allwoman made its TV debut on the ITV Tonight programme at 7.30pm on Thursday 25 November when Julia Etchingham investigated the truth about the menopause.

Missed it? Watch now on the ITV Hub

Back in August I got a call from ITV. ITV calling me? Really? I was just going out for the day with my son, so a sensible conversation just didn’t happen. How do you explain to an excited five year old that mummy needs to talk to a lady about the menopause?

I’m passionate about women’s health and was very excited about the prospect of allwoman being part a documentary about the menopause.

Over the last few years, I’ve worked with more and more women who have started to experience difficulties with their menstrual cycle and hormones in their early 40s as they begin to transition into perimenopause before the menopause really hits.

I’ve found that women are not aware of what’s ahead and how they can better prepare. Transitioning from perimenopause to the menopause can take from ten to 15 years and the symptoms can be life-changing, so anything that can be done to raise awareness and start women talking about the issue can’t be a bad thing.

“Women just don’t want to talk about it, men certainly don’t want to talk about it … And I don’t think women want to talk about it because they pretend or almost put it out of their minds until it actually happens.“

Michelle Heaton, who underwent ‘surgical’ menopause due to the high risk of her getting cancer

As part of the programme, ITV Tonight in conjunction with Wellbeing of Women conducted a survey of perimenopausal and menopausal women and some of the results were startling.

• Just over 80% of the women surveyed said that their quality of life was worsened by the menopause.
• A quarter of the women participating in the survey said they felt they would consider leaving their jobs because of the menopause.
• Of those who had a partner, seven out of 10 felt their relationship was affected by the menopause.

Back in September, ITV visited Leeds to film one of my Well Woman Yoga classes and speak to the ladies afterwards.

It was the Autumn Equinox, 22 September. Very significant, unbeknown to ITV. From the perspective of a woman’s life cycle when she moves into perimenopause, this is represented as the season of Autumn with menopause as Winter.

In this phase of the cycle, instead of looking more towards outward achievement, women should turn in and enjoy more rest and reflection, giving themselves time for renewal and shifting from a more doing state to a more being state.

However, she often experiences an internal struggle at the transition from Summer to Autumn to Winter – or from perimenopause through to menopause. Often feeling confused, sometimes angry, maybe frustrated with no idea what’s going on. Just as she reaches an age when she feels comfortable in her own skin, she enters the unknown.

So at this Autumn/Winter phase of a woman’s life, it’s time for her to stop and reflect as she reconsiders everything she thought she knew about herself.

Bringing these concepts into my Well Woman Yoga session for ITV Tonight, we started with breathing, bringing our attention inwards, grounding ourselves and connecting with our bodies before moving our focus to our womb, belly and pelvis. I then introduced some poses to wake up the legs and feet and connect to the pelvis, moving on to flowing sequences to get rid of blocks and connect to our core power and finally spending some time resting to restore and reflect, with some women in supported inversion poses, which are great for perimenopause and menopause to re-energise the body and rebalance hormones.

During perimenopause and menopause, different women have different symptoms. Some have difficulty at bleed time, some at ovulation time, some may have mood swings, some have night sweats, some have hot flushes, so at allwoman we have designed our programmes and one to one support to suit individual needs, providing women with a toolkit of practices to not only support them in their daily lives, but also to help prevent things getting worse, manage pain and discomfort and help them to become emotionally more resilient and accepting of the transition they are going through with more self-care, nurture and unconditional love.

Get in touch to book or arrange your free 20-minute consultation to assess your needs, together we can then find right the right programme for you. Our new Programmes will be available locally in Leeds but also via Skype in 2017, space is limited get in touch to find out more.