25-YO Hyderabad Mother Turned Her Postpartum Experience Into a Solution for 10000+ Women

The first thing Keerthi Aashish noticed in her postpartum was the silence. Not the quiet of a sleeping newborn, but a heavy, internal quiet — a fog that settled between her and the world after her daughter’s birth in early 2023. At 25, she was surrounded by a family that ran a medical college, by doctors and specialists, and by well-meaning advice. Yet, she felt utterly alone.

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“I could feel the symptoms of PTSD, but I couldn’t pinpoint those feelings. It was just a very rough phase,” she recalls to The Better India. “Nobody really tells you how to cope postpartum. Everyone talks about pregnancy… but after the baby comes, there is nothing.”

The scripts of new motherhood — exhaustion, joy, chaos — were replaced by a harder reality. “I couldn't sleep at night because my baby was waking up every hour. I was tired,  I was so depressed, I would binge on sugar… there's weight gain, there's hormone changes, there's exhaustion… and above all, you have to look after a newborn.” 

Even her mother and grandmother, who had suffered themselves silently, could only pass on the same cryptic solace: this is just how it is. “There's no reasoning behind it,” Keerthi says.

She is vice chairperson of Maheswara Medical College and Hospital in Hyderabad and holds an Economics degree from India, along with an MBA in finance from France. She was immersed in a world of allopathic solutions. 

“Allopathy-wise, we have a lot of backing. We have a team of doctors, specialists, you name it.” But in the face of her own hormonal tumult, that backing felt abstract. The system she was part of had no clear protocol for the silent storm she was weathering. “When you don't have the required help to understand your hormones better,” she realised, “you need to help yourself.”

The kitchen experiment

Three months in, desperate for a sense of agency, she found a thread online: seed cycling. The term felt foreign, a wellness trend from afar. But as she read about pumpkin, flax, sesame, and sunflower seeds, a memory flickered. This wasn't new. 

“It came across as a very Western concept, but it's been rooted in our traditions for very, very long. We do eat these sesame laddus during postpartum, but nobody really explained the tradition or the science behind it. We were just eating it because our elders said so,” she says. 

With nothing to lose, she started blending spoons of seeds in her kitchen, following the two-phase cycle aligned. “For one week, there was no change,” she admits. She committed to a month.

The shift, when it came, was subtle, then noticeable. “The end of one week, two weeks, I stopped feeling tired… At the end of one month, I started having better clarity in my head. I was sleeping better. My acne started going away slowly, and I was producing more milk. I was smiling more, laughing more, and my weight gain stopped because I was binging less,” she shares her experience.

It wasn’t magic, though; it was nourishment for what her body needed. 

“A man's hormone cycle is 24 hours,” she explains. “For a woman, we follow the moon cycle… we need different patterns of nutrition throughout the month. The first half (flax and pumpkin for zinc, magnesium) supports estrogen; the second (sesame and sunflower for selenium, vitamin E) for progesterone. It was a simple, food-based logic”

Her endorsement points to a growing area of nutritional science. While large-scale clinical trials specifically on "seed cycling" are limited, the biochemical rationale is well-supported.

For instance, a 2022 narrative review in the journal Nutrients detailed how lignans in flaxseeds act as phytoestrogens, which can help modulate the body's estrogen activity, while the high zinc content in pumpkin seeds is crucial for ovarian function and progesterone synthesis.

A doctor’s perspective

Dr Savitha, a practising gynaecologist, sees Keerthi’s work as addressing a critical modern lifestyle gap. “Our grandmother used seeds regularly in their diet. But in due course, due to the modern food habits, lifestyle changes, people seem to have forgotten about these things,” she observes.

This nutritional amnesia, she suggests, is a direct contributor to today’s epidemic of hormonal imbalances. “When we include [seed cycling] along with our medication, this definitely helps.” She lists benefits from metabolic health and skincare to improved digestion, affirming its role as a powerful complementary practice. 

