I came to this
the long way
round.

The story

Nobody grows up wanting to be the menopause woman

My first career was in finance. It was fine. It was also not the thing I was going to do for forty years, and at some point I admitted that out loud.

So I retrained as a personal trainer and specialised in women's and children's fitness. That felt like the end of the story. I had changed direction once, which seemed like plenty, and I spent years working with women on strength, movement and the ordinary business of feeling like yourself.

Then menopause turned up and I discovered that almost nobody had told me anything useful about it. Not my employer. Not the internet, which was a mix of panic and supplements. And for a good while, not my doctor either. I was supposedly the fit, informed one, and I still had no language for what was happening to my body, my concentration or my confidence.

That gap is the thing I have been trying to close ever since.

What came out of it

Vitality 40+ came first: menopause education, coaching and training for workplaces. The more rooms I stood in, the clearer it got that women were not short of willpower. They were short of information, and often short of an employer who had thought about any of it.

In 2025 I opened Eve Studios, and with it the Eve Well Woman Collective. The idea was simple and slightly mad: put movement, education, preventative healthcare, clinical expertise and community under one roof, so a woman can ask a question in a place where somebody will actually answer it. In 2026 we launched Eve Glucose Evolution, using continuous glucose monitoring to show people what nutrition, stress and sleep are really doing to them.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I was diagnosed with ADHD, which explained a great deal and reframed about thirty years of my own behaviour.

I have talked about that diagnosis on stage since, because late diagnosis in midlife is its own quiet experience. You look back at everything you thought was a character flaw and realise it had a name the whole time.

Why I keep making a nuisance of myself

My TEDx talk brought men into the menopause conversation, and that is still central to the work. Partners, colleagues and leaders all need to be in the room. Leaving them out of it has never once made things easier for the woman in the middle.

Alongside the teaching I write for Menopause Matters, and I have spent a lot of time in front of clinicians, policymakers and employers arguing that women's health needs a plan rather than good intentions. Which brings me to the question I put to every room.

So far the honest answer is no. That is the work.