MYRIAD TRANSITIONS

Bazaar India talks to four health experts to help women navigate key transformations in different decades of their lives.

- PRIYANKA KATHURIA

Rani Singh Irani, played by actor Pooja Bhatt in Netflix series Bombay Begums (2021), is an ambitious woman. But in the midst of running a bank, she constantly finds relief by standing in front of an open refrigerator because of her hot flashes [commonly caused by changing hormone levels before, during, and after menopause]. Irani handles the discomfort with subtlety and rarely makes a fuss about it. This made me think how we, the women, rarely talk about the many transitions that our bodies go through in almost every decade—particularly in our 30s, 40s, and 50s—and the pangs that accompany them.

We speak with four experts to understand these transitions and how can women navigate them better.

“Hormones have a high and diverse impact on how a woman’s body functions at different ages,” says nutritionist and food coach Anupama Menon. She explains that the female sex hormones—oestrogen—starts to decline with age and the balance of other hormones starts to progressively disrupt, especially progesterone and prolactin. “With this decline, the regulation of Vitamin K2, which is important for bone health, changes and reduces the absorption of calcium and other minerals, increasing the risk of fractures and osteoporosis. Oestrogen also regulates the metabolism of lipids in the liver and hence a decline can lead to an increase of poor cholesterol,” tells Menon.