63 pages • 2 hours read
Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I'd Known About Menopause
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Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “Menoboss”
Watts shares the “winding road” of her career journey. She entered her field as a costume designer and transitioned into working in fashion journalism before leaving to pursue acting. Watts relocated from Australia to the United States with few connections and little money. She reflects on her bravery, noting how she has carried that boldness into middle age and encouraging middle-aged women to “bet on” themselves.
Sharing several anecdotes, Watts shows how many women feel “liberated” in middle age, becoming highly ambitious while also having the time and energy to pursue their interests. She brings up author and activist Mariella Frostrup, who emphasizes the economic bias against women:
Within twelve years of having your first child, you’re likely to be earning 33 percent less than a male contemporary […] By the time you get to your pension at the end of your working life, it’s going to be somewhere between 15 and 40 percent less again than that of a male contemporary (148).
Frostrup also asserts that workplaces benefit from hiring across a diverse age range. Watts reflects on her own career struggles and how she now selects roles featuring characters that she connects with and productions that will help her “grow.” While acknowledging the uniqueness of her career field, Watts also asserts that professional environments are similar, relating the story of news anchor Tamsen Fadal, who had to leave set because of her menopause symptoms and then developed anxiety, worrying that it might happen again. She went to the doctor and was sent a message that said only, “In menopause. Any questions” (151). Later, Fadal found a menopause-savvy doctor who addressed her symptoms, allowing her to feel less anxious.
Watts reiterates that many menopausal women experience professional stress, and she advocates for individuals to “own” their vulnerabilities to boost their confidence.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Rethinking Nutrition”
Reflecting on her teenage modeling career, Watts remembers being told to leave the industry after gaining weight. While that experience temporarily damaged Watts’s relationship with food, she has found a balance, avoiding “hard-core” diets in favor of healthy lifestyle choices and occasional cleanses. She discusses Dr. Haver, who promotes the idea of women building strength rather than losing weight and advises women to use dietary choices, like increased protein intake, to help mitigate menopause-related symptoms.
During menopause, women tend to accumulate more visceral fat, the dangerous fat that collects around internal organs, as opposed to subcutaneous fat, which collects just under the skin. Dr. Haver advocates for a high-fiber diet, which is correlated with less visceral fat, and recommends consuming less food with added sugar and more with probiotics. Both Dr. Haver and Watts are proponents of intermittent fasting, though Dr. Haver has increased her eating window to help her get more protein. They recommend that women measure their waist-to-hip ratio, which is a better indication of health as compared to the traditional body mass index measurement (BMI), which compares height and weight. Watts advises readers to avoid alcohol before moving into a discussion on weight-loss medications, neither endorsing nor opposing them, but rather noting their varying results. Dr. Haver is careful when prescribing weight-loss medications, first advising patients to lose weight naturally then, if that fails, she monitors their health metrics closely while they take the medication.
The chapter ends with two addendums, featuring nutritional advice from Amanda Thebe and Dr. Haver. Thebe’s discussion divides food into macronutrients—carbs, fats, and protein—and micronutrients, like vitamins and minerals. She notes the roles of each of the macronutrients, advising individuals to eat a balance of all of them. Meanwhile, Dr. Haver endorses several supplements, including fiber, magnesium, vitamin D, omega-3, and collagen.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Working It Out”
To maintain resilience in the face of Hollywood’s judgment, Watts looks for humor in others’ opinions of her body, and she challenges herself by asking herself who she is trying to impress. However, she admits that she sometimes struggles with poor self-esteem—“I find it’s hard to tune out this noise in my own head sometimes, too” (169). Watts is grateful for her relatively good health but writes that she is more careful with her body and cognizant with its limits. She admits that, when younger, she cared too much about others’ opinions and advocates for women to support one another, rather than view each other as competition.
Along with benefiting her physical health, Watts writes that exercising, particularly in her group dance classes, has improved her mental health. According to experts, it does not matter what type of exercise individuals practice; it only matters that they are performing some type of exercise. Both Thebe and Dr. Haver advocate strength over fitness, emphasizing the importance of retaining muscle mass and preventing or minimizing visceral fat. The text also notes that while exercise is beneficial, it is not a cure-all, and Thebe advocates for a more interdisciplinary approach to symptom management, noting, “Often the conversation in the menopause world is very binary, and we don’t see a space where menopause hormone therapy and exercise can coexist” (171).
