The truth about menopause triggering eating disorders

A common misconception sees anorexia linked with teens but hormonal changes in perimenopause can also lead to a difficult relationship with food. Helen Coffey finds out more

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"It's absolutely been retriggered and has manifested in slightly more sinister forms. I could feel certain attitudes, thoughts and shame creeping back in." Kirstie, a 42-year-old commercial lawyer, is talking about her eating disorder. Anorexia first reared its head when she was 12 years old; 30 years later, she’s had to grapple with it again as a result of entering perimenopause.

After the birth of her daughter 11 years ago, her relationship with food had markedly improved – but this new life stage saw her relapse. Although Kirstie could spot the warning signs, the difficulty for her was physical: she felt nauseous much of the time and suffered from a reduced capacity to eat. Her stomach felt sore; she wanted food less and less. “That just made me think, ‘Well, I can’t eat.’ You know, that food isn’t good for me,” she says.

Kirstie compares the experience of perimenopause to that of puberty. “It’s still so poorly understood, but your digestive system and your body really are more unpredictable,” she tells me. “You feel you don’t actually know what you want, or how to nourish yourself, or what your body needs. And that’s missing from the menopause conversation – we understand that younger girls going through puberty don’t understand their hormones and might be struggling with body image because their body is changing. Well, that vocabulary also applies to someone who’s perimenopausal.”

She is one of an increasing number of women who are revealing that starting perimenopause has retriggered a previous eating disorder or sparked one for the first time in their lives. A 2024 academic review of studies looking at the link between disordered eating behaviours and the menopause transition found “strong positive associations with disordered eating”, including “potentially higher levels of binge eating during the perimenopausal stage” and “restrictive eating behaviours” postmenopause.