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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit laurathomas.substack.comOne of the things that came out of the 2023 Reader Survey was that you wanted a Q+A/AMA of the pod. So we're giving it a shot. Now our monthly pod schedule will consist of 1-2 guest episodes a month, with 1 Q+A with myself and Lucy. Guest episodes will be free for everyone to listen to, with the Q+A episodes being a perk for paid subscribers. In these episodes, we'll be answering the more juicer questions… and the answers may be a little on the spicy side! We're sharing a trailer of today's episode with free subscribers to give you a taste of what you can expect. And we'll always make sure there's something in there for everyone - whether you're a parent or a nutrition student, or just here for rice cake drama (IYKYK).Today I'm joined by CIHAS audio engineer and host of the podcast , Dearlove, to answer listener and reader questions. Tune in to hear us:* Revive and old classic (DSMG fans, this one's for you!)* Share non-lame-gym-bro snack ideas for pre/post workout* Explain why a certain gut health shot is a lot like a bad night out* Talking about why it's important to be calm in the face of a new medical diagnosis rather than falling into diet culture* Offering some advice towards handling the challenges of co-parenting with someone whose views on diet culture are very different from your own* And lastly, why you should ignore influencers who boast about their kids eating stilton and sushiAgain paid subscribers can set up their own private RSS feed to listen to paid-only episodes in their favourite podcast player by following these instructions.This was a super fun episode to create and I know you'll love it too!Find out more about Lucy here.Follow her on Instagram here and here.Follow here on Substack Follow Laura on Instagram here.Subscribe to Laura's newsletter here.TranscriptLaura: Hey, and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack podcast, where we talk about food, bodies, and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas. I'm an anti diet registered nutritionist, and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter.Lucy: And I'm . I am the audio engineer for CIHAS podcast normally, and I also host the food podcast, . Uh, I'm delighted to be joining you for this, Laura. This is really fun.Laura: So we're mixing it up a little bit today to answer some listener questions that you all sent in. I've asked Lucy to join me so that I'm not just sat here talking to myself, but Lucy, I actually have a little surprise for you that I didn't tell you about. So I'm putting you on the spot, but don't worry, It's hopefully a fun surprise. It's not high stakes. But I don't know if you know, but I used to have another podcast called Don't Salt My Game. And at the beginning…Lucy: I'm aware of it.Laura: Oh yeah, you've heard of it. Okay, that's good. That's a good start. At the beginning of every episode, I used to ask my guests some quick fire questions. So I'm just like, rapid speed, throw them out and justLucy: I remember this.Laura: Just throw whatever comes to the top of your head, okay? So it's meant to be fun.Lucy: Okay, I'm on the spot. I'm in the hot seat. I'm ready.Laura: You ready? Alright. Here we go. Tacos or pizza?

Hey and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? Podcast. This week I'm talking to specialist diabetes dietitian Erin Phillips about all things insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Erin shares some background on what happens in the body that leads to type 2 diabetes, why ‘prediabetes' is a dubious diagnosis and the things the keto-bros often leave out this conversation. We talk about why sugar and higher weight aren't the cause of type 2 diabetes, and how there is so much more we can do to care for diabetes outside of cutting carbs and losing weight, especially if you have a background of an ED or disordered eating. Lots of you have requested more content around this topic - let me know what questions you still have after listening to this episode!Find out more about Erin's work here.Follow her on Instagram here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Subscribe to Laura's newsletter here.Enrol in the Raising Embodied Eaters course here.Here's the transcript in full:INTROErin: I think sometimes a diagnosis of prediabetes or type 2 diabetes can be a traumatic event, especially when it's not in the presence of someone caring and that you trust. Or especially if you have a family history of diabetes where you've seen…maybe some scary things. Which I will – now that I said that – I will add that it's, that's not a definite outcome either, those scary things, yeah.But it can be, that can be really stressful, and that's the opposite of what is helpful for blood sugars.Laura: Hey and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast where we talk about appetite, bodies and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas, I'm an anti-diet registered nutritionist and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter.Today's guest is registered dietitian Erin Phillips. Erin's work is grounded in health at every size and fat positive nutrition. She has an advanced certification as a diabetes specialist and has spent most of her career working with people living with all types of diabetes. She has a private practice that focuses primarily on the intersection of diabetes and eating disorders. She works with people living with diabetes through individual counselling, as well as providing consultation to clinicians looking to be more grounded and confident in supporting their clients and patients with co-occurring diagnoses of diabetes and eating disorders. So I've had a lot of feedback from newsletter readers and people who listen to the podcast saying that you'd like more information about weight-inclusive approaches to so-called prediabetes – which we'll get into in a minute – insulin resistance and elevated glucose levels as well as type 2 diabetes. Most of the advice out there centers on carbs. So I was excited to talk to Erin about why these approaches are not only unhelpful for a lot of folks, but how they can be harmful. And why you don't need to get sucked into diet culture to care for yourself. In this episode, we discuss why type 2 diabetes isn't caused by too much sugar or having a bigger body, why pre-diabetes is a fake diagnosis, and why you don't need to cut out carbs to manage your blood sugar. I'm so excited for you to hear this episode. But before we get to Erin, I want to remind you that the Can I Have Another Snack? universe is entirely listener and reader supported. If you get something out of the work that we do here, please help support us by becoming a paid subscriber. It's £5 a month or £50 for the year. And as well as getting you loads of cool perks, you help guarantee the sustainability of this newsletter, have a say in the work that we do here and help ensure I can keep delivering deeply researched pieces that provide a diet culture-free take on hot nutrition topics like ultra processed foods, the Zoe app, and the deep dive on folic acid and folate that I just did recently.All of those you can read at laurathomas.substack.com if you haven't already. And if you're not totally sold yet then maybe this lovely review that I got recently will help convince you. So one reader wrote: “I feel so lucky that I found your work around the same time I started feeding my kid real food. It saved me so much angst and has allowed me to relax and really enjoy seeing him explore eating. Your essays on sugar especially was a game changer. I'm sure it won't always be plain sailing, but I feel so much more prepared to ride the waves of his changing appetite. and tastes as he grows, accepting them as a feature and not a bug.So hopefully he can have a much more relaxed relationship to food than I had for a long time. And I pay my £5 a month because I so value the work you put into your writing and think it's worth paying for. There's a lot of free advice out there, but I never know what I can trust. This is such a safe haven.”So yeah, it's £5 a month or £50 for the year. You can sign up at laurathomas.substack.com or check out the show notes for this episode. And if you can't stretch to a paid subscription right now, you can email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk for a comp subscription. No questions asked. You don't need to justify yourself. Just put ‘Snacks' in the subject line. This is actually going to be our last podcast of the year. I'll be back in your ears in January with brand new guests. Paid subscribers will continue to hear from me in your inboxes and in the group chat, where I'm going to be holding space for all the venting and screaming at diet culture shit that gets dredged up over the holidays and into January. If you'd like to join us, you can sign up at LauraThomas.substack.com. Otherwise I'll speak to you in January. Okay, team. Over to Erin. MAIN EPISODE:Alright, Erin. Can you please start by telling us a bit more about you and the work that you do?Erin: Yeah. I am a registered dietitian. Well, in the United States, based in, um, the Seattle, Washington…I was gonna say, the ‘state of Washington'! And I'm also a certified diabetes care and education specialist. It used to be a certified diabetes educator and they wanted to add more letters. So I'm in private practice and I focus on working with people with diabetes and eating disorders at the same time, or people who had a history of an eating disorder and then were recently diagnosed with diabetes but don't want like It wouldn't be helpful or safe for them to go to just any diabetes educator.So those are the folks that I work with.Laura: Okay, so you're kind of working at that intersection between eating disorder care and diabetes care. And I think, like, what's important to highlight, which people might not be...aware of or familiar with is the idea that people who have type 2 diabetes, I would say in particular, but all forms of diabetes are at a heightened risk of disordered eating and eating disorders. And does that relationship…? No, it doesn't go the other way, does it?Erin: I think it does.Laura: You think it does?Erin: I think it does. There isn't a lot of research on it, but clinically, I absolutely see that.Laura: Okay. That's interesting. Erin: And eating disorders and gestational diabetes. I was talking with a colleague about this, that we see people with a history of, of an eating disorder, it feels like are at much higher risk of gestational diabetes.But the research…I don't, I haven't looked into the research on that, but we definitely see it clinically.Laura: Yeah, that's an interesting observation that you've noticed. So, you use this term diabetes educator. We don't have that here so it might be helpful to just kind of explain a little bit about what that is and then maybe we can unpack what exactly we're talking about here when we talk about diabetes and sort of associated terms.Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks for clarifying that. I love talking to people in other countries to learn about like, what do things look like there? So, a diabetes educator, I know they have them in the States and in Canada, maybe Australia, but basically what it is, is...Laura: Just to clarify, like, okay, in case my, like...dietetics colleagues are all like yelling at me right now. We do have dieticians that specialise in diabetes, but it's like the diabetes educator title is kind of a, like a bolt on right to your, your like baseline nutrition training. Is that right?Erin: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So here to become a. a certified diabetes care and education specialist – that's such a mouthful! You, yeah, you need, I think it's 2000 hours of working with people with diabetes after you've become, become a dietitian or you can be a social worker, you can be a pharmacist, you can be a nurse. There's lots of nurses that are diabetes educators. So you get those practice hours, you get continuing, I don't know how many hours of continuing education a lot. And then you take an exam, right? Then it's like, well, at least here, like the dietitian renewal where every five years you renew by getting enough continuing education credits.Laura: Okay, so it's safe to say you know a lot of stuff about diabetes.Erin: Yes, I think so, yeah.Laura: It's kind of your thing. So, I really wanted to talk to you specifically about type 2 diabetes today because, 1) there seems to be a lot of confusion about it. 2) It kind of gets bundled up with a lot of anti-fat bias and carb-phobia and diet culture. And then 3), it's something that listeners of the podcast and readers of the newsletter have requested that we talk about. Would you mind starting by just telling us what exactly type 2 diabetes is, and how it relates to concepts like prediabetes and insulin resistance? So that's a big question. Where feels like the best place to start?Erin: I think actually starting with insulin resistance, because I think of that as kind of an umbrella and then prediabetes and type 2 diabetes fall underneath that umbrella. Yeah. So, insulin resistance is a term that means…so all humans have glucose floating around in their blood at all times. That is the main source of fuel. It's so funny to look at you while I'm talking about this because I'm like, you know this! But anyway, all humans have glucose floating around in the blood. It's our main source of fuel for the body. And then for glucose to get into our cells, we need insulin. And I always use the analogy of: insulin is the key that unlocks the cell to let the glucose in. And so insulin resistance is where that key gets a little, like, sticky or…kind of like the key to my car right now that I have to wriggle it the just the right way. So it can take a little bit longer for the glucose to get into the cell. It still happens but it just takes a little bit longer.So that is insulin resistance and that is one of the key features of both ‘prediabetes' and type 2 diabetes. Often, when I say ‘prediabetes', I do bunny ears or air quotes because it's a misunderstood term and we can totally get into that later. But so type 2 diabetes is where a body has either lived with insulin resistance long enough or something else has happened that has made, in addition to insulin resistance, glucose levels get high enough in the blood to meet this diagnostic criteria.And we've actually…this is something I love sharing with people because often type 2 diabetes is just like, all we focus on is insulin resistance, but there's actually at least 10 other changes in the body that lead to elevated glucose levels that are going on in addition to insulin resistance.Laura: Okay, before we go on, I want to actually reverse and back up a little bit here, because…so you talked about how we have glucose in our bloodstreams that needs to get into our cells all the time.That's like everybody, always – even if you're like a keto bro. What I just wanted to make really clear for anyone who's totally new to these conversations is that glucose…it gets into our bloodstream from the food that we eat and it's a sugar, right? So I think those are two important points to clarify, that we consume food, it gets broken down and digested and absorbed across the gut lumen. And that's what raises our blood glucose levels. And then insulin is the hormone that's secreted by the pancreas that unlocks the door to the cell, to let glucose move into the cell, so we have energy, so we can do things, so we can go about our business as being humans. Sometimes what can happen is that the door gets a little rusty, or the key gets a little rusty, and it's harder for that insulin to get into the cell. Is that like a fair summary of... Wow. What's going on? Erin: That was beautiful. I was nodding furiously.Laura: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like I know something about this! Right. So then can you tell us a little, like – I think you alluded to this – but maybe speak to it a little more to how the kind of the cells get rusty and how it's harder to shift insulin into the cells.Can you talk to us about what happens next? Maybe some of the symptoms people might experience and then what's going on physiologically as well.Erin: Yeah. So when a body is experiencing those like rusty cell doors, there's a lot of different hormones that are actually involved in not only glucose regulation or blood sugar regulation, but just metabolism.So glucose regulation is just one part of metabolism. And when I say metabolism, I mean using energy from food and turning that energy into energy for the body and then using energy to the body.Laura: Yeah, thank you for clarifying that because this is something I come up against a lot where like metabolism is used as this kind of catch-all phrase to mean how quickly your body burns energy or it's like this really diet culture-y kind of thing.But when you and I are talking about it... I think we're talking about all the biochemical processes that are going on inside your body, all these cascades of reactions and like how a nutrient that we ingest in food or in a supplement winds its way into our body and becomes part of these chemical reactions that are going on, like, deep inside our tissues.Erin: Yep. Yeah, that good old Krebs cycle. So when the cell door gets rusty, that's a big kind of flag for the body, I guess you could say, for the metabolic process. So, I think you mentioned the pancreas already. So the pancreas is the organ in the body that produces the hormone insulin, along with other hormones. When the pancreas notices the cell doors getting rusty, the pancreas will say, Oh, that's cool. I got this. And we'll start producing more and more insulin because the signal that the pancreas is getting is from the cells. The cells are saying, we're not getting the glucose that we're wanting, that we need, that we need to survive or not getting it as quickly or as much. And so then the pancreas starts producing more and more insulin.Laura: So it's trying to, it's getting the message that there's not enough insulin to, to get the glucose from the bloodstream into the cell so it starts to produce more. And can you maybe speak to the impact that this can have on the pancreas? Is it helpful to explain that a little bit?Erin: Yeah, yeah, I think so, because I think that's also something that people don't think about or aren't explained. Yeah. So the beta cells are the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, and as they produce more and more insulin, they start to, after... I should say after decades of producing more and more insulin, those beta cells start to kind of poop out.Laura: Yeah, they get exhausted.Erin: Yeah. That's a better word.Laura: Crap out, poop out, exhaustion. Yeah, like ultimately they're working really hard for a really long time and that takes a toll, I think is what we're saying.Erin: Yeah, they start to go on strike, like they're doing the work of more…Laura: Like the teachers and the nurses and the doctors and the train drivers and yeah, we're having a lot of strikes here at the moment.So yeah, it's almost as though governments are failing globally, right? Almost.Erin: Yeah, you have to laugh because otherwise you cry! So the pancreas starts to get exhausted, in the research that's called beta cell exhaustion or beta cell failure. So the pancreas isn't able to produce quite as much insulin anymore.And after decades and decades and decades, the pancreas will not be able to produce enough insulin to meet the needs of the body. And that's when I say, store bought insulin works really well for that.Laura: Store bought! I love it. I love it because to me that just feels like a much kinder non-judgmental framing of what I think is…often a condition that is attached with a lot of shame and judgment. Like, yeah, there's, there's a real narrative that if you get to the point where you need the store bought insulin, that that's a failure.And there's a lot of research and a lot of conversations at the moment about this idea around ‘remission' and, you know, ‘reversing diabetes' and, and all of those kinds of things, which we're going to speak to a little bit in a minute, but I think that just adds so much to the shame of needing the store bought insulin. So yeah, that just feels like a really kind kind of framing around that. So let's see, we've talked a little bit about the mechanisms whereby we find it harder to get glucose into the cells over a long, long, long period of time that can kind of exhaust the pancreas, which means that we might need to get that store bought insulin. But there's kind of a wide spectrum between, like, the cells starting to get rusty and getting to the point where you might need insulin...endogenous? Exogenous! Exogenous insulin.Erin: That's why I say store bought!Laura: Store bought, yes. And I think that's where maybe this idea of like prediabetes comes in. And we've, you've talked about how that's maybe not the most helpful label.I suppose what I'm trying to say is that there's a period where somebody might have some insulin resistance, might have elevated blood glucose levels. But it's not considered high enough for a type 2 diabetes diagnosis. So could you explain what's going on there and why that's a contested term?Erin: Yeah, yeah. So if we think about a timeline of a body experiencing insulin resistance, the first thing that will happen is the insulin resistance And then the next thing that will happen…I shouldn't say will, that's the biggest thing that I don't like about the term pr diabetes is this, that it, it makes us think that it will happen.So what could happen, a body experiences insulin resistance. What could happen is that their glucose levels start to increase to a level where they meet the prediabetes diagnostic criteria. And then, the assumption with the term prediabetes is that that means eventually, unless you do something, like in big, bold, scary letters, that eventually, your body will meet the diagnostic criteria for type 2 diabetes.But what research shows is that that's not, that's not the case. I'm maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.Laura: No, I know. That's absolutely…I think it's a really important point. And so I have, and Erin, you can tell me if this isn't quite right, but my understanding is that progression from prediabetes to type 2 diabetes is less than 2% per year or less than 10% in 5 years.And I also have another statistic that 59% of people with prediabetes return to normal blood glucose values between 1 and 11 years with no treatment at all. Does that corroborate with your understanding? .Erin: Yeah, yeah, I recently was looking into this research and that sounds like exactly what I found. And it really depends on where you look and what study you look at and what population they were looking at. But the, the biggest takeaway for me was that it's not…Laura: It's not a done deal.Erin: Yeah, someone's body can just be in that prediabetes range forever or um, either forever or they can go back to below the prediabetes range that it…by focusing on the blood glucose values, we're looking at a symptom and we're not really looking at what's going on underneath.And so it's, I find that less, less helpful for that reason.Laura: Yeah, absolutely. So I think what we're saying is that prediabetes is somewhat of a dubious diagnosis, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this too, but my sense is that like, giving that label can create a lot of shame and create stigma.It freaks people out, is my... experience of working with clients who their doctors have flagged that they have elevated blood sugar levels, let's say, and then….we know that stress and anxiety is not great for blood sugar management, so like, I mean, yeah, do you have anything to add to that? Like, what are your thoughts on that?Erin: That's exactly what I see in my practice and what I saw when I worked in a GP's office as well, that people are freaked out by either, either one of those labels and…yeah, stress and worry and anxiety and trauma. I think sometimes a diagnosis of prediabetes or type 2 diabetes can be a traumatic event, especially when it's not in the presence of someone caring and that you trust, or especially if you have a family history of diabetes where you've seen maybe some scary things, which I will – now that I said that – I will add that it's, that's not a, what's the word? That's not like a definite outcome either of those scary things. But it can be, yeah, it can be really stressful and that's the opposite of what is helpful for blood sugars.Laura: Yeah. Tell us a little about what the difference between a ‘prediabetes' diagnosis is versus a type 2 diabetes diagnosis? Is it just a difference of the level of sugar in the blood?Is it, is there a factor of time or like, is time factored into that? Like how long it's elevated for? Can you maybe speak to how, you know, you go from ‘prediabetes' as it were to type 2 diabetes?Erin: Yeah, that's a really good question. The way that I think about it is just in the diagnostic criteria, which is for a type 2 diabetes diagnosis, your blood sugar needs to get so high in the States, we usually diagnose it based on an A1c.So an A1c is usually what we use in the States to diagnose both prediabetes and type 2 diabetes. And here a type 2 diabetes is diagnosed at 6.5 and prediabetes is diagnosed at 5.7 up to 6.4. So ours is actually lower than yours in the UK and lower than Canada and lower than the rest of the world, basically.Laura: I feel like that's probably a really important and intentional thing, and we could probably go off on some conspiracy theories there. Erin: I have many. Yeah. Laura: Yeah, maybe it would be helpful to just briefly explain what HbA1c is, or A1c, and how it's measured and, like, what, what it's measuring. Erin: Yeah. A1c, I call it A1c, but you guys call it HbA1c. Should I say HbA1c?Laura: No, it's, it's fine. And I don't, I don't know why I call it that because I did my dietetics training in the US but I, I dunno, who knows, who knows?Erin: I've noticed everybody calls it something a little bit different.Laura: So, because I guess the HB refers to it being the hemoglobin is the hemoglobin one. But it's the same thing. A1c is easier, so let's just go with that. Erin: Okay, okay, cool. So A1c is a measurement of average glucose levels over the past two to three months. And the reason that it's average and two to three months is that as hemoglobin, so hemoglobin A1c is the full name of the lab value.As hemoglobin is part of our red blood cells, so in our veins and arteries, our red blood cells are floating around and glucose is also floating around. And so as glucose is bumping up against those red blood cells, it leaves a little bit of stickiness of glucose on the red blood cells. And then red blood cells live for 60 to 90 days, so that's 2 to 3 months.So then when they draw blood to check an A1C, they measure what percentage of the red blood cells are…kind of have this glucose levels on them or glucose on them. And then they can give us that A1C measurement in percentage form. So like 5.7 means... That according to the United States, we're classifying that as prediabetes and then 6.5 is type 2 diabetes. And the reason that we diagnose type 2 diabetes or all diabetes at a 6.5 is that long, long, long term research…or we followed, not we, I'm not part of it, the fancy researchers have followed thousands of people for decades and found that if blood sugar stays kind of in that 6.5 to 6.9 range, risk of those scary things like blindness or kidney disease or circulation problems is very, very, very, very, very, very low, basically the same as people without diabetes. So that's why we diagnose it at that, what I think of as like a pretty conservative level, because we want to keep people from experiencing those scary things.Laura: Absolutely. HbA1c is a sort of medium-ish term measurement of your average blood glucose levels, whereas if we were to just do a blood test randomly at any point in the day, there are like a bajillion different factors that could influence, you know, whether it's a high reading or a low reading, like how recently you ate, it can, you know, it can vary according to a whole bunch of different things.So a better way of measuring blood glucose is to look at that value over a slightly longer period of time and get that average, even though there are still some issues with looking at that number, but it's, it's a better number than, than just doing a random blood glucose test. So we've talked a little bit about insulin resistances, what prediabetes is and what type 2 diabetes is. There is this really pervasive myth that type 2 diabetes is caused by eating too much sugar. What do we know about that? Is that true?Erin: Absolutely not. Absolutely not.Laura: That was such a leading question, right?Erin: Is that true? Tell us! The way I think of that is that it's a real, just a misunderstanding of, of the complicated nature of type 2 diabetes – and when I say complicated, I mean, like referring back to those 11 different changes in the body that I mentioned earlier.Laura: Oh, so tell us about that because you, we said we were going to come back to this. What are the different changes?Erin: I can't even remember them all off the top of my head, but some of them are…the insulin resistance is one, the kidneys are responsible for filtering out our glucose when there's too much. And in type 2 diabetes, the kidneys start holding on to more glucose than we would want them to.Another is a decreased level of incretin hormones. So, GLP 1 is an incretin hormone. GIP is another incretin hormone, and those hormones are responsible for helping regulate glucose levels. And, and many people with type 2 diabetes and someone with prediabetes, they have a decreased level of those hormones.Laura: Okay, so I guess what, what you're saying here is that we often just focus on the changes to the pancreas and insulin, which is what I was asking you about before, but actually there are systemic changes that are going on throughout the whole body, right? Is that what we're saying? Erin: Yeah. Laura: Okay.Erin: Yeah. And those are absolutely not caused by eating, quote, too much sugar or eating sugar.Laura: Right, right, right, but because what we're dealing with is elevated blood glucose levels, the sort of obvious, or what people think of is the obvious pathway, as well…it's too much sugar in the diet, therefore your blood sugar level is too high. But what I'm hearing you say is it's just not as straightforward as that.Erin: Absolutely, yeah.Laura: Okay. Anything else that you wanted to add about, like, that particular myth, or?Erin: I wish I had more, like, definitive, like, it, that is not true because X, Y, Z, but you can't disprove a myth with research, you know what I mean?Laura: Yeah, yeah.Erin: Like, if somebody was like, yeah, unicorns exist, I'd be like, I don't know how to prove that to you. Because I can't show you, like, there is not a unicorn here.Laura: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I hear you. But I guess, like, what I would want people to take away from this and understand is that, like, you didn't cause your type 2 diabetes, like, you're not to blame. And, you know, similarly to how there are all different changes in the body that take place when somebody has type 2 diabetes, there are all sorts of factors that contribute to and help explain why somebody might develop type 2 diabetes. And they are everything from, you know, stress and sleep and things that, you know, often get called like lifestyle variables, even though that in and of itself is problematic, all the way through to experiencing racism, homophobia, transphobia, anti fat bias, you know, all of these like discrimination and prejudiceracism, homophobia, transphobia, anti fat bias, you know, all of these like discrimination and prejudice. Those things are also going to play a part in our blood glucose regulation, but we don't think of that. We don't think about the social determinants of health. We just think about like, well, you ate too many carbs. Therefore you need to cut out carbs. And this is the advice that people are given, we hear this idea that like carbohydrates cause, in inverted commas, type 2 diabetes, but we've…we also hear that it's caused by being a higher body weight.So, I'd love to hear you unpack that a little bit and, and kind of…yeah, is it a similar thing to what I just said about carbohydrates or is there anything else that you would add to that?Erin: So the thing that I go back to a lot with that, I guess, argument is that there's a really big difference between a correlation and a causation.So the example that I give with that is that as soon as ice cream sales go up, there's also an increase in shark attacks. Like, those things are correlated, but we can't say, we can't draw from that that correlation.Laura: Yeah, that ice cream causes shark attacks.Erin: Shark attacks, yeah. Right. And with that one, there's a really obvious, you know, third factor, which is weather, that contributes to both of those things going up, and it's not quite so clear with weight and, and type 2 diabetes.But there's one theory, which is that weight gain can be a symptom of type 2 diabetes. Another problem with that argument is that it really ignores just the natural body diversity that exists and occurs in the world. There are plenty, plenty of people in higher weight bodies who don't have diabetes and If it were true that higher weight causes type 2 diabetes, then all people in larger bodies would, would have type 2 diabetes, and that is...absolutely not true at all and the research shows thatLaura: And I guess the inverse is also true, right, that people who have a lower body weight, a lower BMI also get type 2 diabetes. And so it's, it's again, not looking at the, the correlation and drawing kind of the cause and effect conclusion, but also thinking about, okay, what other factors are going on that we're not seeing?And I think, to my mind, at least, it goes back to some of the things that I talked about before, some of the things that are, well, a lot of things that are outside of our control, like again, how we are treated in society, and how that, you know, that has been shown to like..even things like the Whitehall studies.Are you familiar with the Whitehall studies? Erin: No.Laura: So the Whitehall studies are kind of what I think Michael Marmot's work on the social determinants of health are based on, whereby they studied like civil servants who worked in Whitehall, which is like part of the government in the UK. And basically they stratified, I think it was mostly on men. Whitehall 1 was mostly done on men, because, of course, we need to know more about men, but this was, this was, these studies were done, done a while back and they have since added women. But effectively they stratified people by like their pay grade essentially, and they found that people who were in a lower pay grade, you know, they all worked in the same place. There was a lot of factors that were very similar about these men. But one of the key aspects was how much like autonomy they had in their job and what their income was. And they found that the people who hadl ess autonomy, so they were like a lower pay grade, basically, even though they had sort of overall similar working conditions, that the people in the lower pay grades had, I think, higher risk of cardiovascular disease compared to upper management and that kind of thing.And so it's a similar sort of effect here. And we also see it with like racism and anti-fat bias that there are all these structural things that contribute to our health in really, really complex ways. So I feel like that is a big part of what happens with type 2 diabetes that again, like kind of just seems to get overlooked by the keto bros.Hopefully some of that rambling made sense, but I'd like to maybe now think about...For anyone who has received this prediabetes diagnosis or a type 2 diabetes diagnosis, like, one of the first line pieces of advice that a GP or even a dietitian might give is around weight loss and around limiting carbohydrates in the diet.Where to start, really, Erin? Like, in terms of both of those. But basically, I would be interested to hear from you. Is that where you would start with someone? Or like, even putting it another way, are those helpful places to start? I mean, again, a leading question.Erin: The short answer is no, I do not find that to be a helpful place to start.You know, I'm really looking at this from the perspective of the population that I work with, who are people who have, who have restricted their eating many, many, many times throughout their life, or engaged in intentional weight loss many, many, many times in their life.Laura: Sorry, I just wanted to clarify as well for anyone who's like newer to the podcast that you say intentional weight loss and when you say that someone who has restricted their food for whatever, like, who has restricted their food, that doesn't necessarily mean someone who has an eating disorder, right? Like, like, what I'm trying to get at that people might not immediately realise is that that applies to people who have been chronic dieters, like people who have been dieting their whole life, right? That also kind of falls under that umbrella, right?Erin: Yeah, absolutely. And most people fall under that umbrella versus the, like, the full eating disorder umbrella. So yeah, it really applies to…most people who have been socialised as female, I would be so bold as to say that most, most people who have been socialised as female and many others have, have restricted their eating or dieted or gone on a lifestyle change, many, many times.And. So, because…I'm trying to think of how to say this without getting too into the weeds of, of, um, like clinical weeds…but because the body is hardwired against famine, what will happen if someone tries this again or says like, okay, I've been told to lose weight and restrict carbs or eat less carbs because I've had this diagnosis of prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, what will happen is things will look, quote, better for a little while. And so that's why, that's why the research shows like, oh, yeah, that's the thing that we need to do is because for 12 to 24 months, things are gonna get better. And when I say better, I mean, glucose levels will go lower.Laura: I was just gonna say because research in this area is generally done over like a fairly short term period where maybe If you're really, like, persistent, you can diet for that length of time, but yeah, so that's kind of, I guess what I'm trying to say is that over that shorter time frame, people, especially if they're given lots of support, like in a research study setting, might be able to continue with a restrictive diet for a bit longer, right? But then what happens?Erin: Yeah, but then the body…since the body's hardwired against famine, the body will start to engage in all of these compensatory mechanisms. Yeah. Basically like that, that carb restriction or yeah, any kind of caloric restriction, but especially carb restriction will kind of start the spring loading effect for the body to protect against that famine at all costs, which means that glucose levels will go up higher than they were before, and weight does the same thing, insulin level, same thing. So If we follow people longer than that 12 to 24 months, what we see is that these metabolic health markers are worse than they were at the beginning.Laura: Interesting. Yeah. So, I guess what, what you're saying is... And I see this in practice as well, is that people, yeah, in the shorter term, they might be able to restrict their eating, they may even lose a little bit of weight, or maybe even a lot of weight in some instances, and then in the short term, those biomarkers might seem as though they're improving.But then, because the body is, as you said, hardwired to, yeah, to protect itself, to move, like, protect itself against starvation, and the body can't really tell the difference between, you know, famine. And self imposed or medically imposed dieting and restriction, it eventually fights back against that in the form of like, it dials up cravings for these foods.It might also…like your metabolism, like all of that, those metabolic functions that we talked about right at the beginning, they start to slow down, which means that you start to maintain your weight or, or even put weight on. And what I see – and I'm, I'm curious if you see this as well – is that that degree of restriction that is often asked of people in these very low carb diets that sometimes get prescribed, certainly here in the UK on the NHS or that a lot that are sort of endorsed by a lot of diabetes organizations even, they cause people to fall into a binge restrict cycle. So rather than having kind of a more…moderate's not the right word, but like having a healthier relationship with food where you maybe are eating more regularly, but maybe in a way that feels more attuned to your body and also caring for yourself in all of these other ways that are really important. I don't want to just put that emphasis on food, but we're talking about food here. That what you end up happening is people restrict, restrict, restrict, but then they can't maintain that restriction forever. And so they end up in a blowout, right? Like where they're eating past the point of comfortable fullness, which can send their blood glucose levels sky fucking high, and I don't mean that in like a shaming way. I'm not blaming any individual person who has been caught in this cycle because it's not your fault. But just to illustrate like how kind of messed up that advice is that it can send people sort of, yeah, into this, this downward spiral of binge restrict, binge restrict.And I think what's kind of important to note here is that you could have someone who has what looks like on paper, perfect A1C, right? But they are binging and restricting, binging and restricting, and that the average blood glucose level over time looks like…you know, on paper, it looks great. But if you were to actually look at what was happening to that person and their relationship with food and how they were feeling, you might see a different picture.Erin: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, that's a really good point. A really good point. And to add on to what you were saying about it not being someone's fault, that binge restrict cycle is, is a very predictable result of the exact recommendations that people are being given. People are being given these recommendations to restrict calories, restrict carbs, and that is…the most predictable outcome of that is weight gain, higher glucose, and that binge restrict cycle when we look at the long, in the long term.Laura: Yeah, and I think that there's, there's something kind of psychological that goes on here as well when we ask people to really focus on the minutiae of detail around carbohydrates, around what they're eating, that that in and of itself, like that mental restriction can create, like, what I call the fuck it effect, like, or, yeah, just even the threat of restriction and deprivation can kind of trip a switch for people who have had an experience or had a history of disordered eating or chronic dieting or, you know, even, even people who have just tried to maintain a quote, a healthy lifestyle or wellness lifestyle and it really lead to problems for them.So, Erin, for anyone who's listening to this, who is like, well, my doctor has told me to lose weight. My doctor has told me that I need to cut out carbs or my diabetes nurse or my dietitian. But you're telling me, and actually my lived experience is that that's not a great option for me. Where can people start? Like, or more specifically, like, where do you start with people who come to you with this exact?Erin: The first place I start is by repeating over and over that you did not cause your diabetes. This is absolutely not your fault. You did all the things right, quote, right. Like there's nothing that you could have done differently to make this different, to make this not happen. Because like you were saying, Laura, that's most of the, the biggest factors here are stress, trauma, marginalisation. Those, those are the biggest factors and you don't, those are things are completely out of – and genetics! I didn't, we haven't even mentioned…Laura: Yeah, there's the genetic thing too.Erin: So, I think that's really hard for people to believe because it's the opposite of what they've been told for so long. There's so much of like, if you don't blah blah blah, you're gonna get diabetes. And so I repeat that over and over, that you did not cause your diabetes, it's not your fault. And then the next thing that we talk about is actually eating enough. So making sure that you're nourishing your body enough. Mm hmm. There's a lot of, like, biochemical metabolic processes that we can talk about about the why behind that. But I think we've, we've talked a lot about that today so we can take our words for it. That eating enough is just really, really important.Laura: Yeah, I think there's something there about sort of, you know, if it's available to you, like doing some work maybe around figuring out what your hunger and fullness cues look like, feel like. Because, again, just purely anecdotally, I've noticed that people who are, you know, not so attuned to those signals might, you know, put off, not eat enough throughout the day, so that then it does leave them feeling a bit more vulnerable to bingeing or, you know, like eating in a way that that feels like out of control or chaotic.Not that eating has to be this like super controlled thing, but also just recognising how unsettling and disturbing it can feel, if it feels like you have no say in what's going on as well. So yeah, I love that that's kind of like your, your starting point is like, hold up, are you actually eating enough?Erin: Mm hmm. And I say this in, you know, in this blanket way, talking to you today, because way more often than not, I see that people are not eating enough. And people are shocked at like, wait, I eat that much?Laura: Yeah. And, and I just want to, like, underscore that point. Especially for my clients who are fat or in bigger bodies, plus size, whatever language you feel comfortable using there. When I've said to clients in bigger bodies before, like, I don't think you're eating enough. There is just like a…I don't know, like, just this complete disbelief because it's so counter to what they've always been told, which is like you're eating too much. So, yeah, I just wanted to like flag that as well that like this is not just a thin people thing. That's for everyone.Erin: Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for highlighting that.Laura: Are there any other like, kind of like, I suppose what I'm thinking of is like low hanging fruit, like things that are like, maybe not easy for people, but like, that might feel more accessible. That's maybe the right word.Erin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think it, you know, really, really depends on the person and their, their experiences with food and movement and the medical system and their body, but some other things that may or may not be low hanging fruit are finding a doctor or a, or a medical team that you really vibe with, or at least that you hate less, we can say, like that feels less terrible. Because one of the biggest, most helpful things you can do with any type of diabetes is monitoring. And when I say monitoring, that can be anything from, well, mostly that's just like checking in with your medical team like quarterly or a few times a year, depending on what's going on for you. And if, if you absolutely dread it, that's not going to happen, right? Like you're not going to be able to be monitored.So finding somewhere that is less terrible, or maybe even someone you vibe with is really important.Laura: Yeah. That's really good advice. And I'm just…I'm thinking about the pathways that we have here in the UK and as far as I know, and it will probably depend slightly on different NHS trusts, but as far as I know you get an annual diabetes review for type 2 diabetes and I'm just thinking like about that in relation to the point that you're making which is that, yeah, having that check in that support just…you know not necessarily like a full review but like just to, yeah, see how things are going and, and see like what you might need, like that might not be available to everyone, certainly in this country. And I'm sure it depends on things like insurance and stuff in other countries, but I guess what I'm learning is just how fucking atrocious a lot of medical…or like not atrocious, that's not what I mean. But like, how under-resourced a lot of medical systems are in terms of like giving people the things that would be most useful, which is again why we're like, here's a diet sheet off you go, and that's not helpful.Erin: Yeah. No. Yeah. Not helpful at all. Gosh, that's, that's so maddening. t's really easy for us here in the U. S. to be like, uh, everywhere else has it better with healthcare, but it's really grounding to hear that not everybody's figured it out.Laura: It's like, what, 13 years of a Tory government? So. It's not surprising that our healthcare system has been absolutely obliterated.And again, it will depend on the area that you're in as to how good that care is. And that's not a reflection on any, like, individual practitioner within that system. Like, we all know how hard they are working and how kind of up against it they are. But what I'm hearing you say, really, Erin, is that, like, the going in hard with, like, weight loss and restricting carbohydrates, that is probably counterproductive to the overall aim of, like, caring for yourself, and that there are some other things that we can, like, think about and incorporate that might…Okay, they're maybe not such a like, go hard or go home approach, but that maybe they're more sustainable. Maybe they're like, kinder and gentler. And I think that reminds me of something that I will say to people if they come to me and they're like, you know, my doctor has flagged this, I'm feeling really stressed is…this is not an emergency. Right, like this is your arm is not hanging off or whatever it is. We can take a beat. And if there's other stuff that you just need to like, get a handle on, like life stuff or whatever it is, like, maybe this isn't your top top priority right now. Like, what are some like, small things that we can do to help you feel like you're caring for yourself or are being cared for that don't sort of, are maybe not going like full throttle, like, you know, what the common narrative is that we should be like cutting out carbs and losing all of this weight. But what are maybe some like softer things that we can start with? Yeah. Oh, well, Erin, thank you so much. This has been really helpful. And I know that you have a ton of resources on your website, on your Instagram that people can dig into. And I'll link to all of that in, in the show notes. I also want to mention that a while back at LCIE, we produced a guide, a weight inclusive guide to insulin resistance, and it has some more information about things like medication, supplementation, and again, some of those like lower hanging fruit things that might be helpful if this is something you're navigating and it has, you know, information about what we talked about today, Erin, the lock and key thing and like the how ‘prediabetes' is a dubious diagnosis. So I'll also link to that for anyone who's interested in the show notes. Okay, Erin, before I let you go, At the end of every episode, my guest and I share what they've been snacking on. So it can be anything, you know, a show, a podcast, a literal snack, whatever it is. I'd love to hear what recommendation you have for the listeners.Erin: Can I share a couple? Laura: Of course! Yeah. Erin: Okay, cool. Well, I'm literally snacking on all things peanut butter, which I don't know if you guys like peanut butter, but I. Just had some peanut butter pretzels again recently and I was like, gosh… Laura: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, are they the Trader Joe's ones? Erin: Yes. Laura: Okay. So last Christmas, my brother sent me like a huge ass box of stuff 'cause he lives in Oklahoma. From Trader Joe's. And it had those peanut butter pretzels in them and I hadn't had them before. And we don't have good snacks here. I'm just gonna say like the snack game in the States is just like…it's so much better than it is here, but I know those pretzels and they're so good. They're so good, yeah.We're gonna do a, like a snack box exchange again this year. So I sent him like, he loves chocolate, so I sent him like a ton of like Dairy Milk and like chocolates from... the UK and he sends me stuff from the US. So like, that's, that's fun. But I'm going to add them to the list because they are so good.Erin: They are so good. And you can, if you're in the States, you can also get them at Costco. Very similar ones.Laura: Okay.Erin: In bulk. Yeah. Big ol thing. So that's what I'm snacking on. My other thing is the podcast Normal Gossip.Laura: Oh yeah! I have heard a couple of episodes of that. And like, for anyone who hasn't heard it, can you explain the premise?Erin: Yeah, they get a story sent in from someone, like a true story, and then they share the story, like they're gossiping with a guest on, and they'll pause a lot in the story where they're like, okay, so this is what's going on, what would you do next? And so there's a little bit of like, choose your own adventure that I think is really fun.And then it's just so silly, but it's really nice to like, have some silliness.Laura: Oh, 100%. In the mess of everything. Do you have, like, a favourite episode that you would... Is there like a standout?Erin: Well, I just listened to one that was a live episode that I think it was like the plant story or something like that.And it was fun because they had a guest where they would ask them what they'd do. And then they'd have people raise their hands if they like absolutely disagreed in the audience. And then. So you just got a lot…there was even more choose your own adventure.Laura: There's like, yeah, more back and forth. Okay. Yeah. Like the plant story. I'm going to get you to send me the link and I will include it in the show notes because yeah, I am deep down a research rabbit hole at the moment looking at folic acid and folate and I'm like digesting all this biochemistry and I find that that happens a lot that I listen to a lot of like podcasts that are related to my work in some way and I forget the podcast can be fun.Erin: Uh huh!Laura: Yeah, I need to get back into that. All right, real quick, mine. So this is just like a fun, festive thing that I came across the other day, which I was looking for some new shoes and I came across gold sparkly converse high tops. Erin: Oh my God. Laura: And they are so cool. So I bought a pair. I don't know if I'm going to…they haven't arrived yet. I'm gonna try them on, but I feel like gold is a neutral, right? Like, it will go with everything.Erin: Oh, that's true. When I first heard you said neutral, I was like, are they? Is gold neutral? But it does go with anything.Laura: Yeah, so I'm gonna try them on, see what they're like, but I will, I will include a link in the show notes because, yeah, from the picture, I haven't seen them in real life yet, but from the picture, they don't look like they're too over the top and I feel like…if you know if like depending on what you're wearing like you probably get away with them at the playground, right?Erin: Totally. Totally. Laura: This is what I'm telling myself anyway. I kind of text them to all of my friends. I was like, what do you think of this? And there was like a lukewarm reception, but I think, I think I need new friends is really…with better taste is what, is kind of where I've come down on it! Maybe I'll put them on my Instagram stories and see what people think. Erin: There you go. Laura: All right, Erin. This was…uh, I was gonna say this was really fun, that little bit at the end was really fun. Like, all the bullshit around weight loss and low carb diets, not so fun, but I'm glad that we got to unpack, unpack that a little bit.For anyone who wants to dig into your work and your resources a little bit more, where can they find you and more about your work?Erin: My website is a good place. I have some free resources there and I try to update my blog with some kind of my push, my pushing back beliefs on kind of diabetes diet culture. And that is ErinPhillips.com. No, erinphillipsnutrition.com. Laura: Should we fact check your website?! Erin: I tried to buy erinphillips.com, but it wasn't available. So, erinphillipsnutrition.com. And then my Instagram, I think it's @ErinPhillipsNutrition.Laura: Okay, well we…just make sure you click on the link in the show notes because Erin's not a reliable resource on her own social media! So we'll make sure people get there in the end.All right, thank you so much, I really appreciate it Erin. Erin: Yeah, thank you, Laura. Thanks so much for having me.OUTRO:Laura: Thanks so much for listening to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast. You can support the show by subscribing in your podcast player and leaving a rating and review. And if you want to support the show further and get full access to the Can I Have Another Snack? universe, you can become a paid subscriber.It's just £5 a month or £50 for the year. As well as getting tons of cool perks you help make this work sustainable and we couldn't do it without the support of paying subscribers. Head to laurathomas.substack.com to learn more and sign up today.  Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas. Our sound engineer is Lucy Dearlove. Fiona Bray formats and schedules all of our posts and makes sure that they're out on time every week. Our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser, and the music is by Jason Barkhouse. Thanks so much for listening. ICYMI this week: Gift Concierge + Mini Gift Guide* Fundamentals: Helping Kids build a Good Relationship with Sugar* Here's Why You Might Want to Pass On Getting Your Kid Weighed in School* The One-upMUMship of Kid Food Instagram This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laurathomas.substack.com/subscribe

Hey and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? Podcast. I have been so excited to share this week's episode with you. Our guest today is Kirstie Beaven from Sonshine magazine - a publication dedicated to raising boys for a more equal world. Kirstie and I talk about how seemingly innocuous things like dinosaur t-shirts and shark pants send a message to our kids about who they can and can't be, how they should expect to be treated, and how they should treat others. Kirstie gives us a fascinating history lesson on how kids' clothes became gendered (spoiler, colonialism and capitalism have a lot to do with it) and why these have massive repercussions for gender equality. We also talk about why Kirstie is low-key obsessed with pants (the underwear kind), and why we can't just empower girls in a vacuum; we also need to be teaching boys emotional literacy and allowing them to have an identity outside of the ‘big boy', or the sporty one. Just a heads up that we talk about some distressing statistics around sexual harassment, suicide, and violence towards women and girls, but not in explicit detail.This is without a doubt one of my favourite episodes we've done on the CIHAS pod - if you've never listened before then this is a great place to start, even if you don't have kids. Don't forget to leave a review in your podcast player if you enjoy this episode - or let me know what you think in the comments below. Find out more about Kirstie's work here.Follow her on Instagram here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Subscribe to Laura's newsletter here.Enrol in the Raising Embodied Eaters course here.Here's the transcript in full:INTROKirstie: That's one of the things I really want to do, is just gently point out the things that we take for granted that we say are normal or natural, but they're not. They're totally constructed. Many of the things that we just take for…oh yeah, pink and blue. Pink is a girls' colour, blue is a boys' colour. We think of that as completely normal and it's totally made up and it's so recent.Laura: Hey, and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast, where we talk about appetite, bodies, and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas, I'm an anti diet registered nutritionist, and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter. Today I'm talking to Kirstie Beavan.Kirstie is the founder and editor of Sonshine Magazine, raising boys for a more equal world. Sonshine is a print and digital quarterly, as well as a social profile for parents who want to change the way we talk to and about our sons, to create a better society for all children.I've been so excited to share this episode. We recorded it a while back and I'm really glad that you're able to finally listen to it. It's such a great discussion about gender inequality and why seemingly innocuous things like how we dress our kids have really long term implications for their emotional development and the roles that they learn to occupy in society. Kirstie is a wealth of knowledge about the gendered history of kids clothing, which you won't be surprised to hear is entirely rooted in capitalism, rather than any real biological or physical differences between sexes. I can't wait for you to hear this conversation, and if you don't already, you need to get your hands on a copy of Sonshine Magazine, which is available in print and digitally. I'll link to it in the show notes so you can order yours. It would make a really lovely holiday gift for your co-parent or some other parents that you have in your life, maybe even for yourself. But before we get to today's episode, I'd love to tell you all about the benefits of becoming a paid subscriber to the Can I Have Another Snack? Newsletter. And of course there are cool perks like being able to comment on posts, our Thursday threads, Snacky Bits, and exclusive posts on intuitive eating, weight inclusive health, and responsive feeding. But more than all of that, being reader and listener supported means I can better control who comes into this space. In other words, we can keep the trolls and the fatphobes out. And if they do sneak in, at least they've had to pay for the privilege, and I can still boot them out. Having control over who comes into the space is essential for creating a safe, nurturing space away from diet culture where we can discuss difficult topics like how we deal with diet-y friends, gender division of labour, and body shame. All the way through to more light hearted stuff like the weird shit that mummy influencers say. If you're still not convinced, then here's a recent testimonial from someone in the CIHAS community. So they wrote: “I wish I had access to the advice and information you share when my kids were little, but it's still valuable now that they're nearly adults for a couple of reasons at least. Firstly, having only been diagnosed as autistic in middle age, I have had a complicated relationship with food for most of my life. From childhood fussy eating, through stigma over my higher body weight and internalised fat phobia, to temporary success with dieting, followed by the inevitable return to my previous size. Your writing has helped me cast off many of my own hang ups about food, weight, and health, making me a better role model for my kids. Secondly, your advice helps me to support and advise my kids with their own food, health, and body image issues, and to advocate for them to family and friends. I believe in showing my appreciation for people who provide me with help and support, at least by saying thank you, and where possible, with feedback and or financially. I can't financially support everyone I'd like to all of the time. But I do what I can when I can. Thank you for all you do Laura.”So what are you waiting for? You can sign up today at laurathomas.substack.com or find the link in your show notes. It's £5 a month or £5 for the year and if you can't stretch that right now just email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk with the word “Snacks” in the subject line and we'll hook you up with a comp subscription. No questions asked. You can also gift a subscription to a friend for the holidays to give them unfettered access to the CIHAS community. I can even send you a gift certificate. Just email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk and we'll hook you up.  Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.All right team, let's get to today's conversation with Kirstie Beavan from Sonshine Magazine. MAIN EPISODEAll right, Kirstie, to start with, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?Kirstie: I'm Kirstie and I run Sonshine Magazine, which is a quarterly print and digital magazine and a social profile and community looking at raising.Laura: You said that with sort of like eyes rolled so we'll come back to that!Kirstie: I'm looking at raising boys for a more equal world so specifically it's parenting, thinking about parenting through the lens really of how we talk to and about our boys.Laura: Okay, and I'm curious to know, like, where this interest in gender equality comes from and like what spurred you to start a magazine about it?Kirstie: I think…so I've got two children and when my daughter was born, I think I felt more confident about how I was going to break down gender stereotypes for…I felt like, you know, I grew up in the 80s and 90s, which is a time of real flux in terms of how women were portrayed and expected to behave. It's a real…there's lots of progress and lots of backlash. And I think I felt – by the time I had my first child who happened to be a daughter – I felt quite confident about the things that I wasn't going to do and the stereotypes that I wasn't going to inflict on her and how I was going to help her navigate the world that I had already grown into womanhood through. And then two years later I had my son and I started to see that there were a lot of negative stereotypes associated with raising boys. And I felt like I had absolutely no model for managing that as a mother, not as a father, obviously. I just felt like, Oh, this is something I hadn't really considered or thought about. So I went to look for…where are the resources to help me parent a boy who I want to be able to grow up in a way that's free of the strictures of sort of gender stereotyping, but also who is going to be what we might now call a good man? You know, where are the resources for that? And I couldn't find any.Laura: Right. There wasn't a playbook.Kirstie: No, there's really few and far between. There weren't websites talking about it at the time. There weren't Facebook groups dedicated to this. There wasn't something that sort of scratched the itch that I had.And I had been working in content. I work mainly in the museums and gallery sector, working on the stuff that you see on the walls when you go into a gallery, like labels. Laura: I always wondered who wrote that stuff!Kirstie: Yeah, it was me. So that sort of stuff. So like presenting information for a general audience, that's been my job for a long time.So I was like, well, I'm a writer. I'm going to write one. I'm going to write the things that people needed, or that I needed really. And that's how I started.Laura: So you found that there weren't the resources that you as a new parent to a boy needed to help you navigate parenting that child in, so that they didn't grow up to be an asshole, basically. I think?Kirstie: Yes, exactly. I mean, yeah, partly that, but also partly because I noticed a lot of things about how my children interacted. Having an elder daughter and a younger son, I mean, I think it's the same if you…for many children, if you have an older sibling and a younger sibling quite close in age, that the younger one, is desperate to do all the things that the older ones do.So they're like, because, and I get it, like there's this person who's so close to you, but they're just better at everything than you are. So you're like, I just want to be them. Like that looks so good. And so she was like the leader. She was, you know, he was following her around, wanted to be just like her, wanted to wear her clothes, do the things that she liked doing, all of this stuff.And I sort of came to realise that I was really happy with this idea of my daughter. breaking stereotypes. I was really confident with this, like, Oh yeah, she's, you know…dress her in blues and darks and comfy clothes and all of that sort of stuff. And that seemed…that sat very easily with me. But when my son is saying, well, I actually want to wear a pink tutu, yeah, a dress and we're going to the shops. And I'm actually feeling a bit uncomfortable about that. Oh right, why am I feeling uncomfortable? I'm not uncomfortable about my daughter wearing trousers. I'm uncomfortable about my son wearing a dress. What is it in me? Because there's no problem for either of them. What is it in me that is the problem here?And having to confront that I have a problem with boys doing things that are feminine or coded as feminine. And what does that mean about how I feel about things being girly? Basically made me feel like, actually, that's not okay. That is something that I need to think about because the message I give to both my son and my daughter, if I don't want someone to be girly is because I think being girly is not aspirational because I think being a girl is not enough.So that is something that I felt like, Oh, that's work I have to do. That's work I have to unpick. And I'm the sort of person who likes information to unpick that stuff. And so there just wasn't that information out there to help me with that.  Laura:Yeah, that's so interesting that you, I guess, noticed that tension in yourself, because you're absolutely right.There's social acceptance of, for want of a better phrase, maybe like ‘tomboyishness', where girls can, you know, have names that are traditionally masculine names and they can wear trousers and they can climb trees and that's all very well, but we don't have the same leniency for boys who want to do things that are perceived as being ‘more feminine'.And I have the same thing. I have a three year old boy, you know, assigned male at birth, but you know, we try, we like…we let him wear the tutu to the shop and it is, there is a discomfort that I've noticed in myself that I have to work through and kind of push through and I just haven't gone to the lengths of creating an entire magazine about it!But I, I'm really impressed that you have to kind of work through your shit. You made a whole magazine about it. But I'm curious, like, why a magazine and not, say, a podcast or, you know, and I know you do a lot of stuff on social media, which we can also talk about, but why did that feel like the medium for you?Kirstie: I think it's partly because of the way my brain works. So I prefer to organize things. In a way where I, I'm thematically grouping things.Laura: Okay, yes. I just... I get that instinct very much.Kirstie: I just wanted it to feel like, I didn't want to write a diary, I didn't want to write a straight up blog. And I wanted it to be written content, that's where I feel most confident expressing my ideas.But I didn't want to share too much actually about my children. Because, because... My experience as a parent is my experience, but their experience of being a child is their experience and that felt like that's…their private. It's not for me to talk about that for them. Laura: Right. You don't want to commodify your child, you know, to make money and capital.Kirstie: That's not for me. That's not for me. And I didn't want to feel like I was sharing their lives without their permission, but also telling a story about their lives, which maybe isn't the story that they would tell later on. Yeah. So I wanted to sort of use what I'd noticed in my own experience of parenting to give me a jumping off point to think about lots of other things.And so it made sense to me to work it like a magazine. I started online. So I would publish a series of articles grouped around a theme: clothes, books, screen time, whatever it is. You know, looking at these things, but through this idea of what have I noticed in this space about gender stereotyping and the constraints placed on children time after time, but through lots of different themes.Laura: Yeah. So it becomes a lens to explore a particular topic.Kirstie: Exactly. And the magazine lends itself to that. So each magazine now has a theme and I collate articles around that theme. Yeah. But all with that thread that runs through them, thinking about how you might just. poke at the things that we take for granted.I think that's one of the things I really want to do is just gently point out the things that we take for granted that we say are normal or natural, but they're not. They're totally constructed. Many of the things that we just take for…oh yeah, pink and blue. Pink is a girl's colour. Blue is a boy's colour. We think of that as completely normal and it's totally made up and it's so recent that that has come into being.Laura: Oh, really? Do you know the history of that?Kirstie: Yeah, so basically up until the sort of 1800s, a bit later, all children are wearing white because...Laura: Why? That's, that's a terrible idea!Kirstie: Well, I guess it was probably grey, right? Laura: Yeah. Kirstie: But they're basically wearing stuff they can wash easily. You can produce it and wash it easily. So they're wearing simple, plain colours, stuff you can pass down. All children are wearing dresses until seven, five to seven.Laura: It sounds like it's really, like, utilitarian, right? Like is that the right word? Kirstie: Yes. Yes. It is a bit. So there's this idea that children's clothing is, well, there's lots of things at play and I'm not a fashion historian.Laura: For the purposes of this podcast, you are.Kirstie: So children are wearing clothes that can be washed easily, that are good for toilet training. They're good for, you know, being out and about, right? There is a movement to make children's clothes less constrictive. Particularly for boys, and that's sort of in the 1800s and French ideas around children should be allowed to be outside more and, you know, changing parenting ideals. What happens is that there's a boom in fabric production, which is obviously based on plantations of cotton and exploitation of enslaved people. It's also based on the industrial revolution in places like the UK, which means that using child labour and industrial processes. Cotton can be produced on a huge scale. So there's a lot of exploitation that goes into mass producing fabrics. And then simultaneously there's a movement in chemical production of pigments. So you can start to make colours for clothes. And once you can mass produce fabrics and you can actually cheaply produce colours, for clothes, for the fabric to make clothes on, you know, you can have a boom in fashion for men, for women, and also for children, kids. There's a sort of like, Oh, actually. As a marketer, you know, as a producer of cloth, I want to sell more of this stuff. So as a marketer, what tools have I got at my disposal for that? So one of the things is, you don't want people to hand clothes down. So you don't want people to pass clothes just down and down and down. You want to make them so that they can't be passed on and they have to buy a whole new outfit every time their child grows. So it's building consumption into the processes. And so you come up with reasons for people to buy different things. So by the 1930s, 1940s, people are sort of thinking, Oh, how can we sell more of this stuff? So by the 1940s, there were catalogues going round the department stores and stuff like that saying, ‘these are the clothes that you should buy', ‘this is our new season,' ‘this is what everyone is wearing this season'. And it's the same for children's clothes. And they're looking at ways at dividing the children's clothes market by colour. So some of the catalogues produced around that time are saying pink is for brown eyed infants, because that's better for their complexion. And blue, you know…so all of these like weird things, but pinks and blues, but the idea was: pastels were the best ones for the children. And then someone comes up with it…there's a, I forget what it's called, but you can find a pamphlet, if someone comes up with the idea that pink should be for the girls and blue should be for the boys, though you can find other ones, other catalogues and fashion plates that suggest that pink is a stronger colour because it's associated with the red coats that men would have worn in battle, blah, blah, blah, that that should have been the colour for boys. Just made up, basically. Just all made up. Pink and blue is all made up. But it's stuck. And it's stuck with us. And pink got cemented as a feminine colour. By…now I don't want to get it wrong, but I'm going to say Mamie Eisenhower, who was the first lady in the 1940s, and she redecorated the White House and with all these special pink bathrooms and was her favorite colour. And it became sort of cemented, this idea of baby pink as being really feminine, definitely coded girly colour. And ties in with lots of other ideas around femininity that come in through the 1950s.Laura: Yeah, well, you may not be a fashion historian, but I really enjoyed that little foray into understanding, yeah, the, I mean, just the super problematic history that that what we feel is so ‘normal', was built on.Like, you didn't have to scratch the surface, barely at all, to find the colonialism, the violence, the capitalism, like, the effects of all of these things on. Yeah, how we end up ultimately dressing our kids today and what is coded as feminine, what is coded as masculine…and yeah, I remember when, when Avery was born just me and my husband like eye rolling anytime we got a blue card in the post, you know, like there was just like a sea of blue and we really appreciated our friends who'd like, who knew us really well and went out of the way to, to find a card that wasn't blue.And that's just, that's just such a small, like, meaningless thing in the grand scheme of things, like the colour of your baby card, but you know, there are repercussions to how we dress kids and I think this is something that you talk about so well, not just in terms of like the colour of the clothes – although that I think is, is important as well – but also just like the practicalities of dressing our kids. Maybe practicality isn't the right word, but I guess the functionality of how we dress our kids. And I think you've kind of got a bit of a reputation on Instagram for being the ‘pants lady'.So I'd love you to talk a little bit about that, like what your research has found when it comes to, not just pants, but just generally the discrepancies between clothing for girls and clothing for boys.Kirstie: Yeah. I mean, it's a dubious claim to fame, isn't it? The ‘pants lady'.Laura: I would take it. It's a great moniker to have.Kirstie: I mean, that is…some of the stuff that I've talked about is, that's one of the key things, I think, because people really notice it. It started because my daughter asked for a pair of pants with dinosaurs on them. And this is when we were potty training and I thought, great, dinosaurs, that should be easy. And then she'll want to wear them. And then potty training would be much easier. Yeah. And I went looking for them and I couldn't find any girls pants that had dinosaurs on them. Laura: It doesn't surprise me, but… Kirstie: No, I mean it is a bit better now. This is eight, nine years ago. Yeah, so I couldn't find any, and then I found some boys ones and I thought, oh, well she doesn't know.And then I got them home and I was so shocked to get them out of the packet and find that they were bigger, roomier. They were beautifully…they had these incredible overlocked seams, all the elastic was covered. I noticed that they were about, they were two centimeters bigger in the waistband, basically, than the girls pants, same brand, and were made of a thicker, higher grade cotton. They just were better. They just were loads better. And so I thought, well, maybe that's just the, this is just an anomaly that I've picked up. Because you know, often when you go to a shop, you can pick up two things that are the same size, but actually when you try them on, they're not quite the same. They're different. So there's all of that. So I thought, well, maybe this is it. But actually having looked into it now over the last eight years, that is across the board that the girls' pants in particular are cut to a smaller pattern than the boys pants, and they're made with flimsier fabric. They're more badly made. They're itchy. They've got this lacy trim. They're made with a lighter weight cotton, which has less stretch and give. They're cut shorter in the backside, so they don't come up as high. So this is comparing girls briefs with boys briefs. They have a narrower gusset. So they're more likely to ride up your backside, basically, give you a wedgie.Laura: Ah, is that why that happens? Because of the size of the...Kirstie: Yes, because of how it's cut across the bottom.Laura: Yeah, yeah. No, I can, I can imagine it. As someone who has, like, a lot of problems finding... Like decent underwear. Yeah, like don't get me started on how far downhill M&S underwear has gone over the past few years.Kirstie: Totally agree.Laura: But yeah, I guess I just, I hadn't thought of it…because that was going to be my next question for you was like, so what, right? What's the big deal here? And I think you've already kind of answered it, but it looks like you've got more to say, so…Kirstie: Yeah, I have got more to say. Because the big deal, actually, what it made me realise is that a significant proportion of our children are going to school wearing an uncomfortable piece of underwear. So many people, when I post about this on Instagram, so many people say to me, ‘Oh, my daughter is always getting a wedgie'. ‘My daughter is always complaining that her pants are uncomfortable'.I find it myself, I find the seams and labels inside clothing can be really irritating. Yeah. Giving this advice to oh, just wear them inside out, blah, blah, blah. No! Just let's make..Laura: Buy the boys ones, Kirstie: Kids deserve to be comfortable and it made me think how different my life would have been if I had been wearing clothes that were comfortable, if I'd been wearing clothes that weren't for looking at but were for playing in.It's not just pants actually, it comes across all areas of children's clothing. So you see it in girls' trousers versus boys' trousers. You're more likely to find a knee reinforcement in a boy's trouser than you are in a girl's trouser because the expectation is that boys are harder on their trousers than girls.Well, yeah, I mean, obviously you are if your pants aren't riding up your bum all the time. And also, if your shoes…so if you look at the difference between girls' shoes and boys' shoes, you'll see that boy's shoes tend to have a thicker sole. They tend to be waterproof. They tend to be made with a toe cover so that you can climb or run more easily.And if you look at girls' shoes, particularly noticeable in very, very little toddler shoes and school shoes. You'll see that the girl's shoes come with really thin soles, no grip. They often have holes in the top, so they're not really waterproof. They're often made of patent leather, so they're shiny, so they…you can't scuff them up. I mean, you will scuff them up and then you'll be in trouble. So what is what you say? So what? The thing is, it's all based on our expectations of children, our expectations as adults on children. It's nothing to do with whether they, as individuals…what they like doing. You know, if you've got a child that likes running, they like running. It's not whether they're a boy or a girl, it's whether they like running. If you've got a kid that feels more regulated, if they've climbed something and swung on something, it's not because they're a boy or a girl, it's just who they are. That's what their bodies are asking for. But we are channeling them societally down these routes, down these expected routes of you should be more active and you shouldn't be more active just simply based on your genitalia. And it does actually have impact on children. You can see it if you go to any primary school, you can see who's taking up the space in the playground and it is 90% likely to be the boys.Laura: And that wasn't a…in case it came across this way, it wasn't an accusatory…it was meant to be a provocative question because I am 100% with you on this.And I think you articulated it so beautifully when you said, you know, we're setting a precedent, we're setting an expectation that girls clothes are to be looked at and are there to be pretty, whereas boys clothes are designed to be functional and for movement and yeah, to let them really be…engage in a full variety of experiences that we're inadvertently excluding girls from, right?Movement, getting messy, getting scuffed up, getting dirty, whatever, whatever it is.Kirstie: Yeah, it's two sides of the same coin, actually, because you see it with girls that the expectation is that their clothes will be pretty and good to look at. And I particularly don't want to have…in my children's underwear, I particularly don't want to have my daughter thinking that her underwear needs to be good to look at, right? It's gross.Laura: It's a really disturbing thought when you, like, think about the kind of the implications there.Kirstie: Yeah, yeah. It's actually like, what in the world? Children's underwear should just be functional. It should cover up their genitalia.Laura: Maybe it should have days of the week on it. It could, yeah, I'm up for that.Kirstie: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm up for that. I'm up for patterns. I'm up for that. I'm up for, like, things on the front so you know which side to get into. Yeah, that's all of that. But it doesn't need to be cut small. It doesn't need to be low rise. It doesn't need to be... skimpy in the gusset. Like none of that is necessary for children's clothing. Laura: It needs to be functional. Kirstie: It needs to, it just needs to do its job. Yeah. And I…and you could even argue that the people most likely to be wearing a skirt are girls. So the children who really need the big pants are the girls. So why is it, when I go to the shops, that the girl's pants are miniscule? Laura: Well I wonder if it goes back to capitalism, because if you've got skimpy pants…you know I'm thinking of this from the perspective of a marketer, if I've got skimpy pants, then I can also sell a pair of shorts to go under the dress. Yeah. This is the only explanation that I could come up with.Kirstie: I mean I have been and interviewed some people who've worked in childrenswear, and a lot of them were like….Oh. We've never thought of this because childrenswear is not a thing conceived of in many big shops. It's not conceived of as childrenswear. It's conceived of as girls and boys and they take their cues from womenswear and menswear. And so they're taking maybe what is the best selling hoodie, jersey weight in the menswear and then they're scaling that down for the boys. And then they're taking what is the best selling hoodie weight, say we're talking about sweaters, jersey for the women's and scaling that down for the girls.And they're not talking to each other necessarily. So it's a sort of vicious circle or a chicken and egg thing where menswear is generally heavier weight and more comfortable and womenswear is generally lighter weight and less comfortable. And the styles from menswear are going to come down into boyswear and the styles from womenswear....And that's the same for underwear. So when you look at women's underwear, that's actually what's going to be started to scale down. Lace trims, bows, the types of patterns that you'll see, crop tops, that sort of stuff is going to be scaled down for the girls underwear. And men's underwear is going to be scaled down for the boys. And I see that, but the fact is that children's bodies are not like men's and women's bodies.That is not... Clothes for children can be clothes for children. Until, really, a long way through their childhood. There's no reason to be making them different. Often when I post about this, and I say, here's a pair of jeans and the jeans for the boys, jeans in the boys' section, maybe are two inches bigger in the waist than the girls. And maybe they are…they've got more flex in the leg, and maybe they're also an inch or two longer in the leg than the girls. It's particularly noticeable in shorts, so when summer comes around, you'll see that the girls' shorts are tiny. And that starts from toddler age, so the toddler girls' shorts, which are often really nice, like they come in nice colours and nice prints and all of that sort of stuff, but they are cut inches shorter.Laura: They're teeny tiny. I remember you posted a reel about this over the summer and I'll link to it in the show notes because yeah, it's…yeah, you're basically dressing toddlers in hot pants.Kirstie: Yeah. The flip of the coin is that if you go into the boys section often you can only find things that are khaki, navy, black, burgundy, what I call sludge. Like you just get sludge colour, so you can't find the pretty prints or the…you can't find florals or butterflies or rabbits. My son loves rabbit, love rabbits for years and it's rabbits and cats…you can't have a rabbit if you're a boy. Because you can only have a shark. And then you think, oh, it's fine. I'll go and buy the rabbit top. It's in the girl's section. What does it matter? And then you get the rabbit top and it's cropped or it's got a cap sleeve or a boat neck, you know, so it's not so sun safe. It's not so easy. You know, it doesn't wash as well. It's very easy, I think, to say, this is obviously bad for girls. This is obviously bad for girls. It's obviously bad to create children's clothes that make girls feel that they are too big for their age. That is obviously bad. I can't see why we are doing this. I've had messages from people who've got boy girl twins who are the same size and if they buy a pair of joggers in the boys' section, so two pairs of joggers in the boys' section, they're enormous in the waist, age five to six. And if they go to the girls section and buy the similar joggers. They can't pull them up and these children are the same age and the same size and what does it do to you if by the time you're old enough to understand it, say you're seven, you can see the labels in your own clothes. What does it do to you to know that the age seven jeans are too tight for you? What does that do to you as a girl? What does it conversely do to you as a boy, if you're a slim boy? And you buy the age seven joggers and they're like a tent on you. And the expectation is that you ought to be bigger and you ought to be broader and you ought to be wider or taller. The expectations that this places on our children based only on their gender, you don't have to follow it very far to see how harmful it is.Laura: Yeah. I mean, there's so much to unpack there as well. Like I'm thinking of it through my lens as well, which is thinking about body image and these pretty arbitrary sizes do to kids' sort of body esteem, if they are, you know, maybe at the lower end of the growth curve or the higher end of the growth curve and they don't fit into that seven to eight, like maybe they're in 10 to 11 and the like the mismatch, I think, between ages and sizes of clothes. And I don't know what the workaround is, it's, it seems kind of like it's all wound up in this, it's a similar problem, right?Kirstie: I think so. I think so. I mean, I think the workaround is what they do in a lot of European countries is…it's not, it's not done by age. It's done by height.Laura: Oh, height. Okay. Yeah.Kirstie: It's a measurement. And I think it's really telling, that if you ask a man what size he is, he'll give you a measurement. Yeah. So if you want to buy a pair of jeans as a man, you're buying a size, an actual size.Laura: X centimetres or inches.Kirstie: 32 inch waist, whatever it is, right? That's a measurement. And if you know what your measurement is, you can buy the right size. But as women, you ask what size we are, we have to give a random number. It doesn't equate to any measurement. Except to make you feel bad. And I think that sort of permeates the landscape of children's clothing.This idea of functionality, that actually clothes are made for comfort and what they can do for you. And what they…they'll just be made to whatever size that you need. That your clothes actually…comfort is the least important thing on the list for women's clothes, often. I mean, I feel like underwear in particular.I'm starting to enter into the preteen world. Yeah. It's really made me question a lot of things. Like this idea that when I was a kid, I guess I was 12, 11 or 12, and we went to get a training bra. And I thought about this… training bra? I thought, what's it being trained for? And I thought I was being trained because bras are really uncomfortable.So to get you used to wearing a thing makes your body more palatable to society's view of what women's bodies should look like. It's not on my horizon yet, but it's something that I've got to have a thought aboout. Laura: How do you have that conversation? Kirstie: Yeah, I don't actually know how I feel about that.Laura: Yeah, I mean, that's a really tricky one.I don't know. I don't know if I've added an unanswerable question to that. Yeah, no, but it is, it's, it's just not something that I've ever given any consideration to. And I think what feels probably really sticky about it is that, you know, you can have these conversations with your kid about, you know, whatever, like some man invented a bra to make our bodies more palatable.I don't actually know if it was a man. I'm making this up, but you probably do know the history of bras as well. I think I read, I read like a really interesting article about it once before, and I, and I really can't remember now, but the list of questions that I was going to ask you is completely gone out of the window. But no, it's great. But yeah, you know, you can have these conversations and you can, like, help your kid feel really empowered to not wear a bra or to wear a bra or to like make their own choice or, you know, about the type of bra that they wear if they choose to wear one. And, but then, you know, they go to school and all their friends are wearing, you know, these cutesy little training bras that probably actually do nothing. Yeah. Really. And so then you have to navigate, like, the social piece, with lining that up with, with your values and their values and it's their body. They ultimately…I think probably what we want to promote in our kids is body autonomy. Also that totally backfired on me the other day when my three year old was like, ‘I'm the boss of my body!' when he didn't want to get in the bath. Yeah, I mean, this is... I wasn't prepared for that. But, like, in general, you know, like, it backfires a lot when they're three and they don't want to get in the bath, but hopefully by the time they're, you know, 11, 12, and they're thinking about training bras, maybe a bit younger than that, even, that they...have a better sense of what their boundaries are around their bodies?Kirstie: Yes, I think so. I think they do. But I think there is, I think also the, the influence of peer pressure becomes so much greater then like…actually, you see that you see your influence declines as a parent, you know, you can lay them foundations, but they're coming to the point where what their peers are doing and thinking is really important.And they actually are going to have to navigate this like the foundation that you've laid in terms of what your family values are around bodies and body autonomy, but also, I hope, you know, like that word you used about body esteem. I think that's really great. But I also really like the idea that perhaps they don't think a lot about their bodies.Like, that's what I would really love for them. Laura: That's the dream. Kirstie: Yeah, but there's just a…that's not something that occupies their thoughts all the time. And I, we talked a lot about girls, but it is, it's really important for boys as well. The reason that I want to talk about boys is because it's like the missing piece of the puzzle.We want things to change for our daughters. You can see that the effects of gender stereotyping is,are really bad for women and girls. We have to have actual tasks…well, let's try that again, task force in government, exactly, for violence against women and girls. That's how big of a problem that is. 90% of the perpetrators of violence against women and girls are men. So we have to also be looking at men in that equation. This is not a women's problem. This is a societal problem, a problem across all, everywhere in society about how we treat men and women. And if we're not talking to the boys about equality, If we're only talking to the girls, we're only going to get half of the population changing.It has to be holistically talking to all of our children. And for me, it feels like that means we have to unpick some of that stuff where, you know, the boys are getting a bit of a privilege. You know, we're talking about clothes. That is a privilege for boys that their clothes are made for playing. But it's also, how do you treat a child if their clothes tell you something about them?So if you see a child and they're wearing a top, which has got a bunny wearing a flower crown, what do you, as an adult, think of that child, as opposed to seeing a kid standing next to them, that's wearing a T-Rex with blood dripping from its fangs, right? As adults, how do we treat those children? What are the expectations that we have? Oh, you're big, you're strong, man up, don't cry. You know, the expectations that…that just tiny little cue might give us the emotional connections that we might allow a boy or a girl. These things seem tiny, but they are played out in all sorts of places through society. And unless we allow boys to be warm, be empathetic, to be vulnerable, to be…wrong. You know, to get things wrong and not always be the best at something, you know, we have to allow them some of the things that we're happy to allow girls and the same way that we have to allow the girls some of the things that we're happy to allow the boys. And that's what leads to a more equal distribution as they get older.Laura: I'm really glad that you brought it back there. And I think what I appreciate the most is how you basically connected the dinosaur T-shirt, shark underpants to the toxic masculinity pipeline, right? Like that's, I think what…because I think it's all very well for us to sit here and be like, ‘Oh, girls pants are too small and dah, dah, dah, dah'. But if we can't frame that within the context of, you know, the bigger issues, which I think you do such a great job of bringing it back to, you know, the gender pay gap, for example, like you just did there, like…Well, you didn't say this, but I'm thinking about how male suicide rates are really, really high. Because, and maybe you have some better insight into, like, the statistics around this, but I know especially there was a big conversation about it a few years ago about, yeah, just just like the gender norms that we foist upon men and boys means that they can't express their emotions. They can't tell us when they're struggling, they can't be vulnerable.And I think a consequence of that is that they end up either taking it out on their own lives and ending their own lives, or they take it out on the women around them in the form of things like domestic violence, for example. Can you maybe speak just briefly to, like, yes, it's about pants, but it's about all these other things? You know, like the bigger picture things? Kirstie: Yeah. I mean, it is about pants in, in one way because it sort of lays the baseline. If you are comfortable in your clothes, perhaps you are running a bit faster at school, perhaps you do have a slight advantage in the playground, that sort of thing. Yeah.If your T-shirt says on it, ‘I'm a genius'. Perhaps someone says that to you every time you wear it. Perhaps someone says, ‘Oh yeah, you're a little genius'. And perhaps that's just popping into your head drip, drip, drip day after day. And if your sister's T-shirt says, ‘Isn't she lovely?' on it? LAURA: ‘I'm a princess'. ‘I'm a princess' or just even, I mean, it can be so subtle, you know, ‘Always Happy”'.If your T-shirt says “Always Happy” on it – I see that on so many T-shirts – what's that telling you about how you have to present yourself? So these just little drip drip drip messages, they make a difference. And it makes a difference in how we as adults therefore treat them. And then that gap between how they feel about themselves widens.And what they…they get this idea that they are opposites, instead of things that are really similar: humans. Yeah, humans. You get this idea that you're super, super different. Instead of this idea that everybody here has similarities and differences. And this is just one of them, being a boy and a girl. That's just one of the differences. And we don't separate children by any other characteristics. We don't go to the park and say, Come on brown haired children, time to go home from the park. Like, we just don't do it. There's no other characteristic that we yell out. In the playground. ‘Come on, boys!' So, you know, we make these binary distinctions really, really important.And then by the time they get into secondary school, there's all sorts of things going on. Like, 45% of girls in mixed sex secondary schools have experienced some sort of sexual harassment at school.Laura: I saw this on your Instagram the other day, and I just... It's, it's horrendous. I cannot, like…I mean, I can believe that, but also what?!Kirstie: Yeah, I mean, I…it gives me the fear so badly. Like, what world are we throwing our daughters into? But what world are we throwing our sons into where they think – well, there's a significant proportion of boys in the school that think it's okay to treat women in that way. And it comes back to this idea. This is, that's why this stuff matters. Because it comes back to this idea that if girls are there to be looked at and boys are there to do things. That's how it plays itself out there. So, girls are for looking at. They're not full humans. Boys are the ones that do things. So it doesn't matter if I stick my hand up your skirt, ping a bra strap, whatever it is.That's one pathway, but…as you call it, the toxic masculinity pathway. But the other one is actually...but you can see right through – this is unrelated to clothes really – but you can see right through that the way we talk about, or the way we talk to them, it differs. So studies show that if you know the sex of your baby before it's born, you're more likely to say that they're very active in utero. So you're more likely to use words like ‘active' or say, ‘Oh, got a little footballer in there. So much kicking'. So colours, your expectation colours, your experience of what you're seeing. And then you have a confirmation bias. So when your child does something that chimes with your ideas of what you think boys must like, you notice it more. So you see your boy playing with something with wheels and you're like, ‘Oh, he loves wheels'. I've heard that boys love wheels. You give them more wheels, you give them a lot of praise or excitement or interest. And it creates a feedback loop where they therefore, yeah, they are going to be more interested in this thing.You keep giving them and showing that you're really proud of them. But we also find that parents are less likely to use emotional language with sons than they are with daughters. When they read books together, they're more likely to talk about, what do you think this character's feeling with a daughter than they are with a son?And in fact, the National Education Union did a survey where they looked at preschool, what were the activities that parents were more likely to do with their children, and they broke it down by gender. And parents are more likely to do singing, reading, painting, and expressive things with their daughters. And the only thing that they were more likely to do with the son was sport.Laura: You think about how we are inadvertently training girls to do the emotional labour. And by not teaching boys how to do it, we're double burdening girls with it. Kirstie: It's exactly that. That's exactly it. And we are expecting girls to behave prosocially.So girls are more likely to be punished for what we could call anti-social behavior…but not sharing. Not being kind, that sort of thing. We are more likely to punish, but whatever form that takes, you know? I'm not suggesting that…punish always sounds like a corporal punishment. But actually to come down heavily on…you know, you've gotta share, you've gotta do that.And we are less likely to reward boys for the pro-social stuff. So when boys are sharing or being kind, we are less likely to say, ‘Oh, he's so good at sharing'. Yeah. You know, that's just a thing that people are less likely to say. So there's exactly, that we expect…the expectation that girls will do a little bit more of that emotional labour, but it comes into school where they can, they've been able to see that boys come with a more limited emotional vocabulary.So they're less able to name their feelings and therefore, once you can name a feeling, you can process it. And if you haven't got the skills to name it, you haven't got the skills to process it. So then you see a third more boys are excluded from school. The stat you were talking about, about suicide. So suicide is still the biggest killer of men under 50.And that speaks to not just a crisis in mental health, men's mental health, because I would say there was a crisis in mental health in general, but in the way that it is expressed and dealt with, and men and boys are less likely to reach out to ask for help. So Childline counsel more girls than they do boys, though the same number of them may be having suicidal ideation thoughts. They're more likely to talk to girls about it than they are to talk to the boys about it, and that is seen in the suicide rates, the death by suicide rates for boys. It being significantly higher for male than girls.Laura: It's so horrendous, like, yeah, as a parent of a boy and, yeah, married to one as well, like, a man, yeah, just hearing that is, it's heartbreaking.Kirstie: I suppose the only other thing I would think is worth mentioning, I don't want people to go away feeling like it's doom and gloom because I think It only takes tiny changes, I think.Laura: I mean, I struggle with this a bit because ultimately it's a social issue. And so, I don't want to put everything on individual parents, like we need to change school policy, we need to change…God, even before that, preschool! My preschooler came home the other day, or we were playing in the playground, and he was like, no girls allowed in. And I had to like, I had to stop the play and be like, Let's talk about how we don't exclude people from playing. And I've, like…he had been at nursery for, like, two weeks before this happened. I was mortified. Where are you getting this? It's before they even get to school is what I'm trying to say.Kirstie: Yeah, and I think it peaks actually around six or seven, that really binary thinking, because they want to find their groups, that's like developmental science, like they're coming away from their parents, they want to find their groups, they do want to fit in actually, it's really hard to not fit in.Laura: Yeah, no, it's an evolutionarY…what's the word that I'm looking for? Like, it's evolutionary adaptive to be part of the group. If you're excluded from the group, you're more likely to get eaten by a predator, or like……I'm putting it in really, really simplistic terms there. But, you know, it's this conversation I have with my clients who are coming to see me about, you know, problems with, with body image.  I mean, problems with body image...! But I mean, you know, when they're struggling with how they feel about their body and they say, you know, I just want this last diet. I…you know,  can't let go of the idea of losing weight. And I'm like, well, of course not, because you're more likely to be accepted when you have thin privilege.  And all the privilege that that gives you access to. And that has an evolutionary basis, right? To be accepted, …there's safety in that group. So yeah, the exact same thing……sorry, that was just a massive tangent for me to talk about myself and my work, but…Kirstie: No, I mean, it's... but that's really important because it's all the same thing, isn't it?Because it's exactly…it's all tied up. Like you say, it's like a societal thing. It's so hard to fight against that. Like, I don't always want to be the person who steps out, speaks up. I mean, sometimes I can't help it. That is who I am. But you know, when I'm standing at the school gate, I just want to be friends. I want to make friends. I don't want to be giving people an earful about everything all the time. So it's the same for our children, isn't it? They want to slot in. I think the things that we can do that change that is try and reduce those divisions. I think putting our children in very, very different clothes based on their gender tells them that we think it's really important. So I think there's lots of things that we can do that just reduce those barriers. And I do think that it is a question of changing policies within schools. And I do think it is also maybe shielding them as much as you can from books or TV programs or…I mean, it becomes impossible to be honest, but that, yeah, it's really hard things that don't constantly drip those messages into their heads. And it's really, really hard because they are absolutely everywhere. But if you're aware of it, you keep an eye on what you're reading with them or what you're watching with them or what you're seeing in the supermarket. You know, if you've just got that little thing running in the back of your head thinking, ‘would I let both my kids wear this'? That's one of the questions I ask myself. And the answer has to be yes, I would let both of my kids wear this. One of the questions I ask in the back of my head, like, does this paint everybody in a good light? Like when you're watching Peppa Pig, is Daddy Pig painted in a good light? What do you think it does to little boys to see that? Just think about that for a second. Like what is it when you're watching...Laura: I've given a lot of thought to this.Kirstie: Yeah, I'm sure you have.Laura: Yeah, I wrote recently about – it's from a different angle – but the horrendous anti-fatness in Peppa Pig. And just how...harmful that show is but I hadn't thought of it, because I try and avoid it if possible, but like I hadn't thought of it from the gender perspective as well as, like the lens…Kirstie: Daddy Pig is portrayed inevitably as an idiot. Yeah. And I just think that doesn't do anything good. But on that, I mean, I think it's really interesting now to see how the idea of talking about bodies…We watch Strictly as a family and that's one of the things that my kids enjoy watching and it's hard to find things that everybody can watch together. And there is so much good representation now in the past few years in Strictly, you know, in terms of same sex couples, in terms of people who are openly gay, like, in terms of people from all different backgrounds and ethnicities, like, that's doing a great job, I think. But we watched the opening show and two of the men talked about how they were overweight. “A bit squashy,” one of them said, something like that, talked about, Oh, well, this is going to be hard for me because I've got a problem with weight. And I thought, I think if a woman was saying this, we would be listening to this in a different way. And we would be thinking about how we could positively respond. I think the conversation around body positivity, which is something I feel a bit uncomfortable about, but I think that conversation for women is at least happening. And I feel like that conversation is more complicated and perhaps nuanced for men because we've had this thing about the dad bod, but equally, I was interested to see that people were like talking about their bodies in this…the disparaging their own bodies. In this show that I think of as not being a…that sort of thing, and it fell down gender lines.Laura: That…it's a really interesting observation. I haven't paid much attention to Strictly, but I think just more broadly speaking, I think – and it ties into kind of just not being able to express themselves, maybe in the same way or talk about the things that are bothering them, but also the shifting roles of body image pressures, I suppose, for men and boys. But I did – I'll link to this in the transcript as well – but so I spoke with Dr. Scott Griffiths, who's a psychologist and a body image researcher about sort of the shifting way that the male bodies are perceived and, and kind of the growing pressure and expectation of them to have this ripped, shredded body to the point that we are now seeing, in older sort of teens, we're seeing something called muscle dysmorphic disorder, so a body dysmorphic disorder, it sort of sits between a body dysmorphic and eating disorder.Generally, boys who struggle with it consider themselves to be like insufficiently muscled and really lean and scrawny and they, they want to bulk up and, and get big and strong, like, you know, all the messages that they've been receiving since they were one and two and three years old. And so they end up…on the really extreme end of it, they might inject testosterone [I MEAN STEROIDS HERE!]. It can lead to infertility. It can, it can lead to all sorts of really, really. hugely problematic things. And again, if I just wonder about, you know…it's, it's acceptable for women to talk about how they struggle with their bodies for better or worse. And we obviously have a sort of counterbalance to that in the, the body positivity, body acceptance movement, but that doesn't exist for men.There is no body positivity for men or…like, there is, but there's a few, you know, a few people talking about it.Kirstie: You could argue that because it hasn't been necessary till now because it has been less of a concern societally for people to police men's bodies. But now we're finding ourselves in this highly visual culture where people are policing everybody's bodies.And simultaneously, like you say, we're asking little boys to conform to these really rigid rules about what it means to be a man or look like a man.Laura: And we're giving them like, if you think back to like what a Ken doll looks like, to what a G.I. Joe or like…I don't know if kids play with them anymore, but you know what I mean?Kirstie: What they do play with is Spider Man or Hulk or Batman or, you know, all of these figures, they are all hyper muscled. And if you watch those Marvel films, those are idealised bodies and the idealising for boys and men is to have these bulging biceps and to have a six pack and things that actually aren't…you know, if you ever hear a film, a film star talking about what they have to do to look the way they do.You know, if you ever heard Hugh Jackman talking about what it was like to be Wolverine, that is not okay. It's punishing. It's absolutely punishing. He didn't drink for days on end. You know, really, he was at the limits of what you can do and still be alive and turning up for work and doing specific sort of flexes and the pressure then that that could put on you if you were the, you know, if you're susceptible to, like you say, injecting hormones or steroids and the fact that that stuff is very reasonable, you know, very easily available or to be buying protein powders and being told on TikTok that you, you too can bulk up, you could, yeah, but actually your genetics are playing a part in this.You can't. Yeah. Bodies are different.Laura: So, so much playing, playing into that. And Kirstie, I feel like we could talk for hours about this stuff. And I, I'm, I'm really conscious about your time. It's a...Kirstie: Yeah, so I've got to go and pick my children up from school! Laura: Okay. So, okay. There is one burning question that I have for you, which is...I don't know if you have this, like, data, but do dads read your magazine?Kirstie: Well, that's a good question. So I don't have this data. What I can tell you is, from my social media account is that it's like 90% women. That's slightly to do with Instagram. Instagram skews towards women. Yeah. This is a question that I get asked a lot: why don't more men write for you? So men are less likely to pitch me. And I think you'll find that men talking about parenting often have daughters. Yeah. And I do get it because I think when you have a daughter as a man, you have the same experience that I talked about where I suddenly was like, Oh, I don't know what it is like to be a boy in this world. I haven't done that. Oh, I see some of the things that you're going to run up against. I think that realisation for some fathers can be huge. Yeah. I think it can be absolutely massive for them. I think they can realise a lot about their own previous experiences to see that. And I don't like the fact that they have to have a daughter for this to happen to them.But they suddenly realise, Oh, I see how you're going to be treated in this world and I do not like it. And I want to talk about parenting now.Laura: I was just going to say, you have a much more generous interpretation of it than I do, which I think is that, and maybe – and I don't think it's one or the other, it's probably both – but I also think that this just speaks to the point that we were making earlier, which is that so much of the emotional labour of raising children falls on women.Kirstie: Yes, I mean, I think that is true, that basically who buys parenting books is women, who worries and feels mum guilt? It's women. We don't, I, I mean, I haven't, I spend a lot of time on the internet, but I haven't seen loads of men talking about dad guilt. I haven't heard a lot of men saying how hard they find it to manage their children's emotional development throughout, through our difficult society.Like that isn't a thing that a lot of men are talking about. It's not the case that no men are talking about it. So there are some prominent men who talk about this stuff. It doesn't fit with our societal narratives. So, I mean, I would recommend anybody to read, Robert Webb's, How Not to Be a Boy. I've really enjoyed that book. There's a really interesting, it's a half memoir, half…Laura: Like parenting?Kirstie: …musing on, well, yeah, it was useful in parenting, I think, in terms of he talks about how he would like to raise his children, bearing in mind what he's done. I would recommend Grayson Perry's book, The Descent of Man. That's a great small book. And it's, he's just got such a really great way of pinpointing the sort of weirdnesses of gender, like there's so many…and he's funny as well and warm, isn't he? He even made a TV programme that went along with that. Those books are relatively old, but I think they have a lot to say. I mean, Justin Baldoni, I don't know if you know him, he was in Jane the Virgin? If you've ever seen that. He was like the beefcake guy, I can't remember, he was called Raphael I think. He's written a book about how hard it was for him growing up and how much he struggled with his own body image. And the expectations placed on him as a young man and how hard he found it to be vulnerable and when someone showed him pornography when he was 12 or younger, he, you know, how he couldn't tell his parents and didn't know how to deal with this.And, you know, so there are some people talking about this, but they are so few and far between. And also it doesn't fall into the easy categories, I think, that we find it, that marketers find it easy to sell, that book publishers see the obvious opportunities, you know. And I think, you're right, men as a general rule aren't being asked to think about this. How are they going to change the world for their sons? Laura: Oh, well, you've given some really cool resources for us to check out and buy for our baby daddies! Right. For Father's Day or whatever, Christmas, whatever's coming up, where are we, what is time? And I think, you know, the work that you're doing is so critical as well and getting these conversations started and just thinking about, you know, like the little things like pants and how they have these huge repercussions.So Kirstie, before I let you go…at the end of every episode, my guest and I share something that they have been really into lately. So it can be a book, it can be…which you've just given us lots of books! But it could be something not to do with work. It could be an actual snack. It can be a podcast, anything that you would like to recommend to the listeners.Kirstie: I had a long think about this. And the thing is, I was thinking that in terms of my actual snacks, I do not have a sweet tooth. Oh, I know this is very…but basically I just want savoury things all the time. So the snacks that I have been snacking on is, I mean, I just eat crisps. I just love crisps.Laura: No shame in the crisp game.Kirstie: Just love crisps. But the thing that I've been really snacking on recently is miso soup. Laura: Miso. Oh, yum. Kirstie: Yeah. Because I, what I really crave in the middle of the day. Is like a hit of that salt. Salty, yes. Salty. Tasty. It feels like a hot velvet drink and so I'm always delighted when it's got cold enough. I feel like, yes, it's soup time. And so that's like my hit of salty deliciousness.Laura: Oh my God, that sounds so good. Actually, I never thought of just…I love miso soup, but like usually when I'm eating Japanese food. Yeah. I never thought of just like…cause you can get like, do you make up miso soup like with miso paste or do you do, like, the instant sachet stuff?Kirstie: I do have the paste, which I just stick in everything because I want everything to taste like that basically. But I bought powdered ones. And they are brilliant.Laura: And yeah, you just fill it up with the boiling water and…?Kirstie: Yeah, it's like two o'clock in the afternoon. I've had my lunch. And eat something else that's delicious.Laura: A little miso pick me up.Kirstie: A little pep me up.Laura: Yeah. Oh, yum. Okay, that's making me hungry just thinking about that. So I am going to be your inverse. And I am

