Nadia: “HRT has changed my life – it’s incredible”
TV’s Nadia Sawalha thought she was seriously ill when she first noticed menopausal signs. It also affected her marriage and her body image. Here, she shares the tips that helped
She’s regularly on television talking about the menopause with her Loose Women co-stars, and Nadia Sawalha has never shied away from the topic, admitting that at her lowest point she thought she was dying.
“The first symptom [around eight years ago] was that I started to feel very, very dark, I’d wake up at 4am and feel petrified. I felt empty and pointless,” explained
Nadia, 56. “There was a dark cloud that came over me, then my periods went erratic and then they became horrendous – I could barely leave the house I was bleeding so much. At the time I thought I had ovarian cancer or womb cancer. With that came tiredness, irritability, utter exhaustion and I’d get terrible memory lapses. All the symptoms were very frightening. I went through really dark times. I thought I was dying. First, I thought I had cancer, then I thought I had Alzheimer’s.”
Nadia – who is now a body acceptance advocate – said the menopause also affected the way she felt about her physical appearance.
“I thought, ‘I don’t like myself, I feel really horrible, I’m fatter than I was, my hair is whiter than it was and my collagen is disappearing.’ You feel really, really unattractive and your body feels so different.”
The presenter – mum to Maddie, 18, and Kiki-Bee, 13 – also admits it affected her relationship with husband Mark Adderley, 50, and at her lowest point she felt like she “hated” him. Things have hugely improved for Nadia since going on HRT [hormone replacement therapy], but she also says she made changes to her lifestyle.
She said, “I decided to take a multipronged attack; to look at how
I ate and eat more menopausal-friendly food, go to my homeopath regularly every month, I got into meditation that stopped me from going mad as it slowed me down a bit. I also just accepted that I was changing, which really helped.”
But for Nadia, the biggest change has been taking HRT – following consultations with doctors. Like many, she was initially wary of the therapy following a 2002 study, which linked it to breast cancer. Since then, further studies have found that the link isn’t as strong as first thought and that there can, in fact, be health benefits, such as a decreased chance of heart disease and osteoporosis.
“It’s changed my life,” Nadia admitted. “It’s incredible. For so many women, their relationships break down or they leave careers that they love, and all because they are lacking the female fuel that they need, which is oestrogen. Since having HRT,
I feel like I did before I had children, it is totally unbelievable.”