I had never experienced a hot flush before. One minute, I was calmly enjoying my drink at Wetherspoon with my daughter, and the next….. Whoosh!!!… A tidal wave of heat surged from my neck to my face. If spontaneous combustion were an Olympic sport, I’d have taken home the gold medal. It was one of those UK summer days when even the air conditioning gave up and started sweating too, and there I was, melting quietly in Wetherspoon.

After about a minute, the heat faded, just long enough for me to think I’d survived. Wrong. Boom, round two! Hotter, sweatier, and now I was convinced I might actually catch fire. I started flapping the menu like I was trying to flag down rescue, when really I was just desperate for a little breeze. My daughter, Emily, laughed so hard her drink almost shot out her nose. “Mum, you’re going through the change!” she declared, as if she’d just spotted Bigfoot. “Absolutely not,” I fired back, “I’m far too young for that nonsense!”

Honestly, I had no idea what was going on. I thought menopause was a distant problem for my fifties. I mean, my mum was still having periods in her mid-fifties! But, plot twist: I’d been sterilised at 28 after my son convinced me that having only one daughter and one son was plenty. Don’t get me wrong, I adore my son, but as a baby, he was such hard work that if eBay had existed back then, I’d have listed him under ‘Buy It Now’ for 50p (with free delivery! As in me personally delivering him in person!). So, I chose sterilisation, thinking I’d skipped future baby drama. Little did I know, 25 years later, it was my express ticket to early menopause.

So here I was experiencing mysterious menopausal weight gain, without realising it was indeed the menopause itself. For the first thirty years of my life, I floated through the world with a slim figure, my waist never daring to creep above a UK size 12. At 5ft 9in, that’s practically the textbook definition of tall-girl elegance. I was convinced my metabolism had signed a lifelong contract. Apparently, nobody warned it about the fine print that comes with middle age.

Let’s talk about the journey: first, there’s peri-menopause, a sneak preview where your hormones start playing musical chairs. Then comes the stage I call “men pause,” where your body hits the brakes, and you wonder if you’re starring in a nature documentary nobody asked for. And finally, it’s full steam ahead into menopause, where everything changes, blossoms, and wilts all at once. Is it any wonder we need chocolate?

And then there’s food. Oh, food! Suddenly, it’s your best friend, your emotional support system, and your main hobby. You finish eating and immediately start plotting your next meal, like a culinary chess master. Food becomes less a necessity and more an obsession, the weekly supermarket shop feels like meeting a ‘drug dealer’ for a secret snack fix. I get positively giddy at the sight of everything bad for me. At this point, the bakery aisle is a catwalk of temptation, and I’m sashaying down it with all the confidence of a celebrity at the Oscars.

Yet every year, my dress size kept climbing! I went from a size 12 to a size 20, with my weight creeping up from my mid-thirties onwards, and honestly, I had no clue what was happening. In the fog of weight gain, I’d get so fed up I’d vanish under baggy clothes, throw in the towel, and declare, “Well, I guess I’m just fat now!” I invented every excuse under the sun: “I’m just a big girl,” “You’re never the same after kids,” “It’s genetics!” Blah, blah, blah, and all the other fairy tales I told myself to soften the blow. Who knew denial could be so creative?

In the meantime, my size 18 clothes were getting tighter, to the point where I had to accept my next size up. My bingo wings were flapping, and my joints were aching so bad that even standing for long periods of time was starting to hurt, not good when you run a community centre and deal with heavy lifting and are on your feet half the day. I had to face the truth; something was not right, and I needed to sort it. This is not the representation I want for my adult children, nor my grandchildren. I had to face the fact that I had buried my head and allowed myself to get into this situation; now I wanted a solution, and I was willing to take it seriously this time and sort it out.

The first solution to my problem was to lose weight, then understand how to treat the rest. However, before I let you in on my solutions, please don’t think for one moment that I went to bed one night and woke up the next morning a size 12-14 with absolutely no issues or hard work in between. In fact, if you think I am going to give you a quick-fix solution, you’d best click out of this blog post now, because that is not the case. To really get on top of your hot flushes and the ever-expanding waistline, you have to be prepared to give yourself a starter 2-year transformation, at least. This could be different for other women, so be aware that my results may not be your results, and the time span may be very different. But what you do need to expect is that this will take time, so be prepared.

My journey so far has included 16 months of weight-loss injections, 2 months of HRT gel, and 3 weeks of rubbing testosterone gel into my arms.

What are the results?

Well, I am now a size 12-14 in dress size, my weight has gone from 16 stone 4 pounds to 11 Stone 12 pounds. I have had no hot flushes for over two months and am slowly, but surely, starting to feel my old self again. The pressure taken off my joints is immense. I don’t come home after work and just fall asleep on the sofa (I actually blog now), and my sleep is getting better, less interrupted by hot sweats and aching joints. Don’t get me wrong, my life is still not perfect, and each day I face living with anxiety, PTSD and chronic painful flare-ups, to which I think and feel is fibromyalgia (until I have a diagnosis, I can not be 100% on that), but my life is far better now than it was last year.

So if there is any advice I can help pass on to you, it would be this:

If you start to notice weight gain in your early thirties to late forties, you have intense heat of hot flushes where you feel like you are going to spontaneously combust, then it could be the start of peri-menopause, and it will only start to get worse as you get older. So, please do go see your GP, have a blood test, and check whether this is the case. That way, you can begin your journey to treatment and not leave it as long as I did, and end up in the situation where my hot flushes were unbearable.

I hope that by sharing my own journey, it helps other women on theirs. Feel free to leave a comment below this post, and I will reply. In the meantime, I will continue to share my journey and results with you, support you, and provide more knowledge to help you on your own journey.

Your friend for the journey

Kate x

Mrs Katy Batten BA (Hons)

( Pronouns: She/Her), International Best Selling Author and Admin Management of New Pasture Lane Community Centre, Registered Charity No 700422.

DISCLAIMER: These blog posts are in no way, shape, or form to provide any professional advice and are for entertainment purposes only. The author/s take no personal responsibility or liability for any person/s who chooses to use the methods in their own lives.