Speech becomes free around menopause.
Long considered an intimate and taboo subject, this phase that every woman experiences is being addressed more widely.
Particularly through celebrities who are more likely to speak out on what affects half of the population.
In her podcast “Come on, I dare!”, journalist Elsa Wolinski went to meet several personalities to find out how they experience this stage.
Latest guest, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy spoke very transparently about what she felt: “Talking doesn't freak me out.
What freaks me out is the silence.
I believe that illnesses thrive in silence.
Not expressing something is pathological.
Any trauma, even the most serious, begins to dissolve as soon as it is said.”
When the journalist asks her about her stage of menopause, the model replies that she doesn't know.
“I am precisely in this transitional stage which is between my fifties and my sixties which is very particular in my opinion for women and much more than for men because there is a hormonal break, etc... And modifications which for me are like those of adolescence.
It’s an old adolescence.”
The singer explains that she has noticed something common to all women going through menopause: weight gain.
“But I don’t know any who don’t gain weight.
I stopped gaining weight.
Finally I simply stopped eating, but it was within the last two years.
Before I had a normal life.”
Before explaining that to avoid gaining weight, she now eats one meal instead of three: “I only eat dinner.
But that's for professional reasons.
If I did a job with really no image circumstances, I would gain five kilos.
Quiet, cushy.
Because frankly my husband is not the one who would complain and I, at 56 years old, a little more cheeks, if I gained 4-5 kilos I would not be unhappy even aesthetically.
I wouldn’t want to take 15 but just take one size I would allow myself.”
But the former model does not allow herself to do so.
“It makes me anxious about myself.”
She also explains that public image is a kind of safeguard that “protects you while exposing you to other things but it protects against indifference.
It costs me less to have a public image with all that that implies than to be completely unknown.
For me, unknown, I sink a little into nothingness.
It’s really personal.”
But this rejection of weight gain is also a health issue for her.
“Diseases love fat.
They don't like sports.
If you exercise all the time, you have a lot fewer illnesses.”
Before confiding that she wondered about the causes of her breast cancer, mentioning in particular the fact of being a smoker, of having taken the pill or of having had a child late.
Fears that his doctor revoked.
Among the other symptoms of menopause, the singer notes a strong need to sleep, mood swings but also hot flashes which she limits in particular thanks to cold showers, a technique which she has been adept at for many years for her well-being.