There are two things going on in a menopausal body at once.

One is digestion. That's what BloatBurn is built for.

The other is cortisol.

Cortisol is the hormone your body puts out when it thinks something needs handling.

Everyone has it. It rises in the morning to get you moving and drops off through the evening so you can sleep.

Oestrogen used to keep a lid on it.

As oestrogen falls away in your forties and fifties, that lid comes off. Cortisol tends to run higher and take longer to settle back down.

You've likely felt this already without knowing what to call it.

Waking at three in the morning wide awake with your heart going for no reason you can point to.

Tired and wired at the same time, too exhausted to function and too switched on to sleep.

That tends to be cortisol sitting higher than it used to.

Now the part that matters for your weight.

Cortisol's job is to get your body ready for something hard.

So it does what a body does when it thinks a difficult stretch is coming. It stores.

And it stores around the middle, close to the organs, because that's the fat it can reach quickest. Which is why it goes on there now when it never used to.

It also tells you to eat.

Cortisol pushes your blood sugar up to give you energy for a threat that never turns up.

Your blood sugar then drops. And your body asks for the fastest thing it can find to bring it back.

Usually around nine at night.

Usually after a day that took more out of you than you let on to anyone.

That craving has a hormone behind it. It isn't a character flaw and it isn't something more willpower would have fixed.

Then sleep makes the whole thing worse.

A broken night tends to push cortisol higher the next day.

Higher cortisol tends to make the next night worse.

Round it goes, and a few weeks of that is enough to hold weight on a woman who is doing everything right.

So you can eat well all day, take everything you're meant to take, and still lose most of the ground by bedtime.

Not through lack of effort. Your body has been told to hold on, and it's very good at doing what it's told.

That's why two women can take the same thing for the same length of time and end up somewhere completely different.