Being the supportive one and getting tired

I would say pick one person to be honest with completely. Mine was my brother and having one person who knows everything has been enough.

My body changed how it works and the household did not get a memo. Working that out took about a year of small friction.

Somebody here said that you do not owe anybody an explanation, including people who love you, and I have leaned on that repeatedly.

I have nothing to add and I did not want to leave it unanswered.

What I did not anticipate was how much better things got once I stopped managing everybody's feelings about it as well as my own.

What helped was giving my partner something to read, so that the explaining was not all coming from me at eleven at night.

My children noticed before my partner did, which says something I am still thinking about.

Something I did not expect was how much of our relationship had been organised around food, and how much we had to rebuild.

My partner was frightened for me, which came out as disapproval, and it took a long time to hear it as the first thing.

I asked him to stop commenting, once, clearly, and he did, and I had spent four months building up to a two-minute conversation.

What helped was one honest conversation where I said what I actually needed rather than expecting him to notice.

Coming back to say we are fine, that it took about eighteen months, and that the conversation I dreaded most was the one that fixed it.

What Rufus described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

My family's reaction was the hardest part and I have had to accept that some of them are not going to come round.

My mother cooks as an act of love and my appetite changing felt to her like a rejection, and naming that out loud helped both of us.