Natasha Hamilton says going into perimenopause left her insecure

Natasha Hamilton has confessed that going into early perimenopause and being diagnosed with a chronic health condition has left her feeling ‘insecure and embarrassed’.

The former singer, 43, found fame as a 16-year-old pop star, revealed that after giving birth to her second son, she suffered from postnatal depression.

Natasha Charles Gay shares a daughter, Kitty, two, with her husband Charles, and has children from previous relationships, Josh, 23, Harry, 21, Alfie, 15, and Ella, 11.

She revealed to The Mirror that just 12 months ago, she felt she was ‘falling apart and had lost all confidence in myself’ as she battled with perimenopause and only started to turn her health around when she started Hormone Replacement Therapy.

But she revealed that her lowest moment came six months after Kitty’s birth, when she was shooting a pop video while battling thyroid chaos and perimenopause.

She explained that she was ‘bigger than she has ever been’ and found it hard returning to work.

Natasha said: ‘I remember looking in the mirror and saying, ‘Step into your power.

‘You were a young, thin pop star, but that’s not you now. You’ve just had your fifth kid, you’ve been through life, you’ve had your battles and you look f***ing great.

‘So what if you have cellulite?’

The pop star is still on what she refers to as a ‘journey’, one that began after she became a mum for the fifth time to daughter Kitty, when she realised her body was changing.

She has also been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune condition that attacks the thyroid and causes hypothyroidism, meaning ‘my thyroid was underactive and not producing enough hormones to regulate my metabolism, energy and mood.’

She confessed: ‘The version of Natasha now is not what it was pre-Kitty.’

In the early months of Kitty’s life, Natasha first realised something was changed as she said she says she barely recognised herself and described rolling out of bed in agony.

And after the birth, she said her recall had become so slow and couldn’t find the right words.

‘I started to feel insecure and embarrassed’, she said.

It comes after Natasha revealed she was also battling a huge £250K tax bill as she opened up about her debt.

When she was at the height of her career she said she had credit cards ‘thrown’ at her during her teenage years which left her paying them off into her 30s.

Natasha admitted she faced the ‘tightest’ 12-months of her life last year after previously having a ‘mental breakdown’ over her finances.

Speaking to The Times, she said: ‘In my late teens and early twenties credit cards were thrown at me. I then had to spend my late twenties and early thirties paying off a lot of debt, so I’ve learnt to be less frivolous the hard way. I owed about £20,000 at one point.’

Natasha revealed she has ‘invested everything’ into her record label, Morpho Records last year, and as a result it’s been a slow financial year.

She explained how she would wake up ‘every day crying,’ to which her two-year-old would ask: ‘Why are you sad, Mummy?’

The TV star now lives in Chester with her husband and their daughter, Kitty as well as her older children.

Natasha continued: ‘I first really learnt about money when I left Atomic Kitten and was hit with a tax bill of over £250,000.’

After taking a step back from the band in 2004 to deal with postnatal depression, Natasha acknowledged that she wasn’t ‘mentally and physically able’ to do the job that she had ‘loved.’

But she acknowledged that being dumped with a huge tax bill after her Atomic Kitten fame was ‘incredibly hard.’

‘To pay that tax bill I went back to work too quickly and it had a huge impact on my mental health. I had a mental breakdown,’ she said.

Things continued to go downhill for Natasha, when in 2007, she ‘lost a hell of a lot of money in property’ following the crash.

Natasha and her husband are now stuck renting a property in Chester after they ended up homeless for seven months which saw them living in hotels and Airbnbs.

The singer added: ‘We sold our last house and ended up with no house because the mortgage on the new property hadn’t quite gone through. We ended up homeless for seven months.’

Natasha was also forced to ‘work really hard’ after she divorced her first husband, Riad Erraji, in 2013 because she was left with ‘nothing’.

She now revealed that she keeps her ‘finances on track’ and pays back her credit card at the end of each month.