I Did Not Recognise the Woman in the Mirror

I have always cared about how things look. It is my profession and it is my nature. So it unsettled me more than I want to admit when I began, slowly, to not recognise my own reflection.

It was not one dramatic morning. It was a hundred small ones. Clothes that had fit for years suddenly pulling in the wrong places. A softness around my middle that no amount of my usual walking would shift. My skin drier, my hair thinner, a face in the mirror that looked tired even when I was not.

I want to be honest about how much this hurt, because women are not supposed to admit it. We are supposed to be above vanity, to age gracefully, to not mind. I minded. I stood in front of my wardrobe some mornings and felt genuine grief, as though the body I had lived in comfortably my whole life had quietly been replaced with one I did not know how to dress.

Why the Body Changes in Perimenopause

Fat redistributes Falling oestrogen shifts where the body stores fat, often to the middle, even without eating more

Muscle is lost faster Hormonal changes make muscle harder to keep, which slows metabolism

Skin and hair change Less oestrogen means less collagen and moisture, so skin and hair feel different

Strength helps most Building muscle, not punishing cardio, is what best supports the changing body

For a while I fought it the way I had always fought weight, with more walking and less food. It did not work, and worse, it made me feel like I was failing at something I had always been able to control. That was its own quiet blow.

What shifted things was learning why. A gynaecologist explained that in perimenopause, falling oestrogen actually changes where the body stores fat and how easily it holds muscle. It was not that I had suddenly become lazy or greedy. My body was following new instructions. That reframing alone loosened the grip of shame.

I stopped trying to starve my way back to my old shape and started, for the first time in my life, lifting weights. Not to be thin. To be strong. And something unexpected happened. As I got stronger, I stopped fighting my reflection quite so hard. I began to see a woman who was building something rather than losing something.

I am not going to pretend I have made complete peace with the mirror. Some mornings the grief still visits. But I dress the body I have now with the same care I once gave the old one, and I have learned that strength has its own kind of beauty, one that has nothing to do with the clothes fitting the way they used to.

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