This is not a body positive newsletter

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Photo by Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash

I’ve spent the last 6 years learning to love my curvy body, so I get it.

It sucks being told to lose weight for your health.

So this is not that, here, now, okay?

This is me telling you that a small study presented at this week’s meeting of The Menopause Society of North America (aka NAMS) found obese women with a BMI over 30 – OH MY GOD WHY ARE WE STILL USING THE BMI – reporting worse menopause symptoms and getting less relief from hormone therapy.

In a week where inflammation emerged as a key theme, this is very interesting. Also: There is no known research looking at the effect of hormone therapy on obese women, while very little research has been done on the impact of comorbidities on the efficacy of HRT during menopause.

(We have 1/10th of the research on menopause that we do on pregnancy, so it’s shocking but not that surprising.)

This is a self-reporting study of 119 women over five years, so small. It was led by Dr Anita Pershad, a medical…