Andrea McLean is open and honest on Loose Women - and we love her for that.
Now she has opened up about her experience with menopause in her book Confessions of a Menopausal Woman and is working with Holland & Barrett on their Me.No.Pause campaign.
The 49-year-old said, ''Once you go past a certain age in the media, you will notice that you're not necessarily represented. There's not one definition of beauty or being a woman. Going through the menopause is just that; it's part of our definition of being a female."
Andrea spoke to Hello! magazine about how she dealt with hitting the menopause herself.
She said: "At the end of 2016 I had to have a full hysterectomy and what that did was it put me into full menopause, which is different to a normal menopause in that it's more intense."
She spoke out about it as she was on a TV show every day.
She said, ''I told the truth, which at the time was actually quite a daring thing to do. If you spoke out about going through the menopause, you were instantly seen as old. It was quite a big deal to hold my hand up and say, 'This is what's happening to me, this is what I'm going through'. I was still in my 40s, so I wasn't looking back at it retrospectively. It was something that I was going through at the time."
In response to her detailing her hysterectomy and menopause on air, 10,000 women contacted her within 24 hours.
She said, ''For me, it felt like it came from nowhere but I realised that there's all these women - half the population of the entire world - going through the menopause at some stage. The only time the menopause is ever mentioned is when people are taking the mickey out of it.''
Andrea also spoke about how menopause wasn't just a singular event - it was an ongoing process - ''like gardening.''
She continued, ''You realise, that ok, this has changed and you start sorting everything out, planting new bulbs and trimming your hedges and then in a month's time you turn around and think 'oh I need to do that again' because you need to keep on top of it.''
She added, ''For me, the menopause isn't something I went through and then disappeared; it's something that I'm still going through and will do for a pretty long time, especially because I've had my ovaries removed."
We love that she has been so candid about what she went through as it's a topic that is so important.
