That menopause belly isn't down to eating too much. It's what happens when nothing is holding your middle in any more.

Karen Whitfield is 55 and lives in Kettering. For thirty years she tucked her blouses into her jeans without a second thought. Then, somewhere around the change, she stopped.

It wasn't one moment. It was the side-on glance in a shop window. The soft pooch below her belly button pressing against every button. The photos at her niece's wedding where she'd sucked in so hard she couldn't smile properly.

So the blouses came out, and stayed out. The navy wrap dress went to the back of the wardrobe. She told herself it was her own fault, that she must be eating more than she realised.

She wasn't. She was eating less than she ever had.

Karen did what any of us would. She cut the bread, skipped the biscuits with her tea and swapped supper for soup. She did sit-ups on the bedroom carpet most mornings. When her jeans started cutting in, she went up a size.

None of it touched the pooch. The bigger jeans just rolled down under it the second she sat in the car. The sit-ups left her with a sore neck and the same shape in the mirror.

Every one of those fixes made sense. But every one treated the belly as something to burn off, when the real change was where it sits and what holds it.

And every month she accepted the old explanation, another outfit went on the 'not any more' pile.

Here is what nobody told Karen. As oestrogen falls through the menopause, the body moves fat to the middle instead of the hips and thighs. At the same time, the stomach wall slackens. It simply doesn't hold the way it did at 40.

Put those together and the same body now pushes forward. That's the pooch. It isn't a verdict on what you ate last week.

No diet and no sit-up puts your middle back where it was. Holding it does.

So the answer has to be built around hold, not squeeze. It needs a rise that sits above your belly button, so there's no edge for the pooch to roll over. And it needs something across the front doing the job your stomach wall used to do.

The ShapeChic Instant Brief looks like an ordinary pair of high-waisted knickers. It isn't.

The rise comes up above your belly button, so there's no waistband sitting under the pooch waiting to roll. Two crossed front bands run over your stomach and hold it flat the moment you pull it up. Sheer mesh panels let it breathe, so you can wear it from breakfast to bedtime.

Step in, pull it up, turn sideways in the mirror: the soft bulge below your belly button is held flat. No sucking in. No holding your breath.

Karen's first try was in front of her wardrobe mirror. She turned side-on twice, because she didn't believe it the first time.

This isn't guesswork. SWAN, a long-running US study that followed women through the menopause, found that fat gain roughly doubles its pace during the transition, while lean muscle starts to fall. Research on the menopause also finds more fat settling around the abdomen.

Read that again. The shift speeds up at exactly the point most of us start cutting back. That's why the diet stopped working. It was never a fair fight.

A brief can't change what that study describes. It changes what your middle looks like under your clothes, every single day.

Try the side-on test: blouse tucked in, once without the brief and once with it. With it, the waistband stays put when you sit, and the line from bust to hip runs smooth instead of pushing out.

The first thing Karen did was the thing she'd stopped doing. She tucked her cream blouse into her jeans and left the house like that.

Then the smaller things. Sitting in the car without the waistband folding down. Hugging her sister at the station without angling her hips away. A photo at her friend's sixtieth where she just stood there and smiled, breathing normally.

The navy wrap dress came out of the back of the wardrobe and went to Sunday lunch. Nothing showed underneath. The brief looks like ordinary underwear and works under everything she already owns.

It hasn't made her lose a pound, and she knows that. It's the hold. What she got back was the part of getting dressed she'd quietly given up on.

Go back to where Karen started: a wardrobe full of clothes she'd decided were finished, and a belief that the belly was her fault.

It wasn't her fault, and it isn't yours. Your middle has moved forward and lost its hold. The ShapeChic Instant Brief puts that hold back, above the belly button, with crossed bands across the front and mesh that breathes.

Right now it's Buy 1, Get 2 Free. That's one to wear, one in the wash and one in the drawer, so the blouse can go in every day of the week. Check the size guide on the product page, pick your size and claim the offer while it's running.

Every week you wait is another week of untucked blouses.