Podcast appearances and mentions of anna what

On this episode Chris Bazemore & Chris Reiter welcome, comedian Anna Bianco and they start off liquor snobs, which then leads to a Chris Bazemore’s experience with a 18 year old Tea snob. For the DEEP DIVE segment they ask Anna “What’s Attractive (Physically) In A Man?” Introduce a new segment the HOT TAKE WHEEL. They all then talk about how your 1st dreams are often not the most realistic and need to die so you could get to your real dream.During the SEARCH HISTORIES portion, we have the pleasure to go through some YouTube searches as well and Someone has to explain why they looked up “Expensive Trash Cans?”, and “Bonnie & Clyde”, then briefly discuss the essence of being a ride or die person. LISTEN LAUGH ENJOY RATE and SUBSCRIBE.Host: Chris Bazemore @chrisbazemore_ and Chris Reiter @Christopherthecomic Guest: Anna Bianco @annacainbianco YouTube: I Can Explain That Podcast Audio Available Everywhere!!!

Worth Waiting For - Luke 2-22-38-Digging Deeper---What similarities do you see between Simeon and Anna---What did Simeon declare about Jesus---What does it look like for a believer to be waiting for the second coming of Christ---What about Jesus is worth waiting for--Other Passages to Consider- -Ps 130- Rom 8-18-30- 1 Thess 1-9-10- Titus 2-11-14- Heb 9-27-28- 1 Pet 1-8-9- 2 Pet 3-11-14- Jude 20-21.

