Hello, I’m Ali.

I’m a qualified menopause practitioner, workplace speaker and creator of #TweakAWeek® — although none of that was remotely part of the plan when perimenopause first came along and completely knocked me sideways.

For most of my career, I worked inside big organisations including Arm, Heineken, EDF Energy and MIB, leading employee engagement, culture and social impact programmes. My job was getting people involved, getting people talking and, most importantly, getting people to actually do something. I loved it, and for a long time life felt pretty full — career, travel, renovation projects, big plans and all the usual chaos.

Then somewhere in my mid-40s, things started to change. The hangovers became absolutely brutal, anxiety appeared from nowhere, my sleep went rogue and my energy fell off a cliff. Eventually, I found myself signed off work with exhaustion, antidepressants in one hand and Google in the other, asking what the hell perimenopause actually was.

And that still blows my mind a little. I was an intelligent, capable woman in my 40s and I had absolutely no idea what was happening to my own body.

Giving up alcohol was one of the first changes I made, but what really shifted things was deciding I wanted — and needed — to take some power back. I started learning more about what was happening, made changes to how I was living and eventually found the right HRT and support for me. The more I learned, the more frustrated I became that so many women were reaching this stage of life with so little practical information.

So I retrained and completed a Level 5 qualification in Menopause Wellness, because I wanted proper answers. I wanted to understand the evidence, understand what lifestyle could genuinely influence and, just as importantly, understand where lifestyle advice stops and proper healthcare support needs to begin.

Then, in 2024, life threw me a rather spectacular curveball: Stage 3 anal cancer.

Twenty-eight rounds of chemoradiation later, I came out the other side with a very different relationship with my body, my health and what I’m prepared to spend my time worrying about. Cancer also pushed me abruptly into medical menopause, so if I thought hormones had already given me enough material to work with, apparently they had other plans.

That whole experience reinforced something I now bring into everything I do: health doesn’t happen in a neat little box away from the rest of our lives. Menopause doesn’t wait until work is quiet. Cancer doesn’t check whether you’ve got a big meeting next Tuesday. Sleep problems, anxiety, exhaustion and brain fog don’t politely disappear between 9 and 5. We are dealing with all of it while working, managing relationships, looking after other people and generally trying to keep life moving.

And that is really where #TweakAWeek® comes from.

The idea is incredibly simple: instead of deciding on Sunday night that you are going to overhaul your entire life by Monday morning and then thinking “fuck it” by Wednesday, start with one thing.

One tweak. Give it a proper go. See what happens.

The original #TweakAWeek® eBook contains 52 practical lifestyle tweaks covering sleep, food, movement, stress, alcohol, caffeine, confidence, self-talk and much more.

I’ve since started developing #TweakAWeek® Essentials, a series of deeper-dive guides taking individual topics and exploring what might help, what the evidence says and, most importantly, what you can actually try in real life.

There are no complicated programmes, miracle cures or enormous supplement stacks. I’m not interested in telling women they need to become a completely different person in order to feel better. I’m interested in helping women understand their bodies a little more and find practical changes that might genuinely make a difference.

Menopause at work

Alongside #TweakAWeek®, I deliver workplace menopause sessions for organisations that want something honest, engaging, practical and definitely not a yawn-fest.

Because I spent most of my career inside large organisations, I understand the workplace side of this too. I know the pressure managers are under, how easily wellbeing conversations become policies nobody reads and why telling someone to “speak to their manager” is not, on its own, a menopause strategy.

My sessions help colleagues and managers better understand perimenopause and menopause, but I always move the conversation beyond symptoms into what good support actually looks and feels like. And because I incorporate the #TweakAWeek® approach, people leave with practical things they can do too.

I’ve delivered sessions for organisations including Beko, Zapier, Cloudsmith, Get Berkshire Active, Cambridge Women in Tech and FLEXFest, and I work with organisations of all sizes that want their menopause conversations to be useful, human and relevant to real working life.

And while cancer has changed my life enormously, it hasn’t made me suddenly profound or zen about everything. I still spiral occasionally, I still get stressed, I still have days when looking after myself goes completely out of the window. The difference now is that I understand myself and my body far better than I did when this all started.

That’s what I want women to take from my work too: more understanding, more confidence and a few more tools to help them feel back in the driving seat.

Small tweaks. Real life. One week at a time.

Lots of love,

Ali x

alistripling.com