Zoe Foster Blake has opened up about the moment she knew she needed to see a specialist about her perimenopause symptoms.
During an appearance on The Imperfects podcast this week, the Go-To founder said she realised it was time to ask for help when she started snapping at her husband Hamish Blake and their two children – Sonny, 12, and Rudy, 9.
“You feel stupid, you feel a lot of shame, you feel guilty for snapping,” she explained to hosts Hugh Van Cuylenburg and Ryan Shelton. “And one of the main reasons that I finally advocated for myself was because I was going to lose my relationships with my kids because I was just a tired, cranky mummy all the time and I was on a trigger point.”
“So I did it to salvage my relationships, honestly,” she added.
Earlier in the podcast, the former beauty editor said she started to notice some differences in herself in her late 30s.
“So anxiety ramped up to an 11 and sleep was terrible, waking up all through the night and never feeling rested,” she explained. “Irritable, fury, rage over things that shouldn’t have been inciting that level of rage…
“So if the oven fan was on, my kids were asking for me, and there was music playing, and then my phone would ring and I would just crack.”
‘You start to sort of hate everybody’: Zoe Foster Blake’s perimenopause admission
The 46-year-old admitted she felt “off kilter” for years before she realised there was a problem.
“Like I constantly felt premenstrual, like a real bitch,” she said.
“You just start to like sort of hate everybody… it’s not a nice feeling.”
Zoe’s symptoms coincided with being in lockdown with a young child, so at first she thought it was just normal stress. But as the years went on she realised she wasn’t coping with simple things the way she used to – like someone chewing loudly.
“I mean, they’re really in the crossfire as the partners during all of this,” she said. “And they can be completely lovely people who aren’t doing anything wrong, but the fact that they exist and make chewing noises… no good.”
Zoe Foster Blake reveals surprising doctor advice when seeking help for perimenopause
The mum-of-two was joined on the podcast by Dr Fatima Khan, who explained the relationship between perimenopause, anxiety and stress, and what treatments are available to help women with their symptoms.
Zoe explained that when she first brought up her symptoms with her GP she was told she was “too young”.
“I thought I was too young,” she explained. “So I went to my GP at 43… which is not too young and I was told I was too young.”
“I then saw a specialist, a reproductive endocrinologist, who put me on the right path and I went on HRT and am better.”
The bestselling author wrote her latest fiction book Group Chat about a group of perimenopausal women because she wants other women to know that they’re not imagining their symptoms and there is help out there.
“So it’s so important because I don’t like the idea of so many women out there, and their partners, feeling awful, just not themselves, like a mean, mean bitch who just cannot get a break,” she said.
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