The emotional rollercoaster of caring for a BABY while starting the menopause
AT Liz EARLE’s London pied-aterre, all is calm, orderly and fragrant, as you’d expect from one of Britain’s foremost authorities on beauty and wellbeing. scented candles burn, the fire flickers and a terrier snoozes peacefully.
Fresh-faced and looking younger than her 55 years, Liz is a perfect advert for the regime of healthy living and eating she espouses — a key constituent of which, it turns out, is sitting on a plate in front of us. ‘it’s my Menopause Cake,’ she says, offering me a slice. Chock-full of dried fruits, linseed, walnuts and soya flour, the cake is a veritable powerhouse of goodness featuring the chemical compound phytoestrogen, which mimics the effects of oestrogen and could even help boost levels of the hormone in mid-life women.
‘i bet the men in your house avoid it,’ i say, between mouthfuls.
‘Yes, they can be a bit wary! But it’s nice to have one in the freezer and if girlfriends come round who are having a bad time with the menopause you can cut them a slice and it’s an ice-breaker.’
Liz is one of those envy-inducing multi-taskers who seamlessly combines successful entrepreneurship with parenthood. she’s famous for her
eponymous beauty and skincare range which she sold for an undisclosed sum to avon in 2010, which in turn sold it two years ago to the owners of high street chain Boots for £140 million. But now she’s diversified.
she publishes a magazine (her home in south London — actually a set of adjoining mews cottages set in pretty gardens — doubles as its HQ) and she’s an author of more than 30 books on health, beauty and wellbeing.
somehow, she also helps run her farm in somerset. she and her husband raise grassfed beef and sheep and she promises she’ll be ‘out there with a Thermos and sandwiches’ during lambing. Meanwhile she has produced five children: three boys and two girls. Phew.
she had her children in two sets — the elder two, Guy, 24 and Lily, 27, with her first husband Patrick earle, and the younger three, aged 17, 15 and seven, with her second and current husband, conveniently also a Patrick (Drummond). ‘so friends didn’t have to alter the entries in their address books,’ she smiles.
THERE are 20 years between her eldest and youngest child, who arrived unexpectedly when she was just shy of her 48th birthday. she hadn’t planned him and recalls: ‘i wasn’t quite sure what was going on. My periods were stopping and i thought, maybe it’s the menopause.
‘i hadn’t been trying for a baby so it was a wonderful surprise to discover i was pregnant; quite amazing. i found out at 15 weeks. i did a home test which was confirmed by a scan. it wasn’t what i was expecting at all.
‘My husband was with me at the doctor’s and it was, “Wow! This is amazing!”
‘Of course we knew how it had happened — you don’t exactly have to ask yourself the question — but because you hear so much in the press about the difficulty of conceiving in later life, you don’t actually imagine it will.’
it’s worth continuing to use contraception for at least a year after what we believe to be our last period, she points out, to prevent late-life surprises. Not that she is anything but overjoyed with hers.
‘Of course i’m delighted. i wouldn’t send him back,’ she smiles.
she says she didn’t worry about the risks of having a late- life baby even though complications in pregnancy and the odds of genetic problems rise significantly over the age of 45. ‘You have to keep things in perspective. Obviously there’s more chance of complications, but if you’re not genetically predisposed to them, you eat well and stay fit, the risks lessen.
‘i wasn’t anxious because these days scans are amazing, and at three months everyone has a nuchal fold test (which detects the likelihood of Down’s syndrome) and they were forever taking bloods, and they can pick up such a lot from that. it was all perfectly fine, which was reassuring.’
in your mid-50s, however, energy levels undoubtedly ebb. how does she cope with the competing demands of all this industry?
‘When people say, “how do you do it? Five children!” i point out that because they’re so spread out it makes life much easier. Lily’s hugely helpful at baby-sitting. i’ll ring her and say, “Do you fancy coming over? i’ve cooked supper — and by the way, i’m going out but you can come with Baz [her little dog] and [husband] harry” ’, she laughs.
For all that she seems to sail through life, the fact remains that Liz was looking after a baby just when depleting hormones were signalling the start of the menopause.
‘You go through broken sleep when you have a new baby, and then that ran into falling levels of oestrogen which can dramatically affect sleep too,’ she concedes. ‘i’m sure there was some sort of blurring.
‘i’ve always been a very good sleeper — it’s a fundamental for beauty and wellbeing, and you shouldn’t go much below the gold standard of seven-and-a-half hours. But i certainly suffered disrupted sleep during the perimenopause.
‘i’d fall asleep easily then wake up at 4 or 5 am. My baby was sleeping through the night by then, so there was no reason i was waking up other than a decline in oestrogen levels.
‘i felt tired during the day, and that felt strange and different. My baseline’s always been a good night’s sleep.’
Restoring a pattern of solid, recuperative rest was one of the many reasons she started, and continues, to take HRT. she is a vociferous advocate of the hormone therapy and writes about it in her latest book, The Good Menopause Guide.
The book gives frank advice on negotiating not just the obvious symptoms, but a host of
unexpected ones too. As well as hot flushes, insomnia, mood swings, weight gain and loss of self- esteem, did you know, for instance, that the menopause can cause tinnitus, flatulence, heartburn and dry eyes? No, me neither. Yet Liz, it seems, has negotiated her menopause with few of these debilitating symptoms and believes her HRT — she takes a natural form of HRT derived from yams and prescribed by her NHS doctor — is one of the main reasons for this.
