Reverse Health Reviews

Menopause is a long journey with a unique combination of symptoms and experiences for every woman who goes through it. But a common issue many women experience is an impact on their overall health and wellness that manifests as increased body fat, reduced bone density, and a heightened risk of metabolic disorders like diabetes.1

At the same time, there are numerous fitness and wellness apps out there that offer granular and personalized approaches to diet, exercise, and lifestyle adjustments, but nearly all of them seem to be ignorant of menopause, its specific effects on a woman’s metabolism, and how to approach wellness with it in mind.

That’s a gap in the market that Reverse Health aims to close, with a meal plan, workout program, and tracking system built around the particular needs that women have in perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopause. Our team tried the app out for ourselves so we could relay to you what it costs, what it’s like to use, and whether it might be right for you.

Reverse Health isn’t perfect as an app and a fitness program, but it’s one of the few options on the market that take menopause seriously. Nutrition and workouts are fine-tuned to provide women with what they need to safeguard against some of the various symptoms menopause can cause, from night sweats and hot flashes to abdominal weight gain and osteoporosis. The signup process can sometimes be a little glitchy, pricing can be confusing and inconsistent, and there are some features the app is missing that would really take it to the next level. But it could be the best starting point for some perimenopausal and menopausal women if they want a wellness app that centers on meal planning and workout programs to complement this enormous shift in their lives.

At Innerbody Research, we thoroughly test and investigate every product and service we review, including the Reverse Health app. Our team has collectively spent more than 500 hours studying menopause, its implications for female health, and the various lifestyle interventions intended to help treat it.

For this review, we pored over that scientific research with a specific eye toward the issues Reverse Health claims it can target, namely body composition, metabolism, and hormonal influences on day-to-day life. We also downloaded Reverse Health and tried it ourselves to see what it was like interacting with the app, eating its recommended meals, and enduring its fitness sessions.

Additionally, like all health-related content on this website, this review was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy and will continue to be monitored for updates by our editorial team.

Over the past two decades, Innerbody Research has helped tens of millions of readers make more informed decisions about staying healthy and living healthier lifestyles.

To evaluate Reverse Health, we used a small handful of criteria to pit it up against all of the other fitness apps we’ve tried in the past, looking specifically at:

Effectiveness

Simply put, if you stick to the meal plan and exercise program prescribed by the Reverse Health app, you’re very likely to lose weight — body fat, specifically — and should put yourself in a position to better stave off future metabolic disorders, bone density issues, and other health problems that can arise with menopause.

So, why the mediocre rating for effectiveness? It comes down to a pair of issues, the first of which is that the app leaves a lot to be desired. Research from 2021 comparing two fitness apps — one with food and calorie tracking and one without — found that the regular interaction with a calorie tracker kept dieters more engaged and less likely to have lapses or cheat meals.2 It also reported that technical issues were among the most discouraging aspects of either app, with crashes, glitches, and difficulty navigating the app contributing to lapses among dieters.

Reverse Health has a meal plan, but it doesn’t provide any tools for tracking calories outside of these meals. You can manually input the name and a description of a meal, but unless you’re using another app alongside Reverse Health to calculate that meal’s nutrition, you won’t know where you stand. Add to that our testers’ frequent issues with the app (glitches during signup, meal plan errors, etc.), and it becomes less likely that an individual would stick to their plan day in and day out.

The other issue is that there isn’t anything about the Reverse Health program that achieves its health goals in a more profound way than any other system intended to limit calories, increase nutrient density in your diet, and improve physical strength. Is there scientific evidence that increased physical activity and a caloric deficit can alleviate various aspects of menopause?3 Yes, there is. But is there strong causal evidence that these issues are a result of changes brought about by menopause? Not so much. There’s just as much evidence that these issues are more closely linked to aging than to menopause itself.4 That doesn’t directly negate the potential effectiveness of the app, but it's an aspect of its use that should be approached with clarity and scientific accuracy, not marketing hype.

Safety

This should have been an easy category to score well in for Reverse Health, as much of its offering involved relatively low-impact exercise and a modest caloric deficit delivered through nutrient-dense foods.5 That’s a recipe for improved health and wellness for most people, especially for women of menopausal age.6

However, as was the case with effectiveness, the app’s performance took some of the wind out of Reverse Health's safety sails. Specifically, our testers experienced issues with their meal plans that could make it hard to stick to their calorie goals at best and could actually endanger their lives at worst.

