A Port Moody mom whose alter ego is the Menopause Chick has won the attention of a celebrity doctor for her groundbreaking website on one of the heath industry's least talked-about topics.
Dr. Mehmet Oz of Oprah fame has named www.menopausechicks.com as one of the top 10 information sharing sites on menopause. But Shirley Weir acknowledges it will take more than getting recognized on Oz's sharecare.com website before female menopause is more than simply a punchline to a bad joke.
"We need to be cracking open the conversation," said Weir, who uses the catch phrase as part of her mission statement on the website she started last year.
The 46-year-old mother of a 10- and 13-year-old says there's a lot of misinformation on the web, which she hopes to help dispel with the help of local experts and health care professionals.
Her own life experience prompted her to start a blog and then a website and her 25 years in marketing have given her the skills to get them noticed. Weir said she was experiencing sleep issues and tried to find the cause and some healthy solutions using "Dr. Google" but came up against a wall of noise.
"I'd get all these ads: Lose your belly fat in 10 days." But not much that was unbiased and helpful, Weir said, noting that much of that online information is inaccurate.
It took a considerable amount of dedicated research to find out that her 3 a.m. wakeup call was more than simply a glitch in her sleep-wake cycle. In fact, it turned out to be one of the less-than-joyous aspects of peri-menopause - and one that's experienced by 59% of women between the ages of 35 and 55.
BURNOUT
At the time, Weir's children were just entering school, and her aging parents needed her attention, too. She was burning the candle at both ends and thought the 3 a.m. wake-up call was a gift.
Then came the exhaustion, the burnout, bouts of depression and other issues that came from wakefulness and stress. Learning about menopause was an eye-opener, if a little deflating.
"I learned I wasn't special. I just wasn't taking care of my self."
Her research proved that dealing with peri-menopause is more complicated than taking hormone replacement therapy. If you want to be healthy at 35, 55 and 95, without the diseases that go along with stress, anxiety, poor eating habits and lack of exercise - osteoporosis, for example- you have to start taking care of yourself when you are still young or at least old enough to know better, Weir says.
"You have to think, 'What can I do now to make sure that doesn't happen?' so you age in a healthy way."
LONG JOURNEY
It's been 10 years since she embarked on her peri-menopausal journey and Weir has found some healthy life balance and a network of people interested in talking about menopause. Putting it out there has garnered her the attention of Dr. Oz, Canadian musician Jann Arden is following her on Twitter and Weir is practising her dance routine for the Ellen DeGeneres Show.
"I'm putting it out there to the universe," she enthuses, "So far, everything's been so positive."
Future plans include a directory of health care professionals and ChickFlicksTV on YouTube is in development, where Weir interviews people knowledgeable about the topic.
If anything can be gained by all this talk about menopause, Weir says, it's that women take more time to think about their health and their own needs without embarrassment, shame or guilt.
"I think I've found an awesome niche, one that I'm passionate about, and one that's quite uncrowded."