There's nothing more infuriating than when people throw shade at the anti-diet perspective without bothering to actually research it. When "The Biggest Loser" trainer/shameless fatphobe Jillian Michaels arrogantly released a Youtube clip trashing the 10 principles of intuitive eating, WITHOUT EVEN READING THE BOOK, she REALLY pi***ed off the community! And none more so than my guests, anti-diet fitness trainers Anna Hearn and Shreen El Masry, who have been dying to come on the podcast and set the record straight! Finally the COVID window opened just a crack so I could record the very first IN PERSON podcast! Join us as we dissect Jillian's often hilarious inability to comprehend a life beyond diet prison. WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS 'PERMISSION TO EAT!!' It seems the lady doth protest too much - could it be that the Queen of Diet Prison is sensing the paradigm-shifting power of the anti-diet revolution? That's right folks, the unrivalled reign of Biggest Loser-esque terror is over!! Vive La Difference! Please note - this episode comes with a hefty side serve of calorie count discussions, so if you're in recovery from an eating disorder please consider your level of spoons to hear the diet talk. But, if you've had a gutful of igno-rants about anti-dieting, it's time to get ALL FIRED UP! Show Transcript:   LOUISE: So, here I am with Anna and Shreen. Thank you so much for coming on the show. ANNA: Thank you for having us. SHREEN: Yeah, thank you so much. LOUISE: It’s so exciting to be alive with actual humans in the room, and slightly weird. Why don’t you guys tell me all about what is firing you up? ANNA: We’re really fired up about Jillian Michaels and her aggressive fatphobic rant on intuitive eating. LOUISE: (sighs) First of all, I have to say I love how you say ‘rant’, it’s very proper and awesome. But yes, Jillian Michaels – Biggest Loser trainer in the United States. Horrendously fatphobic. ANNA: Yeah, I mean … she got her living, she makes her living from shaming fat bodies. I think that tells a lot about her character and where she’s going to go with her intuitive eating rant. LOUISE: So, she was on the Biggest Loser for years and years and years. Her website … well, she’s touting herself as the world’s best trainer. Like, the biggest expert in the world on all things fitness. Which, well … this is just a hunch, but I could find people on the planet who are more qualified. ANNA: Well, if you want to break down her qualifications, I think it looks like she’s done a couple of personal training qualifications, a couple of fitness qualifications and … SHREEN: One ‘woo woo’ nutrition qualification. ANNA: There is a nutrition qualification there too, but it doesn’t look like there’s any degrees or anything. So, when it comes to intuitive eating and looking at all of that, when we go into it you’ll realise, I think, that she hasn’t really done her research. She doesn’t understand it. And I think it’s interesting that somebody without that nutrition background or lived experience with that sort of thing talks about it the way that she does. SHREEN: I think as well, not only does she come across really aggressive and shaming, also I think her insecurity is really coming out in this video. Intuitive eating is a movement that’s really starting to take off, and she’s clearly threatened by it. You can see her defence mechanism is up, and she’s … you know, really, just … her demeanour is just awful. LOUISE: It's hard to tell, though, if her demeanour’s just awful because she’s defensive or because her demeanour’s just awful. SHREEN: Yeah, that’s true. ANNA: I kind of picked up on that and thought she was sensing a threat because intuitive eating is becoming more mainstream, people are becoming more aware of it. So that could threaten what she does, because she makes a living forcing people to lose weight. LOUISE: So, during the 90’s and the early 2000’s, like … it was a free-for-all with bullying people with larger bodies, as we saw. World-wide, the Biggest Loser was the number one show, and everyone thought it was okay. So, she’s had this unfettered ability to be horrible about body size and really belittling of people in larger bodies. And now, I think she’s realising it’s not okay to keep on doing that. ANNA: The backlash about it. LOUISE: So, just to set the stage. What we’re seeing … because I did see the internet blow up. It was a while ago now, but let’s face it - we’ve all been in iso and unable to talk to each other. So, she has like a YouTube channel and one of her YouTube little presentations - I don’t watch what she does, just for my own mental health - but this one was Jillian Michaels talking about intuitive eating. Which, oh my god … let’s just get Donald Trump talking about sexism. ANNA: That’s a great analogy. SHREEN: She’s basically, I think she’s just gone on the website and just pulled up the principles without doing any research into it or even understanding there’s over a hundred studies done on intuitive eating and there’s a whole book as well. She just went on there, read out these principles and gave her, I guess, her opinion.  ANNA: It became really clear that she hasn’t taken the time to understand it. She hasn’t learnt about the authors; you’ll see as she comes to the end of it, she talks about assuming that it was written by somebody who had just had some bad experience with diet culture, maybe had an eating disorder LOUISE: Oh my god, that’s so disrespectful SHREEN: So disrespectful. ANNA: No understanding or bothering to explore that the authors are actually dietitians who had come up with this approach because they had done so much work with clients who had struggled a lot and this is what they’d learnt from working with them over years and years. LOUISE: These are the gurus. Like, Tribole and Resch, they wrote the initial book Intuitive Eating and it’s just been updated, which is fantastic. But even that, even their book which is written from that perspective of helping people recover from eating disorders, that book is built on another big long history of social justice and fat activism. To not recognise that intuitive eating is part of a social movement and like, the way she presented it is like, she just stumbled across a webpage and … oh my god. ANNA: Definitely, yeah. And it came across very, very condescending. I felt really bothered … SHREEN: It’s so harmful, as well. That was the thing that really bothered me the most, was how much … I mean, she causes so much harm anyway, but the message was just next level harm. And if anyone was watching that and had no idea, the things that she was saying … yeah, it’s just not on. LOUISE: Oh god, yikes. So, we thought we would unpick Jillian Michael’s feelpinion to each of the ten principles of intuitive eating. And you guys have written some awesomely detailed notes. ANNA: We had a really good chat about it. LOUISE: Fantastic. But I’m so interested, because you guys both work in this industry as HAES® positive, body inclusive, weight neutral trainers hearing from almost like the personification of diet culture woman. SHREEN: She is the reason why people have so much fitness trauma and so much negative association with fitness. She’s causing that. ANNA: She is the epitome of diet culture. SHREEN: Yeah, she is the epitome of diet culture, for sure. ANNA: And I think we chatted about this as we were hanging out one day, and we just came across this as a topic that fired both of us up. And it’s frustrating when you see … when you’re so heavily involved in this space, and the HAES® space, and the body inclusive space, it can be … and luckily for me working here at Haven, this is the space I come to work every day. So, I’m not exposed to traditional diet culture unless I stumble across it or it’s brought to my attention. So, I couldn’t help but just be really quite wild about this. LOUISE: I love it. I mean, I don’t love that you’re wild, but I kind of do. But, yeah. It’s nice to know that in this industry there are people who feel really strongly about just putting an end to this. She’s what’s wrong with the fitness industry at the moment, and you guys are the future. And I think she can smell that. So, I think, like I … I managed to watch it and still shaking with rage but thank you for this glass of champagne. ANNA: I don’t think we could do this without a little bit of champagne. SHREEN: No, we need some bubbles. LOUISE: The first thing she starts with, so she’s actually going through all the principles. SHREEN:  Correct. LOUISE: Why don’t you give me the lowdown on your reaction. ANNA: Let’s kick off. So, she does go through the points one by one, and the first principle is ‘reject the diet mentality’. And I just want to point out a few things that came up for me that were just so apparent throughout. Her fatphobia is so clear. She’s driven, everything she says, and her approach is all drive by this. And I think she’s very ignorant, like she doesn’t see that there’s an issue with this. She comes form that space where it’s very normalised to shame fat bodies, it’s not okay to be in a bigger body. And she very clearly associates weight and health, they’re so closely tied, which I think it really problematic, obviously. So, in this ‘reject diet mentality’, what came up for you, Shreen? SHREEN: Well, the first thing for me was that she couldn’t distinguish a difference between fad diets and what dieting is, and diet culture. She’s like, “oh you know, if it’s fad diets we’re talking about yeah, yeah sure”, but this is a woman who has sold supplements in the past. LOUISE: She’s sold fad diets. SHREEN: She’s sold fad diets. And she is diet culture, so I guess she can’t … she doesn’t understand what diet culture actually is and why it’s so important to reject it. I mean, diet culture in the US alone is worth 70 billion dollars. ANNA:  She profits off it. SHREEN: She profits off everyone’s insecurities. So, she was just like, “reject diet culture? What’s this, what does this mean?”. And I really did sense there that her insecurity is coming out there because that is her, that’s how she makes her money. ANNA: Well that’s it, she’s really incentivised to support diet culture.  LOUISE: But the distinction that she made between “well, if it’s fad, but if it’s proper” … it just made me laugh, because she’s had no less than four separate lawsuits … ANNA:  Jillian? SHREEN: Yeah. LOUISE: Launched against her by her consumers who bought her caffeine-fuelled diet pills. ANNA: Which I think she might have … there might have been something on the Biggest Loser where she gave them to contestants unfairly, apparently, as well. LOUISE: Oh my god, scandal on the Biggest Loser. Like … ANNA: Well, the other thing that came up for me there was she said, “what is this, healthy at any size?”, and that’s immediately a red flag representing that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She hasn’t researched this because … I can understand it’s very easy to misconstrue Health At Every Size® for healthy at every size, but it’s quite a different meaning and that assumption that, you know, just assuming that we’re saying as a Health at Every Size® professional that all bodies are healthy, that’s not where we’re aiming. We’re talking about people being able to pursue health regardless of shape and size. LOUISE: Or, also, we’re talking about the choice not to pursue health and to be left the fuck alone. SHREEN: Yeah, there’s no moral obligation. If people want to do so, then it’s up to them. It shouldn’t be … they shouldn’t have to do it if they don’t want to, but that’s what diet culture is saying. ANNA: Your body, your rules. SHREEN: And this part of her rant really, really … we know that she’s incredibly fatphobic and she fat shames, but it just came out so much in that where she was again talking, talking about size 16. And she’s saying “well, you know, if you’re a size 16 of course I love you but you’re not healthy”. Which is just … LOUISE: Get fucked. SHREEN: Yeah, absolute garbage. ANNA: Yeah. And Health at Every Size® also is about respect for all bodies, and I think there is a real lack of respect in just making that assumption. You can’t tell. How does she know what someone’s health is, you know? What their metabolic functions are, their blood work, their social, mental health … you can’t tell that by someone’s size. SHREEN: Genetics, everything. There’s so much, it’s so multifaceted. LOUISE: Everything I think is just far too complicated for her. She has to actually, like … I mean, clearly, she hasn’t read anything or thought about anything. “Nope, that’s a number, that’s an assumption, and don’t challenge that”.  SHREEN: Yeah. And if someone’s watching that, I mean, how triggering. How much harm that one comment could cause somebody that could lead them down a path of dieting and to an eating disorder. ANNA: And especially if they were already vulnerable of somebody who would identify with being in a size 16, or plus. And also, size 16 is quite variable depending on which shop you shop in, you know? Where you get your clothes from. What’s a size anyway? What does it matter? SHREEN: Yeah, it doesn’t matter. LOUISE: Size is not the same as health, and she needs to pull her head in. I wonder if her YouTube videos come with a trigger warning. I don’t think they do, but they should. Because good point, you know, that she … everything she says is potentially a trigger. SHREEN: Especially the size of her audience as well, I’m worried. ANNA: She’s got a big reach still. Some of the comments though were interesting, some really great points. People were talking about intuitive eating and picking up on that she doesn’t understand it, she’s missing the point. LOUISE: That is really reassuring. ANNA: She stopped the comments, she cut them off. LOUISE: Oh no, they were too complicated. ANNA: So, the next principle is ‘honour your hunger’, and she said something pretty radical here. Well, it’s not really radical in the fitness world. These numbers get thrown around a lot. But trigger warning, there are numbers here. She says, “if you’re trying to lose weight, you can keep your body fed on as low as 1200 calories”. And that most women, especially those over, you know, relating to being a certain age, shouldn’t be eating over 1600 calories a day. SHREEN: Which is just absolutely unbelievable. She’s saying that … I mean, that’s what a toddler needs. A toddler needs 1200-1600 calories a day. LOUISE: How very dare she tell me how much I can eat, under a principle that says, ‘honour your hunger’. ANNA: She … on one hand, I’m not surprised she threw those numbers out because those numbers are thrown out all the time in the fitness world. I don’t know where … MyFitnessPal? LOUISE: Are they really? SHREEN: We were saying, MyFitnessPal may have started the whole 1200 calories thing … LOUISE: I think Michelle Bridges is guilty of that too. ANNA: Oh actually, you’re right, she had a program that was based on that. LOUISE: It’s just a nice round number, isn’t it? Let’s just pluck this out of our arse and throw that at all women. ANNA: What I find there though is that like Shreen said, it’s something that a child needs. And I just wanted to double-check that, because I’m not a nutritionist, I’m a yogi and I run a studio, but I wanted to check with somebody who does work with that. I chatted to our non-diet nutritionist Nina and she clarified that yes - this is generalisation - but that kind of number is something that would serve a child. Like, a toddler or a four, five-year-old. And then thinking about the effects of being on a low-calorie diet for a long period, things like loss of menstrual cycle, loss of bone density, fatigue, mood swings, constipation, blood sugar imbalance, stress hormones getting out of whack … SHREEN: Sex drive … ANNA: Sex drive … what did you say before? SHREEN: Dry vagina (laughs). ANNA: She didn’t mention that, did she? SHREEN: No. LOUISE: No, but that might be suffering all of them, you know? And why she’s so grouchy. ANNA: Memory fog and brain fog … memory loss and brain fog. So, these are all things that can be affected by not being adequately fed. And the better indicator of your needs are your body and your internal hunger signals. And we’re taught to … these external sources of just following this rule plan of 1200 calories a day means that if I need more than that – maybe at the time of my period especially I might need much more - and I’m just denying my natural hunger levels. LOUISE: The whole ‘per day’ thing really gives me the shits as well. SHREEN: Yeah, that’s a really good point. LOUISE: This is just a statistical method to help researchers make assumptions about nutrition. It’s not supposed to be something religiously followed. SHREEN: No, there’s no … ANNA: An individual thing, yeah. LOUISE: It’s bizarre. But, isn’t that interesting that even as she’s like, she’s trying desperately, the poor little thing to understand that this is a principle of intuitive eating but she can’t quite get there because she immediately lurches into “well, if you want to lose weight …”. I just felt like reaching through the screen and saying, “realise that intuitive eating is not a weight loss program”. ANNA: That’s half the problem, is that she clearly thinks that the only people who explore intuitive eating are going for weight loss. She says that a few times. LOUISE: Oh, she’s a scrambled egg. ANNA: Yeah. She doesn’t understand that the whole purpose of intuitive eating is more about finding a peaceful relationship with food and your body, not about trying to pursue making your body be something, a certain size. SHREEN: It’s about food freedom, it’s about having a healthy relationship with food, stopping the obsession. It’s not … it’s definitely not following these external rules. It’s about being in tune with what your body wants and needs and getting in touch with those signals. LOUISE: Different planet, I don’t think she’s visited. SHREEN: I don’t think she understands what the ‘honouring hunger’ … it’s a basic self-care need. If you’re not honouring hunger … LOUISE: Again, you’re mentioning a foreign concept here. This is someone who will happily live with a dry vagina, it doesn’t matter. SHREEN: Yep (all laugh). LOUISE: We all went there. SHREEN: She just really doesn’t understand and that is the reason why … people don’t give themselves enough food and they’re following diet plans, and they’re going to give themselves cravings leading to overeating and bingeing, and that’s perfectly normal as well. Other than ‘rejecting the diet mentality’ one of the first steps of intuitive eating is to just honour your hunger and it’s so important. It’s self-care. ANNA: It's so liberating too, if you’re been on the diet bandwagon for many, many years, to recognise that “hey, my body’s got a lot of wisdom, and it’s telling me, it’s giving me messages and I can learn how to reconnect with that”. And I think part of the common thread that comes up with what she says all the time is that … she thinks it’s all about ‘you can’t trust your body’. I think an important thing that I’ve learned is you can really learn how to trust your body. We get into this as we move into the next principle or two. It’s not about endless eating and not being able to, you know, like you’re just not going to go out of control all the time, which is what she sort of thinks. SHREEN: Point number three is that ‘unconditional permission to eat all foods’. LOUISE: She really had a problem with principle three. Like, she was visibly … SHREEN: Yeah, and she started comparing it to smoking, and credit cards, and it’s like …what are you talking about? ANNA: So yeah, this ‘make peace with food’, you’re right. And she talks about saying, talking about the ‘last supper mentality’, and she says, “I’m not religious, I don’t know what Jesus ate”. LOUISE: She really needs to read some books. ANNA: She needs to read Intuitive Eating if she’s going to talk about it. Because if she read it, she might really understand what that means. I thought it was quite clear just from the ‘last supper mentality’, don’t you think? SHREEN: You just eat everything in sight. LOUISE: I don’t even think it has religious connotations, I thought it was like a death row thing. SHREEN: Oh, that’s true … LOUISE: Like eating your last meal. ANNA: That’s right. And it makes sense, I think, if you think about that. You know you’re not going to have something again, so you want to make the most of it in that moment. And ultimately that’s what it’s about. I think that’s kind of clear. But she didn’t understand that, she was sort of like “I don’t like this intense, this hostile approach”. And I’m like, you ARE intense and hostile.  LOUISE: How is that intense and hostile? I’ve not ever read the ten principles of intuitive eating and thought “gosh, that’s angry”. I mean, gosh. Visit the internet, really (all laugh). ANNA: I think she is the, again, the epitome diet culture, and she is the hostile one. Think about the Biggest Loser, she is very aggressive and in-your-face, pushing her clients. So, here she talks about it all being about self-control and willpower, and I think that’s missing the point of intuitive eating completely as well. LOUISE: She just can’t … SHREEN: She doesn’t understand. If she’d read the book, she would understand there’s science behind it as well, if she … LOUISE: I don’t think if she read the book she would understand.  SHREEN: Yeah (laughs) ANNA: I picked up on that too, she’s [inaudible]. LOUISE: She almost yelled “You do not permission to eat”. Which was quite scary. SHREEN: Because I think that reflects her inner narrative. That’s what’s going on in her head. LOUISE: Yeah. Not … not relaxed, that’s for sure. That response to the third point was quite unhinged. ANNA: And like you said, relating the food to credit cards or smoking, that’s a completely different thing. I don’t think … you know, food is something that we rely on, like biologically … SHREEN: We need food to survive, we need food … and intuitive eating is about healing your relationship to food, it’s about having a healthy relationship to food, and you can’t have that if you’re restricting foods. That’s why it’s really important to give yourself unconditional permission to eat. And yeah, it is scary. Of course. It’s scary when you’ve come from that mentality, but it’s the only way for food to lose its power. ANNA: Yeah. And I think it may be a good point to think about how it’s helpful to be handheld through that process. It can sound really scary to somebody who’s new to it, or who hasn’t delved into intuitive eating too much, or worked with a coach or therapist or something. Maybe working with a. dietitian on this would be really helpful. I understand how it can feel like that lack of control, but I think that’s a period that sometimes is part of that healing process. When you let go of the restriction, and allow yourself full unconditional permission to eat, then you might explore some of those foods that were off-limits for a period. And it might feel like you are diving into them a lot. But … LOUISE: Which is perfectly normal. SHREEN: Yeah. LOUISE: The last supper effect … like, that actually, now I remember. The ‘last supper’ effect, it is the paper by Herman and Polivy, “Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we diet”. That’s the ‘last supper’ effect. It’s a perfectly normal psychological response to restriction is to eat more. And the difference between that and going into massive credit card debt is if you keep giving yourself permission to eat, if you keep reminding yourself that the food’s always there, it’s perfectly safe and I’m allowed to eat it, you will naturally settle down when you get food safety. Eating is totally different to compulsive spending on credit cards. I think she’s just … a lot of people freak out when they let go of dieting and get into that all-or-nothing pattern with eating, but there’s like … a real difference between being in an all-or-nothing pattern of eating and adopting intuitive eating and going through that first phase of eating all the food. It’s just different, and its’ not pathological. It’s a normal response to restriction that obviously … she is so restricted and terrified of that. ANNA: It’s all about control, isn’t it? And I think that, you know, talking about the 1200-1600 calories, and I think she refers to that 1600 calories as something you should never, ever go over. So, as a woman, we’re meant to live our lives constantly not going above that. SHREEN: And it’s such a dangerous message. It’s just not enough food, at all. And it’s … and that’s what she’s selling to people, as well … LOUISE: She’s more like ‘honour your restriction’. SHREEN: Yeah! ANNA: We could reverse all of this and create a Jillian Michaels plan. LOUISE: The non-intuitive eating principles. Accept diet culture … what’s the second one? ANNA: Honour your hunger … don’t honour your hunger. LOUISE: Ignore your hunger. SHREEN: Ignore your hunger, yeah. LOUISE: Number three, you do not have permission to eat (all laugh). Alright, principle four? ANNA: Principle four is ‘challenge the food police’. LOUISE: Okay, so hers would be ‘obey the food police’. SHREEN: I don’t think she really understands that she is the food police. When she’s going through it? Like she is … the food police are all the things she’s already talked about. 1200 calories, 1600 calories, these are things that are the food police. ANNA: These are the rules. SHREEN: She doesn’t understand that principle at all. ANNA: The one thing that she said that I did agree with her on was “don’t beat yourself up”. I think she says it in a different way, she means it in a different way, because she kind of adds on and says, “don’t beat yourself up, but don’t fuck up”. Oh sorry. LOUISE:  Please, swear. ANNA: She says, not quite like that, but “maintain balance, it’s all about balance”. And don’t … SHREEN: And self-control. ANNA: So, “don’t beat yourself up, but just don’t do it”, sort of thing. SHREEN: Or, “you can do better”. She always says that, “you can do better”. ANNA: Yeah, so that message is like, it’s still that sort of shaming approach. SHREEN: Condescending. LOUISE: It makes no sense whatsoever. ANNA: But don’t beat yourself up, I mean, that’s important. LOUISE: You know what, ‘don’t beat yourself up’ means she knows people are not going to be able to do it.  ANNA: That’s a good point, yeah. Yeah, which she talks about the… LOUISE: … about going straight back to jail. ANNA: She talks about the stats, which is interesting. She brings up the stats. LOUISE: Oh, the stats. Yeah, that bit made me itchy. ANNA: That’s coming. It’s coming. The next one is ‘discover the satisfaction factor’, which I think she was actually in agreement with. SHREEN: Yeah, that one … she was saying, food for pleasure … I think that one was almost okay. ANNA: Like wow, okay, we agree. And then six was ‘feel your fullness’. And what came up here was again, it was just clear she hasn’t read the book because she didn’t understand that concept at all. LOUISE: She probably doesn’t know what fulness feels like. SHREEN: And then she started talking about how it’s in your head, and kind of went off … even I got a little bit lost with what she was saying. Like, “oh, we’re on fullness principle? I thought we were …” ANNA: She was kind of saying, yeah, she was kind of saying that if you’re not listening to your body, you’re not picking up your fullness levels, there’s something messed up in your head. And I was thinking, you know what? Sometimes I eat food and I’m quite satisfied physically but I’m still eating because the food’s really good, or I don’t want to … I’m eating in company and I don’t want to finish the meal and want to show that I’ve appreciated it … SHREEN: That’s the thing with intuitive eating, that it’s not the ‘hunger/fullness’ diet. And eating past fullness is normal. It’s totally okay. And it’s not just about eating, you know, getting in touch with your fullness signals. It’s about eating foods that give you pleasure and satisfaction. ANNA: Which is the ‘discover the satisfaction factor’. SHREEN: Which is the next one, but yeah. (sighs). LOUISE: God. So, if you can’t feel fullness, there’s something psychologically wrong with you.  ANNA: That’s the message that she’s giving, yeah. SHREEN: But not understanding that if you’re dieting or especially if you’re only eating those dangerous amount of calories a day, you’re going to be absolutely … LOUISE: You mean, like an adult [inaudible] SHREEN: (laughs). Absolutely starving and of course you’re not going to feel your fullness. But there’s nothing wrong with you, it’s just your body. Your body is doing exactly what it is meant to do. It needs food. ANNA: She doesn’t see that 1200-1600 calories as a restriction. She sees it as like … SHREEN: That’s her normal. ANNA: That’s food, that’s what you’re allowed during the day. LOUISE: So depressing. ANNA: Pretty sure I eat double or triple that. LOUISE: Oh, my goodness. ANNA: So, we’re at number seven. We’re still only … oh, over halfway. ‘Cope with your emotions with kindness’.  SHREEN: I think the thing is … LOUISE: That doesn’t really bring her to my mind. SHREEN: Yeah. She kind of goes “oh, yeah, I agree with this, but it shouldn’t just be one paragraph …”. And I’m like YES, there’s a BOOK. A book! There’s a whole book to go with this.  ANNA: She clearly seems to think it’s just this very basic, you know, overview … SHREEN: Guidelines. ANNA: Yeah, just these ten principles. She hasn’t read the book; she doesn’t know who wrote it. LOUISE: No, but this one really shat me to tears. Because this is where she’s saying that she’s had some childhood history with being maybe fractionally larger than someone else and has had to do, like … basically what she’s saying is that if you cannot lose weight and keep it off forever, that is your psychological fault. SHREEN: Yep. LOUISE: You haven’t done the work in therapy to fix your seemingly not thin body. Which is like, such a load of bullshit. And just unscientific and not sound whatsoever. And like you were saying before, people … she doesn’t understand that food is a relationship, and it’s a complex relationship. And the refusal to see anything other than like … she doesn’t even mention hunger as a reason to eat. Anything other than eating to a calorie control, anything else is incorrect. And we eat for an infinite amount of reasons and all of them make sense. And that’s what I love about intuitive eating, it doesn’t pathologise eating. It doesn’t pathologise hunger, it doesn’t pathologise fullness, and it doesn’t pathologise emotions as a reason to eat. And she clearly is. Seeing the function of how wonderful sometimes binge eating is as a way of protecting yourself from [inaudible] stuff. There’s no pathologizing in intuitive eating, but she’s full of pathologizing thinking that even to read statements like this, it doesn’t sink in. ANNA: She’s oversimplifying the whole thing; she doesn’t understand it at all. And this is where she moves into talking about the percentage of people that are successful versus not successful at diets. SHREEN: So, she acknowledges that 95-98% of diets fail. Is this where she starts talking about the Biggest Loser? ANNA: Yeah. SHREEN: She then starts talking about how the Biggest Loser, there’s a 30% extra success rate if you follow the Biggest Loser method. LOUISE: Really? SHREEN: Yeah. ANNA: So, she basically says, she acknowledges that the studies are very clear that 95% of people are unable to sustain a diet or sustain that weight loss, not a diet. But she says that actually on the Biggest Loser it’s only 65% of people that fail. So actually … SHREEN: So, she’s basically saying “we’ve got this success rate, if you do this …” LOUISE: Which study is this published in? Because the only study I’ve read from season 1 which is the … ANNA: The six-year study? SHREEN: The six year, yeah, really interesting. LOUISE: There were 16 people, and 14 of them regained. I don’t think that equates to 65%. Am I …? ANNA: I don’t know but even so … no, she says 35. So, 30% more than … she says 30%, 35% are successful. SHREEN: But even the fact that she’s now saying that 95-98% of diets fail, and she acknowledges that, but all that she’s been talking about is dieting. Diet the whole way through. She’s just completely contradicting herself. ANNA: Not only is it that they don’t work, but she continues to spruik it, continues to say that it’s possible, and if you do it her way, the Biggest Loser way … they did 7 hours of exercise a day, with gruelling regimes and being pushed and yelled at … LOUISE: And they all put the weight back on. ANNA: They put the weight back on. SHREEN: yeah. LOUISE: And their resting metabolic rate was screwed, six years later. SHREEN: Yeah, 700 calories it decreased by. They lost lean body mass, their fasting glucose increased, their blood sugar levels, yeah. They were the main things. But the fact that their metabolic rate decreased by such a large amount … especially where we were saying, she’s telling people to only eat 1200 calories but then you’re going to follow the Biggest Loser method, your metabolic rate’s going to drop by 700 calories, then what are you going to do? LOUISE: So, she lied about the stats on the Biggest Loser, and she’s not even talking to people about the metabolic impact. Because that study was fascinating, and I talk to clients about it. Because they predicted, the researchers predicted how much their resting metabolic rate would be dropped by …  ANNA: And what did they … LOUISE: And they found out it was even lower. So, they were worse off metabolically than they had predicted six years later. No one expected it to last that long, to have such a devastating impact. ANNA: Yeah, so it’s like a continued effect. It hasn’t regained back to before, pre … LOUISE: Exactly. And when stuff like that is suppressed, we know people are going to experience intense hunger, which of course you can’t honour. SHREEN: And the thing is, again, she’s completely misquoted this study herself but if she’d done her research she would know that there’s been over a hundred studies on intuitive eating that have been done that show you have better body image, higher esteem, improved metabolism, decreased rates of disordered and emotional eating, diminished stress levels and increased satisfaction with life. That’s over a hundred studies on intuitive eating that have been done. ANNA: And I’m pretty sure that you couldn’t say the same, with all of those positive effects, with dieting. LOUISE:  No, especially the ones that use her supplements, which show that everyone puts the weight back on. And the Biggest Loser study, everyone puts the weight back on … but let’s not focus on whether or not the weight comes back on. It’s actually the damage to the body and the metabolic systems that’s just absent from her rant. SHREEN: And not even the psychological damage, that’s not even mentioned. LOUISE: She’s evidence of the psychological damage. SHREEN: Yeah. That is true, yeah. ANNA: So, the next one is … principle eight, respect your body. LOUISE: Oh, fuck. ANNA: So, I think going back to when she spoke about size 16 always equalling healthiness, I think that shows that she doesn’t have respect for all bodies. And that kind of bothers me a bit. SHREEN. A bit. A lot. ANNA: It’s a big part of like, you know, our approach here and being a Health at Every Size® professional, you know? It’s about honouring and understanding and respecting that all bodies are different and need something different. SHREEN: And that you can’t tell somebody’s health by their body size, and that’s such … it’s a huge misconception as it is, let alone, I mean, Jillian Michaels saying this and it’s just … ANNA: Yeah, and just recognising that bodies are diverse, and they will do different things. Your health looks different at different points in your life. What you need changes day to day, and only your body really knows. You know? No external source, no trainer, no Jillian Michaels, no Dr Oz, nobody knows your body. SHREEN: And the whole principle of respecting your body is about being kind to yourself and compassionate and self-care, which is the complete opposite of Jillian Michaels. Like, she is just not kind. She’s not compassionate. She’s just shaming, judgemental, mean. Like … yeah. She’s … I just don’t think she even understands the word ‘respect’, quite frankly. LOUISE: Unless it’s like ‘respect my authority”. SHREEN: Yeah. ANNA: Something I noticed too, that came up before, was that because she’s so invested in it … have you heard of the concept of religion, like dieting? The religion of dieting? She’s so completely invested in it, she’s almost not willing to look the other way, or explore that there might be some truth in this, because she’s so invested, like financially and that’s her way of living … LOUISE: It’s her identity. ANNA: Exactly. LOUISE: It’s interesting, isn’t it? I think Alan Levinovitz, ‘The Gluten Lie’ … ANNA: That’s the guy. LOUISE: He talks about this, the religion of diet mentality. She is definitely the Pope. SHREEN: Quote of the day (all laugh). ANNA: So, then we come into ‘movement, feel the difference’. Which is principle nine. SHREEN: I think this one really got us fired up, didn’t it? ANNA: Well, the first thing that she said was like, “what is this? I don’t know what this ‘militant exercise’ even means”. LOUISE: That’s so funny (all laugh). ANNA: Like, really? Are you sure? LOUISE: She’s like, world-famous on memes for [inaudible]. I think I even did a presentation once where I used her with her finger in her face at someone as a demonstration of militant exercise. ANNA: Yeah, the kind of exercise that you don’t want to do if you want to have a sustainable relationship with movement. LOUISE: Yeah, your name’s on the t-shirt, love. SHREEN: Just telling people in this thing that, you know, this myth that’s just not true – ‘no pain, no gain’, that only hard exercise counts, it’s just utter rubbish. All movement counts, it doesn’t matter what it is. From playing with your kids, to hoovering, to dancing around your living room. LOUISE: Hoovering doesn’t count, I don’t even know what hoovering is … ANNA: She’s talking about hoovering, the hoover … SHREEN: Vacuuming, is that more Aussie? LOUISE: No, I don’t understand. (all laugh). SHREEN: But like, movement can be anything and you get the exact same health benefits from any type of regular movement, doesn’t matter what it is. But what she’s just trying to … she’s just bringing movement and aesthetics, that’s what she’s talking about. She’s talking about … ANNA: That’s a really good point, because if she was really interested in somebody’s health, then any kind of movement would be accessible, you know, like … SHREEN: Beneficial. ANNA: Helpful, yeah. SHREEN: Your blood markers, and stress levels, and sleep, it doesn’t matter what it is, it has the same health benefits. But she’s not talking about health. She’s talking about the way you look. ANNA: Yeah. She’s talking about ‘results’ a lot, and “if you want to get results fast” … because you know, let’s face it, she says “if you’re coming to look at intuitive eating, you’re trying to lose weight, you’re trying to get results fast.” LOUISE: Jillian! ANNA: “You’ve got to do a certain type of exercise, and my programs do that”. So, a little bit of spruiking her own programs too. SHREEN: What she doesn’t realise that she’s doing is having that negative relationship with exercise is not going to make people want to do it.  LOUISE: She doesn’t care about that. SHREEN: She’s the reason why people don’t want to go to the gym, or they hate exercise, because of people like Jillian Michaels. ANNA: Yeah, it’s that fitness trauma that you were talking about before. And what I recognise here, at the studio at Haven, community … in my experience, community has always been really powerful in building that sustainable and healthful relationship with movement. Joy and … SHREEN: And it’s that you enjoy, you [inaudible]. ANNA: And to want to come back, too. And that militant approach might work well for someone who responds to that but maybe for a short time. And then that motivation kind of wanes. And then it’s always trying to get back the motivation, you hear that a lot in fitness culture. But if you’re not coming at it from external, an external place, for external purposes, and it’s more about the … SHREEN: The way it makes you feel, using it as a tool for self-care rather than punishment … ANNA: Your mental health, having fun with your friends, it’s a completely different experience to being yelled at by Jillian Michaels. SHREEN: Her whole thing is yelling at people, making them feel guilty, punishing them. Like, and that’s just not what people need in a fitness professional. They need someone who is kind and compassionate and she’s just … that’s just not her, unfortunately. She’s just giving … ANNA: What is she? She’s the Pope of … the religion of dieting. She’s also the epitome of diet culture. She’s all of those things. And then the last principle is gentle nutrition, principle ten. LOUISE: I think this actually blew up her brain. SHREEN: Yeah, because she couldn’t understand the whole diet … principle one, principle ten … LOUISE: She couldn’t figure out how that fits with unconditional permission to eat. Because of course, if you have unconditional permission to eat, you’re going to stick your face into a burger for the rest of your life.  ANNA: Yeah, so again she thinks it’s all just endless eating. LOUISE: She’s stuck in that ‘all or nothing’ mentality. ANNA: Exactly, yeah. SHREEN: It’s funny, because she talks about that ‘black and white, all or nothing’ mentality and not understanding that’s exactly what she’s saying. Yeah. ANNA: Yeah, and again it came up just very, very clear that she hasn’t read the book, she doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. SHREEN: Yeah, I think that’s the main … ANNA: This is when she said, you know, “it’s probably written by someone who has just really been hurt by diet culture and probably had an eating disorder, and, you know, probably just some random” and actually … LOUISE: Such a shame that she didn’t actually look at the author. SHREEN: Yeah, just even look up to who they were. Yeah. ANNA: It’s a little bit disappointing because you’d think somebody who has such a following, I think, has such a … I think there’s a moral obligation in a way to represent something that … when you have such a big following and you’re sharing something that can affect people deeply … SHREEN: It’s what we say, that she’s really coming from that dieting mentality and all that sort of shaming that she doesn’t understand that intuitive eating at its core is a self-care model. It’s very compassionate and she doesn’t understand that. Also. with intuitive eating, we’re not saying that it’s a solution for everybody. Everyone has the right to do what they want with their body. She just doesn’t understand the concept at all, what it stands for. ANNA: It’s like she’s on such a different planet, and it’s not … doesn’t come across as open to exploring that this might be something that really serves people. SHREEN: Yeah, and that it’s having such a positive impact. We talked about earlier with the … ANNA: Feeling a bit threatened by the impact on her, you know, her … LOUISE: To her bottom line. I also think that, I mean, if she really is undernourished to that point that she has restricted her entire life, one of the things that happens when you’re weight supressed is cognitive rigidity. ANNA: That’s a really good point. LOUISE: So, it’s quite hard to be flexible. We see that a lot with people who are suffering in the depths of Anorexia, that you simply cannot think. And perhaps there’s an element of that that’s happening here. ANNA: That’s really interesting. SHREEN: That’s a really good point. Because what dieting, that kind of restriction is doing to you … LOUISE: Well, it gives her massive benefits. Huge amounts of recognition, it gives her income. She can’t think out of it. So, there’s not a lot of reason for her, like … I think the reason for putting up that video wasn’t a genuine exploration of “what’s this thing called ‘intuitive eating’?”.  SHREEN: It was just to … LOUISE: It was just to kind of … ANNA: Debunk it. LOUISE: To debunk it and keep hold of her customer base. Look, let’s assume that she is interested in the book. Jillian Michael’s house is in Malibu, California. I reckon we just whack a copy in an envelope, address it to her, maybe she’ll read it. ANNA: Do you think?  LOUISE: Yeah? I don’t know. Maybe if all of our listeners whack a copy into an envelope … SHREEN: Yeah!  LOUISE: 20 copies, please read. Maybe. SHREEN: Maybe, yeah. LOUISE: But I don’t think that was anything other than a … it’s quite interesting, I’m seeing this more and more. The famous people, the people who have really invested in diet culture, even the obesity researchers and all of that. They’re all kind of getting a little bit nervous about this pushback. SHREEN: They should be. LOUISE: It makes me feel warm and fuzzy. SHREEN: It’s time. LOUISE: It’s got nothing to do with the champagne. I think the celebs are getting nervous, like “what do you mean, people in larger bodies are okay with themselves just the way they are?”. And finding non weight-loss things to look after themselves, oh my gosh. What a huge, horrible threat. So, we’re not sorry, Jillian, that we made you nervous. ANNA: Agreed. I hope it gives her a little bit of food for thought (all laugh). LOUISE: I don’t know how many calories would be attached to that thought (all laugh). ANNA: I have to say, like, the thing that I think fires me up the most is how fatphobic she is. SHREEN: And how much harm … that’s the thing that fired me up the most, how much harm she’s causing people out there. And having had an eating disorder myself, it’s just … LOUISE: Horrible. You can see how triggering it is. SHREEN: I can see what it can do, yeah. That’s what fires me up. LOUISE: and let’s not forget when we say fatphobic, we mean people who hate fat people. And that is really reflective … even though she is professing “oh, I’m going to love you … but you’re unhealthy so change”. That’s troubling. Using health as a halo, an excuse or a reason for my core treatment of you just based on your appearance. And that’s just … those days are done. You can’t do that anymore. It’s just not cool. And I do wonder if there is like a Biggest Loser university somewhere?  ANNA: Michelle Bridges went to it as well. LOUISE: Because the same kind of hatred of fat people, you know … again, like masked with a thin layer of concern trolling for your health was Michelle Bridges’ thing. Four years ago, when she was on Australian Story and she was saying “I’m yet to meet someone who is morbidly obese and happy”. So, for people who are listening from overseas, Michelle Bridges is the Australian version of Jillian Michaels. And what an awful comment. So, Jillian has been pushed back against from this video, right? Michelle was pushed back against from this video too, with really clear … I know we all live in a bubble, but with quite a lot of push back. ANNA: That’s good. Was she on … was that on like Australian primetime TV? SHREEN: She was on Australian Story. LOUISE: Yeah [inaudible] … it shows how deeply she feels [inaudible] about people she’s profiting from. Putting them through three cycles a year of 1200 calorie program and she knows it doesn’t work. But the thing is, what they do is they double down. People like this double down, when they’re called out, when there’s a pushback. Instead of kind of opening up and say, “okay, I should probably issue an apology, maybe take the video down, maybe do some work”. They’re not doing that. Jillian’s not doing that. ANNA: I think she just keeps responding. And she’s just responding with the same rhetoric, so she’s not … SHREEN: I think she kind of comments that [inaudible], to learn about it more, which is a shame. ANNA: And how did Michele Bridges respond? LOUISE: Doubled down on it. About health, “I care deeply about health”. ANNA: The whole thing with health and weight, this is what really frustrates me about it too. If she’s really interested in health, she could support all the behaviours that support someone’s health. LOUISE: Too complicated. Remember? Too complicated. Anything that actually involves having to think about something other than my own diet plan … ANNA: It makes me realise how happy I’ve become in moving away from all this, that’s why I got away from it. Because I learned about how there’s another way. Intuitive eating, Health at Every Size®, the body positivity movement … I started delving into it and it just felt so triggering being around other fitness professionals from the traditional approach. And this here, I’ve got to say, got me so fired up. I’m going to be fired up for a while from this. SHREEN: We talk about fitness trauma, and Jillian Michaels is causing that. LOUISE: May she go the way of the dinosaurs and … (all laugh). ANNA: Well, hopefully there will be less and less of her to be seen in the future and more and more of kind of this messaging coming up, challenging … LOUISE: Absolutely, I absolutely think that’s going to happen. You’ve just reminded me actually, she … because Jillian, earlier in the year before she posted the nasty intuitive eating thing, she said something nasty about Lizzo. SHREEN: Yeah, of course.  ANNA: That sounds familiar … SHREEN: Yeah. That was before …  LOUISE: A little while before, I don’t know. It’s Covid, none of us have a timeline. ANNA: She’s said some pretty horrendous things. SHREEN: Really horrendous things yeah. LOUISE: Again, like … “she’s clearly going to get diabetes” or something? ANNA: I think she said something along the lines of “there’s nothing sexy about diabetes”, or clogged arteries or something.  SHREEN: Something like that, yeah. ANNA: How can she … that’s so inappropriate. Lizzo’s bouncing away on stage. She’s got stamina, she’s got energy.  SHREEN: We don’t know anything about her or her health. ANNA: And why do we have to talk about that anyway? She’s this amazing performer and doing this really cool stuff. It’s wonderful to see some diverse bodies out there that are getting out there as much as the other, the thin ideal that you see everywhere. LOUISE: Yeah, the comments that she made were like “why are we talking about Lizzo’s body, we should be talking about her music”. ANNA: So, she said that? LOUISE: Yeah. ANNA: But then … LOUISE: And it’s really funny, because she’s saying that we shouldn’t be talking about Lizzo’s body, but her entire website is full of shots of her body. ANNA: Yeah, and that’s her thing. SHREEN: That’s her thing, yeah. ANNA: She’s always talking about people’s bodies. Size 16, yeah. SHREEN: Yeah, non-stop. LOUISE: The point I’m making is that you don’t say that about Lizzo. And the pushback she got after she made that comment? This is the future Jillian. Lizzo is setting the world on fire.  ANNA: We need more Lizzo. SHREEN: We need more Lizzo. LOUISE: and you are the biggest loser. ANNA: Well put. LOUISE: Oh my god, let’s finish on a high note. Thank you, guys, that was an elegant unpacking of Jillian Michael’s ten principles of not understanding intuitive eating (all laugh). And how firmly we can steer the ship to this new awesome way of looking after our body. ANNA: Thank you. SHREEN: Thank you.  Resources Mentioned: (Watch if you can stomach) Jillian Michaels' Igno-rant on Youtube Urbszat, Dax, C. Peter Herman, and Janet Polivy. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we diet: Effects of anticipated deprivation on food intake in restrained and unrestrained eaters." Journal of abnormal psychology 111.2 (2002): 396. News article about 4 lawsuits against Jillian Michaels for her weight loss pills Fothergill, Erin, et al. "Persistent metabolic adaptation 6 years after “The Biggest Loser” competition." Obesity 24.8 (2016): 1612-1619. Alan Levinovitz's The Gluten Lie Find out more about Anna Hearn & Haven Find out more about Shreen El Masry and Be You Be Free  

