The Biohacking Girlfriend wants to be the ‘Most Measured Woman in History’

Bryan Johnson has spent years trying to quantify his way out of ageing. Now his girlfriend Kate Tolo is undergoing an experiment to measure almost every aspect of her body…

For years, Bryan Johnson (better known to some as the ‘Billionaire Biohacker’) has made a public spectacle of trying to outsmart his own biology. The tech entrepreneur spends millions of dollars a year on his longevity programme, tracking everything from blood biomarkers to sleep and body composition in pursuit of what he calls better health and, ultimately, a longer life. His obsession with measurement has become so extreme that it has turned him into something of a mascot for the modern biohacking movement. His premise is simple, if you can measure enough of yourself, you might eventually be able to optimise yourself into a healthy person.

Now, he's doing it with someone else… Kate Tolo, his 30-year-old girlfriend. Tolo has embarked on a detailed programme intended to make her “the most measured female in history.” Over 100 days, she has set out to collect around 14 million data points relating to her menstrual cycle and wider health, using more than 50 devices alongside a 12-person medical team. Her routine involves repeated urine, saliva, and stool samples, hormone monitoring, temperature and heart-rate variability measurements, exercise and a series of other tests. Whew, it’s a lot.

It is easy to look at that list and call it madness. But underneath the clickbait headlines about frozen menstrual blood and ‘techno tampons’ is a genuinely serious problem: we still know far less about female health than we should.

For decades, medical research has frequently found results based on the biological male body. Menstrual cycles have historically been considered a complicating factor in research, while conditions disproportionately affecting women have often been poorly understood, underdiagnosed, or diagnosed late. Johnson says the purpose of Tolo's project is to generate a huge amount of female-specific data and ultimately develop protocols that better account for the female body. More research into reproductive hormones, menstrual cycles, and conditions such as endometriosis could be hugely valuable.

But does more data mean better science? One woman, however extensively measured, cannot represent the biological diversity of women across the world. A set of data gathered from one highly controlled individual may generate interesting patterns that were previously unexplored, but it cannot on its own tell us what is normal or what will work across millions of different bodies.

Tolo's project takes the logic of biohacking to its furthest possible point, something we are all fighting against at the moment too. Sleep becomes a goal, and hormones become graphs in our apps that tell us how we should be feeling at any given hour of the day. The body has already become an ongoing research project, and this coverage only furthers the culture of extreme self-optimisation.

There is nothing inherently wrong with tracking your cycle. For some women, monitoring can provide useful information about their health and help them have more informed conversations with health professionals. The issue is when measurement becomes synonymous with ‘health’.

It is the same tension running through almost every corner of modern wellness. Technology can give us information we previously didn't have, but it can also give us another thing to worry about. Tolo's experiment is both fascinating and slightly uncomfortable… there’s no question about that. It is an attempt to use the tools of extreme optimisation to address a very real failure of women's medicine. But it also risks reinforcing the idea that the female body is a problem to be solved through enough discipline.

Can we improve women’s health based on whether Kate Tolo succeeds in becoming the most measured woman in history? Probably not. But it could be interesting to see how this helps other women understand their bodies without making them feel that they need to monitor every breath, hormone, and bodily function to finally feel ‘well’.