Watts reflects on her varied history with exercise routines and a yoga class in which her and her friend were the oldest participants. At the time, she hid her midsection, but she now bares her stomach, proud despite its “paper-bag” appearance. She recommends a few specific exercises, including squats, lunges, planks, push-ups, and dead lifts. In addition, she suggests a few more exercises for managing frozen shoulder symptoms, including shoulder rotations, forearm planks, and arm raises, as well as advising readers to research more options on their own.
Chapters 12-14 Analysis
In these chapters, Watts expands on the idea that midlife is not a period of decline but a time for reinvention, strength, and self-advocacy. She focuses on career shifts, nutrition, and fitness, all through the lens of Redefining Aging for Women. Rather than positioning aging as a process of limitation, she reframes it as a time of newfound ambition, autonomy, and self-care. Throughout these chapters, Watts synthesizes key lessons into digestible takeaways, acknowledges systemic barriers that impact women’s careers and health, and provides concrete tools to help readers navigate menopause more effectively.
A central argument in this section is that midlife, while often marked by change, can be a period of liberation rather than loss. Watts directly addresses the fear that aging equates to diminishing opportunities, flipping this notion by encouraging women to “bet on” themselves. She writes, “The takeaway here for me is that, as they say, it’s better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than halfway up one you don’t” (146). By positioning midlife as a chance to reassess and realign priorities, she challenges the assumption that career reinvention belongs only to the young. This theme extends into her discussion of motherhood and the empty nest. While many women struggle to balance careers and caregiving, Watts highlights how this period can be redefined as an opportunity for self-focus and growth. She observes, “So many women I know had flourishing careers until they became mothers and wound up struggling to keep everything balanced” (147). Rather than framing midlife as the end of professional ambition, she emphasizes how many women use this time to reclaim their careers, pursue passion projects, or take risks they once felt unable to. This perspective aligns with her larger concept that aging is not about retreating but about redefinition.
Watts does not present this redefinition as an easy process; she acknowledges the systemic barriers that make professional reinvention more difficult for women. She draws from author and activist Mariella Frostrup’s observations on the economic penalties women face after taking career breaks for caregiving: “If you decide to take three years off from paid work to do something in the domestic sphere, it is going to have an impact on your skill set […] It is going to have an impact on what you have to offer. Things change very quickly” (148). With perspectives like these, rather than isolating menopause as a singular issue, Watts layers it onto the broader economic, social, and professional challenges that women face. This accumulation of factors—career interruptions, caregiving responsibilities, systemic biases, and the physical effects of menopause—can make reintegration into the workforce daunting. By offering a holistic perspective on The Physical and Emotional Impact of Menopause, Watts highlights the ways it resonates through women’s personal and professional lives.
She also recognizes her unique position as a celebrity, but she bridges this gap by emphasizing the universal nature of professional struggles: “I know my career story is about a strange job not a lot of people have, but I feel like there are versions of these twists and turns in every industry” (150). This acknowledgment strengthens her connection to readers by addressing her celebrity directly while also ensuring that her insights feel relevant beyond Hollywood. By framing menopause as part of a larger narrative of gendered career and health inequities, Watts encourages women to advocate for themselves in both medical and professional settings.
The text critiques the way health and wellness advice is often dispensed without actionable steps while offering concrete strategies for Taking Control of Menopause Through Information. Many women are told to “lose weight” or “sleep more” without being given the resources to achieve these goals. She counters this trend by offering practical, specific advice, such as how to calculate waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) for assessing health risks. This inclusion of concrete tools aligns with her approach in other chapters, such as her critique of vague sleep advice in Chapter 10. Just as she highlighted the frustration of being told to “sleep more” without solutions, she ensures that her readers receive tangible strategies rather than broad directives.
Watts’s commitment to practical guidance is also evident in the two addendums at the end of Chapter 13 that feature additional nutritional advice from Thebe and Dr. Haver. By supplementing her own insights with expert contributions, she reinforces her argument that managing menopause requires a well-rounded, individualized approach rather than a one-size-fits-all solution.
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