There's nothing more infuriating than when people throw shade at the anti-diet perspective without bothering to actually research it. When "The Biggest Loser" trainer/shameless fatphobe Jillian Michaels arrogantly released a Youtube clip trashing the 10 principles of intuitive eating, WITHOUT EVEN READING THE BOOK, she REALLY pi***ed off the community! And none more so than my guests, anti-diet fitness trainers Anna Hearn and Shreen El Masry, who have been dying to come on the podcast and set the record straight! Finally the COVID window opened just a crack so I could record the very first IN PERSON podcast! Join us as we dissect Jillian's often hilarious inability to comprehend a life beyond diet prison. WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS 'PERMISSION TO EAT!!' It seems the lady doth protest too much - could it be that the Queen of Diet Prison is sensing the paradigm-shifting power of the anti-diet revolution? That's right folks, the unrivalled reign of Biggest Loser-esque terror is over!! Vive La Difference! Please note - this episode comes with a hefty side serve of calorie count discussions, so if you're in recovery from an eating disorder please consider your level of spoons to hear the diet talk. But, if you've had a gutful of igno-rants about anti-dieting, it's time to get ALL FIRED UP! Show Transcript:   LOUISE: So, here I am with Anna and Shreen. Thank you so much for coming on the show. ANNA: Thank you for having us. SHREEN: Yeah, thank you so much. LOUISE: It’s so exciting to be alive with actual humans in the room, and slightly weird. Why don’t you guys tell me all about what is firing you up? ANNA: We’re really fired up about Jillian Michaels and her aggressive fatphobic rant on intuitive eating. LOUISE: (sighs) First of all, I have to say I love how you say ‘rant’, it’s very proper and awesome. But yes, Jillian Michaels – Biggest Loser trainer in the United States. Horrendously fatphobic. ANNA: Yeah, I mean … she got her living, she makes her living from shaming fat bodies. I think that tells a lot about her character and where she’s going to go with her intuitive eating rant. LOUISE: So, she was on the Biggest Loser for years and years and years. Her website … well, she’s touting herself as the world’s best trainer. Like, the biggest expert in the world on all things fitness. Which, well … this is just a hunch, but I could find people on the planet who are more qualified. ANNA: Well, if you want to break down her qualifications, I think it looks like she’s done a couple of personal training qualifications, a couple of fitness qualifications and … SHREEN: One ‘woo woo’ nutrition qualification. ANNA: There is a nutrition qualification there too, but it doesn’t look like there’s any degrees or anything. So, when it comes to intuitive eating and looking at all of that, when we go into it you’ll realise, I think, that she hasn’t really done her research. She doesn’t understand it. And I think it’s interesting that somebody without that nutrition background or lived experience with that sort of thing talks about it the way that she does. SHREEN: I think as well, not only does she come across really aggressive and shaming, also I think her insecurity is really coming out in this video. Intuitive eating is a movement that’s really starting to take off, and she’s clearly threatened by it. You can see her defence mechanism is up, and she’s … you know, really, just … her demeanour is just awful. LOUISE: It's hard to tell, though, if her demeanour’s just awful because she’s defensive or because her demeanour’s just awful. SHREEN: Yeah, that’s true. ANNA: I kind of picked up on that and thought she was sensing a threat because intuitive eating is becoming more mainstream, people are becoming more aware of it. So that could threaten what she does, because she makes a living forcing people to lose weight. LOUISE: So, during the 90’s and the early 2000’s, like … it was a free-for-all with bullying people with larger bodies, as we saw. World-wide, the Biggest Loser was the number one show, and everyone thought it was okay. So, she’s had this unfettered ability to be horrible about body size and really belittling of people in larger bodies. And now, I think she’s realising it’s not okay to keep on doing that. ANNA: The backlash about it. LOUISE: So, just to set the stage. What we’re seeing … because I did see the internet blow up. It was a while ago now, but let’s face it - we’ve all been in iso and unable to talk to each other. So, she has like a YouTube channel and one of her YouTube little presentations - I don’t watch what she does, just for my own mental health - but this one was Jillian Michaels talking about intuitive eating. Which, oh my god … let’s just get Donald Trump talking about sexism. ANNA: That’s a great analogy. SHREEN: She’s basically, I think she’s just gone on the website and just pulled up the principles without doing any research into it or even understanding there’s over a hundred studies done on intuitive eating and there’s a whole book as well. She just went on there, read out these principles and gave her, I guess, her opinion.  ANNA: It became really clear that she hasn’t taken the time to understand it. She hasn’t learnt about the authors; you’ll see as she comes to the end of it, she talks about assuming that it was written by somebody who had just had some bad experience with diet culture, maybe had an eating disorder LOUISE: Oh my god, that’s so disrespectful SHREEN: So disrespectful. ANNA: No understanding or bothering to explore that the authors are actually dietitians who had come up with this approach because they had done so much work with clients who had struggled a lot and this is what they’d learnt from working with them over years and years. LOUISE: These are the gurus. Like, Tribole and Resch, they wrote the initial book Intuitive Eating and it’s just been updated, which is fantastic. But even that, even their book which is written from that perspective of helping people recover from eating disorders, that book is built on another big long history of social justice and fat activism. To not recognise that intuitive eating is part of a social movement and like, the way she presented it is like, she just stumbled across a webpage and … oh my god. ANNA: Definitely, yeah. And it came across very, very condescending. I felt really bothered … SHREEN: It’s so harmful, as well. That was the thing that really bothered me the most, was how much … I mean, she causes so much harm anyway, but the message was just next level harm. And if anyone was watching that and had no idea, the things that she was saying … yeah, it’s just not on. LOUISE: Oh god, yikes. So, we thought we would unpick Jillian Michael’s feelpinion to each of the ten principles of intuitive eating. And you guys have written some awesomely detailed notes. ANNA: We had a really good chat about it. LOUISE: Fantastic. But I’m so interested, because you guys both work in this industry as HAES® positive, body inclusive, weight neutral trainers hearing from almost like the personification of diet culture woman. SHREEN: She is the reason why people have so much fitness trauma and so much negative association with fitness. She’s causing that. ANNA: She is the epitome of diet culture. SHREEN: Yeah, she is the epitome of diet culture, for sure. ANNA: And I think we chatted about this as we were hanging out one day, and we just came across this as a topic that fired both of us up. And it’s frustrating when you see … when you’re so heavily involved in this space, and the HAES® space, and the body inclusive space, it can be … and luckily for me working here at Haven, this is the space I come to work every day. So, I’m not exposed to traditional diet culture unless I stumble across it or it’s brought to my attention. So, I couldn’t help but just be really quite wild about this. LOUISE: I love it. I mean, I don’t love that you’re wild, but I kind of do. But, yeah. It’s nice to know that in this industry there are people who feel really strongly about just putting an end to this. She’s what’s wrong with the fitness industry at the moment, and you guys are the future. And I think she can smell that. So, I think, like I … I managed to watch it and still shaking with rage but thank you for this glass of champagne. ANNA: I don’t think we could do this without a little bit of champagne. SHREEN: No, we need some bubbles. LOUISE: The first thing she starts with, so she’s actually going through all the principles. SHREEN:  Correct. LOUISE: Why don’t you give me the lowdown on your reaction. ANNA: Let’s kick off. So, she does go through the points one by one, and the first principle is ‘reject the diet mentality’. And I just want to point out a few things that came up for me that were just so apparent throughout. Her fatphobia is so clear. She’s driven, everything she says, and her approach is all drive by this. And I think she’s very ignorant, like she doesn’t see that there’s an issue with this. She comes form that space where it’s very normalised to shame fat bodies, it’s not okay to be in a bigger body. And she very clearly associates weight and health, they’re so closely tied, which I think it really problematic, obviously. So, in this ‘reject diet mentality’, what came up for you, Shreen? SHREEN: Well, the first thing for me was that she couldn’t distinguish a difference between fad diets and what dieting is, and diet culture. She’s like, “oh you know, if it’s fad diets we’re talking about yeah, yeah sure”, but this is a woman who has sold supplements in the past. LOUISE: She’s sold fad diets. SHREEN: She’s sold fad diets. And she is diet culture, so I guess she can’t … she doesn’t understand what diet culture actually is and why it’s so important to reject it. I mean, diet culture in the US alone is worth 70 billion dollars. ANNA:  She profits off it. SHREEN: She profits off everyone’s insecurities. So, she was just like, “reject diet culture? What’s this, what does this mean?”. And I really did sense there that her insecurity is coming out there because that is her, that’s how she makes her money. ANNA: Well that’s it, she’s really incentivised to support diet culture.  LOUISE: But the distinction that she made between “well, if it’s fad, but if it’s proper” … it just made me laugh, because she’s had no less than four separate lawsuits … ANNA:  Jillian? SHREEN: Yeah. LOUISE: Launched against her by her consumers who bought her caffeine-fuelled diet pills. ANNA: Which I think she might have … there might have been something on the Biggest Loser where she gave them to contestants unfairly, apparently, as well. LOUISE: Oh my god, scandal on the Biggest Loser. Like … ANNA: Well, the other thing that came up for me there was she said, “what is this, healthy at any size?”, and that’s immediately a red flag representing that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She hasn’t researched this because … I can understand it’s very easy to misconstrue Health At Every Size® for healthy at every size, but it’s quite a different meaning and that assumption that, you know, just assuming that we’re saying as a Health at Every Size® professional that all bodies are healthy, that’s not where we’re aiming. We’re talking about people being able to pursue health regardless of shape and size. LOUISE: Or, also, we’re talking about the choice not to pursue health and to be left the fuck alone. SHREEN: Yeah, there’s no moral obligation. If people want to do so, then it’s up to them. It shouldn’t be … they shouldn’t have to do it if they don’t want to, but that’s what diet culture is saying. ANNA: Your body, your rules. SHREEN: And this part of her rant really, really … we know that she’s incredibly fatphobic and she fat shames, but it just came out so much in that where she was again talking, talking about size 16. And she’s saying “well, you know, if you’re a size 16 of course I love you but you’re not healthy”. Which is just … LOUISE: Get fucked. SHREEN: Yeah, absolute garbage. ANNA: Yeah. And Health at Every Size® also is about respect for all bodies, and I think there is a real lack of respect in just making that assumption. You can’t tell. How does she know what someone’s health is, you know? What their metabolic functions are, their blood work, their social, mental health … you can’t tell that by someone’s size. SHREEN: Genetics, everything. There’s so much, it’s so multifaceted. LOUISE: Everything I think is just far too complicated for her. She has to actually, like … I mean, clearly, she hasn’t read anything or thought about anything. “Nope, that’s a number, that’s an assumption, and don’t challenge that”.  SHREEN: Yeah. And if someone’s watching that, I mean, how triggering. How much harm that one comment could cause somebody that could lead them down a path of dieting and to an eating disorder. ANNA: And especially if they were already vulnerable of somebody who would identify with being in a size 16, or plus. And also, size 16 is quite variable depending on which shop you shop in, you know? Where you get your clothes from. What’s a size anyway? What does it matter? SHREEN: Yeah, it doesn’t matter. LOUISE: Size is not the same as health, and she needs to pull her head in. I wonder if her YouTube videos come with a trigger warning. I don’t think they do, but they should. Because good point, you know, that she … everything she says is potentially a trigger. SHREEN: Especially the size of her audience as well, I’m worried. ANNA: She’s got a big reach still. Some of the comments though were interesting, some really great points. People were talking about intuitive eating and picking up on that she doesn’t understand it, she’s missing the point. LOUISE: That is really reassuring. ANNA: She stopped the comments, she cut them off. LOUISE: Oh no, they were too complicated. ANNA: So, the next principle is ‘honour your hunger’, and she said something pretty radical here. Well, it’s not really radical in the fitness world. These numbers get thrown around a lot. But trigger warning, there are numbers here. She says, “if you’re trying to lose weight, you can keep your body fed on as low as 1200 calories”. And that most women, especially those over, you know, relating to being a certain age, shouldn’t be eating over 1600 calories a day. SHREEN: Which is just absolutely unbelievable. She’s saying that … I mean, that’s what a toddler needs. A toddler needs 1200-1600 calories a day. LOUISE: How very dare she tell me how much I can eat, under a principle that says, ‘honour your hunger’. ANNA: She … on one hand, I’m not surprised she threw those numbers out because those numbers are thrown out all the time in the fitness world. I don’t know where … MyFitnessPal? LOUISE: Are they really? SHREEN: We were saying, MyFitnessPal may have started the whole 1200 calories thing … LOUISE: I think Michelle Bridges is guilty of that too. ANNA: Oh actually, you’re right, she had a program that was based on that. LOUISE: It’s just a nice round number, isn’t it? Let’s just pluck this out of our arse and throw that at all women. ANNA: What I find there though is that like Shreen said, it’s something that a child needs. And I just wanted to double-check that, because I’m not a nutritionist, I’m a yogi and I run a studio, but I wanted to check with somebody who does work with that. I chatted to our non-diet nutritionist Nina and she clarified that yes - this is generalisation - but that kind of number is something that would serve a child. Like, a toddler or a four, five-year-old. And then thinking about the effects of being on a low-calorie diet for a long period, things like loss of menstrual cycle, loss of bone density, fatigue, mood swings, constipation, blood sugar imbalance, stress hormones getting out of whack … SHREEN: Sex drive … ANNA: Sex drive … what did you say before? SHREEN: Dry vagina (laughs). ANNA: She didn’t mention that, did she? SHREEN: No. LOUISE: No, but that might be suffering all of them, you know? And why she’s so grouchy. ANNA: Memory fog and brain fog … memory loss and brain fog. So, these are all things that can be affected by not being adequately fed. And the better indicator of your needs are your body and your internal hunger signals. And we’re taught to … these external sources of just following this rule plan of 1200 calories a day means that if I need more than that – maybe at the time of my period especially I might need much more - and I’m just denying my natural hunger levels. LOUISE: The whole ‘per day’ thing really gives me the shits as well. SHREEN: Yeah, that’s a really good point. LOUISE: This is just a statistical method to help researchers make assumptions about nutrition. It’s not supposed to be something religiously followed. SHREEN: No, there’s no … ANNA: An individual thing, yeah. LOUISE: It’s bizarre. But, isn’t that interesting that even as she’s like, she’s trying desperately, the poor little thing to understand that this is a principle of intuitive eating but she can’t quite get there because she immediately lurches into “well, if you want to lose weight …”. I just felt like reaching through the screen and saying, “realise that intuitive eating is not a weight loss program”. ANNA: That’s half the problem, is that she clearly thinks that the only people who explore intuitive eating are going for weight loss. She says that a few times. LOUISE: Oh, she’s a scrambled egg. ANNA: Yeah. She doesn’t understand that the whole purpose of intuitive eating is more about finding a peaceful relationship with food and your body, not about trying to pursue making your body be something, a certain size. SHREEN: It’s about food freedom, it’s about having a healthy relationship with food, stopping the obsession. It’s not … it’s definitely not following these external rules. It’s about being in tune with what your body wants and needs and getting in touch with those signals. LOUISE: Different planet, I don’t think she’s visited. SHREEN: I don’t think she understands what the ‘honouring hunger’ … it’s a basic self-care need. If you’re not honouring hunger … LOUISE: Again, you’re mentioning a foreign concept here. This is someone who will happily live with a dry vagina, it doesn’t matter. SHREEN: Yep (all laugh). LOUISE: We all went there. SHREEN: She just really doesn’t understand and that is the reason why … people don’t give themselves enough food and they’re following diet plans, and they’re going to give themselves cravings leading to overeating and bingeing, and that’s perfectly normal as well. Other than ‘rejecting the diet mentality’ one of the first steps of intuitive eating is to just honour your hunger and it’s so important. It’s self-care. ANNA: It's so liberating too, if you’re been on the diet bandwagon for many, many years, to recognise that “hey, my body’s got a lot of wisdom, and it’s telling me, it’s giving me messages and I can learn how to reconnect with that”. And I think part of the common thread that comes up with what she says all the time is that … she thinks it’s all about ‘you can’t trust your body’. I think an important thing that I’ve learned is you can really learn how to trust your body. We get into this as we move into the next principle or two. It’s not about endless eating and not being able to, you know, like you’re just not going to go out of control all the time, which is what she sort of thinks. SHREEN: Point number three is that ‘unconditional permission to eat all foods’. LOUISE: She really had a problem with principle three. Like, she was visibly … SHREEN: Yeah, and she started comparing it to smoking, and credit cards, and it’s like …what are you talking about? ANNA: So yeah, this ‘make peace with food’, you’re right. And she talks about saying, talking about the ‘last supper mentality’, and she says, “I’m not religious, I don’t know what Jesus ate”. LOUISE: She really needs to read some books. ANNA: She needs to read Intuitive Eating if she’s going to talk about it. Because if she read it, she might really understand what that means. I thought it was quite clear just from the ‘last supper mentality’, don’t you think? SHREEN: You just eat everything in sight. LOUISE: I don’t even think it has religious connotations, I thought it was like a death row thing. SHREEN: Oh, that’s true … LOUISE: Like eating your last meal. ANNA: That’s right. And it makes sense, I think, if you think about that. You know you’re not going to have something again, so you want to make the most of it in that moment. And ultimately that’s what it’s about. I think that’s kind of clear. But she didn’t understand that, she was sort of like “I don’t like this intense, this hostile approach”. And I’m like, you ARE intense and hostile.  LOUISE: How is that intense and hostile? I’ve not ever read the ten principles of intuitive eating and thought “gosh, that’s angry”. I mean, gosh. Visit the internet, really (all laugh). ANNA: I think she is the, again, the epitome diet culture, and she is the hostile one. Think about the Biggest Loser, she is very aggressive and in-your-face, pushing her clients. So, here she talks about it all being about self-control and willpower, and I think that’s missing the point of intuitive eating completely as well. LOUISE: She just can’t … SHREEN: She doesn’t understand. If she’d read the book, she would understand there’s science behind it as well, if she … LOUISE: I don’t think if she read the book she would understand.  SHREEN: Yeah (laughs) ANNA: I picked up on that too, she’s [inaudible]. LOUISE: She almost yelled “You do not permission to eat”. Which was quite scary. SHREEN: Because I think that reflects her inner narrative. That’s what’s going on in her head. LOUISE: Yeah. Not … not relaxed, that’s for sure. That response to the third point was quite unhinged. ANNA: And like you said, relating the food to credit cards or smoking, that’s a completely different thing. I don’t think … you know, food is something that we rely on, like biologically … SHREEN: We need food to survive, we need food … and intuitive eating is about healing your relationship to food, it’s about having a healthy relationship to food, and you can’t have that if you’re restricting foods. That’s why it’s really important to give yourself unconditional permission to eat. And yeah, it is scary. Of course. It’s scary when you’ve come from that mentality, but it’s the only way for food to lose its power. ANNA: Yeah. And I think it may be a good point to think about how it’s helpful to be handheld through that process. It can sound really scary to somebody who’s new to it, or who hasn’t delved into intuitive eating too much, or worked with a coach or therapist or something. Maybe working with a. dietitian on this would be really helpful. I understand how it can feel like that lack of control, but I think that’s a period that sometimes is part of that healing process. When you let go of the restriction, and allow yourself full unconditional permission to eat, then you might explore some of those foods that were off-limits for a period. And it might feel like you are diving into them a lot. But … LOUISE: Which is perfectly normal. SHREEN: Yeah. LOUISE: The last supper effect … like, that actually, now I remember. The ‘last supper’ effect, it is the paper by Herman and Polivy, “Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we diet”. That’s the ‘last supper’ effect. It’s a perfectly normal psychological response to restriction is to eat more. And the difference between that and going into massive credit card debt is if you keep giving yourself permission to eat, if you keep reminding yourself that the food’s always there, it’s perfectly safe and I’m allowed to eat it, you will naturally settle down when you get food safety. Eating is totally different to compulsive spending on credit cards. I think she’s just … a lot of people freak out when they let go of dieting and get into that all-or-nothing pattern with eating, but there’s like … a real difference between being in an all-or-nothing pattern of eating and adopting intuitive eating and going through that first phase of eating all the food. It’s just different, and its’ not pathological. It’s a normal response to restriction that obviously … she is so restricted and terrified of that. ANNA: It’s all about control, isn’t it? And I think that, you know, talking about the 1200-1600 calories, and I think she refers to that 1600 calories as something you should never, ever go over. So, as a woman, we’re meant to live our lives constantly not going above that. SHREEN: And it’s such a dangerous message. It’s just not enough food, at all. And it’s … and that’s what she’s selling to people, as well … LOUISE: She’s more like ‘honour your restriction’. SHREEN: Yeah! ANNA: We could reverse all of this and create a Jillian Michaels plan. LOUISE: The non-intuitive eating principles. Accept diet culture … what’s the second one? ANNA: Honour your hunger … don’t honour your hunger. LOUISE: Ignore your hunger. SHREEN: Ignore your hunger, yeah. LOUISE: Number three, you do not have permission to eat (all laugh). Alright, principle four? ANNA: Principle four is ‘challenge the food police’. LOUISE: Okay, so hers would be ‘obey the food police’. SHREEN: I don’t think she really understands that she is the food police. When she’s going through it? Like she is … the food police are all the things she’s already talked about. 1200 calories, 1600 calories, these are things that are the food police. ANNA: These are the rules. SHREEN: She doesn’t understand that principle at all. ANNA: The one thing that she said that I did agree with her on was “don’t beat yourself up”. I think she says it in a different way, she means it in a different way, because she kind of adds on and says, “don’t beat yourself up, but don’t fuck up”. Oh sorry. LOUISE:  Please, swear. ANNA: She says, not quite like that, but “maintain balance, it’s all about balance”. And don’t … SHREEN: And self-control. ANNA: So, “don’t beat yourself up, but just don’t do it”, sort of thing. SHREEN: Or, “you can do better”. She always says that, “you can do better”. ANNA: Yeah, so that message is like, it’s still that sort of shaming approach. SHREEN: Condescending. LOUISE: It makes no sense whatsoever. ANNA: But don’t beat yourself up, I mean, that’s important. LOUISE: You know what, ‘don’t beat yourself up’ means she knows people are not going to be able to do it.  