Kimberly, who is one of the cast members in The Color Purple, has a question for Dr. Northrup about fibroids, which are noncancerous tumors that form on the uterus. "I have a lot of fibroids in varying sizes—they're not painful. I have heavy periods. And I'm wondering, do I need to do anything about them? And does it any way inhibit weight loss at any point?"

Dr. Northrup says that she once had a fibroid and had it removed. "I got so tired of dressing around it that I finally got it removed just for vanity, because I wasn't having any problems either," she says. "It wouldn't inhibit weight loss. It depends on how big it is, though. Do you feel like it's big enough so that you can see it when you're lying down? Like you look pregnant a little bit?"

"Yes, and there's several of them," Kimberly says. Dr. Northrup says that Kimberley needs to decide whether or not she wants to have them removed. "In the vast of majority of women, they do nothing. And they go away after menopause. They really, really shrink. In the average age of menopause, the final menstrual period is 52. Okay? So if you can hold off, you know, nothing needs to happen. But there's some kind of cool new treatments. There are treatments with uterine artery embolization. They just thread a little thing up into your femoral artery and put little spheres in there to cut off the circulation to the fibroid and it will shrink that way. They're doing some things with ultrasound. Surgery is actually quite easy—you're in, you're out. So it just depends on how far they're bugging you."

Dr. Northrup says that although no one knows what causes fibroids, she has her own mind-body interpretation. "It's creativity that hasn't been birthed yet because [the uterus] is our creative center, the low heart. Or it is shoving your creative energy into a dead end job or relationship."