Today on the podcast I'm joined by Dr. Molly Moffat - A GP who practices medicine from a weight inclusive, neurodiversity affirming lens, celebrating both diversity of bodies and of minds. In this episode, we are talking about how Molly moved away from recommending diets and weight loss to her patients, towards an anti-diet, weight-inclusive approach, focused on treating individuals with care and compassion. We get into what exactly medical anti-fat bias is and why it's so harmful, and she has some really lovely suggestions for how to talk to patients who come in with the idea that they have to lose weight for medical reasons. Find out more about Molly's work here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Subscribe to Laura's newsletter here.Enrol in the Raising Embodied Eaters course here.Here's the transcript in full:INTRO:Molly: Fat folk don't go and see their doctor when they need to. And you know, I don't need to explain why that is a concern. That is a concern. It means that diagnoses are missed, diagnoses are made late, and it absolutely contributes to stress, mental health, physical health and health inequity in an already marginalised group of people.Laura: Hey, and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast, where we talk all about appetite, bodies and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas, I'm an anti diet registered nutritionist, and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter. Today I'm talking to Dr. Molly Moffat. Molly is a GP with a special interest in learning disability and autism. She practices medicine from a weight inclusive, neurodiversity affirming lens, celebrating both diversity of bodies and of minds. She's neurodivergent herself and has three children. In this episode, Molly and I are talking about how she moved away from recommending diets and weight loss to her patients towards an anti diet, weight inclusive approach, focused on treating individuals with care and compassion. We get into what exactly medical anti-fat bias is and why it's so harmful, and she has some really lovely suggestions for how to talk to patients who come in with the idea that they have to lose weight for medical reasons. I really loved talking to Molly and I think you're going to enjoy this episode.But before we get to today's conversation, I want to tell you real quick about the benefits of becoming a paid subscriber to the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter and community. Now, I know we're not used to having to pay for content on the internet. and why would you pay for something where 85% of the content is free anyway?Well, because without paying supporters, this work just wouldn't be possible. None of the newsletter, not the podcast. As well as supporting me in the time it takes to research, interview contributors, and write articles, your support goes towards paying guests for their time and their labour, as well as a podcast and a newsletter editor, so it's a whole team effort.You also help me keep the space ad and sponsor free, so I don't have to sell out to advertisers or exploit my kid for freebies. Plus, keeping the community closed to paying subscribers only means that we keep the trolls and the fatphobes out. I recently asked the CIHAS community why they support the newsletter, and this is what one reader had to say:“I'm a mum of one fairly adventurous, self proclaimed vegetarian and one theoretical omnivore. The latter survives almost exclusively on added sugar and butter, but mostly sugar. I consumed all the picky eating advice, some of it really well meaning and pretty mellow, but by seven years in, I was more frustrated, confused, and full of self doubt than ever.Enter CIHAS. The no nonsense, cut through the bullshit, science backed content is exceptional. The content about sugar is especially helpful to me, and the anti diet lens is an antidote to my extremely anti fat/diet culture conditioning. And as an American, the British references are just an added bonus. To say your work is actively changing my life is not an understatement. Thank you.”Well, thank you to the reader who sent that really lovely review. Becoming a paid subscriber is a fiver a month or £50 for the year. And you get loads of cool perks as well as just my undying gratitude for supporting my work. Head to laurathomas.substack.com to subscribe now.  All right, team, here's my conversation with Dr. Molly Moffatt. MAIN EPISODE:Hey Molly, can you start by telling us a little bit about you and the work that you do? Molly: Sure, yes. So I'm a GP, although I actually only do one day of general practice at the moment. I have a special interest in learning disability and autism. I've been working in that field for a few years, and I've recently started working in paediatrics, doing some neurodevelopmental assessments, and I also do some teaching for medical students. The reason I'm here is because I do my very best to practice in a weight inclusive manner, so I'm not worried about fat bodies, but I'm really worried about the way fat bodies are treated, particularly when they're trying to seek healthcare.Laura: Yeah, that's what you're here to talk about today, but I feel like we could probably have a whole other conversation about neurodivergence and feeding differences and all of that stuff, but I will try and rein myself in because, yeah, like you said, I really wanted to talk to you about how fat bodies are perceived and how they're treated in medical settings.So I'm wondering if you could kind of take us on a bit of a journey with you. Can you set the scene for us? You're a medic, straight out of training, going into your GP specialisation. At that point, what do you believe to be true about the relationship between weight and health?Molly: Okay. So I mean, all of my medical school teaching, all of my junior doctor training, and my GP training was absolutely based in this weight normative approach.So the idea that weight was a marker of health, and that we should be pursuing weight management for our fat patients. And there was never any discussion around where that came from. So, you know, it was just stated as a fact that ‘ob*sity' came with all of these comorbidities and put people at increased risk of X, Y, and Z.And, like I say, I never remember – and I'm really confident it didn't happen – any discussion around where the evidence behind those statements came from, and the fact that actually...it was really complex and that maybe there were some other factors at play that cause that association between body size and certain diseases.And I also never remember any conversation about weight stigma and the impact that that can have on people's health.Laura: Okay. Well, there's so much that I could kind of, like, tease out of what you just said there, but I think the sort of headline for me is just how this information was presented to you as complete certainty. I think if I'm kind of reading between the lines, or what I've even learned in my own training, that as weight goes up, the worse the health outcomes, right? Like in this linear sort of fashion. It sounds as though you learned something similar, but the evidence behind that was never really presented or unpacked or challenged in any way.And that's the part that I find most, like, terrifying because as medics you should be, like, challenging the evidence and not just, like, swallowing it whole and, you know, swallowing information whole and not kind of having any critical thought around it.Molly: I know, I agree. And of course there were things that we critically appraised and we were taught how to critically appraise, but the world of ‘ob*sity' was just something that was presented as a fact.And I feel so sad that I kind of missed out on all of those years of a greater understanding of how complex it was.Laura: You also mentioned weight stigma, which we'll come back to in a second, but coming back to this idea of how complex it is. So what were some of those messages that you received that oversimplified the relationship between weight and health?You know, I've kind of mentioned this idea that as weight goes up, that health invariably goes down. I'm wondering what other kinds of things that you picked up on that sort of reinforced those ideas.Molly: Yeah, I mean, absolutely kind of ‘eat less and move more' was something that we spouted. And, you know, when we were kind of practicing role play scenarios, one of the tick boxes was ‘give lifestyle advice'.Part of that was, you know, absolutely eat less and move more. And, you know, assumptions around a person's lifestyle and diet again was very much part of that message. That people were fat because they didn't exercise and they ate too much.Laura: And then they also lie to you, right, about how much they've eaten?That's…at least, that's the thread that we got in nutrition training, is that people who are higher weight, they're almost always lying about their dietary intake. And so you are already…I mean, think about how problematic that is, that you're already going in with the assumption that this person is lying to you about, you know, their lived experience, like, what does that do from the perspective of forming any kind of therapeutic relationship to go in with that understanding and assumption?Molly: Yeah, no, I agree entirely and, you know, let's think about when people are presenting to a healthcare setting, they're generally a bit nervous and anxious and feeling quite vulnerable and they are essentially quite powerless in that situation. And then imagine that they're also giving you information and telling you about their lifestyle and that's being doubted. It's horrible, isn't it?Laura: Yeah, it's really, really messed up when you slow it down and think about it. I'm wondering if there were any particular moments or specific patients that you remember that started to change that understanding a bit for you? That kind of threw a kink in that really simple narrative of ‘weight equals health', and ‘calories in equals calories out' and you know, we just need to go on a diet and then everyone will be thin?Molly: Yeah, I mean, my path towards kind of health at every size was quite convoluted. And actually it began with an interest in lifestyle medicine. So I was feeling quite…Laura: Oh, a detour into lifestyle medicine! Okay. The plot thickens.Molly: Yeah, the plot thickens. Absolutely. So. You know, I was feeling quite demoralised by the fact I was seeing a lot of chronic disease and that people were not getting any better and they were coming back to see me and I was giving them lots of medications and, you know, often those medications would come with fairly significant side effects. And so I guess what lifestyle medicine offered me, or what I thought it offered me, was the opportunity to really get to the bottom of those problems without the need for medication and the kind of idea that prevention was better than cure.And it appealed to me from a holistic perspective, you know, this was an opportunity to kind of see the person as a whole, rather than just focusing on an individual symptom. So I was actually really excited and really motivated. But what I found with time was that, first of all, I became more uncomfortable with the dynamic that was being played out, which was me as this middle class professional who carried a significant amount of privilege telling people how to live their lives that with time felt more icky.And also that people weren't able to do all the things we were discussing, or if they did do…follow the advice that I was giving them, it wasn't really making them feel any better because, hey, you know, there are these things called social determinants of health, which actually great…you know, carry a greater significance than personal behaviours.Laura: I'm just wondering for people who maybe aren't familiar with like, the world of lifestyle medicine, if you could say a little bit more about that and kind of the type of advice that you were giving people, like when you say lifestyle advice, what exactly does that mean? And I understand it's like a whole range of things, but yeah, I'm curious to hear how you applied that in your practice.Molly: So, I mean, it was looking at kind of core areas. Those core areas were: sleep, stress management, nutrition, and exercise and, you know, within the nutrition arm, I'm really sad to say that weight loss played a part of that. And, you know, whilst I tried to make that as individualised as possible to the person in front of me, inherently, there is an element of elitism really with lifestyle advice, I feel that, again, just didn't really quite sit right with me. And I actually found myself feeling a bit irritated. If I'm honest, I was feeling irritated that people weren't doing what I was asking. And luckily I had the insight to acknowledge that, you know, that was a me problem, not a them problem.What I realised was that I wasn't really irritated with them. I was just really frustrated that, you know, here was what I thought was this chance to really make people's lives better. And actually it wasn't having the impact that I thought it would.Laura: It's almost as though…and this is totally my perspective and my, I think, a little bit of prejudice against lifestyle medicine.But there…it's kind of this underlying assumption that people need you to tell them what to do because they don't know any better.Molly: Yeah, they don't know. Oh, it's so patronising. Laura: Yeah. And it's like a kind of a knowledge deficit. Molly: Absolutely. Laura: When most people, they do understand the importance of sleep and they do understand, like, it's helpful to, like, move their bodies in some way and to eat some vegetables.Molly: Absolutely. That rings true so much with me. You know, I hear these conversations where people are talking about healthy weight management and you know, the suggestions are, well, ‘let's teach people how to cook'. And I just think, oh, for goodness sake. You know, it's so patronising to assume that people don't know how to cook and that you're kind of…it's this kind of saviour complex that, well, let's teach them how to cook because they don't know that and therefore their life's going to be okay.They do know how to cook, but what if they've, you know, got three jobs because they need to work three jobs in order to pay the bills? They don't have time to cook.Laura: What if they just don't like…because they've got their own cultural background, they cook food in a very different way than how you cook food or like there's a whole number of reasons why like that might just not only fall flat but It could be problematic for some people. You know, especially if they're like, well, ‘my doctor is telling me I need to do this, but this doesn't really align with either my values or you know, what I'm able to access or have time for the competing messages that I'm getting from within my family' or whatever it might be.So there's a lot of idealisation I think that goes on in the lifestyle medicine community and not a deep enough understanding of social determinants of health, like you said.Molly: I think that's the big, big part that's missing in lifestyle medicine and the recognition…recognition of the social determinants of health.Laura: Absolutely. And even just like the understanding that even if everybody did eat whatever Rangan Chatterjee is spouting off that we should eat, it doesn't mean that our health will all kind of play out along the same lines. So we were going through your journey.Molly: Yeah, so I was talking about lifestyle medicine and feeling just a bit uncomfortable with the whole thing.And of course at that time I was nurturing a special interest in neurodiversity, kind of recognising my own neurodivergence and my children's neurodivergence. And so eating disorders were kind of very much on my radar. And so intuitively I just didn't like the idea of creating any kind of fear or anxiety around food that just felt wrong.And, you know, that's what we were doing when we were talking about nutrition, the world of nutrition is also extremely confusing. And it was confusing for me. You know, you have all these people giving really compelling arguments as to why their diet is the best. And they're able to give you all this evidence that backs up their claims.But the kind of general theme, yes, is that we are creating this fear and anxiety around, often, whole groups of food.Laura: I mean, wow. There's so much that we could say even about that. Like I got a message from a parent the other day who was like, I feel like I need to have a degree in nutrition to feed my child.I was just like, yeah, that's how fucking convoluted we have made nutrition with all the kind of competing expert voices who are shouting about, you know, their diet as being the best diet and even like among amongst paediatric feeding professionals and, well, just feediatric…did I just invent a new word?! Paediatric dieticians and nutritionists, there's, you know, there's a right and a wrong way.And like you say, it really creates a lot of fear and anxiety about messing up. And it plays into our fears about not being a good enough parent. And yeah, it really, like, tugs on a lot of different parts of us. Where did it go from there then once you had this kind of recognition of like, well, I don't want to be adding fuel to the fire of eating disorders, disordered eating and making food scary for, you know…I'm thinking about patients of yours that might be neurodivergent where food might already be really scary.Where did it go from there?Molly: Where it went from there is that I went on maternity leave.Laura: Get out of there!Molly: Yeah, exactly. So I went on maternity leave with this kind of feeling of disconnect and that something wasn't right and I needed to do something. And of course maternity leave provided me with the opportunity to listen to lots of podcasts and read lots of things while sat feeding a baby. So that's how I actually stumbled across health at every size. You know, the kind of the parenting path that I've chosen to take meant that I was already aware of, you know, division of responsibility and intuitive eating and kind of food neutrality and body neutrality. So I was already, already aware of those. And, you know, I was…again, intuitively the idea of the language that I was using around food and bodies with my children was very important.So I think I actually listened to a podcast. I think it might have been the Full Blooms podcast that I listened to. And I think was being interviewed on that. And that was the first time I heard the words kind of anti diet and health at every size. And yeah, when I have a special interest, I really have a special interest. So, you know, 158 podcasts later, um, yeah, there I was. And, you know, there I was in this state of…a combination of so many feelings of kind of frustration, guilt, sadness, anger, disbelief. Yeah, you know, I kind of had this very strong sense of justice and feel things very deeply and it…I found it very consuming to begin with. This feeling that I'd been getting it wrong and why are more people not talking about this? Why is this not more mainstream? And really, people should be talking about this. And I wanted to tell everybody I knew about this because this is so important.Laura: I've heard a similar version of that story from not just other medical professionals, but also clients of mine who are like, why, why isn't everyone talking about this?And they want to kind of. become these little social justice warriors and really just, like, shout it from the rooftops. But what I really appreciated, Molly, there, was just you talking about all the complexity of the feelings that came up for you, because I think oftentimes, particularly if you're in the medical profession or any kind of allied health profession, because you're in that caring profession, your automatic line of thinking is often, wow, I've caused so much harm.And, and you feel an immense amount of guilt for continuing to prescribe diets when you're learning that diets don't work and you think about all the encounters you've had with patients that might have inadvertently increased their experiences of stigma and harm. And again, we'll come to talk about that more in a bit.I suppose my point is really that…of course you're going to feel that way and that doesn't have to be where it ends being kind of stuck with those feelings of guilt. And so hopefully there was also like a glimmer of hope in there as well? Molly: Oh gosh, yes. Laura: Well, I'm wondering as well, because it sounds like you were quite disenchanted before you went on maternity leave. So did this feel like, okay, this is something that…this is a missing piece of the puzzle for me, for my practice going forward?Molly: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And I have complete conviction about it. And I did at the time and I still have now, you know, this is absolutely the way I want to practice. And I do have hope.And I do think that in 20 years time, maybe even 10 years time, we are going to change the way we look at weight and weight management, well, weight management, you know, will not be a thing.Laura: Just abolish weight management. Molly: Yeah, absolutely. Laura: You've used the term health at every size and I'm wondering if you could just give a brief kind of like, explainer of what health at every size is for people who haven't encountered it before. Or weight inclusive healthcare, you know, like whatever feels more comfortable for you.Molly: Yeah, I mean, I guess let's talk about the kind of weight-inclusive, the weight inclusive approach, which is probably what I feel kind of most comfortable with. Laura: Same. Molly: Yeah. So the idea that weight isn't a marker of health, and that people of any size deserve good quality, compassionate, equal access to healthcare, that weight loss isn't possible for most people, and that actually trying to achieve weight loss brings with it lots of concerning things like, a, you know, problematic relationship with food, risk for eating disorders, and weight cycling, so weight going up and down, which again is bad for us, along with stress, and again, stress is not good for us.Laura: Yeah, so there's, there's a lot to even think about within there, but I think that even that first idea is really radical and it shouldn't be, right? That first idea of like, people of all sizes deserve equal access to healthcare and it should all be delivered with compassion and care. And I think most of us, at least those of us who have thin privilege, for us that's more or less a given.Although, you know, I've had plenty of shady encounters with doctors, but in general, you know, I am treated well, whereas, and certainly stories I've heard from clients and, you know, fat activists and people online is that that is…and that's, this is what bears out in the evidence as well, is that that is not guaranteed.That people of a higher body weight can walk into a GP surgery, maybe they're seeking care for, I don't know, a sore throat or a pain in their hand. And to call back to your earlier point about how you have to make these, like, lifestyle recommendations. Patients who are of a higher weight, regardless of what they present for, are almost often given a prescription for weight loss, or they might even be handed a coupon for Slimming World, right?Like the NHS partners with Slimming World too, and some other weight loss companies. But even if that's not what that person came in for, or even if that person said in no uncertain terms, I do not want to talk about weight loss. weight. That's not what I'm here for. I don't want to diet. The doctor generally won't respect that boundary. Um, yeah.Molly: And what's so sad is that I see patients preempting that. So I have patients that come to me who will say, ‘I know I need to lose weight', or ‘I know I'm a bigger girl', you know, it's almost like…because they are so anticipating me saying it and so nervous about that conversation, that they kind of want to say it, so it's out the way.Laura: Yeah. What do you think that's about? What do you think's going on there?Molly: Well, I mean, I think they're feeling vulnerable and anxious. And as I said, they are so used to their doctor saying something about their size that it's almost like they kind of just want to get it out of the way. If I say it, then they won't say it.Laura: Yeah, almost like a defence, it sounds like.Molly: Yeah, absolutely. And it, you know, it's so sad.Laura: And how do you approach that with a patient then if they, if they start a consultation off like that, I'm kind of jumping ahead of myself here a little bit, but thinking about, you know, how from this new perspective of, of being a weight inclusive doctor, do you approach that conversation and start to kind of, you know, take them on a, in a slightly different direction than, than they might have been accustomed to.Molly: So it's not easy and it's something that I'm still kind of trying to work out. And of course, you know, bearing in mind, I have 10-15 minutes with these people. And of course, it's not like they come to me and they say, Oh, you know, tell me what you think about my weight, or do you think I need to lose weight?They come to me with the assumption that I believe they should lose weight, and they, you know, usually they will come about something else like, you know, a chest infection or a sore throat, and their weight will... come up as part of that consultation. You know, that kind of respectful two way dialogue is a really important part for me of the weight inclusive approach.And, you know, in the same way that I feel very strongly that a weight centric consultation is horrible because it's that kind of didactic, this is what you must do. Similarly, you know, me just telling somebody, you don't need to lose weight equally wouldn't sit right with me. And of course, I'm very hyper aware in that scenario of my own thin privilege and how insensitive of me it would be to just kind of, you know, dismiss them and say, you don't need to worry about your weight because that would be really kind of minimising their experience.And of course they have had to worry about their weight because their size has meant that they have faced many obstacles and horrible things happen to them and discrimination and so I think it's really important to kind of acknowledge that. So what I try and do is to actually apologise and say, I'm so sorry that anybody has made you feel that your body is flawed and needs fixing. I don't believe that. And I explain my background and I say, you know, I spent the last few years learning a lot about weight science and reflecting, and as a result of that learning, I now don't see weight as a marker of health and I don't recommend weight loss to my patients and I explain the reasons for that. Laura: Oh my God. I feel kind of emotional hearing you say that just because of just how powerful it would be, I mean, for anyone to hear that who's, you know, had concerns about their weight, but particularly for, for fat folks and, and like, I'm thinking specifically of, of a couple of clients of mine in the past, who've just had horrendous experiences with their GP, even when I have preemptively written to the GP saying, like: ‘this person has a history of disordered eating and we're not pursuing intentional weight loss for these reasons. Here's all this science that you can read to say why this isn't a good idea', and then still had, you know, yeah, just horrendous experiences.  And so yeah, just to have a GP who is so compassionate and understanding. First of all, you're signalling that you're a safe person to them. And secondly, you're signalling that you can come and talk to me about this stuff. Like, even if they're not there about their weight, they want to get their antibiotics for their chest infection and just get out of there. But in the future, if that comes up, they know that they can come to you and approach you. And it's just, it feels like a really powerful thing to me.Molly: People do cry, actually. I've had a few people cry when I've said that.Laura: I bet they do. Yeah. I hope that any other GPs listening are frantically taking notes at this point of a little, a little spiel that they can say to their clients. And, and has that gone on to open up any other conversations with patients? Or kind of, you say that people get emotional, but what besides that is the response?Molly: like I say, emotional that that's not something they've ever heard anybody say before. And I guess kind of relief. I mean, at the same time, you know, I fully recognise that they will have had a lifetime of being told different things. So, you know, it will take a lot of time for them to completely change their thinking. But yeah, people do come back and have come back to speak to me about it.And, you know, normally what I say is, how would you feel about us instead thinking about certain health behaviours and how we can talk about those, but without weight loss being the goal? And I, I give them that to kind of think about really.Laura: And how do you make it so that that doesn't end up feeling like an earlier lifestyle medicine conversation?Molly: And I'm very conscious of that too. And I guess I make sure that I point out that the reason I don't want weight loss to be the goal is because when weight loss does become the goal, actually those behaviours... become quite unhealthy. As I said, I'm not quite sure I've got it right just yet. I'm constantly trying to think in my head how I can script these things in a way that does mean that people are going to come back to see me to talk about it because I want to talk to everybody about it and I want them to come back and see me, and like you say, for them to feel safe.Laura: Yeah. And I mean, fundamentally your job is to help people care for themselves and to offer them care. So yeah, you, you also can't be sort of, you can't completely ignore, you know, health promoting behaviours, but I suppose like, at least for me, it's eliciting from the individual what is important to them and what feels doable for them.So it's like really basic motivational interviewing stuff. Yeah. Yeah. How can we work from where you already are. And again, it speaks to that piece that a lot of times people already know the things that they need to do. And so it's just supporting them with the changes that they already want to make or not make and holding space for that as well. And offering them the medication if that's actually what they need.Molly:  And there being no shame around that, you know? Laura: Absolutely. Yeah. Wow. It's like a whole new way of doing medicine. So we've talked about a little bit around this concept of weight stigma, because there's a sort of very particular experience of weight stigma that happens in medical settings, or we could also use the words anti fatness to, I think, better describe weight stigma.And yeah, just a sort of side note, weight stigma tends to be a very, like, neutered term that is used in academia, whereas I think in, in critical fat studies and, and in fat liberation spaces, they're more and more using the word anti-fat bias, which really speaks to what that is. Can you explain a little bit more of what that means and how it plays out in a medical setting and how it is so harmful and damaging for people's health?Molly: Yeah. I mean, what we're referring to there is, as you say, the anti-fat bias that people who work in healthcare carry. So meaning a preference to thin bodies and kind of prejudice towards fat bodies. And that's experienced by fat people as weight stigma, that's really, really concerning and it can present in many ways, but it's, let's give you some examples of what that can look like in a GP surgery.So that can look like a fat person coming to see their GP and, as you said earlier, having every symptom put down to their weight, weight loss being the answer for everything. It can mean a fat person losing weight and that weight loss being celebrated, rather than that weight loss being considered the red flag that it should be and being investigated correctly. It can look like there not being the right equipment available, so therefore the necessary examination doesn't take place, the right investigations don't take place. It can look like the treatment options that are available for thin people not being available or accessible to fat people. And, you know, all of this means that fat folk don't go and see their doctor when they need to.And, you know, I don't need to explain why that is a concern. That is a concern. It means that diagnoses are missed, diagnoses are made late and it absolutely contributes to stress. Mental health, physical health, and health inequity in an already marginalized group of people. I find it so concerning.Laura: When you list it all out like that, it just puts it into perspective how healthcare for...fat people is anything but care. It's anything but health. It's, yeah, prejudice, and marginalisation and, yeah, violence. I think a lot of times. Yeah. Because it can kind of, I was just thinking of another example of what people have told me that they've had to go for like two or three oral glucose tolerance tests in pregnancy, because their doctors have, are just baffled that these people aren't…Molly: Couldn't possibly be diabetic…Laura: Couldn't possibly be diabetic... Because there's an assumption, I think made about what fat people's health should be. Molly: Absolutely. Laura: You know, I want to caveat this whole conversation by saying that nobody owes anyone health and yeah, health is, is morally neutral, right? Molly: Absolutely. Yeah. Laura: But there is a very pervasive idea that fat people cannot also have, you know, markers that we would traditionally consider to be within normal range or are healthy by virtue of the fact that they're fat. But I think what the evidence shows us over and over again, when we really dig through it, is that independent of your body size, you can have markers of health. Like, cardio respiratory health, low cholesterol, or like within the healthy range, not have type 2 diabetes, not have high blood pressure. But I think the assumption that I hear from medical colleagues is that people will invariably have those things if they're a higher weight.Molly: Yeah. And you know, when we think about children, I see that, that we have a child who, in terms of their kind of metabolic health markers is healthy. And yet because they are a certain weight that's pathologised and they are treated as if they are a pathology, whereas actually there is nothing wrong with them when you look at their blood results and their blood pressure.Laura: Yeah, because I did want to ask you a little bit about, about kids, if that's okay.I realize it's a bit of a detour, but I'm, I'm curious to hear if you were the parent of that child that you mentioned who might be a higher body weight, but you know, otherwise there's nothing there to worry about. Or even if there is something to worry about, you know, do you have any advice for parents of how to navigate health care and, you know, have these approach these conversations with their GP, you know, to say, like, ‘I don't want to focus on their weight. What else can we do to support this child?'Molly: Yeah, I mean, I think that's what you've just said is a really good way of framing it. Laura: I just realised I just answered my own question!Molly: And, you know, I really, really feel for parents in this situation because it must be such a horrible confrontation. To be faced with health care professionals who are telling you that you need to do something about your child's weight, and yet you have a child in front of you and you're worried about how they feel about their body, how they feel about themselves. And I guess, you know, the sad thing is that many parents do believe what a doctor says to them, and so would put their child on a diet, which just horrifies me and breaks my heart of what we're doing to children when we do that. But yeah, I mean, I think as you posed it perfectly, you know…'I'm happy to talk about health behaviours, but I'm not happy to focus on my child's weight and the reasons for that are that I don't want my child to develop an eating disorder and my child's relationship with their body and food is really important to me.'Laura: That's a really brave thing, a really brave thing to have to do as a parent. I mean, I know trying to like stand up to…I remember declining to be weighed at my booking appointment for the maternity pathway, and the nurse was just so aggressive with me. She was just like, ‘computer says no'. And I was like, but I don't have to do this. But I was in such a like, fragile state. Molly: Of course. Of course. Yeah. Laura: Trying to push back on a healthcare professional when they're not receptive to it. And also, like, there's some weird stuff there, but like, if you decline a test, which is basically what I did decline, they should respect that. And they didn't. So that's like a whole other thing. But my point is that pushing back on a, on a healthcare, an authoritative, an authoritative healthcare provider is really, really challenging.So I think to step into that space as a parent is, it's really hard.Molly: Really, really hard. Absolutely. I do not underestimate that at all. You know, I recently got told that I shouldn't be breastfeeding my two and a half year old and. You know, I approached that situation as a doctor with privilege, and I found that very difficult.Laura: Oh, so a healthcare professional told you?Molly: Yeah, yeah. What? That it currently wasn't offering any nutritional value. And so, yeah, I mean, you know, I'm not trying to compare that to how it must feel as a parent of a fat child, but, uh, you know, I understand that. Yeah. Confronting somebody in a position of authority is extremely, extremely difficult.And I wish people didn't have to have those conversations.Laura: Well, I hope you told them where to shove it with, with their comments about feeding. Molly: I pulled down my top and latched them. Laura: Love it. Okay. Well. Yes, as a still feeding a preschooler, I totally, totally respect your decision to, to keep feeding. And yes, also if you have any tips for how the fuck to get them to self-wean…! Molly: No, sadly not, no! Laura: Uh, he'll stop one day, I keep telling myself. We were just talking a bit about how anti fatness presents itself in the medical setting and how people are less likely to have their experiences believed, they are less likely to be offered the follow up…what's the word, the medical word, I'm struggling to find the medical word, like the assessments and…Molly: Investigations? Laura: Thank you, that they, they might need. Weight loss is often celebrated when it's a red flag for, you know, if it was a thin person, it would be definitely a red flag, but that just doesn't register. There's, I say ‘avoidance' kind of in quotation marks, avoidance of healthcare and kind of ‘noncompliance' again in inverted commas because they are such loaded problematic terms, because they put the blame on the individual instead of on the medical professional who is often perpetrating violence against that person. And so, yeah, I just want to kind of give that caveat. Yeah. And it can encourage…or it can mean that people die. Like it's, it's often a case of life, life or death because people understandably don't want to go see their GP.There's a really powerful piece, I'm not sure Molly, if you've read it, by Marquisele Mercedes in Pipewrench Magazine, where she's talking about not just the intersection of anti-fatness and medical care, but also anti-blackness because there's a another layer here when someone is racialised about assumptions made about like their pain threshold and, and tolerance. And it's a really eye-opening read if you haven't already read it. So I'm gonna link to that in the show notes just to give people like more, yeah, a kind of deeper understanding of some of these issues. I'm curious to hear, since you've adopted more of a white inclusive approach, if you've had any pushback from your colleagues and if you have, how do you handle that?Molly: So actually, I haven't. Not that I know about, not that anybody has spoken to me about, and actually, I...Laura: You're just keeping it under your hat because you're just alone in that GP room. You don't have to, like, deal with other doctors on a ward.Molly: I mean, that does help, absolutely, that I do have a lot of autonomy. And yes, I'm in my room and I see my patients. I did do a presentation to my colleagues about weight inclusive care, which I was really nervous about. And isn't that funny? Because... You know, I was thinking about the fact I was far more nervous doing that than I would be doing other presentations and, you know, these days I do a fair amount of presenting, and I kind of unpicked that. I thought, let's think about the crux of what I'm saying here and the crux of what I'm saying here is, you know, the point I made earlier that people of all sizes deserve compassionate, good, equal access to health care, which really, I would hope that most, yeah, doctors are on board with, members of the caring profession would be behind.But yeah, so the presentation went well and, you know, people came to speak to me afterwards and said, it kind of made them think, and they'd be really interested in knowing a little bit more. So that was positive. I mean, as GPs, the idea that weight loss isn't sustainable is something that we see day in, day out. And so I don't think that's too difficult for GPs to get behind. Laura: Okay. And just to kind of expand on that point a little bit, because I know we've, we've talked around this idea that diets don't work. And again, I'll link to a piece that I wrote about the diet cycle and, and this sort of why diets don't work, but just to give like a really quick overview of what the weight science literature tells us is essentially there are – and this is simplifying things, and Molly, feel free to jump in and like expand on anything I'm saying, but what happens when we go on a diet is sort of twofold. First of all, so we reduce the amount of food that we're consuming, right? That's the fundamental premise of any diet. They all work the same way, right? ‘Work' initially, at least initially. So you might initially see a little bit of. of weight loss, but then your body starts responding to that by dialling up your hunger and appetite hormones, because what it's trying to do is defend your genetically determined set point weight, right?This blueprint that we have for…I like to think of it as a kind of comfortable zone that our bodies will, like, prefer to be in because there's usually always some fluctuation within that, right? Like our weight just kind of goes up and down on its own through various, you know, stages of life. But overall it likes to stay within a window, shall we say.If we're trying to push it down below that comfortable window, our body will respond by amping up hunger and appetite hormones to drive up our appetite, to get us up off of our asses to go and find some food, right? Like it's an evolutionary mechanism. So that's why you kind of end up diving headfirst into a bread basket or, you know, I always say like you find yourself elbow deep in a tube of Pringles if you're, if you're on a diet, like that, that's what can happen. And it's because there are these biological mechanisms driving that. If for some reason you are able to kind of ride that out, you maybe develop some unhealthy coping mechanisms to sort of essentially ignore your hunger, then what can happen is that your body has another mechanism to try and make up for that, which is to slow down your metabolism. Right, so it can kind of…either you can get more food to defend your set point weight, or all the functions in your body can sort of slow down. It often starts with what are considered non essential functions, like reproduction. So you might notice that you're, if you're menstruating, that your period becomes irregular, your hair might kind of become less thick, your nails might get, I mean, your skin might get a bit dull, but then because your body can't sort of say, okay, turn off this system, but leave all the other ones on, you'll notice it kind of like playing out in, in other areas.So somewhere that I see kind of play out a lot is digestion, which I think we can all agree is an essential function, but you start to notice, you might notice it as like IBS type symptoms, constipation, bloating, diarrhoea, all of these things can be a function of not having enough to eat. So, as your metabolism is slowing down, you will obviously get this plateau in weight loss or your weight might start to increase or you could have both things happening kind of simultaneously where your metabolism is dialling down and then at the same time your hunger hormones are dialling up so you have what I call ‘the fuck it effect' where you know it's like the floodgates open and you're just raiding the fridge. And it's kind of funny but also it's a really distressing experience for people sometimes, if you don't understand what's going on, which is…it's your primal biological urge to eat is kind of overtaking you and you were just trying to meet your needs however you want, but it can feel really chaotic and out of control and oftentimes we label it as like food addiction or comfort eating sometimes, or like, yeah, we pathologise it somehow, even when that's not really what's going on.So that was…more of a detour than I wanted to go on, but I thought it was important to explain a little bit of the mechanics as to why diets don't work. Did you have anything you wanted to add to that, Molly?Molly: No, I think you have summarised that perfectly. My headline would be, bodies are very clever, don't underestimate them.Laura: Absolutely. Yeah, that is a way better way of putting it. But so, medical colleagues, they don't have too much difficulty understanding or kind of appreciating that weight loss is not sustainable. So they see that day to day in their practice. So they…it's an easy sell? Molly: Yes, it's an easy sell. Exactly. Laura: When you kind of go back and fill in, like, some of the stuff that probably should have been taught in medical school, but for whatever reason wasn't…I say probably should have been taught. I mean, definitely should have been taught in medical school, but wasn't. What other kinds of, like, questions or what things did you come up against when having these conversations with colleagues?Molly: So yeah, that is an easy sell. The harder sell is around the idea that, well, ‘ob*sity' being a thing and, you know, it's associated co-morbidities. Also, what is tricky…so even after I'd kind of finished the talk and had a conversation about it, the conversation turned to, but we do need to think about how safe it is to refer somebody with a BMI of over 30 for any replacement.So, you know, the kind of idea that the research that is at the core of, you know, our approaches and the weight centric approach is full of bias and quite frankly, fat phobia. And that's when I start to feel very conspiratorial, which I hate.Laura: I know exactly what you mean. Yeah.Molly: But I think it's a, you know, it's a really important part of the puzzle, and people really need to appreciate that, that actually research, you know, I think Fiona Willer described it as “a persuasive piece of writing”, which I think's a really important way to look at it, because that's what, you know, research really is. And that, you know, people are generally trying to prove a point when they start a piece of research. And because we live in this inherently fat phobic society, people are generally trying to prove that fat is bad.Laura: And so what you're saying is there, and there's a great paper that explores this, there's a BMJ paper that explores all the underlying assumptions in weight research, all these biases that Molly is describing.They filter through into the research that we get. So it becomes this like, circular, like, self fulfilling kind of thing, where we are looking for problems with higher weight and worse health outcomes. So we find them, right? Like it becomes this yeah, very… Molly: Confirmation bias. Laura: Exactly. That's, that's the right word I was looking for.So I'll link to a couple of papers that for anyone, for like medical students or even nutrition, any allied health professionals who are interested in learning more about this, because it's a lot to kind of take in. And we're, I feel like just getting to the tip of the iceberg here. Thank you for reading Can I Have Another Snack?. This post is public so feel free to share it.Molly: And I guess the other point to make about the research as well that people really need to appreciate is that it's, you know, I've said before, but it's really complex.And so, you know, let's take the example of post operative complications of a knee replacement. And by the way, I haven't really done a deep dive on this, so….I'm just kind of using it as an example rather than it being something I know a lot about, but, you know, let's imagine that there is an increased association between post operative complications in somebody with a high BMI after a knee replacement.Is that as simple as a person's fat and therefore they're going to be at risk of post operative complications, or is it that they are really stressed in a hospital because they know that they're going to be made to feel bad about their body size? Is it that they didn't have the right equipment available to carry out the operation or to, you know, anesthetise that person? Is it that anti fat bias has played a part in the treatment that they've received post operatively? We really, really need to be digging deeper and looking at the complexities around these kind of headlines that form the part of, yeah, our management.Laura: So yeah, what you, what you're talking about there is the sort of potential confounding variables that don't get measured for, that help explain the relationship between X and Y.Yeah. But we just…we see the X and the Y and we don't see all the – this is a terrible analogy – all the other letters, but we're looking for cause and effect, but we're not actually looking at all the other complicating factors that might result in that outcome. I think. Because our, like, primal monkey brains love simple explanations for things, right? They don't want things to be complicated, but they are way more complicated than they first seem. So, last thing I want to ask you about is...Whether you have any advice for medical students or even physicians who are bumping up against anti fat bias, either in their training or with their colleagues?Molly: Well, I guess I really hope there are people in the medical profession listening to this who do share our beliefs and, you know, I'd love to hear from you because solidarity is really important. You know, it can feel quite lonely. I guess my advice would be to kind of stick to your guns and hold on to those values and know that you are keeping people safe and you will mean that people feel able to come and see you who wouldn't otherwise have felt safe coming to see you. And that's really important. And you know, when I'm doubting myself or feeling a bit exhausted by swimming against the tide, what I tell myself is, well, let's think about the alternative. And the alternative is not something that I can entertain. In terms of conversations with colleagues, I mean, podcasts, I really find useful as a way of kind of signposting people to snippets of information and also talking about yourself. So, you know, people are more receptive if you kind of critique your own bias as opposed to critiquing theirs.Laura: Yeah, exactly.Molly: So, you know. A conversation like, you know, I'm thinking about a medical student sat in clinic with somebody saying something like, ‘Oh, I've been thinking about my own anti-fat bias, or I've been thinking about weight stigma and how I might be contributing to that and how that's something I'd really like to address'. You know, that kind of thing just plants that seed, doesn't it? And means that, whether they react perfectly in the moment may mean that that person then has to think about it themselves and reflects on it themselves and does a bit of reading.Laura: Mm hmm. Yeah, absolutely. And you can always, you know, if they are open to, to reading more, like, like I said, you could, I'll link to some papers that you could share with them doing a journal club around those papers or like you did, Molly, a presentation that can also be ways to open up conversations within a department or you know, a university setting or something like that, where you can all be kind of working through some of this stuff together, rather than sort of siloed on, on your own. Because I think it can feel really lonely if you're the only little salmon swimming upstream.Molly: It's really hard work, isn't it? Really hard work being the pariah.Laura: Yeah, absolutely. But I'm really grateful for everything that you're doing. And you know, even if we don't change anyone else's minds, just the fact that you're showing up for your patients the way that you are is so important. So yeah, thank you for that work. At the end of every episode, my guest and I share something that they have been snacking on. It could be anything you like, a show, a podcast, an actual little snack. So what have you been snacking on lately, Molly?Molly: So I have a television show that I've been watching that I'm actually able to share. I have a very specific criteria when it comes to television shows that I'm willing to watch because I'm such an empath that I can't bear watching anything that involves, you know, people being treated badly or humiliated or murdered, you know, anything like that. No, and it also has to be very relatable. I can't, my brain just cannot, you know, get into kind of wizardry and magicians and stuff. I have been watching Couples Therapy, which is a documentary on BBC iPlayer, which films couples going through therapy. And it's like reality TV, but without the vacuous….Laura: The drama. Yeah, okay.Molly: Yeah. And yeah, without the drama. So, I mean, there is drama, but it's a really kind of measured drama, and I just love watching the process. I love seeing the dynamic and seeing how it all pans out. I think the therapist is amazing. Oh. And it's fascinating. Laura: So these are real, these are real therapy sessions? They've not been staged?Molly: They've not. No. No.Laura: Oh wow. It's wild. It's real. I have no idea how they got that through any kind of ethics, but…Molly: Yeah. Yeah. Good point. But it's, but it's…Laura: I mean, it sounds interesting. Who doesn't want to listen in to other people's therapy sessions? Molly: Yeah. I mean, I didn't watch it thinking, oh gosh, I feel really bad that this person is doing this on didn't, it didn't feel like that. It actually felt really, you know, therapeutic.Laura: Like I did a documentary with BBC. a long time ago now and there was like a clinical psychologist on the support staff team so I figure that there has to be like someone…that person who's, yeah, just like making sure everything is contained and everyone is safe and yeah like, yeah, no one is, like, baring their soul on national TV who is gonna regret that they said those things. So that sounds really interesting. Okay, so my snack is sort of, I think, well, really related to what we have been talking about. So the book that I have been reading at the moment is called Sugar Rush: Science, Politics, and the Demonization of Fatness. It's by Karen Throsby, who is a sociologist and it is a bit more on the academic side, but it is so fascinating.Basically what she's done is a content analysis of like 500 odd different newspaper articles and books from about, I think just before the implementation of the sugar tax, or maybe when the sugar tax was being debated, all the way through to like 2020 with Boris Johnson's latest round of anti ‘ob*sity' policy.She's just tracing kind of like the history of the sugar tax and the way that the media talks about it and some like key anti sugar figures and some of the, like, the rhetoric around sugar and how it has been kind of like socially constructed. And it's also linking it to the demonization of fatness as, yeah, the subtitle suggests.But what I found really interesting is just how she talks a lot about these ideas that are written into policy documents that are so kind of assertive and confident and definitive that are the similar things that you and I have been talking about in this podcast about the relationship between weight and health that are just in all of these policy documents are just like, like, given at face value and there's no further sort of exploration of the science and I'm only kind of the first couple of chapters, but I'm really enjoying it.It's really good. It appeals to my, like, super nerdy nutrition brain where I want to understand the trajectory of all of these policies and how they all kind of interlink and build on one another. And it also has a fair amount of Jamie Oliver bashing. So I'm here for that. So yeah, Sugar Rush by Karen Throsby. So I will link to Couple's Therapy. Is that the name of your show? Couple's Therapy on iPlayer and Sugar Rush in the show notes. All right, Molly, before I let you go, can you let everyone know where they can find out more about you and your work?Molly: So I am on Instagram as @antidietGP, um, similarly on Facebook as Anti Diet GP. Be great to see you there. Laura: All right, I will link to both of those in the show notes so people can come find you and yeah, let us know what you think of this episode and thank you so much again for your work, Molly. It was really good to talk to you. Molly: Oh, thank you.OUTRO:Laura: Thanks so much for listening to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast. You can support the show by subscribing in your podcast player and leaving a rating and review. And if you want to support the show further and get full access to the Can I Have Another Snack? universe, you can become a paid subscriber.It's just £5 a month or £50 for the year. As well as getting tons of cool perks you help make this work sustainable and we couldn't do it without the support of paying subscribers. Head to laurathomas.substack.com to learn more and sign up today.  Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas. Our sound engineer is Lucy Dearlove. Fiona Bray formats and schedules all of our posts and makes sure that they're out on time every week. Our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser, and the music is by Jason Barkhouse. Thanks so much for listening. ICYMI last week: When Your Friend Announces They're on a Diet… * Rapid Response: Why I don't like ‘this food does a little/this food does a lot'* Dear Laura... How do I stop wishing for the past and accept myself now?* Bandit Standing on the Scales is Not Even the Worst Part of Bluey This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laurathomas.substack.com/subscribe

In today's CIHAS episode, I'm speaking to online personal trainer and performance nutritionist, Michael Ulloa. Michael is on a mission to make the fitness industry a more welcoming and accepting space for all, which is exactly what we dive into in this ‘sode. We are unpacking some toxic myths about exercise, Michael spills the beans on his feelings about Joe Wicks, and we discuss what really goes into professional fitness models' photo shoots. Plus we answer loads of your questions like how to find a more joyful relationship with movement after a lifetime of using it as punishment for eating. Find out more about Michael's work here.Follow his work on Instagram here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Subscribe to Laura's newsletter here.Enrol in the Raising Embodied Eaters course here.Here's the transcript in full:INTRO:Michael: The way that we're being sold health and fitness just isn't sustainable or achievable in any way and then people blame themselves and feel worse and then therefore they're more likely to spend money on all these other programs repeatedly and it's just a vicious cycle that just doesn't ever end.Laura: Hey, and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? Podcast, where we talk about appetite, bodies, and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas. I'm an anti diet registered nutritionist, and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack? Newsletter. Today, I'm talking to Michael Ulloa.Michael is an online personal trainer and performance nutritionist who is on a mission to make the fitness industry a more welcoming and accepting space for all. In today's episode, Michael and I are shooting the shit about the fitness industry, unpacking some toxic myths about exercise, and answering loads of your questions: like how to find a more joyful relationship with movement after a lifetime of using it as punishment for eating.Some of you have been asking for more episodes on movement and fitness, so I think you're going to enjoy this conversation. We'll get to Michael in just a second, but first, I want to tell you real quick about the benefits of becoming a paid subscriber to the Can I Have Another Snack? Newsletter and community.For just £5 a month, or £50 a year, you get access to the extended CIHAS universe. That means exclusive weekly discussion threads, links and recommendations, you get commenting privileges and access to my monthly Dear Laura column, as well as the whole CIHAS archive and a few other sweet perks, but more than anything, you're supporting independent evidence based nutrition information free from diet culture and anti fatness. I can't do this work without the help of paying subscribers. So if you get something out of being here, then please consider upgrading your subscription today. And if you're still not convinced, then check out this recent review I received from a reader. They said: "Laura's podcast and newsletter are always thought provoking, filled with care and compassion, and a respite from one size fits all health and nutrition advice."So if that sounds good to you, then head to laurathomas.substack.com and become a paying subscriber today. Alright team, let's get to today's episode, here's Michael. MAIN EPISODE:All right, Michael, I need to know what the deal is. Because you're like one of maybe five PTs who isn't pushing aesthetic or weight loss goals on us.Has that always been your deal? Or is this more of an evolution for you? Michael: Yeah, it's definitely an evolution and it's funny you mentioned that because I get a lot of angry messages from personal trainers that don't think that my approach is right, which is always quite funny to me. I don't know, it's, I definitely, when I first started off in the fitness industry... I've been a personal trainer now for nearly 10 years.And in terms of personal training, that kind of makes you a bit of a veteran because a lot of trainers are quite short lived on average. When I first started off, I definitely did have your typical, like, mainstream slightly bro approach to fitness and nutrition. And I know most people that maybe work in the kind of space that, like, you operate in, for example, there tends to usually be a reason or a thing that caused them to go down that path.But I didn't have that at all. It really has just been a really slow evolution of just actually reading the research, working with people on a day to day basis, getting feedback from clients about what is working and what isn't, and then just really tweaking things over a very long period of time. I've also had some very honest clients, which have been great too, who kind of really follow my content on social media and they would message me like, oh, that's not very helpful. How about approaching it like this? And i'm always open to feedback, I always want to improve my practice and my messaging and I was always just quite receptive to that and I don't know... 10 years later I now finally feel like i'm working with people in a way that genuinely helps them long term and i'm actually creating content that is useful for people rather than just almost creating content for other personal trainers, which seems to be what a lot of fitness professionals do.Laura: Tell me about the angry messages. Why are other PTs up in your shit about...? Michael: I really don't know. I wish I knew the answer. I think... I guess if you're attacking someone's entire being and their work and their ethos that they've believed in for so many years, then I guess that a lot of people will react to that in quite a negative way.I really don't understand it at all either. Usually male coaches too, are very angry in the way that I approach social media and some of the names and things I've been called are pretty grim, but I only... I wish I knew the answer to that, but some, for some reason people get very angry in the way that I am approaching fitness and nutrition.But yeah, I really don't mind. Like I, as I said, I feel like I'm really helping people now and I'm happy to keep championing that message. Laura: I mean, I'm just wondering if part of it is because that myth, certain myth of no pain, no gain. And that you need to like, basically punish yourself with exercise in order to achieve a particular body type.You're saying, actually, we don't need to do that. It's okay if you don't kill yourself with exercise. We shouldn't be weaponising it against ourselves. For me, it speaks to how deeply internalised people's anti fat bias is. You're challenging the fundamental sort of premise that their beliefs are resting on, which is that, you can't be fit and fat.Or you...yeah, like I said before, that you have to punish yourself with exercise or like that... it's somehow okay to exist in a body that isn't fulfilling this ideal that we have been told that we should not strive for. Michael: Completely. And I mean, if we're completely honest about it, the way that the fitness industry is set up now is way more profitable for these people too.So if you do start attacking the way that they're approaching their lives or their businesses too, then they're probably going to be a little bit grumpy about that. It's so much easier for me as a personal trainer to make money saying, here we go, come sign up for the six week program and we'll strip body fat off you in such a short space of time, rather than me saying, cool, let's work together for three, six, 12 months. And let's really work on those habits and have you feeling and performing better. Like it's just such a hard sell. I mean, especially for, as I mentioned, like, personal training tends to be quite a short lived career for a lot of people. And I appreciate that when people first start off, the best way to get clients is shock and awe, like showing before and after photos, like having the secrets or whatever it is. And the best way to get clients at the start is by doing that. So people are going to follow that path rather than doing it the right way. That is a bit of a slow burner. I know that a lot of coaches aren't really up for that, sadly. Laura: Yeah, no, I think you make a really good point when you're talking about... the financial aspect of things, because, yeah, there's no money to be made in being like, yeah, take a rest day or go for a gentle walk and look at the sky. Yeah, those like making huge promises of around body transformations and then making people sign up for some sort of like intensive bootcamp situation. Of course, that makes sense from like a business model perspective, but as so often is the case, anything that involves capitalism is probably not great for our health overall. Okay, so I am absolutely not in the fitness space at all. I've purged my social media account. I think I follow you and maybe a couple of other personal trainers, because I find it really annoying, honestly, watching fitness content.Michael: I strongly relate to that. And first of all, thank you for following me, but yeah, I honestly, I feel exactly the same way.  Laura: And I think, especially since having had a baby and because I have some enduring physical stuff going on as a result of my pregnancy in terms of, like, pelvic health, even the stuff that is like geared towards women who have had babies and like postpartum stuff.It's just anyway, so I've just checked out of it. So I have no idea. What is going on in that space, really? So I need you to like, translate it all for me. What are some of the most pervasive and toxic fitness myths that you're seeing at the moment? Michael: Everything. Honestly, every topic is so toxic at the moment.It's really frustrating. And I speak to... There's a few coaches that I'm really good friends with, who I think you probably know as well, that I tend to follow their content, I like engaging with them and talking about the fitness industry, but I have also removed myself from a lot of the mainstream approach because...I don't find it motivating or helpful in any way. Like I think a lot of the... Laura: You don't even hate follow some people just to have like stuff to...? Because I hate feed a lot of big feeding. I hate-feed?! I hate-follow a lot of big accounts. I just have this folder on my Instagram called Ammunition.And I just save posts in there that I want to come back and get angry about at some point. What are you seeing from... I know you do it! But what are you seeing from those folks? Michael: So I do a little bit of that. And I, so I've also, I've got an Instagram account for my dog, but I started up ages ago. I don't post anything to it, but every time I see something pop up on, like, the explore page or I see another trainer share, I'll send it to her account. And then I'll use that as fodder for, like, creating content and coming up with ideas. But I do not, I don't hate follow that many people now because like I spent a lot of time on social media, right?And I know that because of that following these accounts and seeing them on a day to day basis all of the time does massively negatively impact my mental health. And I think if i'm feeling that way as a fitness professional who knows the research, knows what these accounts are doing to us and can see through the nonsense... how are everyday people feeling? When they're seeing this content and they don't really know if it's the truth or not. So I actually don't follow that many trainers. There's probably a lot of trainers who... . Laura: So very evolved of you. Michael: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. There's a few trainers who, like, I know through just from working in gyms or whatever, I'll follow them, but I mute them so that I don't have to see their content.Laura: Yeah, that's smart. Michael: But yeah, I don't know. There's so many myths about every topic. Like you mentioned there about, like, women's health and pelvic health and anything pre and postnatal. The stuff around that is really gross because it's not even just the fact that they're spreading misinformation. They somehow always tie in with just losing weight, like this is pretty much what it all comes down to, right? Laura: Yeah. Yeah. That's the subtext. It's always there. Michael: It's always like improve your pelvic health and slim your waist, like it's everything. It just pushes people down the route of still obsessing about body weight and focusing on body weight rather than focusing on general health and wellbeing and health promotion, and it's infuriating.I guess the same as, like, building muscle. Like it's nearly always advertised by these guys that are absolutely jacked, clearly taking steroids, using images of themselves going... you can look like this if you work out like me and buy my programs and my nutrition plans, and you're just never going to look like these people. So you're always going to fail. Like everything within the fitness space is geared towards repeat sales and having people come back for more because the way that we're being sold health and fitness, just isn't sustainable or achievable in any way. And then people blame themselves and feel worse. And then therefore they're more likely to spend money on all these other programs repeatedly. And it's just a vicious cycle that just doesn't ever end. And that's why with my page, I'm trying to step away from any aesthetic goals. Like you'll probably see through my social media, I don't, I'm not against people having aesthetic goals. I just don't really ever talk about it because I don't think it should ever be the focus of someone's fitness journey. I mean, I think that's the bit that seems to piss people off. Laura: Yeah. And I mean, there's some interesting research that shows that people who exercise for aesthetic goals, they're less likely to engage in something that is sustainable for them.Like, it's more likely that they will give up. And I don't mean that in, like, defeatist kind of way, but it just won't be sustainable for them. Versus for people who are approaching, I don't know, a type of exercise or training or whatever it is from a place of maybe wanting to feel stronger or feel more comfortable in their bodies or because they have mobility stuff that they're working through or something like that.So it's really difficult though, because And we'll get to some of the listener questions in a bit where they're asking this, like, how do you uncouple the aesthetic goals from, those more internally motivated goals from the perspective that we are just constantly being drip fed, idealised images of people all over the internet? And then, like you say, half the time those images aren't even real, right? There's people on ‘roids. There are people who are like starving themselves, like making themselves dehydrated, like posing in particular ways. I don't even know what other tactics people use to stylise these images.But I feel like the sort of falsification of these pictures is huge in the fitness industry. Michael: It's honestly horrific. And I would probably go as far as to say, like, every professional fitness model has taken or is taking steroids of some form. That's like the level of manipulation that the fitness industry...I don't know, I don't think there's any issue with... having aesthetic goals. Like I always like to hammer this point home because I think sometimes with my content, I can... people misconstrue that I'm against anyone having any aesthetic goal at all. I'm not, it's just, I think that the emphasis needs to be elsewhere.For example, when I first started in the fitness industry, I was in that loop of must build muscle, have to build muscle to show that I know what I'm talking about and also to be seen as manly and capable or whatever, and I would do a lot of strength training. I would never do cardio because cardio is bad.It ruins your gains. Laura: It's for girls.Michael: Yeah, it's just exactly that. And it's so frustrating that I would... I spent years just, like, strength training, nothing but strength training, even when I was going through cycles of really hating it. Like I had to do strength training, got to build muscle. When I switched up my training... I still do strength training now. I enjoy building muscle. The challenge of building strength and muscle is really fun, but I also do a lot of cardio because I really enjoy it and it makes me feel great in terms of physical and mental health. And actually since switching up, dropping a bit of strength training that I was doing and doing more cardio, the exercise I really enjoy, I've made so much more progress with my strength building and muscle building gains.And I've just got such a better balance with it all. So if someone listening to this is really struggling of knowing like what they should really be doing, what should they be focusing on? Honestly, just like enjoyment and mental health, that needs to be the priority. And then everything else just tends to fall into line after that.And the fitness industry, just the tactics, as I said, like the trainers use. The one thing that really annoys me is a lot of personal trainers will, anyone who follows any trainers will... I've seen this in the past where a trainer goes through a really extreme cycle of dieting, exercise regime because they're training for a photo shoot - in quotation marks - Where they'll go and get professional photos done that they've dieted down to within an inch of their lives. And they'll get a little snapshot image of look how amazing I look and then they'll use that in all their advertising of promoting healthy behaviour change or whatever other nonsense. It's if you're not using healthy, sustainable habits in achieving your physique, then you should not be allowed to use that in terms of advertising it to say that you're going to help people improve their health and their life, their health and their lives.It's just, it's incredibly infuriating and... Laura: it's false advertising. Michael: Massively. Yeah. Massively. Laura: Need to get that fucking, is it ASA, advertising...? Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Standards Agency. Absolutely. Yeah. Laura: I'm on the case! But two interesting things that I wanted to pick out from what you were saying.First of all, I think there's some complexity and nuance around this idea aesthetic goals, isn't there? Because we are all aesthetically driven, right? We are all, like we're aesthetic creatures in some ways, like when you brush your hair in the morning or I don't know, you trim your beard, Michael, or like I chose clothes that I thought looked somewhat okay together. Like those are all aesthetic goals, right? And so I think it's really, like, hard for people to decouple aesthetic goals from their overall movement, exercise routines, whatever you want to call them. But I think what you're saying, and certainly what I would advocate is that the fitness industry has just blown... yeah, they've blown up aesthetics to be like the sole purpose that people should exercise, right? And that I think is the problem is that yeah, they've just coupled exercise and aesthetics to the point that it's like you were saying, people are engaging in disorderly eating behaviours. They're using illicit drugs, they are, like, punishing themselves to look a particular way, and that's when it becomes problematic, right? Michael: Completely agree. Laura: And you end up on that slippery, slippery slope to disordered eating and eating disorders. Michael: Yeah, it's so true the barometer of success or health or knowledge within the fitness industry is body fat levels. That's pretty much what it all comes down to. Like a trainer who is absolutely jacked and really ripped is seen as being an authority figure without really knowing anything about them. And whereas you'll have a trainer who's in maybe a naturally larger sized body who naturally carries a little bit more body fat, has a much healthier balance of exercise and nutrition, a far better trainer. Just look at the comments under the content that they push out there onto social media and people will criticize them and say they don't know what they're talking about. Like our barometer of success is leanness. I don't know what the answer is to trying to combat that other than just keep churning out content, calling out this nonsense.But unfortunately you feel like you take a few steps forward when it was like two, three years ago, when you see, started to see a lot more body diversity on fitness accounts and kind of big companies like Gymshark and Nike and stuff were using people in larger bodies to advertise clothing.That's now disappearing again because it's no longer.... and it's just toxic. And you just have to go on like TikTok, the latest platform, even though it's been around a few years, I felt like we were maybe making a bit of progress. Then TikTok just flips that again, and you just got to search the hashtag fitness on TikTok.And it's just white, slim, muscular people clearly taking steroids that are the main bulk of the content that you're going to see. It's infuriating. Laura: Everyone in the fitness industry really collectively needs to be speaking out against this, but I think there's a simultaneous thing that has to happen whereby we are amplifying and centering experiences and the work of fat fitness creators, right? And I'm using fat, for anyone who's not listened to the podcast before, fat as a neutral descriptor, as a reclamation of a word that is often used to weaponise and hurt people and harm people. So, yeah, I'm just thinking of some people off the top of my head.Like Intuitive Fatty, Jessamyn Stanley is fantastic for yoga content. Lauren Leavell does a lot of barre stuff, but there's loads. I mean, is there anyone that you would want to give a shout out to like anyone that's doing...? Michael: The Instagram handle Decolonizing Fitness? Ilya. The content is amazing. We're trying to set up a time for Ilya to come into our podcast to chat about this at the moment. And I just... there's so many voices that need to be amplified. And I know that I always have to check my privilege in the content that I'm creating. Like you see very few men within the kind of body neutrality, body positivity, space, whatever you want to call the area I'm working in.So I always like to acknowledge that, okay, I'm creating content for a space that isn't really for me, but I do think that can be really powerful. And we still need more voices of guys, especially within this space, calling it out because I rarely ever see male fitness professionals creating the kind of content that I am.They tend to go down the more mainstream approach. And I like to yes, fitness can look like me. I look how the fitness industry says you're supposed to look, but it doesn't have to look like that, right? This is one way it can look, but it doesn't need to be like that for everyone. And I think that can be really powerful whilst amplifying the voices of those who are marginalised and don't get the airtime that I do.Laura: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, yeah, you make a really good point about men in this space. Like just in body neutrality, body positivity and again, there are some really great people doing stuff in that space. I agree like it's still underrepresented, but like the 300 pound runner. I don't know if you've come across his stuff? Michael: yeah, Martinus Evans.Laura: Yeah, His stuff is really cool as well. But yeah, anyway, just wanted to shout out some accounts and I'll link to them in the show notes as well. Yeah, so you mentioned that fitness professionals will embark on this really extreme diet, they will really bulk up, they'll, probably restrict what they're eating for a really long time, and then they'll do all their photos, and they'll probably go back to whatever they were doing before that. And it just reminded me when... and this is it's like really sad, but do you remember when Joe Wicks was talking all about binging? He went to America, and then it ... he just started talking about like he was eating all this chocolate and pizza and like stuff that he obviously was restricting so hard that when he went to the States, he had this like backlash against all of that and his body was just like, fuck this, and he just started eating like all of the food that he'd been denying himself.It just made me think of that and how he's... how disordered like this space is and how normalised that kind of thing is like that just like binge restrict cycle. Michael: Yeah, I mean when your entire business model relies on getting people really lean. If you're not sticking to those rules and keeping your body lean 100 percent of the time, then your business model kind of goes to shit. And I guess that's probably why he was having issues coming to terms with that. Joe Wicks is a really funny one because I don't like his content at all. I'll throw that out there. Some of the nutrition stuff he's spouted has been... I was going to say nonsense, but it's actually just damaging some of the stuff he comes out with.Also, on the other hand, I feel like, maybe this is giving him too much credit, I always feel like his heart is in the right place, but he just goes about it in completely the wrong way. I don't know if you would agree with that. When I hear him being interviewed, I feel like he's a really passionate guy who feels like he's doing the right thing, but he's just absolutely not.Because all of his content is focused on being lean and weight loss. And I just wish that... he's got such a huge platform now. It's terrifying. That if you had someone like him who could start promoting like a balanced and sensible message, it's never going to happen because he makes too much money now, then it would just be so powerful.Laura: But I don't know, like this piece around heart in the right place. I think we say that about a lot of these actually quite problematic white men. Joe Wicks, Jamie Oliver, I'm just gonna say it, don't @ me. But, of course their heart's in the right place, but their heart's also in their fucking bank balance, right?Michael: Completely, 100%. Laura: So that's one part of it, but also, I don't know when we can, when someone is, like you say, promoting harmful messages around food and around nutrition. And I don't. I think it matters where their heart is. Michael: Agreed. I wonder whether this... Laura: A murderer could use that justification to be like, Oh, well, this man is really toxic to women, so I'm just going to kill him.But that's not the solution. Michael: I know. I wonder whether kind of in my head, the reason I use those words is because I think of kind of the fitness industry as like a huge, like a line of like how problematic someone is. And I feel like he feels he's trying to do the right thing despite doing it very badly.Whereas you have a lot of people within the fitness space that go far beyond that, who are intentionally doing the really bad thing, trying to make a lot of money, it's still very bad. And Jamie Oliver is one of those as well, where he's got such a huge platform, thinks he knows what he's doing is the best thing, but it's just not. Like trying to ban the buy one get one free offers when people are really struggling to feed their families right now.It's just, I feel yes, hearts in the right place, but just no, like they need to be more informed and go about it in a better way. Laura: And especially when they are being given this feedback, right? Like it's one thing if you fuck up and you say, I was really wrong about that and I've learned some new information now like you have, right? And like I have. And you hold your hands up and you say, yeah, I was really fucking wrong and I'm sorry that I've caused harm and I don't want to do that anymore. I'm gonna learn and I'm gonna do better. And Michael: that's the sign of a good practitioner, right? And yeah. Laura: But speaking of Joe Wicks... Michael: Oh god!Laura: So, so you are a new ish parent, right? You have a seven month old. Michael: Yes, my son is seven months old, yeah. Laura: How do you feel about the prospect of Joe Wicks teaching your kid PE someday? Michael: Oh, just no, like awful. Yeah it's terrifying, isn't it? And these people do wangle their way into every aspect of our society of fitness.And there's just no getting away from them now. Personally, I never watched any of his school fitness things throughout lockdown. I know they're very popular. What was his wording? Did you watch any of them then with your kids? Laura: I didn't cause my little one was just a newborn at that point. And he's only three now.It just wasn't on my radar. I've seen his books. He has the burpee bears. And I've written a couple of like book reviews. They're super like, just tongue in cheek. But it strikes me as really problematic that he feels that we need to teach specific moves like burpees or other things like that to children, like to young children, like primary school age kids, and I don't really have a good justification for that because I'm not a fitness professional that other than does a five year old need to learn how to plank? Right? Or should we not be focusing on embodied movement that is climbing on play equipment in the playground or running or skipping or jumping or like, all of these things that kids, depending on their level of mobility and ability that they would intuitively do?Michael: I am completely with you there. I don't think we need to be teaching a five year old how to do a burpee. It's a bit ridiculous, to be honest. Yeah, that's the way that movement should be promoted and advertised to kids, if you want to use those kind of technical terms. It should just be about play and fun and movement, and that's... what it should be. Like if a kid sees their parent doing burpees or lifting weights and they want to try a bit out and get involved yeah, absolutely. But it just, it shouldn't be the go to, right? Yeah, absolutely. Laura: Yeah. My kid has seen me do a downward dog and he like gets involved and we do the cosmic kids yoga. I feel like that's a slightly different thing because it's a, it's so gentle and b it's animal poses. I don't know. All right. So I got sent through loads of questions from listeners and I thought they were really fun. So I just thought we could go through them. I think we've touched on a bit of it already, but maybe you can just give me your quick fire answers.Michael: Sure. Yeah. Laura: So this is an interesting question that Gwen from Dieticians for Teachers sent in. She said she would like to know more about the messages in your formal training. I think we can take a good guess, but I guess what she's getting at is, like, what toxic messages were in your formal training?Michael: Unfortunately, when you're learning to become a personal trainer still so much of it is about weight loss, still. You'll get taught, right, this is what we're going to learn about nutrition and this is how you help someone lose weight. So that is still at the core. And I guess a lot of the training for personal trainers, in terms of nutrition anyway, It's still very like basic government guidelines, which you can take those as you will. Some recommendations are maybe okay, others not that helpful. The training for nutrition for personal trainers is so, so, so, so basic that I would encourage any personal trainer who has recently qualified and not done any further nutrition study from there to please sign up to another course and learn more because what you learn as a personal trainer at the basic level is just nowhere near good enough to work with clients in depth.Laura: I have a lot of thoughts about personal trainers and nutrition, but I'm going to keep them to myself! Michael: No, no feel free to talk about it! It terrifies me. And it's very rare now that... a lot of the people I work with have had personal trainers in the past. The large majority of them have had negative experiences, and it's quite scary that's now just the norm.And I'll ask questions of my clients in consultations whilst working together and they'll be like, Oh, I've never been asked that before. I've never even considered that. And it just blows my mind that these things are being missed out or neglected by coaches. But the training is just not there. Laura: It's so interesting that the focus, I mean, it's not surprising, but that the focus is still on body size and not like flexibility or mobility or like rehab or like any of these, which I'm sure they like get touched on, but it sounds like from what you're saying that the real central focus is not mental health or like overall wellbeing. It's here's how you try and get people shredded, which we know is like biogenetically, if not difficult, if not impossible for most people. Michael: Pretty much. Yeah. Like I'm sure... I don't want to call out every personal training course. Like I did qualify a few years ago now, but I know there's some personal training qualifications that are trying to shift that, but it is still a large majority.And that is why a lot of the coaches coming through now, it's still very much before and after photos, weight centric. Yeah, unfortunately. Laura: Well, it's good to know that maybe there are some shifts coming down the pipe a little bit and I guess it just goes to show why again, you need to keep, like, pushing these alternative messages.Okay. This I thought was a really interesting question. And so this person asked, is exercise truly necessary? I don't enjoy exercising, but I do move a lot during the day, running errands and running after a toddler, all while baby wearing a newborn. And then the follow up question is, and if it is necessary to exercise intentionally, what form of exercise is best for someone who wouldn't otherwise prioritise it? Michael: That's such a good question. And it's very nuanced as well, depending on the person's situation. I would say, I mean, no, it's not necessary if you're moving around a lot throughout the day. However, so many health benefits come from incorporating some form of like direct exercise that it would be really sad to not explore all the potential areas that people could incorporate exercise into their life that maybe might not be the mainstream approach, right? If you are someone who moves around a lot throughout your day, if you say running errands and your general movement and step count is actually really high, then you could argue that as long as you get your nutrition, right, you're doing pretty well.However, strength training. Every time someone comes to me, no matter what their fitness goals are, I try and incorporate some form of strength training that I can, but that can take so many different forms. Laura: This person is carrying a baby around! Michael: Right. Yeah, exactly. Which is strength training, right?Exactly. So it's... when I say strength training, a lot of people listening to this episode right now will automatically... they'll think, like, gym, barbells, dumbbells, heavy weights, and it can come in so many different forms and it can be with resistance bands, body weight, dumbbells, kettlebells, barbells at home. It can be like TRX, it can be like so many different ways that you might enjoy at some point. So don't just think, Oh, I'm not an exercise-y person. I've always hated it because there are so many different ways that we can incorporate exercise. That is a very vague answer. without me knowing much more about this person. However, if you can find a form of exercise you enjoy, that should be a priority because the health benefits are huge. Laura: I'm going to push back because this is my opinion, not necessarily based on scientific fact, but it does feel as though there is this tendency, and I'm also conscious of your bias as a fitness professional, that exercise is held up as the pinnacle of health.And it's like the one thing that we need to do in order to be healthy. And I'm not disputing that there are health benefits. I also am like curious about the magnitude of those benefits within the broader context of health and health behaviours, but also nesting that within sort of social determinants of health and like, how do we measure the effect size of exercise individually from, I don't know, sleep, other elements of mental health, community? I guess what I'm maybe trying to temper is like that there are so many, like, variables and factors that contribute to someone's overall picture of health and I appreciate that movement can be an important facet of that.Michael: Yeah, no I really like that point because it is so important and I think that's why it's important to approach exercise and hence why I said without knowing more about this person, it's hard to give an exact answer. I think it's important to look at all of those things in terms of context when you're trying to prescribe or recommend exercise to someone, right?Let's say that this person is, they're likely lacking in sleep right now at the moment, right? Because their life is very busy running around after small humans. If that person is exhausted and they have no free time at all. I'm not then going to say, right, you've got to go and exercise 30 minutes a day for three times a week, because it's just not going to be helpful. There's other areas of your lifestyle that we can focus on to improve your health. However, if there is a bit of wiggle room, if you have a bit of time, then maybe there are things that we could explore that you could quite comfortably fit into your day without it taking over your life like a lot of the fitness industry wants us to do. Laura: Yeah. I think that the, maybe the TL;DR there is you don't have to sweat it when you are running around after a small child and doing other, all these other things. But if it feels like it's something that you want to explore, and you're curious to give something a try, then yeah, you could have a think about some gentle movement or something, see how that feels and how that fits in the context of your life But yeah, it's tricky to prescribe something without knowing, yeah knowing someone's life and what they want to get out of it. Michael: So true and you're never gonna know if it was directly the exercise. It could be so many other things that then, yeah, that then causes the health benefit.I would just say, once again, like anecdotally, rather than looking at research, every person that I've worked with that we've tried to think, right, how can we incorporate exercising today in some format? The large majority of the time, everything else feels better and improves as a result.Laura: Yeah, no , it can, it has a knock on effect on like sleep and pain and like all these other things. So, okay. How can I move my body without shame and guilt driving it? These are two separate questions, but I'm just lumping them together, and then this, another person asked, how to find the joy in movement after a life forcing it?Michael: I think first of all, it's really important to, like, vet where you're getting all of your inspiration and information from is a really important one because a lot of the time, if we're following the kind of general societal recommendations when it comes to exercise and nutrition. It's always going to have quite a prescriptive image focused approach to movement.And if you can shift away, like what we spoke about at the start of this, you don't follow many personal trainers because you don't think that they're motivating or helpful to you. They actually just make you feel worse. I'm the same. When I constantly see gym bros. telling me that I have to lift weights X amount of times a week, and I've got to get shredded and have low body fat levels, it has the complete opposite impact on me. So if you can first of all vet where you're getting your information from, that is absolutely huge. And then, yeah, I guess also once again, it's not beating yourself up for having the more mainstream thoughts that you used to have. I know a lot of people when they're trying to shift into kind of taking a more intuitive eating approach or a more intuitive eating approach with like exercise too, as well as nutrition, we can sometimes feel really guilty when we start slipping back into older habits that maybe are slightly disordered.I'm just... like giving yourself a bit of leeway and a bit of space to grow and learn. I'm still doing that. I still probably get things wrong and have room for improvement, but I think by doing that, removing the pressure on yourself can be really helpful. Laura: Yeah. Two things that I might add to that are something that I've explored with clients as part of working on the relationship with food and body and movement often comes up as part of that, we might explore this idea of, what it feels like in your body where you've had a period where you haven't moved at all, right? Maybe it's because you're recovering from an injury or because you just were so burnt out with exercise that you just really didn't move. How did that feel in your body? Did you get any pain or did it feel nice to rest or what was that experience? And then also thinking about periods of your life where maybe you've been really deeply invested in fitness culture. And maybe doing the punishing exercises, maybe also getting injuries because of that, maybe getting ill a lot of the time, maybe losing your period, like all kinds of different things, like different experiences that you could have in your bodies.If you've got that framing of this is what no exercise feels like in my body, and this is what too much feels like in my body, then it can help you explore what some sort of happy balance might feel like. So that's something that I encourage people to think about. And I also just wanted to shout out Tally Rye's Intuitive Movement Journal.It's her book Intuitive Movement as well. It is isn't it? Clients have found that those are helpful resources for navigating stepping back from exercise and just exploring what rest feels like through kind of the framework of, or a similar framework to intuitive being. So if intuitive being resonates with you, then maybe Tally's work will as well. So I'll link to them in the show notes. All right, this will be our last question. And it is: I cut out all deliberate movement for a while, by which I mean, I walk to get places and that's it. I'd like to try some movement. and see how it makes me feel. But where on earth do I even start? Michael: Okay, once again, without a lot of context, this is very hard to give specific advice.So I would say think about where you would feel most comfortable exercising and start from there. So I know that for a lot of people, the gym environment can be incredibly intense and intimidating for many reasons. So if you think that maybe that feels a bit much and it's going to put you off. Let's write that off. Don't do that. So let's think, okay, maybe we could start some movement at home. Is there a form of exercise that you really enjoy? Do you like dancing? Do you like jump rope? Do you like bodyweight workouts? What is it that kind of you think, Oh, actually that sounds quite fun to me and start there.And then let's say that there's so many decent content creators online, depending on what you like that I could recommend. Feel free to reach out and just start from that point. If you're thinking that kind of back to my earlier point that, okay, strength training doesn't have to look like that in the gym. What can it look like? A set of basic resistance bands from Amazon for 10 quid, you've got a gym at home. Like you don't have to go to a gym. There's so many different ways that it could look start from that start from what gives you that, Oh, that's interesting. I might give it a try, and start really, really small and build from there and that's probably the best place to start. Laura: If someone hasn't done much movement other than, like, incidental daily movements for a while... there's obviously a lot of privilege in this question but I'm wondering if you would recommend like doing a couple of one on one sessions with a trainer, like a safe trainer that could help build up strength or make like a bespoke kind of program for someone or just help them with their form so that they... I'm maybe thinking of myself here, but I know that I have to be really careful what I do at home because I'm more likely to end up injuring myself just because of my like, specific needs and in terms of managing pain. And so what I've ended up doing... and again shitload of privilege in this but, I'm, after three years of pelvic girdle pain, I'm like, at my limit. So I've started seeing a physio one on one who does clinical Pilates. So it's like very much helping me build my strength, which I could do... like I was going to a barre class before that, but I was walking away with more pain, even though it was supposedly like a supervised class, like there were no adjustments. There were no like modifications for my body, like nothing. So I personally, I have found that trying to build my strength and reduce pain, like finding someone who's really specialised has been a game changer for me. Michael: Yeah, I would say... I was gonna say one of the benefits of COVID. That's not what I meant. I was gonna say for the benefits of kind of the lockdown that happened as a result of COVID is the fitness industry got pushed forward by about five to ten years in terms of the way that it can support people, especially on a tighter budget as well. There are now so many... Laura: oh, you mean like online?Michael: Online support, right? Because I know that personal training is an investment for a lot of people. It's not a cheap route to go down. If you can afford it, absolutely, yes. If you can have the support of a professional who's got years of experience, it does speed things up and it makes things a lot more kind of personalised and perhaps more enjoyable.However, the way that the online fitness space works now, it has improved massively. And for, kind of, much cheaper options, monthly options, you can get the support of a trainer online that will be able to do a video call with you to check your form. You can send them videos. Like I speak to people that follow me on Instagram all the time and they'll ask me a question. I'll say, just send me a video of you doing the exercise. I'm happy to give you some pointers. If you find people online that are truly passionate and care. If you send them a video of you doing an exercise, they'll happily help you out. So there are so many different routes that you can go down to get the support that don't cost a huge amount of money.Once again, even the cheaper forms are still an investment, but there are different routes that you can go down now. Yeah, absolutely. Laura: Yeah. Okay. I appreciate that. And then just to add to that, like I've done some sessions with this, like a one on one physio. And now I'm going to, like the group classes as well.So it's, I think, helpful to just... if you have any kind of rehab that needs to be done, or if you just want to feel more confident in the movements. Cause like Pilates can be tricky if you don't know exactly what you're doing to just be thrown into a class situation. So it's helped me at least like doing a few sessions, even though I've done Pilates before, but just having that refresher to then go into a class setting, it's just helped build up my confidence a little bit. And it's also, I'm not going to like this, like a gym. Sorry, I said that with so much disdain, realizing you're a personal trainer! Michael: Ugh, these disgusting personal trainers!Laura: It had, like, a visceral effect. Michael: It's so funny though, isn't it? That it's so sad that's what the fitness industry has become. And especially as a trainer who is one, every time I meet someone and they'll ask oh, what do you do? I have to like preface, Oh, like I'm not like the rest of them, but I'm a personal trainer, like it's really sad.Laura: I do the same thing, but with nutrition, I'm like, I'm a nutritionist, but I'm not that kind of nutritionist. Michael: I'm not going to sell you a cleanse, I promise! Laura: All right, Michael, this has been so fun to have you on and just shoot the shit about fitness culture. But at the end of every episode, my guest and I share something that they have been snacking on. So it can be a book, a podcast, a TV show. Yeah, just about anything that, that you feel like. So what are you snacking on at the moment? Michael: So one podcast I'm listening to, this is going to be a bit of a curve ball, there's probably quite a few people, especially in the UK listening to it... I don't like politics because in this country, it's so gross the way that politics is at the moment, but I like being well informed in what's going in politics because it has such a huge knock on impact to like societal changes.Laura: I was really glad that you said that, because when you said I don't like politics, I was like, argh where is this going! Michael: no, I do, but I get so infuriated by it because it's so important and I feel like coaches need to be informed because it does directly impact everything we're doing with our clients in terms of like socioeconomic impacts and food access and education and stuff, so I've been listening to The Rest Is Politics podcast. I don't know if you've ever listened to it. It's actually really good. It's Alastair Campbell, Rory Stewart, Labour side, Tory side. They chat about all daily topics and I quite like that they disagree and argue. I, depending on what you think about those two individuals, I'm still very mixed on what I think of them.However, I think it's very good to have a nice balanced approach there. So that's the podcast I've been listening to a lot recently. I really like it. In terms of food. So I can't eat eggs and dairy. I'm lactose intolerant and intolerant to eggs as well. Laura: I think you were probably going to wait for like the bummer, yeah, for me to be like, oh, that's such a bummer. But I'm vegan, so I don't eat any of that stuff . Michael: Yeah, I know. I was saying, I'm like the worst gym bro ever. I can't have whey protein shakes and I can't eat like 12 eggs a day. So maybe that's another reason they all hate me. So I found a vegan chocolate bar from Aldi. I don't know if you've ever had it. I don't think so. What? So they do milk, in quotation marks, milk chocolate and a white chocolate. They do a dark chocolate too, but a lot of vegan chocolate is dark. Anyway, so I haven't even tried that but their milk chocolate and their white chocolate is so good .And i'm getting through far too much of this chocolate at the moment but I finally found a chocolate bar that tastes amazing. They're by far the best chocolate you can get that's vegan, hands down Laura: That sounds really good, but we don't have an Aldi near us. We have a Lidl. Michael: So it's worth commuting. Laura: Oh, is it? Michael: Yeah. Yes. Laura: Okay. Might have to go to the dark depths of Dalston too.Okay. So I'm actually going to do a podcast also, and it's Getting Curious with Jonathan van Ness, which everyone knows who JVN is, obviously. He's amazing. Yeah, love them. There was like a bit of a thing a while ago where on their Netflix show they talked about like food addiction and it was just really problematic and icky and fatphobic. But JVN seems to have really been on a bit of a journey with this stuff and the latest, well, at the time that we are recording, they've just come out with a podcast called... well, an episode of their podcast Getting Curious called What's the Cultural History of the Calorie? With Dr. Athia Chaudhry. They're a fat activist and it's immersed in like fat politics. So, yeah. I would recommend going and giving that one a listen, because yeah, JVN has been on a journey, it seems. Michael: That sounds awesome. And that is my afternoon listening. Thank you very much. Laura: I will link to all of those things in the show notes.Michael, before I let you go, can you tell everyone where they can find out more about you and your work? Michael: Of course, so, most of the content I create is through Instagram, so it's just my name, which is very hard to spell, so probably best if you check it in the show notes. Laura: Yeah, I will link to everything.Michael: Thank you very much. So it's @MichaelUlloaPT, and that's on Instagram, Threads, Twitter, TikTok, whatever platform, it's all the same. Laura: All right, Michael, I will make sure that... It's all fully linked in the show notes so that everyone can find you. Thank you so much for coming on and yeah, like I said before, shooting the shit with us about fitness culture was really fun.Michael: Thank you so much for having me.OUTRO:Laura: Thanks so much for listening to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast. You can support the show by subscribing in your podcast player and leaving a rating and review. And if you want to support the show further and get full access to the Can I Have Another Snack? universe, you can become a paid subscriber.It's just £5 a month or £50 for the year. As well as getting tons of cool perks you help make this work sustainable and we couldn't do it without the support of paying subscribers. Head to laurathomas.substack.com to learn more and sign up today. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas. Our sound engineer is Lucy Dearlove. Fiona Bray formats and schedules all of our posts and makes sure that they're out on time every week. Our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser, and the music is by Jason Barkhouse. Thanks so much for listening.ICYMI this week: "I'm Not Your Target Audience" - How Do We Get Men To Care?* Reclaiming our Appetites* MORE Teens, TikTok, and some Good News for a Change.* Dear Laura: I'm freaking out about what my kids eat - but is it really about them? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laurathomas.substack.com/subscribe

