Oprah Winfrey has shared her candid thoughts about menopause and how “ridiculous” she thinks it is to stop the ageing process.
During the second episode of The Check Up with Dr David Agus, the 68-year-old talk show host and her longtime friend, Maria Shriver, opened up about the process of menopause.
Speaking to host Dr David Agus, Winfrey described the benefits of ageing and menopause, detailing that it is a natural thing that women experience. As noted by the Mayo Clinic, menopause is “the time that marks the end of your menstrual cycles” and symptoms can include “hot flashes, chills, and night sweats”.
“We’re surrounded by these beautiful trees here that literally get better with age. I think we all get better with age,” she said. “The culture is set up to tell us, in our particular society, that it’s the wrong thing.
“That you should be fighting it and resisting it with everything that you have, which is kind of ridiculous because in the end, ageing is gonna win,” she added.
Winfrey acknowledged that there’s “shame” behind the ageing process, since people feel like they have to “admit that [they’re] getting older”. She also explained the ways in which women could criticise themselves when they start going through menopause.
“It didn’t occur to me that that also means, I think, to a lot of women, that you’re no longer considered sexy,” she continued. “The fact that you’re not able to bear children means you’re no longer, you know, literally juicy for the eye, for sexual experience, and everything else. And therefore, you just want to resist that.”
Elsewhere in the episode, she recalled that when she was in her 50s, one of her peers noticed that she was having trouble focusing and that there were changes in her mood, which were her first symptoms of menopause.
Winfrey noted that when she reached her late 40s, she was already perimenopause, which is a term used to refer to the body’s transition to menopause. However, she confessed that while she was experiencing “heart palpitations” in her 50s, her doctor didn’t think it was menopause.
“So I ended up going to a female heart doctor who put me on medication, who gave me an angiogram,” she said. “My heart beat was at one point in the 200s, I was severely palpitating.”
After confessing that she thought that she was “going to die”, she acknowledged how the experience made her more grateful for everyday life.
However, she emphasised that multiple doctors still didn’t see her heart palpitations as symptoms of menopause. According to Healthline, heart palpitations can start when someone is in the middle of a heat flash, which is a symptom of menopause.
“I went to five doctors,” she continued. “Nobody ever once suggested that it could be menopause.”
Winfrey also noted that she returned to her doctor’s office to discuss the heart palpitations, after she realised what was causing them.
“When I went back to [my doctor] and said: ‘You know this was menopause,’ she said: ‘Well, you’re Oprah Winfrey. I wasn’t gonna have you die on me,” the TV producer recalled.
This wasn’t Winfrey’s first time candidly opening up about menopause. In a 2019 essay published in Oprah Daily, the actor opened up about her first time experiencing heart palpitations and how she didn’t expect to have some of her other symptoms of menopause.
“Sure, I’d heard about hot flashes. But I wasn’t prepared for palpitations. And, after my menstrual cycle stopped for good, at 53, I wasn’t prepared to have such difficulty concentrating,” she wrote. “Reading, my favourite pastime, became a chore. Suddenly my attitude toward most things was ‘whatever.’ I wasn’t vibrant. My whole world dulled down a couple of notches.”
