FEELING Hot, Hot, Hot THE GIRLFRIENDS' GUIDE TO MENOPAUSE

Change is good...if not always easy. Menopause can throw some heat and other discomfort your way, but it's a normal process, and we've got advice to smooth the way for you.

- MERYL DAVIDS LANDAU

It's hard to believe our society is so rife with misinformation and unanswered questions about a routine stage of life that half the planet moves through, but this is pretty much the case with menopause.

Luckily, things are starting to shift: Women are talking more and more about this natural process, which has been brought into the open in part by the proliferation of books on the topic, free-speaking celebrities and "femtech" apps, along with diets and remedies pitched to menopausal women. "But it's still not something every woman hears about from her mother or sister," says Jackie Thielen, M.D., director of the women's health specialty clinic at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, FL.

The term "menopause" can be confusing even for doctors, says Stephanie Faubion, M.D., medical director of the North American Menopause Society (NAMS) and director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Women's Health in Rochester, MN. People use the word to mean everything from a first skipped period to the decades after bleeding has stopped. But most of those definitions aren't exactly accurate.

Menopause, stage by stage

A big piece of the confusion is that women tend to say they’re “in menopause.” But that phrase actually has little scientific meaning. Perimenopause is the stage when your ovaries start producing fewer hormones and your periods become less regular. The term “menopause” refers to one year after your last menstrual flow — which you can’t know you’ve hit until those 12 months have passed. Menopause itself is really more of a line in the sand, something you’ve passed as opposed to a phase you can be “in.” Everything else, the months and years following the one-year mark? That’s postmenopause.