There are, she insists, a wealth of benefits to be had: stronger bones, as well as protection against cardiovascular disease for a start.
OESTROGEN is a beauty hormone, too,’ she says. ‘It keeps our hair glossy, and eyes bright; it plumps skin and boosts libido.
‘No wonder we start to notice tiny differences in how we feel and look before the main symptoms [of menopause] kick in.
‘ The bladder, blood vessels, bones, brain, breasts, skin, heart, liver, urinary tract, hair, mucous membranes and pelvic muscles all contain oestrogen receptors. They all need oestrogen for regular cell function. When levels plummet, we’re likely to experience symptoms throughout our entire body.’
But what about the potential adverse side-effects of HRT; the studies that have linked it to increased risk of breast cancer?
Liz thinks these have been overplayed. ‘HRT has been negatively viewed for so long, and women have been misled. If it were a male thing, would it be seen in the same way?
‘If you have a thyroid deficiency you take thyroxin. Nobody says, “I wouldn’t do that!” But if we top up our oestrogen levels it’s somehow seen as wrong.
‘It strikes me as interesting that we women spend decades of our lives taking contraceptive pills which are synthetic hormones working against the body, and we seem to accept the risks of that, but when we’re asked, “Would you consider topping up your oestrogen with a botanically- derived, natural form of the hormone?” there’s huge fear and panic.
‘Frankly, why wouldn’t you if it’s going to cut your rate of coronary heart disease in half and build stronger bones? The studies that linked HRT with breast cancer were poorly interpreted and have been discredited.’
Liz inveighs, too, against costly private clinics that charge inflated prices for hormones that are readily available on the NHS.
‘ I’m quite anti these clinics because they can prey on vulnerable women’s insecurities by perpetuating the myths about unsafe hormones,’ she says. ‘Some of the old- style hormones prescribed by the NHS were derived from pregnant horses’ wee, and some private practitioners suggest that these are the only ones NHS doctors prescribe.
‘But it’s simply not true. It’s perfectly possible to get naturallyderived body-identical hormones (patches and gels) from your GP. The cost to the NHS of the oestrogen gel — which I use in conjunction with a progesterone pill — is only a few pounds a month.’
There’s a subtle difference, incidentally, between bio-identical HRT, which is generally tailored by a specialist pharmacist to an individual woman’s needs, and body-identical HRT, which comes as a standardised product made by a pharmaceutical company.
In addition, Liz points out, drugs prescribed by the NHS will have gone through rigorous efficacy and safety trials, ‘while if you go to a private clinic they are not regulated by NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care excellence)’. Of course clinics still have to adhere to standards set by health watchdog the Care Quality Commission.
Aside from HRT — and Liz allows that many women may choose not to use it — her latest book offers advice on healthy eating and includes recipes designed to boost depleted hormone levels, quell sugar cravings and avert energy slumps, while helping to alleviate a range of other symptoms.
Alongside the Menopause Cake, there are tasty, nutritious breakfasts such as spelt pancakes and berries (spelt is easier to digest than wheat, while berries are rich sources of antioxidants), and lunches like cauliflower steaks with hummus and feta. Cauliflower cooked al dente is a great source of vitamin C; hummus is packed with fibre, protein and phytoestrogens; and feta made from goat’s or sheep’s milk is a great protein source.
She tries out her recipes either in her Somerset farmhouse kitchen or the more compact one in London, staying overnight occasionally when she’s working there, while her husband, a documentary filmmaker, stays with the children, running the farm.
Cooking, she says, is as much pleasure as work. ‘I was making almond milk in bulk at the weekend. I ended up with lots of pulp, so I looked at what you could do with it. You can dry it and grind it, using it for cakes and muffins — which went down well — or put it in a seedy crispbread or add it to smoothies.
‘I love passing that kind of information on. It’s work, but I was doing it on Sunday with the radio on. I was quite happy.’
Do her kids ever revolt against healthy food and scream for takeaway pizza with a side order of chips, washed down with Coke?
Actually, she says, she isn’t too prescriptive about what they eat, although packet and convenience food doesn’t infiltrate her larder and she’s outlawed the artificial sweetener aspartame.
‘If you ban food you set yourself up for rebellion,’ she says sensibly. ‘And I tend not to tell them what’s in my recipes. I’ll just say, “Try it”.
‘They really love kale crisps. They’re the easiest thing to do — just chop and massage in a little olive oil, then put in the oven to crisp. My teens can’t get enough of them.’
Often such domestic perfection is allied with a lack of levity and fun. But if you imagine Liz is bereft of mischief or humour, you’d be wrong.
Take note of her tip — gleaned from a friend, she assures me — on dealing with greying hair ‘down there’. If you don’t want an alloff wax, try moustache dye. Apparently it’s guaranteed to restore curl, colour and lustre — her friend says so.
Before I leave, I take one more slice of her Menopause Cake. For that alone it’s been well worth the visit.
THE GOOD MENOPAUSE GUIDE by Liz Earle is published by Orion Spring on March 8 at £25. To order a copy for £20 (offer valid to 25/2/18; P&P free), visit mailshop.co.uk/ books or call 0844 571 0640.