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Growing up, Laura Graber's father was an alcoholic. He was also addicted to pornography and molested his daughters. There was constant tension and the fear of sexually inappropriate behavior of their father in their home, to the point that Laura was afraid of taking a shower. Laura grew up in an Amish family; while many have the perception that the Amish live pristine, peaceful lives, an undercurrent of unspoken sexual abuse is alive in their community. In this first of two interviews, Laura shares her story. Laura Graber on Sexual Abuse - Part 1 - Transcript ANNOUNCER: This radio program is PG-13. Parents strongly cautioned: some material may be inappropriate for children under the age of 13. Jesus's mission was to comfort those who mourn, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to captives, and open prison doors for those who are bound for those who want more than status quo Christianity has to offer, Blazing Grace Radio begins now. And here is your host, Mike Genung: MIKE GENUNG, HOST, BLAZING GRACE RADIO: Hey, Mike Genung here, and welcome back to Blazing Grace Radio. Glad to have you along. It's a beautiful sunshiny day here in Phoenix, AZ. And before I introduce our guest, a couple of quick announcements. May 5th - 7th I'll be in Italy, the north side, leading a men's retreat there. May 13th I'll be in Vienna, Austria leading an all day conference. On that Saturday, May 20th, we'll be in Finland for several speaking engagements. And then, May 27th, I'll be back to the UK in Frimley Green, which is a little southeast of London, holding an all day conference on that Saturday. And then June 3rd holding another conference - all day conference - in North Wales. So for our listeners there in the UK and Europe, I'd love to see you. Go to the website at blazinggrace.org, there's an events calendar on the homepage. And so today I have back with me at the program, Mrs. Laura Graber from James Port, Missouri, Laura my friend and welcome back to the program. LAURA GRABER: Thanks for having me, Mike. It's an honor. MIKE: Thanks for coming on. And so, Laura's going to be with us the next two weeks, and today we'll be talking about some sexual abuse issues she encountered growing up in her family. And then next week, what she's been through with porn addiction in her marriage. And a common thread that can run through both of those scenarios, is anxiety and fears. So along the way, we'll be picking that conversation up and looking at what recovery looks like. So let's begin, Laura, and go and begin by sharing what you went through growing up. LAURA: Sure, absolutely. So I grew up in a in a Baptist Amish home. So, you know, a lot of people have their opinion of how they think the Amish are [laughs] who they are and how they live their lives. Granted, my home that I grew up in was was an exception. Thankfully there's not many of them in the culture, but my father was an alcoholic. And with that came lots of anger and rage, and, you know, all the aspects of that. And as I grew up there became more and more sexual impurities in his life, became more evident, until it got to the point where he definitely was sexually abusing us through a lot of different forms. For a long time in my life I was able to ignore it, and not, you know, call it for what it was because it didn't seem like that big of a deal. Which is, a lot of times, what sexual impurities and sexual sin... you can lie to yourself for a while, believing that it's not as bad as you perceive it to be. But... so, obviously, growing up with a father that you know was an alcoholic, and angry, there was lots of tension in our home. My parents would fight a lot, and argue a lot, and just always being tense, never knowing when something would tip them off. And he would spank you, per se, but it was much more than disciplining you. It was a way for him to unleash his anger, you know, using a whip or, you know, whatever he had close to his hands to use. So a large part of my childhood was spent, like, just living in constant fear. I remember bumping his chair one Sunday afternoon as a little kid, when he was taking a nap, and getting a beating because I bumped his chair. MIKE: Mmm. LAURA: You know, just instances that were completely crazy, you know? Yeah. Sometimes he would come to the table and I'd have to sit beside him and... because that's how we sat at the table, in that row. And he would be angry because he's looking for an excuse, you know? Someone to take his anger out on. And it was so nerve wracking trying to eat, you know, just fear, just complete fear. So obviously as I got older, you know, in the age of eight, nine, ten years old, I started becoming aware that... I can't necessarily pinpoint, like what happened, that I knew to never be alone with him. But I was always very aware at a young age, you know, if he was in the house and there's no one else in the house, like, don't be in the house with him. Yeah, I just... I spent a large part of my life just not being in the same place as him, alone. So by the age of 8-9 years old, he would make me uncomfortable with staring at me. And that led to, you know, occasionally he would, you know, try to touch me as I walk past him, or depending on where you sat or what you were wearing, he would be staring at you. He would write vulgar things on, you know, papers and leave them laying around where... you know, if I was, if he was out in the shop and I was out there too, he'd be sitting there, you know, looking at, like, magazines that were full of, you know, porn, literally. MIKE: Right in front of his daughter? LAURA: Yes, yes. MIKE: Mhmm. LAURA: I mean, he would sometimes try to hide the cover, but I knew they came in the mail. And, you know, we knew that's what he had in his hands. You know, we walked behind him, you'd see what he had. There was just like... slowly but surely it kept getting worse. And I was very naive, like no one... like, my mom would have never talked to me about sexual things, you know, growing up. So for me it was, it was all foreign. It was disturbing to me, like, disgusting to me. Like, I knew it wasn't right, and yet I had no one to explain to me, like, that this is wrong. So it's kind of, yeah, a lot of confusion mixed in with that. But it kept on going throughout my teenage years. You know, like, if in the morning, if he would hear that you're awake then he would all of a sudden, you know, open the bedroom door in hopes to catch us changing. Or if you were showering, the the lock on the door didn't work very well. Which I'd say it was probably done on purpose. And he would, you know, open the door and pretend he didn't know you were in there. It got to the point where us young little girls would, you know, if one of us were showering, the other one would be hanging around the bathroom door or be inside the bathroom just so he didn't try those things. He would, by the time I was like 13-14 years old, he would, like, in the living room evenings, he would sit on his recliner in front of everyone and be masturbating or something. You just... yeah, lots of very disturbing things. MIKE: In front of the whole family? LAURA: A lot of disturbing things. Yes. Yes. I mean, obviously I had older brothers, and if they were around he never acted out in front of them as much. He definitely hid it from them, because there was a time when some of us younger girls started speaking up a bit, and my brothers were just kind of like "What?", you know? Like they didn't know this stuff was happening. So I think he hid it more from them than what I realized, you know, at the time. But yeah, like, my mom would be sitting there sometimes, so us girls would just, I spent... I remember spending quite a bit of evenings in the bedroom until he went to bed. He'd go to bed fairly early. You know, 8:30, 8:00, something like that. And then coming out in the living room and hanging out with mom after he went to the bedroom. So yeah, that was just reality. And I somewhat knew that other dads maybe weren't like that, but it just felt too much for your brain to even process that, that this isn't completely normal. Because then I would have had to admit that this is wrong and there's something wrong. And that felt terrifying to me. Yeah. I would have much rather just had to live in an alternative reality and not face the actual effect that all of that was having on me at the time. MIKE: Mhmm. LAURA: So yeah, he was very... a vulgar person. I mean he would tell me that I was made to satisfy the other half of the population. Oh, that would that would make me very, very angry. [laughs] Obviously. Yeah. Those things kind of all continued until my parents separated when I was 16 years old. And yeah, so obviously that released me from having to live in the same house as him. The last year before they separated I would be home a lot alone with him and my mom. And that last year was... it was awful. It was completely awful. I know there was other people around on the weekends, a lot to distract him. And yeah, it was just a lot that happened that, sometimes I wonder if I even gathered, you know, mentally, today - years later - you know, what all took place. But yeah, so that obviously left me with a lot of, like, the mindset of, like, anything sexual is disturbing and disgusting. And even viewing men in general, in a very... ungodly way. Just, like, being disgusted by males in general, which in a sense, like, God used for good. Because I didn't have a lot of boy drama in my life [laughs] as a teenager. So that was... that was a little positive in the whole aspect. Yeah. Kind of a small glimpse of of my childhood growing up. MIKE: How many kids in your family? LAURA: There was nine of us, and I was the youngest. MIKE: How many boys? How many girls? LAURA: There was five boys and four girls. Actually, I said that exactly opposite, four girls... five girls and four boys. MIKE: And your brothers had no idea that a chunk of this was going on. LAURA: There was things that they did know. I mean, they were aware of, like the magazines he got in the mail. They were aware of different things because, you know, after he was done with the magazines, he would lay them in on my older brother's bed, you know, gave them to the boys. So he was very, like... entitled, you know, as a male. That was just what males did. This is who they were. So my brothers, you know, he... he tremendously impacted their purity at a young age. And they knew some of the things, but a lot of the things that he did toward us younger girls, we just didn't talk about, not even really that much to each other, nor to my mom. It was kind of something that you just didn't want to talk about because it was hard. And subjects like that in the Amish culture, you don't hear anyone talking about sexual things. They're just like a, yeah, a silent subject. Especially in the community that I grew up in that era... you didn't get taught any of that in school, you know, there was no sex ed classes in school. So there was just a lot of silence on the subject. So I remember, you know, several years after my parents had separated, I was talking to one of my brothers and sharing about the showering and he was just horrified. He was like, you know, he remembers me asking him if he could hang out in the hallway while I'm showering. And he remember just like being like, "Okay, what's wrong with her?" you know, "She's acting strange," you know? But he did and he would do that for me if I asked him. But I guess I always just assumed he knew why I was asking him, and he didn't. That's just how less we talked about it at the time. Now, today, and even, like, you know, by the time I was 17-18 years old, all of that stuff was definitely discussed and very openly talked about. At the time it was just a silent subject, yeah. MIKE: Well, a lot of people, myself included, have or had a perception of the Amish community, of being peaceful. They're living life the way it should be. There's wonderful families and communities. And so our listeners know, I've been to James Port where Laura lives, and you guys have kind of educated me that that's not quite the situation. So is there a lot of sexual abuse... immorality in the Amish community? LAURA: There is, there definitely is. And it greatly saddens me because of how that subject is not discussed. It's not taught. It's not addressed. There's, you know, a lot of young kids, you know, things happen between kids, and adults view it as, "Oh, it's just kids doing things." And that's not just kids doing things, you know? I don't know as far as, like the ratio of, you know, the difference between the Amish culture and the so-called English culture - [laughs] MIKE: [laughs] LAURA: - you know, that if you do statistically the difference between the two. But I would say in the Amish culture there is more, from my personal opinion. For the mere fact that A: it is hidden. Few people bring it to the light, talk about it, actually find healing. And it's, like... the Amish community is a really close knit community. So if one person finds it out, like everyone knows, a large part of the time. So it's something that a lot of shame and fear and just complete terror is associated with, so you don't want anyone to know about it. So it's better just stay silent and shove it to the back of your mind and forget that it exists. MIKE: Mmm. LAURA: So that's definitely, like, a lot of times when, like, instances do come up that you catch, you know, little snippets here or there, that you know something may not be quite right. Or something may have happened, but you never know, like, full details, or people don't just openly talk about it or share, you know, that "Hey, I was sexually abused, and this happened, and this is how I found healing." Those conversations would not be a part of the life and Amish community in James Port where I lived. It's more of a yeah, definitely a very shameful thing that hidden scraped under the rug, you know, covered it up. MIKE: Well, the official numbers are that one out of every four women have been abused or molested and one out of every six men have been abused. But those, those are the official numbers. That doesn't even include all those that had even reported it. So the real numbers are - LAURA: Exactly. MIKE: - probably much higher. So was your family going to church when all this was going on? LAURA: Oh yes, yes. We were in church every Sunday that there was church. My dad was actually looked up as a respected person of the community, at one point, a lot. I think as the years went by, more people... he might have happened to show his anger at the wrong time, and more people got to know that there was definitely, maybe some issues, you know, happening in the background. But there was... like, when we left, when my mom and dad separated, we actually - my dad left for work, and my mom and my brother, me and my sister, we just loaded up in the car and left and left him a note. That's how we separated because that's... we just left. And at that point, you know, I think a lot of people were shocked. And still today there's people in the community that they don't know the full story, you know, they don't know what all happened and they would still view us as being wrong. For having just left because my dad was, I mean, in public, he was a jolly person, he was funny, you know. Still today I hear a comment, you know, oh, you know, his laugh or they so enjoyed talking with my dad or something my dad said or, you know, whatever. And there's still a lot of people today that would not, yeah, would not know the real Jake as I knew him growing up. MIKE: And part of the reason on this program I have people who come on and share stories of being molested, like you've been willing to do, Laura, is because a lot of this gets repressed in the family system, and then people grow up thinking, "I'm the only one that's gone through this," and it's far from the truth. LAURA: Yeah. MIKE: So how did you unwind the idea that men are basically scumbag pervs? [laughs] LAURA: Umm... [laughs] That's a big question, Mike. Do you have a couple hours? [laughs] First of all, my brothers were pivotal in that. I mean, obviously God was in the background, you know, orchestrating all of this, but my brothers played a huge part because they treated me differently than from what my dad did. They cared about me. They were, you know, never sexually... toward me in any form. They advocated for me, did things for me, they loved me, they looked out for me. They, you know, were there. They were vibrant in my life and I could trust them completely. So that was huge. And, like, to hear they might be hanging out with guy friends or they might be hanging out with people. Like, if they were comfortable with them, I was comfortable with them a lot of times. Like, who they liked, I liked because I knew that they they had grown up with the same dad as I did. So that that was huge for me. Definitely my brother's impacting me. And also you know, as I became a Christian in later years, recognizing that there are a lot of men out there who have a heart for God. And, you know, as I started sharing my story, little bits here and there, you know, I barely wouldn't say much, you know, because I'd still be scared. But people's reaction, like men's reaction, the same like, "Wow!" like, "That is so wrong!" Or, you know, like, "That's awful!" And recognizing like, "Oh, they would think it's wrong to do this?" You know, "They wouldn't think that's okay?" You know, "That's not just how males are?" So those are probably the two biggest aspects of, yeah, my brothers, and then, like, hearing other males react to parts of my story - MIKE: Mmm. LAURA: - was huge. MIKE: So when I first met you was in 2018 when I led a wive's retreat in Colorado. So, you and seven or eight other women. So I'm wondering what was going through your mind when you're going to a wive's retreat that a man is leading [chuckles] with your background. LAURA: [laughs] Well, I definitely... I was... most of the reason why I went to the retreat was because I needed to get away from my husband. I was losing my mind, it felt like, and I was just desperate to get away. And my friend invited me and I was like, "Hey, let's go. Who cares?" But when I showed up there and I met you and I realized like, "Whoa, like I'm spending the weekend at a retreat that's being led by this male." And it was... yeah, there was thoughts in my mind, definitely, of like "Who are you?" Like, "Why would you do this?" You know, yeah. "What type of person are you?" And then that first evening we were broke up in groups to share a story, and you just happened to be in my group. And you shared your story, and that... yeah. That instantly, I... through hearing your perception and seeing your love for purity and calling things out for what they were to be wrong. You know, speaking the truth over subjects, not just brushing them under the rug, or making them sound better than what they were. Yeah, you gained a lot of respect for me that first evening and I continued to go on that. MIKE: Well, we've got several minutes left, and so I'm wondering what your healing journey... Can you give us a point or two on what that has looked like? Because that was a lot of damage to recover from. LAURA: That was a lot. In a lot of different areas, you know. A lot of small things that I even today, sometimes something strikes me and I'm like, "Wow," like, yeah, "I didn't recognize that until today." Probably the biggest, obviously the biggest thing was becoming a Christian and having God, like, the Holy Spirit, to walk me through those things. And I did a lot of counseling... have done a lot of counseling. And my siblings. My siblings have been pivotal in my life. And, like, we can sit together and we can talk openly and honestly about our childhood and connect and, like, just talk about the hard stuff. You know, the disturbing stuff that's really hard to talk to other people about openly. We do that with each other. We're not afraid to go there and to talk. We can talk about anything. And that has been majorly healing to have people who understand what it was like, and being able to just share and talk and not people freaking out about what all happened. Yeah. MIKE: And at what age did you become a believer? LAURA: I was 20 years old when I first... Yeah. I happened to go to church, which is kind of a crazy thing because I hadn't been in church for a long time, because all of this, really, I was really bitter toward God. MIKE: Mmm. LAURA: I was. I just had the mindset of "If there is a God and he would allow me to live like this, you know, for close to 17 years, then I don't want anything to do with him," you know. If he... yeah. MIKE: Hmm. LAURA: You know, people would tell me, you know, "God's good," or, you know, I would hear things like that and I'd be like,"Yeah, whatever." I would mock Christians and mock people who believed in Him because to me it was like, "How could he turn a blind eye while we suffered all those years?" I mean, just day after day of complete agony and darkness and just horribleness. I mean, just complete terror and fear, and... yeah. It was awful. MIKE: My friends [clears throat] we're going to continue this conversation with Laura next week, so I would encourage you to join us. And Laura, thank you so much for your honesty and transparency, and I look forward to seeing you next time. ANNOUNCER: Blazing Grace is a nonprofit international ministry for the sexually broken and the spouse. Please visit us at blazinggrace.org for information on Mike Genung's books, groups, counseling, or to have Mike speak at your organization. You can email us at e-mail@blazinggrace.org, or call our office in Chandler, AZ at (719) 888-5144. Again, visit us at blazinggrace.org, email us at email@blazinggrace.org or call the office at (719) 888-5144.