When you sign up for Reverse Health, you set your dietary preferences, including food allergies. One of our testers selected allergies to gluten and dairy alongside a preference for pescatarianism. The meals in their plan were mostly gluten- and dairy-free, though some only came with suggested substitutions that lacked calorie adjustments. That’s not the worst of it. The worst of it was that the app ignored their preference for pescatarianism, including various meats like pork, beef, turkey, and chicken in multiple meals. If that preference had been an allergy for a user who included an unfamiliar ingredient in a dish without knowing its origin, it could put their health at risk.

One other knock on the company’s safety profile is its affiliation with Wellinda, a supplement brand. At various points in the Reverse Health program, the lessons promote supplement use, and “Supplements” is one of the three main tabs in the Meal Plan section of the app. That tab takes you directly to a link for Willinda’s online storefront.

Wellinda’s catalog is relatively straightforward, with many single-ingredient supplements that have low side effect risks. But several other supplements raise concerns, including a sleep supplement with an aggressive 10mg melatonin dose (optimization studies have used doses of 2mg and 4mg, for reference).7 There are also a few too many complex ingredient bills obscured by proprietary blends. The company boasts “triple lab testing” rather than third-party testing, and of the two members on its health advisory board, one is Reverse Health’s cofounder, and neither appears to have any medical degrees or certifications.

To be fair, Wellinda is not Reverse Health; it’s its own company. But its products are integrated into and promoted by the Reverse Health experience, and they are not the best supplements out there.

Cost

Reverse Health is relatively well-priced for the features it offers, though its various available discounts make it difficult to track what products are available and what they cost, depending largely on whether you get started on the app itself or a desktop interface. For example, if you head to the website, you’ll see options for smaller-scale plans like the wall pilates program, chair yoga, or keto diet. But if you use the app, you’re more likely to get funneled into the menopause weight loss program, which is the most expensive of the bunch because it includes a comprehensive fitness program incorporating aspects of both wall pilates and chair yoga.

All that said, certain deficiencies in the app, like a lack of symptom tracking or custom food tracking, make it harder to understand exactly how its costs compare to top competitors. Let’s use a handy chart to compare Reverse Health with some of the top fitness, wellness, and menopause apps on the market.

None of these apps quite does what the others do, with Lose It! and MyFitnessPal probably being the two most closely related in their feature sets, though the latter has a comprehensive meal planner that the former lacks. For monthly billing, Reverse Health is around the middle of the pack, but only Noom is more expensive when looking at the lowest possible monthly prices, which are typically achieved by paying a year's worth of monthly costs up front.

An important caveat that hurts our cost ranking for Reverse Health here is that we’ve consistently encountered different prices for the menopause weight loss program, depending largely on the device we used to look it up (though also in ways that felt randomized). On a desktop web browser, we saw a discounted price of $30/month. Later, on the app, we were offered the same program for $20/month.

This inconsistency might reward patient consumers shopping for the best rate, but it’s just as likely that an unsuspecting customer might end up overpaying for a product for no justifiable reason.

Convenience

Convenience is yet another area where Reverse Health suffers a bit from poor app performance and — perhaps more important — conceptual shortcomings. In testing, each member of our testing team had a moment when they found themselves ready to log a meal outside of the prescribed meal plan. Our expectation was that the system would allow us to select from a library of foods, even if that library proved less extensive than those of other apps. The experience was quite different.

When you attempt to log anything outside of the meal plan, you have two options: you can either log a different meal from within the limited scope of the meal plan, or you can make a simple note about what you ate instead. The field for that note contains suggested text that includes things like calories and nutrition, but the only real way to acquire those numbers is to use another app alongside Reverse Health.

Not being able to log that data means you’d spend the rest of the day guesstimating your calorie and macronutrient totals, which could significantly throw off your weight loss efforts over time. If Reverse Health can build a true food tracker into its app, that would be an enormous upgrade for the service. For now, food tracking is too limited to be effective outside the meal plan.

Our testers also ran into several glitches during signup that had them wondering whether they’d be able to participate in the review. In one case, the app became stuck on the subscription purchase screen, even after the tester had paid in full. It took several conversations with customer support, uninstalling and reinstalling the app three times, and a “refresh on Reverse Health’s end,” as one rep put it, to resolve the issue.

The one saving grace for Reverse Health’s convenience measure is the chat support. Reps were quick to respond and committed to resolving our issues when they arose. That gives us hope that whatever issues the Reverse Health app has on the technical side will have good people working to solve them over time.

Reverse Health is a wellness company focused on specific aspects of women’s health for those aged roughly 40 or older. We say roughly because central to Reverse Health’s approach to female wellness is a consideration for menopause and how it reshapes a woman’s physiology, from the early days of perimenopause to the years that follow after ovulation and menstruation cease for good.

