Whichever way you slice it, aging isn’t always a pleasant experience for women. And we’re not even talking about menopause alone: Perimenopause, the period leading up to it (no pun intended), can hit hard as well.
Classic symptoms like hot flashes and night sweats might be infamous (ever seen that viral video of steam rising from a woman’s head at an outdoor event?), but this life stage can also bring other side effects, like appetite changes, Rachel Pessah-Pollack, MD, an endocrinologist at NYU Langone Health and a clinical professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, tells SELF.
So what does that mean? And what can you do about it? Here’s everything you need to know about this lesser-known side effect of perimenopause.
First, a refresher: What exactly is perimenopause?
If you swap the “r” with the first “e” and cut out the “i,” you essentially arrive at the answer: pre-menopause. More precisely, perimenopause is “the period of time leading up to the end of your menstrual cycles,” Melissa Groves Azzaro, RDN (a.k.a. the “Hormone Dietitian”), a practitioner who specializes in women’s health issues like PCOS and perimenopause, tells SELF. While menopause occurs around age 52 on average, your body really sets the stage around eight to 10 years before that as your ovaries start to produce less of the sex hormones estrogen and progesterone.
Perimenopause symptoms tend to appear in your mid-to-late 40s but can emerge as early as your mid-30s or as late as your mid-50s. In the beginning, you might see your cycles becoming shorter. “If you were typically a 28-day cycler and regular on the dot, you might notice them coming every 26 days or every 25 days,” Azzaro says, as an example. You could also experience more pain or heavier bleeding—a little like puberty in reverse.
Then, as perimenopause advances, your cycles will become decidedly more erratic. “You’ll notice a 28-day cycle, followed by a 15-day cycle, followed by a 60-day cycle,” Azzaro says. Ultimately, you’ll start skipping cycles entirely—“so that’s when you might go 60 days or 90 days between periods.”
How does perimenopause affect your appetite?
Remember when we said that perimenopause is regulated by fluctuating levels of estrogen and progesterone? Because estrogen naturally acts as an appetite suppressant by inhibiting hunger cues, it’s this specific hormonal shift that’s responsible for appetite changes during perimenopause, according to Dr. Pessah-Pollack.