This week on the CIHAS pod, we're switching things up. I'm joined by Jeanette Thompson Wesson (AKA The Mindset Nutritionist), a fat positive nutritionist who supports people to heal their relationship with food and their body. Jeanette and I will be answering some listener questions, and you lot really came through and asked some great questions, so let's get into it! Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Find out more about Jeanette's work here.Follow her work on Instagram here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Subscribe to my newsletter here. And I think that's where fat liberation really can come in because, you know, everyone's trying to carve out their own space for them. Whereas actually body liberation and, and fat liberation is all about widening that lens to other people. We are not just trying to carve out the space for ourselves individually.We're trying to carve out spaces and take up space in a way that honors other people's space that they're taking up as well and uplifting the bodies that are the most marginalized and going, okay, these are the people who need this space and we want them to have this space. They deserve unconditionally to have this space as well.INTROLaura: Hey, and welcome back to Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an Anti Diet registered nutritionist, an author of the Can I Have Another snack newsletter. Just a very quick reminder before we get to today's episode that for the month of March I'm running a sale on Can I Have Another Snack paid subscribers to celebrate our half birthday.If you sign up now, you get 20% off, either a monthly or annual subscription. This is a really good deal and I won't be offering it again this year. So head to laurathomas.substack.com to sign up. You get to join in our weekly community discussion threads plus bonus podcast episodes, twice monthly essays, including my Dear Laura column, and more importantly, you're helping making this work possible. And if for any reason you can't afford a subscription right now, you can email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk and put the word “snax” in the header and we'll hook you up with a comp subscription. No questions asked. So today I am joined by the wonderful Jeanette Thompson Wesson, and we are gonna be answering listener questions that you've sent in, and there are some really great questions, but if you don't already know Jeanette, she is a fat positive nutritionist who supports people to heal their relationship with food and their body.And if you want to know more about Jeanette, then I really recommend listening to the episode of Don't Salt My Game that we did together last summer, I'll link to it in the show notes. So go check that out. And how this is gonna work is that we're gonna take it in turns to ask questions and then kind of bounce off of each other to come up with answers.All right, Jeanette, are you ready?Jeanette: I am ready. Should we get into it?Laura: Let's do it. MAIN EPISODELaura: So you're gonna start off with the first question and yeah, let's see where it goes.Jeanette: So here is your first question from Ger. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the connection between diet mentality and gut problems with constipation.Laura: Okay, so Janette and I just had a little back and forth about what exactly this question was getting at, because I think what they're asking is if there is a physiological response in terms of our digestion based on the way we think about food and our relationship with food.Jeanette: Yeah.Laura: And so I think that's my understanding of the question, but just in case, and maybe wanna take a step back and think about what happens.To our gastrointestinal tract when we go on a diet, right? So whether it is, you know, your run of the mill, everyday diet, like a Slimming World or Weight Watchers or whatever, or whether it's, you know, more severe disordered eating or an eating disorder, basically the same thing happens in all of those cases.It's just the degree to which it happens gets more intense, gets worse, the more severe the problems around eating are. So what we could expect to happen is because the total amount of energy available to the body is not enough to support all its basic functioning. A lot of those basic processes like menstruation, like digestion, all of these things that are considered inverted commas non-essential, they slow down so that there's enough energy to divert towards essential functions like primarily your brain. Right? So what happens in our digestive tract is that we have, Jeanette's gonna love how nerdy I'm gonna get, we have what's called delayed gastric emptying. So the contents of our stomach literally emptying, slows down. It's sometimes called, when it gets really severe, it's called gastroparesis, where it's almost like this partial paralysis of the stomach so that contents don't, from the stomach, don't get properly turned around in the stomach.And then when the, and then it's the release into our small, our small intestine is a lot slower. So you get, you have this feeling of fullness for a lot longer after eating a meal. And you might also fill up relatively quickly or feel, feel full quite quickly after eating. What happens in our guts, so in our small, in our small intestine primarily is we have slowed peristalsis.So peristalsis is the action of, um, the muscles along our gastrointestinal tract contracting and pushing food through our guts, right? And basically because there's less, there's less energy available to the body, that process slows down.That's why you get constipated or you might get mixed i b s type symptoms where you alternate between constipation and diarrhea. So that is effectively what is going on in your gastrointestinal tract when you restrict. And it's also why we say a lot in eating disorder recovery and, and when we're working with people with disorder eating, is that the best way to heal your gut is not through going on some sort of low FODMAP diet or some leaky gut protocol or whatever other bullshit is out there, is it's actually having regular, consistent, adequate nutrition and nourishing your body. That's what heals any gut related issues. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't in some cases where people maybe have intolerances or other, you know, have to be mindful of, of what they're eating for other medical reasons, but that broadly speaking, that unless we have enough energy on board and we're eating regularly, then it just sends our guts kind of haywire.Right. Would you have anything to add to that, Jeanette?Jeanette: I mean, have a lot of clients who have experienced that and also I have a lot of personal experience with that. When I did Slimming World, I was, I mean, too much information, I'm gonna say anyway, I was really badly, like really badly constipated, and I knew exactly what was going on in my body. Even as a nutritionist, I was like, I know what's happening.I know exactly why I am constipated right now, and still chose to obviously do what I was doing because of my own internalised fatphobia, because I was working from a place where I thought I had to be thinner.Laura: Mm-hmm.Jeanette: And what it was at the time. And it's, it's really quite, it's really quite horrible to be in that place where you are like, oh my goodness, my body should be doing this. And it doesn't feel comfortable. And but when you really think about it and you tear everything, like you strip everything back, how amazing is our body to basically put ourselves in these like survival modes really?Laura: Mm-hmm.Jeanette: Because actually if we didn't have that delay within our body, um, how would we actually be feeling within ourselves without, with our hunger hormones and stuff, if we didn't have that delay, we'd actually be feeling probably quite ill, reallyLaura: Mm-hmm.Jeanette: Even worse, even more miserable than what we've been, we would, would be feeling.And I think that's the thing that kind of blows my mind with all of these biological processes that go, goes on, is that we forget that when we're actually dieting, we are putting our body in that place of restriction, which our body doesn't actually realize that that's intentional. I mean, it's clever, but it doesn't realize that we are actually choosing to do that.It just goes, oh my goodness, like, what is happening? We are not getting, you know, what, we, we should be getting into our body and these things happen. So it just blows my mind. It's, it's, I always love it. I'm a science nerd myself. So , it's enjoyable.Laura: There's something else that I wanna talk about here, which is what I wonder if the question was kind of getting at, so I've, I feel like I've maybe answered a different question, but I just wanted to give that context because I'm sure a lot of people will wonder like, okay, well what is actually happening inside my body as I'm restricting?Right. Whether it's, like you say through, you know, like legitimate food scarcity in, you know, if someone is food insecure, or you know, from a evolutionary perspective, if there just wasn't enough food around, right? That's why this, this process is there in, in the first place, right? Conservation of the species.But then there's the other side of things, which is this voluntary, and we could argue if it's voluntary or not under diet culture, but you know, like putting ourselves on a diet. What is that doing, both from a physiological perspective, but what is the diet mentality? So just the kind of mindset of restricting ourselves.What does that do to our digestion? And I think this is, I don't know specifically of any literature that connects both of those dots quite as clearly, but I do know that there is something called the nocebo effect. So the effect is essentially the inverse of the placebo effect. So if I tell you this pill has like magic qualities and it's gonna make you feel amazing and you take the pill, you're gonna start feeling amazing.That's the placebo effect. But equally, if I tell you that gluten in your food or like y you know, milk, protein, strawberries, and it could be literally anything if I tell you that that's bad for you, even though it doesn't cause a, you know, even though there's no physiological basis for, um, you to have a reaction to that food, the nocebo effect means that you do have a very real response to that food.Not because there's something, you know, kind of defective in your digestion, but because of the gut brain access and the connection between our brains and our guts. And so that can have major impacts on digestion. And there are studies that have shown that people were given, so there were two groups. They all had self-described lactose intolerance. Both groups were given sugar pills. One group were told that the pills had lactose in them. The other group were told that they didn't have lactose in them.And of course the group that were told that they had lactose in the pills had a physiological response. So they reported increased bouts of diarrhea and constipation. Right. Versus the group that were told that it was just sugar pills, even though they were all receiving sugar pills. But it shows you that there's a real strong physiological impact on our digestion just because the seed has been planted in our brains, which is, that blows my mind that that's even a Jeanette: It's crazy, isn't it? I see There are a lot with people who, um, go for like allergy testing. You know, the kind of ones where you can send like something off on the internet or I don't know, one of, one of those kind of pay 50 pounds and we'll give you a list of all these random things that we think that you are intolerant or allergic to, and you get this list back and they're like, oh my God, how many things are am I supposed to be intolerant to?And you know, people start restricting these things and having exactly the same reaction that you, you know, you said, you know, actually I feel so much better without these being in my body. And when I do have a strawberry, like one of the interesting things is like strawberry comes up quite a lot in my experience when I do eat a strawberry.Oh, I feel awful. I have like diarrhea and this happens and that happens. And, and I think that that gut brain axis is, is so incredibly powerful. And then one of the other things it kind of like takes me to when we are dieting as well, dieting is incredibly stressful. Like really, really stressful.And um, it also makes us feel very miserable. And then when you are coming up to weigh in day, the anxiety, the nervousness of of have I lost weight? Have I not lost weight? And actually having to stand on a scale, the gut-brain axis as well, like axis can actually have a big impact there as well. And cause that constipation and, you know, having diarrhea as well because of that really strong reaction you can have to just actually being on the diet and the men mentality that comes with being on the diet as well.And we, I think we forget about that mental link that we have.Laura: Mm-hmm. . And there are studies that show that that dieting increases your cortisol levels. Right. So your stress, stress hormone. So although there, so I guess what we're saying is, although there's no like, like single study I can point to, there are lots of potential mechanisms by which like, The thought of going on a diet and people know themselves, right?Like how many times have you thought, okay, like diet starts tomorrow, therefore I have to like, eat everything in the cupboards right now. What impact do we think that's gonna have on our digestion if we just like flood our bodies with, with more food than it can handle in one go? Like of course that's gonna have an impact on your, on your digestion.So, okay. Should we head on to the second question?Jeanette: Let'sLaura: This is a question for you Jeanette. This is um, from Monica, and I think it will become clear why I wanted to ask you this question. So, Monica says, I began intuitive eating a few months ago after years and years of heavy restricting and recovering from an eating disorder.I've had problems feeling the fullness and hunger cues, but I feel like I now manage it. Not perfectly, but Okay. And I try not to get too hung up on it. What I most struggle with is noticing my hunger and eating properly during my workday. I work as a teacher and many days I do not have a proper break, maybe like 10 to 15 minutes in total.I'm also often really stressed during the day, and I end up snacking the whole day. Every time I have five minutes by myself at my desk, and I end up never feeling hungry and never feeling satisfied either. Do you have some tips for intuitive eating at work? At home when I manage my time, it's a lot easier.So yeah. Monica, the question totally makes sense and I wanted to ask you that because up until pretty recently you were a teacher. So, what are your thoughts reading this question?Jeanette: My thoughts are like, my heart goes out to you because obviously we know at the moment and just in general that teaching is an incredibly stressful career to be in and you very, very rarely have time to slow down. So I completely understand where actually you say that you can kind of pick up your hunger and fullness cues not perfectly, and not being hung up on that, but then also eating throughout the day as well.I mean, it's no wonder really that you eat the way that you eat because of school. Because like with teaching, you have such little time to yourself and I want to say how important it is to think of intuitive eating as an like, not as like hard and fast rules, cuz we don't want to be approaching intuitive eating like a diet and actually coming from place of imperfection is completely fine, especially in the space that you're in at the.Coming from the teacher point of view as well, I would ask you, is there any way you can try and carve out some time and space during the day, during your break times and your lunch times where you can really take some time out? Is there somewhere you can go to eat that serves you? You know, have you got an office? Have you got a a, a place away for your desk? I think is one of the important things because when we are sitting at a desk and we're trying to do a thousand of one things at the same time as a teacher, we are checking the emails. We are trying to do a detention. We've got kids in front of us. We're trying to answer things. We're trying to create resources. We're trying to lesson plan all throughout our lunchtimes as well. And we don't have that chance to sit back and really have a listen to ourselves and being able to honor our hunger, which is why it makes complete sense why you are going to be eating and snacking throughout the day and that eating and that snacking throughout the day. Also wanna say how normal, that normal that is and how, you know, in the stress of that job job, if you are eating that as almost like an emotional regulator during the day, that is also completely valid to be doing as well. Because if you are in that moment and you are feeling that stress and it's a long time to be under stress from whenever you, you know, head to work like 7 30, 8 and end up leaving like 5, 5 30, then you know you've got loads of work to do in the evening.You know, you've got that anticipation as well. And we also don't have time, with time poor people as teachers, we don't have enough time to be able to be checking in on ourselves and we don't have enough time to be put in other coping mechanisms in place that would actually be really healthy things for us to have in place as teachers as well.Laura: Hmm. Jeanette: I would say at this at the moment, if there's nothing you can change, in the teaching role that you're in right now, to be able to carve out that time away from your desk to be able to honor that hunger when you can honor that hunger is to understand that coming from imperfection in intuitive vision is perfectly fine.And know that hopefully sometimes soon you will be able to listen to those internal cues in a much better way. Maybe when there's less pressure, maybe, um, if and when you want to make a change to the role that you have as well. And also to know that following intuitive eating during your time away from work is also just as important as well, and being able to take that time to honor yourself then,Laura: Yeah. I'm really glad that you said that. You know what you're doing is fine.like if that's what you need to do to get through the day and survive, it's okay that, you know, for you intuitive eating doesn't look like, you know, three perfect meals and however many snacks a day that it, it just means putting something in your mouth when you can Jeanette: Which is intuitive. Laura: Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes like if it feels better than just drop the label intuitive eating. Right. Because, you know, I think that we associate intuitive eating with looking a particular way Jeanette: Oh my Laura: And yeah. And it doesn't have to be perfect. So, you know, how can, how can you maybe bring a little bit more acceptance to, you know, if you, like you say, if you can't change anything, which like, I feel like if she could, she probably would've by nowJeanette: Exactly. It's hard. It's hard to do that.Laura: So. Yeah. You know, like, how can you maybe even bring a bit more self-compassion to that of like, well, fuck, this is hard and teaching is a really hard job and I have a lot of other pressures, so I don't need to put more pressure on feeding myself. I can just let it be what it is for now. And you know, if it, if it's, I, I appreciate that like, you are not really ever feeling hungry, but never feeling satisfied either. And if that feels like it's more of a problem, then, you know, taking a look at like, what, what are you bringing with you, right? What is it that you know is gonna help you feel more satisfied with what you're eating? So is it that you need to bring a bit more balance to what you've got there?Like have, I don't know, a bit more protein or a bit more carbohydrates or something to help power you through the next like, set of lessons or, or whatever is, do you have, like, I'm thinking, is there anything practical that you can think of, Jeanette, in terms of like helping this person feel a bit more satisfied with what they're eating?Jeanette: I would say what I see from teachers is bring more, have a, I always used to have a whole draw in my desk, literally dedicated to snacks. Because we are up so early in the morning, um, I, you know, I, I have children as well that had to sort out in the morning, so my priority wasn't actually making sure I had enough snacks in my bag when I got to school.So I actually just went out and I'd go out every couple of weeks and I'd buy so many long life snacks that I could just keep in there. And that was a mixture of a whole load of things. It was a mixture of cereal bars and little packets of raisins and nuts and also chocolate and caramel buttons and Oreos.And so just literally have that all available to me. And it was literally in my desk so I could just snack as I went to, like as I went along the day. And that was a really helpful thing for me to put in place for myself as well as bringing a really big bottle of water. Cuz otherwise I would just not drink anything. I just didn't have any time to.Laura: Oh yeah. I think getting, like having a snack drawer. And I was thinking as you were saying, like, I think you said pretzels maybe, and I was like, oh yeah. Like something crunchy. Something that's gonna give you, you know, thinking about like your sensory, like what's going to make help you feel satisfied from a sensory perspective?Is it that you need, you know, something like crisp and crunchy or do you prefer something chewy and soft or you know, what is it that will help you feel satisfied even, you know, with that five minute little snack session that you can have? So, yeah, hopefully Monica, that gives you some ideas to think about.All right. Shall we do this next question? What have we got?Jeanette: Okay. My sister-in-law is, to my mind, extremely extra about her kid, currently two and sugar, whereas we take much more relaxed approach with ours currently. For example, we rent out for coffee last weekend. Both sets of parents and kiddos, they had a massive slice of cheesecake, of which their small was allowed a thumb size piece. Well, that's really sad. While they ate the rest, whilst they ate the rest, we merely let our get stuck into our banana bread and chocolate chips. As they get older what's the best way to explain this disparity in attitudes to our kiddo? And how do we handle it with our nephew if he's, if you ask why his cousin can eat what he wants when he isn't allowed? Oh.Laura: This is so heartbreaking for this little nephew. And I also wanna say like, from this parent's perspective, I get it in a similar boat in terms of like how we feed our family compared to how other families around us feed their kids. And like right now, you know, when they're little, when they're toddlers, it like they don't notice, right?But as they get older, they start to think more and more, they'll start to ask more questions, and you're gonna have to figure out how, how to navigate this. But I also think this is a really interesting place that you could talk about differences and how differences are okay, and that we're all different.And sort of thinking about how we can tolerate differences between ourselves and other people. Because yeah, I feel like the more tolerant we are of other people's differences, like the better we will be just as a society, you know? I think it really depends a lot, you know, how you approach this depends a lot on how, on how much time you feel like you're gonna be spending with them.Like if you're gonna be hanging out most weekends, then it, I wonder if it might be, helpful to have a conversation with your sister-in-law, and say like, this is how we approach food, and I know that this isn't how you do things, but how can we navigate this together? Like can we come up with like an approach that works for both of us or that we can, that we both feel comfortable with?And, and I think that with, yeah, like I said, with your kid, I mean, first of all, your nephew is gonna wanna hang out at your house all the time. If you're like , you know, if you've got the goods, then you know, I think they're, they're gonna be kind of excited about that. I wanna hang out with you all the time, but, but yeah, like how, having those conversations with your kids about how everyone eats differently and that's okay.And, but also maybe as they get older and start asking more questions, like being really curious with them, of like, oh yeah, what do you, yeah. Did you notice that you know, little Charlie can only have two chocolate buttons. What did you think about that? Like, how did you feel? How would you feel if I said that you could only have two chocolate buttons and, and just like get yeah, get them to think about it with you a little bit. What do you think Jeanette?Jeanette: I think well exactly the same. You know, I don't navigate things exactly the same way. You have said, I mean, I've got a six year old who, um, has come back from school and um, you know, asked me like very similar questions, how come I can eat this? And I have this for snacks, but actually my friend so-and-so says that she's not allowed snacks or she's only allowed fruit for a snack and that kind of thing.And I very much like to promote having a really nice talk about it and obviously a nice like age appropriate one and going, okay, well it's because, and having a really lovely, like, chat about it for however her attention span last loss in that moment.Laura: And what does what, what kind of things does your six year old say about, about this? What do they come up with?Jeanette: Um, she looks confused a lot of the time, but not with what I say, as in, I'll kind of turn things on. So, a recent one was, um, one of the, one of her friends isn't allowed to have chocolate at the moment because her mom's not allowed to have chocolate in the house because she's not eating chocolate at the moment because she's on a diet. And she was like, but why, um, why isn't she allowed to have chocolate? And I was like, whoa. Laura: Why isn't she? Yeah.  Jeanette: You, you tell me. And she kind of sits there like scratching her head and she was like, but chocolate's not bad, is it? And I was like, no, because, because she's come back previously saying, is chocolate bad for me?Because that's what school had taught them. And I'd obviously have a conversation neutralizing that as, you know, as we do. And um, and she was like, so it's not bad. And I was like, well, no. How do you feel about chocolate? And she was like, well, it makes me feel, and I think she literally put her arms out. It makes me feel wonderful and put her arms out like this.You can't see when you're listening to it, but my arms areLaura: Jeanette's got her arms up above her head hearing. Jeanette: me feel wonderful. And then she said that she felt really sad for her friend that she couldn't have that same wonderful feeling.Laura: And that like, that's it. Is that if we can get our, like we don't need to tell our kids what to think.Jeanette: Yeah.Laura: Because we can get them to tap into that embodied experience of like, and there's research that shows this as well, that like, kids understand how foods feel in their body and that's how they make sense of their world, is that embodied experience.And so if you can help them, you know, instead of like reflexively being like, oh, well that's ridiculous, why would they think that or do that? Like just probing them and, and getting them to connect with, you know, what feels right and true for them. I feel like that's the best that we can do with thisJeanette: They're so good at it as well. And I think because we've dieted, because we've internalized all these messaging about diets and how food is good and bad as when you start children off really young with just allowing them Laura: mm-hmm. Jeanette: listen to themselves and how they feel. What I've been like, my, my six year old also came out.She really likes iceberg lettuce. Loves it. And I was like, so what? What about the lettuce? Do you really love? And she literally got up from her table and started kind of like dancing. And she was like, it makes me feel like I want to do this cuz it's really crunchy and I really like it cause it's crunchy.And she had like a bit of a jig and I love that because I was like, that sounds like it makes you feel really happy and really joyous. And she was like, yeah, it does. And to be able to have that communication with her body, to be able to know that that's how that food makes her feel. And obviously she has food that doesn't make her feel good.And sometimes she'll say to me, oh, what was it the other day that made her feel sad? I think it was mashed potato or something. She was, I did some lazy mash which had like, I leave the skins of the potatoLaura: Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.Jeanette: And she really didn't enjoy the sensory quality of having the potato skins in with the mash.Laura: Would be mad at you for that too.Jeanette: Sorry. It was just really lazy and she said it how sad it made her feel and she really did look really sad about this mashed potato. And obviously she didn't have to eat it becauseLaura: Yeah. You don't, you don't force Jeanette: Her. Yeah.Laura: I was thinking about this last night actually. So we had dinner last night and I, Avery had asked for some chocolate, um, with dinner. And so I put. We have like lots of Easter eggs in at the moment because we're just normalizing Easter over here.Easter chocolate. Um, so I put one out on his tray and he had like some fruit and I think he had like some frozen mango and like blueberries and he had like, like the main that we were having and he ate all of his main and he didn't touch his fruit and he didn't touch his chocolate. And at first my mind went to like, oh, that's interesting.He didn't eat his chocolate. It's like, you know his, he's listening to himself, right? Something in him made him listen to himself and think, oh, you know, he didn't want his chocolate. But something also made him listen to himself and say, I don't want my fruit. And I think we often, it made me think about how are more willing to trust our kids when they don't eat the, the so-called bad food according to diet culture. But if they don't want the, you know, the more healthy inverted commas, food, like fruit or their veggies, we are so much quicker to dismiss their experiences. And, and I just thought about that double standard is in absolutely no way related to this question, but I just like, yeah. I don't know. Mm-hmm.Jeanette: I've experienced exactly the same and yeah. It is so much easier, isn't it, to kind of, yeah. no, I'm really like that, pointing that out. Definitely. Yeah.Laura: All right. where are we up to with these questions? Okay. I have a question for you, Jeanette, from Louisa. And just a little content warning here. I'm gonna use the wording that, um, Louisa has put, and it involves the O word, so just skip past this bit if you don't wanna hear that. But Louisa says, I'm overweight, and then she says, I'm not sure best how best to describe myself. My dad was overweight before he died at 65 of heart disease. Are there things I can read slash learn about generational approaches to weight and emotional eating slash being happy in your body, which my dad wasn't. Thanks. So I feel like there's a lot to unpack in this question. Jeanette, where do we start?Jeanette: I'd like to start with, I'm so sorry to hear about your dad and, you know, 65 is actually a really young age at the moment, isn't it? So I can totally understand any fear that has really come from your dad, you know, passing away at this age from heart disease as well. I mean, I'm sure that your brain has automatically gone to, oh my goodness, my weight.What am I eating? Am I eating too much fat, too much salt, you know, am I healthy enough? You know, what can I do within my control? Like, what can I do? And I want to add that because you've actually named yourself as overweight and you know, BMI is like awful. We know that BMI is awful.We know that BMI is a really terrible way to, um, for the healthcare professionals to say how, whether they're assuming someone is healthy or unhealthy, whereas a chart with some numbers can't accurately name us as unhealthy or healthy or accurately say, and what kind of risk we have in our bodies as well, because it's really putting fatness and health kind of together and kind of connecting that together.So I'm going to kind of take that you feel that you are overweight. I don't know if you are in a large body yourself because BMI scale and the size or the level of fatness that you're at, they don't go together. But I know we can talk about a lot of internalized fatphobia and anti-fat in relation to this as well.Laura: Mm.Jeanette: We know that regardless of our weight, we can have healthy behaviors that can really. be protective towards us, can really support our health and support our heart heart's health. None of that means that it's a guarantee, but it means that we can feel supportive um, regardless of what we do in with the size of our body, we know that we don't have the diet to actually reduce our risk of any cardiovascular disease and any, any problems with that.And really good things to read around that is really having a look at, uh, The Fat Doctor UK and their Twitter and their posts as well are really good. Um, who else? Ragen as well. Um, you'll have to put these things in these showLaura: I'll link to it. So Ragen Chastain has a great, uh, newsletter called, um, Weight and Healthcare, and it's basically how to approach the healthcare system in a weight inclusive way. So she unpacks things like you were saying about how BMI is really not a helpful measure of our health. It's just a way of like categorizing bodies and gatekeeping healthcare, which is so fucked up when you think about it.Um, I would also say Aubrey Gordon's work might be a good place to, yeah, so Aubrey has two books, which I will link to in the show notes. So one of them is called What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat, and the other one that just came out, um, like a month or so ago is, um, You Just Need to Lose Weight and Other Myths.So I would start there in terms of like an accessible place to learn about internalized weight stigma, medical fat phobia, anti-fat bias in general. I also wanted to offer, you don't say this explicitly but I wondered as well about you know, if what part of what you're looking for here is something around how you can care for yourself and pre prevent, or, I don't wanna say prevent ill health because we also know that a lot of this is out of our control.A lot of our health is determined by the social determinants of health as well as things like our genetics. Um, but what can you do to care for yourself in a weight inclusive, non diet way? And there are things that you can do, like you alluded to Jeanette around how we care for ourselves.And I wanna say as well that you're not obligated to be healthy, but I also understand why you might wanna find things that help you feel better and, and care for yourself. So I wanted to offer that we put together a Weight Inclusive Guide to Dyslipidemia or elevated blood cholesterol.And so if that is something that you're navigating, then that might be a helpful guide because it talks about supportive behaviors and in a kind of like more holistic way than just like lose weight, go on a diet. So I'll link to that in a show notes too. But I think like something for me that that kind of came up was like this idea of not, not sure how best to describe myself.And I wondered if we should like, talk a little bit about language and you know, how we kind of. Yeah. The language that we use around, around fat bodies, like this is something that we were talking before we started recording, and it's like, it's something that I grapple with a lot because like, technically according to my BMI I am the O word, right?And, but at the same time, I'm straight size, right? I can go into most clothes shops and be able to find something, um, I can fit into, you know, normal, not normal. What am I trying to say? I can fit into plane seats without worrying about, um, being really uncomfortable. Like, I don't have to think about access.But at the same time, there are, you know, real material things that I have to navigate. Like, you know, the example that I was giving you that I said to you earlier is like, if I were to get pregnant, I would be obese at my booking appointment, and that would have implications for the type of care that I was, and the type of birth that I was entitled to.And my maternity pathway would be completely different because of that. So there's this, it is kind of, I suppose what I'm grappling with is, you know, the loss of privilege as your body gets bigger while still having a fuck ton of thin privilege. I don't even know if that what my point was there, but what did it bring up for you?Jeanette: For me, it brings up a lot about the conversation to do with mid-size.Laura: Mid-size? Yeah.Jeanette: Yeah. That's what it kind of brings up because you Laura: Do you wanna explain that?Jeanette: Yeah, so mid-size is something that people tend to use and they use it in. This is the thing, this is the tricky thing that I find with mid-size because I find that it, it can be useful and could be useful for a lot of people, but I also feel like it is used for some people to distance themselves away from fatness.So it may be used by people who maybe small fats. So small fats are generally people who, who are like a 18 to 20Laura: So that's like a UK 18 to 20. Yeah. CauseJeanette: A UK.Laura: Most of our listeners are in the US, which I find it really weird, but that whatever. Yeah. So UK 18 to 20 Jeanette: Yes. I'm Laura: Would be. Jeanette: Would be for us, but a UK 18 to 20 a roundabouts. And it's, you know, when we're talking about small fat, we're talking about a person in a body who's just beginning to experience a lot more. Um, well experience quite a big loss of, um, body privilege, but not quite enough that they still, that, you know, they still fit in society.It's just that it's uncomfortable to fit in society. Then you have mid fat, which is, it's more uncomfortable, you know, you, you can fit into most seats, but you might end up, um, getting bruises from them and then you get super fat which is probably won't be able to fit in some of the seats. And you will be getting bruises.You will be hurting from sitting in, you know, so we have this kind of level of body privilege we can talk about. And some mid-size people use the term mid-size to distance themselves because of their own internalized fat phobia from calling themselves a small fat or identifying as fatness. But then also we have a group of people who potentially, you know, like you were saying, who are potentially are still experiencing some form of anti-fat really, and because of the BMI scale and that kind of thing, but aren't fat, but aren't straight sized.So they're trying to carve out a space for them in like a community way to try. But it, it's really difficult I think, and I think it's difficult to find that space, which is why I'm very much of the opinion of you. We need to try and find a way that is honouring our fattest people and trying to find equity and you know, lift up our fattest people whilst at the same time recognizing that there are people who are in smaller bodies who are still experiencing some form of anti-fat as well.Laura: Yeah. And I think there were a couple of different things that you talked about there, Janette, that I just wanna like go back to. So when you use the terms small fats, mid fat, large fat, and then super fat and infini fat, you're talking about what is often referred to as like fat degrees or the fat spectrum, right?And so what that names is how, as our body size gets bigger, we lose more and more privilege and become further and further marginalized.And, Linda from, uh, fluffy Kitten Party has done a great explainer on categories and it would be, I think it's a really helpful resource if this is new to you, like how do you, like what language do we use to describe our bodies?The midsize thing is a whole fucking trip, where I think like in its original inception, it was this really important kind of bridge for people between who were at the top end of the straight size spectrum. So maybe like a 16 to 18Jeanette: Yeah.Laura: Who or like the bottom size of the plus size spectrum when it comes to like, clothing, let's say. Because I think that really the mid-size thing is about clothing a lot of times. And like how it can be, you know, it can be really tricky if, if you're in that spot to like, do I try and shop in straight size stores where it might not quite fit, but then the plus size stuff doesn't always fit either.So like it can be a tricky space to be in and you still have a fuck ton of body privilege. Right. And then, but what it feels like has happened is that like objectively straight size people, like people who are like a UK size 12 have co-opted this term.Jeanette: Mm-hmm.Laura: And just because they're not like stick thin, they are like, oh, they're like, it's, yeah. It's kind of, they're using it to, to, to kind of like take up space basically, when actually they're just like a fraction away from the idealJeanette: Yeah.Laura: and they're still comparing themselves to that thin ideal. And that's where I think the problem is.Jeanette: Yeah. And that's the problem of society, isn't it? That's the problem that if we are not conforming to this really quite strict view of, you know, thinness and beauty, then you know, you've, we've got a whole load of different people trying to find community in the way that best fits them.And I think that's where fat liberation really can come in because, you know, everyone's trying to carve out their own space for them. Whereas actually body liberation and, and fat liberation is all about widening that lens to other people. We are not just trying to carve out the space for ourselves individually.We're trying to carve out spaces and take up space in a way that honors other people's space that they're taking up as well and uplifting the bodies that are the most marginalized and going, okay, these are the people who need this space and we want them to have this space. They deserve unconditionally to have this space as well.And that's when I think it's really unhelpful when we have people who are trying to create community and take up their own space when they're not thinking about their impact on the other people and marginalized bodies around them.Laura: Yeah. And that's, I think the thing about the mid-size trend is that there is no acknowledgement of either thin privilege or of body liberation or of how there are people that are way more oppressed than, you know, struggling to find clothes for your size 12th body. Right. Jeanette: Definitely. Laura: Okay. I think, do we have time for one more question? Should we do one more and then, Jeanette: Let's do this. Okay, so this is a question from Janice. I've been on a disordered eating recovery journey for about three years. My rejection of diet culture and calling out of weight stigma, particularly in the medical profession, has been a dramatic change. My husband is not on this journey with me and is still fully committed to diet and exercise equals health and wellbeing.We've had arguments about it because when I call out weight stigma, he gets defensive. He now says he won't speak to me about body image, food, eating because he feels attacked. He also feels that my views are just subjective opinions and there is no evidence that what I say is true. I get upset and then I can't think objectively either.What is the easiest and quick data I can, or research that backs up our non diet, weight inclusive approach to health? Or should I just accept that this is something we really can't talk about at the moment and I continue my work and get in therapy for support. I really appreciate your advice and obviously love the podcast, and.Laura: Oh, oh, Janice, Janice, Janice, Janice. I felt really sad re when this question came in, we can, and we will give you papers that you can read, that's fine. But that's so far from the point here. It's so far from the point, because even if this is just your subjective experience, that really fucking matters, that's so important and you deserve to have your experiences validated.And so I just wanna do that first and foremost, like your experience of weight stigma, and particularly like you say in the medical profession, that's so valid and it matters and it's important. And I'm really sorry that that has been dismissed or trivialized. It's obviously not just in your head. So yeah, that's the first thing that I wanted to offer is that that really matters and that's really important. And I'm really sorry that you know, someone who you love and care about has dismissed you like that. That must be extremely painful. What are you thinking, Jeanette? Like can see youJeanette: Yeah.Laura: Just looking really sad as well.Jeanette: I just really feel for Janice, and I also think this is something that comes up a fair bit as well, especially if, um, the person themselves is in a large body and a fat body. And especially if the partner is at a fat or large body themselves, because obviously they've got a lot of work to be doing themselves around, you know, rejecting diet culture and working on challenging than internalized fatphobia.But I also, it's difficult doing that journey without a supportive partner. And it's even more difficult doing it with someone who wants to challenge, even if it's something that's subjective, that's hard. But also even if we gave, you know, give researching and show papers, I find it doesn't necessarily always, sometimes it does change people's mind because people need to be in the right place themselves to be able to hear the message.Unfortunately, this is why me and Laura aren't millionaires, because we can't go out and force people into rejecting diet culture. You've almost gotta get to this kind of place where you are ready to step into that space and ready to start doing this work of challenging everything that you've believed and everything you've internalized for pretty much the whole of our lives. And it's difficult. So difficult. Also thinking that the partner, your partner isn't in the same place that you are in relation to that as well. So, I'm sorry that you're experiencing this really.Laura: Yeah. And I don't know that I really have a, a helpful answer or solution. You know, I just wonder if you have like a safe place like that you can talk about these things and it doesn't sound like you necessarily do, but I wonder what like take to get you to be able to have conversations in a way that, you know, neither one of you feels attacked and you both have your experiences held and, and validated.And I don't know if that's like couples counselling or therapy or, you know, even working with like a Jeanette or a Laura or like, you know, somebody to help you process that together. And I'll link to some papers in the show notes, but like you say, Jeanette, I don't know if that's gonna nudge the dial any really, but the, the one that I'm thinking of is the Tracy Tylka paper, the weight inclusive versus weight normative approach to health because it really neatly, sort of lays out the issues and summarizes the evidence. I did a Q&A with a weight inclusive researcher, Lizzy Pope, a couple weeks ago, and she shared some research literature as well that that, um, and I think she includes that, that til paper that she uses when she's trying to convince other researchers that this is the way to approach things. Any other like resources or, or things that you think would be helpful?Jeanette: I think maybe you know, in the long term, something like that you can do as a couple to be able to validate each other. Trying to find that way forward is important. But in the short term, is there any way of you finding, um, your community, you know, have you got someone outside of your partner that you can discuss this with?Can you find someone, can you find someone through like Facebook groups? You know, is there anyone? Cause there's loads of really goods, um, anti-D diet, non-diet approach, Facebook groups that you can find. And although online friendship doesn't replace and obviously shouldn't replace the relationship that you have with your partner. But it could be a really good short-term solution. So you still have someone that you can talk to this, talk about all of your experiences about who can validate you, who can go, well actually yeah, this is what I'm experiencing as well, which might be useful.Laura: Yeah. I'm curious to hear like if you have, you know, if your husband has always been on board with this for you. If that's been like a learning curve. I feel like I'm pretty lucky in that Dave listens to all my podcasts and reads all my shit. Like he's the first person to see anything, to like read any drafts of anything I've written.So he just knows, that if he didn't get on board it would be divorce. Right. But I'm, I'm curious, like, did you have that, you know, because you've been on your own journey and we talked about that in the last podcast we did together, but how was, what was that experience like for you?Jeanette: I've had a very similar experience as you to be honest, I am incredibly lucky that, um, no matter what I have decided to do with my body, my husband has always been supportive, has always championed my own body autonomy. And I'm really, I'm really lucky, like exactly the same as you. He's always the first person to listen to podcasts and the first person to read my posts and, you know, he reads all my emails that he sends out.I dunno why he subscribes to them, but he also reads those, you know. So I'm really lucky. I think the place that I struggle with personally is my family. I have a member of my family who understandably, really understandably for her own personal reasons, is entrenched in diet culture. And I do set boundaries with, with her. And she knows that. And we've, we've had the, we've had the, the talk that, um, she's not allowed to talk about weight loss and diets and food being good and bad around the children especially. But she doesn't necessarily understand what I do. She's still very much, you know, fat equals bad. My family are all people who are in fat bodies.Like when you look at both sides of the, when I wear, I was, I was never just in, in my genetics to have a small body. I am six foot tall and I'm also fat. I am supposed to be taking up a lot of space. And when I look at the you know, the generations before me, they're the same. They're also tall people who are fat as well, which comes with a lot of generational, you know, diet culture. But yeah, it, it's hard. It's hard when you don't have family and you don't have, you know, in this case, a partner who is supportive of, of your own body autonomyLaura: Clearly the answer is you have to become an anti diet nutritionist. Like that's the, and then your husband will get it. All right, easy just do that.Jeanette: We just literally talk at them for so long that they have to listen to us and internalizeLaura: Yeah. They have to, they have to get it, otherwise you threaten them with the divorce. So thank you for sharing that, Jeanette. Really appreciate it. I think it's always like, just so much more helpful to hear people's personal experience. So yeah, I'm so glad that you were here to answer these questions with me.I don't feel like we give Janice a very satisfying answer. I'm sorry, Janice. Hopefully there is something to, to think about in that. But, um, yeah, I think we, we've covered a lot of ground here. There were a couple questions that we didn't get to, so maybe we'll do a part two at some point and finish them up.Should we share our snacks? So at the end of every episode, my guest and I share something that they're snacking on. So it can be like a podcast or a book, or a movie or a show, or like literal snacks. So what do you have for us?Jeanette: The first thing that came to mind of what I have been snacking on recently is a podcast. And, um, I have been a very busy bee at the moment, so having a podcast, um, that has been away from like anti-diet Laura: Yes. Jeanette: Sort thinking about fatness and stuff has been a really lovely respite to me. And it's, um, my, and it's probably one, it's been out for a while. I think they're finishing up. my dad wrote a porno.Laura: Oh yeah. I haven't listened to that in so long.Jeanette: No, I keep on it. I started listening to it back in 2019 and then I kind of forgot about that. Now, every now and then I kind of pick up, I go, oh my goodness, I need this in my life. And it's usually when I'm really busy. Like usually when I'm really busy, my brain just needsLaura: Something. Yeah.Jeanette: and something really funny.And so that's what I've been snacking on at the moment. How about you?Laura: So funny. We've been watching a lot of Bob's Burgers, which I love, Bob's burgers. Because our kid goes to bed so freaking late these days, so we usually have like, you know, we just wanna watch something mindless for like 20 minutes before we go to bed, have a snack, and then like an, I mean an actual food snack, watch a show. So they, yeah, that's like, that's what we've been watching lately. Um, but also, like the other thing that I had, cuz just cuz it's sitting on my desk, this is super bougie, um, because I was like having a bad day and I went into asip, which is always a mistake. And I bought, what is it? It's, um, like body bam, pink grapefruit, orange rind and lemon rind. And it's in this like paint tube, which I love Jeanette: I love that.Laura: Yeah, it's so, it's not, I wish, like I'm, I'm holding it up to you, like, you can smell it, you can't, but it's like really citrusy and fresh and like Yeah. I just, it's very, it's like a complete indulgence. But I love it. So yeah, that's my snack also.Um, Jeanette, tell us where people can find more about you and your work and a little bit of what you're up to.Jeanette: Okay. Um, you can find me on Instagram, the mindset nutritionist. You can find my freebie, which is great on my website, www dot mindset nutritionist dot co uk.Laura: Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, go download Jeanette's freebie. It's all about getting in the picture and yeah, being there for the, the moment and not being like hyperfocused on how you look or your body. Jeanette: Thank you so much for saying that for me,Laura: All right. Thanks for listening everyone, and thank you, Jeanette for being here and helping us answer all those questions.Jeanette: so much for having me.OUTROLaura Thomas: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Can I Have Another Snack? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review in your podcast player and head over to laurathomas.substack.com for the full transcript of this conversation, plus links we discussed in the episode and how you can find out more about this week's guest. While you're over there, consider signing up for either a free or paid subscription Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter, where I'm exploring topics around bodies, identity and appetite, especially as it relates to parenting. Also, it's totally cool if you're not a parent, you're welcome too. We're building a really awesome community of cool, creative and smart people who are committed to ending the tyranny of body shame and intergenerational transmission of disordered eating. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. 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Today I'm talking with Dr. Scott Griffiths. Scott is a senior lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He leads the Physical Appearance Research Team, a multidisciplinary group of researchers and health professionals who investigate body image, appearance related stigmas and discrimination, appearance enhancing substances, appearance enhancement and appearance related psychological disorders such as eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder.I wanted to talk to Scott about the phenomenon of muscle dysmorphia, a disorder that sits somewhere between a body dysmorphic disorder and an eating disorder that tends to impact cis boys and men. It's sometimes characterised as the male anorexia. Of course cis boys and men get anorexia too, but muscle dysmorphia is a bit different. It's sometimes known as Bigorexia. It's when an individual doesn't believe that they're big enough or sufficiently muscular to the point that they devote their lives to gains and progress in the gym. They might follow extremely strict diets which prioritise protein and cut out a lot of carbohydrates, and in some cases men can turn to using anabolic steroids, which have some really serious long-term effects for both physical and mental health as you'll hear us talking about. A lot of Scott's research is about the ways that social media, and particularly TikTok feeds people who are vulnerable to eating disorders or muscle dysmorphia, more and more content that upholds unrealistic body and image based ideals, and actually fuels eating disorders.It's really interesting research to hear about, but as a parent and as someone who works with eating disorders, it's really terrifying.Find out more about Scott's work here.Follow his work on Twitter here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Subscribe to my newsletter here.Here's the transcript in full:Scott: When you're on your feed and TikTok is delivering videos for you to consume, all of the reference points you are getting from content that it's popular and influential and that people are responding to it. It's so divorced from reality that you've got a greater pool of people comparing and feeling poorly about themselves and now investing in the general necessity of looking better.INTROLaura: Hey, and welcome to Can I Have Another Snack? I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet, registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. We're having conversations about how we nourish ourselves and our kids in all senses of the word in the hellscape that is diet culture.Today I'm talking with Dr. Scott Griffiths. Scott is a senior lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He leads the Physical Appearance Research Team, a multidisciplinary group of researchers and health professionals who investigate body image, appearance related stigmas and discrimination, appearance enhancing substances, appearance enhancement and appearance related psychological disorders such as eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder.I wanted to talk to Scott about the phenomenon of muscle dysmorphia, a disorder that sits somewhere between a body dysmorphic disorder and an eating disorder that tends to impact cis boys and men. It's sometimes characterized as the male anorexia, which of course cis boys and men get anorexia too. But muscle dysmorphia is a bit different. It's sometimes known as bigorexia. It's when an individual doesn't believe that they're big enough or sufficiently muscular to the point that they devote their lives to gains and progress in the gym. They might follow extremely strict diets which prioritize protein and cut out a lot of carbohydrates. And in some cases men can turn to using anabolic steroids, which have some really serious long-term effects for both physical and mental health as you'll hear us talking about. A lot of Scott's research is about the ways that social media, and particularly TikTok feeds people who are vulnerable to eating disorders or muscle dysmorphia, more and more content that upholds unrealistic body and image based ideals and actually fuels eating disorders.It's really interesting research to hear about, but as a parent and as someone who works with eating disorders, it's. Really terrifying. So you'll notice that this episode has a slightly different vibe to some of the other episodes this season. I'm asking Scott more about his research on muscle dysmorphia rather than his, you know, personal story. And I'm curious to hear what you think of this episode and get some feedback from you as to whether you'd like more interviews with academics, researchers and practitioners with a particular kind of expertise or on a particular topic like this, in addition to hearing people's lived experience. So if you want, you can drop me a comment over on Substack underneath this episode, um, which you can find at laurathomas.substack.com.And while I have you here, just a reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? is entirely listener and reader supported, but in order to be able to cover the costs of admin and people and pay guests and contributors. A lot of my time is devoted to other work outside of the newsletter. That means I have less time to bring deeply researched essays as well as thoughtful interviews here on the podcast. I'd love to be able to devote most of my time to the work and the community that we're building here, but that means I need a lot more of you to consider becoming a paid subscriber. I also know that that's a big ask right now. So for the month of March, I'm running a one off spring sale on Can I Have another Snack subscriptions. They are 20% off, so for this month only, if you subscribe, you'll pay four pounds a month or 40 pounds for the year instead of five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year, which is a bargain. I'm not going to be running this good a deal for the rest of the year, so now is the time to cash in. If you've been sitting on the fence it's time to make a move. I'll put a subscription link in the show notes. You can also gift a subscription to a friend or family member or a coworker and get that same deal. And remember that if you want to sign up with some pals or like your NCT group from five years ago, you always get 20% off of group subscriptions. So I will also link to group subscriptions in the show notes.Okay, team, I appreciate your support and hopefully one day we can make this work more sustainable, so I can give up my side hustles. Thank you so much for being here. Here is my interview with Scott Griffiths.MAIN EPISODELaura: All right, Scott, I would love it if you could start by telling us a little bit about how you got interested in studying appearance related psychological disorders like body dysmorphic disorder and eating disorders.Scott: When I was a teenager, I worked at a cinema and someone who worked there who was kind of a friend of mine, a young woman, she had anorexia, and I remember at the time being completely mystified by her ailment and predicament. And it's probably quite stigmatizing in retrospect because it seemed to me as a, you know, kind of a fool, that the solution to her problem was readily at hand.Like she was really thin and, and just needed to eat. And that kind of set my thinking in motion about the really complex feelings and beliefs that folks can have about their body and their eating, et cetera. And it was when I was in undergraduate doing a, a Bachelor of Psychology that I had a couple of friends, both young men who would say things to me that would remind me of that young woman who had anorexia in the cinema and things they would say were similar, but the manifestations of them were different. The kinds of eating and, and training and the bodies that they wanted for themselves were all different, but it's core, it seemed like the same kind of issue and disorder. So I think that was what got me interested. And it's developed a lot since then.Laura: Yeah, it's so interesting. I think you know that I work with people with eating disorders and something I often hear from them is like, well, it just, how misunderstood that the disorder is, and from the outside, especially to anyone who knows nothing about eating disorders, it seems like, yeah, it's really simple just to eat more food.But I think you've been on your own learning journey with that and, and come through the other side and realized it's, it's a lot more complicated than that. These people would, you know, if, if it was just, just as easy as eating food, they would do it. But unfortunately that's, that's not the case.Sorry, that was a little tangent cuz I think you were touching on something that I know is really important to those with lived experience of eating disorders. And then kind of moving further along, it's really interesting that you saw the parallels between anorexia nervosa and then what I think you would probably characterize as body dysmorphic disorder. Which is the same but different. And maybe the same is too much of a stretch. But it's similar, but also different. So I'm wondering for people who are unfamiliar with body dysmorphic disorder, can you tell us what exactly it is and maybe some of the, the des describing more of the parallels between something like anorexia nervosa or what we would consider to be a more traditional in inverted commas eating disorder versus what we see in the BDD presentation.Scott: When I was talking with those, those friends, those young men when I was at university the disorder that would best capture what was going on for them is something we call muscle dysmorphia, which is a subtype of body dysmorphia disorder, which kind of sits alongside eating disorders. They are distinct, but they're often comorbid.They both have body image often as a central element. So body dysmorphic disorder, the cardinal symptom is you believing there is a defect in your appearance. It can be completely imaginary or it can be real, but the severity of it in your head is almost always much more severe than it is in actual objective reality.And in the context of muscle dysmorphia, which many people, including myself, see more as an eating disorder than body dysmorphic disorder. The defect in appearance is guys, some girls, but often guys who objectively are, are very large and muscular, but when they look in the mirror, what they see reflected back to them is someone who is scrawny, out of shape or overweight.Just a big difference to how they actually are not at all dissimilar to anorexia where we have people, often young women predominantly, but also some men who look in the mirror and see someone reflected back to them who is very different to how they actually look.Laura: It's interesting that you said that you characterize muscle dysmorphic disorder as more similar to an eating disorder than to true body dysmorphic disorder, and I'm curious to hear a little bit more about why you feel like it fits more into that category.Scott: Yeah. To be fair, when people debate about whether muscle dysmorphia ought to be a body dysmorphic disorder as it currently is classified or an eating disorder, it feels a little bit like a semantic exercise.Laura: Absolutely.Scott: The real push and importance in research as far as I'm concerned, is trying to understand both disorders and develop better treatments and trying to figure out which, which category where there's so much overlap between these two categories already, it belongs to, feels a little like a moot point, but to, to answer the question. For me, it's because when you look at the central pathology that motivates folks with muscle dysmorphia, the low self-esteem, especially around appearance, the kinds of things they believe with respect to why they have to look a certain way in order to have worth and be loved.The attention given to dieting and to exercise and the inability to tolerate deviations from that, the need to constantly progress, the perfectionism, it's all there. It all feels like different sides of the same coin. And when I speak to people, including yourself and your audience, it feels to me like explaining away muscle dysmorphia as one manifestation of an eating disorder, kind of like anorexia, or the reverse of it is just an easy way to see how it is that eating disorders are so much more than just thinness, that they can manifest in all sorts of different ways depending on the types of bodies that people feel compelled to achieve for themselves.Laura: Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. And I'm, I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about sort of, you know, maybe not with going with, without going into tons and tons of detail that might be upsetting to hear, but just tell us a little bit about, a bit more about you know, how would you know if someone had muscle dysmorphic disorder? You know, I'm thinking about parents who, you know, what are the signs and symptoms that someone might want to look out for that are sort of red flags, if you will.Scott: Got you. So, when you're trying to identify red flags, some muscle dysmorphia, a useful starting point is to recognize that almost everything that is common in muscle dysmorphia can exist and be benign. So you can train five, six days a week every day of the week if you want. And it's completely fine, as long as it's working for you.You can diet right, and it can be fine. Not a psychological disorder if it's working for you. It's not encouraging people to go and do it, but it's not a psychological disorder to do it in muscle dysmorphia. It's when there is a preoccupation and that preoccupation is causing impairment. So it could be that your training and dieting have become so strict that when you feel that your training or dieting are about to be compromised in some way, maybe there's an important social occasion that you have to attend, and it means that you don't get to stick to your diet or go to train or something unexpected comes up, and you have to prioritize that other important unexpected thing.If that brings you anxiety and guilt makes you angry at yourself, then you are in the territory of massive dysmorphia as opposed to just behaviors that are otherwise benign with respect to disorder.Laura: Yeah, so you're just highlighting here that you know, the behaviors in and of themselves are not pathological. You know, plenty of people go to the gym, you know, they are super careful with their diet. Where it runs into kind of hot water is when, you know, that becomes almost like all encompassing.It takes over your life. It doesn't allow for any flexibility. It becomes very rigid. You can't go to your mates birthday party or just like, go pick up a pizza after work because it's a mess. So that flexibility in eating, that flexibility in your social life, but also I suppose kind of the feelings of guilt, remorse, stress, that might come up if you do do those things.Scott: That's right. And the deteriorations tend to come from many places. They don't just come from one. So maybe you find that on the days where you have to rest where you can't be in gym training, cuz you've gotta have a couple of rest days to recover, you don't feel so good on those days. Maybe every time you don't progress in the gym, so you're not adding on to the weight, you're not getting stronger, it makes you feel like rubbish.Whereas when you first started out, maybe all of those things made you feel really good. Maybe your relationships are starting to suffer. Maybe your partner has had four or five conversations with you now about how they don't like how it's so challenging to go out to a restaurant, et cetera, etc.There's going to be no one thing, but the things tend to all come. Together. And what's challenging as you would well know in the eating disorder space is that the person who is in the thick of it is sometimes not the best judge of how extreme and rigid what they are doing is, and not uncommon at all to have folks who've come out the other end of these disorders look back and say, oh man, I can't believe I didn't see just how crazy it was for me at that.Laura: And that's a really important point, and I'd like to come back and think a little bit about how particularly a parent might address this or raise their concerns with you know, maybe their teen who they know is becoming super fixated on the gym and really rigid around that.Maybe we could come back to that because I feel I still wanna characterize a little bit more of what might be going on for people with muscle dysmorphic disorder. And a big piece that I feel like we haven't talked about yet is the use of anabolic steroids.So yeah, could you tell us how that and maybe any other kind of diet aids and things fit into the picture of muscle dysmorphic disorder?Scott: Yeah, sure. So, if you wanted to be thin and skinny and you were going to abuse drugs to get there, you might use laxatives and diuretics. If you wanna be big and muscular the drug that will typically be abused is anabolic steroids. So the most basic anabolic steroid is just a synthetic form of testosterone, the sex differentiating hormone that men tend to have more of than women, and it helps to synthesize muscle. So if you wanna be bigger muscular, if you've been influenced by, you know, famous fitness influencers, many of whom are using steroids, it may be something you're tempted to turn to and unlike with laxatives and diuretics, where if you take them, they don't have any substantive impact on the calories that you absorb (another way of saying they don't work very well). anabolic steroids, unfortunately do work very well. It's a bit of a public relations disaster, really.Laura: Can I just put a tiny caveat that for people who abuse laxatives and diuretics, in terms of, I just wanna highlight that they are still really dangerous and they can cause electrolyte imbalances. Just because I know people with eating disorders will listen to this podcast and I've worked with eating disorders for long enough to know that they will hear that and think, oh, okay, that means they're safeSo, I just want to highlight that it can cause problems in terms of your intestines. There can be problems with, I'm forgetting the terminology now, but basically twisting your intestines because it just messes with your digestion so much.I'm thinking about laxatives here, but also it can cause dangerously low electrolyte levels in the body, which can cause fits and seizures. So they're not benign, and I don't want anyone to walk away with the message that they're benign. But that's aside from what you're talking about, which is that yeah, you know that people with muscle dysmorphic disorder are more likely to abuse steroids.So, yeah. Could I pass it back to you now?Scott: Of course, and steroids on top of being effective, which makes them very attractive in terms of, you know, as a temptation they also have rather significant health consequences, especially in the long term. But why I bring up the fact that they are effective for building muscle into such a significant degree that you have outfits like the International Olympics Committee who test for doping.The use of things like steroids in sports is because once you're on them, you will experience the progress that you've been craving and to a very significant degree. So folks will get on them, they will put on a lot of muscle, they might even lose some body fat at the same time, which is incredibly challenging to do if you are not on these substances.And of course, they feel. for a time, but they still have the core beliefs and attitudes and thinking so that high doesn't last for very long. But now not only are they not satisfied with their current size often, but to drop in size by coming off would trigger the kinds of intense feelings and distorted thinking that you also see when folks with anorexia are going through recovery and are, you know, weight restoring.So it's incredibly challenging. And what ends up happening is that you have to then treat both the muscle dysmorphia, which is very much a psychological disorder, and the anabolic steroids and their effects, which is an endocrine impactor. And dealing with these in combos is challenging.Laura: And, I was just wondering if you could talk a little to the, the longer term side effects of of the steroid use.Scott: Sure. So the longer term side effects tend to focus on increased mortality and morbidity from, from cardiovascular events, heart attacks, enlarged hearts. The endocrine effects focus predominantly on the capacity of your endocrine system to resume a normal amount of testosterone production endogenously, so from within, subsequent to stopping steroid use.Because when you flood your system with anabolic steroids or synthetic testosterone, the reason men's testicles shrink is because most of the function of testicles is to make testosterone. So the body says, oh, I'm full of testosterone. Now I'm not gonna make any more myself. But when you doing the injections of the tablets and you don't have that testosterone coming in, the body has to restart that system from scratch. And as we've learned, it is not very reliable at doing that. And it is very unpredictable how well that is gonna happen. And there's many, many, many instances of men as young as 23, 24, who will be on testosterone replacement therapy for their entire life, and who have their fertility are greatly compromised now because their bodies have not resumed normal testosterone production.Laura: Yeah. What you're describing is really similar to what happens when once this women are taking the contraceptive pill and then they come off of it and they might not restart their period for five or six months after, hopefully all going well. But what you're talking about, I think in muscle dysmorphic disorder, where there's an abuse of these drugs that those, as I understand it, the doses are much higher than a typical physiological dose.And so the impact, the effect is much, much greater and could last a lot longer, you know, if function is ever fully regained.Scott: Yeah. To give you some context, a beginner's of anabolic steroids, a beginner steroid cycle, if you will, might prescribe something like 500 milligrams of testosterone enate, a really commonly available steroid. I'd wager a bet that it's most widely available in the UK, certainly is in Australia. That beginner's dose is already five times higher than the maximum that a healthy male would produce on their own. And that much testosterone, flooding a system is beyond the bounds of what the human body is used to dealing with. Laura: Yeah. And, and you mentioned you know, the UK context there and there were headlines a couple of years ago that suggested that first of all, that predominantly steroid users in the UK were were using steroids as an appearance or an aesthetic related, you know, for aesthetic reasons rather than for purely like bodybuilding lifting reasons.Although I, I can imagine those things get kind of murky to tease apart and. At that time, I think this was about 2018 the, the reports were that there were about a million steroid users in the UK for, you know, for aesthetic reasons. Is that an accurate reflection? Do you know? Like, is that likely an underestimation, an overestimation, or do we have any, any real sense of what's going on?Scott: I'd say there's a great chance that's an underestimate. Steroid use is incredibly stigmatized. It's heavily criminalized and users are extremely loath to admit even to health professionals that they use anabolic steroids. And you see these schisms even in fitness communities online. So Instagram, TikTok, where there's this constant accusations that someone is using steroids or is natural or bloody for short. So, it's all very underground and it means that whenever you do get an, an estimate based on data that is credible. So in Australia that would be visits to needle and syringe programs as one example, to get injecting equipment for steroids. You can be almost certain that that's just a fraction of what's actually going on out there. And all the evidence we have, at least in Australia suggests that anabolic steroid use is increasing in prevalence and it's gone from something that used to be the purview of just athletes through to professional weightlifters to now those only being a minority. It's very much an aesthetics driven thing.Laura: So tell us what we know about who Muscle Dysmorphic Disorder impacts. You've alluded to that it's mostly cis men. But can you elaborate any further on that?Scott: Sure. So itt's mostly cis men because cis men are the largest pool who would want to be muscular. But you see certain subpopulations of men who are more vulnerable. Gay men are more vulnerable to muscle dysmorphia and to using anabolic steroids because of the heightened appearance pressures in that space. Younger men. So it does tend to be something that has its onset in younger years similar to anorexia.Laura: Sorry, I was gonna ask you, we know kind of what age do boys start becoming vulnerable? Because we know in anorexia it can be as young as like eight or nine sometimes, and that age is getting younger and younger.Scott: Yeah. And you see the same thing in muscle dysmorphia. So the first vulnerability factors can appear there. Studies have been done with action figurines and you have young boys asked which one do they prefer more? And they're able to, to, they have their preferences in line with what you'd expect, and they'll expect a preference for their own bodies to look certain ways, as you'd expect, given media messaging.So the vulnerability factors are there. In terms of muscle dysmorphia on setting tends to take quite a while. You'd be familiar. It's not the case that you hear a couple of messages, you get a mean comment about your appearance, and then suddenly you have it . It's years of internalizing and a bunch of factors that come along, and then it might strike in your teens or your early adulthood.And we see that in muscle dysmorphia too. Steroids often come into the piece a little later, so early adulthood to mid, and it's because they're expensive and they're hard to access.Laura: Yeah. You need to be kind of savvy also. Yeah. I can imagine kids who have figured out the whole cryptocurrency thing. I'm sure that they, you know, would get in there if they could, if they had the means. So you're saying gay men are more at risk. What, are there any other sort of subpopulations that you know, you're particularly worried about?Scott: Men who are in sports for which body weight or some aesthetic element around body weight is a key part. So not uncommon to have guys with muscle dysmorphia say that a lot of some of these thoughts came about because they had to weigh in for their sports. Maybe they were, they were boxes or fighters, something like that. So it just primed them to be in the space of being anxious about the number on the scale and how their fitness was progressing. Things like that.Laura: Do we know anything about racialized groups and, and who might be most at risk?Scott: There is some evidence though, it's not great in terms of its quality as of yet, that folks in predominantly white countries who are not white themselves may be at greater risk for both muscle dysmorphia and steroid use. Data we produced in Australia that was specific to gay bisexual men of, of various races suggested for example, that, you know, if you were an Asian gay man in Australia, that you might be more likely to use anabolic steroids and to succumb to muscle dysmorphia.And in talking with Asian gay men in interviews in qualitative research, part of it is because, you know, if you are an Asian gay man in Australia, then you are often stereotyped as being more feminine. You're not able to be part of the masc for masc subculture, which is still quite dominant and exclusionary and anabolic steroids are a way to compensate for those other aspects of your appearance that are diminishing your masculine capital. You can see something similar happen for men who are shorter. If you go to spaces online where men are complaining about being short to other men, they'll often see, just hit the gym, just get jacked. It's a way to compensate for those other elements that are not helping you to embody that masculine archetypal, conventionally attractive male.Laura: Hmm. Okay. A while back, you talked about pressures from the media. And that has, you know historically, particularly in anorexia research, been held up as a huge antecedent, I suppose, to eating disorder precipitation, but now there's this whole other layer of social media on top of things. How does, and I'm thinking about the fact that young people in particular hang out on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and maybe less Facebook these days I don't know. I don't go on Facebook. So what do we know about the influence that social media is having on aesthetic and appearance based pressures?Scott: Social media makes people more vulnerable to eating disorders, including muscle dysmorphia. And if you are vulnerable, it can make the transition to having one of these disorders shorter. It can intensify it. And I think it can also assist in maintaining them for longer as well. So the reason why media messaging can be so problematic and damaging in terms of vulnerability for and experiencing eating disorders is because you end up with all these idealized reference points and what social media does is expands that limitlessly so that when you're on your feed and TikTok is delivering videos for you to consume, all of the reference points you are getting from content that is popular and influential and that people are responding to. It's so divorced from reality that you've got a greater pool of people comparing and feeling poorly about themselves and now investing in the general necessity of looking better.Laura: So this is an area that you've been researching. Am I right?Scott: Yeah, that's right.Laura: Can you tell us a little bit more about, you know, specific studies or experiments that you've done, that you're excited to share a bit more about?Scott: So, you know, studies of social media, including of TikTok, generally what they will do is have an experiment and you'll show people some images or videos from social media platforms that you're worried about and see how people respond. Or you have people answer a survey question that will amount to, how often do you use, say, TikTok, Instagram, and you correlate that with some measure like how you feel about your body.And that's all well and fine. But where the real explanatory power is, in my mind, is in big data and getting access into exactly what people are seeing and viewing so you can map their social media experience. So what we've been able to do is to take a group of people with eating disorders and a group of people who, we call it our healthy controls, that don't have eating disorders. And see their entire TikTok algorithm from the day they installed it to the day we requested the data. And that means we can track exactly every video that's being delivered to them, the comments, the likes, all with their consent, I'll just say, of course not being done without that. And we can see what is happening.What it means is we can show things like if you are someone with an eating disorder, your TikTok algorithm that decides what videos you see every time you log in is 50% more likely to deliver you an appearance oriented video for each and every video that you see compared to someone without an eating disorder.And the amount of videos that these folks are seeing, the average is around 2000 a month. So if you are someone in weekly therapy for an eating disorder, If you're a clinician and you have someone who you'reLaura: Oh my God. I'm just sitting here thinking about like some of my clients. I'm like,Scott: That's 500 videos on average that they are seeing between each session. And when we run studies to compliment these on new phones with fresh TikTok accounts that we manage, it only takes three minutes to get an appearance oriented video.You get 17 in the first 20 minutes. So it's not that people are seeking this content out. It happens anyway. And when we look at the rate of liking that folks with eating disorders have for this content versus folks without. It's not that the folks with eating disorders are looking for this content, they're liking it at the same rate because what's algorithm is doing is not taking what you like to determine what you want to see. They're interested in engagement, whether it's Facebook or, or Instagram or TikTok. It's what keeps you looking and what keeps you looking isn't just what makes you happy. It's what makes you anxious or what makes you upset. It's what makes you mad. And if you are someone who is really unhappy or worried about the way you look, it knows which videos will make you look more. And that's exactly what happens. And you can see over time how the algorithm becomes more echo chambery as people get sucked into the vortex of this content.Laura: I think the scariest part for me both as someone who works with eating disorders and as a parent, like my child is obviously not on social media right now, but will be one day I'm sure, is the fact that they know, like the social media companies know exactly what they're doing because wasn't it a couple of years ago, but there was a whistleblower at meta. Who said who, who said, we have all of this information that shows that our algorithms are making body image and eating disorders worse, and yet they're not doing anything about it.Scott: Yeah. And then they downplayed and discredited their own data generated by the star researchers they themselves hired which is absurd. And the reason that they don't wanna do anything about it is because the..Laura: It's capitalism.Sorry, go. Scott: No, you, you're exactly right. The money is made from engagement. And I think the faint that the social media companies do is to imply that what they're doing is giving people what they want, community connectedness. And when it comes to advertising that they're connecting people with the products that they want to buy. And through being able to like things, you can get the sense that, oh, the social media companies are just sitting back and people are doing what they want in there.They're getting what they want, but certainly, the controls that you think you have over what your algorithm, especially on TikTok is sending you is less. And it's about engagement. And engagement doesn't care how you feel, if it's positive or negative, it just cares that you spent the time. Whatever it takes to get you to do more time is what it is going to send you. It's worth noting also that when you look at the proportion of appearance honored content that your algorithm sends you, so how big this echo chamber is, that correlates strongly with the eating disorder symptoms. So the more your algorithm becomes, you know, polluted by appearance, honored content, the worse the eating disorder becomes in tandem. And why wouldn't it?Laura: I have a question, and you might not be able to answer this. One of my clients uses the term recovery porn in eating disorder recovery, which are all of these images of usually women who claim to be in recovery or recovered. Have you looked at the impact that these recovery accounts have on eating disorder recovery?Scott: I've not looked at that specifically, but I'm well aware of the phenomenon your client has described. And unfortunately, lots of social media phenomena and hashtags, like for example eating disorder recovery, body positivity is another good example.Laura: Yeah.Scott: They are not clear paragons, they're not at all as clearly useful as we would like them to be if someone went searching for them. You go looking for ed recovery, you might find an account that is extremely thoughtful in the way that that content is presented right alongside content that is clearly not being very helpful. Just like with body positivity, you might get someone who hearkens back to the, the fat acceptance movement, who's really preaching the fighting the good flight right next to someone who is perhaps well-meaning, but still thin, skinny, and they're pinching a tiny little roll of fat and going body positivity, which as I can tell from your reaction is missing the point.Laura: Yeah. Okay. Maybe, maybe something for a future research agenda then, Scott.Scott: Absolutely. It's a great suggestion.Laura: I'm curious to, because, and I think what it comes, what it comes back to you articulated it there really well. I think something that I tried to unpack with my clients, you know, is thinking about, okay, well, is this image, they might have the message on point, right? But if there's an image that is still highly focused on aesthetics, it's highly focused on their body and, you know, showing off their body in a particular way, then that really completely undermines the message that they might have been sending with the best of intention.So just a little interesting aside, but you know, you've talked about how social media, you know, there might be some benefits to social media. I think there's definitely some work that has shown that coming out of the center of appearance research, but it's murkier and less clearly defined than, than maybe we would like to think.So you painted this really dark picture of social media and, and how it contributes to muscle dysmorphic disorder. So I'm wondering what we can do both from maybe a clinical perspective, or maybe a public health perspective as well as maybe a parenting perspective to protect our kids from internalizing these messages because they're gonna be exposed to them. Right. We know that for sure. So how do we buffer the impact, both maybe at the broader public health level, because this is a public health issue clearly, but also maybe in our own parenting in our own homes. Scott: Yeah. And okay, you're absolutely right. You cannot start from a base of let's not use social media altogether. That's, that's the arena. That's where youth culture is driven in, telling young people not to use it is just not practical. So they're going to use it. Encouraging your child to be a critical consumer of media generally, including on social media, is really useful.I think if you feel confident enough to talk about it, explaining to them that what they see is delivered to them by algorithms can be useful. That's something we're exploring in our own research where we want young people to have a better understanding that what they're seeing in their feed is not a one-to-one reflection of reality to the world as it actually is.And that's beyond the, you know, manipulation of photos and self portrayals that go on, but like the algorithm just feeding you with whatever activates your emotions. Part of that is this tool we're developing that can visualize your algorithm for you so that you can know and compare it to others just how biased it's become. And this can be for clinicians too, because if you have a client walk in the door, you need to know if 70% of their feed is appearance oriented, which is not a number I picked out of thin air. That's an actual number from clients we had with anorexia nervosa. And then you can have a productive conversation with that person around, okay, your algorithm is not only not reflective of reality, it's doing you harm and this is how we can work to remediate it.Laura: I would definitely, like sign me up for that tool. I will test it for you. Whatever you need me to do.Scott: Lovely.Laura: So, so yeah, having conversations that, you know, that there's obviously, the images themselves have been highly altered, stylized, potentially photoshopped, all kinds of different things. But then there's this whole machinery and infrastructure behind that feeding you more and more and more of these idealized images.Scott: Yeah, that's it. And you know, when social media, the way we use it, a lot of the time, like a lot of the time when people are using TikTok, people's guards are down. It's incidental. It's minutes in bed when you first wake up, it's bed when you might be trying to go to sleep. It's when you're on a bus, it's when you're bored, it's when you're tired.It's not active consumption of content. And before you know it, you can have scrolled through or mindlessly watched tens and tens of videos that have appearance oriented content and, just like with how people think that advertising isn't working on them, but the reason that so much money is pumped into it is because it does have cumulative accumulative impacts on, on purchasing decisions. The same thing happens with social media, so it's about getting people to recognize that and to try to minimize what's happening in those spaces because it all adds up.Laura: You know, you said kind of towards the top of the interview that people who are deep in their eating disorder, whether it's anorexia, whether it's muscle dysmorphic disorder, bulimia, orthorexia, whatever form that takes, they are, you know, the least clear in what's going on, right? They're the least easily able to see what's going on. They are definitely aware that there's a problem, but they might not be able to identify exactly what that is. So, with that in mind, I'm wondering for, for parents particularly of teen boys, tweens and teens, it sounds like are both vulnerable and kind of heading into adolescence.If a parent notices more protein powders coming into the house, more you know, concerns about lean protein and less carbohydrates on the plate and more time working out or conversations about being fit, about being healthy, and they're, they're noticing that, that's becoming increasingly rigid and perfectionistic. How might a parent approach this, do you think? Scott: It's a very common question that has never had an answer come easy to me, as I'm sure it wouldn't for many parents because teenage boys are notoriously challenging to talk to and get to open up to, especially about these,Laura: Yeah, but you're a psychologist so you ,Scott: So I'm obliged to have an answer and I I have you. So I think the way we approach folks who we think have muscle dysmorphia, but who are perhaps reluctant to talk about it, is to emphasize those parts of their training and their dieting that aren't working for them. We don't say, “Is it making you sad or anxious?” and, “what's not working for you?” because often whether it's a young boy, a teen, a young adult, they're just thinking about progress. They wanna progress. It's, I want my lifts to get stronger, my body to get better, etc. And the things that we think of as the symptoms of the disorder, the things that we're worried about, they're not worried about them per se. They're worried about their progress. And it's those things on the side that are making it hard, right? So we frame it as, okay. What's, what's getting in the way of you being able to train and diet and be like this and, and that maybe it's, ah, you know, I couldn't, I couldn't train today. I had to go and do this.It's like, oh, okay. So like, how did it make you feel? It's like, you can try to get them to see that it's the rigidity that is being more unhelpful than helpful. We deliberately keep it above the level of feelings for a while until that is more approachable. Often with our young clients, we'll just pitch it as, look we don't want to change your training and your dieting. We're not gonna tell you not to go to the gym. We just want you to be in a space where you can get back to making the progress that you wanna make. Then you've got your foot in the door and you go from thereLaura: You're getting them on side. You're telling them I'm on your team. Yeah.Scott: Yeah. Because whilst you can say the term body image to most young women and they intuitively know what you're thinking about, if I try to say, “are you worried about your body image?” to a young man, even if I know they are, it's so super clear as day, a lot of the time they'll say no.Laura: Yeah,Scott: Like straight up, they'll say no to you. Because it's just not the language that they speakLaura: Yeah, yeah. But if you can talk to them in terms of gains and what's getting in the way of theirScott: What's getting in the way? You know, you're not talking about feelings per se. That's just the best way I can describe it. It's a very tactful and challenging spot to be in, I think.Laura: Yeah. I mean, my hope is that I never have to broach this conversation with my kid, but fuck parenting is hard, man.Scott: Yeah, I certainly empathize.Laura: And I really hope you don't say CBT right now, but what do we know about treatment? What is available to help young people, older people, whoever is impacted by muscle dysmorphia to help them recover?Scott: The evidence-based for effective treatment for muscle dysmorphia is extremely limited. It's nowhere near what we have for the other eating disorders. There is nothing in the way of an RCT or anything like that. I have a PhD student now who is running the first manualised treatment for muscle dysmorphia, so we'll see how that turns out.Generally speaking, the approaches that work for eating disorders will also work for muscle dysmorphia, in my opinion, because again, the core maintaining factors of the disorder and precipitating factors are very, very similar. And what has been encouraging as a first port of call, the major eating disorder charities that run helplines, so certainly the Butterfly Foundation in Australia perhaps BEAT over in the UK, they are increasingly cognizant of muscle dysmorphia and the helpline staff are better equipped to, to talk about it, which is perfect.Laura: I noticed the other day that there's even an NHS page, which, you know, you and I spoke a couple of years ago for Don't Salt My Game, and I'm pretty sure it didn't exist even then. So there is certainly more recognition and awareness, but it sounds like people are more equipped to have these conversations, certainly in the eating disorder space.I worry more about kind of general practice in terms of medicine because there's even and, and don't get, this is not GP bashing . We all know how much pressure GPs are under, but there is a lack of awareness even about more traditional eating disorders in that space. So yeah, I reckon BEAT would be probably the best first port of call there.But in terms of treatment, it sounds like we don't exactly know yet. Your sense is that probably some of the modalities that we use for other eating disorders are probably gonna be successful because of, you know, the same underlying maintaining and precipitating factors. But I guess we need to wait for your student to do their research before we have more clear answers on that.Scott: Yeah. But even then for the really convincing answer that yes, you can confidently send someone for this treatment and there's a great chance they get better years and years away from that. But what I find promising is in talking to eating disorder clinicians, in training them when it comes to muscle dysmorphia, it's not a case of, oh, how am I gonna do this?It's, oh wow. There's all the parallels are all there, which is great because it means that the tools are there, it's just a matter of education both on the part of the clinician and on on people and young men so that they know they can go and seek help and that help will be there to meet them.Laura: Absolutely. And I just wanna go back to the TikTok algorithm thing, which is super disturbing to me, but, but just to kind of close out, I wonder, you know, from your perspective as a researcher, what do we need to be doing both in terms of a research agenda, but maybe also like a public health policy agenda in terms of tackling some of these, like really problematic systems, I suppose, that young people are up against. I don't know if that question makes sense, but like, where do we go from here? What do we do with this?Scott: No, I've thought about this. There's the organizations I'm working with in Singapore, we've been talking about that at length and the broader conversation that needs to be had moving back from TikTok to algorithms and data generally is we need greater oversight and control of how our data is used to deliver us content of all kinds.Because people cannot bat an eyelid when they think of, alright, I wanna clean my house and I'm on Instagram and I got an ad for a cleaning product, cool. And in your ideal world, advertising connects you seamlessly to the things that can make your life easier. What you don't want is for an algorithm to see and know that a young person has been looking at a lot of videos that are around weight loss and now a targeted ad comes up for a weight loss supplement, cause that is how that data gets used also.And we need tools, I think like the one we're developing so that people can see what their algorithms are sending that. You should know. You should know if your algorithm is sending you three times more toxic masculinity content than someone else, if it's sending you more eating disorder content, if it's sending you more plastic surgery content.Because the first step in a battle is knowing what your algorithms are sending to you. And this issue only becomes more important because let's say you or I wanted to find out something factual, we go to Google.Gen Z uses things like TikTok for search. 40% of Gen Z prefers to use TikTok than Google for search, which means you are down the rabbit hole of the algorithm from day dot.So you need to know, but of course that information's never released to you. So it's pushing back against the opaqueness of the data that we provide and how that data is used to send us content because it's not in our, in the service of our health and connectedness and community. Again, it's in the service of, of money, and, and engagement. So I think that's the broader conversation, right? The data collected from us is not benign.Laura: Oh, absolutely. Wow. All right, Scott, on that cherry note, um, at the end of every episode, my guest and I share something that they have been really excited about lately. Um, So something they've been snacking on, either literally or metaphorically. Do you have something picked out?Scott: I do. So in Singapore, my favorite breakfast to have is kaya toast with some rather runny under soft boiled eggs with soy sauce and white pepper. It's a very common breakfast here, and I love it. It's so, so satisfying. I had it this morning. I'll have it again tomorrow.Laura: Sorry. What is the kind of toast did you say?Scott: It's called Kaya Toast. So it's like thick cuts of toast with butter that's called kaya butter. And it's slightly sweet. I think it has a more fun and complex flavour than regular butter. And you can dip that in eggs that are loaded up with white pepper and soy sauce.Laura: Got it.Scott: I love it.Laura: Oh, it sounds like they have a really amazing food culture over there. Like I've heard from people that they have like, you know, lots of different kinds of street food and stuff like that, so yeah. That sounds awesome. Mine is also a food so it's, I mean, it's only February at the time of recording, but like all the Easter stuff is now showing up in the shops and so I demolished a pack of like Doisy and Dam, which is like a brand of chocolate over here, mini eggs the other day. And they were so good. Like, I don't know if you get mini eggs in Australia, they're like solid chocolate eggs with like a candy kind of coating shell around them. And they're like all different kind of pastel kind of colors. Like yellow and pink and green and like eastery kind of spring colors.Scott: It's possible we do, I can't recall 'em off the top of my head,Laura: You're gonna tell me like you don't like chocolate or something.Scott: No, no, no. I love chocolate I'm not sillyLaura: So I think you would like, I know you would recognise them. So maybe you don't have them. You don't have them over there. All right, Scott, it's been really great to chat to you again. Can you let everybody know where they can find out more about you, your research group, or any of your publications? I will link to the study, the TikTok studies if they're published yet? Scott: They're in the process of being, so the best place to follow along with the research my team does, including the TikTok work, is at my Twitter. It's @Scott1Griffiths. Or just search Google. Scott Griffiths, Scott Griffiths Body Image Research or something like that, and it will come up. That's the easiest way.Laura: I'll link to it so that it saves people the minefield of Googling stuff.Scott: Yeah.Laura: But yeah, so that's the best place to follow along on your Twitter and get updates about your research. I can't wait to read that. Well say. I can't wait to read it. I'm really depressed after talking to you about the state of social media.I mean, I was already bummed out about it, but this has just solidified that for me. So thank you for that. But otherwise, it was really great to talk to you and it's obviously really essential and important research that you're doing. So thank you for taking the time to share it with us.OUTROLaura Thomas: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Can I Have Another Snack? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review in your podcast player and head over to laurathomas.substack.com for the full transcript of this conversation, plus links we discussed in the episode and how you can find out more about this week's guest. While you're over there, consider signing up for either a free or paid subscription Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter, where I'm exploring topics around bodies, identity and appetite, especially as it relates to parenting. Also, it's totally cool if you're not a parent, you're welcome too. We're building a really awesome community of cool, creative and smart people who are committed to ending the tyranny of body shame and intergenerational transmission of disordered eating. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. 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Today I'm talking to Dr. Hillary McBride. Hillary is a psychologist, a researcher, and podcaster, with expertise that includes working with trauma and trauma therapies, and embodiment. She's the author of two books - ‘Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves as We Are', and ‘The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Wholeness, Healing and Connection through Embodied Living'. She is on the teaching faculty at the University of British Columbia and hosts the podcast Other People's Problems. Today, we're speaking about embodiment, healing from trauma and loads of other really cool things!Find out more about Hillary's work here.Follow her work on Instagram here.Order Hillary's books here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Sign up to the Raising Embodied Eaters workshop here.Subscribe to my newsletter here.Here's the transcript in full:Hillary: We could look at how convenient it is to assume that we are an image and then try to control that image when it causes us to forfeit the information that might say, no, I don't wanna participate in the system, or yes, I am hungry and I wanna eat that food even if it means that my body is not gonna appear the way that so and so expects it to. That the information on the inside is costly to stay connected to in a culture that is asking us to forfeit it, in order to belong in this kind of flattened, disembodied, two-dimensional version of, of being an image.INTROLaura: Hey, and welcome back to Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they are nourishing right now, and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti diet registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to Dr. Hillary McBride. Hillary is a psychologist, a researcher, and a podcaster with expertise that includes working with trauma and trauma therapies and embodiment. She's the author of two books: ‘Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves as We Are', and that was published in 2017 and her latest book, ‘The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Wholeness, Healing and Connection Through Embodied Living' came out in Fall 2021.Hillary is on the teaching faculty at the University of British Columbia, and she hosts the podcast, Other People's Problems. Today I'm talking to Hillary about embodiment, healing from trauma, and loads of other really cool things. So stay tuned.Before we get to our conversation with Hillary, just a reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? is entirely reader and listener supported. We don't have sponsors or do adverts or anything like that. I don't make money from affiliate links. I'm not trying to sell you anything you don't need. All I ask is that if you value the space and the community that we're building, then please consider becoming a paid subscriber. 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I'll drop the link to the group subscriptions in the show notes so you can check that out if you and some pals have been on the fence, then this is a great option and it's go time.And last thing if you enjoy this episode or any of the episodes in this season, then please head over to iTunes and drop five stars. And I see in my statistics that you're all listening on Apple Podcasts anyway, so while you're over there, I would really appreciate it if you could leave a review. I might even read some of them out on the show. It just really helps more people find these conversations and become part of the Can I Have Another Snack community.All right, team. Thank you so much for your support. Here's my conversation with Hillary McBride.MAIN EPISODELaura: All right, Hillary, I'd love it if you could start by telling us who or what you are nourishing right now.Hillary: Well, I am nourishing myself and my toddler, and I am so much more attuned to what that means because, I am breastfeeding and I am always ferociously hungry all the time, and there is something about nourishing and kind of the, the literal transmutation of all the food as it comes into my body, out of my body, into her body, that, uh, shows me how deeply connected those two are, both the nourishing and the being nourished.Laura: Yeah, I haven't thought about it in that way that, I like that word that you use transmutation, um, and also breastfeeding a toddler I can relate to that. And yeah, just having to be really in tune with yourself, but also to a toddler and their needs.Hillary: Yes,Laura: It could be a lot.Hillary: You know, it can be a lot. It's wonderful. And I feel so privileged to, through motherhood, see and experience that connection of how much my attunement and my self care to my body actually literally supports her to thrive and be well. And there's something about that, even just the way you pose the question that highlights for me, the, the interdependence between us as bodies that I think we sometimes forget when we're just mulling about our days, thinking of ourselves as individuals. There's actually this inherent connection between all of us as bodies, and I think parenthood really, really brings that right up close to your face.Laura: Mm, yeah. I think a lot about interdependence in parenting. You know, from the perspective that that capitalism keeps us so sort of separate from one another. And prioritizes independence and, you know, trying to parent under late stage capitalism without family and community around is so fucking hard. So really, really hard that, yeah, like it just really for me has hammered home how interdependent we are.Hillary: Uh-huh. Yeah. You said it. That's exactly it.Laura: So Hillary, this is somewhat related, but your area of expertise is in embodiment, and embodiment is a term I've noticed recently, it's kind of buzzy. I'm seeing it show up everywhere, but I'm wondering if you could tell us how you understand and define embodiment.Hillary: Yes, I would be so privileged. So there's a couple different ways of defining it, and I'll give you a couple different definitions and then I'll, I'll tell you what I think is salient about them, but I really like the Merleau-Ponty definition, which is that embodiment is the perceptual experience of engagement of the body in the world. Or another way of describing it is the lived experience of engaging in the world as a body.Laura: Hm.Hillary: What both of those definitions have in common is that there is both a felt sense, experiential kind of body, you know, as it's known and lived and encountered and understood and sensed by me and a sociopolitical, contextual, cultural piece.It is, you know, how is all of that shaped by the landscape that I'm in, by the people that I'm in, by the stories of power and privilege that I encounter? So there's a dialectic between what felt sense is like in and through me, and then the world that I'm in. You know, it's really interesting to look at it through that lens as having both kind of this material, individual quality and a sociocultural and interpersonal quality, because I think it really breaks down the assumptions that we have, that our bodies are in a way, uniquely ours.We can have autonomy and agency over our bodies, but, but we also are in a world that is constantly saying things to us about what bodies are good and how to be, and how to shape movement and how to feed ourselves and what is desirable in terms of our appearance. And those things really get, you know, lodged inside of us in such a way that sometimes we forget that those stories come from culture and they feel like they're our own thoughts or our own identities.So I love thinking about embodiment as including these two pieces and in, in a way actually being the conversation between them.Laura: I love that, that kind of reciprocal relationship between our bodies and the, the context of our bodies. And I love the quote that you use in your book. I think it's, is it Teresa Silo? Is that how you,Hillary: ah-huh.Laura: Is that how you pronounce her name? Where you quote her as saying, or them as saying the body is not a thing we have, but an experience we are. And I always think there's kind of an irony in talking about and trying to define embodiment because as soon as we kind of put words to it, we're sort of, I don't know, what's the word that I'm looking for? Hillary: Like in an abstraction or we're losing something about the felt sense or the quality of it by trying to talk about it or think aboutLaura: Yeah, yeah. No, that's exactly it. We're turning it into this like, academic thing when it's really, like you've said, it's a felt sense, it's an experience, so I just wanted to highlight the sort of, the irony in us talking about embodiment.Hillary: Oh, I'm so glad that you said that because it reminds me of something else that I often say when I'm talking about embodiment, which is to say, you know, instead of me describing it, how about I tell you about, you know, that time 30 minutes ago or two hours ago, when you really knew that you needed a drink of water. And the quality of the sensation and your awareness of that sensation, and then your action to go meet that need to go get yourself a glass of water or not. And all of the stories around you that impacted why you knew what that sensation was like or didn't know and why you did something about it or not.It's like the, you know, sometimes because we get stuck in the academic definitions and we lose the felt sense quality, we actually understand embodiment when we come back to the, the sensory memory, the procedural memory, the qualitative nature of being a body, because that as much, you know, some of us have harder times accessing that, it may actually be a little bit more accessible to us than all of the, you know, the floral or abstracted language that we use to talk about this thing, which is kind of our aliveness and it as it's felt and sensed.Laura: And I love that word that you used, aliveness. And it makes me think of how I think and how I conceptualise embodiment in some of the work that I do around feeding and working with, with children and families is, you know, I think of embodiment a lot about a baby or a toddler who is just so, you know, they're all feeling, they're all in their body. There's no kind of like, they haven't quite internalised messages around shame and, you know, these social scripts that we pick up and, I think of animals as well as, you know, being really, embodied in a very positive way. Obviously, of course, we're all embodied, but you know, as you alluded to our experiences of embodiment can be, can lean more positively or more negatively depending on, again, some of the social scripts that we've been handed, the sociopolitical context that we find ourselves in, but I wondered if it would just, if it was helpful for some of the listeners to, to especially anyone who's parent or been around children or animals to, you know, connect with that idea that, you know, we're born embodied and, and, and we have this really strong sense of, of positive embodiment when, especially when we're little. And then, you know, Niva Piran's research tells us that as we get closer to, um, particularly for girls, as we get closer to puberty, and we start acting on the body instead of being in, you know, acting from the body, that, yeah, that's where the, those ruptures in our embodiment begin.Hillary: Mm-hmm.Laura: I wonder if you could speak to maybe some of the other ways our experiences of embodiment are shaped both at the individual level, but also from that broader sociopolitical context that we've touched on.Hillary: Well, I think that the most obvious things that we could look at have to do with our isms around power, how power is distributed. So, which bodies are considered desirable, which bodies are forgotten socially, and again, that might seem kind of abstract until, until all of a sudden you're in a wheelchair and you realise that city planning didn't necessarily think about all the ways that people who use mobility aids need to get into buildings.That there's something that's communicated there about which bodies and how bodies move through space that's not really considered by those who have the, the most social power. So we think about like ableism and racism and sizeism, sexism and you know, there's just so many isms that are proliferated in our culture that we don't really even think about, especially if we benefit from them in some way.So there's that quality of it. Of course, there's the way that media and parents and peers are vessels for those messages about what is desirable. That's considered the tripartite model. But looking at these three different streams of influence that disseminate messages about ideal bodies, about good bodies, about what is valuable culturally.And whenever I think about the tripartite model, the, you know what's interesting about it if you were to see it visually, is it places you right, the individual at the centre of these streams of information coming at you, there is these arrows of media. You know, parents or caregivers and peers, colleagues, right? Your friends, they're pointing at you, but you are also in one of those categories, likely, if not more, for another person. And so we are handed this information and then we are handing it to each other. Just based on the ways that we use greetings and how we comment on other people's appearance and what we say about their eating and um, their feeding of themselves and their movement, and the kinds of things that we, we praise and the kinds of things that we are silent about or criticise.So there is this really interesting soup that we're in. But if we follow those arrows back from us to where they come from, we see structures around, you know, hierarchies of body that were created many millennia ago based on who was able to leave or control the body the best. Who is seen as actually having the ability to conquer or subdue the body in terms of its animal nature, it's sensory qualities, it's sensuality. In some ways it's mystery. And all of it, it seems, stems back to that, could this one group of people conquer their body better than someone else, and then the assumption or the conferring of power based on that, right? That this is somehow superior.Laura: Yeah, I think a lot about it in terms of, you know, the, the cultures of domination that we live in. But I think the way that you're expanding it, there is almost, you know, the, the genesis of all of this was domination over one group's own bodies before then that ripple effect goes out to dominate other bodies and animals and the natural world.Hillary: Yes, and I would argue that that might even come from before, that the domination of the body of the earth, the sense that the earth is a body in its own way. That is in a way kind of our original mother as a species. And the earth's body needs to be objectified and conquered, which teaches us to objectify and conquer our own bodies, and then consequently punish the people who can't do that as being kind of unruly or somehow lacking status or privilege or power.Laura: Wow. Okay. I wasn't expecting to go there, but we did. Hillary in, your second book, The Wisdom of Your Body, you talk about the ways that we learn to view our bodies as an image. You know, we use the term body image all the time, which when you think about it, is fundamentally objectifying, right?Hillary: Mm-hmm.Laura: I'm wondering if you can share, you know, how this happens. How do we come to view our bodies as objects separate from, from us and, what does this do to our experience of embodiment?Hillary: It is something so funny to think about, hey, when we start actually looking at the language, like body image has been used as shorthand for how we relate to our bodies, but we are not just images. We are not just in relationship with our appearance and we have so much more dimensionality to us than than what is visible to us, visible about us on the outside and how we perceive and relate to that.So my relationship to that term has evolved since, really because of my own journey through eating disorder recovery and feeling like I wanted to leave behind the two-dimensional way of relating to my body as an image and move inside into a kind of interiority of the body. And what's fascinating about the research about that is that it seems that that actually kind of inoculates us against eating disorders.You might think that, you know, not working on eating disorders as an issue would be missing a major construct in a cornerstone of the work. But it seems that there is something about leaving ourselves and seeing ourselves just as an image that is, as a, a kind of pathology in a way, and that there is a, a wholeness that is lacking in our relationship and experience of ourselves unless we include.All of the other qualities, the felt senses, the interoception, really what it's like to live and be us from the inside out. So when I think about body image, I often very closely think about objectification and self-objectification and the way that we learn to see ourselves from the outside.Seeing ourselves through the gaze of the other, but also, I think you could argue, especially if you're familiar with Foucault's work, like looking at the body through the gaze of those who have the power and those who are most interested in subduing and controlling and disciplining the body. But we learn to take the position of those who have the most power, those who could hurt us, those who could approve of us or judge us. And we begin to see ourselves and police our through their eyes, and it is through assuming the position of this external gaze that we lose or leave behind some of that other more subtle, nuanced information that can only be felt and lived through us and consequently actually might serve to disrupt some of those systems of power.We could look at how convenient it is to assume that we are an image and then try to control that image when it causes us to forfeit the information that might say, no, I don't wanna participate in the system, or yes, I am hungry and I wanna eat that food even if it means that my body is not gonna appear the way that so and so expects it to. That the information on the inside is costly to stay connected to in a culture that is asking us to forfeit it, in order to belong in this kind of flattened, disembodied, two-dimensional version of, of being an image.So there is something that I think that's really important here about recognising, again, what you brought up earlier of power and social control, and the way that even receiving ourselves as simply an image is a byproduct of a social context in which we are rewarded for being less of a body because we are often then more compliant. Laura: Yeah, there's a lot to think about there. I think have to like process that a little bit after we finish our call. I suppose what was coming up for me there is, you know, in the age of hyper information and social media and you know, when, when we're so bombarded with our own image, images of other people, that are often presented in these really like one-dimensional ways.Hillary: Mm.Laura: You know, it's so much easier to self objectifyHillary: Yes.Laura: Than it is to be positively embodied or embodied in any sense, really. I'm just curious, you know, how when you're swimming upstream like this, you know, what do you find to be helpful? Because I think, you know, cognitively we can all understand, wow, that's really messed up when you put it in those terms. But again, embodying something different is so much harder. So, you know, where can we even begin with that, do you think?Hillary: Yeah. Well, my discipline will betray me when I say this because, or I should say I will betray my discipline in a way when I say this, but we, you know, we are constantly in development. The idea that development is only something that happens in these critical and sensitive periods of our life is actually just, it's not true scientifically. And I understand why we do it culturally to say, you know, here's where there is so much that is happening. We need to be protective of people who are vulnerable because their systems are, are changing so much and it's setting up so much of the rest of their lives. But we will be in development, we will be experiencing developmental transitions for the rest of our lives, including death.Death is a developmental transition. When we look at Niva Piran's Developmental Theory of Embodiment, there is so much that we can borrow at different phases of the lifespan. And why I think that's hopeful is because it gives us a guide to the places that we can, we can. Intersect with interventions and support and resources and where we can direct our attention to support ourselves, to continue to reclaim some of the aspects of being a body that have been left behind.So that includes looking at the social domain. What are the places where I can experience the freedom to be in my body and to be understood in the challenges of being a body in the social climate? And where do I experience having social power? Right? Who? Who are the people who understand my lived experience and can validate the lived reality of oppression and marginalisation or, you know, can affirm the goodness of my body, even if the larger social narrative and dominant culture is either silent or oppressive to what my experience of my body is like. So there's the social power aspect, there's the mental, mental freedom aspect. You know, negotiating with some of the, the constructs that we carry inside, being critical about the thinking that we have and the places that we learned that thinking, assessing social discourse.Um, you know, the irony with this is, I had an eating disorder therapist for quite some time who said women with eating disorders are philosopher queens. And there are, you know, I am sure lots of places where that does not apply. But in my experience, and I think what she was trying to say to me was not that there was an absence of thought, but that I was really up in my mind.And if we can be curious about what is going on up in our minds, and if we can harness the criticism that is often turned towards our bodies and actually redirect it to the place that it's due, which is these really harmful social constructs and experiences and distributions of power, then the mechanism of being thoughtful and thinking critically does not have to disappear. It can just get redirected to the place that it deserves to be redirected. We can learn to see the social landscape for the problems and the toxicity that it has and build something new instead of directing that energy towards our bodies, thinking our bodies were ever a problem.And then lastly, of course, the physical freedom piece. If we create experiences where we encounter being in a body and can notice that that is pleasurable and is good and we can work on building attunement towards ourselves, I think that that inoculates us against the pervasive image culture. These are all different ways that we bring our attention back into creating experiences both in ourselves and between us and others that make it hospitable to be in our bodies. And help us remember what we knew right from the beginning in our earliest phases of development, which is that our body is full of communication. Our body is us. Our body can be trusted, our body is wise. Our body knows the way. Our body deserves to be safe and is actually ultimately, I think, interested in creating safety for all of us.Laura: I love that. And again, so many threads that we could, we could pull on there, but I loved especially what you, what you were saying about, well, there were two, two pieces that, that really stood out for me. I think one of which was just this idea of where we are so quick to criticise and tear ourselves down. Yeah. How can we externalise that? How can we turn that towards these oppressive systems that exist outside of our bodies that are making us feel a particular way about our bodies? And then the second piece, you said so elegantly, but I kind of was coming back to this idea of community and finding safety in people who can, um, other people who share similar lived experiences to us, who can affirm our experiences, who can show solidarity with us, who can hold us and, and say, you know, there is nothing wrong with your body. There is nothing wrong with the way that you show up in the world. It's everything else outside of of us that's messed up. and yeah, just, just be in community with one, one another. Kind of almost going full circle back to what we talked about at the very beginning, sort of thinking about interdependence and, and how we all kind of fit together in the sort of wider human tapestry,Hillary: Yes. Yes, exactly.Laura: And I mentioned to you off mic, a lot of the people who listen to this podcast are parents or have children in their lives, and I know you're a parent yourself, and I wonder from your perspective, what do you think are the most important things that adults can do to support kids' sense of positive embodiment?You know, we've talked a lot about at the sort of collective level, and there's a lot that needs to change there, but I'm wondering if you have any nuggets for parents, you know, any considerations or anything that they can do to help their kids maintain a sense of being in their bodies, a sense of their bodies as their homes as this place of safety.Hillary: Well, there's a few things that come to mind, and I'm hoping that that means that even if all of them don't feel accessible, then hopefully one, one does for the parents out there. So I think a really important thing to do is to affirm how they are already listen. So when a kid says, “I'm hungry”, you can say, “Wow, you're really listening to your body. Thank you so much for telling me”. You know, that doesn't necessarily mean that we do whatever they want because we live in families and we have limitations, and we have schedules, and we have all sorts of things that we need to fit in and negotiate. But simply saying, “I'm so glad you're listening. Thank you for telling me”. I think what that does is it protects, protects the knowing even if we have to set a boundary and say, you know, “It's gonna be a little while until we can have a snack because we're actually driving, we don't have anything in the car right now. But you know you're hungry and you're doing such a good job. Listening to that and telling me”. What we don't want to have happen is to signal in any way to children that they have to disqualify their bodily knowing to stay in connection with us because that's often what happens in terms of an attachment framework, right? Children are so sensitive to what their caregivers need in order for them to be considered pleasing and when children perceive their caregiver as being disappointed or scared or ashamed or something because of the information they're giving them, they're gonna learn very, very quickly not to give them that information. And it's not a far jump from, I'm not gonna give that information, to I'm suppressing that information, to I don't notice it at all.So simply being able to say to your children, “You do know you're tired. I believe you, that you're hungry. I am so glad you're listening. Ooh. What does it feel like in your tummy when you're hungry? How do you know? What is it like? Is it like a growling?” You know? Right. Even just being in the experience of it with them to thicken their awareness of it is a great way to preserve that and let them know that them paying attention to their bodies will not cut them off from connection to you.Laura: So the other day, so we send Avery, my almost three year old, with a packed lunch to his daycare setting. And the other day he came home and he said to us, “I ate one carrot”. And he was like, so proud of eating this carrot. And of course, I never praise based on, you know, what he has or hasn't eaten and I'm, you know, maintain this very food neutral approach. So I was really surprised by this and I did a little bit of interrogating it and, you know, I've actually had to go and speak to daycare because they are, you know, pressuring him to eat. Which really crosses so many boundaries for me in terms of not respecting his autonomy. Not respecting his voice, you know, he had said no and he was told, well, you just have to eat one carrot. And then obviously this was reinforced with praise before he came home and said, “I ate one carrot”, you know, I had to sit with why this really played on my mind. And it's, you know, for the reasons that you're describing that overriding someone's no, overriding their body autonomy can become a sort of slippery slope to them. You know, not, not being able to recognise their own needs and suppressing their needs and or performing, you know, for adult's praise or adult's validation, and that's so much bigger than respecting their hunger and fullness cues. That's just one tiny part of this work, I think. So yeah, that was just an example that came to mind.Hillary: Thank you so much for sharing that because I think it, you know, where it takes me is into the complexity that parents often bring to the conversation of, you know, there are times I have to override their cues. Like they're saying, no, I don't wanna have my diaper changed and they've got a poopy diaper. You're like, this would actually be negligent if I didn't, like you actually can't make that call right now, but how important it is to say, you know, “I really hear your no, I really hear that you don't want me to change your diaper. I'm so glad you're telling me there's something about that that doesn't feel good for you. You can always, always tell me, and I'm always going to listen to you. And there are some situations where even if something is uncomfortable or hard for you, I have to help you do it because it is for your safety, because it cares for your body, and I want for you to know that even though I'm gonna be caring for your body in this way, I still believe that you don't want me to, and I'm hearing you, and I'm so glad you're telling me”.Because I think what often happens is if we have to, we are in those situations where we do have to override the no that the parenting kind of reaction that we might naturally wanna have is, I'm gonna shut down your, no, then I'm gonna tell you, you shouldn't say no because it's actually kind of uncomfortable for me as a parent to say to you. Yes, you're allowed to disagree with me, but I'm still gonna do what I'm doing. Right? That's a complicated thing to feel and we can feel like it would just be easier for them to not say anything because it's too uncomfortable for us. So being able to say, you can keep telling me no. You can tell me just how much you don't like it. I believe you. I believe you. Tell me what it is as I'm changing your diaper. What is it about it that you really don't like? Like keeping them connected to themselves and keeping them connected to you while you're also prioritising their health and safety? I think it is possible to do it all.Laura: Yeah, no, and thank you for adding that nuance of, you know, there are times where, especially around care tasks, where we can validate what they're expressing about how strongly they don't want to do something and how that feels really uncomfortable or really annoying or, you know, just not what they want to be doing in that moment.And we have to hold a boundary because it's really important for hygiene or, you know, for their safety or, or whatever it is. And so there's definitely that, that piece of it. And you know, something that I've been thinking about with, with Avery, is, you know, in terms of his body boundaries and helping him assert that.Well, there's two things actually. We're practicing saying things like, “I'm the boss of my body”, which I know is gonna backfire at some point when he, you know, when it comes to washing his hair or getting in the bath or something like that. But yeah, just reminding him that, you know, he is in charge of what crosses that body boundary.And another thing that I've come across lately, I don't know if you've discovered this song yet, but it's called The Boundary Song.Hillary: Ooh, I haven't, I'm gonna have to look it up.Laura: Yeah, it's, um, it's called the Boundary Song. I'll link to it. I think it's Hopscotch is like the YouTube video, but it's basically the words, the lyrics are basically, please stop. I don't like that. I'm feeling uncomfortable. I need more space. And then itHillary: Uh, Yeah.Laura: Not around me. Don't take it personally. It's just a boundary. That's a boundary. And my, not even three year old has like memorised this song and, you know, we're trying to practice like different context in which you might say something like that. And again, it could all go horribly wrong and backfire, but, you know, I think what I'm connecting this back to is just, you know, giving them the tools to express their voice to help solidify their body autonomy, to solidify their body boundaries.And, that feels like a really salient piece around maintaining that positive experience of embodiment that connection to their bodies. Not letting their body boundaries be violated, you know, with the caveat that sometimes we have to do that in a caring way, for hygiene and whatever else.So anyway, I went off on a bit of a monologue there. I'm not really sure what my point was, do you wanna bring it back, Hillary?Hillary: I love the place that we're in, in the conversation, which is looking at both how we protect in a few different ways, right? Because there is a way of protecting that is ‘I'm gonna honour your boundary because you said no, I'm gonna stop'. And there's also a kind of protecting, which, you know, like you said, around care practices and just the nuance and complexity of that, and I think it's important that we're making a space where we can talk about how those fit intentionally with each other, what they bring up in us as adults. And also then subsequently what we weren't given as kids.Because many of the times when these things are hard for us as parents, it's because they're new, because we're having to chart a new path and there is something kind of prophetic and transformational in being in the space that's uncomfortable and foreign. So I'm just appreciating, holding the complexity here.I think the last thing that I'll wanna say around embodiment in children is around creating experiences for free play, for being silly, for jumping, for, you know, unrestricted movement, for experiencing sensation and wide ranges of sensation like the, the developmental literature says that the more we encounter in a sensory capacity, the more ways that we learn to have mastery and agency in our bodies, the more autonomy, the more fullness, the more goodness we encounter in our bodies.So a wide range of activities, movement, spaces getting dirty, getting loud, being silly, playing, coordinated movements, right? Even being able to master a task because we practice something over and over and over again and get good at it, but not at the exclusion of free and unrestricted play, like just as many body experiences we can have.I think that that, you know, that's something that serves us well in our lives and so maybe that's a good piece of advice for parents who are really committed to having their kids be in figure skating and they do a lot of figure skating and over and over and over and over again. Like yes, there might be a sense of, um, mastery. But what about the spaces where there is novel movement or what about the spaces where there is unrestricted kind of free unobserved movement? Or maybe for parents who are really good at letting their kids be wild and free and unrestricted, where are the spaces where kids are learning a task and can feel competence in and through their bodies.And so just thinking about the spectrum and trying to create range, I think that that's, that's really important. It takes a little bit of thought on our part, but I think it goes a really long way.Laura: Yeah. I really appreciate that addition. And yeah, I've been thinking about these kids that I see around, they're always with their dad. I think it's their dad, at least I hope it's their dad. And they must be about, I don't know, like 9 and maybe 11, somewhere around there. And I fondly referred to dad as aggressive sports dad,Hillary: Oh, okay. Yes. I know the type. Okay.Laura: He's like, I see them like at the pool. I see them at the tennis court. I see them at the park. And the dad is like super militantly, like focused on like teaching them skills around sports, like, he's clearly really, really passionate about sports, but you can just see the kids like kind of, uh,Hillary: Mm-hmm.Laura: At how restrained and controlled and, um, kind of like meticulous they're being asked to be. And obviously I'm kind of projecting here like, you know, or using conjecture to make assumptions here, but it does feel like they just wanna run around and climb a tree or like jump.Hillary: Yes. Right, right.Laura: But yeah, we all know an aggressive sports dad. But Hillary, I'm really conscious of your time and I just have a couple quick questions I wanna ask you to wrap up. So the first is, I would love it if you could share a practice with us that you personally like or that you found in your work as a therapist that helps people with that sense of embodiment, with that sense of my body as my home.Hillary: Yeah, Yeah. Two really, really quickly. Uh, one, putting my hands on my body and talking to myself, greeting myself in the morning, in the evening, saying I'm so glad to be with you. I wanna care for you. Can you keep talking to me? Right. Whatever it is that we wanna say to build relationship with our bodily selves, like honouring my body as a subject, not just an object. And then the other one is dancing. I just love having music on and moving my body in a way that really helps me discharge excess energy or stress from the day. For anyone who's familiar with trauma work, we know that moving, shaking, activation in our major muscle groups, like that's actually a way to release energy that is lingering from stressful or demanding events.So there's that side of it, but then there's also the freedom and the pleasure and the sense of enjoyment and you know, how it invites me into self-expression and connection and a sense of yeah, just enjoying being a body. So touching my own body and talking to myself and dancing.Laura: Oh, I love both of those things, and they're definitely things that I try and, yeah, check in with as well. My last sort of serious interview question for you is who or what is nourishing you right now?Hillary: Mm. You know, just this week I had some really, really important conversations with my partner and he really listened to me and really tended to me, and there was something about feeling unshakable support and emotional attunement that felt nourishing to me on such a soul level, that I have to think of the relational. Again, that's my new kind of my therapist disposition and my discipline there. But I feel so nourished by deep and rich, attuned connection. It helps me feel seen and known and loved and safe and, um, nourished.Laura: I really love that. That's so special. I'm so glad that you have that.Hillary: Thank you. Me too.Laura: Okay, so just a fun question to wrap up. So, at the end of every episode, my guest and I share something that they're snacking on. So it can be a literal snack, it can be a podcast, a movie, a show, whatever you're into at the moment. Is there something fun you'd like to share with us?Hillary: Ugh. You know what? I'm having a real cake moment in my life right now. I think. I don't know what it is. Yes, I know.Laura: I thought For a second you were using cake as a euphemism, and I was a bit confused, but then I realised you meant actual cake. Okay.Hillary: Cake. Actual cake. I just had so many years where I really missed out and so we've been making up excuses for reasons to get a cake. So, um, you know, we're just having a lot of cake around here and I love it so much.I'm like having breakfast cake and after dinner cake and sometimes cake with lunch and just really, really enjoying all sorts of different kinds and qualities, and no grocery store cheap cake is beneath me, but I'm also, I like some of the fancy ones, so I'm just trying, trying cake.Laura: Oh, I love it. Breakfast cake.Hillary: Yes,Laura: Genius. That's a stroke of genius. Uh, real quick, I'll share mine. So I think yeah, this is really connected to what we have been talking about today, which is that I've recently taken Avery to toddler dance class, like a toddler ballet class, and I am super conscious of how toxic dance spaces can be in general, but this is a very cute, very safe space where they can just move their bodies in whatever way they like. And you know, I've taken him to a few different sort of dance space classes and things like that, and he really hasn't connected to it. But this class in particular, he was just kind of in his element, twirling and jumping and leaping. And he, you know, he asked if he could put on like the tutu skirt and he was just having the best time. So, um, super special to see that.Hillary: Yes, it sounds like it. Wow. Thank you for sharing that. That just brought me so much joy knowing about that and picturing him there.Laura: it's very, very, sweet. Hillary, could you please share with everyone how they can find out more about you and your work and where they can find you?Hillary: Yeah. You can find me online at hillarylmcbride.com,, on social media, Hillary Lianna McBride on Instagram or Hillary L McBride on Twitter, or maybe it's the other way around, I can never remember. Have a look at those names. Some combination of those names will get you somewhere to me and my work.And, then I've got books, wherever books are sold and podcasts, you can always search my name in the search tool in wherever you listen to podcasts. And both the podcasts that I have produced and the ones I've been on will show up.Laura: And we will link to all your social media and where to find your books and your podcast in the show notes so that, yeah, there won't be any confusion over where to find you.Hillary: Thank you.Laura: Hillary, it was so great to talk to you. I love your book, The Wisdom of Your Body. And I really recommend it to all my clients that I'm working with. So thank you so much for spending some time with us today.Hillary: It was my pleasure. I loved every minute of our conversation.OUTROLaura Thomas: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Can I Have Another Snack? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review in your podcast player and head over to laurathomas.substack.com for the full transcript of this conversation, plus links we discussed in the episode and how you can find out more about this week's guest. While you're over there, consider signing up for either a free or paid subscription Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter, where I'm exploring topics around bodies, identity and appetite, especially as it relates to parenting. Also, it's totally cool if you're not a parent, you're welcome too. We're building a really awesome community of cool, creative and smart people who are committed to ending the tyranny of body shame and intergenerational transmission of disordered eating. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. And lastly Fiona Bray keeps me on track and makes sure this episode gets out every week. This episode wouldn't be possible without your support. So thank you for being here and valuing my work and I'll catch you next week. This is a public episode. 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Hey team! Welcome to episode three of the CIHAS pod, season 2. This week, I'm joined by Dr. Emma Svanberg - clinical psychologist, speaker and campaigner with expertise in attachment and perinatal psychology - AKA Mumologist on IG. In this episode, we focus on some of the stories that we bring to parenting, and the socially constructed ideas we have about parenting. We talk about how sometimes looking for all the advice and answers actually takes us farther away from what we're looking for, and I ask Emma why she thinks we're so drawn to advice from so-called parenting experts. Finally, we talk about how we can sift through all the noise of parenting advice, and find what's best for us and for our kids and learn to leave the rest. Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Find out more about Emma's here.Follow her work on Instagram here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Sign up to the Raising Embodied Eaters workshop here.Subscribe to my newsletter here.Here's the transcript in full:Emma: If we are stuck on that idea that this is, you know, the kinda cognitive, that intellectual idea that this is what should happen, it becomes so hard to see our child's experience of what it is that we're trying to do. So again, you know, being able to base those things on the relationship. You know what, what did it feel like when I have prepared this food for my child and they have refused it, or actually they're disgusted by it? How does that make me feel? what does that touch on for me as a parent? And often there are such complex issues with that.INTROLaura: Hey, and welcome to another episode of Can I Have Another Snack podcast, where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now, and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti diet registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to Dr. Emma Svanberg. You may know her better as Mumologist on Instagram. Emma is a clinical psychologist, speaker and campaigner with expertise in attachment and perinatal psychology. She's co-founder of Make Birth Better and founded the Psychology Collective in 2019, which is a team of practitioners offering psychological support and guidance for the whole family.Today we are gonna be talking about Emma's new book, Parenting for Humans, which is out next month and is available to pre-order now. Now, before you get totally freaked out, this book isn't a book that tells you how to be a better parent or to set up new standards or expectations for how you should parent. Rather, the point of the book is to understand how you were parented and all the experiences that you bring to your parenting with the hope of getting to know yourself better and therefore understand what you are bringing to your relationship with your kid. So Emma and I discuss what some of the stories are that we bring to parenting about what we've learned, about what a parent should be from our own experiences, but also what are socially constructed ideas about parenting.We talk about how sometimes looking for all the advice and answers actually takes us further away from what we're looking for. And I ask Emma why she thinks we're so drawn to advice from so-called parenting experts. Finally, we talk about how we can sift through all the noise of parenting advice and find what's best for us and our kids, and learn to just leave the rest.So we'll get to Emma in just a minute, but first I wanted to remind you that my Raising Embodied Eaters workshop is on Tuesday, the 21st of February. Don't worry, it's not going to be me giving you a bunch of useless tips and tricks, but we will explore your relationship with food and think about how you can support your kids to have a positive relationship with food and their body. I will also give you some practical tools, but my intention is to help you take the pressure off of feeding your kids and help you create a home that supports a healthy relationship to food and bodies. I've linked to the full description in the show notes, so you can check it out. It's 15 pounds. It will be, um, all on Zoom, and I'll have the recording available for a week afterwards that you can watch on catch up if you like. Plus you'll also get a copy of my Raising Embodied Eaters Guide to share with friends, family, childcare, and schools. So click the link in the show notes and you'll get the full details of what we're gonna talk about in that workshop. And lastly, before we get to Emma, just a quick reminder that Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader supported publication. I'd love to bring you more deeply researched pieces, but it requires a significant investment in my time, plus the support of an editor and behind the scenes. Admin support. So if you are in a position to become a paid subscriber, then please consider it. It's five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year. It works out at something like 50 p an article. And if that's not accessible for you right now, you can email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk, putting the word ‘snacks' in the subject line, and we'll hook you up with a comp subscription, no questions asked. You don't have to explain yourself. I trust that if you are able to afford a subscription right now, you will, and if not, then just get in touch. All right, team. Here's my conversation with Dr. Emma Svanberg.MAIN EPISODELaura: All right, Emma, I'd love it if you could start by letting us know who or what you are nourishing right now.Emma: Well, at the moment I am just in the process of nourishing the, I suppose, the next few weeks that are coming up for me, which are all about my new book, that is coming out in March called Parenting for Humans, which is a funny process, right? Because you sort of just dated over a long period of time. And then, uh, you know, as you know yourself, as we get closer to launch date, there are lots of different kinda angles to think about. So at the moment I'm both nourishing trying to, uh, talk about my book, trying to really kind of get to grips with understanding how it's going to resonate with people. I think that's the kinda key thing for me thinking about the ideas that I really want to kind of get out there into the world while at the same time still nourishing myself and my family as best I can.Laura: Yeah. I mean, I remember when I published my first book, I didn't have that same, I didn't have any responsibilities to anyone else except myself. and then when the second book came along, I had a six month old at that point, and it was just a completely different experience and it was such a fine balance to kind of, you know, preserve myself in amongst the chaos of book publishing. So I hope that you're managing to, to find pockets and moments to relax and decompress and, and yeah, tend to yourself because it can be a lot. I don't think people realize that writing the book, editing, fact checking, copy editing, all of the, that whole lengthy, lengthy process is like 50% publishing a book. Maybe? Like there's all of the publicity and everything surrounding that is like, is a huge piece of it.Emma: Yeah, absolutely. I think that what makes it easier is that I'm really excited about this book. I mean, I've also written a previous book that was a very niche specialist book about birth trauma and was also very excited about that one of course, but this book kind of really brings in all of the therapeutic ideas that I've worked with with clients and have done so for many years. So in some ways I think that, you know, in itself, kinda talking about the ideas of the book, um, is something that I'm really enjoying doing and kind trying to figure out, you know, which has always been something that's been really important to me, how do we turn what can feel like really inaccessible, complex psychological concepts into ideas that will make sense to people so that they can very quickly then apply them to their own lives.Laura: So, and you've kind of, you've kind of touched on it a little bit in terms of kind of the, um, maybe more how the book functions, but can you tell us a little bit more about what you are covering in the book, what is the message you're trying to get across?Emma: Um, I think that it started off, the idea came from my experience of working with parents. Um, you know I kind of qualified back in 2009, I qualified but, and the experience that I see parents having over that time has changed so much. So back when I first qualified my role was very much about helping parents, most usually mothers within the NHS and I was seeing people to, you know, kinda really value their role and think about kinda getting support in place, you know, very kinda clear difficulties around, for example, birth trauma or anxiety about bonding with a baby or postnatal depression would be a very common, um, difficulty that I'd see. What's shifted in that time is that there is a whole added layer that has been added on top of that for parents, which is around pressure to do things a certain way, to be a certain way. To parent in a particular way, and that is pressure that is felt by parents, but it's also pressure that then is experienced by children. And what we have then seen kind of come up in, particularly in the last five years or so, is so much advice, so much information about how you can tackle that. You know, try doing it like this. This is a really useful strategy that you could have. These are some really useful words that you can say to your child, but what I then see is parents who've tried that, it's not working for a reason, and then they end up feeling like there's something really wrong with me. I'm a terrible parent, or I'm not doing this well enough, or there's something wrong with my child. My child is broken. Because all of these beautiful strategies are not working. Where we-Laura: I never, sorry. Just that, just like really, that really resonated with, not resonated, but it, it kind of, it struck a nerve that I've thought a lot about how pressure, and I think about this a lot as, as a professional who kind of gives advice and, and shares some of the, the things that you talk about in the book, you know, strategies and advice.Um, I try and be really deliberate and thoughtful and intentional about that. Whether or not that lands is another is, is another thing, but, so I, I think through, you know, at being a parent, think through how that, how much pressure and how much pressure there is on parents in general, how that contributes to anxiety, to guilt, to shame, to all of these things.But I hadn't actually thought about how, what the implication is for our children as well and how they experience that as pressure themselves and how they are embodying some of these ideals and ideas and, and fantasies around, what it means a per, to show up as a parent in a, a person in the world and what that will mean for them as they, as they grow up.So, yeah. Sorry, that just , sorry to interrupt you there, but that just kind of really struck me, what you were saying.Emma: It's so often it's about the dynamic, right? We focus our attentions as professionals onto the parents rather than or onto the child. But actually, I think kinda a really core part of the message of the book is that it's about your dynamic as a family and the relationship that exists between all of the different members of the family.So, you know, you, you as a mother might go off and do loads of reading, loads of research, gather loads of information, try particular strategies, but if they don't click for your child or for your family with your partner or for the context in which you're living in, actually, you can end up feeling like I'm not applying this in the correct way, rather than, actually, maybe that strategy wasn't correct for me and my family and the situation that we're in.Laura: Mm-hmm.Emma: I think for me a lot of that work, cause I, I'm an adult psychologist, I focus on work with kinda adult mental health. You know, for me a lot of that is about us as parents understanding where we're coming from. You know what's important to us, what history we're bringing into our parenting relationship.Once we understand ourselves, it becomes so much easier to understand what will work for our child or for our family, and it also really allows us to see them as the people that they are. That's why it's called Parenting For Humans, right? Cause it's about, you know, how do we parent as the whole humans that we are, not just how we show up as mum or dad, but also then parenting our children for the whole humans that they are, which is, you know, flaws and all. Aside from those kind of idealized stories that we read about or hear about that, you know, kinda describe family life as only fitting a very particular model.Laura: Absolutely. Yeah, you, that's one of the, the main themes that you, you talk about at the beginning of the book, this idea that we hold onto stories about what being a parent means, what it looks like, how we should be as parents, what we should value, and so on, and I'm wondering if you could just say a little more about this idea of stories and the impact that holding so tightly to these fantasies can have on us, on our family life, on those dynamics that you mentioned.Emma: Yeah, absolutely. I think, uh, you know, the book is based on this idea of a map that we kinda bring stories onto a map that we don't even know necessarily, that we have. Now might be stories from our own babyhood and childhood and stories from adulthood, stories from society, but also the stories that we've kinda internalized from previous generations, from the cultures that we live in.So, so many stories that we hold unconsciously, the tricky thing for us as adults is that we often don't even know that we're holding those stories until we come up against something that proves them wrong. And there are so many of them in parenthood, right? Like there's the kinda really basic ones like, I dunno, for example, maybe I hold a story that I should be able to put a baby in a blanket, pop it in a cot and it's going to go to sleep and that's just what babies do. That is a story that is so prevalent in our society.You know, think about what you see on tv, what you see in images. You know, those kinda photos that you see of beautiful babies with, you know, angelic faces, fast asleep. And actually then when you experience an actual baby and babies are full of more emotion, that can just change at any moment, you don't always know what that is, because you have that story or maybe you hold that unconscious story that when I put that baby in a blanket and I put it in a crib, it's gonna go to sleep. We're then coming up against that obstacle straightaway when that doesn't work. Cause we internalize that almost like a should, like this is what should happen. And when it doesn't happen, it can often take us quite a while to then think, well maybe that's because that story actually doesn't apply to me, my child, our situation. We then think I'm doing something wrong. Maybe I need a different blanket, maybe I need a different crib, maybe the room temperature's wrong. Maybe my baby has a sleep problem. You know? So we go down that road rather than go that level down and think, what is the story that I've kind internalized here? Is that a story that actually fits for me and for my baby or for my family?Laura: Yeah. I like that idea of kind of peeling back the layers. Like of, okay, this is what I'm told is, you know, could be wrong. Here are all the, you know, as you were listing all those solutions there, I was like, oh my God, there's so many things that we're told that we should do, so many variables that we should, you know, be well, first of all, aware of, and secondly, be able to manipulate. Um, when actually when we strip that away, asking ourselves, does this advice, does this information that I'm sifting through actually apply to me? And, and what is that background story that I've kind of hung, you know, I'm hanging my ideas about my child on, um, and, and, you know, do they actually hold up to scrutiny when we, when we look at them more closely?Emma: Absolutely. And it's, you know, we have to bring them into consciousness before we can hold them up to scrutiny. And that's the bit that often we don't do. Cause we just have so many of these stories. We have so many of these ideas that, you know, just because they're around us all the time, we don't question them.And then as soon as you start questioning them, what often happens is that people have, you know, multiple light bulb moments, right on that journey of parenthood where you suddenly go, oh, why am I doing that actually? Cause that doesn't really work.Laura: I know exactly what you're talking about with those light bulb moments, and I, I remember having one, maybe even, I don't know, as recently as like six or or nine months ago when kind of just, we just got out of, you know, the really, really intense baby phase. It's still pretty intense. But, looking back and, and like thinking about how many of these, you know, like how many stories I suppose I had collected from, you know, parenting books or podcasts or social media accounts or whatever it was.And then having to like really have a talk with myself about like, this is not, this does not apply to me like this , I don't need any of this. This is making things more difficult, more stressful, more pressured for me. And actually, what I noticed was that it was really undermining my own instincts about how I wanted to parent and, and kind of making me second guess myself a lot.Um, and, and as soon as I kind of got to that, it like made things so much simpler. I was like, okay, but is this, does this, you know, now I can look at something and say, okay, but does this actually align with my values? Is this actually helpful to me?Emma: Absolutely. And does it fit?Laura: Does it fit my child? You know, or is it actually gonna cause us more tension or friction or, or whatever it might be.Um, so yeah, I really resonate with that idea of having, being like a sort of light bulb moment and being like, this is trash. We don't need this . Um, and what, what's actually important and valuable for me? There was a part in the book again that really resonated with me, and I think it kind of relates to, um, to what, what we're talking about here. So I have your book and I've, I've highlighted a little section here and I wondered if it'd be okay if I, if I read it back.Emma: Oh, I'd love that. I haven't heard it out loud. So yes,Laura: Have you, you haven't recorded the audio book then yet?Emma: That's coming.Laura: You have that fun to come. So you, you've written, "because when we find ourselves looking for the answers that will make it all easier we can lose sight of the child right in front of us. We have this idea that if we just find the right strategy, the right label, the right technique, the right line to say, perhaps even the right diagnosis, then everything would be okay. Then we'll have cracked it, whatever it is, sleeping, feeding, eating five portions of fruit and veg, good behavior, a healthy relationship. We keep chasing that magic solution and we never stop and look at what is going on right now in ourselves, in our children, and in our families." And yeah, this is such a fine line that I straddle as a practitioner, someone who works with parents and families, how can I be supportive without making it seem like if you just follow my five point plan or my formula , that um, you know, everything will, you know, will solve all, all your problems.I wonder if you could speak to, you know, why we are so drawn to looking to experts to help us figure out how to parent rather than looking at our own child.Emma: I think that there's, well, there's two parts to it, right. There's kinda the context in which we live. So historically we would've lived closer to our families. We would've been part of communities, you know, even when I was a child, absolutely, there was much more a sense of kinda community there, other neighbors around, or more experienced parents who you might come to a particular guidance.So a lot of that has gone, you know, people are parenting much more in isolation. Um, and also in this country, that kind early intervention, preventative care that used to be very much part of the early parenting experience where you'd have a midwife that you knew well, you'd a health visitor that you knew well.There were community nurses that were around, had school nurses, so you know, all of those professionals that you had easy access to have virtually disappeared in the last kind of 15 years. So that has made a huge difference to people's ability to access information. The research shows that people still do turn to their family and friends, first and foremost, for information above experts.I think then when you have maybe particular issues that you are struggling with, where you might want to speak to a professional like you, if you can't access that for whatever reason, then of course there is this, you know, absolute wealth of information that is now available to you on the internet. So I think that there's just a kind practical reality to how differently we live and how that has meant that lots of people have less access to professional expertise then maybe they would have done in the past.There's also, I think, because there's so much more information out there that is accessible on the internet, for example, um, people tend to feel a bit bombarded. So there can be a pressure to feel like you have to choose a particular camp, you know, I follow the expertise of experts who follow like this line of thinking, for example.And then, you know, you can absolutely go down a rabbit hole finding out so much information about this one particular thing. But if that is a, an idea or um, a set of strategies that doesn't really fit your family, it can feel really hard to then pull yourself out that and shift to different, different model, you know, these things are presented to us as different models or strategies rather than flexible ideas that we might be able to apply in flexible ways. And then I also think the kind of other side of it is, I mean, we know this in a wider sense, that we do live in a society that rises perfection. And often when we come to have children, we might have already felt great sense of achievement and success in other areas of our life.And there can be a sense for lots of parents that they're gonna take same set of principles that I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do this well, and by doing it well I have to follow these particular guidelines. If I do these things, and that means that I'm a good parent, and it's almost like we apply that same sense of achievement, productivity, purpose to the act of parenting.What's difficult, of course, is that they children and ourselves change on a daily basis, you know when they're really little they change almost on an hourly basis, so, when we can feel like we're picking that box, we feel like we've got a strategy or a plan that works, if our child changes or our circumstances change, or we change, you know, and, and actually, you know, again, that kinda idea of flexibility can feel quite hard to hold onto. Think it's a combination of lots of different things and, and then of course, you know, supply and demand. The more that we look for expertise, the more experts will share their knowledge with us.Laura: Mm-hmm.Emma: You know it's so easy to be able to go and find a piece of information that we're looking for. And there can be tremendous benefits to that. And again, the research shows that there is a benefit to that. The cost is for people who have that sense of socially oriented perfectionism, where there might be a sense of shame or judgment, when they don't feel like they're meeting this particular ideal, for example, that might be held up to them by the different things that they're kinda reading or hearing.So again, I think, yeah, lots of different reasons. Some, some of them have kinda huge benefits to us in kinda what we have access to, but that also has to be held in mind with what it's costing us in terms of the pressure that we put on ourselves as parents. But also, like we said before, the pressure that then puts on us as a family, in the relationships within the family if not everybody's on board with that way of doing things. So it's important to kind of hold that in mind too. And sometimes, you know, you can take the bits that you need from experts, but essentially what it comes down to is how am I gonna apply this to my situation or our situation? That can be really hard to do.Laura: Mm-hmm. And, and I want to, to talk to you in a second, just a little bit about how we can sort of sift through the noise and, and figure out what, what is valuable and helpful for us. Because as you say, there are things that you know, might, might make a difference and, and might be really important, um, you know, might be great, helpful information for us. But  really appreciated you naming in the book and, and you've said it again here, just sort of this, what I would conceptualize probably as sort of internalized capitalism. This idea to constantly be producing, to be achieving, to be succeeding. And, and as you pointed out in the book, you know, that's how we are, um, schooled. That's, you know, if we go onto further education, that's how we approach our employment. But do we ever take a step back and, and think about why am a, applying the same tools to my parenting and, and my relationships with other human beings as I am to, you know, a, a achieving, um, you know, a certificate or a degree or whatever, whatever it might be. And I just think that, yeah, capitalism has so much to answer for here, both in terms of that and, and how we just approach our parenting. But also going back to what you were saying before about how we used to be so much more in community and around, you know, we would turn to like our parents or maybe like our older siblings or neighbors or cousins or, or whatever it was that were, you know, in proximity to us. And now it's so much easier to just look at, at, at somebody on our phone than it is to like reach out and have a meaningful conversation with someone. And that's because we're, you know, capitalism thrives right, by keeping us isolated, keeping us away from each other, um, when we are, we are so interdependent especially when it comes to, to parenting. And I think about this a lot in terms of how much easier it would be to feed kids if we were more in community. You know, if your neighbors were like taking round a lasagna cuz like you've had this reciprocal thing where like, you know, you each double batch cooked something and then swapped every week so that you ha-, you know, that you were caring for each other in that way and sharing the load and sharing the burden.And also when we're in community, we can see that, yeah. Oh, look, that toddler also doesn't eat vegetables. Cool. All right. it's a toddler thing. Whereas when we, when we look, log into social media, all we hear is like, oh, let's, you know, try and program our children to love broccoli more than they love cake or you know, whatever, whatever it is. So I'm on my high horse now, Emma, but-Emma: So go for it. Go for it. Love it.Laura: I just, I guess kind of thinking, thinking a little bit more specifically about feeding, um, and like the relationship that our children have, um, with food, which I think is so often, well it's a reflection of our own relationship with our food and we with food and our bodies and we, if we have unresolved things there, then that can, can kind of have a cascade effect.But also, you know, I see a lot of generic feeding advice that gets thrown around without nuance or caveats or, or just even the disclaimer of like, it, you don't have to do this if it doesn't work for you and your family. I think, I feel like if people said that more often, that would be really helpful.But this advice ends up adding more pressure to the feeding relationship, which can be counterproductive for feeding, and perpetuates this narrative about a correct or a best way to feed a child. And I mean, we could extrapolate this to almost any element of parenting. It's just I'm interested in feeding.Can we talk about how we can find a way to like sift through the noise and tune into what works for you and your family?Emma: Um, I obviously would say yes, And one of the things that I talk about in the book is kinda, uh, general parenting tools rather than kinda overarching strategies that there are, you know, few key things if you can hold them in mind, then you can apply different advice to your child and your family situation.And for me, one of the most important ones of them is around collaboration. And I think that, you know, what we were talking about before when you were talking about capitalism and that kinda sense of productivity and purpose, how that applies to feeding, and you know, in the home, how we bring our own histories into that too. I think so often when we're, whether we're talking about feeding, whether we're talking about anything else to do with family life, we come to it in a very intellectual way, we're talking about I'm going to apply this principle or I'm going to do it this way, and that's just going to work.What I focus on a lot in the book is that how do we go down into thinking about this as a relationship, which I know you talk about, you know, feeding is a relationship, that we bring our own relationship with food into that, but also our child will have their own experience with food. When we come at things from a cognitive way, you know, we're thinking about this is what I'm gonna apply to this situation and we're not thinking so much about how it's going to land with that other person. Or what they're bringing to that situation.Laura: Mm.Emma: So let's say you followed some beautiful advice that you've seen on social media around talking broccoli, that we're going to feed children broccoli.If we are stuck on that idea that this is, you know, the kinda cognitive, that intellectual idea that this is what should happen, it becomes so hard to see our child's experience of what it's we're trying to do. So again, you know, being able to base those things on the relationship. You know what, what did it feel like when I have prepared this food for my child and they have refused it, or actually they're disgusted by it?How does that make me feel, what does that touch on for me as a parent? And often there are such complex issues with that. Right? In the book, I kinda start off by thinking about us as, as whole human beings and what we're bringing. And then, you know, it's only when we understand ourselves that we can really think about how can we then relate to our children.So with food for example, you know, so much gets brought up for us as parents, where our children, we feel rejected. We feel like we're not doing, you know, good job, I can't even feed my child. It's one of those basic tasks like how can this be so hard? You know, that basic thing that everyone else seems to be doing ok. I must be doing something wrong. So what touches on for you, you know, those feelings of, let's say rejection or, or you know, conversely, maybe it's fury, you know how, how dare they reject this? I've worked so hard, so we're thinking about our own histories.And once we can think about what does that touch on for us, we can then think about, what do we want to shift so that our experience, our emotions aren't getting in the way of what we're trying to do with our child, which is very much a relational process.Once we understand that and we can think about what we're bringing, then we can think about what are those pieces of information advice that do fit? Where are those things actually that I feel like are still niggling, like actually this makes me so angry, so that maybe I wanna go think about that somewhere outside of this situation or circumstances. And it's only really then once we understand all of that, that we can then think about how does that child actually feel about broccoli? You know, do they actually like broccoli?If they don't, what am I gonna do about that? Am I gonna persevere? Is that worth it for me? Do I have the resources? Maybe it's okay for them not to eat broccoli for a little while, while I just get over all emotions that this broccoli has brought in. You know, it seems so simple these are the things that come up for us as parents, you know, multiple, multiple times a day when these particular situations or events can touch something that can feel so fundamental, so emotional, so raw. What we tend to then do is that we bring in more information, more kinda cognitive information so that we try a different strategy rather than than pause at that point and think, why is it that this is bringing up something that feels so powerful for me that is getting in the way of what I want to happen between me and my child?Does that make sense?Laura: Yeah. Absolutely. And, and I think like, just to maybe put it in slightly more, concrete context, at least this is something I've been thinking a lot about recently when I see a lot of advice about feeding our children. It's, you know, there's like, let's take for example, this idea that you shouldn't offer alternatives, right? If the child doesn't like, you know, doesn't eat what's on the table. By, you know, there's this, there's this school of thought by of, of like, well, if you offer alternatives, then your child is manipulating you and you know, you're getting into this battle of wills with your child and you know, setting aside what's going on with the child's psychology there, you're already setting this up as a sort of,Emma: A battle. Laura: A battle. Yeah. Uh, rather than a relationship where, you know, where you might be able to be like, okay, what, what, what's coming up for me when they refuse their broccoli? And Okay. Then once I've, once I've maybe processed that a little bit and, you know, talk myself down off the edge. What's going on for them?Oh, actually, like they have a sensor processing difference or they, you know, there's not enough safe foods on the table, so they can't actually, it doesn't feel, they don't have that sense of felt safety that allows them to come to the table and, and have a meal with the, the rest of the family if you're even eating at a table in the first place.Basically, it actually prevents us from being responsive to the child that is in front of us. And, and I, I know responsive can be kind of like a loaded term for some people, but what I mean by that is literally just being able to see the, the child and their needs and meet them where they're at rather than kind assuming that actually they're trying to manipulate you and,Emma: Totally. And I think we can often have this idea, right, that we as parents are in control and that if our children are not doing the things that we feel like they should be doing, that they're meant to be doing, that other people's children seem to be doing, then that's our failure as a parent and we just need to try harder or we need to work more, or that there's something wrong with them and so we need to work at kinda fixing them. Actually, you know, the relationship between a parent and child is so complex. You know, it's almost, we have this idea that children are like these malleable objects that, you know, if we're just molding them in the right way, then they're gonna come out, the outcome is gonna be the one that we are, you know, striving for.Rather than actually our children come into the world as these whole human beings who have their own thoughts, feelings, needs, beliefs, tastes, you know, and also then within the, the wider context in which we're living. You know, can I afford broccoli at the moment? How do I feel about broccoli? You know, what happened when I refused broccoli at the kitchen table?And how much is that impacting on how I feel now? So, you know, our history, our current circumstances, the relationships that we're in our work environments, our financial circumstances. You were talking about broccoli, but all of those things can really, um, you know, kinda, yeah. Obviously have a huge impact on these kinda very, what seem like very minor circumstances.Laura: Yeah. What does that broccoli represent?Emma: What does broccoli represent?Laura: What's it really about?Emma: I'm thinking about people listening to this and go, yeah, typical psychologist, right? We're talking about broccoli and now I'm talking about like wider society, but actually, you know, because we so often just see that kind of one idea of it's just, it's just about the broccoli and you know, if, if I tried hard enough then I'd be able to mold my child to eat that broccoli or whatever it might be.But when we can take into account everything that we're bringing, everything that they're bringing, our wider circumstances, then we can kinda, yeah, focus in on that relationship as whole people, right? Like this is who I'm showing up to this, you know, this kitchen table and this is who they're, and this is how they're showing up.And you know, all of those kinda different circumstances, how tired they are, all of those things that can get in the way, that once we let go of that idea of this is how it should be, we can start to see what actually is, you know, what actually is in front of us. And then we can, you know, think about solutions to target what is going on in those moments?Laura: I think there is something, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this as well, Emma, that feels uniquely. kind of, yeah. I think you used the word fundamental earlier or primitive or something that, you know, gets to really the core of, um, you know, survival for humans when it comes to feeding that really kind of just, it kind of, it's like a knife gets dug in in a way that it doesn't with, with some other areas of, of parenting that, yeah. It's just such a, an essential part maybe of parent, feeding your child particularly again, I'm thinking to like those early, um, early weeks and months and, and years when, you know, there is that kind of narrative of like, the first 1000 days are the most important of a child's life and you know, what you feed them now is gonna impact their, you know, cognitive development and da da da da da for the rest of their lives.And so I just wonder if, from a psychologist perspective, if you have any thoughts about just like, you know, what that's kind of touching on for us when feeding isn't going well. Emma: I think you're right. I think it's so primitive, you know, that actually so much of parenting is around these kind of really primitive survival mechanisms.Laura: Yeah.Emma: You know that actually our, our role first and foremost is to keep this child alive you know whatever, at whatever cost. And you know, feeding difficulties, can start, you know, from day one. So thinking about, you know, kinda those who have breastfeeding difficulties or feel judged for their feeding choices, for example. And then that can kinda go on so much through food being a representation of love, you know, how did we experience that when we were growing up?And then how do we wanna kinda translate that for our own family again within the context that we're in. So if we're, you know, two parents are working full-time, for example, how does, how, how do we kinda translate that into, you know, eating together or those kinda idealized family meals that we hold in our minds? So I think it can be very fraught. It can be such a fraught experience. And I think it's also an experience that is so judged, right? You know, thinking about feeding babies, thinking about what kinda food we give our toddlers, thinking about, you know, the, all of the stories that you've spoken about, diet, culture, obesity, all of that kinda, it can get really mixed. Our own relationships with our bodies, our own relationships with food, and how that comes up in our experience of feeding our children, how well supported we are in that, you know, financially. Again, kinda how that, how that can impact on what we're able to offer our children. So, I think, you know, it is the way that we express love, it's the way that we kinda show our children that we care about them. At the same time, there is so much pressure to do it a certain way so it can become so fraught so quickly.Laura: Yeah.Emma: And we also don't talk enough about how boring it can be to feed children day in and day out.Laura: It's so relentless. Three meals, three snacks. Like, oh, you don't like this anymore. Suddenly you like that.Emma: And especially, you know, when, you know, you've kind of been, if you've raised children during lockdowns and you literally, you know, it was almost like a constant rotation of food over lockdowns. So, you know, I think that we don't talk enough about that kinda ambivalence around, you know, not just parenting tasks, but parenting in general.But, you know, again, the idea is that we're have this kinda lovely, you know, food environment that, um, we're gonna share these kinda pleasant meals together where the family are coming together to talk about their day. All of this kinda, again, kinda back to stories, narratives, ideals that we hold when actually for a lot of parents, food is something that can just feel quite boring and quite relentless and, and often very stressful.And, and you know, as soon as we start talking about that side of things too, the more difficult, the more negative side of things. Often we can feel a sense of relief that actually it doesn't have to be this one ideal way that actually all of these experiences can be so complex and varied with individual.Laura: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for, for speaking to the, to that point and, and I think naming how Yeah. Tedious feeding a family can be. And we were kind of talking a little bit off mic. I have a piece coming out next week that talks about, um, feeding a child as an aesthetic. Like that's what we see so much of on, on, um, social media when actually if, if we're feeding with that per- like idealized image in our head. Again, it occludes us from seeing the child in front of us and being in relationship with that child and, and food can be, You know, again, without romanticizing it, it can be ti-, a time for connection and for checking in. It can also just be a cluster fuck, sometimes and through nobody else, you know, through no one's fault.Um, just because you, sometimes you have to just get food in their mouths to sustain them to get to the next activity or like, you know, to grandma's house or what, you know, whatever it is. So, um, yeah, I think. I really appreciate that you know, that you're having these conversations where we're looking at the messy, ugly, boring, tiring, exhausting side of it, but not in this like meme-ified way that we often see that that sort of like really trivializes how exhausting and draining and how much hard work all of this is.But yeah, I really appreciate that in your, in the book that you're kind of inviting us to check in with what, what stories and fantasies we're bringing to our parenting that actually might be causing us more suffering and, and, and harming the relationships that we're having with, with our families so that we can kind of, you know, give ourselves permission to take what we need and leave the rest ofEmma: Yeah. Yeah. And you can get really creative then, right? Like once you let go of those ideas and you think about what do I want? What do we need as a family, you can get really creative with the way that you do things.Laura: Yeah.Emma: You know, for example, feeding children in the bath, that is something that somebody that I know does, you know, occasionally when they've had a really tricky day and it's been an absolute shitshow, I'm like, you know we're gonna get in the bath, you can have some sandwiches, that means I don't need to do any cleaning up, and then I'm gonna pop you into bed and I'm going to sit on the sofa and that is not something that you'd ever see on Instagram, I don't think.But you know, just that kinda idea of what, what is gonna work for me? And what do I need right now and what does my child need right now? And maybe they don't need to have this kinda really beautiful aesthetic, aesthetically pleasing, mealtime actually. Maybe they just need to eat something quickly so that you can then move on with your day or have connection in a different way, and if you know, as you know, and you talked about, you know, the stress that can come with feeding can cause such a vicious circle so quickly that actually anything that you can do to kinda nip that in the bud and again bring in ideas around flexibility, creativity. What's gonna work so that you can feed your child but also in a way that feels the least stressful for all of you?Laura: Yeah, absolutely. I fully endorse toast for dinner. If that's like, you know what you need to do to like put something in their bellies and get them to bed. Like as long as they're having enough to eat, then yeah, we're good. Emma, thank you so much. This has been a really great conversation. Before I let you go, I want to ask you who or what is nourishing you right now?Emma: Um, well at the moment I've been really focused on kinda restoration, so I think last year I did a lot of work around kinda reflection over the pandemic experience that parents had and how burnt out so many are, given the experiences of the past few years that are continuing. But at the moment, what I'm really kinda nourishing myself with, so a particular person, Lama Rod, who is an amazing meditation teacher and started to run these Thursday meditation groups, for UK people, cause he's based in the States. So, I've been kind of really consuming a lot of his work and his presence is just incredibly helpful and healing and I really love what he has to say about this particular time that we live in. I think that you'll really like him. He has a lot to say about you know, he calls this the age of apocalypse that we are coming into, we're in dark times at the moment, but there actually is by embracing that darkness that we can start to think about what we wanna shift into the future. So very much about, you know, not being afraid of embracing the dark, messy stuff, which is something that feels, really resonates with me.Laura: I think that, um, it reminds me of Bayo Akomolafe's work. I don't know if you're familiar with their book, um, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences where they talk about that in terms of like climate crisis and, um, but also like racism and parenting. They're a parent. It's like, there's also some like nuclear physics or something in there. It's like, it's a really dense dense book. But, um, I'll, I'll link to that and I'll link to, sorry, what say the name of the, the per-, the,Emma: His name is Lama, Lama Rod Owens, and he's on Instagram, but he also has stuff on the internet and he does a number of courses. He also wrote a book, so.Laura: Okay. I'll link, definitely link to, to them in the, in the show notes. And then the final question I have for you, Emma, is, what are you snacking on right now? So at the end of every episode, my guest and I share something. It's like a recommendation that they have for the audience. It can be an actual snack. I mean, I feel like you've just given us a recommendation, but I want another one. Like what you've been into lately.Emma: I am snacking on rest, which I think, you know, the, again, we can often have this idea that we have to do these things in a perfect way. That you know, what our kind of recovery journey might look like, having a few years where I think things have been so intense, you know so many families... You know that if we talk about kinda how, you know, self healing or wellness journeys, often we're talking about, I'm up and meditate for an hour in morning. You just can't do that when you've got children, or it's hard to do that when you've got children, so I am a big fan of snacking on moments of rest, you know moments during the day to just reset yourself. So even just sitting with your eyes closed, taking a few deep breaths.Or just thinking about the ground beneath your feet or just stopping, you know, so that you're not just going and going and going all day, but when you taking a moment to check in with yourself and just see how you are.Laura: I love that microdosing on rest throughout the day.Emma: Absolutely.Laura: Love it. Okay, so my, I feel like my thing is kind of just silly, but in a, in a good way. So we are recording this in January, 2023. So we're just coming out of like the holiday blah, whatever that was. But I just came across last, at the end of last week, the 2022 Haters Guide to the Williams Sonoma catalog.So I'm not sure if you're familiar with what Williams Sonoma is, but it's this US based brand and it's like if you think about like a John Lewis or like, you know, a higher end department store, but on steroids. Um, that's Williams Sonoma. It's like all these wildly expensive, like, you know, like a countertop pizza oven.Like nobody needs that in a flat in London, you know, like who needs that? Who has the kitchen space for that? And it's like, you know, everything is, like, all the kitchen appliances are like $500 and stuff. But anyway, this guy just goes through a bunch of items in the Williams Sonoma, um, catalog takes like the copy that they've written in there and just rips it a new one, just tears into it and it's hilarious and it's very cathartic, um, and highly enjoyable. So I'll link to that, I know we're like, out of Christmas season and holiday season. But, um, I think it's still worthwhile to have a little look at and, um, you can watch out for the 2023 one if you're listening to this later in the year. All right, Emma, can you tell everyone the name of your amazing new book and where they can find out more information about you?Emma: Uh, yes. So I am Mumologist on Instagram and loads of my kinda links and everything are on there. Or my website is dremmasvanberg.com. The book is called Parenting for Humans, and it's out on March 2nd which is World Book Day, which I love.Laura: Lovely. That's so,Emma: So, you know, I'd again love it if people would pre-order it. That makes a big difference. But yeah, if people do get their hands on it, I'd love to hear what people make of it.Laura: We'll have all of the links for Emma's books and her social media and her website in the transcript and in the show notes for this episode. So check her out. Thank you so much, Emma. This was,Emma: Thank you.Laura: will be really reassuring for a lot of parents to just hear that, Okay we can let go of some of the pressure and expectations and just check in with ourselves and figure out what it is that we need and what we want from our relationships.Emma: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for chatting.OUTROLaura Thomas: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Can I Have Another Snack? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review in your podcast player and head over to laurathomas.substack.com for the full transcript of this conversation, plus links we discussed in the episode and how you can find out more about this week's guest. While you're over there, consider signing up for either a free or paid subscription Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter, where I'm exploring topics around bodies, identity and appetite, especially as it relates to parenting. Also, it's totally cool if you're not a parent, you're welcome too. We're building a really awesome community of cool, creative and smart people who are committed to ending the tyranny of body shame and intergenerational transmission of disordered eating. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. And lastly Fiona Bray keeps me on track and makes sure this episode gets out every week. This episode wouldn't be possible without your support. So thank you for being here and valuing my work and I'll catch you next week. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laurathomas.substack.com/subscribe

