Atlantum Alliance Podcast | Episode featuring Coach Mabina Daniel Lengweng, Women’s Health Strategist & Founder of Mabina Coaching Services
You’ve been told to eat less and move more. You’ve tracked your calories, tried the trending diets, pushed yourself through workouts built for someone else’s body. And the results — if they came at all — didn’t last.
Coach Mabina Daniel Lengweng has spent 25 years in the fitness industry, the last eight entirely focused on women’s health. His conclusion: the system isn’t broken. The approach is.
In this episode of Atlantum Alliance, recorded at the villa in Dubai, Vishakha Abbi sits down with the South African-born, Dubai-based women’s health strategist for a conversation that covers hormones, the menstrual cycle, gut health, nutrition myths, and why most women are being held to health standards that were never designed for them.
The 28 Days Nobody Taught You to Use
The menstrual cycle is not just a monthly inconvenience. It is, as Mabina describes it, a blueprint — a 28 to 35-day operating system that, when understood and worked with rather than against, changes everything from mood and energy to how a woman responds to food and exercise.
Most women know the phases exist. Almost none know how to use them. And the consequences are visible in his clients every day: mood swings, anxiety, insomnia, bloating, brain fog — symptoms routinely dismissed or medicated, when in many cases they are the body’s response to being chronically under-fuelled and out of sync with its own rhythm.
His analogy is precise: you know the rain is coming, so you prep the farm. You plant the seeds, you put the systems in place, because you know what the season demands. The women who suffer most are the ones who haven’t prepped — not because they’re not trying, but because nobody taught them what to prepare for.
Hormones Are Messengers. Food Is the Information.
One of the most clarifying ideas in this conversation is Mabina’s framing of nutrition: hormones are messengers, and food is the information they carry. If you’re not feeding the system correctly, the messages go wrong — and the symptoms follow.
In the three days before a period, the body needs higher quality fat and complex carbohydrates. Avocado, flax seeds, chia seeds, pumpkin, buckwheat. Not because of a trend, but because insulin resistance spikes in that window, and what a woman eats in that phase directly determines the severity of what comes next. The cravings for sugar and junk food at that time aren’t weakness. They’re the body asking — loudly — for something it’s not getting.
The average woman, he notes, eats between 1,000 and 1,300 calories a day. In the days around her cycle, she needs closer to 1,600 to 1,800 just to maintain basic nutrient levels — iron, manganese, copper, B vitamins. The gap between what most women consume and what their bodies actually require during that phase is where many of the symptoms live.
The Research Left These Women Out
Vishakha, speaking as both a nurse and a woman who has lived with PCOS and insulin resistance, raises something Mabina returns to throughout: most of the existing research into women’s health is based on Western populations. African women, Indian women, Arabic women, Asian women — the vast majority of his clients — have been largely left out of the studies their doctors use to treat them.
Mabina has spent years filling that gap himself. He cross-references leading medical researchers with Ayurvedic texts, Traditional Chinese Medicine, the nutritional traditions of the Arabian Peninsula and South Africa. He’s spoken to his own mother about what women in Africa were taught to do before and during their cycles — and the answer, consistently, comes back to food. Specific, intentional, traditional food.
The environmental dimension matters too. Women living in Dubai face particular challenges: air conditioning, pollution, limited sun exposure, and a built environment that makes vitamin D deficiency almost inevitable. Mabina tested this on himself — years of unexplained illness in the UK resolved almost entirely when he moved to Dubai, got sun exposure, and began supplementing vitamin D3. He now prioritises morning and late afternoon sun daily. Most of his female clients don’t.
Lift Weights. This Is Not Optional.
When it comes to exercise, Mabina is unambiguous: strength training is non-negotiable for women who want to transform their health. Not the high-intensity, cortisol-spiking workouts that dominate fitness culture, but targeted, low-intensity resistance work that supports hormonal stability rather than undermining it.
His recommended framework is the 5-5 method — five exercises, five sets, five reps of heavy compound movements — followed by leaving the gym. Simple, efficient, and compatible with a full working day. Paired with incline treadmill walking at a steady pace — he recommends starting at incline 10, speed 3.5, working toward 30 minutes daily — it forms the backbone of what he prescribes to most clients.
Protein is the other non-negotiable: 120 grams daily, minimum, spread across meals. And not protein in isolation — taken without fat, it’s like supplementing vitamin D3 without K2. The pairing matters. The sequencing matters. The timing matters.
Gut Health, Bone Broth, and the Foods We Abandoned
Modern medicine is catching up to something traditional cultures never forgot: gut health is foundational to everything else. Mabina prescribes bone broth frequently — vegetable or chicken — because it supports the gut lining gently and accessibly. For women with PCOS in particular, chicken gizzards and chicken livers are, in his words, magic. Foods that disappeared from modern diets and are only now returning to clinical interest.
For vegetarian clients — many of his Indian women eat this way for religious reasons — the principles hold: okra, pumpkin, sweet potato, buckwheat, chia seeds soaked overnight. Real food, prepared simply, eaten consistently. No calorie counting required.
The Final Message
The closing of this conversation is worth sitting with.
“You are not broken. It’s just that your system is different from other people. You are completely different, and you need different treatment.”
Not the trending diet. Not the generic programme. Not the comparison to the woman next to you who seems to be managing the same symptoms differently. You are an individual with a specific history, a specific cycle, a specific set of needs — and the first step is learning to treat yourself as one.
Two sessions of strength training a week. A daily walk. Six to eight hours of sleep. Enough protein. Food that is actually food.
The fundamentals, it turns out, have always been the answer.
Connect with Coach Mabina
🌐 neyawellness.fitness 📱 Instagram: @hormones_muscles_coach
Global Health Stratalogues explores the frontiers of performance through conversations on health, business, and mental wellbeing. Produced with MedEdge MEA and hosted by Atlantum Alliance, a global community dedicated to activating human potential.
If you are interested in being a guest on the podcast email: info@GlobalStratalogues.com
