Stars who have been open about their menopausal body transformations

Heidi shared that she had gained weight as a side effect of menopause, after people began speculating that she was pregnant at age 52.

"Many say she's too fat or too thin or pregnant, but I am not pregnant. I'm just a little fatter now. It's the menopause," she shared in her documentary On and Off the Catwalk.

The Catwoman star has become a leading advocate for menopausal women, and previously shared that she was misdiagnosed with herpes when the menopause symptoms began to kick in.

"I was probably 10 years into it and had no clue. I thought I was going crazy," she told Glamour. "I had really bad memory loss. I had a hard time concentrating, I flooded my laundry room three times, and I would leave my keys stuck in doorways."

"I could never find my phone," she continued. "I was walking into rooms and not remembering why I was there. These were things that were not a part of my makeup before this time period. I started to think, Oh God, am I starting to have early-onset dementia? Is something happening to my brain?"

Halle added that she experienced constant feelings of anger and was no longer "the chill one".

"I had a hard time sleeping, and I guess sleep deprivation is a form of torture. It felt like I was falling apart at the seams, and nobody seemed to be able to relate," she said.

"Everybody just said, 'Oh, it's just a time of life. You're getting old. Just deal with it.' But I didn't feel old. I didn't feel like it was time for me just to pack it up and wander off to pasture, but yet that's kind of what everybody started to tell me. I felt crazy and alone and afraid. I felt ashamed."

Halle visited the US Capitol in 2024 to advocate for increased funding for research into menopause, and encouraged people to talk about their experiences.

The Goop founder shared that her major menopause symptoms involved anxiety and poor sleep, which worsened when she took up drinking.

"I would just wake up [and] I would get crushed with anxiety, which I've never had in my life," Gwyneth said on the Goop podcast.

"And I would lie in bed thinking about every mistake I've ever made, every person's feelings I ever hurt, like, every bad, you know. And I would be up, like, for six hours. It was crazy."

The actress added that after the Palisades fires tore through Los Angeles in early 2025, she began to drink every night, which worsened her symptoms. 

"My symptoms were completely out of control. It was the first time I really noticed causation in that way," she explained.  

The British actress revealed that she experienced such intense hot flashes during the filming of Harry Potter that she had to have her own on-set air source to cool her down.

"Trying to film when you're constantly flushing is very difficult – I remember being on Harry Potter, and they had to turn the air conditioning onto me," she told the Daily Mail. "I used to get so hot with all the padding and the wig and everything."

"The worst aspects for me were the hot flushes and not being able to sleep – my sleep has always been a bit fragile, but it was very bad through that time and trying to work at the same time," Julie added. "I've got so much more energy now than I ever had in my early 50s before the menopause."

The 59-year-old experienced an unexpected body transformation during menopause, which saw her breasts grow significantly. "The boobs grow a lot," she said on Red Table Talk.

"For some women, they get smaller. But there are some women that when you gain weight, your boobs grow...and then in some of the cases, when you are in menopause, they grow again. And I just happen to be one of those women that it happened in every single step!"

"A lot of people said that I had breast augmentation; I don't blame them!" she continued. "My boobs were smaller [before], so was the rest of my body...But they have just kept growing. Many, many sizes. And my back has been really suffering from it. And not a lot of people talk about this."

"Also, the hot flashes aren't fun," she quipped.