HEYO. And welcome back to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast! We took a break back in November after wrapping up Season 1 of the pod with Katie Greenall talking all things Embodiment, so check out that episode if you haven't already. Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.We're kicking off Season 2 with Whitney Trotter - Registered Dietitian and nurse, Anti-racism Educator/Consultant and Human Trafficking Activist. Whitney is also mother to a 6 year old who is a selective eater. In this ‘sode, Whitney and I talk about her daughter's eating and what this brings up for her as a dietitian and eating disorder professional. Whitney goes on to talk about her work supporting parents with eating disorders who are really struggling in their relationship with food and their body, looking closely at the underlying anxieties that come up around eating and what they can teach us. We talk about what feeding children can bring up for parents who have eating disorders or disordered eating and how that experience can be so triggering.And Whitney talks about how going to the drive thru is 1) not something you should feel bad about and 2) something that can actually bring more connection when you're feeding a family.Find out more about Whitney here.Follow her work on Instagram here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Here's the transcript in full:Whitney: You know, I always think anxiety can teach us so much, right? Like, we typically treat anxiety as all bad, but I think it's a root of a lot of things. And so really leaning into, okay, what is the anxiety telling us? You know, are we, is there a fear? Right? So for sometimes, it's the meal that we're cooking. The parent or mom really wants their kid to have variety, but they're so worried about how this particular food is gonna show up for them. There's a lot of myths. There's a lot of lies that their eating disorder has told them about certain foods. And so really processing through that, processing okay, what feels safe to eat? What feels safe to share like community wise with our family. Things like that. And maybe even delegating, you know, what is their partner doing? Can the partner help with the meal times and the plating and the cooking, things like that, will that dial down some of that anxiety?INTROLaura: Hey, and welcome to Season Two of Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them? I'm Laura Thomas, an anti diet registered nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter. Today I'm talking to Whitney Trotter.Whitney is a registered dietician and nurse, anti-racism consultant and human trafficking activist based in Memphis, Tennessee. And as we'll learn, she's also the parent of a six-year-old who is a selective eater. So Whitney and I talk about her daughter's eating, and what this brings up for her as a dietician and an eating disorder professional. It touches on anxiety, fear, and feelings of failure, especially if you've made your whole career about nourishing people.Whitney goes on to talk about her work supporting parents with eating disorders who are really struggling in the relationship with food and their body, looking closely at the underlying anxieties that come up around eating and what they can teach us. We talk about what feeding children can bring up for parents who have eating disorders or disordered eating, and how that experience can be really triggering.We also talk about renourishing our inner child through eating nostalgic kid foods, and I talk a little bit about that article that I published last week on clean eating orthorexia and kids, which I've linked to in the show notes and the transcript, if you haven't already seen that. And we also talk about how mumfluencer culture and diet culture collide to make it seem like feeding kids is about an aesthetic as opposed to being based on something that's achievable or realistic or practical or even functional.And then Whitney talks, uh, about how going to the drive-through is one, not something that you should feel bad about. And two, something that can actually bring more connection when you're feeding a family. Lots of really cool stuff. We kind of go all over the place, but in a good way. And I really enjoy talking to Whitney, she's someone I've wanted to have on the podcast for a long time, so I'm glad that we finally made it work. I just want to give a content warning. We talk about body image in the context of sexual assault and miscarriage. Not in any detail, but I just wanted to mention that it's there. We also talk about eating disorders and our experiences of having babies in the NICU and breastfeeding challenges. So if those are things that you don't need to hear right now, then please skip ahead. There will be another episode out next week. And before we get to today's episode, I just want to share that I am gonna be running my Raising Embodied Eaters workshop again in February. A lot of you have been asking about this. I kind of took a break from running workshops as I was getting my Substack up and going. Um, but now I'm able to kind of offer, I don't know how often I'm gonna do it, but we're gonna have one in February. It will be a 90 minute workshop completely online, and you'll be sent a copy of the recording afterwards to watch back.So you know, if bedtime goes way later than you're expecting, then um, yeah, you'll be able to catch up with it another time. We'll be talking about how kids' embodiment gets disrupted by diet culture, and what this has to do with feeding and how it can affect the feeding relationship. We'll discuss why we need to throw the rule book out the window and let them have ice cream before broccoli, and we'll talk about how we can build trust in our kids to get what they need.I'll offer a framework that can help you feel more relaxed about mealtimes whilst also encouraging kids to have autonomy. We'll talk about how providing supportive structure can encourage children to remain in touch with their internal cues for hunger satisfaction and pleasure and fullness. And I'll cover how fussy eating develops and talk about some developmental milestones with eating as well as tools to help move through it. We'll also talk about why cutting out sugar and saying things like just another bite can undermine kids' instincts around food. And we'll talk about how we can talk about food and bodies without causing harm. So you'll be asked to fill out a short questionnaire about your specific situation ahead of time, and I'll try and tailor the content to the audience as much as possible.You'll also get a copy of my Raising Embodied Eaters download. The workshop is suitable for grownups of kids of all ages, but I would say it's probably best for kids under 12. Parents, whatever that means to you and your family, grandparents, teachers, nutrition professionals, and anyone else working with kids are all welcome.It will be on Tuesday, the 21st of February, which aptly is pancake day, and it will be at seven o'clock and it's 15 pounds to join and it will be over Zoom. The full details and the booking information is in the show notes and the transcript for this episode. For those of you who are subscribed to the newsletter, you'll get a reminder and a link in an upcoming newsletter as well.And one more thing just before we get to Whitney, just a reminder that Can I Have Another Snack is a reader supportive publication. I'd love to bring you more deeply research pieces like my piece on clean eating and kids, but it requires a significant investment in my time, plus the support of an editor. So, if you are in a position to become a paid subscriber, then please consider it. It's five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year. And if that's not accessible for you right now, you can email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk, putting the word snacks in the subject line and we will hook you up with a comp subscription, no questions asked. Alright, team, here is my conversation with Whitney Trotter.MAIN EPISODELaura: All right, Whitney, I'd love it if you could share with the audience who or what you are nourishing right now.Whitney: Oh my goodness. Okay. Well I am a mom of a feisty six year old, little girl who I just adore. So, we were kind of talking before the thing about some other dieticians that work in pediatrics and feeding and things like that. So I'm exploring the land of working with the selective eater. So our, yeah, so it's really fun.Like our, nourishing times are a bit chaotic right now and so doing that. I'm also, uh, an avid coffee lover, so I have been trying different just flavours of coffee, different roasters and a non beverage food thing that I've been kind of nourishing my soul with lately is I've been listening to the audiobook of Hood Feminism.I love, love it. So.Laura: Yeah, lots of different things. Tell us about your selective eater a little bit more.Whitney: Oh my goodness, so I think any, any mom, but particularly like dietician, nurse, mom, it's, it's so hard to like really kind of step back from our traditional schooling. So she legitimately has like six foods that she'll eat. Um, Mac and cheese, chicken nuggets, bacon, pancakes, strawberries, peanut butter and jelly. And that is it. So we've been really working with, you know, the autonomy piece, but also like, you know, there's also that just like natural worry of parents of it's like, okay, is my kid getting enough? Like, so many times in like our kind of traditional setting, it's like variety, variety, variety. And so really working on trying to let her be autonomous in the variety.So we've been giving her like, you know, three options to choose from and then she gets to choose out of those, like three to four options, what she's willing to try.Laura: Yeah, it's so, it's so interesting hearing from a parent who is, is, you know, has, I don't wanna say legitimately selective eater, because that makes it seem like other forms are illegitimate. But I suppose what I was thinking about there is how from social media, we get a really distorted picture of what kids should eat.And we see them eating like kale and I don't know, mushrooms and all of these, these foods that are really challenging for little kids. And so then when they go through that like normal or like typical food neophobic stage as toddlers and preschoolers and even into like school age, that parents have this sense that they're this, that they're developing feeding differences.And it's not until you hear of a child who is literally only eating six foods that you realize, wow, okay, actually my kid does have a reasonable variety and balance of food. So how are you, are you like, are you getting professional support with that? Like, and, and also like what does that bring up for you as a dietician, as a nurse?Whitney: Well at first you're like did I fail my kid? What am I doing wrong? I mean, you know, cause I work in and I see, I work in the land of eating disorder, so I treat a lot of children and adolescents and adults with disordered eating and eating disorders. So it is interesting. We do a lot of food neutrality, like we do not moralise food. Food is food. So, and she's, she's a spicy six year old, so she's very quick to, you know, to say the same thing that, that I'm teaching her back to me, which is always funny. So she's on the growth chart, like she's growing and so right now we're just kind of, you know, living in the land of offering the choices and not forcing, and then just making sure she's getting enough of the foods that she will eat throughout the day.So the biggest thing is I just wanna make sure she was growing and nourishing. And she is, and our pediatrician is wonderful.She's also Venezuelan, and so I think it's just a, another just added benefit of she's seen kids in from so many different other cultures and countries. And so she was like, you know what? I'm not worried. I don't want you to be worried. I'm like, okay.Laura: Yeah. Yeah. And I like, I suppose it is really reassuring to hear from another healthcare professional like it, you know, everything looks good here. But I can also imagine like, as, as a nutritionist being like, holy shit, my kid is only six. Like, it is, it's so, even though I work with that population, like I know it's like really anxiety provoking when, you know, like kind of in the way that doctors make the worst patients like... Whitney: Yes, it's so true, so true. Cuz I mean, you really do, you're like, okay, what do I do? Like, you know, especially again cuz working in the eating disorders, you know what the outcome could be if you say certain things, if you press too hard. You know what I'm saying? So we're very cognizant of that. But we also just, we are, we really do tend to like, let her choose a lot of things. Like we really are those type of parents that like work with her in bodily autonomy and even when it comes to food, you know, so, it, I would be lying if I said it wasn't challenging, cuz it definitely is challenging. So we're kind of just staying the course right now.Laura: Well, and this is a, this is a, a different thing, but I have a two and a half year old and I've, I've spoken about this, loads on the podcast, but he was in the NICU for like two, only like two weeks, which, actually, I say only two weeks now, but at the time it felt like an eternity. And we had a really, really difficult time getting feeding established, breastfeeding established, and yeah.And, and there was something that felt so like, It, it just like really shook the core of my identity as a nutritionist to not be able to feed my child.Whitney: Yes,Laura: There is something that, that like just touched on, something like really deep, like I've made my entire career about nourishing people, yet I can't nourish my own child and that, I don't know if, if that resonates with you at all in your experience of feeding your daughter. Whitney: This is so wild that you're saying this, and thank you for sharing that. We had the exact same thing. She was in NICU and they gave her a, they gave her the wrong nipple. They, for the bottle, it was like a fast,Laura: A fast flow. Yes. That happened to us too.Whitney: Yeah. So then when she went to latch, I couldn't, she, she couldn't latch.And so similar, you go through this period, like you feel like a failure, you know, like you feel like, like you just said, it's like I, I've spent my whole career trying to help others nourish their body and like, I can't even feed my own child. And so she ended up with a really bad gag reflex, like, just really, really bad when she was younger. We would have to like prop her up to sleep. She was on medication. So I mean, it's been, yeah, even now she will kind of sometimes struggle with that, but yeah, that resonates so deeply. And just the trauma of your baby being in NICU, I mean, so, it's so traumatic for you, you know, as a parent. And so, yeah, definitely. It's so interesting. We have similar, uh, similar stories regarding that.Laura: Well, and then I think this is the, the thing that I've kind of discovered, like through having conversations on this podcast is that it it, because it, it happens to so many of us but we're just kind of expected to power on and keep going and, and not, and you know, just like dust it under, under the rug. And yeah, I think there, I'm thinking particularly of a conversation that I had with Christy Harrison. You know, again, sort of her story parallels a lot of my experience as well. And yeah, just how healing and cathartic it is to be able to, to share this more openly. Yeah, because it's, like I said, I think a lot of it, we, we, a lot of us experience, you know, similar things. I'm also really, you know, you've, you've mentioned a couple of times that you work in the eating disorder field and another theme that we touch on a lot in the, on the podcast is, you know, healing our own relationship with food as a parent and sort of supporting our children to have a positive or a healthy, or, you know, like however you wanna frame it, like a, a good relationship with food and bodies.And I'm, I'm really curious to hear more about your experience of working with parents who have either disordered eating or eating disorders and, and yeah, how you hold them and support them in your work.Whitney: Yeah, it's so interesting because I, I'm thinking of a particular session I had last week with a mom and we were really talking about how, you know, her daughter for the first time noticed that she ate dinner and you know, one of the things I told her, I said, your daughter is never gonna thank you for your restriction, but she is gonna remember the memories that you cultivate with her, particularly around meal times. And you know, I think that was really hard for her to hear and we kind of just sat with that and really explored, you know, what is it like for you to be able to sit at the dinner table with your kids and not every night like I know that's not realistic and you know, but two or three nights a week and engage in conversation.Cuz usually as parents and it's hard, right? Like different seasons of life, sometimes dinnertime is the only time you have to like sit and talk with them. There's after school activities, you know, parents are usually working, somebody's cooking, somebody's cleaning, and then you're exhausted. And so sometimes that like 30, 45 minutes is like the only time the family is together.And I think the eating disorder, you know, really can come in and monopolize that time as well. And it makes it very hard for somebody who is struggling, you know, with nourishment of their body, with body image to be able to sit and really holistically be present and be in the moment. So we definitely talk a lot about that.You know, I think too, you know, kind of speaking more generally with moms, we're, we're used to having to do so much, right? Like some of us are working in home, some of us are working outside of the home. Still taking a lot of the responsibility of maybe driving or navigating, dropping kids off to school or daycare, cooking, like I said, cooking, cleaning, there's so much on us that I think also by the time we finally sit down to eat, we're just so exhausted.Laura: Mm-hmm. If, if you have an eating disorder, even just disordered eating, when you're that exhausted, it's those eating disorder thoughts or those, you know, thoughts about weight and body size becomes so much more pronounced,Whitney: Yes,Laura: and that further takes you away from being connected and being present with your family. And I'm, I'm wondering what you offer your clients who are, yeah, really just struggling even to get through a mealtime with their family. Whitney: Yeah. So usually what we'll do is we'll do meal exposures together or we'll do like a snack, something to where there's not as much pressure of eyes kind of on them, so to speak. You know, so, maybe we'll try breakfast or lunch, we'll do some kind of exposures together, really dialing into what is the anxiety.You know, I think anxiety can teach us so much, right? Like, we typically treat anxiety as all bad, but I think it's, it's a root of a lot of things. And so really leaning into, okay, what is the anxiety telling us? You know, are we, is there a fear? Right? Sometimes, it's the meal that we're cooking. The parent or mom really wants their kid to have variety, but they're so worried about how this particular food is gonna show up for them. There's a lot of myths. There's a lot of lies that their eating disorder has told them about certain foods. And so really processing through that, processing okay, what feels safe to eat? What feels safe to share like community wise with our family. Things like that. And maybe even delegating, you know, what is their partner doing? Can the partner help with the meal times and the plating and the cooking, things like that, will that dial down some of that anxiety?So kind of really processing through all of that and trying to figure out, and also too, you know, I think a lot of us tend to treat the eating disorder from an abstinence-based approach, and that's not necessarily my philosophy. And so always trying to figure out, okay, what is the root of this? You know, what is the eating disorder giving us, you know, what is it telling us?What is it, what is it helping you navigate through? You know? And then are there alternative coping things that we can use?Laura: Yeah. So I think what you're, you're naming there is how oftentimes eating disorders manifest as a sort of byproduct of trauma oftentimes, and how, I mean, a, a major part of the reason that they develop is because they felt safe, like safety, they kept us safe in one way, shape or another. And so it's, it's almost kind of understanding, okay, the ways that, that this was helpful and protective at least initially, but how perhaps, you know now that the, the immediate danger has subsided, clinging onto an eating disorder is actually more harmful and destructive.Whitney: Yes.Laura: So what are the other ways of coping, of managing that are not destructive, that are helpful and, yeah, that allow us to have a, a, a quality of life that you know, an eating disorder just does not afford anyone. Is that fair? Is that-Whitney: Yeah, absolutely.Laura: -a decent summary?Whitney: Beautifully said Laura: And I hear from a lot of parents maybe kind of early on in terms of feeding their kids. So when it comes up to the point that they're introducing solids and like in the UK we call that weening. I know that's a different thing in the US, but at the point that they're introducing solids and how that can for people with an eating disorder can be really a really triggering phase of parenting. And I'm curious to hear if you've come across this with any of your clients or had conversations with folks about this and what your thoughts are.Whitney: It can be so triggering. It can be triggering, you know, there's so much of the body that can be triggering that we don't talk about, right? So if you are pregnant and you lose your baby, you will still lactate. You know, you will, your, your milk will still come in which can be so triggering. Um, I also have a lot of expertise and experience working with sexual assault victims, and so definitely wanna do a, a trigger warning on that.But the breastfeeding can be particularly triggering if there was a traumatic, anything traumatizing to the breast. And so really kind of going through that as well. Body image, you know, our body changes so much. And that postpartum, you know, pregnancy and that postpartum, I like to think of postpartum as a year.And so that postpartum,Laura: I'm two and a half years out and I'm still saying I'm postpartum.Whitney: I, you know, yeah, I, it makes me so mad.Laura: You're always postpartum, right,Whitney: Yes. Laura: after you've had a baby?Whitney: You are. You are never, yeah, you are never the same, right? You are never the same. I love that. I love that. So I think all of that really needs to be taken into consideration as well. And then the weaning part. So what we, what I've done before in the past is have met with the partners and have really developed a plan for kind of that postpartum in the perinatal phase and, you know, during pregnancy as well.And really have, having the partner be kind of the eyes and ears. And so then it takes, it kind of takes a pressure off because we want our partner also to be involved with the, with the, you know, we call it baby led weaning too, and, and solid sometimes. Different verbiage, but meaning the same thing. So how can we get the partner involved? Sometimes I'll have parents take pictures too of like, okay, like, what do you think? And then also work with the pediatrician as well. I think it's really, really important that we work with a pediatrician just to make sure that baby is, you know, adequately growing.Particularly too, I've always been so curious of this, of, you know, you and I share similar experiences with the, the trauma of NICU and, and latching. But when you have an eating disorder, particularly in such a vulnerable space and time, how does that affect milk supply? How does that affect latching? Different things like that. If there's a co-occurring mood disorder, right? So how is that showing up as well? And so really just trying to hold space for all of the variables while providing, you know, as much support and how the person wants support. I'm also a nurse and so I work with a lot of nurses that have eating disorders and some of them are like, okay, Whitney, give me like, I just need cognitive things. Like, tell me what to do. I need cognitive resources. I always like to ask like, how do you want to receive information, you know, as well.Laura: Yeah. Yeah. And, I think like one thing that I just wanna point out that I've heard from, from parents with eating disorders as well, is that actually sometimes seeing your child have this like real innate embodied wisdom around food and knowing exactly what to do can be so healing for a parent with an eating disorder as well. Like that can really be like, wow, here's this almost role model in a sense of how to have an intuitive relationship with food.Whitney: Yes. And it's almost like reparenting, they get a chance of kind of like to reparent or, or sometimes I like to, maybe not reparent is the best word, but like renourish their inner child. Like they get to reclaim some of that as they're going through the process of, you know, watching the baby-led weaning.And so I try to do things to like make it fun. I, and you know, some parents will side-eye me, but like, also like if your kid is doing chicken nuggets and peas and, mac and cheese, eat chicken nuggets, peas and mac and cheese with them, you know, eat some of those kid foods that maybe.Laura: Oh my God. This is not like, if any parent listening in on this podcast side eyed you for that, then I would put them out personally, because we don't judge or shame food around here. But yeah. Sorry. Your point still stands though. Like get, get in there with them.Whitney: Yes. Make food messy. Make it fun. I've had so many parents be like, oh my goodness, you want me to do what? I'm like, yes, eat those things that you did not necessarily get to eat as a child. You know, because maybe, cuz sometimes too, you gotta think we're, we're dealing generational, right? There was the grandmother that had the eating disorder or the grandfather, which, or a close family member, which directly impacted how the parent, their relationship with food and body and that parent is like, okay, I really wanna break this generational cycle of disordered eating, eating disorder, and some of that is, it gets renourishing, the younger our, our younger inner child too.Laura: Yeah. And that's like a question that I was gonna ask you, you know, for parents who have their own eating disorder, who really are terrified of passing that onto their own kids. You've sort of named there that eating those fun, nostalgic childhood foods is something that they can do to help, like you say, end that intergenerational cycle of dieting, disordered eating, eating disorders. But I'm wondering if there's anything else that you would offer to parents to help, you know, put their mind at ease in terms of, you know, passing on an eating disorder.Whitney: Yeah, you know, we know that there is a genetic vulnerability. It's, you know, we can actually in the bio psychosocial model, like the biology, the psychology, the social environment, and I think the social environment really is key, right? Is how are we creating these safe spaces for you and family members when it comes to eating? And I think too, like taking the pressure off of eating, you know, food is so many different things. It's cultural, it's celebratory you know, it can be, you know, different religions have different food, uh, preferences and things as well. But we can also make it fun. And that's the thing too, is like, I don't think a lot of kids and adolescents are like wanting parents to cook these gourmet meals and make sure they have the salmon, twiced baked potatoes, right? Like, I couldn't, I, I remember some of those things I grew up eating right, but I don't remember every mealtime. But I do remember the, like how I felt as a kid getting to be in that space with my parents. So that's what I tell the parents that I'm working with is how do we create just that safe space where you get to just be with your kid for those 20, 30 minutes. Right? Especially the teenagers, right. I have a lot of parents that are parenting teenagers and it's like just, you know, such a chaotic time. Right?Laura: Yeah.Whitney: So I'm like, go through the drive through. Go through the drive through, turn off the radio, and y'all talk, you know, maybe have 20 minutes a day where there's no stimulation, if you can and just talk and, and see how they're doing. That's the kind of stuff that they remember, you know.Laura: I, yeah. I love that so much. You know, my next question was going to be about sort of the influence of social media in terms of like our, in influencing us to feed our kids perfectly. And as you were saying that, like, I wish that you turned that into like a post for social media. Like take your kids to the fucking drive-through , just go.Whitney: Just go through the drive through. It amazes me, like, yeah, it amazes me. Just like you said, I'm gonna make that a post. That's a great idea. Laura: Do it. Please do it. Because like not only is it subversive in and of itself, but like coming from a dietician who works in eating disorders, like, just like we need that, I'm, I'm working on a piece at the moment, for my newsletter about clean eating and orthorexia and how that is then transmitted to kids and like the fallout on children like, Whitney, I found a case study of a six month old baby. I'm actually gonna cry. A six month old baby who was being fed a homemade formula of sea moss and hemp seed, no supplementation. This child had hypocalcemia, was admitted to hospital with seizures and had rickets. A six month old baby in like, this is like a couple of years ago, right. And so this, yeah, I'm, I guess, You know, we, we all want our kids to be well-nourished, like you were saying at the beginning. Right. That's like, that's a, that's like a, it's a fundamental job of a parent, right? To make sure your kid has like enough to eat and like gets all their, all their nutrition and at the same time, all the, like the fearmongering, the scaremongering around nutrition, around, you know, the quote unquote obesity epidemic. It's driving parents to, and I'm not blaming any individual parent here cuz it's a systemic issue, but it's, you know, promoting a way of eating that is so dangerous for children.Whitney: Yeah.Laura: Anyway, sorry, that was like a major tangent because I've been thinking about it and I find it so disturbing and upsetting. But even in my own practice, I see it happen on like a, not such an acute level, but see the fallout of kind of like this of like healthy eating and clean eating and yeah, this strive for perfection in feeding our kids.Whitney: Yes. And well, and you bring up such a good point too, is I've actually had the parent, the mom, and the, and again, kind of speaking more generally, the mom ended up realizing she had a problem because the kid's teacher was like, you're not packing enough food.Laura: Okay. Yeah.Whitney: So that's when she was like, my relationship, I'm passing on these traits and behaviors. Like I'm, I'm, I'm so, my relationship with food is so distorted that now I'm not even packing enough for my kid. And so even teachers just really, you know, and I'm so grateful. My daughter's kindergarten teacher actually has a son who is in recovery. And so she is so aligned with positive reinforcement. I mean, and like, you know, I told at the beginning, we pack the same lunch. My kid has had the same exact school lunch for three years. I mean, that's, you know, and so I, I just had an honest conversation with her. I was like, you're gonna see the same thing. You know, I, I would love it if she would eat through the line, if she sees something, if she ends up having two lunches, I please support her in that. I want her, you know, we give her free room to try the school lunch if she wants, but we always pack her lunch on field trips. And so, but even teachers, right? Teachers and educators, if we can get them really plugged in on some of these things because you're right, it's, you know, early childhood is such an important time for kids. But it can be so anxiety provoking for parents who are really struggling and are trying to figure out, how do I live with this and it's taking over my life and I don't pass it on.Laura: Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, it just, I have all the compassion in the world for parents who are in recovery from an eating disorder and, and then having to navigate that layer of feeding their kid. I think it's difficult enough feeding a child with the pressures and expectations that we get from social media anyway without having that layer of, of an eating disorder as well.It's so tricky and like you were sort of suggesting before, there are so many pressure points in terms of conception, pregnancy, baby loss. Infertility is another one. And then the actual, you know, birth and if, if, if it's a traumatic birth in that early postnatal period, and then you go from all of that to then having to, to, to, you know, pick up the reins with baby led weaning or, or whatever else, you know, whatever approach that you're taking. And it just all can be so tricky.Whitney: Yes.Laura: And there's just, there, I feel like there's a lack of anyone having conversations about these things and even less support for these things.Whitney: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Laura: I'm just wondering if, if there's anything that you wanted to add about either navigating feeding kids with an eating disorder or kind of the influence of diet culture, and you know what the like mom influencer culture for want of better word on how we feed our kids and kind of what you are seeing in your clinical practice.Whitney: Yeah. Well you brought up a really good point earlier. We're seeing a lot in the land of orthorexia and so, you know, something I've said before in the past of, uh, clients that I'm like, okay, we, we want to really work on the embodiment. We really wanna work on the variety if we can. The consistent nourishment, you know, without. without engaging orthorexia if we can. And what I mean by that is sometimes there's a tendency, I, I very much treat eating disorders on the spectrum. And so what tends to happen is maybe one, maybe one behavior dials down, but then there's this intense fear anxiety that ramps up and then kind of that obsession with the clean eating, or I don't wanna have like, you know, another co-occurring disease with this. And it's like that hyper fixation emerges. And so really talking about that in a very, just like, non-chain based way. But I definitely see the influence, like you said. I love, I love what you said, the mom culture of this like clean eating smoothie, like whole foods kind of like obsession, which feels so elitist to me. It feels very elitist. Laura: It is because, I mean, this is something I think a lot about is the not only the time, the money, the energy, I don't know. There's so much additional labor that goes into producing that, but it's all hidden, right? Nobody talks about the fact that like, you need someone else to look after your kids while you're doing this right, or you know, the, the labor, like where does that labor fall? Who does that fall on, that labor? And the fact that like it's, you know, it's not necessary from a nutrition perspective, right? You could get like a yogurt drink or a store bought smoothie if that's, you know, available to you. That a lot of what we see on social media is really about aesthetics rather than about nutrition. And I don't know if you know, is it, is it Casey, is it Davis from, from Struggle Care? I don't know if you know that account on social media. I think I've, I've spoken about this before. But she, so she talks about this in terms of your home and, like what's functional versus what is kind of like an aesthetic in terms of your home. And she talks about it through like, through the lens of like laundry. A lot of the times, you know how people have these like pristine laundry rooms and like laundry is kind of a hobby for some people, but that's not necessary in order to have like clean clothes that don't stink, right? You don't like, what is an essential function is like sorting your laundry, putting it in the machine and then like putting it away or putting it in a pile that is, you know, accessible to you. Right. And it's the same thing with feeding, right? This like, I don't even know what the cool, like, super foods are right now, but like the berry nourishing whole foods smoothie.Whitney: Yes,Laura: Like, sure. Give your kids, like, my kid loves berries. My kid would like eat their entire body weight in berries, but I'm not like making a fresh smoothie every morning for him, I'm like throwing some on a tray and being like, here you go.Whitney: Yes, and it's ending up on the wall, on the floor. The fingers are blue. AbsolutelyLaura: So, yeah, and, and I think that that's like a really helpful way to, for us to frame things that we see on social media, like, is this, is this, uh, is this functional or is this an aesthetic? Right. More, more, more often than not on social media, it's an aesthetic, it's a hobby. It's not like a fundamental requirement for feeding our children.Whitney: That's so good. Gosh, I love, okay, it's called struggling. What's the account called? Laura: Struggle Care. Whitney: Struggle Care. That is the most beautiful like metaphor that I have heard in such a while. Like that is,Laura: It's so good. And she did a podcast with you know, like that 10% Happier podcast?Whitney: Yes. Yes.Laura: And she said in that, that she was inspired by like the anti-diet movement to talk about this. She's a therapist. But she kind of took like a lot of the teachings of like the anti diet, like body and body autonomy, and movements like that, and kind of like translated it into home care. So it makes a lot of sense because there are a lot of parallels in terms of like giving yourself permission for your house to be messy. Because what matters is that it's functional and it works for you. Similarly, like eating in a way that works for you rather than all these prescribed rules that diet culture teaches us. I mean, she articulates it a bit better than that, but like, yeah, that's her kind of general,Whitney: I love that so much. I feel like this podcast time was like for me today because I love this so much.Laura: Yeah, she's got, she's got a book. I haven't read it, but I need to get, I need to get on that because yeah, it's clearly she's got a lot of wisdom to share that I think like yeah, we can take for our, you know, to talk about yeah, to, in, in terms of how we can like give ourselves permission to feed our kids in a way that is functional rather than adhering to someone else's unrealistic standards and ideals, which is more about aesthetics than it is about nutrition. Okay.So I'm, I'm curious to know if there's anything else that you wanted to add to that, or if you feel like we've, likeWhitney: I feel like we've talked so about so many things. I love it. I feel like, yeah, so many things today, so far.Laura: Well, given that we have covered a lot of ground, there are, so there are two things that I ask at the end of every episode, and the first thing is that I would love to hear who or what is nourishing you right now.Whitney: Gosh, that's such a good question. So my partner is fabulous and just cannot speak the like enough amazing things. So my partner has been so amazing. Does a lot of the early morning routine , I'm notLaura: Love to see it.Whitney: Yes, I was a night shift nurse for years, and so I, just mornings are still hard for me, so definitely my partner has, has stepped up and I've been getting a lot of nourishment just from a lot of colleagues, you know. I just came back from New York. We were at A Project Heal which is an eating disorder nonprofit in New York City. And so it just felt so nice to be in space with people, you know, I just had really been craving that likeminded people, and so that was just so, just refreshing, like just for my soul, just to be, you know, so many people that I had met honestly over Instagram, right? Like most of the people there I had met and connected with over Instagram. So it was just so nice just to like be in space with them for the first time. So I loved that.Laura: Yeah. Especially like, I don't know how you feel, but if it just feels like, we're still sort of almost in this lockdown mentality of like not really being physically together a lot of times. And a lot of stuff is still like professional stuff is still online, which is great because it makes it really accessible, but at the same time you still miss out on that connection.So yeah. I was watch, I saw some of your stories and posts and stuff from New York and I was like, oh, you looked like you were having the best time.Whitney: It was so fun.Laura: And New York is such a fun city to be in. So yeah, it was like coming across for sure.Whitney: Yeah, I told my, I was telling my husband, I was like, I really wanna go back and take our little one when she's a little older, cuz it's so magical this time of year. And I didn't know that. Like I just, I, you know, I've never been to New York City like, you know, in holiday season and so it is just, it was so, it was cold, but it,Laura: I was just about to say, that's my like memory of New York in like November, December is it's fucking freezingWhitney: It is. It is.Laura: But also spectacular, so yeah. Yeah. Oh, well thank you for sharing that. And then the last, the last question that I have for you is what are you snacking on right now? So, at the end of every episode, my guests and I share something that they've been really into, something that they've been enjoying. Basically a recommendation that you have for the listeners.Whitney: Okay. So I am one of these people that I like to try seasonal things, so I've been trying a lot of mocktails. And we love donuts in our house. So I'm, I, yeah, I, we like love, like, donuts, coffee, chocolate milk, all the things. So I've been trying to do coffee mocktails with like a pastry each morning because it's kind of chilly here, but I just love warmth, just warm things. So that's what I've been doing a lot lately.Laura: So when you're saying a, like a coffee mocktail, is it warm or is it like a, oh, my. Okay. I feel like you need to give a bit more explanation here because like when you said mocktail, I thought you meant like, like an espresso martini, but,Whitney: Yes. So you could do that without the, which. Okay, so how I am, I could drink an espresso martini every day or Bailey's and so I love like a Bailey's Peppermint or like a Bailey liqueor but obviously, you know, at, uh, Laura: It's not, not totally advisable, right?Whitney: I've been doing the hot coffee and I've been exploring with like doing like, so this one dessert that I love to make is, it's cool whip, but I put, uh, okay, so I make, I melt chocolate chips and white chocolate, and then cocoa powder, whip that, let it cool. And then I fold that into like, cool whip or icing, let it freeze. So I'll put that in my hot coffee, let it melt, and then I'll do like a peppermint or a lavender, like simple, like a, a simple syrup thing.Laura: Oh wow.Whitney: And then I'll decorate that with like, and then I'll put more like, whipped cream on top, and I'll decorate that with like, uh, cinnamon or nutmeg or like pecan sprinkle, something like that.Laura: You are doing this for breakfast, like on a weekday.Whitney: Yeah. Yeah.Laura: Oh my God. I can like barely get some oatmeal on the table. That's impressive.Whitney: Yeah, just so I'm, I just finished my semester, so the school year is just so hectic for us because I'm in clinic, I'm getting my, I'm finishing my degree to be a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and so I usually was in clinic like 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM Tuesday, Wednesday, Laura: Uh,Whitney: So I just finished last week. I was in New York taking exams and so I had three weeks off. So I'm just gonna enjoy and do this.Laura: Okay. So your, yeah. Okay. This is a hobby for you. Then, you've got a little bit of extra time. It's luxurious. You're leaning into the seasonal mocktail drink situation. It sounds amazing. I would love to be at your house for breakfast,Whitney: Gosh. I wish I could make you one. I wish I could make you,Laura: I will take a recipe for one. If you have one to share. I will put it in the links.Whitney: Okay. Okay. I'll have to send you some recipes. So I love drinks, like I love beverages, it's so funny you said the word luxury. I made a mood board. Do you know, like Delina Soto, Nutrition Tea? Okay. So we're all like close friends, all met from Instagram, and we have this like nutrition chat. And so Clara was like, let's do a mood board. And so we all zoomed one night with our beverages and Canva. And did these like online mood boards, which were like, amazing. But like my word was luxury. And I was like, I'm really embracing that end of 2022, 2023,Laura: I love it. I love it. Channeling it for the new year. Clara was on Season One of the podcast, so yes. Yay. Yeah. She is known to us. Yeah, she's great. And yeah, I totally love that luxurious energy that you're bringing into 2023. All right, so real quick, my thing that I've been snacking on, so there is this like little brand in the UK I think it's like an independent female owned clothing brand. And they used to do a lot of kid stuff, but now they're doing grownup stuff, but it's still super cute and funky. And I just bought - I've linked to it in a newsletter, but I'll link to it again in this episode - just like a plain t-shirt, but it's got a cereal box, like a little drawing on the front and it's super cute. I just put it in my stories so you can go check that out afterwards. Whitney: Definitely will. Laura: But yeah, it's by Cub & Pudding and just like the cotton is super soft and it's like, you know, just like comfy on my body. I have no idea how I'm gonna wear it yet, but we're recording this before Christmas, even though it will come out afterwards. And yeah, it was like a little Christmas treat to myself. Whitney: I love that. Laura: And it just like is very on brand for me, so loving it. Whitney, it was such a pleasure to chat to you. And I wondered if you could please share where people can find you and, and hear more about your work.Whitney: Yes. Thank you so much for offering that. So my website is www.whitneytrotter.com. And then my Instagram, which I'm probably most accessible through is @whitneytrotter.rd.Laura: And I'll link to all of that in the show notes so people can find you. But this was such a lovely conversation. So thanks for being here. And yeah, everyone go and check Whitney out.OUTROLaura Thomas: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Can I Have Another Snack? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review in your podcast player and head over to laurathomas.substack.com for the full transcript of this conversation, plus links we discussed in the episode and how you can find out more about this week's guest. While you're over there, consider signing up for either a free or paid subscription Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter, where I'm exploring topics around bodies, identity and appetite, especially as it relates to parenting. Also, it's totally cool if you're not a parent, you're welcome too. We're building a really awesome community of cool, creative and smart people who are committed to ending the tyranny of body shame and intergenerational transmission of disordered eating. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. And lastly Fiona Bray keeps me on track and makes sure this episode gets out every week. This episode wouldn't be possible without your support. So thank you for being here and valuing my work and I'll catch you next week. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laurathomas.substack.com/subscribe

Laura Maguire is a Researcher at Jeli.io, the first dedicated instant analysis platform that combines more comprehensive data to deliver more proactive solutions and identify problems. Victoria talks to Laura about incident management, giving companies a powerful tool to learn from their incidents, and what types of customers are ideal for taking on a platform like Jeli.io. Jeli.io (https://www.jeli.io/) Follow Jeli.io on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/jeli_io/), Twitter (https://twitter.com/jeli_io) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/jeli-inc/). Follow Laura Maguire on Twitter (https://twitter.com/LauraMDMaguire) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauramaguire/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Laura Maguire, Researcher at Jeli, the first dedicated instant analysis platform that combines more comprehensive data to deliver more proactive solutions and identify problems. Laura, thank you for joining me. LAURA: Thanks for having me, Victoria. VICTORIA: This might be a very introductory level question but just right off the bat, what is an incident? LAURA: What we find is a lot of companies define this very differently across the space, but typically, it's where they are seeing an impact, either a customer impact or a degradation of their service. This can be either formally, it kind of impacts their SLOs or their SLAs, or informally it's something that someone on the team notices or someone, you know, one of their users notice as being degraded performance or something not working as intended. VICTORIA: Gotcha. From my background being in IT operations, I'm familiar with incidents, and it's been a practice in IT for a long time. But what brought you to be a part of building this platform and creating a product around incidents? LAURA: I am a, let's say, recovering safety professional. VICTORIA: [chuckles] LAURA: I started my career in the safety and risk management realm within natural resource industries in the physical world. And so I worked with people who were at the sharp end in high-risk, high-consequence type work. And they were really navigating risk and navigating safety in the real world. And as I was working in this domain, I noticed that there was a delta between what was being said, created safety, and helped risk management and what I was actually seeing with the people that I was working with on the front lines. And so I started to pull the thread on this, and I thought, is work as done really the same as work as written or work as prescribed? And what I found was a whole field of research, a whole field of practice around thinking about safety and risk management in the world of cognitive work. And so this is how people think about risk, how they manage risk, and how do they interpret change and events in the world around them. And so as I started to do my master's degree in human factors and system safety and then later my Ph.D. in cognitive systems engineering, I realized that whether you are on the frontlines of a wildland fire or you're on the frontlines of responding to an incident in the software realm, the ways in which people detect, diagnose, and repair the issues that they're facing are quite similar in terms of the cognitive work. And so when I was starting my Ph.D. work, I was working with Dr. David Woods at the Cognitive Systems Engineering Lab at The Ohio State University. And I came into it, and I was thinking I'm going to work with astronauts, or with fighter pilots, or emergency room doctors, these really exciting domains. And he was like, "We're going to have you work with software engineers." And at first, I really failed to see the connection there, but as I started to learn more about site reliability engineering, about DevOps, about the continuous deployment, continuous integration world, I realized software engineers are really at the forefront of managing critical digital infrastructure. They're keeping up the systems that run society, both for recreation and pleasure in the sense of Netflix, for example, as well as the critical functions within society like our 911 call routing systems, our financial markets. And so the ability to study how software engineers detect outages, manage outages, and work together collaboratively across the team was really giving us a way to study this kind of work that could actually feed back into other types of domains like emergency response, like emergency rooms, and even back to the fighter pilots and astronauts. VICTORIA: Wow, that's so interesting. And so is your research that went into your Ph.D. did that help you help define the product strategy and kind of market fit for what you've been building at Jeli? LAURA: Yeah, absolutely. So Nora Jones, who is the founder and CEO of Jeli, reached out to me at a conference and told me a little bit about what she was thinking about, about how she wanted to support software engineers using a lot of this literature and a lot of the learnings from these other domains to build this product to help support incident management in software engineering. So we base a lot of our thinking around how to help support this cognitive work and how to help resilient performance in these very dynamic, these very changing large scale, you know, distributed software systems on this research, as well as the research that we do with our own users and with our own members from learning from incidents in software engineering Slack community that Nora and several other fairly prominent names within the software community started, Lorin Hochstein, John Allspaw Dr. Richard Cook, Jessica DeVita, Ryan Kitchens, and I may be missing someone else but...and myself, oh, Will Galego as well. Yeah, we based a lot of our understandings, really deep qualitative understandings of what is work like for software engineers when they're, you know, in continuous deployment type environments. And we've translated this into building a product that we think helps but not hinders by getting in the way of engineers while they're under time pressure and there's a lot of uncertainty. And there's often quite a bit of stress involved with responding to incidents. VICTORIA: Right. And you mentioned resilience engineering. And for those who don't know, David Woods, who you worked on with your Ph.D., wrote "Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts." So maybe you could talk a little bit about resilience engineering and what that really means, not just in technology but in the people who were running the tools, right? LAURA: Yeah. So resilience engineering is different from how we think about protecting and defending our software systems. And it's different in the sense that we aren't just thinking about how do we prevent incidents from happening again, like, how do we fix things that have happened to us in the past? But how do we better understand the ways in which our systems operate under a wide variety of conditions? So that includes normal operating conditions as well as abnormal or anomalous operating conditions, such as an incident response. And so resilience engineering was kind of this way of thinking differently about predicting failure, about managing failure, and navigating these kinds of worlds. And one of the fundamental differences about it is it sees people as being the most adaptive component within the system of work. So we can have really good processes and practices around deploying code; we can institute things like cross-checking and peer review of code; we can have really good robust backup and failover systems, but ultimately, it's very likely that in these kinds of complex and adaptive always-changing systems that you're going to encounter problems that you weren't able to anticipate. And so this is where the resilience part comes in because if you're faced with a novel problem, if you're faced with an issue you've never seen before, or a hidden dependency within your system, or an unanticipated failure mode, you have to adapt. You have to be able to take all of the information that's available to you in the moment. You have to interpret that in real-time. You have to think of who else might have skills, knowledge, expertise, access to information, or access to certain kinds of systems or software components. And you have to bring all of those people together in real-time to be able to manage the problem at hand. And so this is really quite a different way of thinking about supporting this work than just let's keep the runbooks updated, and let's make sure that we can write prescriptive processes for everything that we're going to encounter. Because this really is the difference that I saw when I was talking about earlier about that work is done versus work is prescribed. The rules don't cover all of the situations. And so you have to think of how do you help people adapt? How do you help people access information in real-time to be able to handle unforeseen failures? VICTORIA: Right. That makes a lot of sense. It's an interesting evolution of site reliability engineering where you're thinking about the users' experience of your site. It's also thinking about the people who are running your site and what their experience is, and what freedom they have to be able to solve the problems that you wouldn't be able to predict, right? LAURA: Yeah, it's a really good point, actually, because there is sort of this double layer in the product that we are building. So, as you mentioned earlier, we are an incident analysis platform, and so what does that mean? Well, it means that we pull in data whenever there's been an incident, and we help you to look at it a little bit more deeply than you may if you're just following a template and sort of reconstructing a timeline. And so we pull in the actual Slack data that, you know, say, an ops channel or an incident channel that's been spun up following a report of a degraded performance or of an outage. And we look very closely at how did people talk to one another? Who did they bring into the incident? What kinds of things did they think were relevant and important at different points in time? And in doing this, it helps us to understand what information was available to people at different points in time. Because after the incident and after it's been resolved, people often look back and say, "Oh, there's nothing we can learn from that. We figured out what it was." But if we go back and we start looking at how people detected it, how they diagnosed it, who they brought into the event, we can start to unpack these patterns and these ways of understanding how do people work together? What information is useful at different points in time? Which helps us get a deeper understanding of how our systems actually work and how they actually fail. VICTORIA: Right. And I see there are a few different ways the platform does that: there's a narrative builder, a people view, and also a visual timeline. So, do you find that combining all those things together really gives companies a powerful tool to learn from their incidents? LAURA: Yeah. So let me talk a little bit about each of those different components. Our MVP of the product we started out with this understanding of the incident analyst and the incident investigator who, you know, was ready to dive in and ready to understand their incident and apply some qualitative analysis techniques to thinking about their incidents. And what we found was there are a number of these people who are really interested in this deep dive within the software industry. But there's a broader subset of folks that they work with who maybe only do these kinds of incident analysis every once in a while, and they're not as interested in going quite as deep. And so the narrative builder is really this kind of bridge between those two types of users. And what it does is helps construct a timeline which is typically what most companies do to help drive the discussion that they might have in a post-mortem or to drive their kind of findings in their summary report. And it helps them take this closer look at the interactions that happened in that slack transcript and raise questions about what kinds of uncertainties there were, point out who was involved, or interesting aspects of the event at that point in time. And it helps them to summarize what was happening. What did people think was happening at this point in time to create this story about the incident? And the story element is really important because we all learn from stories. It helps bring to life some of the details about what was hard, who was involved, how did they get brought in, what the sources of technical failure were, and whether those were easy or difficult to understand and to repair once the source of the failure was actually understood. And so that narrative builder helps reconstruct this timeline in a much richer way but also do it very efficiently. And as you mentioned, the visual timeline is something that we've created to help that lightweight user or that every once in a while user to go a little bit deeper on their analysis. And how we do that is because it lays out the progression of the event in a way that helps you see, oh, this maybe wasn't straightforward. We didn't detect it in the beginning, and then diagnose it, and then repair it at the end. What happened actually was the detection was intermittent. The signals about what was going wrong was intermittent, and so that was going on in parallel with the diagnosis. The diagnosis took a really long time, and that may have been because we can also see the repair was happening concurrently. And so it starts to show these kinds of characteristics about whether the incident was difficult, whether it was challenging and hard, or whether it was simple and straightforward. This helps lend a bit more depth to metrics like MTTR and TTD by saying, oh, there was a lot more going on in this incident than we initially thought. The last thing that you mentioned was the people view, and so that really sets our product apart from other products in that we look at the sociotechnical system. So it's not just about the software that broke; it is about who was involved in managing that system, in repairing that system, and in communicating about that system outwardly. And so the people view this kind of pulls in some HR data. It helps us to understand who was involved. How long have they been in their role? Were they on-call? Were they not on-call? And other kinds of irrelevant details that show us what was their engagement or their interaction with this event. And so when we start to bring in the socio part of the sociotechnical system, we can identify things like what knowledge do we have within the organization? Is that knowledge well-distributed, or is it just isolated in one or two people? And so those people are constantly getting pulled into incidents when they may be not on-call, which can start to show us whether or not these folks are in danger of burning out or whether their knowledge might need to be transferred more broadly throughout the organization. So this is kind of where the resilience piece comes in because it helps us to distribute knowledge. It helps us to identify who is relevant and useful and how do they partner and collaborate with other people, and their knowledge and skill sets to be able to manage some of the outages that they face? VICTORIA: That's wonderful because one of my follow-up questions would be, as a CEO, as a founder, what kind of insights or choices do you get to make now that you have this insight to help make your team more resilient? [laughs] LAURA: So if this is a manager, or a founder, or a CEO that is looking at their data in Jeli, they can start to understand how to resource their teams more appropriately, as I mentioned, how to spread that knowledge around. They can start to see what parts of their system are creating the most problems or what parts of their system do they have maybe less insight into how it works, how it interacts with other parts of the system, and what this actually means for their ability to meet their SLOs or their SLAs. So it gives you a more in-depth understanding of how your business is actually operating on both the technical side of things, as well as on the people side of things. VICTORIA: That makes a lot of sense. Thank you for that overview of the platform. There's the incident analysis platform, and you also have the bot, the response chatbot. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? LAURA: Yeah, absolutely. We think that incident management should be conducted wherever your work actually takes place, and so for most of our customers and a lot of folks that we know about in the industry, that's Slack. And so, if you are communicating in real-time with your team in Slack, we think that you should stay there. And so, we built this incident management bot that is free and will be free for the lifetime of the product. Because we think that this is really the fundamental basis for helping you manage your incidents more efficiently and more effectively. So it's a pretty lightweight bot. It gives kind of some guardrails or some guidance around collaboration by spinning up a new incident channel, helping you to bring the right kinds of responders into that, helping you to communicate to interested stakeholders by broadcasting to channels they might be in. It kind of nudges you to think about how to communicate about what's happening during different stages of the event progression. And so it's prompting you in a very lightweight way; hey, do you have a status update? Do you have a summary of what the current thinking is? What are the hypotheses about what's going on? Who's conducting what kinds of activities right now? So that if I'm a responder that's coming into the event after 20-30 minutes after it started, I can very quickly come up to speed, understand what's going on, who's doing what, and figure out what's useful for me to do to help step in and not disrupt the incident management that's underway right now. Our users can choose to use the bot independently of the incident analysis platform. But of course, being able to ingest that incident into Jeli it helps you understand who's been involved in the incident, if they've been involved in similar incidents in the past, and helps them start to see some patterns and some themes that emerge over time when you start to look at incidents across the organization. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And I love that it's free and that there's something for every type of organization to take advantage of there. And I wonder if at Jeli you have data about what type of customer is it who'd be targeted or really ideal to take on this kind of platform. LAURA: So most organizations...I was actually recently at SREcon EMEA, and there was a really interesting series of talks; one was SRE for Enterprise, and the next talk was SRE for Startups. And so it was a very thought-provoking discussion around is SRE for everyone, so site reliability engineering? Even smaller teams are starting to have to be responsible for reliability and responsible for running their service. And so we kind of have built our platform thinking about how do we help not just big enterprises or organizations that may have dedicated teams for this but also small startups to learn from their incidents. So internally, we actually call incidents opportunities as in they are learning opportunities for checking out how does your system actually work? How do your people work together? What things were difficult and challenging about the incident? And how do you talk about those things as a team to help create more resilient performance in future? So in terms of an ideal customer, it's really folks that are interested in conducting these sort of lightweight but in-depth looks at how their system actually works on both the people side of things and the technical side of things. Those who we found are most successful with our product are interested in not so much figuring out who did the thing and who can they blame for the incident itself but rather how do they learn from what happened? And would another engineer, or another product owner, another customer service representative, whoever the incident may be sort of focused around, would another person in their shoes have taken the same actions that they took or made the same decisions that they made? Which helps us understand from a systems level how do we repair or how do we adjust the system of work surrounding folks so that they are better supported when they're faced with uncertainty, or with that kind of time pressure, or that ambiguity about what's actually going on? VICTORIA: And I love that you said that because part of the reason [laughs] I invited you on to the podcast is that a lot of companies I have experience with don't think about incidents until it happens to them, and then it can be a scramble. It can impact their customer base. It can stress their team out. But if you go about creating...the term obviously you all use is psychological safety on your team, and maybe you use some of the free tools from Jeli like the Post-Incident Guide and the Incident Analysis 101 blog to set your team up for success from the beginning, then you can increase your customer loyalty and your team loyalty as well to the company. Is that your experience? LAURA: Yeah, absolutely. So one thing that I have learned throughout my career, you know, starting way back in forestry and looking at safety and risk in that domain, was as soon as there is an accident or even a serious near miss, right away, everybody gets sweaty palms. Everybody is concerned about, uh-oh, am I going to get blamed for this? Am I going to get fired? Am I going to get publicly shamed for the decisions that I made when I was in this situation? And what that response, that reaction does is it drives a lot of the communication and a lot of the understanding of the conditions that that person was in. It drives that underground. And it's important to allow people to talk about here's what I was seeing, here's what I was experiencing because, in these kinds of complex systems, information is not readily available to people. The signals are not always coming through loud and clear about what's going on or about what the appropriate actions to take are. Instead, it's messy; it's loud, it's noisy. There are usually multiple different demands on that person's attention and on their time, and they're often managing trade-offs: do I keep the system down so that I can gather more information about what's actually going on, or do I just try and bring it up as quickly as I can so that there's less impact to users? Those kinds of decisions are having to be made under pressure. So when we create these conditions of psychological safety, when we say you know what? This happened. We want to learn from it. We've already made this investment. Richard Cook mentioned in the very first SNAFU Catchers Report, which was a report that came out of Ohio State, that incidents are unplanned investments into understanding how your system works. And so you've already had the incident. You've already paid the price of that downtime or of that outage. So you might as well extract some learning from it so that you can help create a safer and more resilient system in the future. So by helping people to reconstruct what was actually happening in real-time, not what they were retrospectively saying, "Oh, I should have done this," well, you didn't do that. So let's understand why you thought at that moment in time that was the right way to respond because, more than likely, other people in that same position would have made that same choice. And so it helps us to think more broadly about ways that we can support decision-making and sense-making under conditions of stress and uncertainty. And ultimately, that helps your system be more resilient and be more reliable for your customers. VICTORIA: What a great reframing: unplanned investment. [laughs] And if you don't learn from it, then you're going to lose out on what you've already invested that time in resolving it, right? LAURA: Absolutely. MID-ROLL AD: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you're tight on time and investment, which is why we've created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product's next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at: tbot.io/entrepreneurs. VICTORIA: Getting more into that psychological safety and how to create that culture where people feel safe telling about what really happened, but how does that relate to...Jeli says that they are a people software. [laughs] Talk to me more about that. Like, what advice do you give founders and CEOs on how to create that psychological safety which makes them be more resilient in these types of incidents? LAURA: So you mentioned the Howie Guide that we published last year, and this is our guidance around how to do incident analysis, how to help your team start to learn from their incidents, and Howie stands for how we got here. And that's really important, that language because what it says is there's a history that led up to this incident. And most teams, when they've had an outage, they'll kind of look backwards from that outage, maybe an hour, maybe a day, maybe to the last deploy. But they don't think about how the decisions got made to use that piece of software in the first place. They don't think about how did engineers actually get on-boarded to being on-call. They don't necessarily think about what kinds of skills, and knowledge, and expertise when we're hiring a DevOps engineer, and I'm using air quotes here or an SRE. What kinds of skills and knowledge do they actually have? Those are very broad terms. And what it means to be a DevOps engineer or an SRE is quite underspecified. And so the knowledge behind the folks that you might hire into the company is going to necessarily be very diverse. It's going to be partial and incomplete in many ways because not everyone can know everything about the system. And so, we need to have multiple diverse perspectives about how the system works, how our customers use that system, what kinds of pressures and constraints exist within our company that allow us some possibilities over others. We need to bring all of those perspectives together to get a more reflective picture of what was actually happening before this incident took place and how we actually got here. This reframing helps a lot of people disarm that initial defensiveness response or that initial, oh, shoot; I'm going to get in trouble for this kind of response. And it says to them, "Hey, you're a part of this bigger system of work. You are only one piece of this puzzle. And what we want to try and do is understand what was happening within the company, not just what you did, what you said, and what you decided." So once people realize that you're not just trying to find fault or place blame, but you're really trying to understand their work, and you're trying to understand their work with other teams and other vendors, and trying to understand their work relative to the competing demands that were going on, so those are some of the things that help create psychological safety. About ten years ago, John Allspaw and the team at Etsy put out The Etsy Debriefing Facilitation Guide, which also poses a number of questions and helps to frame the post-incident learnings in a way that moves it from the individual and looks more collectively at the company as a whole. And so these things are helpful for founders or for CEOs to help bring forward more information about what's really going on, more information about what are the real risks and threats and opportunities within the company, and gives you an opportunity to step back and do what we call microlearning, which is sharing knowledge about how the system works, sharing understandings of what people think is going on, and what people know about the system. We don't typically talk about those things unless there's a reason to, and incidents kind of give us that reason because they're uncomfortable and they can be painful. They can be very public. They can be very disruptive to what we think about how resilient and reliable we actually are. And so if you can kind of step away from this defensiveness and step away from this need to place blame and instead try and understand the conditions, you will get a lot more learning and a lot more resilience and reliability out of your teams and out of your systems. VICTORIA: That makes sense to me. And I'd like to draw a connection between that and some other things you mentioned with The 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report that highlights that the people who are often responding to those incidents or in that high-stress situation tend to be historically underrepresented or historically excluded groups. And so do you see that having this insight into both who is actually taking on a lot of the work when these incidents happen and creating that psychological safety can make a better environment for diversity, equity, inclusion at a company as well? LAURA: Well, I think anytime you work to establish trust and transparency, and you focus on recognizing the skills that people do have, the knowledge that they do have, and not over assuming that someone knows something or that they have been involved in the discussions that may have been relevant to an incident, anytime you focus on that trust and transparency you are really signaling to people within your organization that you value their contributions and that you recognize that they've come to work and trying to do a good job. But they have multiple competing demands on their attention and on their time. And so we're not making assumptions about people being complacent, or people being reckless or being sloppy in their work. So that creates an environment where people feel more willing to speak up and to talk about some of the challenges that they might face, to talk about the ways in which it's not clear to them how certain parts of the system work or how certain teams actually operate. So you're just opening the channels for communication, which helps to share more knowledge. It helps to share more information about what teams are doing at different points in time. And this helps people to preemptively anticipate how a change that they might be making in their part of the system could be influencing up or downstream teams. And so this helps create more resilience because now you're thinking laterally about your system and about your involvement across teams and across boundary lines. And an example of this is if a marketing team...this is a story that Nora tells quite a bit; if a marketing team is, say, launching a Super Bowl commercial for their company but they don't actually tell the engineers on-call that that is about to happen, you can create all sorts of breakdowns when all of a sudden you have this surge of traffic to your website because people see the Super Bowl commercial and they want to go to the site. And then you have a single person who's trying to respond to that in real-time. So, instead, when you do start thinking about that trust and transparency, you're helping teams to help each other and to think more broadly about how their work is actually impacting other parts of the system. So from a diversity and inclusion and underrepresented groups perspective, this is creating the conditions for more people to be involved, more people to feel like their voice is going to be heard, and that their perspective actually matters. VICTORIA: That sounds really powerful, and I'm glad we were able to touch on that. Shifting gears a little bit, I wanted to talk about two different questions; so one is if you could travel back in time to when Jeli first started, what advice would you give yourself, your past self? LAURA: I would encourage myself to recognize that our ability to experiment is fundamental to our ability to learn. And learning is what helps us to iterate faster. Learning is what helps us to reflect on the tool that we're building or the feature that we're building and what this actually means to our users. I actually copped that advice to myself from CEO Zoran Perkov of the Long-Term Stock Exchange. They launched a whole new stock market during the pandemic with a fully remote team. And I had interviewed him for an article that I wrote about resilient leadership. And he said to me, like, "My job as a CEO is 100% about protecting our ability to experiment as a company because if we stop learning, we're not going to be able to iterate. We're not going to be able to adapt to the changes that we see in the market and in our users." So I think I would tell myself to continually experiment. One of the things that I talk to our customers about a lot because many of them are implementing new incident management programs or they're trying to level up their engineering teams around incident analysis, and I would say, "This doesn't have to be a fully-fleshed out program where you know all of the ways in which this is going to unfold." It's really about trying experiments, conduct some training, start small. Do one incident analysis on a really particularly spicy incident that you may have had or a really challenging incident where a lot of people were surprised by what happened. Bring together that group and say, "Hey, we're going to try something a little bit different here. We'll use some questions from the Howie Guide. We'll use the format and the structure from the Etsy Debriefing Guide. And we're just going to try and learn what we can about this event. We're not going to try and place blame. We're not going to try and generate corrective actions. We just want to see what we can learn from this." Then ask people that were involved, "How did this go? What did we learn from it? What should we do differently next time?" And continually iterate on those small, little experiments so that you can grow your product and grow your team's capacity. I think it took us a little bit of time to figure that out within the organization, but once we did, we were just able to collaborate more effectively work more effectively by integrating some of the feedback that we were getting from our users. And then the last piece of advice that I would give myself is to really invest in cross-discipline coordination and collaboration. Engineers, designers, researchers, CEOs they all have a different view of the product. They all have a different understanding of what the goals and priorities are. And those mental models of the product and of what the right thing to do is are constantly changing. And they all have different language that they use to talk about the product and to talk about their processes for integrating this understanding of the changing conditions and the changing user into the product. And so I would say invest in establishing common ground across the different disciplines within your team to be able to talk about what people are seeing, to be able to stop and identify when we're making assumptions about what other people know or what other people's orientation towards the problem or towards the product are. And spend a little bit of time saying, "When I say this is important, I'm saying it's important because of XYZ, not just this is important." So spending a little bit of time elaborating on what your mental model is and where you're drawing from can help the teams work more effectively together across those disciplines. VICTORIA: That's pretty powerful advice. You're iterating and experimenting at Jeli. What's on the horizon that you are...what new experiments are you excited about? LAURA: One of the things that has been front and center for us since we started is this idea of cross-incident analysis. And so we've kind of built out a number of different features within the product, being able to help tag the incident with the relevant services and technologies that were involved, being able to identify which teams were involved, and also being able to identify different kinds of themes or patterns that emerge from individual incidents. So all of this data that we can get from mostly just from the ingested incident itself or from the incident that you bring into Jeli but also from the analysis that you do on it this helps us start to be able to see across incidents what's happening not just with the technical side of things. So is it always Travis that is causing a problem? Are there components that work together that kind of have these really hidden and strange interdependencies that are really hard for the team to actually cope with? What kinds of themes are emerging across your suite of opportunities, your suite of incidents that you've ingested? Some of the things that we're starting to see from those experiments is an ability to look at where are your knowledge islands within your organization? Do you have an engineer who, if they were to leave, would take the majority of your systems knowledge about your database, or about your users, or about some critical aspect of your system that would disappear with all of that tacit knowledge? Or are there engineers that work really effectively together during really difficult incidents? And so you can start to unpack what are these characteristics of these people, and of these teams, and of these technologies that offer both opportunities or threats to your organization? So basically, what we're doing is we're helping you to see how your system performs under different kinds of conditions, which I think as a safety and risk professional working in a variety of different domains for the last 15 years, I think this is really where the rubber hits the road in helping teams be more reliable, and be more resilient, and more proactive about where investments in maintenance, or training, or headcount are going to have the biggest bang for your buck. VICTORIA: That makes a lot of sense. In my experience, sometimes those decisions are made more on intuition or on limited data so having a more full picture to rely on probably produces better results. [laughs] LAURA: Yeah, and I think that we all want to be data-driven, thinking about not only the quantitative data is how many incidents do we have around certain parts of the system, or certain teams, or certain services? But also, the qualitative side of things is what does this actually mean? And what does this mean to our ability to grow and change over time and to scale? The partnership of that quantitative data and qualitative data means we're being data-driven on a whole other level. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And it seems like we're getting close to the end of our time here. Is there anything else you want to give as a final takeaway to our listeners? LAURA: Yeah. So I think that we are, you know, as a domain, as a field, software engineering is increasingly becoming responsible for not only critical infrastructure within society, but we have a responsibility to our users and to each other within our companies to help make work better, help make our services more reliable and more resilient over time. And there's a variety of lessons that we can learn from other domains. As I mentioned before, aviation, healthcare, nuclear power all of those kinds of domains have been thinking about supporting cognitive work and supporting frontline operators. And we can learn from this history and this literature that exists out there. There is a GitHub repo that Lorin Hochstein has curated with a number of other folks with the industry that points to some of these resources. And as well, we'll be hosting the first Learning From Incidents in Software Engineering Conference in Denver in February, February 15 and 16th. And one feature of this conference that I'm super excited about is affectionately called CasesConf. And it is going to be an opportunity for software engineers from a variety of organizations to tell real stories about incidents that they had, how they handled them, what was challenging, what went surprisingly well, and just what is actually going on within their organizations. And this is kind of a new thing for the software industry to be talking very publicly about failures and sharing the messy details of our incidents. This won't be a recorded part of the conference. It is going to be conducted under the Chatham House Rule, which is participants who are in the room while these stories are being told can share some of the stories but not any identifying details about the company or the engineers that were involved. And so this kind of real-world situations helps us to, as I talked about before, with that psychological safety, helps us to say this is the reality of operating complex systems. They're going to fail. We're going to have to learn from them. And the more that we can talk at an industry level about what's going on and about what kinds of things are creating problems or opportunities for each other, the more we're going to be able to lift the bar for the industry as a whole. So you can check out register.learningfromincidents.io for more information about the conference. And we can link Lorin's resilience engineering GitHub repo in the notes as well. VICTORIA: Wonderful. Well, I was looking for an excuse to come to Denver in February anyways. LAURA: We would love to have ya. VICTORIA: Thank you. And thank you so much for taking time to share with us today, Laura. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Laura Maguire.