Crucially, both Keerthi and Dr Savitha frame this as nutritional support, not a medical intervention. “These are not medical claims,” Keerthi is quick to clarify. Her goal is to fill a dietary — not a pharmaceutical — void. She clarifies that this distinction is central to Samah’s philosophy: using food as foundational care.

The seed of a movement

However, her personal victory was eclipsed by a rising frustration. “I was like, why don't more people know about this? Why isn't this talked about?… It's just seeds.” The potential was staggering in its simplicity.

But the catalyst was her daughter, Samaya. “I knew she was going to probably go through the same thing… I wanted to change the narrative.” She named her nascent mission Samah — ‘balance’ — after her.

In March 2023, she packaged her kitchen blends and took them to a pop-up stall in Chennai, a tentative experiment. The response was a lightning bolt. Women approached her with stories of PCOS, irregular cycles, and fatigue. “We sold out immediately,” she adds.

The ripple effect

Content creator Tanisha Kohli found the brand during her own struggle. Diagnosed with PCOS, she had cycled through medications that felt like temporary masks. “Whenever I go see a gynaecologist, they always prescribe me something to just mask and manage my symptoms for the time being and not… cure me from within,” she shares.

For her, seed cycling offered a different path — simple, side-effect-free, and sustainable. “It is so easy, actually. I just add it to my food.” After six months of consistency, coupled with a dedicated workout routine, the changes were undeniable. 

“I saw my cycles slowly becoming more predictable. Before that, I used to literally skip a whole two months or three months.” Her advice to others mirrors Keerthi’s philosophy: “Don’t expect fast results. It’s like a gradual and slow process,  have some patience and stick to it.”

Building Samah

Formally launching in July 2023, Keerthi faced a dual challenge: scaling a product while sticking to a radical ethos. “The motto of our brand is to make it at home. Do it at home. We'll give you the resources for that. But if you feel like it's too time-consuming, then you can always come to us.”

The market response has been decisive. From that first pop-up, Samah has grown to average 1,100 monthly orders. To date, they have processed over 10,500 orders on Shopify and, combined with Amazon, have served approximately 10,000 unique consumers. These figures underscore the scale of the need she identified — transforming a kitchen experiment into a profitable venture rooted in information.

She understands the consumer resistance, though. “Seed cycling does not show changes overnight; it takes a couple of months. I know with the world we live in, we want to see results really quickly. Nobody wants to take time.” In an age of instant gratification, she was advocating for patience, for a return to kitchen-shelf wisdom.

The next chapter

The stories from Tanisha and countless others in her DMs revealed a final gap: knowledge and tracking. This led Keerthi to her current project, the SYNC app. 

“Generally… we have these apps where you track your period. They're very female-centric. What about men?” she asks. The app, now in final review, will be a free tool for all genders to track cycles and holistic health. 

Unlike basic trackers that only log data, Sync helps users interpret what their body is doing in real-time and offers practical lifestyle, nutrition, and movement tips aligned with natural rhythms. For women, this includes phase-based insights into menstrual, follicular, ovulatory and luteal cycles; for men, it provides daily insights tied to patterns in energy, stress and sleep.

Now expecting her second child, Keerthi’s purpose is crystalline. “For me, it's really about growing the next generation to be aware of food. We need to really gear up and take care of ourselves by ourselves.”

Her journey — from the silent fog of postpartum trauma to founding a movement — closes with a simple, powerful loop back to where it began: in the kitchen.

Her advice for other women is the lesson she learned the hard way: “The cure is in your kitchen. It really is just as simple as that. Give some time for yourself and stick with the routine.”

All images from Keerthi Aashish and her team.

Source:

'Evaluation of the Effect of Seed Cycling on Anthropometric, Biochemical, Hormonal and Nutritional Parameters in Women Diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome – A Cohort Interventional Study Design': by Journal on Natural Remedies, published in Research Gate in July 2024.