We've long loved Davina McCall's refreshingly candid and open approach to speaking about 'taboo' topics and we can't praise her enough for the way she recently opened up about her experiences with the menopause and taking HRT.
No matter which of the three stages of menopause you find yourself in, menopause symptoms can be debilitating and life-altering; Hot flushes, mood swings, loss of libido, changes in skin, hair and body. So it's no surprise that women turn to medications like HRT or HRT alternatives to alleviate the symptoms and improve their day-to-day.
But there's a taboo, a stigma, surrounding HRT - and Davina McCall is leading the charge to change that.
"When I started taking HRT, I was so ashamed of it. In some way, I thought I'd given up," she revealed. "I was less of a woman, I wasn't as strong as my other female counterparts. I didn't think that any of my friends were on HRT. We never talked about it, it was such a shameful subject. It was ageing. It kind of gave this impression that you were washed up."
But while Davina worried about people thinking she was taking HRT to stay 'youthful,' she admitted that she was actually just 'trying to stay sane' and wouldn't have been able to do that without HRT.
She explained, "It [HRT] did really, really, really save me. But I wasted and lost three years of my life not taking it because of the stigma around it. When I finally did, I didn't tell anybody. And if anybody asked me about it, I lied and said I wasn't on it."
But when she did finally tell people, after about three years of taking HRT she admitted, she was shocked at the responses from friends and family. "I ended up kind of whispering to a couple of people 'I'm on HRT'," she said, demonstrating the shy, closed-off demeanour that accompanied her admission by playing with her hair and closing in her shoulders.
"And then they went, 'Oh, God! So are we.' And then we laughed so hard because I thought, 'What is going on where all of us are lying to each other?'," she added, reliving the moment she realised that nearly every women of a similar age around her was going through the exact same struggles with menopause as she was, but just weren't comfortable enough to talk about handling it with HRT.
"If we're not necessarily lying," she added, "we're omitting the truth about something that could have really helped all of us if we'd just talked about it."
It's easier said than done to speak up about something so personal and that feels so private, but with Davina willing to go on TV and social media to speak about it, maybe dropping it into conversation with a close friend might not be so scary.