Today's episode of The Skylark Bell was made in collaboration with The Haunted UK podcast. It is a little different than what you've become used to at The Skylark Bell; it is recorded in Audio Drama format as a phone call between two characters, and features an introduction and voice acting by the host of The Haunted UK podcast. Fair warning, this episode may also be slightly scarier than a typical episode of The Skylark Bell.Story and Script by The Haunted UKFind The Haunted UK podcast's 2021 Halloween Special here *We suggest listening to this FIRST*: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0bvnvqkUCIxmFA2DWuomp2?si=f4LImIeoTJ6zKeMJa6WUlgFind The Haunted UK podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hauntedukpodcast/The Skylark Bell is brought to you by: Phaeton Starling Publishing and Things with Wings Productions.The Skylark Bell official website - http://www.theskylarkbell.comThe Skylark Bell on Instagram: @theskylarkbellAuthor/Producer: Melissa Oliveri - http://www.melissaoliveri.comJoin Melissa's Patreon for early access to podcast episodes, music downloads, and more: http://www.patreon.com/melissaoliveriMelissa on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@melissaoliveriAll music by Cannelle: http://www.cannellemusic.comCannelle on Instagram: @cannelle.musicOfficial Merch Shops: http://www.melissaoliveri.com/storeFULL TRANSCRIPT:Things with Wings productions presents – A Special episode of The Skylark Bell, in collaboration with The Haunted UK Podcast. I'm your host, Melissa Oliveri.Before you begin this episode, I strongly suggest you hit pause, and go visit The Haunted UK podcast's 2021 Halloween Special episode, the link is in the show notes. It is a fantastic episode retelling a story that will give you chills. Then, come back here for an epilogue of sorts... Now, today's episode of The Skylark Bell is a little different than what you're used to, as it is recorded in Audio Drama format as a phone call between two characters, and features an introduction and voice acting by the host of The Haunted UK. This episode may also be slightly scarier than a typical episode of The Skylark Bell.Alright, you've been warned! Now go grab a blanket and a warm drink, and let's get started.Halloween 2021 saw the Haunted UK Podcast publish a bonus episode which told the unbelievable story of an author and his terrifying experience with something completely out of the ordinary. Going by the name of Robert Crawford, this individual tried to gain some sort of normality back into his life...but those experiences on an isolated farm in England's Peak District would continue to haunt him every minute of every day.Little by little Robert's life began to fall apart because of the impact of what he'd witnessed, and also the fact that Gwen and Bernie knew where he lived. He had no idea what had happened to both of them after he left the farm on that final fateful night.... did they both get out of the tunnels under the barn... or did they die down there?? Every day was a waiting game.... would someone come looking for him to make sure that he never spoke of what he saw?Just how long had the existence of this bloodline of creatures been kept secret, and how many actually knew about what was going on at the farm. Maybe it was paranoia, but since the events witnessed by Robert Crawford had happened, he began to record his phone calls and document any events which he felt were strange.From his diary notes he mentioned a number of times that he felt that he was being followed, but never actually saw anyone. He also says that his house phone would ring a number of times every day, but nobody would speak... there would just be light breathing. Was this someone from the farm, or was it someone else entirely? Crawford would have his phone disconnected and would then rely completely on his iPhone, which few people had the number for.What you are about to hear is a telephone conversation which allegedly took place a few months ago. The audio file for this conversation was on a USB drive which had been posted in a padded envelope. We've taken the liberty of re-recording this conversation to protect those involved and to also keep the real name of the farm under wraps. There was also a written note enclosed which simply read "Seek out the Book of Aldaraia".After a little bit of digging regarding the book mentioned in the note, the Book of Aldaraia is also known as the Book of Soyga....or The Book That Kills. It's not known who actually wrote this book, but it was part of the extensive library of John Dee until his death in 1608. Legend has it that a medium by the name of Edward Kelley was used by John Dee to help translate the book, which was mostly in Latin, in 1582.Kelley offered John Dee the chance to speak to the Archangel Uriel to help him decode the most mysterious sections of the book, which are around 40,000 seemingly randomly distributed letters. Not satisfied with the secrets of magic, divination, spells, incantations, and details regarding demonology already discovered within the book, John Dee wanted the key to unlock the code within these characters. When he asked Kelley to instruct the Archangel Uriel to give up the code he refused, telling him that only the Archangel Michael could truly decode and translate the full potential of the book.... and that wasn't something that was going to happen. The contents were just too dangerous.So, what mysterious powers lay behind these layers of random letters? It's still unknown today, but John Dee devoted his entire life trying to crack this code and upon his death in 1608, the book went missing... until 1994. Where had it been? What was it used for, and what did it have to do with what went on at the farm? The book resides in the British Library to this day.Here is the phone conversation, make of it what you will...(iPhone rings and Robert Crawford answers.)Robert: Hello (short period of silence)...Hello...Laura:  Is this Robert Crawford??Robert: Ermm..who's asking?Laura:  My name is Laura Arden....I work at the Natural History Museum in London...in the Department of Medieval and Latter Antiquities...so sorry to call so late, but I was wondering if you could help me out with something?Robert: Sorry, but how did you get this number? Are you American??Laura: Canadian actually....ummm...well, a little research and access to some databases and I managed to find you. You're a really difficult guy to track down considering you're an author.Robert: Well, I prefer to keep as much of my life as private as possible. What is it you wanted again?Laura: I just needed to ask you a few questions about something that I think you may be able to help with......you can look me up online at the museum if you like....Robert: No, no,...there's no need for that. I just don't get many phone calls nowadays, that's all.Laura: So....do you think you could help me out??Robert: ..Sure, yes, I'll try my best....This isn't about a book signing is it??Laura:  No, no, no....although I have read a couple of your books, but no....I was wondering if you'd be kind enough to help me get to the bottom of something that I found while I was on vacation...it may have something to do with you.Robert: I suppose so...but I'm not sure how much help I'm going to be, but fire awayLaura:  Ok...bit of a strange question for starters, but do you have any interest in the occult...witchcraft...black magic...things like that?Robert: Well if you say you've read a few of my books then you'll know that I sometimes dabble in those topics....look, what's this about exactly, and how can this have anything to do with me??Laura:  Well it's not just about something that I found, but more about the location it was found in....and I think you can give me some valuable information about this location.Robert: Ok, look it's late and I don't want to come across as being rude, but can you just get to the point please??Laura:  Ok...fair enough.....Have you ever been to Manor Ridge Farm Mr Crawford??(a long silence)Laura:  Hello??...Mr Crawford...Hello??...are you still there??Robert: Yeah..I'm still here....how do you know that name??Laura:  Have you been there...or not Mr Crawford?Robert: Look, there's nothing I can help you with Laura...it's been lovely talking to you but I have things to...(Laura cuts in)Laura: (more forcefully now) HAVE YOU BEEN THERE OR NOT???Robert: ....yes...I was there around a year ago.Laura:  Good...now we're getting somewhere. So what circumstance led you to Manor Ridge Farm??Robert: In all honesty...I had writers block while I was working my next book. I needed a change of scenery...something to snap me back in to focus. I found a cottage for rent on the farm and hired it. The different views, the atmosphere, the clean air...it was supposed to help but....well...it didn't.Laura:  So what happened??Robert: Hold on...how do you even know I was there? Are you working with the police or something?Laura:  Police???..no..it's..it's nothing like that. As I said..I was on vacation and found something.Robert: So why don't you enlighten me as to what you've found...and why were YOU up at that farm??Laura:  I was on a week long hiking vacation in the Peak District. I planned to get as many of the trails under my belt as possible...same as you, take in the views, absorb the atmosphere...get away from the city. I'm not really someone who enjoys being in other people's back pockets if you know what I mean? I prefer my own company at times and this vacation was one that I was going to go on alone.Robert: So you came across the farm as a place to stay??Laura:  Yes...but not because I'd organised it. Weather had turned bad, and it was getting late. I was literally in the middle of nowhere in the pouring rain and it was getting dark. I saw a farmhouse with lights on in the distance so I headed towards it. The owners told me that they didn't take in visitors...don't get me wrong, they weren't nasty...far from it, they were really helpful. They told me that Manor Ridge Farm had a cottage that they hired out, I should head there and see if they could help, so I did.Robert: So you make your way to the farm....then what?Laura:  Well, I got to the main house and I saw a cottage opposite a barn further up the driveway, so, assuming that this was the place, I knocked on the door and was greeted by a woman...I'd say she was in her fifties...maybe sixties...had a patch covering one eye. She introduced herself as Gwen and seemed friendly enough. When I asked about the cottage she was more than happy to help, but something seemed off....I didn't know what it was at the time...but something just didn't seem right.Robert: Was there anyone else in the Farm House...a man maybe...or outside??Laura:  I never saw anyone other than Gwen...anyway, she said that the cottage hadn't been let out for a while so was in a bit of a mess, but I was welcome to stay the night if I wanted. Well, there was no way that I was going to stay out in the rain overnight, so I jumped at the chance. She gave me the key and walked up to the cottage with me and quickly showed me around...that's when she started to make me feel uncomfortable.Robert: In what way? What did she do?Laura:  She just suddenly said that she needed to go, and I was to stay in the cottage and not come out until morning. She said that many people had gone missing in the area because they didn't know the hills and the weather...it was just really creepy. Anyway, she just took off towards the barn and I thought that was strange because the weather was getting really bad...why not go back to the house?Robert: You didn't go back out there did you??Laura:  No, not right away...I wanted to get out of my wet clothes, get changed and get warm. I had a few chocolate bars in my pack, but was really hungry so I started to hunt around to see if there were any cans of soup or something like that to eat...but there wasn't anything....so that's when I decided to go down to the farm house.Robert: I can't believe you went back out there...especially down to the house. If you've managed to track me down and link me to that place then surely you know something of what went on there...if not...why are you calling?Laura:  I'm getting to that....so...I went down to the main house, and by this time it was dark, pouring with rain and the wind was really getting strong. As I got to the front door, I noticed it was wide open...so I stepped inside and called out for Gwen...but there was no answer...and then the smell hit me...a kind of blood-like metallic smell. I went into the kitchen and....well it looked like something had been torn to pieces. It was definitely an animal...but that was all I could make out. I began to feel sick and knew that I had to get out of there as quickly as possible...and that's when I saw the book on the floor.Robert: Book!!! What book?? You hung around because of a book??Laura:  This wasn't any ordinary book Robert...from the markings on the front of the leather cover I knew it was old...so I grabbed it and ran for the front door. I took a look around, didn't see anyone so then ran for the cottage and locked myself inside.Robert: Why didn't you phone the police?? Why didn't you.....no signal....you didn't have a phone signal did you?Laura:  No...my phone was the first thing I checked when I'd locked the front door. I was trapped there until the morning and there was no way that I was going back down to the main house after what I'd seen.Robert: Well at least you were safe for the time being...when I was there I wasn't so lucky. It was Bernie who came for me with a....well...that's in the past now. So what was so special about this book?Laura:  At the Museum we have archives of extremely old, rare and precious books...bibles, authors first volumes, writings from kings and queens of the past...and books about the occult...the supernatural...black magic...witchcraft. Some of these books go back to at least the 1500's and their contents are still considered by some to be highly dangerous...but this book was more than just a book...it was a diary. A diary of generations of individuals who had been blessed by a specific bloodline.Robert: Blessed!!! I don't think you realise exactly what you were dealing with there Laura. What I saw at that farm challenged every single thing that I thought was pure and simple fiction...what I encountered, firsthand, wasn't something that was blessed...it was something that every man, woman and child should only encounter in their nightmares...but there it was...right in front of me...and it was being protected...coverted...aloud to exist.Laura:  But yours was an accidental encounter Robert....if you hadn't discovered that cave system then none of this would have happened...(Robert cuts in)Robert: How do you know about the cave??? Who told you about that?? Is my name in that book??Laura:  Yes, it is, everything that happened over the time period that you were at the farm was recorded, first by Bernie, then by Gwen. I'm assuming that you know what happened to Bernie after you left them both locked up in the tunnels under the barn?Robert: You make this sound like all of this was intentional...as if I wanted this to happen. Do you know what this whole experience did to me? It left me alone...I lost my partner...my publishing deal...my confidence...my life. I hardly leave the house, never socialise. I'll tell you what I think happened to Bernie shall I? Bernie was murdered by whatever that thing was that Gwen turned into...but if I say what I know it is...then it makes it real...and it can't be. It just can't be. When I was taken down into the tunnels by Bernie, at gunpoint might I add, I was never supposed to come back out...it was only down to chance and luck that I made it out alive....so...I ask you again...why do you need my help?Laura:  I'm so sorry Robert....I never meant to make you feel that way. What you went through was horrific, but here we both are...armed with the experiences and facts that prove that what was only considered to be something from folklore...is in fact real...I can't quite believe that I'm actually saying this myself...but it's true. If I were to go to my head of department with this book and this story.... they'd have me committed...but you've seen these things...you're the only one who knows what Gwen really is....a Werewolf...a Lycanthrope...a shapeshifter.Robert: STOP!!! Stop....please....I can't help you....I've tried desperately for the last 12 months to try and forget what happened but it's impossible. If I had the chance I'd go back to the farm and simply kill Gwen and put an end to all of it....but I can't...I can't go back there.Laura:  Listen...I get it...I really do, but there are far more people at risk now. As mad as all of this sounds it was Bernie that kept the lid on all of this by knowing when to take Gwen down to the tunnels to lock her away when the condition started to take over. Reading in the book, Bernie had documented that Gwen had escaped a number of times and attacked animals on the hills...she almost made it to the village one time....(Robert Interupts)Robert: I know!!!...Bernie explained all of this. He told me that it was him that used to take her down there to feed...to isolate her away from others...to protect her. But Bernie isn't there anymore...so who's locking her away now when she needs to feed...who's protecting her now?? Why haven't we had headlines in the newspapers of some rampant wild animal attacking people on the hills and in the villages?Laura:  Because she's doing it herself. Gwen had written entries into the book stating that after she had woken from the last transformation in the caves, she found that she'd killed Bernie....ripped him apart. She managed to find her way out of the tunnels via the cave system that you found the entrance to up on the hillside. She had to wait until darkness to make her way back to the house where she cleaned herself up, opened the trap door in the barn, and took care of Bernie's body. Then she waited...waited to see if you, the police, or both would turn up...but nothing.Robert: Who was I supposed to tell? Who was going to believe a story like that...you?? It's only after you've read that book that you finally realise what's actually out there...but all you're basing your opinion on is my testimony and what's written down. All of this could be lie...you haven't actually seen it...have you?Laura:  .....yes....I have.Robert: But you said that you locked yourself away in the cottage after you came from the house...did you go back out??Laura:  Yes...I had to....Robert: What do you mean you had to??? What happened??Laura:  I'd made sure that everything was locked up tight after what I'd seen in the farmhouse, and I'd bedded down in the living room on the couch. I grabbed the book I'd found and started to leaf through it.... I couldn't believe what I was reading, there were details of ancient ceremonies, symbols, potions and treatments that had been passed down from generation to generation over the span of hundreds and hundreds of years.... all with the same one goal: to rid the beast from within, to cure the condition. It seems that no one actually knows where this bloodline started, but in a passage from the late 1900's written by a man named Harold Thomas Anderson, he mentions a cave system in Romania where he was due to travel to find the "Primal". Whether this was a person or a creature isn't confirmed....and there are no other entries from this man in the book, but he was definitely part of the bloodline. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. So, I'm lying on the couch when I begin to hear something moving from outside of the rear of the cottage, as if someone was bumping into stuff and knocking it over.Robert: Did you see what what it was??Laura:  Not at first no. I ran upstairs and looked out of one of the rear bedroom windows, but I couldn't see anything. I initially put it down to the wind and rain, until I heard a loud screaming sound. This wasn't the sound a human would make, it sounded animalistic...guttural...as if something was in terrible pain. It sounded as if it was coming from outside the front of the cottage this time, so I ran across the landing and into the master bedroom and peered out of the window....and I saw it....it was Gwen....she was naked, crawling across the floor of the barn trying to get to an opening in the floor....but as I watched I could see hair growing, slowly covering her body...joints bending in ways that seemed impossible....more screams pierced the air as the process continued....then it happened.Robert: What happened??Laura:  She saw me, she looked straight at me.Robert: Oh my god....what did you do??Laura: At first, I was completely frozen to the spot. Both of our stares fixed at one another; mine terrified, hers furious, full of rage. Her eyes looked black, and her face was... it was changing... changing right in front of me. She then rose herself up onto all fours and started to walk towards the cottage. I've never felt fear like that in my life, watching something like that slowly walking over to the place that you hope will keep you safe, but knowing that it will never be a match for it.Robert: Jesus Laura....I can remember knives being in the kitchen. Did you manage to get hold of something to try and defend yourself with?Laura:  Yes...one of the knives. I figured that she was either going to try and get through the front or back door, so I ran downstairs and pushed the large wooden dresser across the back door to try and buy me some time...then I went to the front door and looked out of the window. I couldn't see her, she was out there somewhere but I couldn't see her. Then something hit the back door and I heard glass shatter. I quickly closed the living room door and pushed the couch up against it, not that it would have provided much resistance against her, but it went quiet again.I stood up against the front door with tears starting to stream down my face. I was mentally broken....I couldn't believe the situation that I'd found myself in, and I couldn't see how I was going to get myself out of it. I couldn't call my mom and dad to tell them that I loved them...to hear their voices...to have that comfort...I was going to die here...and there wasn't anything that anyone could do to help me.Suddenly there was a huge bang at the front door, so powerful that the door frame moved. I pushed back at the door screaming for her to go away. Another bang came and it was clear that the door wasn't going to last long. I pushed as hard as I could and gripped the knife, readying myself to use it if I had to. Then another huge blow came against the door and it finally buckled. An arm, covered in grey/black hair came around the door and grabbed my wrist and pulled my arm outside....then I felt searing pain as teeth pierced my skin and bit down hard into my arm. I screamed again louder, and pulled as hard as I could to get my arm back inside the door but it was no use....this thing was so strong. A clawed hand reached inside the door against the frame to try and push the door open. I immediately raised the knife using my other arm and plunged it into the hand.I pulled it back out to strike again but a huge scream came from her and she let go of my arm and the door closed with me falling against it and onto the floor. I sat there, back up against the door waiting for her to smash into it again and finish the job off...but there was nothing. I plucked up the courage to look out of the window but she'd vanished....I had no idea where she'd gone.Robert: How bad was your arm??Laura:  There were four deep pucture wounds and a few shallower ones. It looked worse than it actually was with all of the blood, but I needed to clean it up. I waited for what seemed like hours, but when I was pretty sure that she wasn't coming back I got hold of my back pack and my first aid kit. I used a towel from the kitchen to take care of most of the blood and then pushed the sofa back against the door. It was just a matter of a couple of hours before daylight and then I'd be gone...or so I thought.Robert: What do you mean "so you thought"....she didn't come back did she??Laura:  No...well...not exactly. I watched the sunlight fill the cottage as morning broke and I wasn't going to hang around, so I grabbed my stuff, packed my bag and got ready to get the hell out. I figured I'd go out the back way and get across the fields as quickly as I could and try to make it to a road. Hopefully I could hitchhike to a town or village from there.....but then there was a knock at the front door....it was Gwen. She asked me to open the door. She assured me that nothing would happen....but also that we needed to talk....urgently.Robert: What did you do?? Did you let her in??Laura:  I didn't have a choice. What was I going to do....stay in the cottage for the rest of my life? I opened the door, slowly at first, then wider. She could see that I had the knife in my hand and I told her that I would use again if I had to. She said there was no need....she wouldn't harm me. She reached out her hand....it was bandaged up now...and she asked for the book back. I handed it over and that's when she began to speak. She explained that the book had details of potions which could delay the effects of the condition. When her husband was around she never needed them, because he would take care of her when the urges came.It was her dog that she had killed in the farmhouse when I found all of the blood in the kitchen with the book. The hunger, as she called it, became so overwhelming that she couldn't control it and the remedy that she'd mixed was in the tunnels under the barn...that's where she was trying to get to when we saw each other. For years her and Bernie searched for a cure to stop her condition, and while she never told me how she'd become infected, she did tell me that the bloodlines stretched around the world....and all of the infected are looking for that illusive cure....and now so am I.Robert: What do you mean?? Why would you be helping her find a cure after what she did to you??Laura:  Because her bite has now infected me....and I now need to find that cure....and you're going to help me.....and Gwen....Robert: What....are you mad?? Why the hell am I going to put myself at risk yet again to help you or Gwen!! She almost killed me, and you're asking me to.....I'm sorry Laura, but even though none of what happened was your fault, you're both on your own... (silence)... Laura... Laura are you still there? Do you understand what I'm saying to you???Laura:  It's a nice part of the world you live in Robert....not many houses around....nice and quiet....Robert: What are you talking about?? How do you know where I live....are you threatening me?? I can leave here right now and you'll never find me.Laura:  I don't think so Mr Crawford....why don't you take a look outside your window....you see that silver car across your driveway? Well I've been here since this call began, and I'm not leaving until you make a decision...the right decision. And also, don't think about trying to leave using the backdoor....because there's someone you may well remember who'll be waiting for you in your garden. The hunger is getting strong Mr Crawford....and whilst Gwen and myself have a remedy that we can drink to delay the inevitable...we don't have to drink it...and you're the only one who knows what we are....and if we have to permanently silence you then we will.Robert: If you try to get in here I'll call the police.Laura:  The Police!!! What will they do to help you? You'll be dead before they even arrive. So what it's to be Robert?? Are coming back to the farm to take care of us.....or are we coming into your house to take care of you?? You've got 2 minutes to decide...and if you hang up we'll be inside before you know it. All of your questions will be answered in time, and I give you my word that you'll be safe...but you need to make the right decision...so...tick-tock, tick-tock....time is running out....To be continued.....Thank you so much for listening.  Join me next week for the last Skylark Special episode of the year, a touching story called Elliot Under Glass, and please be sure to subscribe to The Haunted UK podcast if you haven't already, the content and sound quality are unbeatable.If you enjoyed this story, please consider leaving a rating and a review, it's quick and free, and incredibly helpful in giving the podcast visibility so others can find and enjoy it.If you'd like to support my work, you can subscribe to Patreon or Ko-Fi for exclusive content and advance access to podcast episodes. You can also follow me on social media so we can stay in touch, all necessary links are in my bio.Once again, thank you for listening, On behalf of myself and The Haunted UK podcast, we wish you happy... or spooky if that's your thing... holidays.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/theskylarkbell/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

I'm super excited to share this conversation with Anjali Prasertong - writer and registered dietitian, focused on food systems and racial equity. In this episode we talk about Anjali's path towards anti-racism work, why anti-racism work is so badly needed in the field of nutrition and dietetics, and how you can begin to start noticing where white supremacy culture is showing up for you, and how to find places to start unlearning white supremacy, especially if you work in nutrition, but even if you don't this is a really valuable conversation and I hope you learn a lot from it. Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribe to Anjali's newsletter hereFollow her work on Instagram hereFollow Laura on Instagram here Here's the transcript in full:Anjali Prasertong: And that was a really just clarifying moment for me where, you know, we're talking about all these systems in the world that we live in, that uphold white supremacy. And I just sat there and realised like, Oh, like I'm falling out of love with dietetics because I've never heard anyone talk about racism and the effect that white supremacy has on nutrition when we all know it has a huge impact. And it's, it's complicit, it's part of the system. And kind of in that moment I was like, I just wanna, like racial equity and anti-racism in food is what I'm interested in and it just doesn't feel like anything else I could do would be as impactful. So that, that was sort of the turning point for me professionally.INTRO:Laura: Hey, and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack podcast where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet registered nutritionist, and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter.Today I'm talking to Anjali Prasertong. Anjali is a writer and registered dietitian focused on food systems and racial equity. She's originally from Los Angeles where she was a contributing editor for the award-winning food website, the Kitchen, before moving to New Orleans, Louisiana, and getting her master's of public health degree. In New Orleans, she led an innovative city-funded corner store program that increased fresh food access in low-income neighbourhoods and worked with food entrepreneurs looking to operationalise racial equity in their businesses.She currently lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband and her two children. Her newsletter, anti-racist dietitian, which by the way, hard recommend, is about the intersection of nutrition and racial equity covering history, food systems, land, water, politics, basically everything that lies beyond the individual choices we make about the food that we eat.Anjali writes about what she wishes she had learned as a nutrition student, and she's creating a space that centres honesty, vulnerability, and the lived experiences of people of colour. In this episode, we talk about Anjali's path towards anti-racism work, why anti-racism work is so badly needed in the field of nutrition and dietetics, and how you can begin to start noticing where white supremacy culture is showing up for you and how to find places to start unlearning white supremacy, especially if you work in nutrition.But even if you don't, this is a really valuable conversation and I hope you learn a lot. And while you're here, just a reminder that if you're not a fully paid-up member of the, Can I have another snack community then you're missing out on so many great benefits like our Thursday discussion threads, Snacky Bits, where we're having smart conversations away from the noise and the fat-phobic trolls of social media.You'll also get access to my Dear Laura column where this month I was answering a question from a stepparent about parenting a fat child. Plus you'll get access to my anti-parenting, my anti Diet parenting, not Anti Parenting downloads, bonus podcast episodes and loads more. It's five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year, and your support allows me to pay a podcast editor, a copy editor for my long-form essays, and it pays for the hours and hours of research and other labour that is required to produce thoughtful writing. If you need a comp subscription for any reason, then please just email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk with snacks in the email header and we will hook you up. No questions asked. And one last favour to ask. If you're listening to this in Apple Podcasts, please go and leave a rating and review. We haven't had any reviews yet, which is a total bummer because it really helps more people find this podcast episode and hopefully feel heard and supported by these conversations. All right, team. Here's Anjali.MAIN EPISODE:Laura: So Anjali, I'd love to know who or what you are nourishing right now.Anjali: So I'm nourishing, um, my family who I'm always nourishing, uh, which is my husband Rob, and we have an eight-year-old son and a two-year-old son. But I'm also lately just been really nourishing myself. I have had a pretty big professional change in the last year and within the last two years, a lot of big life changes and it feels like the first time in a long time that I can just sort of enjoy the world around me. I mean, I think a lot of people are probably feeling similarly. And I've really been sort of getting back in touch with creativity, which used to be a big part of my life, um, and just trying to find ways to nurture that, whether it's going to museums or just spending time in nature, reading all sorts of different kinds of books and just yeah, just kind of reconnecting with that side of the world.Laura: Mmmh. That comes through in your newsletter in your Friday post where you're talking about just things that have been bringing you joy lately. And I've so appreciated getting those posts in my inbox because it's a reminder to take stock and notice the things that are bringing us joy. And yeah, as you're sort of alluding to the world has felt really heavy the past two years. I mean, it has been a heavy place, and I think we do need those reminders to connect with joy because it also, you know when you are doing, particularly if you're doing work that is rooted in social justice in some way, it's very easy to get burnt out otherwise.Anjali: Definitely. Yeah, I think. The Friday Joy pieces were sort of like, Oh, you know, I wanna have something else and, and what can be something that I don't need to do a lot of research for. But for me it's, it's been kind of a grounding practice to really think about like, what is bringing me joy, what's keeping me nourished And, I've just, in the last couple years, been able, it feels like I've been able to bring a lot of things into alignment with my life as far as being able to live my values.And, this last piece of just getting back into writing again, which is something that I had done for my entire life, but had sort of stepped away from when I was doing my studies, just getting back to writing is really, I think it feels like just completing the circle for me and, bringing me a lot of happiness and fulfilment that I feel I've been missing for a long time.Laura: I love the expression that you used there, which was kind of bringing things into alignment with your values, and I wondered if you could speak more to that idea.Anjali: Sure. So I lived in, so I'm originally from Southern California, and then I lived in New Orleans for seven years, which was an incredible experience, but it was also just a very shocking experience for this sort of escaping the California bubble and moving to the deep South for, I mean, many reasons it was shocking. But, It didn't, you know, there would be small things that would kind of, I would complain about while living there. Like, why don't I, why can't I recycle glass? Just this feels so strange to just throw this bottle into the trash or, you know, why is the school system all charter schools?So I'm trying to send my kindergartner to a school in a way that's not going to perpetuate these inequities of the educational system and it's almost impossible.Laura: Sorry to interrupt you, but we don't have charter schools here, so would you mind explaining what they are and like why that's an issue?Anjali: Sure. So charter schools are basically, for-profit schools. Usually, they have some sort of, like alternative focus or something that, um, the founders believe that the public school is not offering to students. And sometimes that can be a great fit for people. They do receive public money. So the problem with charter schools, so the problem that some people see is that it funnels children away from the local public schools.And, you know, in the United States, there's not many places where, especially these days where people of different socioeconomic status, different races, different cultures all come together in one place. So, a public school is a great site for being able to interact with all different sorts of people.So in some places, you know, charter schools are funnelling kids away and that's harming, at least I think the fabric, the social fabric of the country. And in New Orleans, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, basically the entire school system became only charter schools. So that means in New Orleans we lived down the street from a public charter school.And there was no guarantee that we would be able to get into that school. There was no guarantee that we would get into any school that was what we preferred. So, just inequitable in so many ways. One of them being like, how do you find out what school to go to? Probably through your networks. Who's in your network? Probably people like you. So it, it really creates this hierarchy of good schools which are disproportionately white because most public schools in New Orleans are almost like 90% or more black students. And then creates a system where, you know, students whose parents don't have time to go to all these open houses and decide what school they wanna send their child to can end up going to these schools that are close to failing.So it, it's just very complicated, frustrating, and inequitable system and really tests your resolve as someone who wants to live by your values of like, okay. I want to, you know, it's a, it's a lottery in the end, so you put your choices and then if, depending on where you're chosen in the lottery, you get placed in a school.So it was just a question of, all right, if he doesn't get into these schools that are, you know, in my top choices, will I send him to like a, a school that's rated a c that is, sort of close to, unable to meet the needs of its students. So we didn't, I wasn't put in that situation.He ended up getting into one of our choices, but, it, it's, yeah, so, so just that whole system and various issues with living in a deep red state in the United States. Just constantly was testing my values of like, how far am I willing to go? How much am I willing to sort of inconvenience myself or push myself to live what I believe?So when we moved to Denver, it was just like a great relief. I just felt like I had been so tired from fighting against these wins for so long that it just felt good to be like, Oh, I can just, just live my life in alignment with what I believe to be true. So, we actually, my son does go to the, the local public school now, and it's amazing.It's such a, a great community and just all these small things that have really brought me a lot of fulfilment in my life. Laura: And the other thing that you touched on was a career change. And I'm wondering if that, if you were talking about the, the sort of path that you've been on the, towards becoming an anti-racist dietician, which I know has, sort of, has seeds sown in your experiences in New Orleans. I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about that.Anjali: Sure. So, you know, moving to New Orleans was just a huge wake-up call for me, because I had been in a dietetics program, in near LA and just met amazing students. Had teachers from all over the world just bringing really diverse perspectives and never really felt the, the whiteness of the dietetics field while I was there.And also just very open to kind of alternative, you know, it's California, like alternative, cutting edge ways of approaching nutrition. And then moving to Louisiana, I had to switch to a state school that was kind of in the middle of the Cajun Bayou. So that was a huge culture shock for me.And then also just the approach to nutrition dietetics was completely different, where it was just very much by the book, this is what you're supposed to do, we're just kind of gonna scoff at any sort of alternative viewpoints.Laura: Sorry, can I just before we, before we keep going on, because I think this is important, and again, this is where like a lot of my listeners are based in the UK and Australia, weirdly, um, and, they may not have that context of what the Cajun Bayou is. Like, I know, cuz I lived in Texas for five years, so I get, I know where you're coming from, but I wonder if you could just maybe tell us a little bit more about what exactly you mean by that.Anjali: Sure. So it is like a really, in the Cajun Bayou is a really interesting place because it is so uniquely American and there's no nowhere else like it in the world. So it's sort of the area of Louisiana, close to the Gulf of Mexico. And so, it, you know, has always been a place of very waterways and very like, rich with life.Like there's a, you know, a lot of indigenous cultures that have long history there. And, so it's just an interesting place in that it combines, you know, the, those sort of the indigenous history, and also the French fur trappers that came to that area, like early in the history of the United States, because Louisiana was for a long time, like a French colony. So there's a lot of that influence. And so it's just a very unique place. So if you think about, you know, like a crawfish boil or like alligators, uh, what's the Disney movie Princess and the Frog, Like that sort of, um, swampy, the sort of Cajun accents, a lot of spicy food, um, that, that life is the Cajun Bayou.And it's interesting because it is quite rural. And so people actually do have a very close connection to their ancestor's foodways that I think is really interesting, you know, that, like people are still eating things that their great-great-great grandparents were eating, and the like recipes passed down for generations.So it does have that old, old history.Laura: Yeah. Like it's not uncommon for people to eat things like squirrels right?Anjali: Hunting's very big. Yeah. Every, a lot of people actually live next to like a canal or some other waterway. So it's really common for kids to be like driving boats from a, a young age and, living on houseboats and things like that.Laura: Well, okay, sorry for the, the little detour, but I just thought it would be helpful.Anjali: Yeah. Let me know if there's anything that's too American.Laura: And, and, and I'm wondering as well, and I don't know if this is gonna be important context for the rest of your story, but, and this again may be, uh, an assumption that I have, but I have this sense that, and especially cuz you said that it's quite rural as well, that there's a lot of poverty there. Is that fair to say?Anjali: Yeah, so that was also just a real wake-up call because, I mean, I could just feel it in going from one state school, like the state school in California to a state school in Louisiana. It was just a feeling of like, Oh, this is what happens when you disinvest from education systems and like public service and other, systems to kind of uplift the citizens of a state. I mean, halfway through my semester at school, they were like, well, the, um, we're kind of outta money so we might have to cancel all classes for next semester. So luckily that didn't happen. But, um, there is definitely a lot of poverty, a lot of, a lot of students that I went to school with, they were first-generation college students, which I had experienced in California, but often in that case it would be, you know, like a student whose family had come from Mexico or something like that. At the school in Louisiana, I met a lot of students where their fathers had like, only had, uh, eighth-grade education, had never even gone to high school. And the, a lot of them were like shrimp farmers and things like that. So, um, it was definitely much less educated as far as like receiving formal education than I had experienced before.So that was part of my sort of culture shock of like, Oh, I can't make any assumptions about people's lives, their family's lives, what they believe, what their experiences have been.Laura: So where did you go from there? Like, it sounds like you were in, in a program, and maybe it'd be helpful to explain what that program was and what you were doing there.Anjali: Sure. So I was sort of finishing up for, in order to become a dietician in the US you have to take these specific set of classes that meet sort of, you know, you studied, uh, counselling people, you studied all these things. So I, I had started that in California and had to finish it in Louisiana because, um, we moved rather suddenly due to my husband's job.And, so that, that's what I was studying, but it, uh, was gonna require two years. So after one year, I was like, I can't just do this , because it, I was. I just knew I needed some more stimulation and, and, um, I knew I had wanted to pursue my master's degree. So, I was living in New Orleans and they, they have a great program at Tulane University.And I should say, So the Bayou is, there is like a, a pretty significant black population, and also people that have indigenous, uh, ancestry. But New Orleans itself is a majority black city, so it's about 60% black residents. And, so that was also quite different for me just coming from LA which I didn't realise until later and sort of reflecting on, you know, where I had grown up.But that's really the results of like redlining and segregation where the black communities in Los Angeles are very much clustered in certain parts of the city. And so I grew up in a very racially diverse suburb, but there were not a lot of black people there because, you know, those, once you establish those lines, like they kind of persist over the generations. So New Orleans is not only a majority black city, it's also a city that's really founded on black culture. And there's an artist that had a t-shirt that was like, Everything you love about New Orleans comes from black people. And that's basically true of just all these, you know, the food, the music, all these cultural events are all rooted in, the history of black people in New Orleans. So I, you know, went to Tulane and, and they did a pretty good job of, sort of talking about, I mean, they did an excellent job of talking about the disparities between black and white people in Louisiana, in the south, in New Orleans, and, a pretty good job of, of just sort of, allowing everyone to have a perspective and, and kind of giving you the full picture. There are a lot of tensions between Tulane and the surrounding black communities. Um, just historical. Um, so that's a whole other story. But, just being in the world of public health was really eye-opening for me as far as like, oh, okay, we're not blaming people for the food choices that they make and trying to shame them. Instead, we're talking about these systemic issues of why are these the only foods they're being allowed to choose from? And, you know, what are the upstream causes of these diet-related diseases? So, so that was just felt like a revelation to me to be able to talk about those types of things.And through the program, um, I was able to do a, uh, undoing racism training with the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond.And that was a really just clarifying moment for me where, you know, we're talking about all these systems in the world that we live in, that uphold white supremacy. And I just sat there and realized like, Oh, like I'm falling out of love with dietetics because I've never heard anyone talk about racism and the effect that white supremacy has on nutrition when we all know it has a huge impact. And it's, it's complicit, it's part of the system. And kind of in that moment I was like, I just wanna, like racial equity and anti-racism in food is what I'm interested in and it just doesn't feel like anything else I could do would be as impactful. So that, that was sort of the turning point for me professionally.Laura: So it sounds as though, if I'm understanding you correctly, that what was being named in your public health classes around structural and social determinants of health and inequality was not been given the same air time in your nutrition and dietetics classes. So there was like this huge disconnect where in, and I'm putting words into your mouth here, so correct me if I'm wrong, but in, in nutrition and dietetics, it's very focused on the individual and, and we're counselling a single person on what they should or shouldn't eat without the broader context of those social and structural determinants that could be informing things like the amount of money that they have to afford food, the, their access to that food, you know, physical access because of where they're located, which as you've just said could be through generations of.I can't remember the exact terms that you, you used, there were specific terms, so maybe you want to jump in there. The, what was it you said?Anjali: For which part?Laura: I think basically the idea that that, like of segregation essentiallyAnjali: Oh, ohLaura: Yeah. Physical segregation.Anjali: Yeah. I mean, New Orleans has, you can look up maps. Um, I think the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation did a big project where you can actually map how people's like lifespan, expected lifespan changes by neighbourhood in New Orleans. And the neighbourhoods with the highest lifespans are the ones that are disproportionately white. And the ones with the lowest are the ones that are disproportionately black. And it's not, it's not like a, it's like 30 years difference. Like, it's not a small amount of time. And so I feel, I felt that in not addressing these issues, I mean, I still feel this way, I felt this way during my entire dietetic internship.It's like, if you don't name this, which I did not hear it named in my programs in Louisiana, then the conclusion that people might draw is that, oh, it's, it's their fault.Like there's a reason, you know, it's their fault that they're living thirty- Yes. That they're, they're, well, they're not exercising, you know, they're just, they're eating this horrible food.And that was just infuriating to me. I, I just think it's so, I think it's unfair for everyone. I think obviously it's unfair to shame people. And I mean, I saw people openly, I saw black patients openly be shamed and treated differently. But then it's also not fair to the, the dietetic interns and the students who are trying to understand the world that they're about to enter, and you're not giving them all the information that they need. You're not giving them the tools to process it. So it just feels like everybody loses.Laura: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I wanted to ask you about is, you know, through your newsletter and on Instagram, you've taken this position of the anti-racist dietician and I'm, I'm really curious if you could help us understand a little bit more about what that actually means. What is the process towards becoming anti-racist in the context of nutrition and dietetics?Anjali: Yeah. Well first I wanna say I chose anti-racist because to me it felt like the antithesis of what you think of when you think of a dietician. And I wanted it to be a word that was a little bit challenging because I think especially in an overwhelmingly white field like dietetics, it's easy to hide behind words like diversity, equity, inclusion, like things that are more easy to swallow.Laura: They're palatable. Mm-hmm. Anjali: Yes. whereas anti-racist, it's like, no, this is what we're talking about. We're talking about racism and we're all part of it. So that was kind of why I went in that direction with the name And, Sorry, can you repeat the question?Laura: Yeah, no, I, I guess what I'm, I'm curious about, and sorry if I might have worded it kind of weirdly, but I suppose what I'm asking about what, what does it mean to be anti-racist in the context of nutrition and dietetics and, you know, that could be for you personally, but also kind of more broadly speaking as well.Anjali: Yeah. So I, for me, being anti-racist is not only taking a personal stance of I am dedicated to sort of rooting out racism and calling it out when I see it. I am dedicated to the lifelong practice of looking, just always trying to improve the way that I treat people, my understanding of other people's lives and, um, just being vulnerable, admitting mistakes and learning from them.I think that that is the only way to be, uh, truly anti-racist is to admit, like, you're going to make mistakes. You're going to learn things along the way. And, you have to be okay with that vulnerability and maybe even like shame and humiliation about how you made someone else feel. And I think that, I wish that we could bring this into the dietetics education of just that viewpoint.Like, um, getting comfortable with that. Honestly, I think it starts with being in a group of people who aren't like you. And so you can't be assured that what you say is going to be acceptable and understandable by everyone. You need to be challenged by people who are bringing other viewpoints to the table and who feel comfortable, and safe enough to call you on that.And it's when, if the room is 83% white as it is in dietetics in the us, no person of colour or very few will feel comfortable stepping up and speaking up because it is not a safe space for them.Laura: Yeah, so I think it's, you know, safe to say that nutrition and dietetics has a white supremacy problem, both in terms of the makeup and representation of people who actually become dieticians. And we were kind of speaking off mic a little bit before about just the, the barriers of entry to accessing nutrition and dietetics as a profession.But then I think there are also the structural things as well that are upheld by institutions that, that hold power within the profession. So in the US it's the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. In the UK it's the Association for Nutrition in the British Dietetic Association. And I think they form some like mega conglomerate of nutrition associations as well, which is also like really weird power hoarding.But, yeah, so I, I'm wondering, you know, for maybe any, Nutrition students or actual practicing professionals who are newer to this work and, and don't really fully understand like the, the extent of the problem besides just, you know, representation in invert commas. It maybe it would be helpful for us to give some examples of, you know, where it maybe shows up in our counselling and our recommendations and maybe some of the structural side of things as well.Anjali: Sure. Um, well, I can also talk a little bit about I, what I see as the missed opportunities that if, so first, I mean, the first just huge missed opportunity is to just admit mistakes and say we're sorry. You know, dietetics was a field that was established to kind of give white women scientific legitimacy and like many fields established to empower white women, it, it's did that by disempowering women and men of colour. And so I think it starts with that, just admitting, you know, we have made mistakes along the way, but we want to, to do better. You can't really heal and change until you take that first step. And in not taking that step and in sort of doubling down on No, we're, we're making the changes that need to be made, just don't ask too much about what we're doing. They're just missing out on an opportunity to really serve, really like serve dieticians better by giving them the resources they need to more effectively and empathetically work with clients of colour and, and communities of colour, you know, immigrant communities. I was talking to a friend and just talking about like, how amazing would it be if, if we could turn to our professional organization for resources around, you know, like culturally appropriate recommended food lists for different diet-related diseases for, for patients of all different cultures. They have the money to do that, you know, they have money to do so many things, and it seems like that is just a baseline, just very baseline what, what dieticians need in order to better serve the people that they work with.Laura: Just to kind of like, just to go back a, a tiny second, I, I think what we're saying is that the, the roots of the nutrition and dietetic profession were sort of established in the image of white supremacy, I think is maybe one, one way to, to think about it. And for context, for people who, who maybe aren't familiar, didactics is an evolution of home economics as a profession. And at the time of its creation, it was considered to be this like super empowering scientific evolution of that profession. But what Anjali, you are saying is that yes, and it only liberated and empowered white women.And as a result, ended up creating this deep inequity in, not just in the people who could access the profession, but also in the way that we practice nutrition and dietetics. Because it's then not reflective and not inclusive of the folks that we are going, that we are, you know, ostensibly trying to help.Anjali: Yeah. Because if it's only white women deciding what healthy food is, and then, and those white women are the ones that the government are like, oh, they are the ones that are following the latest scientific research and they're the experts. So we're gonna ask them what is healthy food. And now the government is using their ideas around healthy food to inform so many different policies from what we serve in schools, to what's on My Plate, which is what we, we use to kind of talk about the ideal healthy diet.And in just kind of, you know, we talked a little bit about the characteristics earlier off mic, talked about some of the characteristics of white supremacy that show up in dietetics, and there are so many, but, um, just this is making me think about the worship of the written word.And now that, now that it's all about, like, well we're scientific, so you have to take us seriously because we're a scientific profession now. So if it hasn't been published in a peer-reviewed journal, is it true? But so many cultures, you know, nutrition knowledge is passed down. Through oral, through, you know, people who maybe don't have a scientific degree, but have been taking care of members of their community for their entire lives, like at these other alternative ways of passing down important nutrition know knowledge.But because it is not written down in a venue that is deemed, you know, authoritative, then it doesn't, it's not true. It doesn't matter.Laura: Oh, so many things that I just wanna kind of like touch on, you know, that, that you've mentioned there, cuz this is like a really important aspect of what we're talking about. So first of all, you mentioned white supremacy culture and I don't think a lot of people are aware that the, the characteristics of white supremacy culture have been kind of, not that this is like the be all and end almost, you know, comprehensive, there's lots of ways that white supremacy culture shows up. But what we are talking about specifically when we say the characteristics of white supremacy culture is from a piece by Kenneth Jones and Tema Oak Hunt from the Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change text, which I'll link to in the show notes.And I think it's a really important read for people who are like, aren't familiar with what we're talking about when we talk about the characteristics of white supremacy culture. So that's the first thing that I wanted to say. And then, yeah, this, the second thing around what you're naming is epistemologies or, or ways of knowing, that, that are outside the realms of science.And you know, in nutrition and dietetics, we are told, we are taught that science is the be all and end all. And if there isn't any evidence to support a recommendation, then we can't use it. And what ends up happening is, I mean so many things, but we end up weaponising science to gaslight recommendations that, or medicines that, have been passed down through different cultures for, you know, eons and eons. And then I think about what happens there in terms of, of a really creating a really imbalanced power dynamic as well between the, the clinician, the practitioner and the client and, and how that really renders people powerless in that interaction.Anjali: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm also, when, when you're talking about it now, I'm just thinking about it, you know, if you are a nutrition student or an intern coming from a culture that does have these long cultural practices that sort of disagree with, with what your textbook is saying, just that feeling of disconnection and pain that, that causes of, okay well I either have to sort of turn my back on my family, my friends, my ancestors, or be weak in front of my professors and my fellow interns. So we're just putting, we're putting people from other cultures that want to enter the field into a really painful place, I think.Laura: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm wondering, I think that was a helpful way to kind of illustrate what some of you know, why this is something that we need to address in the field of nutrition, not just in field of nutrition and dietetics, but everywhere, but, you know, using the lens of nutrition and dietetics. I wondered, you know, if we could talk maybe a little bit more about something you touched on before, which was about nutrition recommendations in things like, you know, the dietary guidelines that were recommended and something that you wrote about recently, which I'll link to as well, is the recommendation that, you know, everyone should have milk. And this is a very specifically US example, but I think it's a really good one, a really important one. Would you mind sharing a little bit more about, you know, how the, the unbearable whiteness of milk?Anjali: Okay. . Yeah, so, I don't know how it is in the UK but um, the My Plate, which sort of is the consumer-facing ideal plate for people, has a serving of dairy on this side. And It all struck me as interesting, even as a student or just like confusing because, I think something like 60% of the world, 65% of the world actually can't digest lactose as adults.So because of this recommendation for dairy in schools in the US, students have to take a carton of milk with their lunch unless they have a written note from a doctor exempting them, in which case they can take something like soy milk.Laura: So, can I just clarify something? And again, like my, I haven't worked or studied in the US for a long time, but my understanding was that, and I think this is why it's particularly pernicious, is that if you are on, So there's like different tiers of school lunches in the US, there's kids who just pay full price because they can afford it. And so this program is kind of means based. And for, poorer kids, they can either get a reduced cost or free lunch. However, if you're, if you're just buying your lunch, you can just, I think you can just get whatever you want off of the line. But if you are, if you qualify for a reduced or free lunch, you have to take certain components. So you have to take like a fruit, a vegetable, the whole grain, the protein, and this carton of milk. Is that, is that still theAnjali: Thank you for clarifying. So the reason why it needs to be on the tray is so the school can get reimbursed by the federal government for that meal. So it's most relevant for students who are getting the free or reduced-price lunch, because meals...Laura: Sorry, I was just gonna say, those are disproportionately the people who can't drink the milk. Anjali: Oh, yeah, so it's mostly, it varies by like racial background, but the major, like vast majority of people of colour do not have the ability to digest lactose in adulthood. So it doesn't quite, you know, this whole program was set up in the 1940s, so in a lot of ways it doesn't really make sense anymore, just because, you know, that was like a different time when the country had different needs of not only needing to support the dairy system, but also, you know, kids were suffering more from like under nutrition and milk was a very easy way to get a lot of calories, fat, vitamins, things like that. So it's just a different time and place and it's also why are we operating... in the article I talk about if, if, you know, lactose intolerance, only affected 5% of the population, which is the case if you have Northern European ancestry, then it would make sense that it's on those who can't digest lactose to get the note from the doctor exempt, you know, get their alternative drink.But we're operating from a place where public schools in the US are disproportionate and recipients of free and reduced lunch in particular, are disproportionately black and brown students who disproportionately cannot digest lactose. But we aren't starting with their reality as the defaults.Instead, it's sort of the reality of the white students who can drink lactose and, and they're the starting place. Because, you know, if you are studying any sort of like health behaviour you know, anytime you erect a barrier to get to the sort of outcome you're looking for, it's going to, people are gonna drop off. So if it's you have to go, well, first you have to have health insurance and have a doctor for your child. Already a barrier. Then you have to take time off work to bring your child to the doctor in order to get the, get the diagnosis of lactose intolerance and get the note to give to your school. So just all these different barriers that are erected, that are making it harder for families of colour to just get a drink that's not going to cause their child's digestive distress. It just seems really, I don't know, kind of,Laura: Regressive and backwards and yeah, like harmful, violent.Anjali: Mm-hmm.Laura: I mean, and like, I think we could spend all day talking about how this shows up. You know, I'm thinking about it in the, the context of parenting for a second as well, and how these nutrition recommendations kind of filter through to the public, but in a way that becomes like, again, like slow violence where, I'm thinking of it in the context of infant feeding, for example, and I'm not sure how it is in the US now, but in the UK there's this like real push, especially from white nutritionists on Instagram, that you should be pushing green foods first for your child to help them develop a taste for savoury foods.And, there are these like really wild, kind of like two-week feeding schedules with like different savoury tastes for your infant that you need to start them on. You're like nodding, like, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Right? And like I had, you know, I have friends who, we have kids around the same age and they, when they came to weaning, they were coming to me being like really stressed out about this green foods first thing, because that's not the foods, those aren't the foods that they eat culturally. And they were really concerned that they were doing harm or, or like causing this irreparable damage to their child by not giving them these foods and just causing so much stress and anxiety.So it's just like another way that this, this shows up in the world of parenting. And yeah, like I said, we could probably sit and think of examples all day long, I just thought that was a pertinent one as well.Anjali: Yeah. I just have no more patience for making people feel bad about their choices based on these white-centered principles of what is healthy. And it, it's just really frustrating. I think living in a place like New Orleans that has a food culture that is really strong and vibrant and really different from, pretty much every recommendation that is, is given by any sort of nutrition body, I really, I just couldn't stomach telling people, you know, Oh, that dish your grandmother has been making for your entire life that her grandmother made for her entire life, it's just, you just shouldn't be eating it.Laura: Or here's a way to healthify it and completely likeAnjali: Oh yes, Um, and yeah, uh, it was just embarrassing and sad. I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't, I couldn't stomach it anymore.Laura: So, I'm just wondering for students or professionals who are, are listening to this or reading the transcript and resonating with what you're saying, who are feeling that discomfort in their body when they're, you know, their preceptors in their internship are like, You have to recommend brown rice when like this, the person in front of them, all, all their family knows is, is white rice. And that's just like one tiny example obviously, but one of many, yeah, that they're feeling that discomfort and that disconnect and they, they want to kind of, I suppose, interrogate this a little bit more and, and start to make changes in their practice and, and, and have the tools, I suppose to create change more systemically. Aside from your substack, which I will obviously link to, what are the, the resources and, and the places that you are looking to, to help with this work?Anjali: So, I would say just in, just to find a safe person or place, in person to discuss those things. It's really hard and potentially dangerous to your internship to speak up in the moment because there is that power, um, differential between preceptors and the interns. But I also think it's really important to be able to process it. I was lucky in my internship, and I, I don't know if this is always the case, but in, in most of my rotations I had a partner and my car kind of became, or her car were like the places where we just deconstructed what we had seen. You know? Did that give you a weird feeling? Me too. And just being able to talk about that and, you know, if you can't find that in person, then just talking to someone on the phone, just anyone where you can just decompress, get it out and, and walk through it, because I think it is, it just kind of like rocks you from the inside to witness these moments that you know are wrong and harmful and to not be able to speak about them. And then honestly, I, it's kind of been frustrating because I set up my Instagram in 2020 when it was like, Oh, I think dieticians are ready to talk about this.Had to step away because like you had a, had a, an infant and just couldn't, couldn't keep up with it. And came back to it earlier this year to to take a deep dive with my newsletter and was like, Wait, nothing has happened. No other avenues have opened up. I'm in a couple Facebook groups, one called hashtag inclusive dietetics that was, I think, established for some sort of research study, and it's not that active. But that's like one small place where, you know, for example, a student recently posted about a problematic assignment that she got, she or, or they. And then that's kind of it.So honestly, with, with my newsletter, I hope to build up a community where people can gather, that do wanna talk about these issues because I, I myself, I'm kind of like want to create the thing that I have been unable to find. Outside of nutrition, dietetics, I think there are a lot of, places to gather, you know, I find a lot of affinity in my public health groups because racism as a public health problem is something that we study. And I am involved with a couple local food policy councils. That's something I wanna write about, um, upcoming is just like how much opportunity there is to both like support change in the food system through a local food policy council, but also just meet like-minded people.And I very rarely meet dieticians who are part of these councils. But you know, each, each one has a racial equity subcommittee that I'm also a part of. So it's just a place to be able to talk through some of these issues. And a lot of times they can be very localised to where you live. Like what is the history of your town, what kinds of racist systems were established over the years and how can you dismantle them?And to be honest, like it's much easier to pass policy change at the local level and can, can make a huge impact, people that live there. So personally, that's where I find that kind of support.Laura: Yeah. So it's, it sounds like what has been really important to you is, is kind of getting stuck in, into that, like, into the, the work as it were, like doing the work, getting involved at a local kind of policy level, organisational level. And what I might do as well is just link in the show notes to a couple of like books and resources and things if people want to just kind of maybe, you know, and I'm speaking from my experience here, like I don't always feel like I have the language and the tools and that's also white supremacy culture showing like it doesn't have to be perfect, but if you want to have kind of a baseline understanding of like, you know, some of the issues, some of the ways that white supremacy, you know, shows up, then there are definitely a couple of books that might be able to help you with that as you're trying to find your feet. And I'm speaking specifically to white people here. And I think the other thing that I wanted to say is, you know, white nutritionists, dietitians, white students, it's on you to be doing the work that might not be safe for our colleagues of colour whether that's in professional organisations, whether that's in university settings. Like I, I get, like, I get that it's also, you know, when it's your degree, it's, it can also be not safe to, to say anything but where you have some power to push back, please use that, you know, and keep yourself safe also.Anjali: I think it's so important that everyone do some sort of anti-racism training that forces you to confront your own internalised issues. And I, you know, I think reading books and educating yourself is so important, but there's no replacement for that experience of, especially if you can be in a room or in a Zoom space with people from other backgrounds from you and make mistakes. I think that's such an important experience to have, just to know that I can make mistakes and I will bounce back from it. Also, maybe if you're not used to, I'm shouldn't be speaking right now. Like, this isn't my place to speak. No one needs to know my opinion on this right now. And I feel those spaces are places where you will get called out on that. And I think that's a good experience. So I went through the Undergoing Racism Training, through the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond. Highly recommend that. I believe it's a three day training if you can get your employer to pay for anything like that. I think this type of training is more helpful than say, like an anti-bias training because really talking about the roots of things, after I did the training, I basically felt like sick, like I felt like I had a cold for like three days afterwards because I just really had to go deep into myself, both my own internalised issues about others, and then also realising like how white supremacy had affected me. So I think it's important, you know, BIPOC people, white people, everyone should do that type of really challenging work least once in your life.Laura: Yeah. And, I think what you're naming there is so important. It's something that with, that folks with a lot of privilege especially are not at all used to, which is sitting with discomfort. And I think that's what your invitation is really, is to sit in the discomfort and that's where deep learning and deep growth happens. You know, we can intellectualise things all we want by reading it in a book, but the actual work is in sitting in that discomfort and you're only gonna be put in that discomfort if you're, you know, in a room full of people that will challenge you and, will push you.So yeah, thank you for, for naming that. And, I will link to that training in the show notes. And also I'll include some trainings for UK-based folk as well because there are some great people in the UK doing this work in earlier settings in, you know, other organisational settings. So yeah, please check those out. Before we like wrap up, was there anything else that like, felt really important to say.Anjali: Um, just that, you know, I think that people do have the ability and the opportunity to make change in their individual workplaces. Even if, you know that isn't coming from the higher ups in the nutrition and dietetics world. You can, you can change, you know, how you interact with clients to make it less you know, rooted in paternalism or, do more to create true deep community engagement with the communities that you, you work with.And, until, until we do get that wide-scale change, I think, like, don't feel, don't feel disempowered, don't feel crushed by how much needs to get done. I think there are small changes that people can make, just by changing their mindset and, and taking that step to serve people better.Laura: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. I think that's, it can feel, yeah, when you are trying to tackle a huge system that can feel really disempowering. So just thinking about, okay, what are the, what are the little things that I can do to make someone I'm working with feel more comfortable, feel more held and seen and, yeah, not lectured to.At the end of every episode we share something that we've been snacking on. So it can be a literal snack or it can be just something that you recommend and want to share with the audience. So, do you mind sharing what you are snacking on right now?Anjali: Yeah, so my mine is sort of a like a life practice and then with an actual physical product to recommend. So life practice is that on Fridays, in my household we started doing screen-free 24 hours. So starting on Friday when my kids get home from school. And that's been really great just in general cuz I have an eight-year-old and he was getting towards the, like I just wanna be on my iPad all the time. It was really difficult at first. My husband described it as watching train spotting like the first night that he couldn't have his screen after school he was just sort of lying in the snow.We've been doing this for about nine months now. But now, you know, everyone's sort of in a rhythm and after, our two-year-old goes to bed, my husband, eight-year-old, and I play a board game together. That's sort of our wind down thing on Fridays. So, that's been really nice because I love board games, played a lot of them with my family growing up and, my husband and I are kind of into a lot of like indie board games. So one that we've been playing all at lately is called Wingspan and it's very peaceful and soothing. You just have these different habitats and you populate them with birds. So the cards are like really beautiful, these watercolour paintings of birds with different facts about them. It has a lot of components that I won't go into, but it's just, it's very fun. Like you do different rounds, there's these little egg sort of game pieces that are really satisfying in their colour. You know, like I feel like the feeling of a game piece is like 25% of the experience of playing a game. So yeah, it's just a fun, interesting, sort of unique game that is a really good time for the whole family. So we've been into that.Laura: That's really cute. I need to check that out. My husband loves an obscure board game. Our like cupboards are full of things that we can never play because our toddler does not sleep.Anjali: Aw.Laura: I'm also jealous of, of the fact that your child like, goes to bed time that allows you to still have somewhat of an evening.Okay. So my, my snack, if you will, is actually a meal. This is a recipe that has been kind of having like a bit of a moment on Instagram, so people might have seen it, but it's Ruby Tandoh's Chilli Crisp Gnocchi. I don't know if you are familiar with Ruby's work, but like, she just released her cookbook, Cook As You Are, in the US and like she shared this recipe and it's just kind of like taken on a life of its own it seems. But it's the simplest, easiest, quickest like week-time dinner that has like five ingredients, literally takes 15 minutes and is so delicious.So, you basically just cook the gnocchi, then you melt some butter in a fry pan, toss in the chilli crisp oil, add in some capers, and then like coat the gnocchi with that mixture and then add some parmesan and it sounds bonkers, but it's so delicious and I..Anjali: ThatLaura: I keep a couple of gnocchi aside for my two-year-old who probably won't eat anyway because he is two, and like just put some like, but like melted butter and cheese on that for him.And then I just like stir fry some veggies quickly on the side and that's like it, and it's so delicious and so easy. So I'll link to the recipe for that. Her cookbook is really good as well. It's all about like really quick and accessible meals that don't have a ton of ingredients and it's like split into sections of like, I'm really hungry and I wanna eat right now, versus like recipes where you have a bit more time to invest in them. So yeah, that's my thing.Anjali, can you please share where we can find you on the internet?Anjali: Sure. So, um, you. Read and subscribe to my Substack at anjaliruth.substack.com. Um, my first name is A-N-J-A-L-I. My middle name is Ruth, named after my great aunt. And then my Instagram is @antiracistrd - those are the two best ways. Yeah.Laura: Yeah, I'll link to all of that in the show notes. And also like some of the, the pieces that we mentioned you've talked about like sort of your path to becoming anti-racist dietician and also like that whole milk fiasco. So I'll link to both of those. Anjali, it was really great to actually be able to talk to you in real life as opposed to just messaging on the internet. So thank you for being here and I'm excited for everyone to go check out your newsletter cause it really is great.Anjali: Thanks so much, Laura.OUTRO:Laura Thomas: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Can I Have Another Snack? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review in your podcast player and head over to laurathomas.substack.com for the full transcript of this conversation, plus links we discussed in the episode and how you can find out more about this week's guest. While you're over there, consider signing up for either a free or paid subscription Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter, where I'm exploring topics around bodies, identity and appetite, especially as it relates to parenting. Also, it's totally cool if you're not a parent, you're welcome too. We're building a really awesome community of cool, creative and smart people who are committed to ending the tyranny of body shame and intergenerational transmission of disordered eating. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. And lastly Fiona Bray keeps me on track and makes sure this episode gets out every week. This episode wouldn't be possible without your support. So thank you for being here and valuing my work and I'll catch you next week. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laurathomas.substack.com/subscribe

Today's conversation with Laura Hatley about using business as a form of activism fits under the P of Partnership. Laura Hartley is an activist, writer and founder of Public LovEd (pronounced Public Love Ed), an online school empowering changemakers & forward-thinking entrepreneurs to radically reimagine the world, creating the conditions for social healing and collective thriving. Laura's work centres around the three areas of transforming self, business and changemaking. She runs programs on healing burnout culture, business beyond capitalism & the inner work of dismantling capitalism and supremacy culture. Laura lives and works on Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia but can frequently be found travelling the world. In this episode, you'll learn about business as a form of activism as well as...   The problem with capitalism If not this, then what? How can this new form of business look like? Laura's framework, The Business of Revolution Why business is political The difference between human-centered and life-centered How to approach the transition out of capitalism The importance of the inner work And so much more Laura's Resources   Laura's Website The Public Love Project Podcast Download a free guide to Business Beyond Capitalism Connect with Laura on: LinkedIn Facebook Instagram   Sarah's Resources Watch this episode on Youtube (FREE) Sarah's One Page Marketing Plan (FREE) Sarah Suggests Newsletter (FREE) The Humane Business Manifesto (FREE) Gentle Confidence Mini-Course Marketing Like We're Human - Sarah's book The Humane Marketing Circle Authentic & Fair Pricing Mini-Course Podcast Show Notes We use Descript to edit our episodes and it's fantastic! Email Sarah at sarah@sarahsantacroce.com Thanks for listening!   After you listen, check out Humane Business Manifesto, an invitation to belong to a movement of people who do business the humane and gentle way and disrupt the current marketing paradigm. You can download it for free at this page. There's no opt-in. Just an instant download. Are you enjoying the podcast?  The Humane Marketing show is listener-supported—I'd love for you to become an active supporter of the show and join the Humane Marketing Circle. You will be invited to a private monthly Q&A call with me and fellow Humane Marketers -  a safe zone to hang out with like-minded conscious entrepreneurs and help each other build our business and grow our impact.  — I'd love for you to join us! Learn more at humane.marketing/circle Don't forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes or on Android to get notified for all my future shows and why not sign up for my weekly(ish) "Sarah Suggests Saturdays", a round-up of best practices, tools I use, books I read, podcasts, and other resources. Raise your hand and join the Humane Business Revolution. Warmly, Sarah Imperfect Transcript of the show We use and love Descript to edit our podcast and provide this free transcript of the episode. And yes, that's an affiliate link. Sarah: [00:00:00] [00:01:00] [00:02:00] [00:03:00] [00:04:00] Hi, Laura. It's so good to speak to you today. I'm so excited for our conversation.  Laura: Oh, thank you. So am I, I'm so excited to be here, so thank you for having me on the show.  Sarah: Yeah, thanks. It's, it's good. We've had a couple of exchanges already, first on LinkedIn where we met, and then I attended your workshop, and then we're like, Oh, we gotta talk about this more. So now you're here and yeah, super excited to talk about business as a form of activism. [00:05:00] So as you know, Kind of organizing the conversations on this podcast around the seven Ps of humane marketing. And I was thinking, well, where does does fit? And to me it really kind of fit under the p for partnership. , in a way we're almost like partnering with activism. We're also partnering, you know, with our clients, but. In a bigger way, we're partnering kind of with our future and, you know, the future paradigm of business. So that's where I felt like it fits best. What do you think about that? Pick? How, how does that sound? Laura: I actually think it's perfect. You know, it is, It's partnering with our future. It's partnering with life, with a different world, with the vision that we want to see born. So I think partnership was the perfect p to put this.  Sarah: Nice. Great. All right, so, we're talking about business as activism. I know, you also talk a lot about, you know, the, postcapitalism world, right? Like that's, that's really what [00:06:00] we're. Talking about here is like, there's something wrong with the way we do business now. And let's face it, the way we do business now is after, is according to this model of capitalism. And, and I just kind of touch upon it in, in my, marketing, like we're human book. I don't go too much into it, but I would love for you, because you talk about this a lot, I would love for you to kind of tell us, well, you know, capitalism maybe served us for a certain amount of time. Now there's definitely something probably wrong with that model, so take us through that. What's broken with capitalism the way we, , use it now.  Laura: Oh gosh. I mean so many things, but I think to start, you know, this answer, it's really I wanna establish a business and capitalism and not the same thing. They're actually two very different things. You know, business is just a form of trade of goods or services, and it's existed for. Thousands of years, right? [00:07:00] It predated capitalism and it will exist after capitalism as well. So business itself is a bit different. Capitalism is the way that we organize wealth and commerce and you know, we tend to think that it's the, just the way the world works or it's the best system we've come up with. But capitalism's only about 500 years. And there are kind of three fundamental problems with capitalism. One is it's based on the pursuit of infinite growth on a finite planet. It's why it is the leading driver of the climate crisis. It's why we have this problem with extractivism with biodiversity loss. The second is the artificial production of scarcity. So capitalism is reliant on scarcity. It is scarcity that drives the growth. And you see that scarcity in a lot of different ways. You see it in marketing, You see it in planned obsolescence where we design products not to last. They're deliberately designed to die in order for us to buy more, and therefore we need to extract more, to have [00:08:00] more. And of course the third problem is the devaluation of complex living systems to lifeless resources. You know, forests, oceans, these beautiful, incredible natural world that we live in. Only has value when we can extract something from it. Mm-hmm. , even if that is tourism, it's still a way that humans can use it and therefore it has value as opposed to having an intrinsic right to have value in and of itself. So these three kind of principles of pursuit of infinite growth, you know, this artificial requirement and production of scar. You know, we're not talking real scarcity here. We're saying scarcity is embedded into the system in order for it to perpetuate. And the devaluation of complex living systems, the devaluation of our living world, is really what leads us to the crises that we see today. So what leads to the climate crisis? The loss of wildlife that we face, and in other forms as well, it perpetuates racial injustice and it perpetuates increasing wealth inequity. [00:09:00] Hmm. So capitalism. Has served us to a point, but we really need to look to go beyond it if we want to create a more beautiful world and if we wanna solve some of the challenges that we're facing as a speciess. Sarah: Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. There's so much in here. sounds like, okay, 1, 2, 3, but. Yeah, there is a lot, , in here that obviously, like you say, 500 years ago, those didn't seem like problems, right? We had no idea that eventually this growth, , oriented attitude would lead to certain problems. We were just like, Yeah. Oblivious to what was coming. But I would say probably even 50 years ago now, we were already, or at least a scientific, , kind of people, they were seeing that, okay, that this is gonna end so, , and, and yet not much was done. But as a marketer and as a kind of marketing [00:10:00] oriented podcast, obviously what really, , speaks to me and, and you know, that, that we have so much things that are aligned There is the second one, The scarcity cuz , yeah, that's, that's the one where, you know, I was also seeing, oh my God, there's something just so wrong with marketing and already we were starting to talk about using business for good and yet, , We didn't look at the marketing piece, that if we do business for good, we can't also still use, , you know, the marketing with the scarcity approach. We still, we also need to change that conversation. So, , yeah, for, for me, , when I started looking at, you know, a marketing revolution, it really, this word, , Anxiety came up so many times in the conversations that people felt marketing gave them anxiety or being the marketer gave them anxiety and, and I believe it had to do with the scarcity, right? Feeling that we are living in scarcity gives us anxiety. Would you agree to that? [00:11:00]  Laura: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think that's kind of the point of it. Mm-hmm. Is, you know, when we sell from scarcity is we're actually activating a person's flight or freeze response. Yeah. You know, that kind of panic decision to go, Oh my gosh, there's something wrong. I need to make a decision. If I don't take it like right now, I'm gonna miss out. And then if I miss out, What's gonna happen? You know, we, we insinuate these feelings like, You won't belong, you won't fit in. This is a one time offer. You won't be able to build your business as much. You're not gonna be able to enjoy this product. You won't be as cool, whatever it will be. You know, there are intended consequences that. We don't explicitly say, but are kind of underlying that scarcity tactic. Mm. And so whether it is simply countdown timers or you know, this real like by now there's only two seats left type thing, you know, this artificial and very often, , completely false scarcity that we could try to sell. Is creating this [00:12:00] constant stress and survival response within us. Mm. And of course, if we're then taking that into actually wanting a more beautiful world, none of us are making our best decisions when we're stressed. No. Like when we're in this state of being panicked and anxious. Yeah, we're making poor decisions from that  Sarah: place. Yeah. Because we, we feel like we can't have the energy to look out for future generations or, or even just, you know, other people. We just feel like, Oh, there's not enough for ourselves. So first we need to feel safe ourselves, which is normal. I like totally understandable as well. But like you say, some of the scarcity is actually. Created. It's false. And if we do not always think, Oh, I have to get more and more and more, and kind of live outside of our maybe, comfort zone or, or, you know, realistic, , living what we actually need, then, then yeah, we're in this cons, constant tussle. Oh yeah. So [00:13:00] much. , agree with what you said. Okay. So we know that this is the state of things right now, so I'm curious to hear how you envision a new type of business. So the postcapitalism business, how does that look like? Paint the picture for us.  Laura: You know, I think the beauty of post-capitalism is that it's not actually born yet. We're kind of co-creating it together. Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . So when people talk about going beyond capitalism, I wanna establish first as well, most people automatically talk about conscious capitalism as the alternative. Mm-hmm. and conscious capitalism. Obviously we had the kind of triple bottom line of like people, planet profit, and it seems like a great alternative to capitalism, but conscious capital. Has kind of added in some values. It's added in like some justice, like we need to care about people, we need to care about the earth. But it hasn't really dealt with the actual issue of looking for infinite growth [00:14:00] and it hasn't dealt with the issue of, , embedded scarcity within the system. It's perhaps dealt with the third issue. It's actually given some value to living systems. So, but it hasn't dealt with the other. Right. So when we're looking to go into post-capitalism, we're looking to kind of create an all new system together, you know, and this is something that's going to arise out of this time. Now, as entrepreneurs, this can mean a lot of different things for us, but really I think it's coming back to the values. Of our business and how we want to embody those values in every area, in our operations, in our marketing, in our sales, in our strategy, and to really bring them to life. So, you know, the first thing that I've mentioned here is this need for infinite growth that we see on the collective scale. And most of us have internalized this as well, to a degree, the sense that there's never enough. There's never enough time [00:15:00] that I'm never good enough that we end up internalizing perfectionism in the same way that, you know, I'm not quite there yet. It needs to be a little bit better. Where the sense that my business needs to grow faster, it needs to grow bigger. You know, I haven't got enough clients yet, and what we lost in this is this ability to know what it feels like to be satisfied, you know, to feel satiated, to feel enough. Right. And so when I'm looking at post capitalist business, it's not saying that growth doesn't have a place, It's not saying that we should all be struggling, that we shouldn't be earning money cause we should, you know, we need to support ourselves. We deserve to live flourishing, abundant lives. But it also means understanding what this feeling of enoughness is. Like, what actually feels good to us? What is the actual vision of the business that we want? And then how do we start to look at some of these other principles like abundance, like justice, like regeneration, and embedding them into all that we do.  Sarah: I think once you [00:16:00] feel that you are enough and you have enough, then you actually get time to look at the other stuff, right? Which you can't, , if you're still struggling with de gotta get more clients and gotta grow and gotta scale and whatnot, then you just, your focus is not on, the other two things. I talk about. You are enough also in the marketing, like we're human bug. And it's, it starts in a way with the definition of success. I think that's where a big, problem lies as well, is like, how do we define success? Because if we never take the time to define it for ourselves, we're chasing after everybody else's definition of success, which, you know, is what we are fed. That it's always more and more and more. , so it sounds to me like. This new business, , as entrepreneurs, especially cuz that's who we we're talking to here is really starting with the, the inner work and starting there rather than always, you know, starting with [00:17:00] the business and who I am as the business owner. Uh, Do I hear that right? Yeah.  Laura: Absolutely. I mean, oh, there's so many places I could go with this, but certainly in terms of success, you know, culturally we have such a narrow definition of success. Like we generally define success as more or growth, and certainly we define it in terms of money. Right. But you know, and this isn't to say that money doesn't make us happy because actually a certain level does. Right. , but we can have a much wider definition of success, right? So I remember. I was really fortunate a number of years ago to visit Bhutan, this tiny country between India and China that's famous for its development philosophy called Gross National Happiness. And you know, they measure the overall happiness of the nation as their primary determinant of success or wellbeing as opposed to countries like Australia where we primarily, , measure and value gdp, right? Or gross domestic product. And you know what I loved about [00:18:00] their model? Was, there were so many, layers and complexities to it, but also so many ideas which we could actually transfer into business. Mm-hmm. into redefining success for us entrepreneurs. You know, let's take time. Use as an example. You know, are we just using our days to fill the nine to five or you know, eight to six much more often or even longer, Or are we doing it to break free? You know, are we still feeling or experiencing that sense of time? Scar. Can we measure success through our health, You know, and how stressed we are, or how relaxed we are, or how relaxed our consumers or customers are when they interact with us, right? You know, we could also look at our working environment, how it makes us feel, or our contribution to the planet and the world around us. So really. Taking the time as an entrepreneur, I think to redefine what success actually means to us and to give it a much more holistic picture. Mm-hmm. of things that actually contribute to our wellbeing is really important. [00:19:00] Yeah. And then of course this inner work comes with that. You can't redefine success and actually understand what it means to you unless you're able to kind of stop and be with yourself for a moment and understand what is most important to you. Sarah: Yeah. And you brought up something that really was also a big aha in my, Personal development journey is this correlation between time and money. You know, you feel like, okay, finally you've dealt with your money story and you kind of detached yourself from this, tight hold on, on the money stuff. And then you realize, Hold on a minute, , I have the same kind of scarcity approach to time as I did to money. Because obviously also there's the saying time is money and all of that, right? and so, I feel like the new business paradigm also values time much more than or to an equal amount, at least as money. and really looking at how do we want to spend our time? And I, we [00:20:00] see that already post pandemic, right? People are like, Well, I don't want to commute two hours anymore. I'd rather spend that time with my family. So time has really gotten a new, Yeah, a new weight in terms of the values that , we, you know, prioritize. So I think this idea of figuring out how do you approach time? Are you still always hustling? and usually yeah, it's linked to money because you wanna. Use your time more efficiently in order to make more money. Right. It's just,  Laura: it's crazy. It's linked to money, but it's also something that I think that I refer to as internalized capitalism. You know, internalized capitalism is the equation of our worth with our productivity, with what we produce. So it's not just about getting more money, it's, it's when we feel guilty, when we. Yeah. It's when we go into work, even when we're sick. Yeah. It's that sense of, you know, we've got a lot to power through in this meeting. We're just gonna squeeze a little bit more in mm-hmm. , [00:21:00] or, you know, I'm gonna like make this phone call while I'm on my run, while I'm like cooking dinner in the microwave or whatever it is. This feeling that there's just not enough time. Mm-hmm. , and it's partly because, you know, We have internalized the cultural systems around us to such a degree that says if I'm not doing enough, if I am not maximizing my time, if I'm not making every ounce of this, you know, which is scarce because everything is scarce. Then I'm not worthy. Right. Then I'm not good enough. Yeah. And so there's a lot of that kind of steeped into it as well.  Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. So good. , let's talk about the transition because you know, as people are listening, they're, they're like, Yeah, that sounds great. You know, Yes, I wanna be feeling more, , at ease and relaxed about my business. And, but how do I make the transition and. I just feel like I'm not there yet, but I'm definitely on a good pass. I feel like , I, you know, I block time now [00:22:00] for, , walks outside, like every day I have an hour, , going for walks either with a dog or with friends. I make that my priority before any kind of business stuff. And, and I do my yoga, so things that matter to me and that I know they're, , Things that matter, , you know, 10 years from now. So it's, it's kind of this longer vision rather than just, you know, what do I do today in order to make my business grow? So, , and yet I do have that, I feel like this internalized capitalism because as a Gen Xer, That's just how we grew up with, right, How we grew up. It's like all these things that we hear in our head and it feels, it feels very challenging to want to do things differently when. Every where you look, people are still talking. You know, the old talk about scaling and hustling and you know, maybe, maybe in the corporate [00:23:00] world there's a bit less of that because you still get paid if you don't, you know, if you don't commute or whatever. But has entrepreneurs, Well, it's still about, you know, how do I make a living and how do I make enough so I feel like. It would be interesting for you, you to share also, how do you take care of yourself while going through this transition knowing that we're not there yet, and so you are probably gonna be one of the few who thinks like that. I think that's the point I'm trying to make because believe me, I feel alone a lot of times when I feel like my week is really easy and I don't. You know, a lot of work and I give myself time to grow the circle, for example, and I feel. Am I doing this right? You know, who, who, who else is out there? Who does it like, like I wanna do it. Laura: Oh, you know, I so get that , few weeks ago, I think I decided to kind of just take a step back from launching anything. I was a bit [00:24:00] overwhelmed. I had a lot happening in my personal life. I wasn't ready with the materials like I wanted to be. And I'll say, Okay, no, like just pause. Take the time. You know, I'm very privileged and fortunate that I was in a position that I didn't have to make money right then and there. You know, that may have been a different story, right? But of course then in taking this time, then this is Pushful of, am I doing enough? You know, am I doing this the way that I should? Because like everything out there says that I need to be doing this now. Mm-hmm. , you know, but there's a part of me that's going, No, it's actually. Everything has a season, everything has a time. And to trust that, Yeah, So there is so many different practices I think in, in taking care of ourselves throughout this, but for me, I think it's about returning back to my body, to what it's really feeling, what it's offering, what its energy level is. Because so often, We override our body. You know, when our body needs rest or it needs pleasure, or it [00:25:00] needs stimulation, or whatever it is. And we go, No, I've gotta work. No, I've gotta do this. I've gotta send this email, I've gotta launch this course. I've gotta put this out into the world. And when we do this, when we override our body enough, when we're so disconnected from it, then we really lead to a state of burnout very easily. Mm-hmm. . So coming back to. What am I really feeling? What is true for me in this moment? And then what do I ac? What are my desires right now? What am I callings right now? And so, yes, I need discipline. Yes, I need structure. These are important things that every entrepreneur needs, but also a little bit of trust of ourselves and trust that there is a. And if it is not the time now, that it will be the time at some point that you need to be ready for that. Right. And you need to trust that you'll know when it is. Mm-hmm. .  Sarah: Yeah. It really sounds like, , this balance between the being and the doing that I talk a lot about on the podcast, you know, this yin and yang, all of this, and. And if you are [00:26:00] struggling in your mind, which we often do when we're thinking about growth and those things, then it's time to come back to the yin, which in what you said is the body, and you know, just the energy and, and give the mind and break and say, Yeah, I know you want to, you know, grow or whatever, but right now we need to focus on on other things. Yeah. This is so good.  Laura: Yeah. I wish there was some nice easy answer for so much of this. Like, you know, you just like, tick this box or like, you know, you take this pill or press X button, whatever it is. Like it doesn't exist. It is this nuanced kind of place between the being and the doing that is like the perfect description. Sarah: Yeah. Do you feel like though, I mean you already are younger than I am, and do you feel like the new generations. It will come easier for them because maybe already they see more people doing it in a different way.  Laura: [00:27:00] I want to say yes. , yes and no. I think it really depends on, The environment in which you have for young people been raised in and what they're coming out of. Mm-hmm. , You know, I think for the younger generations there is already an inherent distrust of the system and a desire to do things differently, and I think that is really powerful. And then it will be how, and I know some amazing young people who are already doing this, but how they choose to challenge those systems, right? It's very easy still to kind of fall into. A, or resistance to systems, or as opposed to, Okay, let's actually build something new. Right? And so my hope for the generation younger than me and also for my own, is that we continue to build something new that we do both. That's a place for resistance, and there is a place for trialing and prototyping and experimenting with a new way to do business and a new form of entrepre. Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. I think this is a good segue into your business of Rev [00:28:00] Revolution. So I talk about the Humane marketing revolution. You talk about the revolution, , for business itself, and you have this framework also with the six leaves. Maybe just quickly, , cuz we don't have that much time left, but quickly give us the different leaves and then I wanna dive into the one about choosing life and human centered versus life centered. But give us the tour of the six pillars.  Laura: Yeah. So I run a program called Business for the Revolution, and this is really. I hesitate to use the word anti-capitalist, but it's really about exploring what it is for entrepreneurs and solo entrepreneurs to explore business beyond capitalism using feminist principles and anti-oppressive principles. So there's six pillars upon which the work is based, which is really about using abundance over scarcity. So really looking at what it would mean to feel like there's enough. To know that there's enough and to really market and sell at the speed of trust and relationality. The [00:29:00] second is understanding that everything is relational. Everything is connected. You know, there's so many sayings like it's business not personal, and you know, the ends justify the means, or, you know, it's, it's not, it's not real. It's just what I do here, or leave your personal life at the door, whatever it might be. But recognizing that actually business is an extension of us. It is just another ways we're relating to one another. So understanding everything is relational and we need to come back to everything is connected. Now, the third that you mentioned is choose life. You know, in an age of ecological breakdown, which we are in, it is not enough to be sustainable, like sustainability is too often about maintaining the status quo. We need to be actively regenerating both the earth and our culture. So really exploring this idea of a regenerative culture. Right. The fourth principle is dream deeper. You know that we need to embed our vision, our values, and [00:30:00] our vocation. Those callings into everything that we do. We need to really reimagine the world and then reimagine how we want our business to serve a more beautiful world. So we're kind of widening the scope of what we're trying to picture. Fifth principle is that business is political. , for too long business has upheld and perpetuated, , racism, white supremacy, injustice. It still does, Capitalism does, and a lot of global business does where, where more disconnected from it than perhaps we used to be, but it still exists. So understanding that business is political and that we need to be conscious of how we're embed. Anti oppressive and feminist principles into what we do. Mm-hmm. . And the sixth and final principle is about wide streams of value. So Edward Abbey once said that growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. And you know, I love that because when you think about the natural world, the only thing that grows with [00:31:00] that end is cancer until it kills itself. Mm-hmm. . So what we. Looking defined with this principle is really redefining success away from growth. What are our wide streams of value over our tall mountains of growth? So these six principles are really about reimagining how we do business and how we want to show up in our business. It's about embedding these values into our strategy, into our operations, into our marketing, into our sales, into every aspect. So it's no longer about just what we sell or what we do or what we're offering to customers, but the way in which we run the business. Sarah: Mm. Yeah. I just love that so much, really, resonated with me. And on that workshop we, I was on, I was like, Yep. I gotta talk to you, Laura, and have her on my podcast and, and I learned a lot more having this conversation, so thank you so much. One of the concepts that I also kind of had a big aha around was this idea of [00:32:00] human centered versus life centered, right? , human centered is a term that. Myself and other people in business marketers, , have been using a lot, these past years. And it kind of almost got like, you know, like authentic. It became this buzzword. Oh, if you say human centered, then, then that means you're, you're getting it. And, and so when you, , said, Well, actually we need to extend it to life centered, it really kind of blew my mind a little bit. I. Wait a minute, I thought I'd been having it right. All this, all this time, and now here you are expanding my thinking and saying, Yeah, human centered is good, but let's extend it to life. So maybe just talk to us a little bit about the difference in what life centered really means and how, how that looks like in, in the marketing world, for example. Laura: So for me with this point, I think I was speaking about, you know, when we're [00:33:00] talking about the ideology of how capitalism shows up in business, is that it's very human and and human centered. And when we're looking to go beyond capitalism, what would look different? And we're like, well, actually it would just be life centered. And really what this was about was breaking down the binary that there is a difference between humans and the planet or humans in the natural world. Mm-hmm. as if somehow what is good for humans might be good for the planet, it might not be. Or you know, what's good for the planet probably won't be good for humans and vice versa. They're not. We are of the natural world. We are the natural world. We are intrinsically linked. Right. When we're looking as well at these deeper mindsets that actually influence capitalism that have led to the climate crisis and some of the struggles that we are facing today. So much of that comes from a place of separation or a place of domination that humans are somehow separate from everything else and that humans are somehow. Better than or above. And you know this principle, [00:34:00] it's not about being all airy fairy and like, Oh, we need to just, you know, like save every dolphin. We should all be vegans, or whatever it is. It's really just about widening the sphere of value to go beyond the human and to look at the essence of life, you know, the essence of life that animates all living things on this planet and to understand. Where there might be value for that. Now you can apply this really looking at regenerative culture into our supply chains, you know, and what is happening at the ends of the supply chain that perhaps we don't see, you know, really examining every end in our marketing. I actually am very curious to hear from you, cause I think you are the expert here around what it might mean to have a life centered approach. Yeah.  Sarah: Actually, I'd love to hear from you on that. Mm-hmm. . Yes. So to me, really. I think it, it's a, a different stage, , and maybe, you know, depends on where people [00:35:00] are in their journey. Coming to human centered is the first stage in some kind of development, right? Maybe they have been just. Focused on growth and numbers and scaling and money making. And so coming back to human centered, I feel like that's the first stage maybe in this personal development and kind of seeing the bigger picture. And yet, and once you, you know, got that and you're like, Yes, human connections are important, I think then you are ready to go to the next stage and say, We might have a very limited time here on Earth. It's not enough anymore to just talk about human connections. We really need to extend it. And to me, that brings in this idea of the triple bottom line and doing marketing in a way that involves, yes, our human relations, but then also the win for the planet. And so really, using. [00:36:00] What I talk a lot about in humane marketing is our worldview in our marketing. And that worldview has to do not just with the humans making doing business, but also, , you know, what do we stand for, , in terms of our values and how do we plan to, save this planet somehow. So I feel like it's. a third stage of getting more connected and seeing business as having a role to play in the whole sustainability piece, Right? So,  Laura: human flourishing is tied to ecological, flourishing, Right? You know, this idea that we can flourish when the earth is not, or that we can just go to another planet is, you know, It's not accurate. Yeah. It's part it. It will catch up with us. Yeah. And so it's really bringing it back to, Okay, well actually you're right. As business owners, I think we have a tremendous source of power. Even those of us who are solar printers, like you don't have major global [00:37:00] Fortune 500 companies. I don't think they can lead the way to change because they're too stuck in the old paradigm. Yeah. But when you're looking at small businesses and how we can pivot and how we can use our values and. And embed this idea of regeneration, of embedding life, giving principles into all that we do. So into physical products, into supply chains, into materials, but into our communities, into our cultures, into our interactions is so important. I love that definition and I agree it's this kind of next stage of looking at it beyond the human. Yeah.  Sarah: The other thing that comes up for me is also what we previously discussed of, you know, seeing the new definition of business post-capitalism. , about something that is holistic and it includes our whole life , and how do we want to create this life, and make it life centered and not just maybe business centered or money centered. So to me [00:38:00] it's also this idea of life centered means we want to create a sustainable life for us ourselves without burnout. So beyond the sustainability piece, which is important. I also feel like life centered means well, let's create a life that we can sustain and, and that we enjoy living rather than, you know, going into that hustle mode and, and always making more and more and more. Laura: Yeah, I think it's about flourishing. Mm-hmm. , you know, it's about thriving. Yeah. And too often we don't think of that in our society or in business. You know, we kind of focus on like just getting by or like just being good enough, you know? You know, How are you? ,  Sarah: good. I'm busy. You know, Instead of Yeah. Laura: Yeah. But instead we could be flourishing. We could be thriving, and. Shouldn't we, You know, why not design our lives and design our business to promote human, our own and ecological [00:39:00] flourishing, You know, so they're all live around us. And this doesn't mean you need to be out there working with dolphins or whatever else. No. Yeah. But the essence of what you're doing is embodying the principle. Yeah. And that I think is where the change comes  Sarah: from. Yeah. I. I'm so glad you brought up the, the busy answer cuz that's when I notice my internal capitalism every time somebody, you know tells me, Oh, I'm busy, I'm. I don't know. I'm not that busy , so am I doing something wrong that I'm not that busy, but I just, yeah. I'm not buying into the busy stuff anymore. I'm like, I don't wanna be busy. And even if I'm, you know, working on something that I wanna really get out, then I don't call it busy. I guess I just. College. Yeah. I'm working on something that gives me great joy. I just feel like busy now has a bad after paste Laura: Yeah. You know, this idea, we need to stop the glorification of busy. Yeah. Because again, but it's that link to the fact [00:40:00] that we're always, well, if we're busy, we're doing more, where we're keeping up, we're doing enough. Like, so that sense of scarcity underlying. Busy is really important to notice.  Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. I know we could keep going and we're, we're having a real fun here, but, , I think we need to start wrapping it up, but this has been amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the Humane Marketing Podcast. Please do share, with people where they can find out more about you, your work, your program. Laura: , yes. So you can go to my website. My school is called Public Love Enterprises. So Public Love Do Enterprises. You can find me on Instagram at Laura Do H dot Hartley. I'm also on LinkedIn and Facebook. So please check us out. Google. Laura Hartley, Public love, public love enterprises, and I look forward to, , Working with you further and getting to know your guests and thank you to everyone who is listening. Sarah: Yeah, thanks Laura. I have one last question. , what are you grateful for today or this week? What comes up? Laura: I'm grateful [00:41:00] for my partner. I have an incredibly supportive partner who always brings me back to myself when I start to go somewhere else. Nice. And so she's who I'm grateful for.  Sarah: Nice. Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing and for being here. Thank you.[00:42:00] 