ANNA: That’s a good point, yeah. Yeah, which she talks about the… LOUISE: … about going straight back to jail. ANNA: She talks about the stats, which is interesting. She brings up the stats. LOUISE: Oh, the stats. Yeah, that bit made me itchy. ANNA: That’s coming. It’s coming. The next one is ‘discover the satisfaction factor’, which I think she was actually in agreement with. SHREEN: Yeah, that one … she was saying, food for pleasure … I think that one was almost okay. ANNA: Like wow, okay, we agree. And then six was ‘feel your fullness’. And what came up here was again, it was just clear she hasn’t read the book because she didn’t understand that concept at all. LOUISE: She probably doesn’t know what fulness feels like. SHREEN: And then she started talking about how it’s in your head, and kind of went off … even I got a little bit lost with what she was saying. Like, “oh, we’re on fullness principle? I thought we were …” ANNA: She was kind of saying, yeah, she was kind of saying that if you’re not listening to your body, you’re not picking up your fullness levels, there’s something messed up in your head. And I was thinking, you know what? Sometimes I eat food and I’m quite satisfied physically but I’m still eating because the food’s really good, or I don’t want to … I’m eating in company and I don’t want to finish the meal and want to show that I’ve appreciated it … SHREEN: That’s the thing with intuitive eating, that it’s not the ‘hunger/fullness’ diet. And eating past fullness is normal. It’s totally okay. And it’s not just about eating, you know, getting in touch with your fullness signals. It’s about eating foods that give you pleasure and satisfaction. ANNA: Which is the ‘discover the satisfaction factor’. SHREEN: Which is the next one, but yeah. (sighs). LOUISE: God. So, if you can’t feel fullness, there’s something psychologically wrong with you.  ANNA: That’s the message that she’s giving, yeah. SHREEN: But not understanding that if you’re dieting or especially if you’re only eating those dangerous amount of calories a day, you’re going to be absolutely … LOUISE: You mean, like an adult [inaudible] SHREEN: (laughs). Absolutely starving and of course you’re not going to feel your fullness. But there’s nothing wrong with you, it’s just your body. Your body is doing exactly what it is meant to do. It needs food. ANNA: She doesn’t see that 1200-1600 calories as a restriction. She sees it as like … SHREEN: That’s her normal. ANNA: That’s food, that’s what you’re allowed during the day. LOUISE: So depressing. ANNA: Pretty sure I eat double or triple that. LOUISE: Oh, my goodness. ANNA: So, we’re at number seven. We’re still only … oh, over halfway. ‘Cope with your emotions with kindness’.  SHREEN: I think the thing is … LOUISE: That doesn’t really bring her to my mind. SHREEN: Yeah. She kind of goes “oh, yeah, I agree with this, but it shouldn’t just be one paragraph …”. And I’m like YES, there’s a BOOK. A book! There’s a whole book to go with this.  ANNA: She clearly seems to think it’s just this very basic, you know, overview … SHREEN: Guidelines. ANNA: Yeah, just these ten principles. She hasn’t read the book; she doesn’t know who wrote it. LOUISE: No, but this one really shat me to tears. Because this is where she’s saying that she’s had some childhood history with being maybe fractionally larger than someone else and has had to do, like … basically what she’s saying is that if you cannot lose weight and keep it off forever, that is your psychological fault. SHREEN: Yep. LOUISE: You haven’t done the work in therapy to fix your seemingly not thin body. Which is like, such a load of bullshit. And just unscientific and not sound whatsoever. And like you were saying before, people … she doesn’t understand that food is a relationship, and it’s a complex relationship. And the refusal to see anything other than like … she doesn’t even mention hunger as a reason to eat. Anything other than eating to a calorie control, anything else is incorrect. And we eat for an infinite amount of reasons and all of them make sense. And that’s what I love about intuitive eating, it doesn’t pathologise eating. It doesn’t pathologise hunger, it doesn’t pathologise fullness, and it doesn’t pathologise emotions as a reason to eat. And she clearly is. Seeing the function of how wonderful sometimes binge eating is as a way of protecting yourself from [inaudible] stuff. There’s no pathologizing in intuitive eating, but she’s full of pathologizing thinking that even to read statements like this, it doesn’t sink in. ANNA: She’s oversimplifying the whole thing; she doesn’t understand it at all. And this is where she moves into talking about the percentage of people that are successful versus not successful at diets. SHREEN: So, she acknowledges that 95-98% of diets fail. Is this where she starts talking about the Biggest Loser? ANNA: Yeah. SHREEN: She then starts talking about how the Biggest Loser, there’s a 30% extra success rate if you follow the Biggest Loser method. LOUISE: Really? SHREEN: Yeah. ANNA: So, she basically says, she acknowledges that the studies are very clear that 95% of people are unable to sustain a diet or sustain that weight loss, not a diet. But she says that actually on the Biggest Loser it’s only 65% of people that fail. So actually … SHREEN: So, she’s basically saying “we’ve got this success rate, if you do this …” LOUISE: Which study is this published in? Because the only study I’ve read from season 1 which is the … ANNA: The six-year study? SHREEN: The six year, yeah, really interesting. LOUISE: There were 16 people, and 14 of them regained. I don’t think that equates to 65%. Am I …? ANNA: I don’t know but even so … no, she says 35. So, 30% more than … she says 30%, 35% are successful. SHREEN: But even the fact that she’s now saying that 95-98% of diets fail, and she acknowledges that, but all that she’s been talking about is dieting. Diet the whole way through. She’s just completely contradicting herself. ANNA: Not only is it that they don’t work, but she continues to spruik it, continues to say that it’s possible, and if you do it her way, the Biggest Loser way … they did 7 hours of exercise a day, with gruelling regimes and being pushed and yelled at … LOUISE: And they all put the weight back on. ANNA: They put the weight back on. SHREEN: yeah. LOUISE: And their resting metabolic rate was screwed, six years later. SHREEN: Yeah, 700 calories it decreased by. They lost lean body mass, their fasting glucose increased, their blood sugar levels, yeah. They were the main things. But the fact that their metabolic rate decreased by such a large amount … especially where we were saying, she’s telling people to only eat 1200 calories but then you’re going to follow the Biggest Loser method, your metabolic rate’s going to drop by 700 calories, then what are you going to do? LOUISE: So, she lied about the stats on the Biggest Loser, and she’s not even talking to people about the metabolic impact. Because that study was fascinating, and I talk to clients about it. Because they predicted, the researchers predicted how much their resting metabolic rate would be dropped by …  ANNA: And what did they … LOUISE: And they found out it was even lower. So, they were worse off metabolically than they had predicted six years later. No one expected it to last that long, to have such a devastating impact. ANNA: Yeah, so it’s like a continued effect. It hasn’t regained back to before, pre … LOUISE: Exactly. And when stuff like that is suppressed, we know people are going to experience intense hunger, which of course you can’t honour. SHREEN: And the thing is, again, she’s completely misquoted this study herself but if she’d done her research she would know that there’s been over a hundred studies on intuitive eating that have been done that show you have better body image, higher esteem, improved metabolism, decreased rates of disordered and emotional eating, diminished stress levels and increased satisfaction with life. That’s over a hundred studies on intuitive eating that have been done. ANNA: And I’m pretty sure that you couldn’t say the same, with all of those positive effects, with dieting. LOUISE:  No, especially the ones that use her supplements, which show that everyone puts the weight back on. And the Biggest Loser study, everyone puts the weight back on … but let’s not focus on whether or not the weight comes back on. It’s actually the damage to the body and the metabolic systems that’s just absent from her rant. SHREEN: And not even the psychological damage, that’s not even mentioned. LOUISE: She’s evidence of the psychological damage. SHREEN: Yeah. That is true, yeah. ANNA: So, the next one is … principle eight, respect your body. LOUISE: Oh, fuck. ANNA: So, I think going back to when she spoke about size 16 always equalling healthiness, I think that shows that she doesn’t have respect for all bodies. And that kind of bothers me a bit. SHREEN. A bit. A lot. ANNA: It’s a big part of like, you know, our approach here and being a Health at Every Size® professional, you know? It’s about honouring and understanding and respecting that all bodies are different and need something different. SHREEN: And that you can’t tell somebody’s health by their body size, and that’s such … it’s a huge misconception as it is, let alone, I mean, Jillian Michaels saying this and it’s just … ANNA: Yeah, and just recognising that bodies are diverse, and they will do different things. Your health looks different at different points in your life. What you need changes day to day, and only your body really knows. You know? No external source, no trainer, no Jillian Michaels, no Dr Oz, nobody knows your body. SHREEN: And the whole principle of respecting your body is about being kind to yourself and compassionate and self-care, which is the complete opposite of Jillian Michaels. Like, she is just not kind. She’s not compassionate. She’s just shaming, judgemental, mean. Like … yeah. She’s … I just don’t think she even understands the word ‘respect’, quite frankly. LOUISE: Unless it’s like ‘respect my authority”. SHREEN: Yeah. ANNA: Something I noticed too, that came up before, was that because she’s so invested in it … have you heard of the concept of religion, like dieting? The religion of dieting? She’s so completely invested in it, she’s almost not willing to look the other way, or explore that there might be some truth in this, because she’s so invested, like financially and that’s her way of living … LOUISE: It’s her identity. ANNA: Exactly. LOUISE: It’s interesting, isn’t it? I think Alan Levinovitz, ‘The Gluten Lie’ … ANNA: That’s the guy. LOUISE: He talks about this, the religion of diet mentality. She is definitely the Pope. SHREEN: Quote of the day (all laugh). ANNA: So, then we come into ‘movement, feel the difference’. Which is principle nine. SHREEN: I think this one really got us fired up, didn’t it? ANNA: Well, the first thing that she said was like, “what is this? I don’t know what this ‘militant exercise’ even means”. LOUISE: That’s so funny (all laugh). ANNA: Like, really? Are you sure? LOUISE: She’s like, world-famous on memes for [inaudible]. I think I even did a presentation once where I used her with her finger in her face at someone as a demonstration of militant exercise. ANNA: Yeah, the kind of exercise that you don’t want to do if you want to have a sustainable relationship with movement. LOUISE: Yeah, your name’s on the t-shirt, love. SHREEN: Just telling people in this thing that, you know, this myth that’s just not true – ‘no pain, no gain’, that only hard exercise counts, it’s just utter rubbish. All movement counts, it doesn’t matter what it is. From playing with your kids, to hoovering, to dancing around your living room. LOUISE: Hoovering doesn’t count, I don’t even know what hoovering is … ANNA: She’s talking about hoovering, the hoover … SHREEN: Vacuuming, is that more Aussie? LOUISE: No, I don’t understand. (all laugh). SHREEN: But like, movement can be anything and you get the exact same health benefits from any type of regular movement, doesn’t matter what it is. But what she’s just trying to … she’s just bringing movement and aesthetics, that’s what she’s talking about. She’s talking about … ANNA: That’s a really good point, because if she was really interested in somebody’s health, then any kind of movement would be accessible, you know, like … SHREEN: Beneficial. ANNA: Helpful, yeah. SHREEN: Your blood markers, and stress levels, and sleep, it doesn’t matter what it is, it has the same health benefits. But she’s not talking about health. She’s talking about the way you look. ANNA: Yeah. She’s talking about ‘results’ a lot, and “if you want to get results fast” … because you know, let’s face it, she says “if you’re coming to look at intuitive eating, you’re trying to lose weight, you’re trying to get results fast.” LOUISE: Jillian! ANNA: “You’ve got to do a certain type of exercise, and my programs do that”. So, a little bit of spruiking her own programs too. SHREEN: What she doesn’t realise that she’s doing is having that negative relationship with exercise is not going to make people want to do it.  LOUISE: She doesn’t care about that. SHREEN: She’s the reason why people don’t want to go to the gym, or they hate exercise, because of people like Jillian Michaels. ANNA: Yeah, it’s that fitness trauma that you were talking about before. And what I recognise here, at the studio at Haven, community … in my experience, community has always been really powerful in building that sustainable and healthful relationship with movement. Joy and … SHREEN: And it’s that you enjoy, you [inaudible]. ANNA: And to want to come back, too. And that militant approach might work well for someone who responds to that but maybe for a short time. And then that motivation kind of wanes. And then it’s always trying to get back the motivation, you hear that a lot in fitness culture. But if you’re not coming at it from external, an external place, for external purposes, and it’s more about the … SHREEN: The way it makes you feel, using it as a tool for self-care rather than punishment … ANNA: Your mental health, having fun with your friends, it’s a completely different experience to being yelled at by Jillian Michaels. SHREEN: Her whole thing is yelling at people, making them feel guilty, punishing them. Like, and that’s just not what people need in a fitness professional. They need someone who is kind and compassionate and she’s just … that’s just not her, unfortunately. She’s just giving … ANNA: What is she? She’s the Pope of … the religion of dieting. She’s also the epitome of diet culture. She’s all of those things. And then the last principle is gentle nutrition, principle ten. LOUISE: I think this actually blew up her brain. SHREEN: Yeah, because she couldn’t understand the whole diet … principle one, principle ten … LOUISE: She couldn’t figure out how that fits with unconditional permission to eat. Because of course, if you have unconditional permission to eat, you’re going to stick your face into a burger for the rest of your life.  ANNA: Yeah, so again she thinks it’s all just endless eating. LOUISE: She’s stuck in that ‘all or nothing’ mentality. ANNA: Exactly, yeah. SHREEN: It’s funny, because she talks about that ‘black and white, all or nothing’ mentality and not understanding that’s exactly what she’s saying. Yeah. ANNA: Yeah, and again it came up just very, very clear that she hasn’t read the book, she doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. SHREEN: Yeah, I think that’s the main … ANNA: This is when she said, you know, “it’s probably written by someone who has just really been hurt by diet culture and probably had an eating disorder, and, you know, probably just some random” and actually … LOUISE: Such a shame that she didn’t actually look at the author. SHREEN: Yeah, just even look up to who they were. Yeah. ANNA: It’s a little bit disappointing because you’d think somebody who has such a following, I think, has such a … I think there’s a moral obligation in a way to represent something that … when you have such a big following and you’re sharing something that can affect people deeply … SHREEN: It’s what we say, that she’s really coming from that dieting mentality and all that sort of shaming that she doesn’t understand that intuitive eating at its core is a self-care model. It’s very compassionate and she doesn’t understand that. Also. with intuitive eating, we’re not saying that it’s a solution for everybody. Everyone has the right to do what they want with their body. She just doesn’t understand the concept at all, what it stands for. ANNA: It’s like she’s on such a different planet, and it’s not … doesn’t come across as open to exploring that this might be something that really serves people. SHREEN: Yeah, and that it’s having such a positive impact. We talked about earlier with the … ANNA: Feeling a bit threatened by the impact on her, you know, her … LOUISE: To her bottom line. I also think that, I mean, if she really is undernourished to that point that she has restricted her entire life, one of the things that happens when you’re weight supressed is cognitive rigidity. ANNA: That’s a really good point. LOUISE: So, it’s quite hard to be flexible. We see that a lot with people who are suffering in the depths of Anorexia, that you simply cannot think. And perhaps there’s an element of that that’s happening here. ANNA: That’s really interesting. SHREEN: That’s a really good point. Because what dieting, that kind of restriction is doing to you … LOUISE: Well, it gives her massive benefits. Huge amounts of recognition, it gives her income. She can’t think out of it. So, there’s not a lot of reason for her, like … I think the reason for putting up that video wasn’t a genuine exploration of “what’s this thing called ‘intuitive eating’?”.  SHREEN: It was just to … LOUISE: It was just to kind of … ANNA: Debunk it. LOUISE: To debunk it and keep hold of her customer base. Look, let’s assume that she is interested in the book. Jillian Michael’s house is in Malibu, California. I reckon we just whack a copy in an envelope, address it to her, maybe she’ll read it. ANNA: Do you think?  LOUISE: Yeah? I don’t know. Maybe if all of our listeners whack a copy into an envelope … SHREEN: Yeah!  LOUISE: 20 copies, please read. Maybe. SHREEN: Maybe, yeah. LOUISE: But I don’t think that was anything other than a … it’s quite interesting, I’m seeing this more and more. The famous people, the people who have really invested in diet culture, even the obesity researchers and all of that. They’re all kind of getting a little bit nervous about this pushback. SHREEN: They should be. LOUISE: It makes me feel warm and fuzzy. SHREEN: It’s time. LOUISE: It’s got nothing to do with the champagne. I think the celebs are getting nervous, like “what do you mean, people in larger bodies are okay with themselves just the way they are?”. And finding non weight-loss things to look after themselves, oh my gosh. What a huge, horrible threat. So, we’re not sorry, Jillian, that we made you nervous. ANNA: Agreed. I hope it gives her a little bit of food for thought (all laugh). LOUISE: I don’t know how many calories would be attached to that thought (all laugh). ANNA: I have to say, like, the thing that I think fires me up the most is how fatphobic she is. SHREEN: And how much harm … that’s the thing that fired me up the most, how much harm she’s causing people out there. And having had an eating disorder myself, it’s just … LOUISE: Horrible. You can see how triggering it is. SHREEN: I can see what it can do, yeah. That’s what fires me up. LOUISE: and let’s not forget when we say fatphobic, we mean people who hate fat people. And that is really reflective … even though she is professing “oh, I’m going to love you … but you’re unhealthy so change”. That’s troubling. Using health as a halo, an excuse or a reason for my core treatment of you just based on your appearance. And that’s just … those days are done. You can’t do that anymore. It’s just not cool. And I do wonder if there is like a Biggest Loser university somewhere?  ANNA: Michelle Bridges went to it as well. LOUISE: Because the same kind of hatred of fat people, you know … again, like masked with a thin layer of concern trolling for your health was Michelle Bridges’ thing. Four years ago, when she was on Australian Story and she was saying “I’m yet to meet someone who is morbidly obese and happy”. So, for people who are listening from overseas, Michelle Bridges is the Australian version of Jillian Michaels. And what an awful comment. So, Jillian has been pushed back against from this video, right? Michelle was pushed back against from this video too, with really clear … I know we all live in a bubble, but with quite a lot of push back. ANNA: That’s good. Was she on … was that on like Australian primetime TV? SHREEN: She was on Australian Story. LOUISE: Yeah [inaudible] … it shows how deeply she feels [inaudible] about people she’s profiting from. Putting them through three cycles a year of 1200 calorie program and she knows it doesn’t work. But the thing is, what they do is they double down. People like this double down, when they’re called out, when there’s a pushback. Instead of kind of opening up and say, “okay, I should probably issue an apology, maybe take the video down, maybe do some work”. They’re not doing that. Jillian’s not doing that. ANNA: I think she just keeps responding. And she’s just responding with the same rhetoric, so she’s not … SHREEN: I think she kind of comments that [inaudible], to learn about it more, which is a shame. ANNA: And how did Michele Bridges respond? LOUISE: Doubled down on it. About health, “I care deeply about health”. ANNA: The whole thing with health and weight, this is what really frustrates me about it too. If she’s really interested in health, she could support all the behaviours that support someone’s health. LOUISE: Too complicated. Remember? Too complicated. Anything that actually involves having to think about something other than my own diet plan … ANNA: It makes me realise how happy I’ve become in moving away from all this, that’s why I got away from it. Because I learned about how there’s another way. Intuitive eating, Health at Every Size®, the body positivity movement … I started delving into it and it just felt so triggering being around other fitness professionals from the traditional approach. And this here, I’ve got to say, got me so fired up. I’m going to be fired up for a while from this. SHREEN: We talk about fitness trauma, and Jillian Michaels is causing that. LOUISE: May she go the way of the dinosaurs and … (all laugh). ANNA: Well, hopefully there will be less and less of her to be seen in the future and more and more of kind of this messaging coming up, challenging … LOUISE: Absolutely, I absolutely think that’s going to happen. You’ve just reminded me actually, she … because Jillian, earlier in the year before she posted the nasty intuitive eating thing, she said something nasty about Lizzo. SHREEN: Yeah, of course.  ANNA: That sounds familiar … SHREEN: Yeah. That was before …  LOUISE: A little while before, I don’t know. It’s Covid, none of us have a timeline. ANNA: She’s said some pretty horrendous things. SHREEN: Really horrendous things yeah. LOUISE: Again, like … “she’s clearly going to get diabetes” or something? ANNA: I think she said something along the lines of “there’s nothing sexy about diabetes”, or clogged arteries or something.  SHREEN: Something like that, yeah. ANNA: How can she … that’s so inappropriate. Lizzo’s bouncing away on stage. She’s got stamina, she’s got energy.  SHREEN: We don’t know anything about her or her health. ANNA: And why do we have to talk about that anyway? She’s this amazing performer and doing this really cool stuff. It’s wonderful to see some diverse bodies out there that are getting out there as much as the other, the thin ideal that you see everywhere. LOUISE: Yeah, the comments that she made were like “why are we talking about Lizzo’s body, we should be talking about her music”. ANNA: So, she said that? LOUISE: Yeah. ANNA: But then … LOUISE: And it’s really funny, because she’s saying that we shouldn’t be talking about Lizzo’s body, but her entire website is full of shots of her body. ANNA: Yeah, and that’s her thing. SHREEN: That’s her thing, yeah. ANNA: She’s always talking about people’s bodies. Size 16, yeah. SHREEN: Yeah, non-stop. LOUISE: The point I’m making is that you don’t say that about Lizzo. And the pushback she got after she made that comment? This is the future Jillian. Lizzo is setting the world on fire.  ANNA: We need more Lizzo. SHREEN: We need more Lizzo. LOUISE: and you are the biggest loser. ANNA: Well put. LOUISE: Oh my god, let’s finish on a high note. Thank you, guys, that was an elegant unpacking of Jillian Michael’s ten principles of not understanding intuitive eating (all laugh). And how firmly we can steer the ship to this new awesome way of looking after our body. ANNA: Thank you. SHREEN: Thank you.  Resources Mentioned: (Watch if you can stomach) Jillian Michaels' Igno-rant on Youtube Urbszat, Dax, C. Peter Herman, and Janet Polivy. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we diet: Effects of anticipated deprivation on food intake in restrained and unrestrained eaters." Journal of abnormal psychology 111.2 (2002): 396. News article about 4 lawsuits against Jillian Michaels for her weight loss pills Fothergill, Erin, et al. "Persistent metabolic adaptation 6 years after “The Biggest Loser” competition." Obesity 24.8 (2016): 1612-1619. Alan Levinovitz's The Gluten Lie Find out more about Anna Hearn & Haven Find out more about Shreen El Masry and Be You Be Free  

