My Perimenopause Story: Why Everything Suddenly Felt Impossible

I had been coaching nutrition for almost two decades when my own body stopped making sense to me.

I knew what to do with a body. I had worked with a lot of women, raised three kids, and built a life that held together. I could still get up a mountain, and I could still eat the way I had always eaten, and I assumed both of those things would keep being true.

Then the weight started arriving anyway. A few pounds at first, on exactly the same food. The energy that used to carry me through a long hike was gone by the time I finished my morning coffee. I told myself it was stress, or a bad stretch, or simply age, and I pushed on, because pushing on is what I do.

The kitchen floor

It was 2am. Another night of drenching sweats. I ended up on the kitchen floor crying in a way that had nothing to do with anything that had actually happened that day.

By then I had gained thirty pounds, while doing everything I had spent my career telling other women to do.

My husband found me there. What he said was, there has got to be a better way.

He was right, although not in the way either of us meant at the time. There was a better way. I did not have the information yet.

What I had to relearn

What followed was not a transformation. It was slow and unglamorous, and mostly it was a matter of going back to foundations I already knew and looking at them again through a perimenopause lens.

Fuel for energy, not only for weight loss.

Protein, because holding onto muscle is what protects nearly everything else.

Strength training, because it does things for bone and body composition that cardio does not do. I say that as a woman who tried to run her way out of this first.

Consistency ahead of perfection, because my energy was unpredictable, and a plan that only works in a good week is not a plan.

None of it was exciting. All of it worked.

What the doctors said

I did ask for help. I saw several doctors, more than one gynecologist among them.

I was told it was in my head. I was told I should consider counselling.

I want to be careful here, because therapy is valuable and mental health support matters. But when your body is doing something real and you are told the problem is your mind, it does not help you. It teaches you not to trust yourself.

I sat in an office with tears running down my face trying to describe the night sweats and the fog and the way my own body had stopped feeling like mine. What I got back was that it was not like it was a disease.

I understand it better now. Those doctors were not bad people. Perimenopause was barely in their training, so they reached for the explanation they had, and the explanation they had was me.

Six words

Eventually I found a provider who actually understood this. Someone who could explain the hormonal changes, the timeline, and the reason behind every symptom I had been trying to describe for years.

She said: you are not crazy, you are in perimenopause.

Nothing about my body changed that day. Everything about how I understood it did.

What actually turned it

The turn did not come from a supplement or a protocol. It came from finally understanding the mechanism. Once I knew what estrogen decline was doing to my sleep and to where my body was storing fat, the symptoms stopped reading as a personal failing and started looking like a problem with levers on it.

That is the whole difference. Suffering has no handles. A problem does.

What I do with it now

Four years on, I work with women who are standing where I stood. The same confusion, and the same certainty that they are the only one it is happening to.

They are not broken and they are not imagining it. Most of them are drowning in information and starving for translation.

After that I went and learned this properly. I trained as a menopause coaching specialist, did the Canadian Menopause Society masterclass and the IMS programs, and read the guidelines the societies actually publish, the ones that had never reached my exam room. The evidence largely exists. It is not perfect, but it is far better than what women are being handed.

The information was never the problem. Nobody was translating it.

So that is the job. I read the research, I clear the noise off it, and I hand back the few things that actually move the needle.

I am not going to tell you this is your awakening. I have read that line a hundred times, and I think it asks far too much of a woman who is already exhausted. This is a stage of life with a mechanism and an evidence base behind it, and you are allowed to find it hard while you work your way through.

You do not need to overhaul your life by Monday. You need a few true things, applied steadily, in the week you actually have.

I am in your corner.

🩷 Catharine

Certified Menopause Coach Specialist • NASM-CNC • NASM-CPT • PN Level 1 • GGS-1 • Level 2 Mindset Coaching Certified • NASM-Weightloss Specialist

Certified Menopause Coaching Specialist & Perimenopause Navigator. Founder of The Meno Collective, translating perimenopause research into work women can actually do. She also provides personalised 1-on-1 coaching through Macros Inc.