Drew Barrymore says she was embarrassed to tell a date she’s perimenopausal

As Drew Barrymore was scheduling a date in March, she mentioned she was appearing on a panel, and her date asked what she planned to discuss. Barrymore hesitated. The panel was about menopause, and she felt uncomfortable telling her date that, she said.

“Here was a prime life example,” she told Oprah Winfrey during the conversation, which will air at 4 p.m. ET April 5 on OprahDaily.com. Sign up to watch it here.

“There’s something in that stigma that I don’t want you to think I’m some dusty, old, dry thing. That’s not the image I want," Barrymore continued.

The actor admitted that she’s normally “confident” and likes being an “open book," but something stopped her from bringing up perimenopause and menopause with a man she found attractive.

“To a lover ... there might be something repellent about that subject, whereas with no one else do I find the subject taboo,” Barrymore reflected. “So why did I have that feeling?”

“You wanted him to think that you were a hot babe,” Winfrey replied.

“I did,” Barrymore agreed. “In this moment, I thought, ‘Oh, it’s so funny that there’s one hot guy there that I didn’t want to know that I was about to go talk about menopause because of the stigma.’”

Barrymore and Winfrey were joined by Maria Shriver, Dr. Sharone Malone, Dr. Heather Hirsch and Dr. Judith Joseph for the chat about menopause, which also included a discussion of the symptoms of perimenopause and menopause, and the embarrassment and shame around them.

Shriver said she believes some of the shame around menopause has to do with women’s “complicated relationship with aging.”

“This conversation is about health,” Shriver said. “But it’s also about the stigma and that women who are premenopausal and menopausal, postmenopausal can see themselves as vibrant, as sexual, as attractive."

"We’re not just attractive in our 20s. ... We’re whole at every decade," Shriver added.

Winfrey went on to encourage women to change the conversation about perimenopause and menopause.

“We get now to redefine it … unlike our mothers and their mothers before them, where there was no discussion about it,” she said.

What's the difference between perimenopause and menopause?

“There’s a lot of confusion about the terminology because women don’t realize that the perimenopause, which is also called the menopausal transition — where you’re going between your peak fertility years to the end of your fertility at menopause — that transition can take anywhere from four to 10 years,” said Malone, chief medical advisor of Alloy, which provides online menopause treatment. “When you start to have these symptoms, you associate hot flashes with menopause. But when you are 40 or 38 and you’ve having hot flashes, you would be very confused.”

Symptoms commonly attributed to menopause, such as hot flashes, vaginal dryness, sleep disturbances or brain fog, “start well in advanced of your last menstrual period,” Malone explained. That means women experience these changes often in perimenopause.

In fact, Barrymore recently said on her talk show that she was experiencing her first ever hot flash on air. "

Menopause, on the other hand, is a fixed point in time.

“Menopause actually starts the moment you have your last period,” Malone said. “It’s confirmed by going another 12 months and not getting another period.”

She added that she dislikes using the term postmenopausal “because you are menopausal forever. ... You’re never over it. (We) will be in it for, if we’re lucky, a third of our lives.”

The lack of conversations about perimenopause and menopause mean that some women don’t understand the scope of the symptoms and could mistake some of the whole-body changes for something else. For example, brain fog commonly occurs in perimenopause, but some women mistake it for early dementia.

Winfrey shared her experience with a symptom that even doctors mistook for something other than perimenopause.

“I started at 48 with heart palpitations and I went from doctor to doctor, literally five different doctors at one point. A female doctor had given me a first of all an angiogram and put me on heart medications,” Winfrey said. “(She) had never once mentioned that this could be menopause or perimenopause and I just happened to be in the office one day and opened a book and saw heart palpitations, symptoms of perimenopause.”

The speakers agree that they hope that women understand perimenopause and menopause better and feel less ashamed to talk about it.

“The stigma that has to change,” Barrymore said. “We have to make it funnier, more sexy and more safe.”

To watch the full conversation airing Wednesday, April 5, at 4 p.m. EST, sign up here.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com