About LauraLaura leads the research program at Jeli.io.  She has a Master's degree in Human Factors & Systems Safety and a PhD in Cognitive Systems Engineering. Her doctoral work focused on distributed incident response practices in DevOps teams responsible for critical digital services. She was a researcher with the SNAFU Catchers Consortium from 2017-2020 and her research interests lie in resilience engineering, coordination design and enabling adaptive capacity across distributed work teams. As a backcountry skier and alpine climber, she also studies cognition & resilient performance in high risk, high consequence mountain environments.  Links: Howie: The Post-Incident Guide: https://www.jeli.io/howie-the-post-incident-guide/ Jeli: https://www.jeli.io Twitter: https://twitter.com/lauramdmaguire TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Today's episode is brought to you in part by our friends at MinIO the high-performance Kubernetes native object store that's built for the multi-cloud, creating a consistent data storage layer for your public cloud instances, your private cloud instances, and even your edge instances, depending upon what the heck you're defining those as, which depends probably on where you work. It's getting that unified is one of the greatest challenges facing developers and architects today. It requires S3 compatibility, enterprise-grade security and resiliency, the speed to run any workload, and the footprint to run anywhere, and that's exactly what MinIO offers. With superb read speeds in excess of 360 gigs and 100 megabyte binary that doesn't eat all the data you've gotten on the system, it's exactly what you've been looking for. Check it out today at min.io/download, and see for yourself. That's min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig is the solution for securing DevOps. They have a blog post that went up recently about how an insecure AWS Lambda function could be used as a pivot point to get access into your environment. They've also gone deep in-depth with a bunch of other approaches to how DevOps and security are inextricably linked. To learn more, visit sysdig.com and tell them I sent you. That's S-Y-S-D-I-G dot com. My thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. One of the things that's always been a treasure and a joy in working in production environments is things breaking. What do you do after the fact? How do you respond to that incident?Now, very often in my experience, you dive directly into the next incident because no one has time to actually fix the problems but just spend their entire careers firefighting. It turns out that there are apparently alternate ways. My guest today is Laura Maguire who leads the research program at Jeli, and her doctoral work focused on distributed incident response in DevOps teams responsible for critical digital services. Laura, thank you for joining me.Laura: Happy to be here, Corey, thanks for having me.Corey: I'm still just trying to wrap my head around the idea of there being a critical digital service, as someone whose primary output is, let's be honest, shitposting. But that's right, people do use the internet for things that are a bit more serious than making jokes that are at least funny only to me. So, what got you down this path? How did you get to be the person that you are in the industry and standing in the position you hold?Laura: Yeah, I have had a long circuitous route to get to where I am today, but one of the common threads is about safety and risk and how do people manage safety and risk? I started off in natural resource industries, in mountain safety, trying to understand how do we stop things from crashing, from breaking, from exploding, from catching fire, and how do we help support the people in those environments? And when I went back to do my PhD, I was tossed into the world of software engineers. And at first I thought, now, what do firefighters, pilots, you know, emergency room physicians have to do with software engineers and risk in software engineering? And it turns out, there's actually a lot, there's a lot in common between the types of people who handle real-time failures that have widespread consequences and the folks who run continuous deployment environments.And so one of the things that the pandemic did for us is it made it immediately apparent that digital service delivery is a critical function in society. Initially, we'd been thinking about these kinds of things as being financial markets, as being availability of electronic health records, communication systems for disaster recovery, and now we're seeing things like communication and collaboration systems for schools, for businesses, this helps keep society functioning.Corey: What makes part of this field so interesting is that the evolution in the space where, back when I first started my career about a decade-and-a-half ago, there was a very real concern in my first Linux admin gig when I accidentally deleted some of the data from the data warehouse that, “Oh, I don't have a job anymore.” And I remember being surprised and grateful that I still did because, “Oh, you just learned something. You going to do it again?” “No. Well, not like that exactly, but probably some other way, yeah.”And we have evolved so far beyond that now, to the point where when that doesn't happen after an incident, it becomes almost noteworthy in its own right and it blows up on social media. So, the Overton window of what is acceptable disaster response and incident management, and how we learn from those things has dramatically shifted even in the relatively brief window of 15 years. And we're starting to see now almost a next-generation approach to this. One thing that you were, I believe the principal author behind is Howie: The Post-Incident Guide, which is a thing that you have up on jeli.io—that's J-E-L-I dot I-O—talking about how to run post-incident investigations. What made you decide to write something like this?Laura: Yeah, so what you described at the beginning there about this kind of shift from blameless—blameful-type approaches to incident response to thinking more broadly about the system of work, thinking about what does it mean to operate in continuous deployment environments is really fundamental. Because working in these kinds of worlds, we don't have an established knowledge base about how these systems work, about how they break because they're continuously changing, the knowledge, the expertise required to manage them is continuously changing. And so that shift towards a blameless or blame-aware post-incident review is really important because it creates this environment where we can actually share knowledge, share expertise, and distribute more of our understandings of how these systems work and how they break. So that, kind of, led us to create the Howie Guide—the how we got here post-incident guide. And it was largely because companies were kind of coming from this position of, we find the person who did the thing that broke the system and then we can all rest easy and move forward. And so it was really a way to provide some foundation, introduce some ideas from the resilience engineering literature, which has been around for, you know, the last 30 or 40 years—Corey: It's kind of amazing, on some level, how tech as an industry has always tried to reinvent things from first principles. I mean, we figured out long before we started caring about computers in the way we do that when there was an incident, the right response to get the learnings from it for things like airline crashes—always a perennial favorite topic in this space for conference talks—is to make sure that everyone can report what happened in a safe way that's non-accusatory, but even in the early-2010s, I was still working in environments where the last person to break production or break the bill had the shame trophy hanging out on their desk, and it would stay there until the next person broke it. And it was just a weird, perverse incentive where it's, “Oh if I broke something, I should hide it.”That is absolutely the most dangerous approach because when things are broken, yes, it's generally a bad thing, so you may as well find the silver lining in it from my point of view and figure out, okay, what have we learned about our systems as a result of the way that these things break? And sometimes the things that we learn are, in fact, not that deep, or there's not a whole lot of learnings about it, such as when the entire county loses power, computers don't work so well. Oh, okay. Great, we have learned that. More often, though, there seem to be deeper learnings.And I guess what I'm trying to understand is, I have a relatively naive approach on what the idea of incident response should look like, but it's basically based on the last time I touched things that were production-looking, which was six or seven years ago. What is the current state of the art that the advanced leaders in the space as they start to really look at how to dive into this? Because I'm reasonably certain it's not still the, “Oh, you know, you can learn things when your computers break.” What is pushing the envelope these days?Laura: Yeah, so it's kind of interesting. You brought up incident response because incident response and incident analysis are the, sort of like, what do we learn from those things are very tightly coupled. What we can see when we look at someone responding in real-time to a failure is, it's difficult to detect all of the signals; they don't pop up and wave a little flag and say, like, “I am what's broken.” There's multiple compounding and interacting factors. So, there's difficulty in the detection phase; diagnosis is always challenging because of how the systems are interrelated, and then the repair is never straightforward.But when we stop and look at these kinds of things after the fact, of really common theme emerges, and that it's not necessarily about a specific technical skill set or understanding about the system, it's about the shared, distributed understanding of that. And so to put that in plain speak, it's what do you know that's important to the problem? What do I know that's important to the problem? And then how do we collectively work together to extract that specific knowledge and expertise, and put that into practice when we're under time pressure, when there's a lot of uncertainty, when we've got the VP DMing us and being like, “When's the system going to be back up?” and Twitter's exploding with unhappy customers?So, when we think about the cutting edge of what's really interesting and relevant, I think organizations are starting to understand that it's how do we coordinate and we collaborate effectively? And so using incident analysis as a way to recognize not only the technical aspects of what went wrong but the social aspects of that as well. And the teamwork aspects of that is really driving some innovation in this space.Corey: It seems to me, on some level, that the increasing sophistication of what environments look like is also potentially driving some of these things. I mean, again, when you have three web servers and one of them's broken, okay, it's a problem; we should definitely jump on that and fix it. But now you have thousands of containers running hundreds of microservices for some Godforsaken reason because what we decided this thing that solves the problem of 500 engineers working on the same repository is a political problem, so now we're going to use microservices for everything because, you know, people. Great. But then it becomes this really difficult to identify problem of what is actually broken?And past a certain point of scale, it's no longer a question of, “Is it broken?” so much as, “How broken is it at any given point in time?” And getting real-time observability into what's going on does pose more than a little bit of a challenge.Laura: Yeah, absolutely. So, the more complexity that you have in the system, the more diversity of knowledge and skill sets that you have. One person is never going to know everything about the system, obviously, and so you need kind of variability in what people know, how current that knowledge is, you need some people who have legacy knowledge, you have some people who have bleeding edge, my fingers were on the keyboard just moments ago, I did the last deploy, that kind of variability in whose knowledge and skill sets you have to be able to bring to bear to the problem in front of you. One of the really interesting aspects, when you step back and you start to look really carefully about how people work in these kinds of incidents, is you have folks that are jumping, get things done, probe a lot of things, they look at a lot of different areas trying to gather information about what's happening, and then you have people who sit back and they kind of take a bit of a broader view, and they're trying to understand where are people trying to find information? Where might our systems not be showing us what's going on?And so it takes this combination of people working in the problem directly and people working on the problem more broadly to be able to get a better sense of how it's broken, how widespread is that problem, what are the implications, what might repair actually look like in this specific context?Corey: Do you suspect that this might be what gives rise, sometimes, to it seems middle management's perennial quest to build the single pane of glass dashboard of, “Wow, it looks like you're poking around through 15 disparate systems trying to figure out what's going on. Why don't we put that all on one page?” It's a, “Great, let's go tilt at that windmill some more.” It feels like it's very aligned with what you're saying. And I just, I don't know where the pattern comes from; I just know I see it all the time, and it drives me up a wall.Laura: Yeah, I would call that pattern pretty common across many different domains that work in very complex, adaptive environments. And that is—like, it's an oversimplification. We want the world to be less messy, less unstructured, less ad hoc than it often is when you're working at the cutting edge of whatever kind of technology or whatever kind of operating environment you're in. There are things that we can know about the problems that we are going to face, and we can defend against those kinds of failure modes effectively, but to your point, these are very largely unstructured problem spaces when you start to have multiple interacting failures happening concurrently. And so Ashby, who back in 1956 started talking about, sort of, control systems really hammered this point home when he was talking about, if you have a world where there's a lot of variability—in this case, how things are going to break—you need a lot of variability in how you're going to cope with those potential types of failures.And so part of it is, yes, trying to find the right dashboard or the right set of metrics that are going to tell us about the system performance, but part of it is also giving the responders the ability to, in real-time, figure out what kinds of things they're going to need to address the problem. So, there's this tension between wanting to structure unstructured problems—put those all in a single pane of glass—and what most folks who work at the frontlines of these kinds of worlds know is, it's actually my ability to be flexible and to be able to adapt and to be able to search very quickly to gather the information and the people that I need, that are what's really going to help me to address those hard problems.Corey: Something I've noticed for my entire career, and I don't know if it's just unfounded arrogance, and I'm very much on the wrong side of the Dunning-Kruger curve here, but it always struck me that the corporate response to any form of outage has is generally trending toward oh, we need a process around this, where it seems like the entire idea is that every time a thing happens, there should be a documented process and a runbook on how to perform every given task, with the ultimate milestone on the hill that everyone's striving for is, ah, with enough process and enough runbooks, we can then eventually get rid of all the people who know all this stuff works, and basically staff at up with people who'd know how to follow a script and run push the button when told to buy the instruction manual. And that's always rankled, as someone who got into this space because I enjoy creative thinking, I enjoy looking at the relationships between things. Cost and architecture are the same thing; that's how I got into this. It's not due to an undying love of spreadsheets on my part. That's my business partner's problem.But it's this idea of being able to play with the puzzle, and the more you document things with process, the more you become reliant on those things. On some level, it feels like it ossifies things to the point where change is no longer easily attainable. Is that actually what happens, or am I just wildly overstating the case? Either as possible. Or a third option, too. You're the expert; I'm just here asking ridiculous questions.Laura: Yeah, well, I think it's a balance between needing some structure, needing some guidelines around expected actions to take place. This is for a number of reasons. One, we talked about earlier about how we need multiple diverse perspectives. So, you're going to have people from different teams, from different roles in the organization, from different levels of knowledge, participating in an incident response. And so because of that, you need some form of script, some kind of process that creates some predictability, creates some common ground around how is this thing going to go, what kinds of tools do we have at our disposal to be able to either find out what's going on, fix what's going on, get the right kinds of authority to be able to take certain kinds of actions.So, you need some degree of process around that, but I agree with you that too much process and the idea that we can actually apply operational procedures to these kinds of environments is completely counterproductive. And what it ends up doing is it ends up, kind of, saying, “Well, you didn't follow those rules and that's why the incident went the way it did,” as opposed to saying, “Oh, these rules actually didn't apply in ways that really matter, given the problem that was faced, and there was no latitude to be able to adapt in real-time or to be able to improvise, to be creative in how you're thinking about the problem.” And so you've really kind of put the responders into a bit of a box, and not given them productive avenues to, kind of, move forward from. So, having worked in a lot of very highly regulated environments, I recognize there's value in having prescription, but it's also about enabling performance and enabling adaptive performance in real-time when you're working at the speeds and the scales that we are in this kind of world.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance query accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service, although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLAP and OLTP—don't ask me to pronounce those acronyms again—workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time-consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: Yeah, and let's be fair, here; I am setting up something of a false dichotomy. I'm not suggesting that the answer is oh, you either are mired in process, or it is the complete Wild West. If you start a new role and, “Great. How do I get started? What's the onboarding process?” Like, “Step one, write those docs for us.”Or how many times have we seen the pattern where day-one onboarding is, “Well, here's the GitHub repo, and there's some docs there. And update it as you go because this stuff is constantly in motion.” That's a terrible first-time experience for a lot of folks, so there has to be something that starts people off in the right direction, a sort of a quick guide to this is what's going on in the environment, and here are some directions for exploration. But also, you aren't going to be able to get that to a level of granularity where it's going to be anything other than woefully out of date in most environments without resorting to draconian measures. I feel like—Laura: Yeah.Corey: —the answer is somewhere in the middle, and where that lives depends upon whether you're running Twitter for Pets or a nuclear reactor control system.Laura: Yeah. And it brings us to a really important point of organizational life, which is that we are always operating under constraints. We are always managing trade-offs in this space. It's very acute when you're in an incident and you're like, “Do I bring the system back up but I still don't know what's wrong or do I leave it down a little bit longer and I can collect more information about the nature of the problem that I'm facing?”But more chronic is the fact that organizations are always facing this need to build the next thing, not focus on what just happened. You talked about the next incident starting and jumping in before we can actually really digest what just happened with the last incident; these kinds of pressures and constraints are a very normal part of organizational life, and we are balancing those trade-offs between time spent on one thing versus another as being innovating, learning, creating change within our environment. The reason why it's important to surface that is that it helps change the conversation when we're doing any kind of post-incident learning session.It's like, oh, it allows us to surface things that we typically can't say in a meeting. “Well, I wasn't able to do that because I know that team has a code freeze going on right now.” Or, “We don't have the right type of, like, service agreement to get our vendor on the phone, so we had to sit and wait for the ticket to get dealt with.” Those kinds of things are very real limiters to how people can act during incidents, and yet, don't typically get brought up because they're just kind of chronic, everyday things that people deal with.Corey: As you look across the industry, what do you think that organizations are getting, I guess, it's the most wrong when it comes to these things today? Because most people are no longer in the era of, “All right. Who's the last person to touch it? Well, they're fired.” But I also don't think that they're necessarily living the envisioned reality that you described in the Howie Guide, as well as the areas of research you're exploring. What's the most common failure mode?Laura: Hmm. I got to tweak that a little bit to make it less about the failure mode and more about the challenges that I see organizations facing because there are many failure modes, but some common issues that we see companies facing is they're like, “Okay, we buy into this idea that we should start looking at the system, that we should start looking beyond the technical thing that broke and more broadly at how did different aspects of our system interact.” And I mean, both people as a part of the system, I mean processes part of the system, as well as the software itself. And so that's a big part of why we wrote the Howie Guide, is because companies are struggling with that gap between, “Okay, we're not entirely sure what this means to our organization, but we're willing to take steps to get there.” But there's a big gap between recognizing that and jumping into the academic literature that's been around for many, many years from other kinds of high-risk, high-consequence type domains.So, I think some of the challenges they face is actually operationalizing some of these ideas, particularly when they already have processes and practices in place. There's ideas that are very common throughout an organization that take a long time to shift people's thinking around, the implicit biases or orientations towards a problem that we as individuals have, all of those kinds of things take time. You mentioned the Overton window, and that's a great example of it is intolerable in some organizations to have a discussion about what do people know and not know about different aspects of the system because there's an assumption that if you're the engineer responsible for that, you should know everything. So, those challenges, I think, are quite limiting to helping organizations move forward. Unfortunately, we see not a lot of time being put into really understanding how an incident was handled, and so typically, reviews get done on the side of the desk, they get done with a minimal amount of effort, and then the learnings that come out of them are quite shallow.Corey: Is there a maturity model, where it makes sense to begin investing in this, whereas if you've do it too quickly, you're not really going to be able to ship your MVP and see what happens; if you go too late, you have a globe-spanning service that winds up being down all the time so no one trusts it. What is the sweet spot for really started to care about incident response? In other words, how do people know that it's time to start taking this stuff more seriously?Laura: Ah. Well… you have kids?Corey: Oh, yes. One and four. Oh yeah.Laura: Right—Corey: Demons. Little demons whom I love very much.Laura: [laugh]. They look angelic, Corey. I don't know what you're talking about. Would you not teach them how to learn or not teach them about the world until they started school?Corey: No, but it would also be considered child abuse at this age to teach them about the AWS bill. So, there is a spectrum as far as what is appropriate learnings at what stage.Laura: Yeah, absolutely. So, that's a really good point is that depending on where you are at in your operation, you might not have the resources to be able to launch full-scale investigations. You may not have the complexity within your system, within your teams, and you don't have the legacy to, sort of, draw through, to pull through, that requires large-scale investigations with multiple investigators. That's really why we were trying to make the Howie Guide very applicable to a broad range of organizations is, here are the tools, here are the techniques that we know can help you understand more about the environment that you're operating in, the people that you're working with, so that you can level up over time, you can draw more and more techniques and resources to be able to go deeper on those kinds of things over time. It might be appropriate at an early stage to say, hey, let's do these really informally, let's pull the team together, talk about how things got set up, why choices were made to use the kinds of components that we use, and talk a little bit more about why someone made a decision they did.That might be low-risk when you're small because y'all know each other, largely you know the decisions, those conversations can be more frank. As you get larger, as more people you don't know are on those types of calls, you might need to handle them differently so that people have psychological safety, to be able to share what they knew and what they didn't know at the time. It can be a graduated process over time, but we've also seen very small, early-stage companies really treat this seriously right from the get-go. At Jeli, I mean, one of our core fundamentals is learning, right, and so we do, we spend time on sharing with each other, “Oh, my mental model about this was X. Is that the same as what you have?” “No.” And then we can kind of parse what's going on between those kinds of things. So, I think it really is an orientation towards learning that is appropriate any size or scale.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, how you view these things and possibly improve their own position on these areas, where can they find you?Laura: So, we have a lot of content on jeli.io. I am also on Twitter at—Corey: Oh, that's always a mistake.Laura: [laugh]. @lauramdmaguire. And I love to talk about this stuff. I love to hear how people are interpreting, kind of, some of the ideas that are in the resilience engineering space. Should I say, “Tweet at me,” or is that dangerous, Corey?Corey: It depends. I find that the listeners to this show are all far more attractive than the average, and good people, through and through. At least that's what I tell the sponsors. So yeah, it should be just fine. And we will of course include links to those in the [show notes 00:27:11].Laura: Sounds good.Corey: Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.Laura: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.Corey: Laura Maguire, researcher at Jeli. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please give a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, insulting comment that I will read just as soon as I get them all to display on my single-pane-of-glass dashboard.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

@lauraracky is a #commerciallawyer in her own firm @LLGold. But her being her knows that's not really enough. She likes to have lots of things going. Her portfolio of interests includes;#cofounder @AllFounders - a business which is more focused on #leadershiptraining and #businessstrategy but has expanded into #podcasting #tickertv#founder @LGlowBeauty - because she just loves all things beauty and skincaremultiple board and advisory roles (past & current) in #nfps and #communityorganisations including @channel31 @hibgrouphug #mazzeifoundationFor Laura these #newbusinesses are a kind of hobby and an outstanding source of constant learning which feeds back into her core role as #commerciallawyer and  #businessowner. She #loveslearning, #newchallenges and #newbusiness. In our discussion we cover;the #businesschallenges thrown up by #covid19#takingstock how #businessowners are adapting and reinventingthe boring but important things to do in the #first100days of a new business a love of learning new things and being challenged becoming a better #businessadviserhow she chooses to do what she does and time management learning that not everything is urgent or important #givingbackgetting involved with #nfps #ecommercewww.kerrcapital.com.auA full transcript is below.Michael Kerr: Hi, it's Michael Kerr here, presenting Small Business Banter. A healthy micro and small business sector means a successful economy and a more vibrant society. Small Business Banter is about helping regional business owners better prepare for current challenges but also for the next stage of business success. I'm Michael Kerr, founder of Kerr Capital, advisors to business owners.Each week, I interview a fellow small business owner or an expert and they share their stories, their lived experiences, the wins and the losses, and their best advice to help you, the listener, get the most you can from your own business. Small Business Banter is brought to you from the studios of 104.7 Gippsland FM and is heard across Australia on the Community Radio Network. And thanks also to Kerr Capital supporters of the show.Okay, so welcome to another edition of Small Business Banter radio. Laura Racky from LL Gold. Laura is in, chatting to us today. Laura's got a really diverse background, and what we're going to focus on today is her experiences as a commercial lawyer but also, as a founder and a business operator, how she manages to fit all that in, and some of the tips and advice she would give to prospective business owners.So Laura, a principal at LL Gold, founder of LGlow Beauty, also a director of All Founders, a host on All Founders Show, you can tell us about that in a minute, Laura. And look, you've got a host of other advisory or board roles that span sort of tech companies, small new businesses, as well as, you had a strong involvement with Channel 31. So firstly, welcome in, Laura.Laura Racky: Thanks, Michael. Great to be here.Michael: Yes. It's really great to have you in. Do you want to just expand a little bit on the sort of major things that you're involved with and why you do that, firstly?Laura: Absolutely. So I suppose my sort of number one career baby is my law firm, LL Gold. And she's nearly 5 years old now. That's probably, I suppose, where my main bread and butter comes from. But me being me, that's not really enough. I like to have lots of things going on. So we've also recently started up the All Founders business. So that's more focused on leadership training and strategy. This year, we kicked off LGlow Beauty. I just love all things beauty and skincare, so I thought why not give it a go. So that's been really fun, getting into e-commerce.Michael: Classic lawyer stuff.Laura: And then, yeah, I'm very lucky and grateful to be working with some excellent not-for-profits at the moment, Big Group Hug and the Mazzei Foundation. So lots of things going on keeps me interested, I guess.Micahel: For sure. Let's start with how you choose what to do and how you manage your time with that extensive portfolio of things.Laura: Yes. I suppose when you do run your own business as your main line of work, so the law firm, that does give me some flexibility in terms of where I spend my time. And I always joke about when you run your own business, you choose which 20 hours a day to work. So really, I've got a funny little timetable.I actually don't start and sit down at the desk until about 10:30. The majority of the working day is on the law firm, and then it's really the evenings that the extracurricular sort of interests and board roles or advisory roles get looking. So it's a bit of a mixed bag, but it just means that my days are very diverse and there are lots of jumping around, which for some reason, just works for my brain.Michael: Yeah. So why get involved in this range of things? Is that your role or purpose to be fully and fully again occupied? Is it because opportunities come your way? Or is it because you just see yourself driven to achieve? I'm really interested in the underpinning motivation for you.Laura: It's funny you ask that because I think many people during, well, this COVID time, it's been the first time in my life I've actually taken stock and ask some of those questions. It's just always been this internal driver for me to load up and be completely sort of overwhelmed, I suppose. But I think the more that I step back and look at it, I really like learning new things. I like being challenged.And as much as being a commercial lawyer throws up new challenges every day because I don't know everything and all of my clients have all different types of businesses, I think that doing this just gives me a great opportunity to work with all different types of people in all different types of capacities. And every day, something different comes up that I have an aha moment or I can learn something from. And it's actually very interesting and rewarding.And obviously, on the not-for-profit side of things, in my view, when you're a professional and you get to a certain stage in your career, it's really important to find ways to give back to the community. And I've got special skills, so that seems to be the most appropriate way to give back.Michael: Yeah. And some people want to give back and others. I think about it and probably, maybe, don't see the benefit of it because it is giving back. But does all that experience make you a better commercial lawyer in the end?Laura: Absolutely. I mean, when you're sitting on not-for-profit boards or advisory boards, especially as a professional consultant, all of a sudden, you're actually involved in a business from that director-level where you can have a real oversight on all of the working parts rather than when you're an advisor, people come to you often with a very sort of small problem or issue and that might be all that you'll see about their business.Whereas, when you get to work as an advisor or a director on a not-for-profit, you see everything. You're involved in operations, partnerships, employment, leasing, the full gamut. And it actually, I think, makes you a much better advisor because you're actually, all of a sudden, exposed to the wide range of things that a not-for-profit or a business face every day rather than this little pocket of problems, I suppose.Michael: Yeah. Yeah, I think as a specialist advisor, often, you can be busy, but the clients already framed their problem. And it's like if I knew this or that, I could have helped you more broadly. So that's kind of what you're saying. You see those same business challenges from a different perspective and you can bring up other advice or other solutions.Laura: Exactly.Michael: Yeah. And look, I do a lot of work with SME owners and a lot busy doing the day-to-day stuff. And it's kind of hard to have the conversation that you need to take time out of the business. And you can learn away from the business and bring things back. But I understand why people just sometimes say, "I'm too busy." But the roles you have with not-for-profits and other organizations, as I say, can be really rich in learning. How do you go from the law to beauty? Like this is in e-commerce and social media and all that goes with that business.Laura: I will admit, it has been a real personal challenge for me. So in my legal career, I have often worked in insolvency, restructuring, and litigation. That sort of work is very, very urgent [corsstalk] and heavy and considered, I think, important.Michael: Heavy.Laura: And so I have this general expectation because my clients are very responsive and they moved quickly and I am the same, that I felt that in this new endeavor, that anything that I wanted to complete or get done or buy would move in the same way and be as easy to navigate. Boy. I know this sounds crazy, but really simple things like ordering stickers for packaging, for someone who's just used to things just going through in a very linear fashion and it being really quick and easy, it's just like, you might send an email to a prospective supplier, and you might get a response like 6 days later. And to someone like me, who's used to things just getting done, it just [inaudible].Michael: How hard is it?Laura: Yes. But again, it's made me realize not everything is urgent or important, and different types of things have different ways that people work in them. So I think just from a personal perspective on patience and navigating a different industry and world, that's been really challenging and interesting. But yeah, just, I think e-commerce, obviously, it's not going away, it's only going to grow. And I feel that being an advisor in this day and age and not really getting into this world and understanding how it works would be a miss. I'll be missing out to try and do it myself.So a lot of learning. We're still growing, changing. I'm still trying to work out what the brand's voice is, what we're about, our mission, all of these things. But I'm now at the point where I say, "You know what, you ran headlong into this. You didn't know what you were doing. You're making it up as you're going along. You don't have to. This is not a Sprint. It can be a marathon." So I really realized I don't have to be turning over a million dollars. Let's just actually use this as this tool taught for learning. So it just so happens it coincides with something I really enjoy, the beauty and skincare industry. And so I'm trying to treat it as something fun.And actually, you talked about business owners feeling like they don't have time. To me, I think you can view all these extra things, if you love business, if you love having autonomy and doing things that interest you, you can actually start seeing all of these things as fun. I know that sounds really lame, maybe, to a lot of people, but I think there's a lot of us who actually get a lot of pleasure out of all this learning and interest. And it so happens that our hobbies and our fun are running businesses and learning things.Michael: Yeah, you're not playing golf.Laura: Yeah.Michael: Not there's anything wrong with those things, but you've got a different interest.Laura: Yeah.Michael: Yeah.Laura: So I stay tuned, LGlow Beauty. I'm going to take over the world, but just not straight away. And that's okay.Michael: I have wondered whether there was any reference to LL Cool J in that.Laura: I actually can't even remember where. I mean, L, my name is Laura, but I don't even know where, when I came up with LL Gold, came from. I didn't want it to be my name. I didn't want the firm to be my name, but yeah, no.Michael: It's a pretty contemporary brand. It's great. But it suits with the energy and the interest you bring to it. With your clients, just to come back to some of the stuff you're dealing with us today, I'm keen to understand what you're seeing your business clients, what are the big challenges they've got at the moment.Laura: It's been a bit cyclical. There was, obviously, March onwards for the first few months, a lot of issues with leases. And they were the clients who literally were shutting their doors, work-from-home wasn't a possibility. So we're talking about hospitality, entertainment. So that was sort of a huge focus at that time, a lot of negotiating with landlords, also employment issues. But now, as we're sort of, I don't know, coming out of it or learning to live with this new normal, yes, there are still leasing issues, but a lot of people are trying to get out of leases, moving to new premises, change the way they work.And also, I think this has been an opportunity for a lot of businesses to take stock and look at the way they interact with their clients, what their employment agreements say. When things are good, we just put our contracts in a drawer and we hope to never look at them. But I think over this last 12 months, this has been the first time maybe a lot of businesses have had to look at employment agreements, have had to look at their leases or their employments with their customers or their clients.Michael: And even, by the sounds of it, their core business model.Laura: Yes.Michael: Why we're in business? How do we do it differently? Can we do it without a lease on a property?Laura: Exactly, exactly. So there are lots of strategic questions. And part of that is flushing out, "Well, where do we sit in our contractual landscape? What leeway do we actually have to make these changes?" I mean, if you're stuck in a 5-year lease, it's pretty hard to get out of it. So these sorts of questions, I think, have been interesting. But then, more from a strategical leadership perspective, a lot of clients have are facing heaps of issues with their employees.And I think this is not new, no one's surprised about this, but people's expectations have changed, people's wants and desires have changed. Things they thought were important 12 Months ago, they don't think are important anymore. Getting people back into the office is tricky. So it's a weird time, a really weird time.Michael: Yeah, it sure is. I want to continue that, but on today's episode of Small Business Banter, we're talking with Laura Rocky from LL Gold. Laura, yeah, this complete rethink, some owners might see that as an opportunity, and maybe not right now but later on. They've kind of been able to completely remodel or being forced to remodel the way they do business. Are you seeing, with your clients, an outflow of people? Getting to the point where they go, "The lease is too challenging. I'm going to reinvent. I'm going to do e-commerce."Laura: Look, a lot of clients who are coming towards the end of their leases and now looking at different spaces, I think co-working spaces, I think, had a very, very difficult time over COVID, but I think they'll find that there'll be a resurgence because a lot of businesses are going to look for more nimble and agile spaces for their staff. I think that physical spaces are still going to be really important. We are human beings and it doesn't matter how comfy it is to work in your UGG boots, we like to be around one another sometimes and to have that choice. But look, a lot of things have changed.And actually, a little pattern that I have noticed in the last couple of months with clients is there is a lot of discussions that clients are having with potential partners or potential sales of their business. There's a lot of movement, a lot of exploratory movement because I don't think people know what's going to happen in the next little while, but there is a lot of, I wouldn't say M&A activity, but just lots of discussions about what if we move into this space or what if we join forces with this partner. And a lot of these discussions are happening because I think, for the first time, like I said, people are facing a shift and the revenue isn't just flowing in without thought anymore.Michael: Yeah.Laura: A lot of businesses have had to stop and think about how they make money.Michael: Yeah, yeah. Look, you said you need to pull out those contracts, employment contracts, lease agreements, others. But underpinning that is just, "How am I going to continue to do business?" And so on that front, alliances and joint ventures and I think you do work with bringing in employees to businesses as well so it's diversifying and collaborating. It's all those kind of nice words, but it's maybe forcing a complete rethink of how we're going to survive. But not just survive, prosper but by maybe getting closer to other businesses and bringing in key employees.Laura: Yes. Yeah, I think when things are good, it's easy not to navel-gaze. But when things start getting tricky, yeah, we've got to be creative and inventive. And that's why this time is actually very, very interesting.Michael: Yeah. Yeah, and look, at the hub of all of that is personal relationships, whether it's with suppliers, partners, customers, employees. And the value of those personal relationships, even in a business context, is so important. You got to put time into them. And entering into business with someone, I mean, you and I have talked about this in the past, you got to have an exit plan from all those sorts of things.Laura: Yeah.Michael: You've got to think through the good and the bad, unfortunately, because sometimes, they don't work.Laura: Absolutely. And I talk about this a lot with clients, especially when we're starting new businesses or entering into new organizations where we've got a group of shareholders. It's always very nice at the start. And everyone's all really excited and everyone puts on their best behavior. And when everyone's making money, everybody gets along great and we never have to look at a shareholder agreement. But when things turn or people's life circumstances change, this is the stuff, this is when the rubber hits the road. So if people have not been thinking about these things early on, it can cause a bit of drama later.Michael: It sure can, yeah. So you launched All Founders.Laura: Yes.Michael: So this is kind of like a further progression of your portfolio, but also a logical extension of running your own business and experiencing just those day-to-day operational things around stickers. So is that the impetus for...?Laura: Well, All Founders came early last year, so this was before COVID and before LGlow Beauty, everything.Michael: Oh, okay.Laura: So Christian Cunningham and I are at the head of All Founders. And where it came from is, I run a legal business, he runs a recruiting M&A business. But what we both realized is that over our careers, we actually had learned so much from the people we work with and from advising that we needed a new brand to offer those types of services. It's very hard to pick up the phone and say to your lawyer, "Can you give me some leadership training?" I just think intellectually, people want to see it in a different bundle. And obviously, the same for him. From a recruitment and acquisition specialist, no one's expecting strategy and leadership training from him.So we bought that all together under the All Founders brand. We set up the All Founders Show, a podcast that then ended up a TV show on Ticker. And that's been really interesting and fun to go and work with clients in a totally different way than as a lawyer or a recruiter because I think, for me, when I walk into the room as a lawyer, people do bristle and they respond differently and they get a bit nervous. And it's good to just sort of come in and say "Yes, I'm that but today, we're going to-"Michael: Switch hats.Laura: Although I do get wheeled out often by Christian to give the governance training, but anyway, that's for another day.Michael: Yeah, yeah.Laura: It's very important. So that's been really fun, to actually work with clients in a different way, to talk about their succession planning, their short and long-term strategy, building up managers. And I think, again, when we talk from the COVID perspective, there's going to be a huge gap in our managers and our leaders who are not being managed and led through COVID because we're all remote.Michael: Right. You see a really big hole getting bigger.Laura: Absolutely. And if you're not around your leader often to have those really quick chats to run things by them, I mean, you're not picking up your phone every 5 minutes to make that call to your manager to ask the question. I remember, even just as a young lawyer, always wanting to sit in the office or the spot outside the partners office because I loved hearing them on the phone. I loved hearing them in meetings with other partners because you learn so much just by listening. And we are losing this. So I think there is this big gap where a lot of these leaders are just going to need a little bit of outside mentorship to get them through, to get their skills up. I think they're a bit at sea at the moment.Michael: Yeah. Look, and it's probably the same as it's always been for those small business owners who have always done it solo.Laura: Yes.Michael: I've always been their own counsel. They've always struggled to find somebody that is a trusted advisor. So yeah, I think it's kind of the same thing, but it's obviously removed from employees in a massive way in the last 12 to 18 months. And it goes to where we started, which is developing broader experience outside of whatever it is you do day-to-day. You sought out a partner to learn. And I mean, there are opportunities everywhere you look. I think there's an explosion of clubs and online networking business things, so the resources are out there.But we've only got a little bit of time left, Laura. There are two things I want to cover. One is there's a lot of energy with businesses recreating or starting afresh. So in the first hundred days, what are the three or four things you're thinking about reinventing your business or starting? What are the three or four things you absolutely must address?Laura: Yes. Look, the really boring thing, I think, is always structure. It always shocks me how many small business owners have no understanding, I guess, of how they exist in the legal space.Michael: So this is in the sense of having a company versus a trust versus a partnership?Laura: Yeah.Michael: Yeah, okay. Yeah.Laura: And what if it's really boring and it is very expensive, but if you're going to do it, I think you need to do it right.Michael: Yup.Laura: Because if you don't get that right, then the next thing, which is contracts with your customers and your suppliers, you're not going to get that right. So if you don't know who you are as a business from a structural perspective, you can't enter into contracts properly. So those two things go quite hand in hand. And then obviously, we've got things like your insurance and your work cover and your employment agreements.Michael: It's very easy as I'm excited, which is going to work and we're going to get on with it, but don't fall for the trap.Laura: Exactly.Michael: Yeah.Laura: I think lots of small business owners get super excited. And I get it, I've done it too, about logos and branding and websites and Instagram. But at the heart of all of that, you still need to have a functional structure in a business because here's hoping you're going to go gangbusters. And rewinding and fixing those structural issues later is very, very difficult.Michael: Hey, Laura Racky, that's fantastic, really enjoyed the discussion with you. Thanks so much for sharing everything. I just wanted to close out, you had an involvement with Channel 31. We're on the Community Radio Network so there's some pretty good news. Just before the end of June, a renewal for 4 years?Laura: Yeah. So I think it's 3.Michael: Three?Laura: Yes.Michael: Yeah.Laura: So really fantastic. I mean, the last couple of renewals have only been for a year, which is not a lot of time.Michael: Yes.Laura: I think the 3 years is a real recognition that one, the spectrum is not going anywhere so we may as well put it to good use.Michael: Yeah.Laura: And two, that these organizations need that time to transition properly. So I'm really thrilled. I think it's wonderful.Michael: Yeah, it's a great result. Hey, Laura Racky from LL Gold, thank you very much for your time today.Laura: Thanks, Michael.Michael: So that is all for today's episode of Small Business Banter. I continue to be inspired, bringing you small business experts and other small business owners and hearing their stories.If you want to listen to any past episode, jump onto your podcast platform of choice and search Small Business Banter. There, you will find a diverse and fascinating collection of small business owners and experts openly discussing and sharing their experiences.For any of the links, resources, or information we've talked about on the show today or to contact me, please head over to smallbusinessbanter.com or you can find us on Facebook and Instagram. And it would be great to have you tuned in the same time next week for another episode of Small Business Banter.[END]

Laura Herberg is a reporter in Detroit and the host/creator of COMPLETE ME. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: This episode is a long time coming. 15-months coming, in fact. That's when I recorded this interview originally. I've been holding it because for the most part we haven't been going to many event together, which is starting to change, thank God. And that's what today's advice is about, at least in part. LAURA: So, Zak. You know that I have trouble getting things done. So much so that I created a whole podcast around that idea. ZAK: It's an absolutely wonderful show. It's called, Complete Me. LAURA: But one thing I'm really proud of which I'm going to give advice on today is the fact that I even launched the podcast in the first place. So for people out there who have a creative project that they've been working on or even just an idea, actually, that they really want to put out in the world. My advice and this is what I did with my podcast is just book the launch event now. Even if, maybe it's not the final, final...the film is finished or whatever event. Maybe it's your showing of where you're at so far. But book it now, tell your friends and don't back out of it no matter what and I think that's the kick in the pants that a lot of people need to get something done. ZAK: I think you're absolutely right. I mean, speaking personally. Deadlines are the only way I'll get anything done. So I think that's brilliant. I feel like, it doesn't even have to be a creative project. You don't have to be an artist or "creative person" to do this. I was thinking, like if you have been meaning to clean out your basement for 3 years, you could plan a house party and send out the invites and then you better clean that shit up before the guests arrive. LAURA: Yes, plan a clean basement party! I love that!

Laura Solomon is an attorney dedicated to providing specialized, but affordable, legal services to nonprofit, charitable organizations, foundations, business leagues, political action committees, and philanthropic individuals. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: I'm Jewish and in our tradition we have this thing called tzedakah. That's Hebrew word that translates to righteousness. But really tzedakah is this ethical obligation we have. And one of the core tenants of this obligation is that we're supposed to give ten-percent or our income to charity each year or to people or organizations in need. The ten-percent principle is something I heard my whole life. But one thing I never learned, at least explicitly, is how to give. And that's where today's advice, from Laura Soloman comes in. LAURA: So, I'm a lawyer. I have a law firm devoted to forming and representing charitable organizations and working with philanthropic individuals to achieve their charitable missions philanthropic visions. I think people benefit from having philanthropic mentors, role-models. I was blessed in growing up with a grandmother who was a survivor of the holocaust who would get her reparation check from Germany and we would sit down at her kitchen table in Washington Heights, New York and write check after check until it was all gone for charitable purposes. And she had a catch-phrase. In German she'd say, "the last dress has no pockets," meaning you don't hoard it. You don't keep it for yourself. Give freely with a full-heart and give now and so I think finding a philanthropist of a generous person that you look up to as a role model can be incredibly helpful. ZAK: I love that. And so you had your grandmother as your philanthropic mentor or at least one of them. What are some questions that I might ask my philanthropic mentor once I find them? LAURA: How have your priorities changed over time? Have you always been passionate about the environment or last year were you more interested in addressing racial disparities? I think it's important to understand that, you know, our thoughts and feeling change over time and therefore our priorities and therefore our philanthropic priorities. ZAK: What's the objective of having the mentor? LAURA: I think you can learn to be good at philanthropy just like you can learn to be good at something else. ZAK: Like, what do you think makes a compatible mentor/mentee relationship in this dynamic? LAURA: Somebody who's open to talking about it. Not feeling as through money or philanthropy is a taboo subject but one that should be part of our everyday lives and part of the conversation. You know, one of the things I think COVID has shown us is that we all have this shared vulnerability. But we can also all share in the repair.

*Apologies for the occasional interruptions in this episode. We were contending with door knocking, phone calls and very loud package deliveries.*Imagine, if you will, a very safe and special place for women. It's candy-hued and tastefully lit; it's a space of female community and mutual empowerment. Most of all, it's secret, exclusive, guarded. If a cis man ever tries to enter, he will be met with force. It's The Wing meets Skull and Bones, and behind the gates, New York's most elite women are plotting change.This is Nevertheless, a clandestine social club at the heart of Laura Hankin's witty, suspenseful satire A Special Place for Women. The novel follows an out-of-work, lonely journalist named Jillian Beckley who pitches a moonshot story to her old editor and crush: An exposé of what really goes on inside the long-rumored, never-confirmed-to-exist club. She believes that the powerful women of Nevertheless were behind the election of the city's first woman mayor, and that they engineered her downfall after she tried to pass a wealth tax. She infiltrates the club — with some help from her childhood friend, Raf, a celebrity chef who agrees to pretend to be her boyfriend — and quickly discovers there is a lot going on. But what exactly? Is it just kitschy cute you-go-girl feminism, salary negotiation workshops, and virtue signaling? Or is there something darker… even something genuinely spooky?We chatted with Laura — who is, full disclosure, a longtime close friend — about her new book, safe spaces for women, girlbosses, Rachel Hollis, capitalism, female friendship, and so much more. Here's a brief excerpt of our conversation:Claire: There's so much to discuss in this book: corporate feminism and girlbosses, pastel furniture and cute neon signs that say, like, f**k the patriarchy, Tarot decks on sale at Urban Outfitters, and, of course, being special women, which we all are. Laura, thank you so much for joining us.Laura: Thank you so much for having me. We've had so many conversations over the years, but never one recorded before. Emma: The pressure is on! To kick us off, where did the idea for this book come from?Laura: So the funny thing that I don't think you knew until today, Emma, is that you played a role. About four years ago, you invited me to come and meet you for a coffee at this exclusive women-only space, The Wing. I remember being so excited to meet you there. I had never been before, but I had obviously seen the gorgeous Instagram. And I was like, “Oh my god, it's gonna be this incredible utopia for women. I'm gonna feel so welcomed. Maybe I'll try to join.” And I was at this place in my life where I didn't feel particularly impressive — [My first book], Happy And You Know It, had not been published yet. I was running around to a bunch of day jobs. And I remember going and meeting you and you were so wonderful. But I just felt so out of place and so self-conscious. I was like, “What am I doing here? My dress is so wrinkly. I'm too short.” It just made me wonder, what would happen if a woman who really did not picture herself being part of an exclusive club had to infiltrate it for her career? Claire: I was really intrigued by the idea of setting a really dark thriller/satire/mystery in these really glossy, cozy spaces that are supposed to be safe spaces for women who are threatened by male violence at every turn. I'm curious for you, what appealed to you about this juxtaposition of genre and setting?Laura: I think I was always like, “Oh, if I could just get into those beautiful spaces, and be surrounded by other women, and suddenly, I just had my allies in the fight and we could rest together, then everything would be great.” And that is obviously not the case. And so I wanted to dig underneath these shiny surfaces. Because I feel like sometimes the shiny surfaces can hide the deepest secrets. And also, I'm really drawn to shiny surfaces, and I want to be a part of them.Emma: In the book, you get at the inherent tension between advocating for gender equality and the exclusivity of an elite club — even if it is focused on women. It erases so many other ways that oppression plays out in our culture [other than gender], and also turns this social justice mission into a capitalist product. It's something that I think was you dealt with really compassionately, which, as someone who was a member of The Wing, and loved it, but also felt really conflicted about it the whole time, I really appreciated. Claire: It's so seductive to believe that you could belong to this beautiful place full of impressive people. And I feel like your book really gets at this. [Places like] The Wing, and more importantly, Nevertheless [the fictional women's club in the book], they're trying to embody an ideal of acceptance. That is what social justice is built on. It's not exclusivity, it's everyone gets the same, everyone gets their needs met equally. But what we really want in our communities is to be special. There's no community, the way that humans build community, without some people not being in it. And that is fundamentally inextricable from the appeal of a social club. So how do you find community without betraying the ideal of “everyone is equal, everyone is accepted”? It's very difficult for the women of Nevertheless to resolve that. Do you feel like you're still struggling with resolving that?Laura: A little bit? It's really nice to be able to have a “common enemy.” That might be the wrong [term], but to be able to be like, “well, the men can't come.” And I think a lot of the women in the club in the book will say the right things. Like, “we have to remember these other women, too, we have to support them, the ones who are not as fortunate as us.” But it takes hard work to actually reach out and include those other people. And also, then it would make going to the club not feel quite as exciting and fun, right? Having something be secret or exclusive makes it automatically feel so much more important than it actually is.Emma: I think so many of us don't want to admit the appeal of that, because it feels kind of gross to be like, “I like being special. I like being included in the thing that not everyone is [included in].” And so if you can dress that up in a mission, then you don't have to feel bad.Claire: There's this incredible balancing act that these companies are trying to do, which is marketing both acceptance and exclusivity, and trying to capitalize on both of those desires. Because what we all want is to be accepted and for other people not to be. And so if you can sell both sides of that, that's very effective.Emma: Laura, you do a really good job of interrogating those impulses, and universalizing the experience [of wanting to be chosen] and then picking it apart, but doing it from a really compassionate place, which makes A Special Place For Women such a fantastic read.Laura: Ultimately, I always really love my characters. And so I always do want them to succeed and try to be better. So I think I was coming at the writing of the book from that place. It's like, okay, they might fail, they might do some bad things. But is there hope for redemption for us all? Can we find a way to both belong and not keep people out unnecessarily?This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. You can listen to the full Rich Text audio chat in this newsletter, or wherever you get your podcasts! You can buy “A Special Place For Women,” which comes out May 11th, here, check out her virtual book launch here, and follow Laura on Instagram and Twitter! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireandemma.substack.com/subscribe