In this episode I chat to Theo Paphitis, businessman, retail expert, shopkeeper and former Dragon. We discuss tips retail during COVID-19 and his experiences of surviving school and becoming a business owner with dyslexia.  You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on running a retail business and supporting employees with dyslexia. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Would you prefer to read Theo Paphitis' podcast interview instead? Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan. In this episode we have Theo Paphitis, businessman, retail expert, former Dragon and shopkeeper. Born in Cyprus, Theo came to the UK at age of seven, living in Manchester then London. He left school at the age of 16 with no qualifications after having struggles with dyslexia. He started work as a filing clerk in a Lloyds of London brokerage, moving on to Watches of Switzerland at the age of 18. He had a stint in insurance then returned to retail, taking on names such as Ryman, La Senza and Robert Dyas. In spring 2011, he launched lingerie brand, Boux Avenue. Since then he’s created the Theo Paphitis Retail Group encompassing the aforementioned retail businesses and the London Graphic Centre, which he acquired in 2016. In 2005, Theo joined Dragon’s Den and in 2012 to focus on his growing retail empire. He came back for a few episodes last year to fill in for Touker Suleyman. 10 years ago, Theo started Small Business Sunday, #SBS, where entrepreneurs describe their businesses via Twitter. Theo retweets his favourites to his audience to boost their exposure. Today we’re going to be talking about retail in the age of COVID-19 and what it’s like being a business owner with dyslexia. Anna: Hi Theo. Theo: Hello! That was quite some introduction. Anna: Oh, I know. I tried to shorten it, but it’s just come out as ‘Theo’s done quite a lot of stuff!’ Theo: It keeps me busy. Anna: How are you today? Theo: I’m good, thank you – in a very soggy Wimbledon. Anna: Yeah, it seems like that all over the UK. I’m up in Scotland and it’s much the same. But that’s very much, you know… Theo: I did refrain from butting in there but thank you for doing that for me! Let’s crack on. I’d like to go back to – I believe you were 15 years old at the time – you opened up a school tuck shop, so retail must’ve been in your blood from quite early on. What was the inspiration behind that?   Theo: Well, the inspiration was actually a need. I didn’t even know what retail was. I’d been in shops, obviously, but at that age – 14, 15 – there was a need at the school. We didn’t have a tuck shop. And on the basis that I didn’t enjoy school very much and I wasn’t a model student in classes. When I suggested to the school that they fund me to do so, they jumped at it because I didn’t have to sit in class for too long, being disruptive. I’m sure that was the main reason. I thought it was a great opportunity, it was great fun. It was great to learn on the job, overcome problems – of which there were many – everything from litter to security to stock control. All the things that us shopkeepers do day-to-day now. So, your first retail job was at Watches of Switzerland and you sold a Rolex on your first day. Tell me what that was like and how did it spark your love of retail? Theo: On my first day, it was all very different for me from what I was doing as an office clerk before. There’s no paperwork involved, just loads and loads of shiny things. Watches and all bits and pieces. I spent the morning having my induction by the manager. And then I was let loose on the shop floor, a customer came in and there I was, extolling the virtues of the Rolex Oyster, that I’d only just heard of barely an hour ago. All of the information that’d been fed into me came blubbering out with some authority. And there you go – I had a sale. It was amazing.     We know that one of the things from this year is that online sales have exploded – what other changes in consumer habits have you noticed this year? Theo: When we went into lockdown, I said quite publicly that the longer this goes on for, the more consumer habits will change. And in fact, within the second week, I could see that digital was accelerating at unprecedented rates and I estimated at the time that we’d had at least five years of acceleration in the adoption of digital in the time from the end of March 2020 until the end of June 2020. Eventually, it was always in our businesses plan, investment in the digital side, that a lot of our business would go online. So, we’d already invested quite heavily as a business. But the acceleration in those three months was phenomenal. We weren’t expecting to get that level of increase until about five years’ time. Actually, coming back to that, your business portfolio is made up, as we heard in the intro, of a lot of retail firms that are traditional to the high street. That must mean you have quite a lot of faith in the future of retail on the high street, despite what naysayers might say and an encouragement to move towards more predominantly digital businesses. What would you say to that? Theo: I think that like many retailers, we’ve got two legacy, very traditional brands in Ryman and Robert Dyas. Robert Dyas has been trading for over 150 years and Ryman for over 125 years, so they’ve been a big part of the fascia of United Kingdom high streets over those times. But our services within those and the things that we sell within those businesses have changed quite tremendously in that time. And we always anticipated that some of our stores just wouldn’t make it out of the other side. That was always going to be the case. It was just a matter of when. There’s no point in keeping a store open if you’re the last person standing and nobody’s visiting the high street. Or, in fact, because of short-termism. And, quite honestly, workshy politicians not reviewing the business rates, which in itself has killed so many high streets. It’s not the rent, it’s the ancillary costs. We’d already planned for that. That doesn’t mean we had plans to shut all of our stores – far from it. We just need to make sure that we focus on the stores where there’s a community. That was always the plan and remains the plan. You’ve talked about an acceleration in adopting technology, do you think there will be some sort of push to reduce or reform business rates [in the longer term]? It’s been talked about for some time. Theo: It’s been talked about forever, but I use my words very carefully. I use the word ‘lazy’. I use it a lot when it comes to various people that have held the seat at no.11 that just couldn’t be bothered to put the work in to repurpose business rates. Business rates is an archaic tax from the 1500s. Ye Olde Internet Shoppe would not exist in the 1500s. The Exchequer needs income, of course it needs income, otherwise how are we going to pay for our services? But you can just keep loading it up on what is a very easy tax to collect and then put people out of business because you reach the law of diminishing returns. They needed to repurpose taxation to reflect the new modern and digital age. It’s very difficult for people paying rent and rates when other people are trading out of warehouses and contributing very little. It needs to be balanced – it has always needed to be balanced – but even more so now. Of course, since March, the present Chancellor has absolutely done the right thing in suspending business rates, giving a business rates holiday. That expires in March ’21 and it’ll be interesting to see what he does then. I can’t believe for one minute that he would even contemplate bringing them back. If he does, that would spell the demise of many high streets and many trusted names within those high streets. What do you think should happen instead? Theo: I think we’ve got to relook at the way we pay taxes. It’s very simple – it’s not complicated. It requires work, but we’ve got to look at the different ways of collecting taxation, whether it’s a sales tax or any other form of tax you put on, that is fair and allows people to trade on a level playing field. I think that arguably, for a long time, the worry has been the wealthy individuals who benefit from having those business rates and high costs in place. Theo: The fact remains that, with landlords, we’ve been able to negotiate as footfall has gone down in various parts of the country. We’ve been able to sit down with landlords a lot. We’re taking a lot less money now. If you want us to remain in your store, then we can only afford to pay X or Y and in the main, they’ve agreed. We’ve got so many stores where the rates are higher than the rent. That can’t be right. And obviously, you can’t negotiate with the Exchequer. Absolutely. Do you think there are certain types of businesses that would move into empty high street spaces in the future, especially when things start to settle post COVID-19? Theo: What we’ve seen is the conversion of many high streets into old age people’s homes where they’ve just built loads and loads of retirement homes, sheltered accommodation because it’s in close proximity – right on top of the high street. If that’s what we’re planning – to turn high streets into retirement villages – then that’s a different story altogether because that’s what you’re going to get. But high streets have really been the backbone of the community. So, you start destroying it and everybody stays in their homes and you’ve got millions and millions and millions of vans driving around and polluting the atmosphere, delivering a £4 or a £5 or a £3 product. Does that really make sense? What do you think about a digital tax? Theo: The Exchequer needs to collect income and that’s a great way of doing it.                     I’ll move on a little bit here. In the intro we mentioned Small Business Sunday which, on the day of recording (October 12th), launched 10 years ago yesterday. In your view, what is the greatest success story to come out of SBS? Theo: It’s got 3000 businesses at different sizes, different levels of activity. The biggest success story is the fact that it exists, and it allows small businesses and medium-sized businesses, all of a sudden, to get a leg up, get PR, get a social media boost, support for other SBS winners in the network. It boosts sales. It offers opportunities for them to collaborate. It gets them together at our annual event to hear great speakers, talk to them and inspire them about what the future holds. Don’t forget that it’s really tough to be a small business – 50 per cent of businesses fail within the first two years. And that’s probably normal because they haven’t got the skillset, the information, the support that they need. Some fail and then go on to run really successful businesses because they’ve learned from their failures. So, the whole gambit of SBS is to try and assist to lower that failure rate and give support and all of the things that small businesses need. It’s tough – if you’ve got two or three kids and you’re running a business from your kitchen table and you’ve got to balance a household. Where do you go for help when things aren’t running your way? Who can you talk to that’s having or has had the same experience as you? I can guarantee that someone form SBS has and someone will be able to talk to you about it. And somebody when you’re having a tough time is going to be having a really good time and there’s nothing better than to talk to somebody to bring you out of those doldrums and give you that burst of enthusiasm that you desperately need to get you going. Anna: Sometimes that’s all you need – I’ve seen some of the comments back and forth on the thread and it’s quite the community.   As mentioned in the intro as well, you struggled at school because you have dyslexia. From the research I’ve done, it seems like people with dyslexia felt discouraged at school (‘you have this, so you can’t do that’) but went on to be successful entrepreneurs because they worked hard at their other qualities, like social skills. How does that align with your experience of school and going into business? Theo: Oh, that describes me. When I turned 16, they showed me the door. Not because I was particularly disruptive, but because I was a lost cause. I wasn’t going to get any examinations. Anna: They dismissed you before you even took them? Theo: No, I did sit a few, but I ended up with great big ‘U’s. In fairness, I did get one certificate, and it was a Scottish certificate in colouring in maps. It was geography. And the reason I say it was a Scottish certificate is because we had the most amazing Scottish lady teacher who worked incredibly but had got all of our attention and made it very interesting. I always call it my Scottish certificate in colouring in maps. It was clear school wasn’t for me. Even to get through to 16, I had loads and loads of workarounds to try and get my work and homework done. I couldn’t do it in a traditional way. I was always problem-solving to try and achieve what other kids were achieving in minutes. It took me hours. I always found workarounds to deal with the issues so that when I actually went to work, dealing with issues and problems was a piece of cake – I’d been doing it all of my life. Some kids go to work, who had an academic upbringing at school, sit there and there’s a problem. Now they’ve got a problem. So that was one of the things that I benefited from. Anna: What do you mean when you say workarounds? Could you elaborate a bit? Theo: For instance, my first day at work, I had to go with a picture in my pocket. If I’m doing numbers – which I’m not bad at, to be honest with you – I couldn’t remember my times tables. It was a nightmare. But I could find workarounds. For instance, if I needed to do 12x12, it’d be 10x12 which is 120, and two more equals 24. That’d be 144. Or I’d break it down into fives or threes or ones to get there or find percentages. You always had to find different ways, it takes longer, but you get there. Anna: Exactly – and that’s what’s important. Theo: And then the biggest thing that changed my life was computers. I no longer had to worry about spelling or rubbish handwriting. All of these things I could get over, so I really embraced technology very early. Anna: That’s an advantage in a way, isn’t it? Theo: It is an advantage – and always has been – hence why I embraced eCommerce and digital and I embraced computers and had one of the first computers. I learned to program because there wasn’t any programs to give me what I wanted. I thought, “It can’t be that difficult, can it?” It gives you a push. It’s interesting to see that other entrepreneurs like Lord Sugar, Richard Branson and Jamie Oliver have dyslexia as well. Theo: Well, of course, a lot of dyslexic people are pushed to be entrepreneurs because they can’t get a job anywhere else. The key thing is that that it’s difficult to get a job when you can’t spell or you can’t read very fast. I can read, believe you me, I can read. Give me a contract and I will read it front to back and I will understand it and I will be as good as anybody else, but it will take me three times as long as anybody else to do. It’s just a speed thing. Exactly. Fortunately, we are in a better place now, especially in schools with picking up dyslexia earlier on, allowing longer exams and that sort of thing. But if you’ve got someone out there who’s still at school, has dyslexia and wants to be an entrepreneur, what kind of things would you say to them? Theo: Well, the good news is that it will be one of the least resistant paths open to them. You’ll find it hard to compete in the jobs sector when people have got all of these qualifications and you haven’t. But all I can say to them is make sure that when you become an entrepreneur, become an entrepreneur doing something that you love and are passionate about. You can become an entrepreneur doing lots of things but find something that you’re passionate about because on those dark, wet winter days, when things are not running according to plan and you’re down to your last few quid, you need that passion, that enthusiasm, that drive, to get you out of it. And if you’re doing something you’re not really passionate about, then you might, just might, throw in the towel. But it’s about doing something you’re passionate about. That’s the best chance of success. Anna: Well, that seems like a great place to wrap up. Thank you for coming on the podcast, Theo. Theo: Absolute pleasure. Find out more about Theo at theopaphitis.com. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more articles on retail and supporting employees with dyslexia. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Until next time, thank you for listening.   