The company offers four programs, one of which incorporates aspects of others:

• Weight loss
• Wall pilates
• Chair yoga
• Keto diet

The weight loss program includes both a meal plan and a fitness regimen. The fitness regimen will include lessons from the wall pilates and chair yoga programs, but the included meal plan isn’t necessarily ketogenic in nature unless you set that as a preference. That’s why, as we’ll discuss later in the pricing section, the weight loss program is significantly more expensive than the other, smaller standalone programs.

Reverse Health company reputation

Reverse Health has a relatively poor reputation online, especially through its page on the Better Business Bureau (BBB). There, the company sports an A+ rating from the Bureau, but its customer reviews aggregate to a 1.07 out of 5 stars at the time of this review. There have also been 140 official complaints over the last three years, with 42 of those coming in the last 12 months. Most of the issues are associated with difficulty receiving a refund despite the company’s 30-day guarantee. Many reviewers also had trouble downloading and using the app itself — technical problems our testers encountered, as well.

On Trustpilot, the picture is a little rosier, with Reverse Health owning a 3.8 rating out of a possible 5. Reviews here largely praise the quality of the wall pilates program and meal plan design. Negative reviews are similar to those on BBB, with refund hurdles and technical problems in the app being the top concerns.

While our rating is closer to what you see from the Trustpilot community, we share many of the same concerns voiced in negative reviews. The technical difficulties we encountered didn’t prevent us from being able to use the app, but it’s not hard for us to see how similar glitches could have barred others from successful use.

Menopause is, by the clinical definition, a moment in time. Specifically, it’s the exact one-year mark from a woman’s last menstruation, with no subsequent menstruations thereafter. Or, as one study author put it, it’s “the physiological cessation of reproductive capacity in a woman’s life.”17

It’s like the peak of a mountain. Between puberty and perimenopause, you’re in a nice green fertile valley. The start of perimenopause coincides with the first few steps up the mountain. Menopause is the peak, and everything after that — the way back down the mountain and beyond — is postmenopause. The whole experience, from its earliest symptoms to its last, can go on for anywhere between about three and 12 years on average.8 The peak within that range typically occurs at around seven years. That’s a long journey.

And when we talk about menopause, the conversation isn’t about that one moment. It’s about the journey, starting before those first steps up the incline and continuing for the rest of your life. It's more common to use the term “menopause” to refer to the entire experience, from perimenopause forward, even if symptoms and wellness needs change once you make it over that peak. We’ll use the terms similarly, with menopause serving as a more general term, and employing peri- or post- when we need to be specific.

So, where does Reverse Health fit into this process?

Reverse Health aims to alleviate various symptoms women endure throughout menopause and to reduce the risks of health complications that arise at this time in their lives. At the heart of the program is weight loss, as increased body fat, especially around the abdomen, is closely linked with the menopause transition. That increased abdominal fat carries a host of additional risks, most notably heart disease and diabetes.9

Diet and exercise are central to Reverse Health’s approach to these issues, and its programs are intended to be low-impact and easy to follow. That’s why the platform uses a meal plan and physically supported exercises like wall pilates and chair yoga. There’s a high likelihood that most of the people signing up will be able to make some semblance of the meals prescribed and have the physical ability to perform most of the exercise moves involved.

Let’s take a quick look at each of Reverse Health’s approaches to improving the menopause experience for women over 40:

Who is Reverse Health for?

Reverse Health is ideal for a small niche of women approaching or going through menopause who want a particular set of features in an app to accompany them on their journey. Specifically, it’s well-suited to those who:

• Want a consideration for menopause at the heart of recommendations: Reverse Health has menopause in mind at every turn, with available scientific evidence guiding its meal and exercise programs.
• Prefer meal plans to calorie tracking: By using a prefabricated meal plan, there’s no need to log foods or scan barcodes, though it requires a lot of cooking at home.
• Prefer the act of exercise to the act of tracking exercise data: Most fitness apps obsess over data, from heart rate to VO2 max, but Reverse Health simply takes you through its workouts. Your progress is tracked, but not in fine detail.

Who might want to look elsewhere?

Reverse Health lacks some features you’ll find in other fitness- or menopause-centric apps, which would make certain alternatives superior for those seeking them. We’ll outline those specific options in the dedicated alternatives section toward the bottom of this page, but here are some of the missing features and who might desire them:

• Menopause symptom tracking: Ideal for those who want to track menstruation and symptom data to follow the course of their transition.
• Nuanced calorie and nutrition tracking: Best for people who want to cook freely for themselves or don’t have the time or ability to follow a strict meal plan.
• Advanced fitness metrics: Other apps can sync with fitness trackers to incorporate more specific fitness data into your body composition journey.
• Food psychology: An ideal complement to any fitness goals, as it can help you understand and overcome your habits.

