resembled that of a rugby player.

Only then, she says, did she realize she had spent decades building companies and almost no time maintaining the body that built them.

FLI is her attempt to rewrite that script—not just for herself, but for “dysregulated” midlife women who feel their bodies unravel faster than their ambitions.

Set in a luxurious environment, FLI offers a 30-day diagnostic blur of blood panels, glucose monitoring, gut-microbiome testing, biological-age scoring, epigenetics, neurocognitive assessments, and fitness analysis. After that comes a year of treatment and oversight. At the center of it all—unexpectedly—is heavy weightlifting.

A small training room houses a squat rack, Rogue plates, and little else. No treadmill. No stationary bike. No cardio equipment at all.

“A key goal of ours is to bring back feminine power,” Jurich says.

Exploring Alternative Therapies

Within minutes of arriving at FLI, you may be zipped into what looks like a giant pressurized sleeping bag as a staffer sticks three electrodes behind your ears. A skipping, disharmonious rhythm pulses through the headphones. It’s a neurofeedback session, meant to calm the brain and improve focus.

To be sure, research on neurofeedback is mixed. A recent JAMA Psychiatry meta-analysis found little evidence of meaningful benefit, though some studies showed small, statistically significant gains. Still, the ambiguity has not slowed demand.

“People are desperate to find tools to help them, and that’s why alternative medicine is growing rapidly,” says Deborah Kado, a professor of medicine who co-directs the Stanford Longevity Center. “The focus has largely been on men. But women want answers, too. They want to feel young and beautiful for as long as they can. And the medical research just hasn’t been there yet to make most doctors comfortable giving recommendations.”

Feeding into this exploration of alternative medicine is a common frustration shared by many women: being told they are “fine” by traditional doctors even when they don’t feel fine.

Rethinking Hormone Treatments

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT), long stigmatized by outdated cancer warnings, is slowly being reconsidered. Yet fewer than 5% of menopausal women use it.

In research and practitioner circles, however, there’s a growing belief that HRT offers not just symptom relief but real longevity potential—across brain health, cardiovascular protection, osteoporosis prevention, and bone density.

The problem, Jurich says, is that HRT is still approached primarily through the lens of symptom management, not long-term health. The default remains the “minimum viable dose,” rather than an understanding that these are, in many ways, longevity hormones.

Two to three times a week, 52-year-old Melissa Gisler arrives in Vuori leggings for an hour of Romanian deadlifts, barbell hip thrusts, and goblet squats with her trainer, Sara Goldman. Gisler joined in February and didn’t balk at the $1,333 monthly fee. She’d already been spending roughly the same for concierge medicine for her family—without much clarity or progress.

“I was spending $10,000 to $15,000 a year trying to piece this together myself,” she says. “Nothing fit together. Here, it finally does.”

FLI ordered microbiome testing, genetic screening, biological-age scoring, and an early-cancer blood panel. Within months, clinicians gradually increased her estradiol dose from 0.025 mg—the lowest starter level—to 0.075 mg.

Living Well, Not Living Forever

Recently, Gisler popped in to show a nurse practitioner a swollen finger. It turned out to be nothing serious. But within minutes, the staff wrote a case report, looped in a dermatologist, and phoned an ER specialist to confirm their thinking.

“That just doesn’t happen anywhere else,” Gisler says. “To go in, point to my finger, and everyone mobilizes around it—I’ve never experienced care like that.”

Jurich plans to build lower-cost versions of the FLI model in the future and use revenue to research ovarian optimization, which she believes is one of the most neglected areas in medicine.

The goal, she insists, is not to live to 150.

“We just need to feel good again,” Jurich says. “That’s it.”