Zoe Hardman: 'I want to be strong in my 80s!'

Broadcaster and podcast host Zoe Hardman, 42, talks to Joanna Ebsworth about early menopause symptoms, exercising to protect her health, and why women shouldn’t be embarrassed to admit having hair extensions if their hair is thinning.

Words: Joanna Ebsworth. Images: Karis Kennedy.

I juggle a lot around parenting my two children. Aside from giving 100 per cent to my Made by Mammas podcast and presenting my Heart FM breakfast show on Sundays – I cover for other presenters like Amanda Holden when they go away – I also started making short films for the BBC’s Morning Live show last year on important subjects such as coercive control, missing people, and early menopause.

I get a lot of fulfilment from everything I do but I felt like my workload ran me last year rather than the other way around. So, over Christmas I decided to be a bit more structured and in control of what I say yes to. It doesn’t come naturally to me but I’m trying!

Recording two podcast episodes a week is a lot of hard work. My business partner, Georgia Dayton, and I have been doing the show for five years now, and it’s incredibly important to me that the information we share with our parents really supports them and impacts their day.

We’re so proud of the global community we’ve built up and, after realising that we’ve got all these incredible mothers with amazing skills who want to get back to work but are struggling to find work/life balance, we’ve launched our new recruitment business, Made by Mammas Careers, to help mums connect with companies so they can get back into work on flexible terms. We’ve just recruited three new mums within our network and we’re having lots of conversations with HR specialists, brands and companies, which is very exciting.

I was diagnosed with early menopause at 38 years old. I knew it was coming because it’s hereditary in my family – my granny, mum and sister went through it – and I’d had tests that showed my anti-Müllerian hormone levels (measuring the number of eggs a woman has left in her ovaries) were very low, which is why my husband and I were so quick to have our children.

I gave birth to our second child in 2018, but around the time we went into lockdown, I also lost a very good friend. It was such a horrific time, and I just knew I was going into early menopause. After three months of blood tests, including a DEXA scan to measure my bone strength and thickness, I was told my oestrogen levels were frighteningly low.

Experiencing perimenopause symptoms can be a scary time. You can feel as though you’re losing yourself, which is why I really urge all women to get their symptoms checked out. We’re such fighters and we do just ignore symptoms and carry on, not wanting to bother anybody or prioritise ourselves.

I’ve been lucky to have had great experiences with doctors but, even so, you do still have to bang on the door sometimes and say, ‘This isn’t right. No, I’m not depressed, and I don’t need antidepressants. What I need is HRT’. Obviously, I know some women don’t want to take HRT, and some can’t take it. But, for me, it was life changing.

Find out more about the benefits, risks & side effects of HRT

I would also say you should listen to your symptoms above anything else. Yes, you can have blood tests but your hormones can be doing different things at different times of the month and changes might not always get picked up. There are more than 40 symptoms of perimenopause, so instead of thinking, “I’m not having hot flushes so it can’t be peri” think about the symptoms you do have and the impact they are having on your life, family, parenting and work.

Personally, I just couldn’t control my anger; I’d fly off the handle with my kids and my rage could go from zero to 60 in a few seconds, even though I’m not an angry person. I’m a lover, not a fighter, so I hated that side of things. Thankfully, my rage has sorted itself out and I’ve felt good for a few years now, which is great!

Reaching perimenopause so soon definitely impacted my exercise regime. Fitness has always been a huge part of my life but for a very long time, I had no desire to train because I felt too exhausted. I also felt very low, cried a lot, had terrible headaches, brain fog, achy joints, and my libido was through the floor.

With such bad symptoms and very young kids to look after, training just wasn’t a priority, but going on HRT when I was 38 was revolutionary for giving me back some energy. Exercise is one of those things that ebbs and flows in people’s lives, but I know what it does for me and my menopause: it helps me sleep better and drink more water, which are the two things I need to keep me feeling healthy.

These days, I prioritise exercise over everything else. My workouts go in the diary every single weekday morning and they don’t come out unless I must do a live TV show, so I normally leg it up to the gym for a 9am training session after the school run. People message me to ask how I find the time to train and how they can find the time, and while I know I’m very lucky to be able to work on my business from home, it helps that I’ve made exercise a complete non-negotiable.

Exercise helps me to be a better mum, a better broadcaster, and a better human, and it definitely helped me to level out my perimenopausal rage. I feel as though I can handle things a lot better because it’s an hour for me when I put my phone away and no one’s trying to reach me. I can just train and have fun.

For a long time, I shied away from trying to gain muscle. But once I hit 40, I had a good think about what I wanted my health to look like over the next 40 years, and one of the things I really wanted was to be strong. Not for aesthetic reasons, but to protect my bones and my heart, and to make sure that I can still get out of a chair and go for a walk when I’m in my 70s and 80s.

So, weight training is a key part of my training now, not least because my early menopause means I have a higher risk of developing osteoporosis as I get older because of my lack of oestrogen. I feel like I’m nurturing my body when I’m strength training, and it makes me feel incredible.

Find out more about managing menopause symptoms with weight training

My confidence was smashed when my hair started falling out. I’d already suffered badly with postpartum hair loss, and then it happened again when I went into early menopause. It’s frightening when I look back at old photos because I used to have the most incredibly long, healthy hair, until it just started coming out in clumps and breaking off, which is terrifying.

I wish hair loss was talked about more because you see all these adverts with women swishing around their amazing locks and they make you feel bad when your own hair doesn’t look like that.

Thankfully, there’s loads you can do to help with hair loss. I take a collagen supplement every day and I’ve been using a haircare brand called Champo who specialise in hair loss. I massage my scalp with their Pitta Growth Serum and I’ve seen some amazing improvements, so I am getting back to a place where I feel more confident.

That said, I think it’s important to be honest about the fact I have a full head of hair extensions. Women are under so much pressure to look a certain way, and I think we should share the techniques we’re using to make us feel more confident rather than keeping them a secret. If your hair is falling out and you want to do something about it, go get some extensions. Why are we not saying that more often?

My extensions make me feel so much better. I remember meeting a woman at a party who had an amazing head of hair, and when she complimented me on my hair, I thanked her and admitted I’d just had my extensions done.

She replied by saying she was lucky because her hair was naturally thick but later, I found out that she had a full head of extensions too. I thought, “Why did you not share that? Why not just be honest?”. I think it’s better to normalise anything that can help rebuild our self-confidence.

I’m a bit of a skincare freak, so I’m quite regimented about my routine. I’m hot on my cleansing and toning, and I love retinol, too. I use Medik8 Intelligent Retinol, which is incredible, and I’m also a big fan of Tatcha products.

I suffered quite badly from melasma during my pregnancies and it’s taken a long time to get on top of it, but my die-hard product recommendation for anyone who has dark pigmentation is the Obagi Nu-Derm 3 Clear FX Skin Brightening Cream. I can’t put my face in the sun anymore, so I always wear a big hat and shades and an SPF every day. We never did that in the 90s – we were sunbathing with baby oil! – but we’ve learned our lesson now!

Zoe Hardman presents her Made by Mammas podcast and also presents the Heart FM breakfast show on Sundays. She is also an ambassador for Champo. Visit champohaircare.com.

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