What would have happened if Hans had killed Elsa and Anna? What would he do if he had actually taken over the proud, historic, and magical kingdom of Arendelle and became king? Today I’m going through everything that the Prince of the Southern Isles might have done. From partnering with the Duke of Weselton to the heroic story he would sell to the respect he may finally get from his brothers, we are going to explore it all as we theorize on the wonderful world of Frozen! __Join our exclusive family of fun people, become a producer, and help support the show!http://patreon.com/wotsovideos __Shop Following Dreams shirts, hoodies, stickers, and more -http://wotsostore.com __Ask questions, send comments and business inquiries -wotsovideos@gmail.com __Watch all of the magical Disney film content Isaac makes on YouTube - http://youtube.com/wotsovideos ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Follow me on InstagramFollow me on TwitterLike me on Facebook@WotsoVideos

The Annunciation. This episode comes from the Gospel of Luke. Why did God choose Mary to bear the Christ? Was Mary ever virgin? How is it possible that a woman can get pregnant without a man? Was Mary a miracle child given to Joachim and Anna? What other woman had a miracle birth? Why was it necessary that Jesus did not have an earthly father? Listen and find out.Presented by Dr. Al (Petros) Maeyens Doc. of Div.

In this episode I meet Deborah Meaden, businesswoman, author and Dragon. We talk about her definition of success and what makes a disastrous investment pitch. Be sure to visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for more articles on pitching to investors.  Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Want to read the Deborah Meaden's podcast interview instead? Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan. Today we have Deborah Meaden, investor, businesswoman, author and one of the longest-serving Dragons on Dragons’ Den, second only to Peter Jones. She launched her first company at 19 years old, importing glass and ceramics and supplying UK retailers such as Harvey Nichols. She then took on a franchise of Stefanel, an Italian clothing company and sold it two years later. Next came her family’s amusement arcade business, where she went from shop floor worker to operations director before moving to Weststar Holidays. Within two years she became managing director and did a management buyout in 1999. Then in 2005, she sold the business for £33m. After deciding that retirement wasn’t for her, Deborah joined Dragons’ Den in 2006 and has since invested £3,746,000. Anna: Hello, Deborah. Deborah: Good morning. I’m still smarting for being called second best to Peter Jones! Anna: How are you doing today? Deborah: Good! Yeah, very good day – so far. Anna: Yeah, that’s it – you want to touch wood but unfortunately there’s not much wood in here at the moment…  Right, I’ll start off with something quite general. In the past you’ve said that you like success and successful people. How do you define success? Deborah: I can tell when someone is successful because they’re comfortable with themselves. And it’s odd because often when people think of success, they think of these driven people who are constantly reaching for bigger and more and more money and more profit and whatever. But actually, I consider success someone who’s reached that stage in life where they’ve thought, ‘This is great, this is good. It might not be great forever but I’m enjoying what I’m doing now – I’m having a great impact. And the thing that I’ve set out to achieve I’m achieving and I’m achieving well.’ That is my idea of success. You can tell when you’re around successful people – they enjoy it, they’re comfortable with themselves. Anna: So, it’s not necessarily financial. Deborah: It’s easy to say it’s not financial. Of course, in the early days when I didn’t have money, it was financial. But when you reach a level you can start thinking that money isn’t the be all and end all. The thing I always say about money is that it’s kind of the measure of business, or it has been in the past. It’s, ‘If I’m good at business, I make great profits.’ I think that’s changing and that suits me better. It’s more a case of, ‘What do I want my output to be?’ Of course, I’ve got to make money, otherwise I wouldn’t have a business. But do I want to have a social impact as well? Do I want to feel good about what I do? I’m much more comfortable in that space. Anna: Yeah, we’re seeing businesses move towards having more of an ethical basis in their business models, supporting animals, doing charity contributions on the side. Deborah: Yes, and I think it doesn’t have to be through charity, just behaving well. If you believe in something, it should be reflected through your business and treating your people well, being respectful of them. Making an impact in your community. Sometimes I feel the charity side can be absolving yourself of responsibility: ‘Let’s just give them the money and they can do the work for me!’ I feel there’s a bigger responsibility – we should all behave well in our business lives.            And no matter how successful you are as an entrepreneur, everyone has their own set of strengths and weaknesses. You said that when you were at Weststar, you lost some good people because you didn’t temper your approach to nurture them. Have you adapted to different personalities in the workplace since, and if so, how did you got about it?    Deborah: That is very very true. I’m very robust. And anybody who’s watched Dragons’ Den will know that I’m very robust. But what I mean when I’m robust is that I throw things out there and I’m hoping that people are going to challenge me. I’m not just saying it because I want everyone to go, ‘Oh yes, I agree with you.’ I put things out there and I want a lively, energetic conversation around the stuff. But I did realise early on that that doesn’t suit everybody. Sometimes I’d say things and they’d think, ‘Ohhhh, alright! Okay!’ They don’t debate it, they don’t discuss it with me. I think that’s part of experience: take yourself off transmit and receive as well as transmit. Anna: How did you put that into practice? Deborah: It’s a bit odd because, of course, life is about communication. I just realised I had a great group of friends that I communicate and debate with and I listen to and I think, ‘Why am I behaving differently at work?’ People are people – just because they happen to be in the work environment. Why don’t I just the use the skills I use when I’m outside of work? When you first meet people you sense them, you feel them out. Are they shy, are they very robust, are they gregarious? What are they? And you temper yourself to them. I just remembered to do that in the workplace and of course, the response was amazing. It just meant that people with a different style could find their style with me. We found a way of working together as opposed to [them] thinking, ‘I need to just shrivel up and leave the room because she’s said something that she obviously wants to happen!’ One of your greater strengths as an entrepreneur is your frankness. And we’re surrounded by so many options these days and plagued by indecision. How do you make good decisions as a business owner? Deborah: Well, the first thing is learning to make decisions, good or bad. It’s better to make a bad decision than it is to make no decision. In making no decision, you destabilise everything and everybody gets into this awful limbo land and thinks, ‘Ohhhhh, I really don’t know what’s going on’ and they lose the ability to make decisions. So learning to consider, know what you need to know, and the moment to say: ‘Right – I’ve heard enough, now I need to make a decision.’ I have watched people get trapped in this, ‘Oh, well I’ll just ask’ and ‘Maybe if we ask this’ and sometimes we get to a stage where we’re doing research and I’ll say ‘Okay, we need to stop the research now, because I think we know enough’. Otherwise, we shouldn’t be doing our job. The researchers aren’t going to tell us what we should do. They’re going to give us the information to help us make our decisions. We need to make those decisions. And coming back to different personality types, how would somebody who is perhaps less confident, less decisive – how do they make the most of their qualities as a business leader? Deborah: It’s interesting that you say ‘business leader’ because I was reading a really interesting book on leadership. It was saying that people need different leaders in different environments and at different times. If you think about the history of the country, we needed different people at different times and businesses are the same. Leaders are given permission to lead. It’s not like, ‘I’m a fantastic leader – I can walk into any environment and anybody will follow me.’ Because actually, if you don’t do a good job, I promise you that your permission to lead will be taken away very very quickly. People will just start finding ways around you. They’ll think, ‘You know what? They don’t know what they’re doing so I’ll carry on with my thing.’ So I actually think that knowledge and experience and proving that you’re good eventually attracts people around you. [They] work out really quickly, ‘Who is it that makes my life better because I can do my job better? I know they’re going to help me do my job better.’ Be good at what you do, be really helpful to other people. Recognise that you are all in this together because the more helpful you are, the more people look to you. We all think of leaders as these big strident people who are born leaders but actually in the wrong environment – and the wrong time – people will just say, ‘Oh, shush’. Anna: But sometimes people just need to be given the chance to come out and make those decisions. Deborah: Absolutely, and to get the feedback on those decisions. A lot of it is a lack of confidence. I’ve seen so many people sit in a room – and this has happened a lot since I’ve been on Dragons’ Den – suddenly, it’s like I’m the expert on everything. I’ve been on television, so I know everything. I’ve got confident, competent people who know way more about their subject than me, who will not stick their stake in the ground because they think, ‘Deborah’s in the room – she must know more than anybody.’ I’m like, ‘Guys, if I think I know everything, what am I doing sitting in a room talking to you lot?! I’ll just carry on, thank you. You know way more than me so could you just carry on making the decisions you made before the day I was on Dragons’ Den? It’s much more difficult now to get people to challenge me – and I love challenge. What’s the point of sitting in a room with people who are just agreeing with me? Anna: I feel like I should disagree with you right now, but I actually do agree!                   One of the companies you have invested in, ran into difficulty last year [the founder is no longer part of the company]. How do you know when it’s time to walk away from a business? Deborah: In the case of Gripit, it’s what to do. It’s come through and it’s selling to the US market. It’s when to stop or it’s when to say, in the case of Gripit, actually we’ve got a fantastic product here – no one ever questioned the product. So, what we’re going to do now is present it in a different way and have a completely different structure sitting behind it. I’ve got a feeling that if I wasn’t there, it probably would’ve gone. It was definitely in a very difficult moment in time. But I was able to see through that, underpinned by a product. What I do see sometimes is a product that is clearly failing. When you’ve got to wander around, holding up the product going, ‘Buy me, please please buy me’, that worries me much much more. If you’ve got a good product but the structure in which you’re selling it isn’t quite right, that’s a problem you can get through. If you’ve got a bad product and you’re having to work too hard to get out there, that’s the time to call it a day. You’ve got to understand why you’re at that difficult moment. Every single business I’ve ever been in has had a difficult moment and if you can’t work out what’s causing it – and see a way through it – that’s the time to stop. But if you can work out what’s caused it and think, ‘Oh, I can fix that’ then clearly, you need to carry on.      Anna: Coming back to Dragons’ Den, I’ve read that when you do a day of shooting you record six pitches. Most are about an hour long, but some are as short as 15 minutes while others are two hours long. What are the common themes run among the not-so-good pitches, the ones that tend to end after 15 minutes? Deborah: I’m not sure there’s a common theme. Sometimes it’s purely and simply: ‘That isn’t going to work’. It’s just, all five of us – and we’re all very different – but you’ve got a lot of experience sitting there, in a lot of sectors. And we’re not always right. Fantastic businesses go out there and prove us wrong, that’s brilliant, that’s fine. But sometimes you just think, ‘You have not thought that out’ and you fall at the first hurdle because what’s your market? How are you going to make it? What does it cost to make?        Anna: So, people come in with no idea… Deborah: Well, they come in with an idea sometimes and that is the problem: there’s a mile of difference between an idea and a business proposition. You’ve got to have something that I’m investing in – not just a thought. That’s one of the big issues.    Anna: Although that is to say that they’re quick because they’re weaker pitches than the ones that are longer and you want to know more. Deborah: Oh, absolutely. I think the shortest pitch I’ve ever seen is 11 minutes and it was a product where everybody was clearly just wrong on all counts. It was badly thought out, it was badly presented, there was no idea what the market was going to be, didn’t know what the cost of making it was going to be, didn’t know what the cost of selling it was going to be… that’s a quick pitch! There’s nothing to invest in here. I think the longest pitch I’ve ever been on was three hours. And to be honest, by that point you’re interested. We don’t sit there for three hours and don’t invest – we’re trying to unpick a business. Anna: Wow. What do you discuss in a three-hour pitch? Deborah: We’re trying to get to the stage where an investment is going to proceed because once we get out of the Den, not all of the businesses pass due diligence. I don’t want to waste my time or their time – life’s too short to agree something and then find afterwards, ‘Damn, if I’d known that I wouldn’t’ve made an offer’. So if you’re interested, it takes longer because we’re trying to eke out all of the things so it shortens the process. In my experience, when you come out of the Den, the longer it takes for that deal to get away, the less likely the deal is going to be. And I don’t want to walk out the Den and find out that actually, they haven’t got a patent, they’ve made a patent application. Or their numbers are wrong by a factor of 100. Or – this happens a lot – they have loans that were not disclosed in the Den. And I specifically ask now – people sometimes don’t count a Director’s Loan as a loan. Well, of course it’s a loan! It’s still a loan. So often we’ll come out and then find out that something wasn’t disclosed that should’ve been disclosed. Because in good faith, we’re both trying to find out about each other. And there’s no point me agreeing a deal in the Den and then walking out and thinking, ‘Ohhh, if only I’d known that, I’d have never…’ Anna: And you’re hoping to build a long-term business relationship so keeping stuff from each other at that point is never a good sign. Deborah: Actually, the deal just won’t proceed. We are agreeing to invest but between that and the investment is normal due diligence that you would do on any business. I might as well know in the Den what’s going on and if you haven’t told me something material, the trust is gone and I need to trust people. Anna: What’s the worst pitch you’ve seen in the Den? Deborah: Oh, it’s hard to tell. False fingernails for cats was a funny one. There was a fantastic – it was a guy who came up with an invention of a fold-out sunbed in a suitcase which you can take on holiday with you and take your suitcase down to the beach and then unfold it – because obviously people use all the beach chairs. You think, ‘You don’t seriously believe I’m going to carry a huge big suitcase on holiday with me.’ Anna: People only have so much checked-in baggage, you know? Deborah: At least he was thinking! Anna: Yeah, he can make one for himself. How about pitches that you turned down at the time but turned out to be quite successful after the show. Were there any of those that you thought, ‘Oh, I wish I got involved in that’? Deborah: I’m not an ‘I wish I had’ kind of person. I put everything into achieving the thing that I’m trying to achieve and if I don’t, I don’t. There will always be other opportunities. And I’m not just saying this: that’s the best kind of mistake to make. If you don’t invest in somebody and they go on and make a huge success, it’d be a bit churlish not to think, ‘Well good on you’. Anna: That’s a very mature approach to take. Deborah: We started off by saying I like success. I get no pleasure from seeing people fail. Even if a fleeting ‘I told you so’ crosses my mind, it’s very fleeting. Anna: I know for some people it must be quite difficult. Deborah: I’m actually quite hard to interview because people ask me, ‘What are you most proud of?’ and I honestly don’t know. I don’t really look back, I don’t worry, I don’t carry stuff around with me. Bad stuff has happened and at the time it was awful and two days later it’s gone. I’ve always looked forward. I’ve always been more interested in what’s coming up than what’s going on behind.                             Anna: And in the spirit of moving forward, we have a Budget coming up. What support would you like to see to support small business owners? Deborah: I would definitely like to see the EIS and SEIS schemes maintained, just in case there’s any consideration that they go. Because if ever there was a time for people to get their investment out of the bank and working with small businesses, that’s what we should be doing. We should be supporting them. What else would I like to see for small business? I think this is a very very difficult Budget because we still don’t know about the Brexit scenario and we have no idea on the basis on which that’s going to be very difficult to say what you want for a business when you don’t know what the landscape is. You asking me this question in a normal landscape, I’d say, ‘You can do A and B and C and help’ but I have no idea what we’re aiming at anymore. So I really don’t know which levers to pull. That feels really awkward for somebody who spends their life making decisions and working out what is the best thing to do now. Anna: Yeah – business owners are planning three, five, ten years in advance. They’ve just been at a point where they can’t. Deborah: Listen, we’re in a really funny time at the moment. We don’t know the landscape and we can only control what we can control. But I really do worry that there are some businesses that are really not looking at the potential pitfalls and preparing themselves for it. I’ve spoken to a lot of businesses who at first thought, ‘Well, of course Brexit won’t affect me’. That’s because they weren’t doing business in the EU, but they’re not really looking back through their supply chains, not understanding what could happen to the data within their business. There’s no agreement on data transfer. So, I think businesses should just look into themselves for a moment and think, ‘Actually, which bits of these could be affected in terms of a future trade deal?’ There’ll be a lot of stuff that’s left undone and you need to know your risk. With a lot of my businesses I’ve had to set up offices in Ireland, almost as an insurance to say ‘just in case we can’t directly trade with the EU without pretty hefty tariffs. I need to find a way of trading’. There are things you can do to mitigate on a best guess scenario – you’ve got to understand what’s at risk in your business.   Anna: That seems like a good place to wrap up. Thank you for coming on the podcast, Deborah. Deborah: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it. Anna: You can learn more about Deborah at deborahmeaden.com. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more insight on preparing for Brexit planning and how to pitch to investors. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Until next time, thank you for listening.   