If these features speak to you specifically, you’ll most certainly feel their absence from Reverse Health and may find better results elsewhere.

Reverse Health may also be an inferior option for women who are many years away from the start of perimenopause. Theoretically, its nutrition and fitness advice could still be helpful, but it’s better-suited to women around and over 40.

The Reverse Health meal plan also requires you to cook most, if not all, of your meals. Most recipes make several servings each, so you don’t have to cook from scratch three times per day. Still, you will be responsible for cooking the food for the vast majority of your meals. If that doesn’t align with your lifestyle or culinary experience, you might need another approach.

Reverse Health programs should be safe and easy to follow for most people, but there are potential risks involved with any health intervention. The meal program has some pitfalls, including a potential lack of precision in serving sizes unless you use a sensitive kitchen scale. Misserving yourself in enough meals could put you into too deep a calorie deficit or undermine your attempts at weight loss by providing too many calories. And because the app doesn’t sync with wearable devices to get a more personalized sense of your metabolic state, your calorie recommendations are based on limited information, potentially making recommendations less useful, if not unsafe.

If you opt for a low-carb or ketogenic meal plan, other issues can arise, as well. The keto diet isn’t for everyone and may not even be an ideal way to address menopause symptoms. The approach — a severe limitation of carbohydrates with a moderate limitation on protein and an abundance of dietary fat in their places — has been mentioned in studies regarding female reproductive endocrine diseases, but it hasn’t been tested much as a first-line treatment for menopause symptoms.17 And the diet can pose significant risks, including nutrient deficiencies, the formation of kidney stones, muscle loss, cognitive issues, and more.18

On the workout side, exercises are low-impact and based on body weight. That makes it likely that most users could approach the required moves safely. But the videos go by somewhat quickly, and there’s no button in the video player to jump back 10 or 15 seconds. If you hit the back button, it jumps back to the beginning of a chapter, which can be several minutes long. That makes it hard to go back and check on recommendations for form and technique, both of which are critical to ensure safety.

Also, as we discussed earlier, the Reverse Health app pushes certain supplements to improve the menopause transition and even treat certain symptoms. But rather than make simple supplement recommendations, the app directs you at various points to a specific store called Wellinda. The company’s medical board leaves a lot to be desired, its supplements are not third-party tested, and many of its products obscure doses behind proprietary blends. That makes it hard for us to recommend them on safety or efficacy grounds.

In our experience, Reverse Health pricing tends to fluctuate a lot depending on the day and whether you’re accessing the platform from a desktop web browser or the app itself. In our testing, we ran across one set of prices more often than others, so we’ll use those here to give you an idea of what you’re most likely to see offered from Reverse Health.

First, let’s look at pricing for the complete menopause weight loss program, which includes aspects of the wall pilates and chair yoga programs and can include elements of the keto diet program if you choose low carb in your meal preferences:

Typically, opting for the three-month plan over the one-month plan would net you savings, but we were able to find the full program offered through the app for $20 on a monthly subscription, undercutting the three-month option by nearly $1 per month.

The other three programs all share price points, so we've included them in the following chart together:

It’s unclear why Reverse Health charges for these programs on a weekly instead of a monthly basis, but it’s worth noting that they do.

Reverse Health returns and customer communication

Reverse Health offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on its programs, but nearly every complaint lodged against the company through the Better Business Bureau related to refusals to honor this promise. We had no such difficulties in our testing experience, but we also can’t advise you to put your faith in this guarantee. It’s a better offering than competitors like My Fitness Pal, which doesn’t offer any refunds. Still, some other apps, like Lose It!, have similar refund offerings.

A quick note on communication: over the decades that we’ve spent scrutinizing online telehealth offerings, ranging from at-home testing kits and supplements to prescription interfaces and online therapy, we’ve only rarely come across a company with communication standards as limited as Reverse Health.

At first, this is a blessing. There’s no uninvited barrage of emails trying to get you to sign up if you get partway through the process and decide to wait. After actually signing up, though, the lack of communication becomes problematic. None of our testers received so much as a receipt verifying our purchase. When we hit glitches getting started in the app, we actually had to check our company expense records to make sure the payments went through.

Fortunately, the chat feature in the app is readily attended and the people on the other end are courteous and helpful.

So, Reverse Health is far from perfect, and its ideal niche is a somewhat narrow band of menopausal women who want a simple meal plan and low-impact exercise routines without much room for customization or data tracking. If that doesn’t sound ideal to you, you may prefer an alternative to Reverse Health. Some of the best alternatives are other fitness apps, while there are also menopause-specific apps out there that could be better for your specific needs.

Here are some of the best alternatives to Reverse Health for tackling the same fundamental wellness issues: