Nobody Told Me. And Then Davina Did.
Menopausing Davina McCall is the book note I wish I had found before perimenopause made me question my sleep, my focus, my body and, honestly, my sanity.
I was forty-two when I finally understood that what I had been experiencing for the past couple of years was not stress, or tiredness, or a personality shift.
It had a name. A mechanism. A medical conversation that had been happening – loudly, publicly, for years in the UK – that I had somehow been adjacent to without ever fully landing in.
I am not particularly surprised I missed it. I had been in France since 2020, and the menopause conversation that exploded in British media largely passed me by. I knew Davina McCall from television – the warm, relentless energy, the willingness to talk about things other people found uncomfortable. I did not know she had put that same energy into a book that would eventually be recommended to me by a very good French friend who stayed in the UK. She called me the second she’d heard of it because she recognised the symptoms I had been describing for years – and because no doctor had thought to connect them for me.
Menopausing by Davina McCall, written with Dr. Naomi Potter, is the book I wish I had been handed in my thirties as a warning, and again in my forties as reassurance. Understanding it at forty-two was still early enough to change the conversation I was having with myself. Living in France has made parts of the UK discussion – especially around HRT – harder to access in practice, but it has not made me give up.
Table of Contents
What Menopausing Is and Why It Matters
Menopausing is Davina McCall and Dr. Naomi Potter writing together – Davina’s voice (direct, warm, occasionally furious in the best possible way) alongside Dr. Potter’s clinical expertise. The combination works because it is both personal and precise. This is not a medical textbook, and it is not just a celebrity memoir. It is a comprehensive guide to what happens to women’s bodies in perimenopause and menopause, written by people who are genuinely angry that so many women have gone through it in silence, confused, and frequently dismissed.
The book covers: what perimenopause actually is (and why it starts far earlier than most women realise), the full range of symptoms (far wider than the hot flushes most women are warned about), the HRT story and what actually happened to the evidence, the treatment options and, crucially, how to have a better conversation with your doctor.
It is not a book that tells you what to do. It is a book that gives you language and context so you can make informed decisions. That distinction matters.
The HRT Conversation Nobody Was Having
Davina McCall has been very public about her own decision to use HRT (hormone replacement therapy) and about the difficulty she had getting doctors to take her seriously before she did.
The central argument of Menopausing on HRT is this: a 2002 study frightened millions of women and thousands of doctors away from HRT by suggesting it significantly increased the risk of breast cancer and heart disease. The study was subsequently found to have significant methodological problems. The risk profile was reassessed. But the fear remained (embedded in medical culture and public consciousness) and many women spent the next two decades suffering unnecessarily because of it.
This is not an unusual story. Lara Briden writes in Hormone Repair Manual about the same gap between updated evidence and medical practice when it comes to women’s hormonal health. The science moved. The conversation did not follow fast enough. Women paid the price in years of symptoms they were told were either normal, stress-related, or something they should simply manage better.
Davina McCall and Dr. Potter are careful, in the book, to say that HRT is not the right choice for everyone and that the decision belongs to each woman in conversation with a doctor who is up to date with current evidence. What they are less careful about – deliberately – is letting women continue to believe the old fear story without challenge.
I appreciated the honesty. I had absorbed some version of that fear without ever having consciously adopted it, and the book unpicked it.
The Symptoms Nobody Connects to Hormones
This is the section of the book that I found most personally useful.
Most women know that menopause involves hot flushes and the end of periods. Fewer know that it can also involve: brain fog (yes, actually hormonal), disrupted sleep, joint pain, anxiety that arrives apparently from nowhere, low mood, reduced libido, changes in skin and hair, heart palpitations, and a generalised sense that you have become a slightly less coherent version of yourself.
These symptoms are often not connected to hormones by the women experiencing them – or by their doctors. They are attributed to stress, to ageing generally, to depression, to lifestyle. Women are prescribed antidepressants when they needed oestrogen. They are told to sleep better when the disrupted sleep is caused by fluctuating progesterone. They spend years managing symptoms without ever addressing the mechanism.
I have three children with ADHD. I am someone who has spent years managing fluctuating energy, focus, and mood across different phases of the month. Reading Menopausing added a layer to my understanding of my own body that the parenting books never offered – because this one is specifically about me, at this specific age, and what my hormones are doing right now.
The brain fog I attributed to doing too much. The sleep fragmentation I put down to being a light sleeper. The afternoon low that I initially thought keto had resolved (it helped, but the underlying pattern was still there). Reading Davina McCall’s descriptions, I recognised things I had been experiencing and not connecting.
That recognition is not nothing. It is, in fact, everything – because you cannot address what you have not named.
What Changed for Me
Two things shifted after reading Menopausing.
The first is that I stopped apologising for symptoms I had been treating as character flaws. The brain fog is not a failure of discipline. The sleep disruption is not something I should be able to power through. The anxiety that arrives without obvious cause is not weakness. These are physiological events. Treating them as moral failings is not only inaccurate – it is exhausting.
The second is that I felt equipped to have a better conversation with my doctor. One of the most practical sections of the book is about what to say, what to ask, and what to do if you are dismissed. It is a guide to navigating a medical system that has historically been poorly equipped to support women in perimenopause – and it does this without being adversarial. Just informed.
I am someone who fundamentally distrusts mainstream advice when the evidence has been distorted or misapplied. The Glucose Revolution by Jessie Inchauspé gave me the same feeling: here is what is actually happening, here is why the conventional wisdom got it wrong, here is what you can actually do. Menopausing does the same thing for a different and deeply personal territory.
Practical Takeaways
- Learn the difference between menopause and perimenopause. Menopause is one day – the day twelve months after your last period. Everything before that is perimenopause, and it can last years. Most of the symptoms women attribute to menopause are actually perimenopausal. Knowing this means you understand that the conversation starts much earlier than you probably think.
- Expand your symptom list. Hot flushes are not the whole story. If you are in your early to mid forties and experiencing brain fog, disrupted sleep, joint pain, unexplained anxiety, or low mood that your antidepressant is not quite touching – these may be hormonal. Bringing them to a doctor as a connected cluster, rather than individually, changes the conversation.
- Update your understanding of HRT. The 2002 study that frightened a generation of women and doctors has been substantially revisited. Current evidence suggests that for most women, starting HRT in perimenopause or early menopause carries benefits that outweigh the risks. This is not a decision to make alone – but it is a decision to make with accurate information rather than outdated fear.
- Go to appointments prepared. Menopausing includes practical guidance on what to say, what to ask, and how to respond if you are told your symptoms are “just stress” or “just ageing.” Knowing what you are asking for, and why, makes a significant difference to the quality of the medical conversation.
- Connect hormone health to everything else you are already doing. Sleep quality, exercise, nutrition, stress management – all of these interact with hormonal health. The keto approach I have been following since December 2025, the strength training, the attention to sleep – these are not separate from the hormone conversation. They are part of the same system. Dr. Stacy Sims’ research on exercise for women over forty, and Lara Briden’s Hormone Repair Manual for the full hormonal picture – these belong alongside Menopausing as a reading set.
Why This Belongs in Body
Body on this blog is about health, energy, and how we fuel ourselves – the physical foundation that makes everything else possible.
Menopausing by Davina McCall belongs here because it addresses a phase of women’s physical life that has been under-discussed, under-treated, and frequently misattributed for decades. For me, Menopausing Davina McCall is less a celebrity book and more a practical permission slip. It is not a lifestyle book. It is a health book – clear, current, and honest about a process that affects every woman who lives long enough to experience it.
It sits alongside Hormone Repair Manual (Lara Briden on the hormonal mechanics), Glucose Revolution (Jessie Inchauspé on blood sugar and energy), Heavy Lifting for Women (Dr. Stacy Sims on exercise and female physiology), and Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind (Georgia Ede on nutrition and the brain). Together these books make the case that women’s health is not a niche interest – it is the foundation everything else is built on.
Nobody warned me that my forties would feel like this. Nobody gave me the vocabulary, the context, or the sense that what I was experiencing was a known, named, treatable thing rather than a personal failing.
Menopausing by Davina McCall did that. Bluntly, warmly, with occasional righteous anger on behalf of every woman who has been dismissed or left to figure this out alone. That is why these Menopausing Davina McCall reflections felt important to write down.
Better late than never. But honestly – it should have been sooner.
Notes from Soph | Learning, not perfection.
Et toi? Are you in perimenopause or have you been through it – and did anyone actually prepare you for what it would feel like? Or did you have to piece it together yourself? Come and share in the Notes from Soph community on Skool. This conversation is long overdue.
Book Details:
Menopausing: The Positive Roadmap to Your Menopause – Davina McCall with Dr. Naomi Potter
Published 2022 | Orion Spring
📚 Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1398704180/?tag=websitenote0f-21
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