Women Living Better would not have been born if Jo McChesney, Nina’s good friend and co-founder, hadn’t been having a parallel experience with perimenopause while she too was in her early 40s and still getting a monthly period.
Both Nina and Jo were told, “This can’t be perimenopause” by their healthcare providers, and it didn’t sit right with them.
An initial survey of 400 women ages 35-80 in 2016, convinced them there was a need for better information about perimenopause. Together, they created the Women Living Better website in 2018 to be the resource they couldn’t find — something in consumer-friendly language that explained what was happening to their bodies, what was causing their symptoms and what they could do to feel better. The ones they did find were selling a product, a program or wanted to help them fend off aging or make them sexier. This co-mingling with a product made them suspicious about accuracy.
They knew women deserved better — deserved to understand what they were experiencing and why; deserved education to fill in all they hadn’t learned about how hormonal patterns begin to change around 40 and the possible implications, deserved to know why healthcare providers aren’t able to normalize or validate these experiences. They also believed that collecting and sharing the views of experts and the experiences of others would combat the shroud of secrecy around reproductive aging.
Original message from 2018, still true today
Too many women deal with symptoms in their 40s and don’t know that they can be related to changing hormones. Sleep issues. Irritability. Mood swings. Anxiety. Mood changes. Headaches. It’s easy to think things are wrong with your life or your relationships when in reality it might be changing hormones causing these issues.
We’ve learned a lot over the past several years and knowing more about this phase has made us feel better. We hope you’ll look around, learn something and as a result feel better by knowing more.
