There isn’t a silver bullet for perimenopause..
…because menopause isn’t a werewolf.
Although I admit there may be days when you feel like it and nights when you’re howling at the moon.
Menopause isn’t magical and it certainly isn’t mythical. There’s no silver bullet that fixes everything.
We’re all different — and we know from all our experience living with these female bodies, that our hormones have a very different impact on all of us.
I’ve got to be honest with you, I’d love a quick fix. And after 14 years in perimenopause I can promise you I’ve tried a few.
Even Hormone Replacement Therapy that most scientific of scientific solutions gets treated as though it’s a magic bullet.
You’re oestrogen deficient. Take oestrogen. Hey Presto! Abracadabra! Alakazam!
And there’s are a few pitfalls to that.
🧙♀️We can get discouraged when it doesn’t work miracles and give up on something that might really have helped us.
🧙♀️We can drive ourselves crazy trying different forms or different doses in the quest for the perfect solution.
🧙♀️It can be exhausting. We can cause ourselves more worry trying to find that one things and making our symptoms worse.
🧙♀️ It gets very upsetting if it doesn’t work for us or if we struggle with side-effects.
🧙♀️It can make us less inclined to do all the small, regular things, such as exercise, mindfulness or improving our diet, which make such a massive difference to our wellbeing.
🧙♀️Other people may not understand that we don’t just take our HRT and shut up. We may still need their support.
I am incredibly grateful for the HRT I take, and I know many women are too. But it’s just one part of an occasionally rather boring routine that helps me manage my perimenopause symptoms.
That routine includes weight-bearing exercise, a diet that’s high in protein and fibre but lower in sugars, meditation and mindfulness, fans, sleep hygiene, vaginal oestrogen and emollients, hypoallergenic moisturisers and a damn good hairdresser.
And all those things are really useful if HRT is really not for you. And sometimes it just isn’t. For many reasons.
And it’s equally true that there’s no magic combination of herbs that will fix it. And no secret diet which will balance your hormones — because the thing about hormones is that if they were balanced all the time they wouldn’t work.
Which is why, even though werewolves can be quite sexy, I prefer the science to the magic.
So, in this workshop we look at the data. We think about what we know and what we don’t know. We work out what’s important to us. We think about how we make decisions and how we want to make this one. And we make the right choice for ourselves. Because that’s the only right choice there is.
Here’s the booking link for the workshop next Thursday https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/344859793927
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