Anna Jordan chats to Caprice, a supermodel turned entrepreneur. She tells us more about the struggles of the model stereotype in starting her first business and protecting your brand when you enter a licence deal.    Be sure to visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for more articles about starting a company and Government funding for small businesses.   Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Prefer to read it instead? Here's the transcript. Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan. Today we have Caprice Bourret, a former model turned businesswoman. You might recognise her from the front covers of Vogue and Esquire or from her appearance on Channel 4’s The Jump in 2017. She’s here to talk about moving into the business world and the experiences that came with launching her lingerie brand, By Caprice and her homeware range, By Caprice Home. Anna: Hi, Caprice. Caprice: Good morning! Anna: How are you? Caprice: I’m…OK. Anna: Nice. Right, let’s crack on. When you retired from modelling you were well-known and then you moved into the business world where you were relatively less well-known. How did you rebuild your reputation in another field? Caprice: That took quite a few years. I’m not going to paint a beautiful picture because it wasn’t. The stereotype was quite severe. I didn’t think it would be that difficult coming from being a well-known model to having credibility in the business world was difficult. But it took a lot of tenacity and I had to ascertain stockists. So, I would call up and go directly to the CEO and try it that way because with buyers I was a bit chopped liver, regardless of who I was, so I went to the CEOs. I said, “Listen, I’ve got this great idea and this great brand”, ba ba ba. And most of them – you know, when you invest in a new brand, you’re talking about a massive investment in some regards. When I started, it was a licence deal so they would invest. I know because I invested at least a half a million into a new brand, so I know it was a hard sale. And then when I started supplying myself, I didn’t have any sales so they just thought, “We’re just not going to invest – we could go with this brand and we know off the bat that we’ll make a quarter of a million in the first drop. Yeah, she gets notoriety and she gets press but we don’t get any sales traction.” So it was really really difficult initially. The stereotype worked to my advantage in a way because I did get the meetings with the CEOs or the CEOs went to the buyers and said, “Listen, you have to take this meeting.” But then it worked against me because they thought, “Oh, a model. Come on, she’s going to be here one day and out the next. Forget it – we’re not going to make this investment.” But all I needed was one stockist and I got the one stockist and then I worked at it and the sales were great. Then I went to the other stockists and said, “Listen, you can stereotype all you want but I got the sales.” So, I had to be very patient and in business it’s hard. Every time you fall down you’ve got to get back up and if you think you’re not going to fall down, then shame on you, because it happens. The ones that are successful are the ones who keep getting back up.       Anna: You must have thought about branding yourself before you retired from modelling and building it up slowly. How did you start that when you were still modelling?   Caprice: Welp, I have to tell you that when you’re in the modelling business – and not only the modelling business but when you have some notoriety behind that and you become sort of a household name – you start to believe your own bullsh*t, I have to tell you. It’s fantastic on the ego but you don’t think it’s going to end, ever. But for some reason – I think because I know what it’s like to not have enough money to eat – I know what it’s like to be really really down and out, from nothing. When I was 18, my mom said, “See ya, good luck, write me a postcard!” I had no money, it was hard. When I started building my career, it makes you a different person: it makes you a grafter, it makes you hungry, it makes you smarter. So, I knew that the modelling industry would – I was in my 30s and that’s, like, one foot in the grave regardless of how successful you are, so I knew I had to think of Plan B. So, I thought, “What will everyone buy into?” Boom: lingerie. Easy peasy. Right? So I had to think about that while I was at the top of my game because that’s when I had the power – which I did – and I initially started out with a licence deal because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, so I let someone else take the risk. I convinced the CEO of Debenhams to do that and he did and that was a smart risk to take because I made them very very rich! Then I took the licence back and started to supply myself.         Anna: Let’s talk a bit more about the licensing. You were doing that six-year deal with Debenhams and with By Caprice Home you’ve just done a licence agreement with Sadaqat. They must’ve been totally different experiences. What kind of tips do you have for entrepreneurs who are going through that licence agreement process for the first time? Caprice: So, every deal is different. Let me explain what a licence deal is to begin with. I give them my name and they develop my brand and supply it. Boom. You get five to 12pc of sales. Now with Debenhams, they had creative control, they basically did everything and all I had to do was say, “OK, that’s pretty, yeah great”. It was pretty straightforward stuff. But with Sadaqat it’s a different kind of deal. I have creative input and control, because my name is much more established and I need to protect my name. So, it’s even more to my advantage to be more intertwined and not just to say, “Here’s my name, go get ‘em, bad boy, let’s do this.” With the Sadaqat licence deal I had to build my brand first, [they] didn’t just take me on board with this new idea. I was supplying myself for two years – and then I had the power. Then I went to Sadaqat with gold on a tray saying, “Hey, listen, after two years, we’re making money.” And they were like “Oh, oh.” They’re like the Victoria’s Secret of the home world so there were no qualms – they took it. Obviously, the contracts are iron-clad, you have to – but even with the lawyers I’m telling them what to say and what to do. I mean, you’ve got to be careful. You’re lucky if you get a good lawyer and a good standard contract but you even have to tweak the contract. You have to protect yourself, you have to protect your brand because when you enter the corporate world, they don’t have the same passion. They don’t dot their ‘i’s or cross their ‘t’s. They have more money than God. You know, even though I have a licence deal, I’m very intertwined. Every single stockist I’ve gotten myself – even with Sadaqat – but I have this monster machine. I’m still micro-managing my brand right now. And for me it was really important to go with one of the big boys because now we’re expanding to the world. I just got into Bed, Bath and Beyond, into Macy’s, I’m hoping to sign a deal with this massive conglomerate and they base themselves out of Dubai so I wouldn’t be able to expand the way I’m expanding now [without Sadaqat]. This is another thing in business: you need to know your strengths and your weaknesses. Though some people become very complacent, “Oh we’re making money, we’re making six figures, this is great”, ba ba ba, but you have to keep growing. If you stay stagnant, you will die. And I didn’t have the capability to grow my brand. I needed more people – and even though I was working 12-hour days, I’d just had two babies and they are my priority and they are my business. So, I just couldn’t do it myself and that’s why I went for a licence deal. Anna: Do you feel you were slightly taken advantage because of your lack of business experience in the early days? Caprice: If you think you’re being taken advantage of then boo-hoo on you! It’s your responsibility to go out there and to learn, so that no one ever takes advantage of you. So I’m never a victim here. I am taking full responsibility for everything that happens in my life and that’s my power and that’s what I recommend to all – especially – I’m all about the women and I’m such a supporter of women in business and women in general. Don’t ever be a victim because a lot of us play that card. Don’t do it – you lose your power. You’re not a victim – you take responsibility and you move forward. I learned every integral part of my business. I mean, I trained the people who are so-called ‘specialists’. I know how to manage my brand, I know how to market my brand, I know how to negotiate, I know about the factories. I know a lot about production – I don’t know everything about production – but it hasn’t been a detriment to me, not knowing everything about the factories. But I made it a point to educate myself and I never went to university, I’m a grafter. It’s all about Googling, researching, asking and just doing. Sort of learning from the streets, learning from your mistakes and never making them again. Anna: Has Brexit had any impact on the business? Caprice: Yes. With the exchange rate – massive. Not so much on me anymore. When I was supplying myself, it killed me. The sterling dropped so tremendously and then obviously sales were impacted. It’s tough, I’m not going to lie. Retail is tough. That’s why I need to expand to the world. Anna: I’ve read that when you started By Caprice that you made underwear and swimwear that you wanted to wear and that went wrong because sales suffered as a result. Caprice: Oh my God, everyone knows?! I know now that my personal taste, no one else likes. So I will never let my ego get involved again because I lost money. It makes me laugh with corporates, right – they spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on these marketing research groups. Just look at your sales! Look at your weekly sales and understand your customer. Anna: I understand that you were looking at the sales when you were partnered with Debenhams and that’s how you got ahead and got yourself out of the licence agreement to start supplying yourself. That’s what I do, every single week. I’m obsessed with sell-through on every single stockist and that’s how I get to know my customers. And you know what? By the way, my customer changes. It used to be so young and I catered to that. Now, maybe because I’m middle-aged, it’s getting slightly older: age 18-42. It used to be 18-30. So I have to cater to that, the designs are different – they’re a little bit more elegant, a little bit more timeless, rather than quirky and fun. Anna: Now we have more celebrity-led products, but you were among the early adopters. Caprice: I was the first one. I know Elle Macpherson was doing it but only in Australia, she hadn’t come over [to the UK], so I was one of the first ones. That’s why it was so difficult for Terry Green – he was the CEO of Debenhams – to come on-board right away because this was a new concept. It wasn’t tried and tested. He took a big leap and was hailed king of innovation as a result because we sold out in, like, two weeks. This was the initial stages in 2000, I think. That’s why I initially stopped doing a licence deal with Debenhams because I knew I wouldn’t be the flavour of the moment and they’d dump me. I had to be on top of my game and supply myself to other stockists while my name was hot, while the brand name Caprice was popular – and respected. Anna: How do you think celebrity products have evolved since the early noughties?        Caprice: You know what? It’s saturated. The market is absolutely saturated with celebrity endorsement. I think with some of the celebrities, it works for a year and they’re finished. Then they see who the hot Love Island winner is of that season and then they go with it. With my product it’s different. I actually supplied, I actually paid for the business, I’ve actually become a brand name. I’ve gone past the celebrity endorsement. This is a business.     Anna: What kind of difficulties did you face in moving away from Debenhams? Caprice: The biggest difficulty was that I was risking all my own money. In that first drop I almost lost a quarter of a million. That hurt! And then with the exchange rate – although it impacted me in 2009 – I lost over a million, just in exchange rate. I was so silly. I didn’t understand forwards, I didn’t understand how to buy currencies because remember all my factories were in China, so I was paying for everything in American dollars and then I was getting paid by my stockists in sterling. So I was constantly exchanging money and I just didn’t understand how to do it properly. I didn’t understand forwards, I didn’t understand how to hedge, I would just buy on-spot. How stupid was that? It went from 2.05 to 1.37 almost overnight. I didn’t understand it so I lost a lot of money, so I never made that mistake again. Anna: Of course, because you have to wear all the hats, as they say, when you’re a business owner but there are some things you just don’t have a natural knack for. Caprice: No, and you know what I did? I did research and there’s some great, great Government funding and you have to go and research it. And there are people out there who will help you. This country encourages small business. There’s so much help out there – it’s really, really impressive, actually.    Anna: Was it a combination of the money you made from modelling plus Government investment? Caprice: Yeah, it was my savings, which I lost a lot, so I was hurting. Yet my brand was doing really really well.  By the way, everyone, I pay all my taxes and I’ve paid a lot of taxes for the last 500 years. I have the right to access this and I was smart enough to do this, otherwise I would’ve lost my business. Anna: It can be so volatile. Caprice: Oh, you just don’t know. Not only that, I had to completely readjust my business plan. But thank goodness, one thing that was really important to me was the people who worked for me – I’m quite loyal. So, I wanted that to be the last port of call to get rid of any employees. You’re supporting families, for goodness sakes. So I was fortunate enough to keep my employees but I had to readjust my whole business plan.    Anna: What kind of adjustments did you have to make? Caprice: Well, I had to cut back, even my collections, I had to cut back. I couldn’t take any risk anymore. Before, I was buying a lot of extra stock because I knew the buying patterns of my stockists and my stockists were buying differently. They were much more cautious. And they weren’t buying enough – I knew they weren’t buying enough. So I would take that risk and I would buy deeper at my own risk. I had to stop doing that. So it did impact because I would run out of stock and that’s not good for a business as well – if you’re selling two months later then you have ‘out of stock’ all over the place, it’s a disaster, but I couldn’t take that risk anymore.   I think for people starting out, understanding cash flow, because normally when you start a business you don’t see a return for three to five years – know that. And passion – you’ve got to be obsessed with what you’re doing because you live it. Anna: Great. Well, that’s it from me unless there’s anything you’d like to add or any other wisdom. Caprice: Honey, we killed it – ten times over! Anna: Ha! Thanks for coming on the show. You can find out more about Caprice at capricebourret.com. You can also visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for entrepreneur Q&As and other advice to help you start your own business. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Until next time, thank you for listening.  

In this episode, we sat down for a laid back conversation with Kate Spinner - a local mom and CrossFit box owner. She shares her journey to motherhood, baby Luke's birth story. And we had a lot of fun discussing fitness - prenatal, postpartum, and after a miscarriage, and chatting about that mompreneur life. We hope you enjoy this interview! 3:30 – Candace What’s Up 5:55 – Anna What’s Up 7:15 – Kate What’s Up 8:32 – Kate’s Introduction 11:20 – First Miscarriage – Early Term Miscarriage 12:35 – Keeping Baby Hope’s Memory Alive 16:50 – Second Miscarriage/Stillbirth 17:10 – Getting pregnant with Luke Mindset – fear of pregnancy after miscarriages 19:10 – How she felt during pregnancy Zofran, Progesterone shots 21:27 – Birth story C-section, NICU stay 25:25 – The journey back to fitness Working out while pregnant Each person is different Subchorionic hematoma 35:28 – Fitness in the postpartum period Diastasis Recti, Birthfit Functional Progressions 37:20 – Mompreneur Life Kate’s desire to get back into competing 46:10 – I Am Stronger – nonprofit Kate runs – www.iamstronger.org Free girls class on Saturdays Girls Only Fall Camp 48:40 – Progesterone in 3rdpregnancy because of pre-term labor details 51:25 – Rainbow babies 52:55 – How do you feel you’re Delivering Strength? 55:10 – How can our listeners find you? cocacrossfit.com iamstronger.org katerawlings.com Delivering Strength: Find Us Online Website – www.deliveringstrength.com Facebook – www.facebook.com/deliveringstrength Instagram – www.instagram.com/deliveringstrength Facebook Community – www.facebook.com/groups/DeliveringStrength/   If you have show topics or guests that you’d like to recommend to us, please feel free to send us a message through our website or send us an email at info@deliveringstrength.com. Find Dr. Candace Gesicki, DC at Cleveland Chiropractic & Integrative Health Center or Birthfit Cleveland. 

