By Editor,Lavina Mehta

Copyright dailymail

It’s fair to say this was not your average party. In fact, it might have been one of a kind. Rather than canapes, there were chia pots and granola.

I was celebrating that moment when you can officially say you’ve gone through menopause – exactly 12 months after your final period. I was excited not just about the start of the second half of my life, but that, after a difficult time, I’ve never felt so healthy and happy.

We have birthday parties, weddings, baby showers and even divorce parties these days, so why not celebrate how amazing our mid-life bodies are too?

I had booked a room at a five-star hotel in London’s Marylebone and the dress code was ‘vibrant and colourful’, symbolising the fact that middle-aged women shouldn’t need to hide.

My guests included skincare and wellbeing expert Liz Earle, make-up supremo Ruby Hammer and Gladiator and Olympian Montell Douglas.

I made a speech and we did a bit of ‘exercise snacking’ – the phrase I coined in my best-selling book The Feel Good Fix – including a ten-second balance on each leg, a few squats and a bit of marching on the spot. Then we ended with a group hug.

It’s ironic that it’s taken until I’m almost 50 to throw a party for myself, but, like many women, I struggled through menopause without knowing what was happening to my body.

My South Asian heritage meant menopause was likely to arrive five or six years earlier than the oft-mentioned 51, which is the ‘average’ age cited for women globally, and I went through the final moment aged 46 (I’m just 47 now).

But I didn’t know that when I first started having symptoms. Sixteen years previously, I’d left a high-flying corporate job as a global project manager to be a mum to my three boys. Then, as they were all at school, I retrained as a PT aged 39. Inadvertently, this launched a whole new career. When lockdown hit in 2020, I started to do live, free workouts online, and soon thousands of people were joining me in my classes.

I was thrilled by my work, and I looked happy enough, but, by then in my early 40s, my periods were all over the place and I couldn’t sleep – lying awake for hours on end, getting more and more wound up.

My mood had changed; I was stressed and anxious but put it down to my new career and simply carried on – that’s what women do.

But then I developed awful brain fog, which brought me to tears. I was terrified I had early-onset Alzheimer’s, as I forgot to do things or remember dates – parties, games kit, picking up times, and it was driving my kids and my husband mad. He was sympathetic, but as baffled as me, and repeatedly asked me to write things down. So I had lists everywhere.

The worst came when I had tightness in my chest and thought I had heart problems. I begged my husband to book me a chest X-ray, but the results came back normal.

Ironically, at the same time I was struggling with my health my PT career was going from strength to strength. I launched a campaign called Get UK Asians Fit! and received an MBE for my health and fitness work during the pandemic, which has seen my online following grow to around 200,000.

The turning point came after two years, in 2022, when I watched Davina McCall’s programme, Sex, Myths and the Menopause. Then 44, I burst into tears, stunned and relieved to learn that what I was going through was entirely normal.

When my husband came in to see what was wrong, I simply turned to him and said, ‘Just sit with me’. The next day I wrote an emotional post on Instagram and declared I was in perimenopause, a word I had never previously mentioned or heard of.

This had a huge response. My direct messages were flooded with women at rock bottom who had had a lightbulb moment like me. I found it liberating, partly because women’s health, and periods in particular, have always been imbued with shame for South Asian women.

One woman even came up to me in the gym in tears. ‘You’re so brave talking about this as an Indian woman,’ she said. ‘I wanted to thank you for normalising the menopause, so my family and friends understand what I’ve gone through.’ I was blown away.

Like that woman, once I knew what was happening with my body, I was able to take action.

I tried HRT for 18 months, but everyone is different, and it didn’t work for me. Now I focus purely on lifestyle changes: healthy eating, exercise, good sleep and stress management. It has, as I say, been like a rebirth.

So I was determined this party would be a celebration of mid-life. I wore a bright pink dress by Coast with wide, pleated sleeves, like wings. One friend even referred to them being like butterfly wings – for mid-life metamorphosis.

Most heartwarming were the friends who stood up and said how much it means to have menopause in the public forum.

TV presenter Cherry Healey made me laugh by doing an impression of the two of us doing squats in the Houses of Parliament on World Menopause Day.

We’re seeing a lot of women reinventing themselves now. We need to focus on our health, on our future, and on ourselves – women don’t do enough of that.

We need to remove the stigma around ageing. That’s why I hope countless other women will now feel inspired to have their own menopause party.

As told to Alice Smellie