Jaimie Schrock has a story to tell. After three cesarean sections, she researched and fought to have the VBA3C (vaginal birth after 3 cesareans) that she wanted. She shares her journey in this episode and also in her book that is about to be released – A VBAC Mom and Her Journey. Her journey and outlook on life is inspiring and uplifting. We're so glad she has shared it with us! Please share this episode and these resources with anyone who has had a cesarean. Let them know that resources are available and they can have a say in their future births!  Show Notes: 1:10 – Delivering Strength will be at the Cleveland Birth Expo April 15th from 12 p.m.- 3 p.m. at the Holiday Inn in Independence at the BIRTHFIT Cleveland Booth. We will have giveaways at the table and Candace will be offering 25% off any BIRTHFIT Cleveland services booked on site! 1:56 – Intro to Episode 3:20 – Candace What’s Up 7:50 – Anna What’s Up 11:21 – Jaimie What’s Up 14:10 – Intro Jaimie & Babies 1-3   18:30 – Baby #4 32:24 – What is the medical reasoning/fear of vaginal birth after a cesarean? 34:54 – Why do doctors shy away from VBAC? Book Recommendation – Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care https://amzn.to/2EHFHj9 37:33 – Jaimie’s doula and how she supported Jaimie through her pregnancy and birth 40:04 – Jaimie’s experience becoming a doula 42:35 – ICAN – International Cesarean Awareness Network ICAN – National http://www.ican-online.org ICAN – Cleveland http://icanofgreatercleveland.org 43:50 – Jaimie’s story online & where to find her/her resources: Website:http://www.jaimieschrock.com Book:http://www.jaimieschrock.com/the-book/(In the works! Stay tuned for more details on the release of her book.) Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/AVBACMomandHerJourney/ Journey to VBAC Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/129298131040565/?source_id=447610075394905 47:00 – Advice for women who want to VBAC 50:20 – How do you feel like you’re Delivering Strength? Delivering Strength: Find Us Online Website – www.deliveringstrength.com Facebook – www.facebook.com/deliveringstrength Instagram – www.instagram.com/deliveringstrength Facebook Community – www.facebook.com/groups/DeliveringStrength/ If you have show topics or guests that you’d like to recommend to us, please feel free to send us a message through our website or send us an email at info@deliveringstrength.com. Find Dr. Candace Gesicki, DC at Cleveland Chiropractic & Integrative Health Center or Birthfit Cleveland. We’d love to hear from you! Do you have comments on today’s episode? Ideas for future episodes? Questions for us? Send them to us at info@deliveringstrength.com.

This week we sat down with Brianna K, momma of two, YouTube Vlogger, and #BossMom. We discussed baby led weaning, working from home, going back to work from maternity leave, traveling for work, pumping while traveling, and a whole lot more! This is such a great, insightful episode for working moms with littles - or anyone who may become a working mom with a baby in the future! Show Notes  Each of our episodes will have some show notes so that you can skip to specific topics that apply to you if that’s what you’d like to do. Those show notes for this episode are shown below.  1:15 Delivering Strength will be at the Cleveland Birth Expo April 15th from 10-3pm at the Holiday Inn in Independence at the BIRTHFIT Cleveland Booth. We will have giveaways at the table and Candace will be offering 25% off any BIRTHFIT Cleveland services booked on site! 2:50 – Brianna K introduction 3:30 – Candace What’s Up 4:20 – Anna What’s Up E-meals 7:45 – Brianna What’s Up 15:00 – Maternity leave Maternity leave Paternity leave 27:40 – Transition back to work 32:00 – Breastfeeding + pumping while traveling Skip hop bag Madela pump and style Tips for breastfeeding while working + pumping while traveling + security 40:00 – Working from home 43:35 – Blocking calendar 52:47 – Tips for moms returning to work Brianna’s first work trip 55:10 – Traveling with a baby 57:07 – How do you feel like you are Delivering Strength through the work that you do? Find Brianna Online: YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0uHB4d6u0jIJSgPC3WzBFw Instagram: www.instagram.com/BitsofBri Delivering Strength: Find Us Online Website – www.deliveringstrength.com Facebook – www.facebook.com/deliveringstrength Instagram – www.instagram.com/deliveringstrength Facebook Community – www.facebook.com/groups/DeliveringStrength/ If you have show topics or guests that you’d like to recommend to us, please feel free to send us a message through our website or send us an email at info@deliveringstrength.com. Find Dr. Candace Gesicki, DC at Cleveland Chiropractic & Integrative Health Center or Birthfit Cleveland. We'd love to hear from you! Do you have comments on today's episode? Ideas for future episodes? Questions for us? Send them to us at info@deliveringstrength.com. Thanks!

This week we sat down with Christy Phillips Adkins, 8 times CrossFit Games Athlete, for a conversation on pregnancy and fitness. Throughout her pregnancy, Christy has been soaking in ALL the info to make sure she's approaching this period of life & birth (the greatest athletic event of her life!) appropriately. Whether you are a weekend warrior at your local gym or an uber competitive athlete, this episode has something for you! Show Notes  1:13 Giveaways!  In February we will be giving out two $30 gift certificates to Café Avalaun.  Leave us a review on iTunes or Facebook to enter!  Send us a screenshoot to info@deliveringstrength.com to enter! 3:13 – Christy Bio BIRTHFIT Prenatal Series 5:50 – Candace What’s Up Wonder Weeks Book 6:18 – Anna What’s Up Ganas Fitness The Winter Classic 8:56 – Christy What’s Up Training United BIRTHFIT Professional Seminar (Coming to Cleveland in May!) 15:32 – How Christy has been feeling during her pregnancy 20:12 – How Christy has been handling fitness during her pregnancy Expecting Better by Emily Oster Subchorionic bleed 27:50 – “Highlight reel” that is Instagram vs. reality when training 28:25 – Feedback from social media followers 29:51 – Instagram photo: coning during a strict muscle up 31:31 – BIRTHFIT Consult as prehab Movements to cut out during pregnancy 34:45 – What is coning?  Diastasis rectus abdominis explanation.  37:25 – You don’t have to pee when you jump rope! 38:20 – BIRTHFIT Functional Progressions 43:37 – Christy’s advice for athletes who enjoy being competitive Approaching birth like a big athletic event Book recommendation: Exercising through Your Pregnancy What you “should/shouldn’t” do / Intention 49:00 – Mindwork & Breathwork Belly breathing Mindset – Dawn Fletcher of MentalityWOD 54:22 – How are you preparing for birth? Birthfit Prenatal Series – Cleveland, Ohio 57:45 – How Christy’s husband is feeling about becoming a dad 1:02:00 – Getting back to competitive CrossFit after baby Find Christy Online Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/christyphillipsadkins/ Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/ChristyPhillipsAdkins/ Twitter – https:// twitter.com/ChristyPhill Training United (Beyond the Whiteboard) –  https://beyondthewhiteboard.com/coaching/trainingunited/ Delivering Strength: Find Us Online Website – deliveringstrength.com Facebook – facebook.com/deliveringstrength Instagram – instagram.com/deliveringstrength Facebook Community – facebook.com/groups/DeliveringStrength/ If you have show topics or guests that you’d like to recommend to us, please feel free to send us a message through our website or send us an email at info@deliveringstrength.com.

1:10 Expectful – Expectful – We are proud to share with our listeners a great resource – Expectful: A guided meditation app for your fertility, pregnancy and motherhood journey. Sign up for a free two week trial at expectful.com/delivering. 3:03 -- Anna Gannon introduction 4:40 – Candace What’s Up BIRTHFIT Professional Seminar- http://www.birthfit.com/education/seminars/ 8:00 – Anna What’s Up 10:20 – Prenatal massages Power Provider: The Womb Wellness Center 13:10 – Anna Gannon Bio 14:24 – Anna Gannon’s journey to where she is at now 23:15 – Anna Gannon and founder of Expectful, Mark Krassner, connect 25:04 – How Expectful has grown over the last year and a half Motherhood Meditations Trying to Conceive Meditations Pregnancy Meditations 27:20 – Dr. Jessica Zucker- #IHadAMiscarriage Campaign http://shop.drjessicazucker.com/about/ 29:30 – Structure of the meditation app Expectful 36:26 – Where is Anna Gannon at with her meditation practice as mother of a two year old 38:00 – Why “meditation has transformed my life more than anything else” 43:05 – How do I start a meditation practice? 47:20 – Meditation during the postpartum period Postpartum depression 54:45 – How do you feel like you are Delivering Strength to women through the motherhood transition with what you are doing with Expectful? Find Anna Gannon/Expectful Online: Expectful Website: http://www.expectful.com/delivering Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/expectful/ Instagram:  @expectful Delivering Strength: Find Us Online Website – com Facebook – com/deliveringstrength Instagram – com/deliveringstrength Facebook Community – com/groups/DeliveringStrength/   If you have show topics or guests that you’d like to recommend to us, please feel free to send us a message through our website or send us an email at info@deliveringstrength.com.   Our next Cleveland Birth Worker Coffee Date is this week!  Join us on Thursday, December 7th from 10am-12pm at Blackbird Baking Company in Lakewood to network with other birth workers in Cleveland. 

This week we sat down with Jenna Hull, prenatal yoga instructor at Awaken Yoga and birth junkie, for a conversation on the benefits of yoga during pregnancy.  Show Notes  1:10 Expectful – Expectful – We are proud to share with our listeners a great resource – Expectful: A guided meditation app for your fertility, pregnancy and motherhood journey. Sign up for a free two week trial at expectful.com/delivering. 3:00 – Candace What’s Up 5:59 – Anna What’s Up 9:20 – Jenna What’s Up 10:04 – Jenna Bio DONA Doula Training Rebozo Workshop with Gena Kirby Spinning Babies Prenatal Yoga at Awaken Yoga Baby and Me Class at Awaken Yoga Birth Partner Class 11:40 – Switching from a medicated hospital birth to a homebirth at 30+ weeks pregnant Homebirth Option of Cleveland 18:03 – Jenna’s path to becoming a prenatal yoga instructor 22:12 – Prenatal yoga teacher training at Awaken Yoga for yoga teachers, doulas, midwives, birth workers, and anyone else interested! 23:58 – Goddess Intoxication Workshop at Awaken Yoga 25:16 – Benefits of prenatal yoga 28:38 – When can someone begin taking prenatal yoga? 29:50 – What does a prenatal yoga class look like? 31:38 – BIRTHFIT Cleveland Prenatal Fitness 34:00 – Bradley Method of Natural Childbirth 34:25 – Other prenatal yoga offerings in Northeast Ohio Blue Sky Yoga in Willoughby with Paula Gardner 34:50 – Non-pregnancy specific yoga during pregnancy Hot yoga 38:30 – Incorporating Spinning Babies into prenatal yoga 40:30 – Optimal fetal position 47:13 – Birth partner workshop at Awaken Yoga 50:10 – Baby and Me Yoga at Awaken Yoga, offered monthly 52:12 – How do you feel like you’re Delivering Strength to the families in NEO through what you do? Find Jenna Online: Awaken Yoga Studio Website: http://awakenyoga.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/awakenyoga/ Chrysalis- Yoga Mama Doula FB Page Instagram:  @jennahull27 Other shout-outs from Jenna: Mother Rising Studio Light Footsteps Delivering Strength: Find Us Online Website – com Facebook – com/deliveringstrength Instagram – com/deliveringstrength Facebook Community – com/groups/DeliveringStrength/ If you have show topics or guests that you’d like to recommend to us, please feel free to send us a message through our website or send us an email at info@deliveringstrength.com.

This week we sat down with Jolynn Radin, owner of The Womb Wellness Center, for a conversation on preparing the body physically and mentally for a natural childbirth. 1:10 Expectful – Expectful – We are proud to share with our listeners a great resource – Expectful: A guided meditation app for your fertility, pregnancy and motherhood journey. Sign up for a free two week trial at expectful.com/delivering. 3:00 – Candace What’s Up BIRTHFIT Professional Seminar- http://www.birthfit.com/education/seminars/ 5:26 – Anna What’s Up 7:44 – Jolynn Introduction 8:20 – Jolynn Bio 13:18 – Preparing your body in a physical way for birth 14:26 – Prenatal massage in the first trimester and types of massage techniques Maya Abdominal Massage- https://arvigotherapy.com/ 16:26 – Why is massage important in pregnancy? 19:10 – Addressing imbalances in the pelvis for optimal fetal positioning and birth prep 21:45 – Ideal body mechanics during pregnancy 24:58 – Spinning Babies Spinning Babies- https://spinningbabies.com/ Spinning Babies- Daily Essentials 28:07 – Baby positioning and belly mapping 30:50 – Just because you are pregnant, does not mean you need to be in pain during pregnancy 32:27 – Supporting herbs during pregnancy Light Footsteps- http://www.lightfootsteps.com/ Light Footsteps Facebook Page- https://www.facebook.com/LightFootsteps/ Susan Weeds- Wise Woman Herbal for the Childbearing Year Aviva Rams- The Natural Pregnancy Book 35:10 – Tonifying the uterus 36:10 – Mountain Meadow Herbs Gentle Birth Formula- 2oz Gentle Birth Formula- 4oz Gentle Birth Formula w/o Blue Cohosh- 2oz Gentle Birth Formula w/o Blue Cohosh- 4oz **Talk with your care provider before adding any new herbal formulas or supplements into your routine. These links are a reference as to what our guest discussed on the podcast from her personal experience, not as a professional recommendation.** 37:44 – Preparing the mind for birth Expectful- Sign up for a free two week trial at expectful.com/delivering. Bountiful Beautiful Blissful by St. Martin’s Griffin 38:33 – BIRTHFIT Online Programming- http://www.birthfit.com/education/coaching/ 42:52 – Birthing From Within by Partera Press 45:38 – Favorite Birth Mantras 47:30 – OP Baby 49:20 – How do you feel like you’re Delivering Strength to the families in NEO through what you do? Find Jolynn Online: The Womb Wellness Center Website: http://thewombwellnesscenter.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheWombWellnessCenter/ Instagram:  @thewombwellnesscenter Power provider link on our website:  https://deliveringstrength.com/portfolio-items/the-womb-wellness-center/   Delivering Strength: Find Us Online Website – com Facebook – com/deliveringstrength Instagram – com/deliveringstrength Facebook Community – com/groups/DeliveringStrength/   If you have show topics or guests that you’d like to recommend to us, please feel free to send us a message through our website or send us an email at info@deliveringstrength.com.   Our next Cleveland Birth Worker Coffee Date is this week!  Join us on Thursday, November 2nd from 10am-1pm at Erie Island Coffee Company in Rocky River to network with other birth workers in Cleveland. 

In honor of Pregnancy & Infant Loss Remembrance Day/Week, we sat down for a conversation with local bereavement doula, Ashley Rainey, of Nurtured Foundation Doula Services. A helpful listen for anyone experiencing a loss, and insightful info for all so that you can be prepared if this happens to you or someone you know and love. Delivering Strength Podcast | Real talk about pregnancy, birth and postpartum health. | www.deliveringstrength.com DS 009: Miscarriage and Infant Loss with Bereavement Doula Ashley Rainey SHOW NOTES:  1:10 Expectful - Expectful – We are proud to share with our listeners a great resource – Expectful: A guided meditation app for your fertility, pregnancy and motherhood journey. Sign up for a free two week trial at www.expectful.com/delivering. 3:30 – Candace What’s Up 5:30 – Anna What’s Up 8:53 – Ashley What’s Up 9:30 – Ashley Bio 13:10 – Anna’s experience with two miscarriages 19:45 – Bereavement clients – where they come from for Ashley 21:08 – What a bereavement doula does 25:30 – At what point would someone contact a bereavement doula? 26:50 – What kind of training is involved in becoming a bereavement doula? 27:41 About Sufficient Grace Ministries - http://sufficientgraceministries.org/support-sufficient-grace/ Sufficient Grace Book - http://sufficientgraceministries.org/sufficient-grace-the-book/ Regional Support - http://sufficientgraceministries.org/find-support/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/SufficientGraceMinistries/ Training http://sufficientgraceministries.org/sgm-perinatal-loss-support-training/ Tuesday, October 24 – Birth Story Circle with a Focus on Loss Awareness at Mother Rising – https://www.facebook.com/events/101311337266080/ 30:30 – Statistics of miscarriage and loss 31:45 – Reducing the stigma of talking about this topic, waiting to tell people you’re pregnant until 12 weeks 35:10 – Waiting to tell people you’re pregnant until you’re 12 weeks, knowing what to say if someone tells you that they’ve experienced a loss 38:05 – Passing judgment on someone who’s grieving 39:35 – Ways to keep your baby’s memory alive – balloon releases, toy donation drive, knitting hats, etc. 40:13 – Rainbow babies 42:34 – Moms going through a rainbow pregnancy might need some extra support 43:17 – Support groups – Sufficient Grace Ministries - http://sufficientgraceministries.org/northeast-ohio/ 44:15 – Events at Circle of Life Birth Services in Lakewood http://www.circleoflifebirthservices.org/events/ 45:03 – People who have experienced loss will likely be struggling through pregnancy 47:41 – Emergency ultrasounds and care providers – care providers are typically supportive of fitting you in 47:08 – Typical recommendation that labwork only be done after 3 miscarriages? 49:42 – What kind of questions do you get as a bereavement doula? 51:25 – What can someone expect when someone experiences a miscarriage? 52:21 – What is a D&C? 53:14 – What can you do with what you pass? 54:52 – Recommended books: (all of them listed on this page) 55:58 – Does someone have to have religious affiliation to be supported by Sufficient Grace Ministries? 56:17 – How do you feel like you’re Delivering Strength to the families in NEO through what you do? Find Ashley Online: Sufficient Grace Ministries: http://sufficientgraceministries.org Nurtured Foundation Doula Services: Website: https://nurturedfoundation.com  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nurturedfoundationdoula/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nurtured_foundation_doulas/ 59:18 Power provider link on our website:  https://deliveringstrength.com/portfolio-items/nurtured-foundation-doula-services/ Delivering Strength: Find Us Online Website – deliveringstrength.com Facebook – facebook.com/deliveringstrength Instagram – instagram.com/deliveringstrength Facebook Community – facebook.com/groups/DeliveringStrength/

We're back with another weekend of the Cabral House Call! Here are today's community questions: Susie: Brown mark on upper lip and it’s not hair - is it hormone related? Jen: What’s better for energy during longer run & bike workouts - goo packs & caffeine or coffee? Anna: What's your opinion on collagen powder drinks for joint pain? Enjoy the Q&A and all the tips along the way! - - - Show Notes: See all the Show Notes, Links & Recommendations at: http://stephencabral.com/154 - - - Get Your Questioned Answered! Each week I answer our community questions and I'd love to answer yours on an upcoming show: http://StephenCabral.com/askcabral