Failure happens to everyone; we will experience it at some point in our lives. Despite our sacrifices and hard work, we may not achieve what we set out to do. It is, however, important to approach failure not as the end of a journey but as a crucial lesson. And it doesn’t matter how many times you fail—physical, emotional and mental resilience will take us one step forward towards our eventual success and victory.  Laura Penhaul joins us in this episode to share the story of her expedition across the Pacific Ocean. She describes the preparations she undertook, from planning the expedition to gaining financial support. Laura also talks about the importance of breaking down the journey and being clear with team dynamics in the expedition’s success.   If you want to know more about the makings of strength and mental resilience in a person, then this episode is for you.   Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health programme all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.   Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year’s time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5-km or run a 100-miler? ​​Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, your goals and your lifestyle?  Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.   Health Optimisation and Life Coaching If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com, we can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you. If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity or are wanting to take your performance to the next level and want to learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.   Lisa’s Anti-Ageing and Longevity Supplements  NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, a NAD+ precursor Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, is being dramatically decreased over time. What is NMN? NMN Bio offers a cutting edge Vitamin B3 derivative named NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) that is capable of boosting the levels of NAD+ in muscle tissue and liver. Take charge of your energy levels, focus, metabolism and overall health so you can live a happy, fulfilling life. Founded by scientists, NMN Bio offers supplements that are of highest purity and rigorously tested by an independent, third party lab. Start your cellular rejuvenation journey today. Support Your Healthy Ageing We offer powerful, third party tested, NAD+ boosting supplements so you can start your healthy ageing journey today. Shop now: https://nmnbio.nz/collections/all NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 capsules NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 Capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 Capsules Quality You Can Trust — NMN Our premium range of anti-ageing nutraceuticals (supplements that combine Mother Nature with cutting edge science) combat the effects of aging, while designed to boost NAD+ levels. Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce’ Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection ‘Fierce’, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Gain valuable insights through Laura’s journey and expedition across the Pacific Ocean. Learn about mental resilience and adaptability in dealing with failure.   Discover the importance of team dynamics in the success of Laura’s expedition.   Resources Gain exclusive access to premium podcast content and bonuses! Become a Pushing the Limits Patron now! Support healthy ageing through the NAD+ boosting supplement, NMN! Visit NMN Bio for more information.  Watch Losing Sight of Shore, a documentary about four brave women rowing across the Pacific Ocean, from America to Australia. The strength of adaptability: achieving the impossible, Laura Penhaul on TEDxTruro What it takes for a team to survive 9 months at sea, Laura Penhaul on TEDxClapham Endurance podcast with Mark Beaumont and Laura Penhaul Endurance: How to Cycle Further by Mark Beaumont Connect with Laura: Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn   Episode Highlights [05:12] Laura’s Background Laura worked in elite sport for the Olympics and Paralympics for more than 14 years. As a physical therapist, she was able to see people through their journeys as athletes.  In the face of adversity, Laura found two types of people: those who bounced back from it and those who gave up because of it.  She was inspired by those who wanted to thrive and make the most out of life.  She never experienced rowing before, but she was searching for a challenge. Ocean rowing was something she found ideal.  The expedition gave her a lot of learnings.  [12:58] Gaining Confidence Reach out to those who have done what you want to do or to those who have expertise.  Laura had to break down the journey and prepare for it: planning the possibility of the route, gaining logistical and structural support, planning out the time frame and preparing the team.  She expected to finish in a year but didn’t. It took four years of planning before they could carry out the expedition.  She had to learn from her failures, figure out her blind spots and reach out to other people for help.  [16:12] Gathering Financial Support and Sponsorships At first, Laura could not ask for money to support her journey. She reached out to people who worked in business and sponsorship. They helped her shape her deck, brand and business model.  She also reached out to Mark Beaumont, an elite expedition athlete. She learned from his experience and failures.  With Mark’s help, Laura could have a structure for the timeline, budget and sponsorship.  [20:06] Physical, Emotional and Mental Resilience  Optimise your own elite performance.  Break down the journey and plan everything. Being prepared makes you feel confident when dealing with the unknown.  Have the courage to step away from comfort and the norms.  Push outside of your comfort bubble to reach your full potential.  [25:40] Going Beyond Your Comfort Zone Laura considers herself a calculated risk-taker.  She does not leap blindly and makes sure not to leave any stone unturned.  It’s not a failure if you learn from it.  Have the physical, emotional and mental resilience and robustness to bounce back and ask where and why you went wrong.  [29:36] Dealing with Failure You can prepare everything and still fail. There are things you can’t control. Be adaptable and flexible in your performance. During difficult times, the strength of Laura’s team was able to support a struggling individual. Different perspectives help you see things you can and cannot control. It can prevent you from being ill or injured. [34:42] Team Dynamics Compared to individual sports, being in a team is difficult.  Expeditions bring out the best and worst in people. You won’t know unless you are in the situation.  Laura wanted her team to be cohesive and transparent. She always confronts an issue and steps forward to speak about it.  A performance psychologist helped them understand the differences in each other's personalities, which helped make their journey a success. [44:05] Keeping Mindfulness in Moments of Struggle Leveraging each member’s strengths and differences can end up holding the team together rather than pulling it apart. When you are struggling, you may show a part of yourself that is cynical and selfish.  Remember: we are all working on our character.  In extreme circumstances, the bad side of ourselves could come out. Dealing with it is part of resilience and teamwork.   7 Powerful Quotes ‘There's people that can go through the same type of thing. And yet one person wakes up, being so thankful that they're alive’ they're now going to make the most of life. And then somebody else that wakes up and they're like, they wish they didn't wake up’. ‘How can I put myself in a situation which is completely unknown, that's kind of gonna make me want to give up? And I want to understand what it is we draw on when we can't give up [and] we've only got one option’. ‘It's all about perspective, isn't it? And it's all about the context that you're in. And this is the thing that I get really passionate about is, I want to optimise people's own elite performance’. ‘It is not a failure unless you don’t learn from it. And leaping sometimes is exactly what you need to do, and it's just not being scared to fall, like just knowing that, you know what, if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. It's got you one step further. And one step closer to finding what the next thing might be’. ‘You kind of just got to crack on and then there's no going back, you can't row backwards, sort of, it's only about having the confidence to step into taking on the Pacific’. ‘You've got to understand that there are things you can't control. So you've done everything you can control. And now the rest is up to the gods, basically. And you're going to have to be able to be adaptable and flexible’. ‘The girls hated confrontation. They weren't used to giving and receiving feedback. That was always felt like a personal threat. I just had to put myself in the barrier first. I be like, “Right, cool, okay, if you're not going to give it and you're going to say everything's rosy when it's not, I’ll pull it out”’.   About Laura Laura Penhaul is one of the world's most respected physiotherapists. She helps train many of the top athletes in Olympic sailing and the Paralympics.  Laura is known for her nine-month, 9000-mile crossing of the Pacific in a rowboat. She managed a team of four women known as the Coxless Crew; she was the expedition's team leader and organiser. The expedition is featured in a documentary called Losing Sight of Shore. Connect with Laura through Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.   Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can learn more about stories of strength and mental resilience. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa    Full Transcript Of The Podcast!  Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: Hi everyone, and welcome back to Pushing the Limits once again. Today, I have another world-leading, actually world-record-holding, superwoman. Now, this lady is Laura Penhaul from England, and Laura is one of the world's most respected physiotherapists. She helps train many of the top athletes in Olympic sailing and in Paralympics with people with disabilities. She's done an awful lot in high-performance sport. But what Laura is really known for is that Laura did a 9,000-mile crossing of the Pacific in a rowboat, you heard that right. Right across the Pacific. Nine months it took and she was the team leader and organiser of this whole expedition. She got four women together to do this epic event. And there is a documentary out called Losing Sight of Shore. And today we discuss this mammoth expedition that Laura undertook. The funny thing is that Laura hadn't even been a rower before she took this on. But because she had worked so much with high-performance athletes, people pushing the limits of endurance, and people with disabilities doing crazy things. She wanted to understand what is it that makes some people so resilient and strong, and other ones want to give up when they're faced with a trauma. And she thought, 'I don't need to wait until something drastic happens in my life, and my health has taken off me or my mobility, or I have an accident or I have something to wake up. I can actually take on some mammoth task so that I can start to understand what it actually takes and what resilience and strength is all about'. And she felt like she didn't have the right to be leading and guiding other people if she didn't have that experience herself. So she set off on a mission, what she thought would take them a year to do for a status to organise this expedition across the Pacific. And they knew that taking it four years of preparation, we go into the, all the details of putting together such a high-performance team, it's a fantastic interview. She really is a superwoman. I'm in awe over here, I can't imagine being in a 29-foot boat for anything more than about two hours, I reckon, before I'd start going nuts, so she's pretty impressive, this lady. And before we head over to the show, just want to remind you, we've launched now, our patron program for the podcast. So if you want to become a premium member of our podcast tribe, if you like, we'd love you to come and join us here on over to patron.lisatamati.com. And we'd love to see you over, the, it's all about keeping the show going. We've been doing it now for five and a half years each and every episode takes me a long time to put together to chase these world-leading experts, to do the research that I need to do, especially when it's dealing with scientific topics, and a test takes an awful amount of time. And to keep it going we need your help. And we wanted to give you lots of benefits too so people who do get in behind the podcast and help us provide this super valuable content to everybody get a whole lot of exclusive member benefits. So we'd love you to check it out. Go to patron.lisatamati.com for more information on that. And on that note before we just hit over to Laura, I just want to remind you about my new longevity and anti-ageing supplement NMN Nicotinamide Mononucleotide. You would have heard a couple of times in the podcast I had Dr Elena Seranova and we're going to have her on more often. She's a molecular biologist and tells us all about the ways that we can help with anti-ageing. And one of those things is by taking Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, which is a very, very powerful supplement. It's an NAD precursor that helps up-regulate the sirtuin genes, helps provide a bigger pool of NAD to every cell in the body and helps on a very, very deep level. The ageing working against the ageing process and who doesn't want to know about them if you want to find out all about it and all the science behind it, please go to nmnbio.nz. Right, now over to the show with Laura Penhaul. Lisa: Well, hi everyone, and welcome to Pushing the Limits. Today I'm super excited. I have an amazing, amazing guest for you. I really do find the most incredible people and this lady is a superwoman. So welcome to the show. It's really, really nice to have you Laura. Laura Penhaul is sitting in Cornwall in England. Laura, how's your day going? Well, you're not going. Laura Penhaul: Oh I was gonna say yeah no, it's been great. Do it. Yeah, it's now eight o'clock in the evening. So yeah, no, it's all good. It's been a beautiful sunny day. Lisa: Oh lovely, lovely. So Laura is an amazing person who does expeditions and as a physio, Laura, can you give us a little bit of background? I want you to tell your story in your words, give us a bit of a synopsis about what you do and what the critical things. I mean I've done a bit in the intro so, but I really want your words, if you like. Laura: Yeah, no props well, firstly, yes. Thanks, Lisa for having me on the show. It's been an honour because I think you're a superwoman more than me. Lisa: Hell no. Laura: But no I mean yeah, my background is I worked in elite sport, in Olympic and Paralympic sport for over 14 years. Sort of went to Vancouver, London, Rio, Tokyo cycles. And yeah during that kind of journey, and that was as lead physio in different sports, whether that was downhill skiing, whether it was with British Athletics Paralympic team. And more recently, I was with the British sailing team. And during that sort of journey as a physio like, the role that we have, as physios, physical therapists are very much kind of, you know, you're seeing somebody through a journey. And like when I worked with them and we've worked with patients in trauma, worked versus kind of, you know, in spinal cord injuries, and then straight to Paralympic sport, I've been surrounded by people that have been faced with significant adversity. And it's sort of, it's always along my journey of my career, have I been fascinated by understanding the person in front of me and kind of going, there's usually two types of people when they've been thrown a massive curveball, like an RTA or road traffic accident, or something horrendous, that is completely changed their life for the rest of their life. Those two, there's people that can go through the same type of thing. And yet one person wakes up, being so thankful that they're alive, they're now going to make the most of life. And then somebody else that wakes up and they're like, they wish they didn't wake up. And as a physio dealing with those two people, you've got to have a very different approach. And in the, kind of—to me, understanding that person that wants to give up and actually being able to change their mindset and facilitate, go shoulder to shoulder with them is really powerful. And then those people that do wake up and want to thrive, like they're the ones that have inspired me to do more stuff, because I'm like, why do we wait for adversity? Why do we wait for something to be a curveball before we then, like, start to go, ‘Oh, my God, I need to make the most of life like I’m fit. And I'm healthy. I need to make the most of life because clearly stuff could happen in an hour’s time. Lisa: At any time. Laura: Exactly. So that's kind of what then drove me to start to do more and more personally, and kind of a bit of exploratory expedition space. And then the real, so that led me to ride the Pacific Ocean, which is kind of you know what, we're talking about. Lisa: You said it again, you just rode the Pacific Ocean is, I just dropped it as a, to yeah, and then I rode the Pacific Ocean. So you were into sailing and into rowing and into all of that sport, as prior, this was your thing? Laura: No. Well, that's the thing, no wasn't in all honesty. I was, I'm kind of a jack of all trades like I love anybody, any athletes, anybody that I work with, I want to understand them. And I want to understand the sport, the environment that they're in. So when I was working with skiers, I went off and did a ski season. I learned to ski when I, and I'm somebody that, yeah, I love to do different sports and outdoors, the sort of outdoor environments. And if I was working with marathon runners, I was like, I can't fully treat them if I don't understand, if I haven't run a marathon like, to me, I need to experience what they've experienced, even in a small way to kind of get a glimpse of the environment. So I would run a marathon, same with triathletes, and, you know, not to the extent of your, sort of did a half Ironman, and then the point was the Paralympic cohort when I was working with them. I was like, this is an area that I can't untap you know, yeah. Lisa: Yeah. Laura: I can do it, but I can't understand what it is to be a Paralympian. Lisa: Yep. Laura: However, how can I put myself in a situation which is completely unknown, that's kind of gonna make me want to give up. And I want to understand what it is we draw on when we can't give up you know, we've only got one option. Lisa: Yep. Laura: So I kind of, that's what I was searching for, for a couple of years of searching for something that was going to be out of my comfort zone completely and was going to be a challenge on multiple levels. Lisa: Sure must have been. Laura: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I guess at the time, I was doing, sort of, triathlons. I was enjoying them. But anything that was cycling, running, swimming, I felt like this would be expected and I kind of would already be a bit familiar with it. So when I suddenly heard about ocean rowing, I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is ideal'. I've always wanted to row but never did it. Then never got a chance to, so I'd never rode before. I've never lost sight of shore. Like, you know, I've never been out at sea properly, never sailed or any of that stuff. Well, a bar like going on a few trips. But yeah, not a sailor by anyway, shape or form.  So it was, I was, and that just connected, you know, when something, an opportunity comes up and you're like, ‘This is exactly what I've been looking for'. And it was a proper light bulb moment. And the thing for me, it's the one time in my whole life that I've been so focused, like, ‘I have to make this happen'. Because I know, in my heart of hearts, I know what I'm going to get out of this is going to be huge. Lisa: Wow. Laura: And that basically is why starting point with it, it was kind of, I didn't know how to row, I went from being a marathon weight of like, something stupid, like 58 kilos up to, I had to go up to 72 kilos to grow on mass, you know, to be not skinny, because we lose a lot of weight out there. I had to put a team together, whereas, in my personal sport, I was doing quite individual sports. So, you know, I had to work out the team cohesion, the whole team dynamics, and recruitment. I had to figure out what the boat was, get it built, like then set up this as a business, you know, so. So yeah, so the whole journey it was, I mean, now on reflection, there's so many learnings from it. But I absolutely thrive from the self-awareness piece, how much I've learned about myself, and the different perspectives. And you know, approaching that row, my approach is very much like, this is all brand spanking new. So if I can approach it with a blank canvas, if I can have a real adaptive mindset, and if I surround, if I've now gone on the other side of the table, rather than surrounding athletes, if I surround myself with the relevant expertise, how far can I get? And how far can I really experience that athlete? Lisa: Yeah, sorry, just my brother's just come in the middle of the podcast it’s all right. There. Come on Mitch, get around the other side. Yeah, this is podcast life for you. Didn't tell your brother you’re recording. There was so much here that I wanted to unpack. Because there was like, you just skipped over a ton of stuff. Number one, you had no idea. So what gave you the confidence, what was the little voice inside you saying, ‘I can do this’, when you're in a completely unknown sport? Like what was it that made you think, ‘Oh, yeah, I can ride across the Pacific on a row across the Pacific, you know, for nine months, and that all worked out well'. You know, how did you even come up with a concept for something so audacious? Laura: Well, I mean, it's all about small pieces, isn't it, and kind of reaching out to those that have done stuff and those that you respect and have the expertise. So it was basically breaking it, breaking the journey down. First of all, one is that route even possible? So initially, somebody had asked me to be part of the Indian Ocean, and they were putting a team together and then I evolved it into the Pacific. And then somebody, I was like, well, actually, originally, it might have been the new ocean wave race, which just goes from San Fran to Hawaii. And I was like, well, that's not the Pacific. That's a third of it, like so if I'm going to say I'm going to row the Pacific. I want to row, can I row all of it? Yeah. So it was then reaching out to somebody from a logistical point of view and a support structure point of view saying, ‘Is this even feasible? And what would it look like?’ And when they said, 'Yes'. I was like, right, okay. So that's route can get involved, this is what it's going to look like. We're going to need to start, we're going to need to replenish, but it's doable. But it's going to take this time frame. And then it was kind of like right, in order for me to get prepped and the team to get prepped, what's the time frame that it's going to take to do that? Let's be realistic. And I wasn't realistic. I was naive, I thought it would only take us about a year to get to the start line. And hell no. It took four years to get to start, like four years. Lisa: Four years. That’s massive. Laura: Yeah, so it was. But interestingly, there's so many parallels, you know, like working in Olympic sport, everything's in four-year cycles for the Olympic cycle. And so there's so much that I learned through that process of, I thought I was only going to go in a year's time. That didn't happen. We didn't have the funding. I didn't got the team, the boat wasn't finished, you know, it was like, right, I need to go again. I need to reset. I need to sort of keep the ball rolling. But I need to learn from what failures have had here. And how do I overcome them? Lisa: Wow. Laura: The second year, I didn’t quite have to win I thought it was but it's all that sort of stuff. You go, yeah, you can give up why it's such a clear vision with it. And the question in my head was, ‘There's going to be an all-female team that is going to do this at some point. Like, why can't it be me? And I'm sure that will happen in my lifetime'. So what am I missing? What are the things that I can't see? That's in my blind spots. And that's where I started to reach out, to pull in different people to say, right, ‘This is the problem I've got, how can you help me’? How can you see and it was that reaching out for help with the right expertise that got us to the start line? It wasn't me. It was the collective bigger support team around us. Lisa: How did you even, like the resources and the money in the financial and the sponsorship, when you didn't have a—I mean, you had a backstory as a high-performance expert, and helping other people in training and so on. But, you know you didn't have, you weren't—there were no huge amount of resources behind you. How did you—I know what I had to go through to get to the races that I did. And that was probably a heck of a lot less than what you had to go through. How did you face that? And what did you learn on the business side of the journey, the marketing, all of that sort of stuff? Laura: Yeah, I mean– Lisa: Selling the idea to people. Laura: Yeah, the money. It kind of—it’s exactly that. I think it's showing the belief, like the absolute dogged determinedness, that this is going to happen, and you know, like, I put in my own swag to it. I paid for the boat built in the first place. So I'm like, I'm gonna do this, like, do you want to be part of it or not? But I want to do this regardless. Yeah. Lisa: So basically, how I did too. Laura: This is not my approach. But you know, I mean, I say that, but let's face it, I was useless at kind of asking for money, like, you know, it's great, you're doing it for charities. But to ask to support me, and like our journey. I was crap. You know, I'm a physio, I like to help people. I don't like asking for help. You know, at the time, I was very much in that poor sort of leadership style. And that's a big, that was a big learning point. But then reaching out to people that do work in business and do work in sponsorship. And they were the people that then helped me to shape sort of your sponsorship deck and how you need to brand it, what's your, you know, the colours, the language, all of that type of stuff. Lisa: Wow. Laura: And I loved it because I mean, I love learning. So suddenly, I was entering a snippet of a different world that I knew nothing about previously. Same with like the PR side of it, I had no idea but that was great fun, and, and the business model itself, like yeah became a business and I thought it was all about the physical and that was totally not it was 10% of like the project. And then yeah, so like you say, setting up a business no Scooby-Doo about and so simplicity was reaching out to people that had been successful had done it before. And the likes of, you know, Mark Beaumont, that we've talked about before like Mark. Mark is somebody that's an elite athlete, expedition athlete, he'd actually at the time rode the Atlantic, and unfortunately, they nearly died at sea. So I'd reached out to him to learn from his experiences from the actual failures, more, I don't want necessarily the successes, but, and he then was great at providing me with a bit more of the structure for you know, the timeline, the budget that this, that in the other room. Lisa: Wow. Laura: How you sort of need to get the sponsorship. And yeah, so I think to me, it's about as you know, if you hold, if this is a new space and you hold an ego thinking you're going to, then you're never gonna get anywhere. Lisa: You’re gonna get your ass kicked. Laura: Yeah, basically, just whereas for me, yeah, well, I don't mind. I don't mind saying I don't know something. I'm happy to ask why and how and who can help… Lisa: You can be very humble, we can tell that five minutes of talking to you, you know. Laura: Thank you very much. Lisa: And how did you get a team together? Because you get four ladies, you rode the Pacific and people were talking like nine months and a rowboat unsupported, like from California to Cairns, wasn’t it? It's great. Yeah. There's a documentary out on it. If people want to find out we'll work out with it with the link sir. And how they can get hold of it perhaps afterwards. Four ladies in a rowboat, rowing across the lake. I mean, to the average person who doesn't know anything about rowing? It sounds absolutely insane. And I, like, I said to my husband, I was interviewing this morning and I said I couldn't last 24 hours in a rowboat. I probably couldn't last four hours in a rowboat. How do you comprehend nine months like that for me? Is, I mean, I've never done anything on that scale, of that long. You know, like, the longest thing I ever did was run through New Zealand which was a sustained effort over 42 days. And that well nearly bloody killed me, you know. But that's not nine months, you know, little logistics and all that. Wow. Laura: Yeah, but you know what, I've been, flipping heck, you know. 40 odd days that you're running the lengths of New Zealand, like that is insane. So you could have... Lisa: That’s a hell lot easier than rowing. Laura: It’s not though! I mean, it's all about perspective, isn't it? And it's all about the context that you're in. And this is the thing that I get really passionate about is, I want to optimise people's own elite performance, like, not comparative to anybody else, like, what's your—so what you're really is your achievement of like, 42 days and everything else you've achieved is huge. Whereas somebody else's 42 days of running, will be running a marathon like that will be—it's about that gap analysis, like, where you'd got yourself to, to then be able to take on the 42-day sort of challenge. Like that was a big old leap, but you're already like, sort of—your experiences, and you'd prepped yourself for that. Lisa: Yes, years and years. Laura: Yeah, and where is somebody who's on a couch, but then is setting their sights of running a marathon. That's their 42 days, like, that's their elite performance for them. And the row for us? Yeah, it was a big old leap, but it was fundamentally, it was broken down. Like I think sometimes you must have found this with the run, you're talking about there and everything else. You've got to break it down, like you certainly in the preparation phase, you've got to plan every inch and every sort of crook of it within its life so that you don't leave any stone left unturned. You feel like you're best prepared, that gives you confidence, to then have capacity to deal with the unknown when you're faced with it. So to me, that sort of, I always wanted to leave, like, at least 30% of capacity in my headspace to make sure I can react to when I need to. Lisa: You can handle it. Laura: Exactly, and deal with the unknown. If I mean, if we'd gone on that row in that first year, Jesus Christ, like most of it was unknown, like that. I was so naive, it was ridiculous. But by the time you know, it's four years down the line, I felt so confident in actually we've trialed the boat, we've done 72 hours, we've done a couple of weeks. We've done team testing, we've done routines, we've done steep depot, we've done the training, we've done the site support, you know, all of those, every aspect of it. I feel like we took out and then it was a case of right, well, then we just need to do this on a day and day out. And then however long that's gonna last for it's just sticking to routines, which you know, the same in whatever you do. Lisa: The more you do the more it becomes normal. Laura: Exactly. And then it's kind of like, Well, actually, once you lose sight of shore, whether you're out there for five days, five weeks, five months, actually doesn't make much difference. Lisa: You’re in this shit anyway. Too far from home anyway, you've lost sight of shore! Laura: Yeah, you kind of just got to crack on and then, you know, there's no going back, you can't row backwards, sort of, it's only about, you know, having the confidence to step into taking on the Pacific. And for us, you know, yes, we rowed the Pacific literally, but to me, it was the essence of everybody's got their own Pacifics to cross like... Lisa: Yes.  Laura: ...our film’s called Losing Sight of Shore because it's about having the courage to lose sight of shore, like, have that sort of courage to just step away from the comfort, step away from the knowns. And like, Oh, my God, you know, that's where life just opens up and expose. Lisa: Because you know, I had Paul Taylor, who's a neuroscientist, and ex-British Navy guy, and exercise physiologist on the show last week, and he's talking about the small bubble where you can live in or the big bubble. And the big bubble is where we all want to be, you know, where we’re reaching our potential and we are filling and where are all these amazing things that we could do. We know that that bubble was there. But we're all scared living in this little comfort zone. And how do you push outside because that outside is risk of failure, and in your case risk of dying. You know, there was so much that you put on the line physically, mentally, financially, emotionally, relationships, you know. You name it, you put it on the line for this one thing, and that is living in that big bubble and scaring the crap out of yourself and doing it anyway. Most people have this tendency to want to be comfortable in and I see this as a massive problem in our society today is that we are all cozy and comfortable and sitting on the couch watching Netflix and we are warm and we don't push ourselves for the gloom we don't push yourself. And this leads to disaster when it comes to resilience and being able to cope because you're been through this amazing adventure and expedition and you've risked everything, you must have an inner confidence that is just—and I know that you won't have it in all areas of life because this is certainly specific. And I know how that works because I'm really good and some things and really crap in others and I'm still working on my mindset in this area and that area or whatever, we're work in progress but you when you've lifted up your horizons to that big, nothing must daunt you in a way. Like he must be like, ‘Okay, whatever is coming at me, I can probably handle it'. Because you know, inside you have that resilience, which is so important. Laura: Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. It's about context, isn't it? Like I—you know, I'm a risk-taker, but I'm a really calculated risk-taker, right. Lisa: Yeah. Laura: Exactly. So kind of the Pacific seems like it's ridiculous, and it's life threatening. I mean, I didn't leave any stone left unturned. I had military guys helping us to make sure we'd sort of not left stuff unturned. We went through survival practice. We, I mean, there was everything and the amount of sort of, you know, routines we had on the boat, leashes, and kind of safety equipment was next to none. Because I was like, the risk we've got is getting separated from the boat. So I'm risk-aware, really risk-aware. And, and kind of, and make sure that sort of don't leave any stone unturned so then I feel confident to go forwards. I wouldn't just leap into it like blindly. Lisa: Yep, you shouldn’t. Laura: Yeah exactly. Lisa: Because you will die. Laura: Yeah. But I mean, it's no different if you watch, I don't think like, you know, you watch Alex Honnold, climbing free solo, you know, the El Cap, sort of the climb, if anybody’s seen that film. I mean, it's phenomenal. And anybody would, you know, you watch it. You're like, ‘Oh, my God, that's insane. He’s free climbing that like, what if he just slipped’? What if this? What if that? But look at his meticulous approach to it. Lisa: Yeah, one hand wrong. Laura: Exactly. But then his meticulous approach, he hasn't just woken up that day one, right. So I'm going to climb up, you know, sort of freestyle at this thing. He's like, he's been off top-roping with it, he is kind of lead climbed it. He's, kind of, known every single holding place he's written it, he’s drawn it, he’s visualising it. And he's only done it when he feels completely ready, prepped. And that actually, there's no move in that that is going to be a risk. So, therefore, he's a calculated risk-taker. And it is extreme when you watch it, but the preparedness is totally there. Lisa: I couldn't do it. I didn't put the parachute on as I'm halfway down. You know, you do learn from that, you know. I remember going out into the race in Niger, which was 353Ks across one of the most dangerous landscapes in you know, places on Earth, countries on Earth. And we were meant to have food come from France, and it didn't arrive. And I wasn't prepared. I didn't have my own stash, I didn't, my husband at the time, my ex-husband there. He did, you know, like, and when you're doing things like that, and you end up with food poisoning, and you're, you know, vomiting and shitting your way across the Sahara. And you realise, you know, you could have avoided that. That’s sort of a big lesson and do your preparation better, you know. Don't be so cavalier with your, ‘I am going to go and, you know, run 100 miles, and I haven't even trained for a marathon yet'. No, no, you know, and I had to learn those things the hard way because I had a tendency just to dive in. And this is all exciting. And let's do it. Laura: But then you learned that didn’t you? Lisa: Yeah, but it's not a good way to learn in the middle of the Sahara. It’s better to learn previously. Laura: Yeah, that is sure. But yeah, I mean, you still but you learn and I think that's one of the biggest takeaways, of whenever we talk about failure and stuff. It is not a failure, if you, unless you don’t learn from it. And leaping sometimes is exactly what you need to do, and it's just not being scared to fall, like just knowing that, you know what, if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. It's got you one step further. And one step closer to finding what the next thing might be. Lisa: Yeah. Laura: So yeah, just it's having that like you say, that the sort of the robustness, the resilience or whatever it is to bounce back to kind of jump back up to ask the questions. ‘Well, why didn't that work? And let's try it a different way', or learn from it and do something. Lisa: Yeah, like you said, You reached out to Mark and he'd had, you know, nearly died and had actually failed in that particular expedition, done lots of other crazy stuff, but you know, and that one and it is those things like you are risking failure and you have to understand it from the outset. That you can take care of all the things you can prepare. You can get everything and you're still risking because, if this was easy, everyone would be doing it. And you have to be okay with the—this is something I try and get my athletes to understand. When you're actually done the work, you've done the boulder, you've done the—all the hard stuff that you knew now standing at the start line, that's actually to have time to celebrate and go, you know, ‘I've done the hard work. Now it's up to whatever's going to come my way'. And like you say, being able to adapt and to have the flexibility to take whatever's coming at you, which isn't always easy, but you have to sort of give up those—I think the consequences of what if, what if, what if, because if you’re constantly asking yourself, for ‘What if I don't make that time?’ You know, say you're running a marathon, or I want to do it in under three and a half hours, or whatever the case may be, and then you're so like, ‘Oh, no’, and then it takes you three hours and thirty-two and you know, ‘I'm a failure’, you know, like, hang on a minute, no, hang on. That's not how it works. Laura: Yeah. Lisa: Yeah, you've got to understand that there are things you can't control. So you've done everything you can control. And now the rest is up to the gods, basically. And you're going to have to be able to be adaptable and flexible. And that was one of the things in your website, talking about adaptive, being adaptive in your performance. And I think that's a really good thing because we cannot control like… You can be having a bad day at the office and get up and you feel sick and your immune system’s down and you've got your period and you've, you know, whatever the case may be. And you weren't bargaining with that, you know, so you have to be able to work, ‘I need to still go because there's no way back. How do I deal with it’? You know? Laura: Yeah, and I think it's a really valid point. Because I mean, even in the row halfway through, and it's in the films, it's not kind of confidential stuff. One of the girls, like, she just completely changed her personality, right, because that was exactly the problem. She thought she could control the boat. She thought, you know, she was a rower. Out of all of us, she was somebody that actually had rowed since she was a kid and stuff. She thought ocean rowing was, you know. She didn't want to lose the passion. Unfortunately, yeah, it killed her passion. She didn't know then, she lost the sense of identity, all of that stuff. Lisa: Oh yeah, real tough. Laura: Yeah, awful. And, but because she was trying to control the boat, you know, like, the current, the wind was against us, like, those are things you cannot control. It’s a one ton boat, not one person is going to be able to control moving that in the direction you want it to go in. And so, but it was the collective of the team that enabled us to be able to rally around and understand, first of all, recognise the change in personality, it was a behaviour, it was yeah, there was something underlying. It was not her—well, it was, but there was something emotional that she couldn't verbalise straightaway. So hence, she just changed her personality type. Lisa: Wow. Laura: And then it was like the strength of the team to be able to rally together to support that. So kind of come at it from the right approach that she was able to share it, to then collectively go, we just need to see a different perspective on this stuff. And I think that's where, you know, a vast dynamic sort of team, you know, a diverse team sorry is what I meant, has got so much strength in it, because you know, what, when you see it through your own lens, there's only sort of one way. Whereas if you've got some diversity there, I just think it brings a different perspective. And suddenly, you're able to see, you can't control the uncontrollable, you know, you can only control the controllables. You can't control what's out of control. And those things are the weather that is, you know, yes will prevent being ill or injured. But that might well happen. That, you know, is what it is. And if the boat sort of fails, but you whatever, then those are only three things that are going to be out of our control. And if anything happened there, then I wouldn't be. I would have been upset, I would be upset, but I wouldn't be throwing my toys out the pram because it isn't something we could control. And if the row didn't happen, we didn't finish because one of those three things, that is what it is. Lisa: Yeah, it is what it is. And you've done your utmost. And I mean, I've failed on different expeditions and things that I’ve done, like really fallen on my face, you know, with, you know, documentary crews there have captured all on film as you just absolutely completely faceplant. And, you know, and it takes a long time to get up again, and it knocks the crap out of you. And, you know, but it's part of that, okay, well, this is the game wherein, you know, we’re pushing the limits, and sometimes, you know, you are human and you don't have the resources or one of the things that I find really, really I'd love to and I think this probably needs its own podcast is the whole team dynamic thing. I mean, it's one thing to be a solo athlete that does things, you know, but it's a—couple of times when I've had to be in a team situation. I find it really, really tough because you were reliant... I did one in the Himalayas, and we're trying to do the world's highest marathon ever done. And I was with a guy who was a mountaineer and used to altitude and very at home in that space. And I wasn't. And I don't—I've done a couple of things at altitude and sort of survive by the skin of my teeth. I'm an asthamtic and I don't really do well on the mountains. So take on, you know, the world's highest mountain. Good idea. And we'd be in shape. And I got sick. I got altitude sickness, and I couldn't even start my body. I couldn't even tie my shoelaces.  But the worst thing was that he changed. The person that he was down here was not the person that he was up there, and, it ended up being quite nasty, and quite, detrimental. And he's not here to defend himself. So I'm not gonna say anything too much. But it wasn't a nice situation to be in — I did not trust that if I was in the shutout there, that we would work together as a team to get through it. I felt like, now, he wouldn't do that.  And then so now I'm like, very, very always aware of if I'm teaming up with people like we've got at the moment, this weekend in my hometown, that Oxfam 100, it's 100-kilometre event where lots of just normal everyday people are doing 100Ks, which is like amazing, walking, and they're doing it in, you know, teams of four, and the staff are going to go through... And there'll be people that are, you know, expeditions bring out the worst and bring out the best in people. And you don't know until you're in the situation with them, which way are they going to go, and which way you're going to go. I mean, I can become, I've been a really horrible person on some of my, you know, with my crew on different occasions where I've just lost my shit because I'm in so much pain, sleep deprivation, motions are up the wazoo. And you just, you know, you're snappy, irritable, you know, just horrible. Afterwards, I’m heading to go and say, ‘I'm very sorry'. You know? So how did you deal with that over nine months like that on steroids? Like the dynamic—four women—everybody's having their highs and lows at different points in there. How did you cope with that? I mean, you're obviously,  you've mentioned the one person and how you helped pull together, it takes incredible leadership to keep a team like that together for nine months, no matter how wonderful you all are. Laura: Yeah, that I mean, don't get me wrong, you still have arguments and stuff, but it was all in the preparation. And it was, we knew I mean, so it is a 29th version rowing boat, right. So it's kind of the size of Greg Rutherford's, it's got the world record for the long jump, right? So it is, kind of, his long jump is the size of our boat. So it's a really small space. And then when you're cramped into the cabin, there's two of you. And if it's stormy, then all four of you are either in that or two in each cabin. So it's a tight, confined space. So it was really clear from the outset that this team had to be, we had to be cohesive, we had to be really transparent. And something I was particularly pedantic about was, I never want to leave a permanent issue. Like if there's an issue, we need to confront it, we will have to step forward into it. We can't, I don't want any bitchiness like, there was, that was always been, sort of my approach to most things. Like, I can't stand the whole talking to other people, rather than talking to the individual that you've got an issue with. You just need to step into that as much as it might feel uncomfortable. And I guess, working in a performance context, we're scrutinised on a daily basis, you know. We're kind of everybody's asking you why what are you doing, you know, type stuff, you've got to justify, you feel like you're under a spotlight all the time. So you start to feel this kind of separation, you know, look kind of right. No, this is they're asking me that because of the person in front of us or the, you know, the end goal, that's what it's about. It's got nothing to do with me personally. We're just trying to optimise what we need to do. So when, my, I pulled this, the sort of the team came together, a lot of it, I was like, how do we stress test this, like, we have to stress test it because– Lisa: Hell yeah. Laura: –exactly. And that's where I, you know, I started working with Keith, the performance psychologist. I reached out to him so I was like, there's got to be more depth to this, you know, we need tools we need to I need to know what I'm going to draw on when I'm wanting to give up like, what's going to be my go-to’s, I'm going to, I need to know how I can respond and react to different personalities and stuff and how they're going to react to each other. So Keith was the absolute rock to the success of our journey, in all honesty. I worked with him for four years and I still worked with him. I still work with him, sorry, to this day. And Keith, sort o—he enabled us to sort of understand the differences in our personalities from the basics of just doing psychometrics and stuff, but pretty in-depth ones. And then analyzing that a little bit more and playing it out in different scenarios, and then really forcing us to kind of do the round table. Yeah, because—and the girls hated confrontation. They weren't used to giving and receiving feedback. That was always felt like a personal threat. Yeah. So I just had to put myself in the barrier first. So I be like, ‘Right, cool, okay, if you're not going to give it and you're going to say everything's rosy when it's not, I’ll pull it out'. ‘So this is what's not going so well. And this is not going so well. Right now give it back to me, hit me’, like because then as soon as I've given it they're happy to give it back to me because I think I'm being—yeah exactly. That's fine. And then I would show them that I was learning from it because I was. And there was— I— they would call me, I would have Laura number one, Laura number two, my personalities. And they—I didn't realise that until sort of, you know, going through the row and they're like, ‘Oh my god, it's Laura number two'. And Laura number two is somebody that when she starts getting, like, tired, hungry, all of that gubbins and, and sort of just a bit over it, I start getting really assertive. I'm very tunnel vision, and my empathy just goes. Whereas normal time, like I've got heaps of the empathy, until it gets to a point… Lisa: Yeah, yeah. So like me. Laura: And so they’d be like, all right, Laura number two. Because we then had a language that was a little bit disconnected to the personal and it made a bit of fun of it, then we sort of were able to sort of take a pause, hear it and stuff. But we had loads of loads of methodologies that we built, we'd worked on to try and get to that point. And that was sort of to the point with there, though, is that is not to say we didn't have any arguments, because we did like, I mean Nat and I, in particular, completely different personalities. She is like a, she's a beautiful character. She is Miss Mindful, she is in the moment, and she is just totally there. She's talking about the sky and the sea and the colours. Whereas I'm Miss Planner. Like I'm already in Cannes, I'm thinking about fear, I’m planning, and what do we need to do, what do we need to sort out? So, you know, when we did the team testing before, this was during selection of the team. I remember when I met Nat, I was like, ‘Oh, god, no, we are poles apart. There's just no way', you know because I was trying to see it through. I was only seeing it through my own lens of who I was getting a rapport with. But I brought her onto the team testing weekend, which was, I'd gone to some ex-military guys. And I said, ‘Look, we need to be tested. I need to see what we're like when we're cold, we’re hungry, really sore, in pain. You need to physically push us. You need to mentally push us'. Well. And so we did like a 72-hour sleep depot type thing, you know, in the Brackens in Wales, yeah. On reflection that was like, yeah, that was it was great fun and obviously hated it during. I remember, like during it, sort of Nat in particular, as a personality that stood miles out because when she came on to it, I was thinking oh she can come along. But she's, I don't think that I’m going to be selecting her. And then Nat was the one that, you know, she might not have been the fittest. But even when she was struggling, and she was in pain, she had a sense of humour. When I was starting to struggle, she made me laugh. And I was like, ‘Oh my god, there's not many people that can do that while I'm in that space'. Lisa: Yeah. Laura:  And I'm like, this isn't just about me. But for the comfort of the team, like we need that. Because otherwise, I will make this too serious. I will. When it gets into it, it will be too boring and serious. I need a sense of humour in this. And she is, she's got it in abundance. And she kept us at the moment. Lisa: Wow, yep. Laura: As well. Like, I needed that mindfulness when we're out to sea because otherwise, I wouldn't have remembered half the things that went on and I wouldn't have recognised and seen it. Lisa: Isn't that amazing? So looking at the strengths and differences can actually end up being the thing that holds you together rather than pulls you apart. Laura: A hundred percent. Lisa: And I just think in this space I have to connect you with Paul Taylor, he will love you. He's a resilience expert that I was mentioning before and yeah, I think it when you have characters and I've started to do this just with for myself even now I have these different characters, you know, there's the good me and there's bad me and the good means like Wonder Woman, she can do anything and she's amazing.  And he has all these character traits that you know I aspire to and want to have and that side of me and then the other side's a real bitch, you know, she's a horrible, cynical, selfish person and those are both of me. And I know when you put this on—Paul talks about doing like cartoon characters and putting speech bubbles on them and actually giving them life and because it puts you outside of these characters that are fighting in your head, and you're trying to be that good one you want to be, but when you're hungry and cold and freezing, and you haven't slept in three days, and you're struggling somewhere, and God knows where. And you just want to go home and cry and hide under the covers and get mummy to give you a chicken soup. Well, you—it puts it outside of you, and it helps you see what you're doing.  And even in daily things like, you know, I've been rehabilitating my mum now for five years, seven days a week. And you know, beginning first three years, it was like eight hours a day. So it was just, it was full, full-on. And then even longer than that in the first year. And I catch myself sometimes being so short and irritable because I'm like trying to multitask and trying to run my businesses and she's waiting for me and you know, like, you just find yourself snapping at somebody when you just feel like, you know, that asshole is sure is present, you know, and you're just like listening to yourself going, ‘How the hell do I get a grip on this?’ We're all human. And we're all working on this. And, you know, I go to my mum and I put her in bed at night time and a cuddle. And tell her, I say, 'You know, I'm sorry for being a bitch today, Ma. I’m sorry for snapping at you'. And she's so lovely. She's like, 'Oh, that's all right'. Like, you know. But we have moments where we're just not nice, and when you're in these extreme circumstances fad, the ones that come out, and this is a part of the dynamic thing that I find really, really fascinating in that whole resilience and teamwork, and how do you bring it all together? So, you know, we're going to have to wrap up this one, because I've really enjoyed talking to you, Laura. But I really would like to have you on a couple of times, because I think there's much more to this actual story because we haven't even got to talking about well, what was it actually like to row? How did you, you know, do, what did you actually do on a daily basis? And how do you plan for such a thing? And how do you have such a big project and deal with it? And so I'm really glad that we've made this connection, and I'm very, very keen to have you on the show again, if you, because we've really just been part one, I think. Laura: Let's see… No, I’ll be honoured to come back on. There’s so much I think we connect with in, and we can talk about for sure, especially in that headspace how we can be… What we've both learned from the experiences that we faced and continue to learn, I think is always an exciting journey. Lisa: Yeah. Laura: Yeah, I'd be honoured to come back on it. It’s been great. Lisa: That would be fantastic because I think also the work that you've done with Paralympians and, you know, people that have worked with disabilities and trauma, we haven't even unpacked that either. Because I think that, you know, we can learn a heck of a lot from people that have gone through, you know, all these dramas and so on, me, I learn every day from Mum, like, her mindset is just like, incredibly strong, resilient. And so I'd like to unpack some of that stuff as well. So Laura, thank you very much for your time today. I think you're a rock star, where can people find you? And where can they get involved in what you're doing? And, you know, do whatever you got available? Because you've got some really good lessons to share with people. So tell us where we can find you. Laura: Yeah, I mean, on usual social media, sort of, the Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn, just @laurapenhaul. And that sort of, you know, P-E-N-H-A-U-L is my surname. So yeah, reach out to that we've also got our endurance book. So where we've sort of added science behind, kind of some of the endurance sort of focus is on GCN, which is a Global Cycling Network website, or our podcast is Endurance as well, which is where's Mark Beaumont, which I co-author on. Lisa: So I'm very keen to meet and hopefully get on the show as well. Yeah, hook me up there. Laura: Yeah, Keith will get you on that as well. I think you've got a lot to add and share their experiences for sure. Lisa: I'd love to. That would be an absolute honor. Laura, you're one hell of a strong woman. I can't wait to see where you go and in the future in what you know, what you take on. God forbid is probably going to be big, and thank you for sharing. I think you have such great knowledge to share with people and you have a duty to get that information out there because this is the sort of stuff that helps people. So thank you very much for your time today Laura. That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.      

Laura Beck is an activist and the founder of LottoLove, the first ever scratch off card with a social mission. LottoLove brings charitable giving to everyday gifting. It's been featured on The Today Show and Ellen DeGeneres and included in national publications, such as Women's Day, Real Simple and Redbook. Through her work with LottoLove, Laura is making a positive impact on people's lives by providing a better way to gift that empowers people in need and inspires communities to do good in a fun and exciting way. Learn more about LottoLove. Learn more about The Passionistas Project. Full Transcript: Passionistas: Hi, and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast, where we tell the stories of empowered women who are following their passions to inspire you to do the same. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and today we're talking with Laura Beck and activists and the founder of LottoLove, the first ever scratch off card with a social mission. LottoLove brings charitable giving to everyday gifting. It's been featured on The Today Show and Ellen DeGeneres and included in national publications, such as Women's Day, Real Simple and Redbook. Through her work with LottoLove, Laura is making a positive impact on people's lives by providing a better way to gift that empowers people in need and inspires communities to do good in a fun and exciting way.  So please welcome to the show, Laura Beck. Laura Beck: Hello, thank you for having me on here. Passionistas: Thanks for joining us today. So what's the one thing you're most passionate about. Laura Beck: I always get a little hung up on like picking the one thing, but I really, I mean, I'm passionate about the environment and cooking, but I think the most, the thing I'm most passionate about would be relationships and connecting with people. My dad always said something along the lines of, if you have relationships, you'll be rich in life. And that's something that really stuck with me. And so I've really spent a lot of time investing in friendships, which have had a lot of them for over 20 years, you know, with family, coworkers, mentors. And I think, you know, really having a variety of all these different relationships in your life allows you to connect with people on a lot of different levels, which I think is important. And with a lot of love, you know, I don't get to meet everyone that we're helping, but I do feel a connection to them with what I'm doing. And I value that relationship too, even though it's, you know, more distant, Passionistas: You mentioned your father and your parents really showed you firsthand about giving back when you were a kid. So can you talk about that experience and how it's informed your life? Laura: So my dad for, I want to say, like, I don't know, for 14 years he was going to Guatemala on mission trips. And then when I was in high school, he wanted to bring the whole family. And I think at that point it was like, my little brother's older, not old enough, I'm one of four. So we all went as a family to small town in Guatemala and he had been working on building an orphanage or every year that he would go to that orphanage was built. And there were like three families in there that had, you know, maybe five kids each. And we went down probably for like 10 days and did a lot of like mission work within the orphanage. But then we would venture out and go up into the, like the most remote villages in the mountains where we were giving, you know, some medical relief. There was a CR you know, a little religious component to it and just Christianity, which, you know, is the main religion of Guatemala. And so there were, you know, a lot of different ways of helping and connecting with these people that, you know, most of the time never come down from their villages. They never get to see a doctor, you know, they're suffering from arthritis and to fakes and, you know, a lot of different ailments. So they were very grateful when we would come up there and help with, you know, help them just ease pain and play with the kids and, you know, just interact and kind of give them this, give them some hope. And so I did that trip a couple times. And then at right after I graduated from college, I raised money to go to Honduras with my sister and we did something similar there. So those were, you know, were big experiences. And then just like on a daily basis, my dad had been on the board of directors at the homeless shelter in the home, in the town where I grew up. So, you know, I just grew up with him, always giving his time and not, you know, not just time and money and resources, but so that was always kind of ingrained in our upbringing was, you know, helping those less fortunate and really just taking the emphasis out of material things and putting it more on, you know, these relationships and connections with people.  Passionistas: So you mentioned college, where did you go to college and what did you study?  Laura: I went to University of Michigan. I'm originally from a small town in Northern Michigan, like four hours North of Detroit. And then I studied art history with a minor in Spanish. So I was using a lot of, well. I mean, when I went in high school, I took Spanish as well. So I was able to speak Spanish and these in Guatemala and Honduras when we were there. But then after I graduated, I moved to Chicago and I went back to school for art direction and design. And there's this type of, I guess, school, which is called a portfolio school. And that is where you go specifically to get a job in an advertising agency afterwards. So you can study copywriting design or art direction. And the whole it's a really intensive program. And some of them are two years, but the one I took was just one year. So it was pretty much for an entire year, no breaks taking the courses. So that's where I got my art direction background. Passionistas: What were some of your early jobs after you got that degree? Laura: I had set my sights on New York. I always wanted, when I was younger, I wanted to go to a big city. I think it was partially of like, I want to rebel against the small town and, you know, live somewhere where the closest mall is not an hour and a half away. So I always wanted to go to a big city and I liked Chicago, but I felt like I wanted something more. So I started applying to some jobs in New York and I got an internship at a small midsize agency. And so I moved to New York for that job. After the internship, I worked there as an art director, and then I started working for this woman who is a lifestyle brand and I was hired to basically kind of just overhaul her branding and, um, design and, you know, head there, like the lead of her website development. So I did that. And then at that point I was like, I think I want to do something on my own work for myself. And then that's when I started my own design shop on my own. Passionistas: Tell us about that. That's Tiny Rebels. Right? Tell us about that. And some of the socially good companies you work for there. Laura: I really enjoy working with brands that needed that I really liked working with them from the ground up, you know, being part of their initial, I guess, the initial phase. And so one of the companies I worked for was called OneGridCandle, and their mission was, you know, to help provide clean energy to people in Africa and sell their candles. And so that one was a company that I was able to, I got in touch with right away, you know, from helped them from logo design, to packaging design, to their website and know pretty much all marketing touch points as well. And that was like, okay, I see them able to, um, giving back in a way, you know, by helping this company get off the ground, I really enjoy doing this and that at that point I was like, I think I want to, you know, try doing this a little more direct and be the one that's, you know, has the company that's giving back. So I kind of, I slowly just start kind of as like not accepting new clients and was just letting the phase, not the phase out naturally happen. And then that's when I took a leap with LottoLove. Passionistas: So what inspired you to create lot of love cards? Laura: I wanted a career change and I had a desire to do something that did more good in the world. And I, you know, I felt I could do that, you know, helping client or, you know, the companies I was working with, get off the ground and do that. But I wanted to do that in a little more direct way. And, you know, if you ask yourself the question, why do I do what I do? It really forces you to reflect on what gets you out of bed in the morning? And I knew I had, you know, interesting background and experiences and, you know, different talents that I had, um, honed in on with my past jobs. And I wanted to figure out how I could put all that together and figure out a way to positively impact other people's lives. And if I thought back to a time where I felt like empowered, it was when I went on those mission trips with my family.   And then with my sister that I mentioned earlier, at that point, I saw extreme poverty and seeing it firsthand is very different than, you know, seeing it on the news or reading about it. So I knew that there was a lot of people out there that needed help, but if I can't be there physically, you know, helping them, what can I do based on everything I know, and I've done to create something. And so I, I was ready to make that career change. And I think having my branding company gave me the confidence to do that because could brand LottoLove all on my own, you know, I didn't need to outsource that. So I was able to really kind of take everything in my own hands. And I enjoyed the client aspect of, you know, or the service aspect of Tiny Rebels, but I wanted to try out something a little different by creating a product.   And so my inspiration for LottoLove actually was my grandma because she loved scratch off cards. And that was something that we would always gift her for holidays, you know, especially, you know, what do you give an 80 year old grandma, you know, and they love the scratchers, but that whole idea is about winning for yourself and, you know, winning money. And, you know, I think I saw a way to flip that concept on its head a little bit and add a twist to it. So instead of winning for yourself, you're able to win for other people. And it was actually during a road trip with my now husband, he would love to scratch off tickets too. So he would, every time we'd stop and get gas, he would, you know, buy a couple and he bought two, which actually happened to be winners. They were both like $5 winners, but that's kind of where the whole idea started coming about was on that road trip. So   Passionistas: Explain what the LottoLove card is, how it works and what happens when   Laura: Get one, like you mentioned, we're a social good scratch off cards. So instead of winning money, you want a charitable prize. That's donated to someone in need and we have four charitable partners and each one's tied to what I call the charitable prizes. So you can either win clean water, solar energy, literacy tools, or meals. And it will always be one of those four. And I like to say that we're the only lottery where everyone wins, because we really are. When people ask me that question a lot. So I like to say it right off the bat, every card is a winner. It's one of the four charitable prizes. So, you know, we sell most of on our website and the buyer would then buy a LottoLove card. They could mail it directly to the recipient and then the recipient would get to play the game, scratch off all the circles to figure out basically what was donated in their honor. So it's a gifting item and they come with a greeting card. So it can just be an easy, all-in-one like gifting experience and it's a matching game. So are you familiar with scratch off cards or have you done a lot in your days?  Passionistas: It's been awhile, but yeah, we've definitely done them… for sure. Laura: Yeah, so it's like a matching game. So we've designed icons that represent each charitable prize and then you have to match one of those icons. And then that tells you flip it over and explains a little bit more about the causes that we're supporting. And then we direct everyone to our website where they can learn more about our charities and the efforts that we're supporting. Passionistas: So tell us about those charities who are they and why did you choose them? Laura: We have four Austin charities. Solar aid is our solar non-profit and their mission is to eradicate the use of kerosene, which is harmful to health and to the environment. And why really like about their mission is they're working to employ people to sell the lights, which creates jobs and a sustainable markets. So, you know, they're creating sustainability in a lot of different ways, as opposed to just providing a clean energy source. And so they're able to combat poverty and climate change. And they work specifically within Africa, lit world is our literacy partner, lit worlds based in New York. And they work within the U S and also globally. They're putting emphasis on not just learning how to read and write, but to learn how to teach kids, how to tell their story and how to communicate, which helps them build a sustainable life because, you know, communications foundation of a lot of things.   So they put a lot of emphasis on, you know, talking about feelings and being able to communicate water is life is our word, water, charity. And they, we specifically are supporting their water filtration efforts. They've created this straw that kids can wear around their neck, and they can basically go to any water source and purify the water from that straw, which is pretty awesome. And it can filter two to three liters a day. I think it's really impressive. I mean, when you look at it, you're like, you know, you're like, how can this actually do what it does, but the insides of it, it's, it's an amazing invention. So yeah, that's really cool. And then our hunger non-profit is rise against hunger and they are working to end hunger by 2030. And they do a lot of natural, like natural disaster relief as well. But they've created the most nutritious packaged meals all in like one where it's basically like add water and you get all these vitamins and nutrients that you need in a day.   Passionistas: Tell us specifically what each card gives to these charities Laura Are a limited amount of like gifting options, but you can either give one week of clean water or four weeks of clean water. So when you go onto our website, you're not going to be able to, as of right now, but we might change this. You can't choose. If you are getting a water winning card or a meal, it's a surprise, but you can either win one meal or three meals, one month of solar light, or four months of solar light, and then one set of literacy tools or three sets of literacy tools. Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington. And you're listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Laura Beck. To learn more about her scratch cards with a social mission visit, GiveLottoLove.com.  Now here's more of our interview with Laura.  Have you personally had any interactions with people that have benefited from the work you're doing and are there any that stand out? Laura: Yes, actually I think it was two years ago now I was able to go to Kenya and I met with one of the partners of our literacy charity. They work in Kibera, which is like one of the chorus slums in the world. So we spend a day with the Red Rose School and it was all girls and, you know, got to see everything firsthand. They call them lit clubs. So how they run their lit club. So it started with a story and then that story had an underlying message about feelings and like bravery. And so then, you know, we all sat in a circle when it was great, because I got to like sit in a circle with them and I was participating, you know, just like a student with them. And everyone went around the room, talking about the story, you know, talking about moments in their life, where they had to be brave and courageous.   And then there was activity, which they call a heart map and it's basically drawing a heart on a piece of paper and then filling that heart with everything that represents you or that you love in your life. And then we all went around the room and explained our heart maps to everyone. And I was just, you know, I was really blown away by them and their ability to, you know, talk about their lives. And, you know, their upbringing was a lot more difficult than mine. And they were just, you know, full of life and love and, you know, just proud to be a sister and a daughter and a friend. And it was really amazing to actually see how our who we're supporting and the benefits of it.  Passionistas: We were reading about that story. And one of the things that struck us was you told, said you played a game with them and did an exercise with them called a rose, a bud or a thorn, which we loved the concept of that. Tell us about that. Laura: That it wasn't the first time I heard it when I went to Kibera. That was something that actually my parents did with us growing up too. Like, especially around like Thanksgiving, it was like, you know, we'd all be home from college or something and they'd be like, tell us, you know, something good that happened. And you know, and so the rows, the button, the thorn really kind of puts a metaphor to that. I think, you know, arose is something that you're really happy and excited about. The bud is something, you know, you're anticipating, you know, that's going to happen and you're excited. And then a thorn is, you know, something was difficult. Something was a little prickly, a challenge that you faced. And yeah, we went all went around the room and did the Rose about a thorn. It's actually something really fun to do with, you know, friends and family too. And it's just another way to connect with people. And if, you know, for lack of a better word forces, but allows people to open up, you know, cause everyone's doing it. You know, we all have hardships, but you know, we all have something that we can find that we're excited for or something good that happened in our lives.  Passionistas: You've also added wedding favors to your store. So talk about those. Laura: I would say it's a little bit of a work in progress, but something that excites me about a lot, all of is all the different ways that you can gift it. You know, we really want people to rethink what they gift and how they, and there's so many occasions why when we need to buy people, things. And so weddings, and I think it kinda came about like when I was planning mine, now people buy wedding favors and they're cute and they're fun. And I it's a fun thing to do, but I really had a hard time wrapping my head around that because one, it feels a little wasteful to me and it's just not where I really wanted to spend the money. And I, you know, I felt like I could gift something to someone outside of a trinket, you know, the header initials on it or something or something that might get thrown away.   So I use my wedding as like a test case for that. And, you know, it's a slightly different design. Our typical cards are like really bright and punchy, but our wedding line called Lucky in Love. It's, you know, we're stripping it of all the color and, you know, keeping it white and clean, you know, everyone has different themes for their wedding. And white just felt like it would fit. Um, a lot of people's decor. So the game is the same, but we allow this like top portion to be customized. So if people have, you know, like a logo they created for their wedding or a monogram, or they want to have write a little message to all their guests, they can do that. And the way we kind of tell people to gift it is to put it at their placement settings at dinner, but it's also good dependent, like gift bags.   If you're doing that, or people can grab them as they're leaving the wedding, but really easy way. It's just, everyone's sitting down. It's a great way to like get people, talking, bring awareness to the causes. And we included a little penny on each place setting. Um, so people can scratch off and play and you know, their response from people that have included it as part of their wedding has been great. And I love seeing all the photos and, you know, even seen like the little, the little kids participating and playing the game. So it's another way to spread love and your wedding day, Passionistas: What would you like to see as the future for a LottoLove? Laura: Sometimes I feel like it changes a little bit, but you know, near term, I want to expand our product line, you know, which means adding new charities and increasing the causes that we can support. You know, right now we have four and it's what we call our basic needs line. And I'm really happy with the four that we chose, but I know there are so many more causes out there that mean a lot to people. You know, I want to expand and do like a health card, you know, support breast cancer and Alzheimer's, and I mean, there's so many, you know, maybe an animal card. I know a lot of, you know, people want to support animals and help them. So expanding our product line is something I want to do near term. I want to get into more into corporate gifting because I think that is a way to really reach a lot of people and obviously increase our impact.   Like I mentioned before, a lot of creative ways to gift a LottoLove. And I think, you know, just what we have now is kind of the tip. And I think we can really expand a little bit and, you know, bigger picture. I want to continue to figure out how I can help people to rethink about traditional gifting. And I think LottoLove does that for a lot of people, but I think we can do that a little bit more because we are solving a few problems. You know, simply gifting is stressful. A lot of people get stressed out around the holidays because it's expensive and they don't know what to get people in. There's so many people that don't need anything and people that are hard to buy for. So LottoLove solves that problem. Obviously our social mission, you know, we're helping people just live and also thrive, but I think there's more than we can do and want to tap into, you know, traditional gifting and how we can uproot that a little bit. Passionistas: So where can people go to get the cards and find out more about what you do Laura: Our website, which is GiveLottoLove.com. So G I V E L O T T O L O V E dot com. That's where we do pretty much all of our sales through our website and we ship all over. I pretty much ship across the world. We just sent an order out today to Australia. So wherever you are listening, you're not too far.  Passionistas: You do corporate gifts as well. Talk about that. Laura: It's been a really fun aspect of the business, which it wasn't something I was thinking about when I first started, but usually mostly around the holidays. That's when everyone's, you know, figuring out how they can gift people, something, but we did something for the Cleveland Cavaliers. They had a yearly summit and they wanted to include LottoLove at this meeting. So anything from meetings like that to including them and gift baskets that get sent to clients or customers, we can do a lot of the fulfillment ourselves. So if you know, we're mailing these out to 500 people, we've done it. And, you know, we try to be as flexible as possible because everyone's gifting needs are different and unique. And you know, some people want a greeting card and some people just want the scratch off. And we create these little custom informational cards, which are a great, like co-branding option where we can put their logo on it and custom messaging. Or if these corporate companies are ordering a lot more, you know, we have like a 500 unit minimum order quantity, but we can customize the scratch off cards, which is a fun way to, to do a little like co-branding where we can add a logo and some messaging. There's not as much flexibility with that, but we try our best. Passionistas: Is there a lesson that you've learned during your journey that sticks with you? Laura: I would say one of the biggest lessons is to not give up because they're just in startup life. There are so many roadblocks and times where you feel like, okay, this is too hard. I can't do this, but to just not, not give up and to put yourself in uncomfortable situations, because I think those uncomfortable situations is where you really see growth and to not shy away from those because you're afraid. So, you know, there are a lot of twists and turns and disappointment comes with that. But the one thing we can control is to just keep going, regardless of people's response or lack of response and validation, and then saying yes, because I think fear can creep in and we can shy away from doing things, but I've gotten in this habit of just agreeing to things, knowing even if sometimes my guts like, Oh, I can't do this. I'm not good enough for this or something, but, you know, say yes and I'll figure it out and I'll figure out how to do it. But I think that's where I've seen a lot of like my personal and career growth by putting myself in these situations and just not giving up. Passionistas: So as the mother of the new baby girl, what's your dream for women? Laura: My dream is well for my daughter. I want to instill like instill in her the belief that she can do anything and that we're stronger than we know, especially, you know, just giving birth as a woman and being able to give birth, I think is a beautiful and wonderful thing, but it was also one of the scariest things that I've ever done. But after that, I was like, you know what? We can do anything. Like we're so much stronger than we know. And I want women to feel empowered in all aspects of their life because they should, because we're strong and you know, we need to, you know, rise above the fear or whatever's like keeping us down. What's your definition of success? You know, since I had violet, I think that changed a little bit, but you know, I think it's really enjoying what you do and, you know, success, I think looks different. Day-to-day especially now, you know, I think success is okay, my daughter's happy and she's alive. And that is success. Like every day right now is successful for me. If I do that. And if I get a little bit of work done, it's a bonus. But I think success is feeling nourished at the end of the day. You know, whether that's working, whether that's not working, but as you know, feeling that fulfillment and nourishment at the end of the day, I think is success. Passionistas: What's your secret to a rewarding life? Laura: Well, can I still be figuring it out a little bit, but I think one now being a new mom is having really good time management. I have learned I work better under pressure, but I don't have that luxury. Like if I get a minute, I need to use that minute wisely. But, and I think having good time management, it can really either make you feel fulfilled or it can deplete you if you're not doing it in the right way and being an entrepreneur, you know, weekends and weekdays blend together. And they can all the days all feel the same sometimes, but you have to really allow yourself to have the fun, the self-care and do the work. And I think that's keeps your mind and body in check. But then at the end of the day, I think it's, you know, doing something that one thing that brings you joy every day, if you can fit in one thing, you know, whether it's a workout or reading a book or meditating, you know, really, I think gives you that energizes you to keep going. Because there, I mean, a lot of things that we have to get done just to live and to not, you know, to pay our bills and do things, but finding ways to sneak enjoy is really important.   Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Lara Beck. To learn more about her scratch cards with a social mission visit, GiveLottoLove.com.  Please visit ThePassionistasProject.com to learn more about our podcast and subscription box filled with products made by women owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions. Our winter box with the theme Passionistas Pamper is on sale now and will ship just in time for the holidays. Sign up for our mailing list to get 10% off your first purchase. And be sure to subscribe to The Passionistas Project Podcast, so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests.

I believe that high achieving professionals can achieve their executive ambitions when they create a plan for generating their inner-well of positivity. When you are working to advance your career within large organizations, challenging situations are commonplace. A toxic colleague who seems to undermine your good work every chance they get. A boss who plays favorites and seems to only issue praise to others on your team. Or you may feel a general lack of respect for all that you do within your organization. When situations like these arise, you want to know how to be the best version of you and generate the inner-well of positivity within you. In today’s podcast, I am speaking with Laura Masters, Life Coach with AbunDance Enterprises who shares with me her professional wisdom on the science of positivity. The field of positive psychology is 20 years old, and new evidence-based research continues to emerge. Research results are revealing profound work in the areas of happiness, well-being and strengths that are essential tools for your leadership toolbox. Enjoy the podcast! 00:03 Monique: What is your definition of positivity? 00:12 Laura: It’s a practice and a way of being, it leans on the edge of optimism and your attitude and reflects how a person that looks for a solution. It’s like a muscle you cultivate and a viewpoint in a way of being in the world. 00:44 Monique: Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, a leading scholar in the field of positive psychology, as advanced the theory of Broaden and Build. Please share insights of this theory. 01:12 Laura: The Broaden and Build theory talks about the power of positive emotions and positive emotions are what make up positivity. They are the feelings that make you feel really good, joy, happiness, tranquility, enthusiasm, appreciation, and gratitude. When those feelings happen, it sets you up to see the world differently. You’re more able to tend to others, you’re open to ideas, you want to explore, you connect better, and you have more safety. It opens up your mind and so it broadens your ability to take in life on a daily basis, the experience of being healthier, happier, some more personal fulfillment, and you have more success in your life. 03:29 Coach Mo: Is positivity something people are born with? Or do we have the capacity to create that within ourselves? 03: 52 Laura: So what happens is we do have this ability to build that which is built into our Neuroplasticity - the ability that we can create systems in our mind. We’re born with what’s called the “Negativity Bias” which means our systems in our bodies from, you know, our days on the savannah, are set up and wired for survival. Barbara Fredrickson also talks about 3:1 positivity ratio. And to overcome one negative experience in your day, she says we must have at least 3 to 4 positive, heartfelt emotions. 05:56 Coach Mo: What example do you have, Laura to speak to that really illuminates how powerful the positivity ratio is? 06:34 Laura: So what happen was, I had a day when a lot of things happened and one of them that happened on that day was my mom passed away. I had a catastrophe in my house. It was like, everything was broken down. I mean, I was in a terrible place to stress so one of the things that I did was deep breathing. I just can’t see it ever ending so I got on my heart map machine and it took me thirteen or fourteen minutes but I got myself back to where I was showing coherence on the Biofeedback machine and I could feel the shift in my body. And then after that, I thought, “Okay, so that’s one" then I went out to my garden and I looked at my flowers and I did a little bit of gardening - so that was just enjoying the moment. I came back into my office and I wrote a few thank you notes for just some friends whom I’ve done some nice things lately; going over those positive things. Then I went for a run and I built myself up physically. At the end of the day, I was back in a good place and able to handle things. 08:23 Coach Mo: What is the distinction between the use of that terminology, or the ideas of happiness compared to positivity. 08:46 Laura: Happiness is a feeling and Positivity is more like a mindset. 09:52 Coach Mo: What are some options for someone to do right now within the hour to generate positivity in their life? What resources are available? 10:23 Laura: • Deep breathing • Doing one kind thing • Email • Listen to a song • Order a book And things that is meaningful and brings joy to your life and really being aware of what those are and cultivating them. Sometimes, we have to schedule that in, like you know, “From 12:00 to 12:30, I am going to do nothing but things that I absolutely love.” 11:18 Coach Mo: What is just your final thought that relates to the individuals building their muscle of positivity? 12:11 Laura: And to care about yourself and have enough compassion for yourself to do that in tiny little habit that shifts the trajectory of your ability to handle challenges. And then to share it with others and to just, you know, know that this is in your capability and that you can, by doing all of that just create a better and better life for yourself and everyone around you. Dr. Barbara Fredrickson’s book Positivity revealed that past researchers discovered that most fast-paced changes in emotions don't last. This is what is referred to as the hedonic treadmill effect. So how do you create positive emotions in your life that are sustained? Research suggests that it is a slow and steady process. As Laura Masters mentioned in our conversation, there are things that you can begin doing right now. Whatever you choose, be deliberate in building your capacity or inner resource for positivity. ______________________ Coach Mo Knows (a tip, a coaching question, and a bit of inspiration) Tip: 1) Connect with Laura Masters :) https://www.facebook.com/AbunDanceEnterprise Coaching Question: On a scale of 1 to 10, rate the kind of day you had yesterday (10 = great, 1 = not so great) And then answer these three short questions as you consider your rating: • What were you doing? • What were you feeling? • Were you interacting with others, or were you alone? The general premise of this sample exercise is to get you thinking about the micro-pieces of your day. Continue to self-rate each day for a period of time (one or two weeks) Then start to determine for yourself, what is the opportunity for you in generating the positivity you want as you build your ability to generate positivity, Inspiration New York Yankees great Derek Jeter " I go into every game thinking I'm going to be the hero. I have to, or I wouldn't enjoy it." If you are a first-time listener of Tuesdays with Coach Mo - - Welcome! Please subscribe, leave a review and a rating! If you have a podcast idea you’d like to hear or if you are experiencing a workplace dilemma that you’d like my thoughts on, please follow me on Instagram at Tuesdays with Coach Mo and send me a message, I'll get back to you with my thoughts and perspective on how to navigate the situation.

They say that a goldfish grows to the size of its tank. But what if that small fish is ready to launch into a bigger pond? That is the situation Sea Bags has found itself in recently. With a rabid following and millions in revenue, the Portland, Maine-based retail store has outgrown its initial eCommerce setup and is ready to grow into a major totes and accessories brand thanks to growth fueled by personalization, storytelling and an incredible social media presence. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Laura Hnatow, the Vice President, Marketing & Ecommerce at Sea Bags, explains how she is helping to expand the eCommerce platform using a cross-platform social media strategy, and she digs into the re-platforming experience she is leading to help Sea Bags utilize tools like A.I. and M.L. to grow their business both online and as they expand to brick and mortar locations. Key Takeaways: Content, social media and UGC utilization are critical in building and maintaining an active and engaged customer base Re-platforming offers an opportunity to utilize new tools such as A.I. and machine learning to introduce new forms of personalization in product offerings as well as marketing strategies The power of storytelling is the most important tool in your toolkit to differentiate yourself from the competition For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible eCommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome to the show. Laura: Hi, thanks for having me. Stephanie: I'm really excited about you joining me today. I just was browsing through your website, Sea Bags, and I wanted to buy like about five things. Laura: Oh, that's flattering. Stephanie: Yeah. It's awesome. An awesome product. I'd love to hear a little bit about what Sea Bags, in your own words, and why you joined it. Laura: Yeah. Sea Bags is a company based in Portland, Maine, that manufacturers bags, totes and accessories from recycled sails from sailboats. We gather those sails one at time from the boating community all around the country, and bring them back to Portland, where we cut them down one-by-one. Each sail is a little bit different, therefore each bag is a little bit different from the next. People come to visit us in Portland, where they can actually see the bags being made on the waterfront, at our building that actually overhangs the water, with the hum of lobster boats outside, along with the sewing machines and the seagulls. It's really a great experience in quintessential Maine. Laura: The reason why I joined Sea Bags... It was almost seven years ago at this point. The opportunity was presented to be by the current CEO. It was the story effectively. The whole story about the brand. It was so compelling. I've worked for a number of brand manufacturers before, L.L. Bean and Cuddledown. They all had great manufacturing stories to tell, but this story was so much more authentic and rich. It was that authenticity that made the story so easy to tell. They also had built the brand up on these three core tenets, that drive the business every day. It was this very defined mission behind the company, of being made in the U.S.A., sustainable in product and practice, and also committed to giving back to the community generously. Those three things guide all of our decision-making in everything that we do. With such a clear mission and mandate, in terms of how we were going to grow the business forward, to me it seemed like a no-brainer to join that team. Stephanie: Yeah. That's very cool. What is the story behind Sea Bags? I think it started with the Founder's dad. Right? Laura: Yeah. Many years ago, the original founder, Hannah, her dad, he was in the sail bag-making industry, for the actual bags that hold sails in between seasons. He made a recommendation to his daughter, "You should try to figure out what to do with these old sails. They're just going to landfills." She crafted the first ones. It's our current COO, Beth, who actually grew the business from there. She partnered with her and then grew the business to where we're at now, with the help of our current leadership and CEO. Yeah. It started as a hobby business, and now has really ground to be a lifestyle brand. Stephanie: That's amazing.The one thing I really liked, which I didn't know before, was I didn't realize that sailboat sails actually can't break down. So when you guys say you're focused on sustainability, you really mean it. Nothing would happen with those sails, if you didn't transform them and give them a second life. Is that correct? Laura: You're absolute right. Yeah. Predominantly sailboat sails are made out a material called Dacron. Dacron has an element of plastic fiber in it. It's that resilience that lets the sail hold up to the strength of the wind and actually propel a sailboat forward. But it is that strength in the fiber and how it's made that makes our bags so durable as well. Because of that inability to break down in the landfill, we knew that that material, itself, would be perfect for a bag. They wear like steel. People have gone into our store to show off, "Here's my bag. I brought it 15 years ago." They wash it regularly in the washing machine. They look great. Yeah. They do wear really well. Stephanie: That's so cool. How do you convey that uniqueness to your customers, especially through an online experience? I saw some really great videos that you all had on your website, which I thought were amazing. Is that part of the way that you convey that? Laura: Yeah, absolutely. Storytelling is one of the things that we do best. Like I said, that's why I joined the brand, is this rich story. We do a lot of content creation on our team. It's easy to do content creation when you have a lot to work with. Building really great video content... We have a new line of products all the time. We have new partners that we're collaborating with regularly. So being able to stitch together different videos, content pages on the website. We integrate a lot of user-generated content into the website and our marketing. Laura: So things like customer testimonials, but also customer images. We have a very rich user-generated content campaign, called our Sea Bag Citing campaign. It's a hashtag. And customers in that campaign will tag us and show us all the places they take their Sea Bag. It's really a great opportunity for us, because when we see a great picture, instead of us having to go out and stage a photo shoot, we've got a really authentic image of somebody vacationing using their bag in the environment that it was intended for. Stephanie: Yeah. I was very impressed when I saw your social media following and how engaged people were and the really great photos they were tagging you all in. I definitely see the world of online sales seems to be moving to social media and building a community. How do you think about building that up, and creating relevant content, and keeping those followers engaged? Laura: Yeah. I'd say it's one of the things we're really good at, but it's also probably one of the things that's the most challenging in what we do. Because people spend a lot of time on social media, but everybody's competing for their attention. I have a social media team with multiple partners on it. I've tasked them with making sure, across all the platforms, that, number one, we're showing different content, to keep different types of people engaged. And the other thing is that we're hitting the breadth of content that I'd like us to do. Laura: They have a filter that they put all of our content through, to make sure that we're showing the right variety of, and frequency of, things like behind the scenes images, testimonials, new product launches, PR news that we're doing. We're trying to make sure that we hit the breadth. And also, we're tailoring it to the specific types of platforms. Obviously Facebook and LinkedIn are not a synonymous platform so we make sure that some of the content goes on one location and we speak to those audiences a little bit differently. Laura: I think customers want to be invited to participate and we do a lot of that with either surprise and delight opportunities, where we ask people to come and bid on something for a chance a win to a wristlet. A wristlet is a small item. It's not like a vacation getaway. But that alone... people love the gesture. They love to participate. It's really interesting. When somebody does win a prize, it's funny how authentically and genuinely thrilled for the winner the other customers are. It does become very communal. They're like, "Oh, my God. I'm so happy for you. Great job. You're going to love it." Laura: Then we also find that customers... Getting back to this idea of engagement. This is delightful for us. Customers sometimes answer on our behalf. We'll get comments that say, "Do you have this bag in this color? Are you ever going to offer this again?" Before we can even comment, we'll have other customers saying, "Yes, they have it. You can go to this page." It's almost like we've got these brand ambassadors stalking us right within our social media. That is so flattering. It really does speak to a highly-engaged social media following. Stephanie: Yeah. That's amazing. Having people who are working for you and your brand without even asking. Laura: Yeah. Yeah. Stephanie: It's a key strategy, if you can figure it out. Laura: It is. It's great. Stephanie: Are there any new emerging digital channels that you are excited about or focused on right now? Laura: I think in terms of new channels, I don't think there is one. Social media really is where we're spending a lot of our time as a channel, in terms of trying to grow audience and engagement. We are playing around with some things like influencer marketing, which is important. I think some people might not call it new and emerging either. We're doing quite a bit in just dabbling in lots of different spaces. There is a lot of overlap. I think video is probably where we found the most success, in terms of developing content and distributing. Video specifically for Facebook has been fantastic for us. We're repurposing a lot of that video content again. We like to recycle. We put it in a lot of places. We're trying to incorporate it into the site. We use it for things like Instagram Stories. It's been really fruitful, so that's been really fun. Stephanie: Very cool. Any key strategy that you have when it comes to guiding a customer through that buying journey while utilizing social? Laura: It's interesting. We have a really defined and fine-tuned digital marketing strategy. We work with a great partner that helps us distribute all of our paid advertising. That would include paid social. One of the things about paid social that I think is challenging for people... I do chat with folks who say, "Facebook doesn't really work for us." I am always surprised to hear that. I think part of it is, it's the type of content that you're putting out in terms of advertising on Facebook advertising. Making sure you have the right mix of video, and static ads and then dynamic remarketing ads are really important. Laura: I think the other thing, too, is how you measure it. Of course, there's different attribution models. Last click attribution and first click attribution. Of course, Facebook measures the performance differently than some other folks might measure it. We base it on Facebook's measurement. When you base it that way, you'll see that the programs themselves actually perform much better than if you base it on the other attrition models out there using Google Analytics. Stephanie: That's interesting. I definitely see Facebook stepping their game up with the launch of I think it's Facebook Shops just yesterday or the day before. Laura: Yeah. It's so interesting. The landscape is changing quite a bit. I was actually talking about this recently with the CEO, because we see organic shifting quite a bit. We're doing a lot, in terms of SEO on the website and building organic content. We have a blog that we try to regularly publish. It's made a big impact on our SEO, but then all of a sudden when you have the search results pages changing to favor, again, more ad space? You do immediately see a falloff in your organic search results. Paid search all of a sudden is also doing much better, but you're also spending a lot more money perhaps than you had intended to. Stephanie: Are you guys doing any quick pivots to try and bring back the organic searches? How do you think about that when things change so quickly? Laura: Yeah. I don't think there is a quick pivot with organic. Organic is a long game, as always. The pivot that we're doing right now, and I wouldn't even call it that. We are looking at our digital strategy on a daily basis and really refining things. So if we see something taking off, we are chasing it. A great example is shopping at one point was doing very poorly. We didn't know why and watched it for about a week or two. It was right when things were headed down to a flat line period at the end of March. Everybody was in kind of a lull. Then all of sudden things turned around and a lot of e-commerce folks were seeing a spike. As soon as we saw that spike, we chased it. I think that's the thing. You really have to be on top of it and know when to chase it and keep increasing your budget. Laura: We've increased our budgets in area like shopping more than we've typically been comfortable. I would say the same goes for Facebook Prospecting. We found that Facebook Prospecting is performing incredibly well for us. We do a lot of prospecting with video ads for Facebook as well, and those are very productive too. Stephanie: Very cool. Did you have to adjust any messaging when it came to acting fast on that? With everything going on with the pandemic, did you kind of change how you target people and market to them? How do you think about that? Laura: We changed the messaging. Yeah. We definitely wanted to make sure we weren't being tone deaf to what was going on. We definitely pulled down any ads that had anything to do with travel-related products. We have a great travel collection. We pulled down all of those because nobody was going to be traveling. I think the thing that we did more so than the actual ad strategy was our product strategy changed a little bit. We wanted to look at our product from the viewpoint of how we could add more value to it, to help solve problems for people who were now stuck at home and still had life to conduct. Laura: The example I'll give is Easter came around and people were kind of caUght off guard by the idea that, "Oh, our Easter family celebration is not going to happen. The Easter egg hunt is not going to happen. I have a grandchild. How are we going to commemorate this holiday that is very important to a good portion of the population?" We quickly partnered with a local chocolate company that had just laid off most of its workforce. They were able to bring back five of their employees to help produce chocolate to put in our Easter buckets. Stephanie: That's great. Laura: Within a very short period of time... We thought, "We might sell 50 of these over the next three or four days." We sold over 700. It was one of those things that every day, we said, "How many more do we need?" It was really a matter of how much chocolate could the chocolate maker make in that short period of time? It was a real success story, in being able to reach out, help a fellow business in the community, but also solve some problems for customers. The comments we got from customers were unbelievable. Just saying how appreciative they were because they weren't going to be able to see their family and bring them something. This is how they were able to do that. Laura: So that was really rewarding. That afforded us a lot of opportunity in our digital advertising to reach new customers, to convert customers who were prospects and who were already looking into the brand. It was more about just being relevant with a message that solved a problem for customers. So then we took that same product strategy and same digital strategy and expanded it onto Mother's Day, and Father's Day, and Graduation. Even though a lot of the stay-at-home orders have been loosened a bit? I think a lot of people are still looking for some convenience to eliminate any unnecessary visits to stores that they don't want to make. Stephanie: Yeah. I completely agree. That's such a good strategy, to find partnerships like that. I could see that lasting into the future, where a lot of brands start thinking about who they can partner with. That seems like it would help future-proof both brands, if they figure out ways to work together and send business to each other. I think we'll see more of that over the coming years. Laura: Yeah. I hope so. I know for our brand, we're not going to stop doing it. It was a pilot that was a success. Now we've realized there is an opportunity here and the customers see the value in it. We've always been very collaborative as a brand. We typically do reach out and collaborate with a handful of companies that are like-minded in their business practices and approach. What we often bring to the table is that we're a sustainable product and they might not have that same messaging in their product that they can offer. Or the fact that we're a Made in the U.S.A. product, which again is really valuable to a lot of brands to partner with us. So we have similar mindsets and very much focused the Coastal lifestyles perhaps. Laura: A more recent relevant example, we're partnering right now with Life Is Good. If you're not familiar with that brand, they are an apparel and accessory company that basically delivers the message of optimism in all of their designs. Really quirky designs that we are now able to add to a Sea Bag, and then with these really important optimistic messages during this time that we're all going through. It resonates really broadly with customers. That's another example of ways that we reach out and collaborate. It's given Life Is Good an opportunity to have a Bag story that they sell to their audience, and it gives us a different story in terms of different designs and messaging for our audience as well. Stephanie: That's great. When it comes to messaging, does the consumer know the background of the flag, where it came from and the journeys that sailboat went on? Do they have any insights into that, so they can find of feel connected to their bag even more? Laura: Yeah. It's interesting. We would love to be able to pedigree every bag, but when you start talking about 700 tons of sails that we've saved from landfills, it's really, really challenging to figure out how we could actually catalog that many sails. On a one-to-one basis, no. But what we do is when we take a sail in, our customers are so great about wanting to share the stories. So we've had many cases where a Sail Trade, is what we call it. The customer will bring a sail into our store, for example. Just show up and unfold the sail right in the middle of the retail store and start talking about, "Oh, this is the sail that was on my grandfather's boat. As a kid, we sailed." They just go into this long elaborate story. What we try to do is get somebody from the marketing team downstairs to take notes, and talk to them about it and basically interview them a little bit about what the story behind the sail is. Because that stuff is so meaningful. Laura: We have a really great one on our website called The Santana Sail Trade Story. The gentlemen, Ben, tells the story about how this boat meant everything to him. He had this boat since he was 15. At this point, he was in his late 40s, maybe early 50s. He still has the boat but was retiring the sails. He talked about the different moments that that boat was present for his life and every smudge and stain on that sail means something. He hoped that everybody who buys a bag really understands how meaningful the heart of the sails are. Stephanie: That's great. Feeling like you're connected to a community like that, and another person, without even knowing them, I think it's super important. What people are going to want after all this. Now we're all getting in the state where we're connecting with people that we don't even know online. Laura: Right. Stephanie: We're getting used to that now. I think moving in that direction is really smart and also just fun. Knowing that you have something that has experienced things that you could never even think of. Laura: Yeah. Yeah. We like to say that carrying a Sea Bag is like carrying a story on your shoulder. Stephanie: Yeah. That's great. Have you ever had a sail come through where you're like, "This is from a pirate ship?" Laura: I don't know about that. There is a type of sail called tanbark. It's like a dyed tan-colored sail. The lure of tanbark, it's not often used in sail manufacturing today. It's definitely not as common. The lure is that the pirates, they used to use tanbark sails so that they wouldn't be seen on the horizon with the sunset. It was the way that they were able to sneak about in the ocean and not be spotted in the distance with a bright white sail. Stephanie: That's cool. So if you see one of those come through, you'll know. You'll know where it came from. Laura: Yeah, exactly. I do think we have some tanbark on the site right now. It is definitely a little bit more rare and we tend not to offer it all the time. But I think we have a handful of tanbark designs right now. They're just so cool because they are really uncommon and we don't always offer it. Stephanie: I'd also be giving the side eye to whoever brought that in, like, "What did you do to get this sail?" Laura: Exactly! I could be looking for their medallion. "Are you actually a pirate?" Stephanie: Yeah. I know. "Tell me." Obviously retail is on hold right now, but I saw you guys were expanding. Expanding actually one place that is close to my heart, Rehoboth Beach, in Delaware. Laura: Yeah. Yeah. Stephanie: We used to go there every single summer. I'm from Maryland. Such a cute beach town. How are you thinking about utilizing brick and mortar stores? How are they lifting each other up and accelerating your e-commerce as well? Laura: That's a great question. By the end of this year, we'll have 33 stores, spanning 12 states. That's really exciting for us because when I joined the company, we had two stores. That's a lot of growth. We open four to six stores a year. We're opening eight this year, alone, which is really, really exciting. I think that one of the important things with meshing the retail business and the online business is just a general omnichannel approach. Right? Laura: Our CEO likes to say that the e-commerce site is our biggest retail store. It carries all the products for the brand and you can see them all there at any time. And you go to our stores, and the stores may have most of those products but some different selections that might be regionally appropriate. For example, you mentioned Rehoboth Beach. There might be some coastal nautical chart bags down in the Rehoboth Beach store relevant to that regional area. So there's some things like that. But we try to do... Stephanie: Crabs all over the bags and whatnot? Laura: Right. Yeah. To customize and be relevant to that local region. If you were to go to a store and they didn't have a product, the great thing is that you can log onto the iPad at the store. They can get the bag for you that you were looking for and ship for free. We're using an endless aisle concept that leverages the flexibility that we have as a just-in-time manufacturer. We make our bags on demand for customers. It's great to have that flexibility, where we don't have lead times to worry about. We're sourcing everything locally here in the United States. Most everything we source is within New England. That's really criticaL, in terms of being able to take an order and turn it around in a matter of days. Stephanie: Yeah. That's huge. With all this expansion that you guys are experiencing, how have you had to adjust your technology, your platforms you're using. What does that process look like with such a large amount of change that you guys have been experiencing? Laura: Yeah. It's great. I'm actually really excited about this. It's very timely. We decided right in the beginning of this year to move forward with replatforming our website. It's a huge endeavor. We realize that over the last six years, we've been on this very exciting ride of growth and expansion. Quite simply, we've outgrown the website platform that we're using. I do find it really rewarding to think that we have squeezed every ounce that we could get out of the current platform we're on. There's nothing that we have left unturned. Laura: Embarking onto this new platform, we're working with Salesforce Commerce Cloud. There are so many new opportunities for us to improve the customer experience and to refine our practices, in terms of how we approach selling to customers. Using new technology like artificial intelligence and machine learning, personalization, I think we're going to be as a team much more efficient and much more sophisticated in how we are able to speak to our customers and give them what they want. It's going to take us a lot less time to manage that. I'm really excited about being able to grow the business utilizing those types of tools specifically for the e-commerce website. But the great thing is that it really does trickle into the other channels as well that we sell in retail, for example, too. Stephanie: Yeah. That's very cool. Tell me a little bit more details around how you plan on using AI. When you think of using that with Commerce Cloud, what are your ideas around how that's going to improve the consumer experience? What does that look like? Laura: Yeah. We have some personalization currently on the site that we do. Not too much. It's mostly personalized recommendations. I'm really looking forward to using that, in terms of... One of the most exciting things for me is the merchandising of the site and making sure that the predictive sort of the categories. When a customer lands on a page with 150 different wristlets, that the ones that are most relevant to them are actually rising to the top. It's not based on a static presentation of what we think is the most important things to put at the top. Laura: I think that's really important. One of the things on our roadmap after the site is launched, is to actually take a look at the marketing opportunities in terms of email marketing and how we can pull some of the artificial intelligence into the journey map of the customer and how we message to the customer in their lifecycle. I think a lot of those components as well will be really exciting to start to create not just a series. I think in the past, people have created a welcome series, or a trigger series after they buy X product. Laura: I think instead what I want this to be is a more dynamic opportunity to generate emails to customers that are, again, pulling in predictive content. So the customers have performed certain activities, and then the machine learning decides, "Okay, great. Because they did these five things, the most relevant thing to put here is this item and a message about this." That's what I'm excited about. And then being able to look at that data. I think the data is so exciting too, and knowing what works and what's not working. And being able to do site tweaks and adjustments to it will be really helpful. Stephanie: Yeah. I completely agree. I was just going to ask, were there any metrics that you paid attention to in the past that you think it will be way easier to get to? Or that you weren't able to access easily because it was too hard to maybe compile all the data and see it easily. What are some of those metrics if so, that are now going to be accessible to you that'll really help? Laura: I'm not sure if this definitely going to make it easier. But what I'm really more excited about is seeing... The measurements are customer lifetime value and customer acquisition costs. Starting to really understand the customer lifecycle better. So that once we see customers logging onto the website. Also, we just launched a Customer Loyalty program. Getting customers more engaged and in the habit of, "To get your reward points, logging in and making sure." We're keeping track of what customers are doing and delivering them relevant content, as opposed to just sending them too many emails. Laura: I think I was telling you, I'm in the process right now of cleaning out my email and unsubscribing from everything possible. I don't want people to have that experience with our brand. Saying, "You guys just email me too much." I want the contact that we're sending them to be interesting. The one thing I will tell you, and again this goes back to how we engaged our audience is. The open rates on our emails are really high. The click through rates are high. Our customers, like when we do these auctions periodically on the website. Laura: After the auction is complete, we usually take a look at who won the auction. We'll just see who the customer is. What's their lifecycle like? Almost every time when we do this, the customers email open rate is over 80%. They're highly-engaged people. Of course, they're participating in an auction. You would assume that. But it is so interesting to see somebody opening that emails from us. That to me, is a real testament to the strength of the brand and how engaged people are. Stephanie: That means you're definitely doing something right. For sure. How are you assembling the team for this digital transformation that you guys are about to undergo? How are you thinking about aligning your organization and your team members so everyone can help make this transition quick and easy? Laura: Yeah. That is critical. So what we did, it's probably not so different than what a lot of other folks might do. I assembled a core team. A Project Manager whose in charge of managing the project with our Systems Integrator. Then I have a Lead Developer in-house. His job is really to get into the technical details behind the development and transition. Because he has been primarily responsible for all of the development on our current website. I'm on the team, more from a strategic guidance standpoint and decision-making. Then our CEO has been really involved as well, which I really appreciate. Laura: This is the biggest project that our company has undertaken in the last six years, to do this type of major replatforming. It's a totally new platform. We've done some previous site launches and relaunches, but this one's pretty huge. I still have a number of other people on my marketing team who will participate and we'll start pulling them in one-by-one. We'll also embarking on a training curriculum, that we're developing in-house for our team. That's going to be going on while we're doing the developing, so that we're ready to go when the site's ready to launch. Laura: We're also looking at peripheral technology that is impacted by this transition. So an example I might give you is, our shipping platform and how we ship products. That was impacted. We needed to make a decision to shift to another provider. We assembled pilot team to get together and review the technology available and the vendor. We got all our decision-makers in one room and everybody agreed said, "Yes, let's do it." We've been making these decisions quickly. Kind of in that agile methodology of those sprints. Laura: Part of that is a function of how the Systems Integrator has outlined and structured the project. We have a very tight timeline, too. We're looking to have the website launched by October 1st. We started it in mid-March. We're definitely on an accelerated scheduled and we don't want to miss any milestones. Knock on wood, we are currently on target. So I'm excited about that. Stephanie: That's so fun. I can't wait to see the new site and try it out. Are there any digital commerce trends that you guys are preparing for, as you're launching this new platform and putting out a V2 of the brand? Are you preparing anything in the e-commerce space that you think is coming down the pike, that you're thinking, "We better get ready for this, or this trend?" Laura: No. I can't say that we're focused on anything like that right now. We're definitely mostly looking at the capabilities of the new platform. Like I said, the AI and machine learning component is so rich, that we see that as foundation to changing how we approach, how we do our marketing strategies and communicate with customers. So I think that's really the biggest opportunity for us. Stephanie: Very cool. One side question I had was, when you have your customers tagging all these photos and they're flowing into your website, are people able to buy from those photos right now? Laura: Yeah. On a limited basis right now. When we launch the new site, it'll much more prolific. You'll be able to buy from almost all of them. Stephanie: Yeah. That's great. Laura: I think that's really critical and it's important. Stephanie: Yeah. I know. When I was looking at all the different photos that you guys were getting tagged in, I'm like, "Oh, I want this Bag." There was this one alignment. It was like a tan orangeish bag but it had a duffle bag, and a bigger bag and there was like three of them together. I'm like, "If I could just click in and get this set, it would be so much easier than going into the website and trying to find out what this is called, or trying to figure out which one it was." Laura: Yeah. It's really interesting. The thing about user-generated content is that the customers put the product in context that we wouldn't necessarily be able to in our marketing because it wouldn't make sense. I'll give you an example. Just this week, we received a review from a customer, that was a picture of what they were calling a COVID Survival Pack that they were sending out their friends. It was a Sea Bag's beverage bucket bag. A beverage bucket is kind of a like a tall 14-inch high bucket that has handles, and the interior has six pockets for six beers. Then in the very middle is like a cavity that you can put ice and it has a grommet in the bottom, so that the ice can melt and escape out of the bottom of the bag. So it's a collapsible cooler. Laura: While they were filling the buckets with six Corona beers, and then put a roll of toilet paper in the center. They were mailing these out to their friends as COVID Survival Packs. It got such a laugh for us. It also is great, in terms of giving other customers ideas on ways to use our product in a way that is memorable and fun. Yeah. There's a lot of that. But like I said, that whole idea of content creation... While a lot of stuff can come from us and we can push it out, when it comes our audience, it's even more relevant. Stephanie: Yeah. That's such a fun idea. I want one of those Survival Packs right now. Person whoever made that, please send one my way. I want lime as well. Laura: Yeah. The lime would be great. Stephanie: Yeah. That's a necessity. That's a good point, too, for larger brands. We work with a lot of larger brands developing podcasts for them and whatnot. When you have your customers, where they can actually interact how they want. They don't have to go through the brand policy team and all these approvals and things like this, where maybe 80% of it would never get past the company's PR team. But when the customers are able to engage the way that they want to, it seems like it allows for more organic conversations to start and just things that maybe wouldn't normally get past the actual internal policies. It makes it more fun to have those customers who can do that stuff. Laura: Yeah. Absolutely. I agree. Stephanie: So to shift a little bit. Are you the founder of Women in Retail Leadership Circle? Laura: No, not the founder. Stephanie: Tell me about that. Laura: I'm very flattered. No. Women in Retail Leadership Circle is a national organization that basically connects senior women in leadership, C level and director level, in retail organizations. They were started about seven years ago. They're backed by NATCO Media. I was a founding advisory board member, on the team there. So I've been involved over the last almost seven years. They've grown significantly in size over that time. It's one of the most energized and engaged leadership groups I've ever participated in. They have an Annual Conference that I can say is nothing short of transformational. It has been rescheduled this year for October. I'm hoping that I'll be traveling, to be able to go to it. Laura: Even so, during COVID. The conference is usually in April. They were very quick to figure out how they could be of service to their audience. They set up peer groups that leaders could participate in on a biweekly basis with opportunities to share advice and experience with other senior female leadership. During more normal times, they do regular what they call On The Road Events, where you can connect in a major city, like Boston or New York, over an evening of cocktails or something like that with leaders like Rebecca Minkoff talking about her leadership struggles perhaps. It's a great way to collaborate with other companies. Laura: I've been able to uncover new tactics and strategies for growth. I also use it as a tool to refine my leadership style, because there's a lot of inspirational leadership that we share in those, like I said, events that they sponsor. They're doing a lot of stuff virtually right now. The thing I like the most about it, is it's noncompetitive. It's just great personal development at the senior leadership level, which I think there doesn't happen to be a lot of that typically. A lot of the personal development that happens in organizations usually is more at a junior level. Stephanie: That's really cool. Is there anyone in the industry that you look to for not only leadership, but maybe different tactics or strategies that they're trying out or doing? Do you keep an eye on anyone to incorporate at Sea Bags? Like incorporate what they're doing? Laura: Yeah. I look at a lot of brands, which is the reason why I need to pair down my emails so much. I do. I track a lot of folks. I also follow a lot of people on LinkedIn, because I feel like it's just a great opportunity to see what everyone's doing. As a brand, we try to spend time benchmarking and keeping our eye on brands, again, that are very, very correlated with our DNA. Coastal lifestyle brands, like Sperry Top-Sider, Life is Good, a very inspirational brand. We have a lot of partnerships like that. We also try to keep an eye towards some more local name brands too that we partner with, and just benchmarking what they're doing. Laura: And we also share a lot of information too. An example of that would be Stonewall Kitchen, which is a gourmet food brand. They also are on Sales Commerce Cloud. While we were going through this whole replatforming project, being able to reach out to people within our network and benchmark around what their experiences were on their websites platforms and technologies that they're using is really important. Stephanie: That's great. Having that little network that you can tap into and be like, "Hey, how did you guys do this?" Or, "Does this work better, or this strategy?" That's really fun. And all about, once again, tying it back to having that community that you can tap into to get answers from and learn from people who've already gone through that. Laura: Yeah, absolutely. Over the years, that's one thing that I learned very early in my career. Some of my leaders, actually one that I'm still working with today, who is on our Board at Sea Bags, taught me how important that skill of networking was and that networking is a two-way street. It's really important to make sure that you're not only asking things of people and keeping in touch with them, but you're also being a value to them as well, in terms of that networking relationship. Stephanie: Yeah. That's such a great point. Coming up next we have the Lightning Round, which I can tell you a little bit more about in a second. But do you have thoughts or ideas that you want to share before we move onto that? Laura: Geez, thoughts that I want to share. Stephanie: Anything that we missed? Laura: I'm sure there's something we missed. But I think we covered a lot, too. I'm excited to hear what the Lightning Round is all about. Stephanie: All right. Cool. So the Lightning Round, bought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. It's where I ask a question and you have one minute or less to answer. Are you ready? Laura: I guess so. Stephanie: All right. What's up next on your reading list? Laura: Oh, on my reading list. I am about to start... I'm like one chapter in. A book by the founder of IDEO. I think his name is Dave Kelly, if remember correctly. It's a book all about innovation and idea generation and how to approach innovation a little bit differently. I'm really excited about that. I'm definitely one of those people that reads multiple books at once, too. Stephanie: Yeah. Me, too. I think they did have a space here in Palo Alto, right down the street from us. Laura: Yeah. I think you're right. I think you're right. The name of the book is The Art of Innovation. Stephanie: Okay. Cool. Laura: It's Tom Kelly. I got his name wrong. Stephanie: Tom Kelly. Got it. For everyone, Tom Kelly. Yeah. That's really funny. We went and we were touring office spaces. We toured through their building. It was very forward-thinking and innovative. I mean, just like what you were talking about. It was all about R&D and trying new things. It was cool to see the inner workings of their space. Laura: Very cool. Stephanie: What's up next on your Netflix or Hulu Video? Laura: Oh, I am watching Ozark. I know I'm a little painfully behind. Yeah. I'm trying to make my way through into, I think, season three of Ozark. I am really enjoying that and it's a problem I will sometimes stay up way to late trying to fit in just one more episode. Stephanie: Yeah. Me, too. I love that show. What's the next conference you're excited about attending? Laura: I am really excited about the Women in Retail Leadership Conference. Like I said, I hope it's happening in October. This is, as I mentioned, it's a transformational opportunity for me to go talk with other senior female leaders about their challenges and opportunities and where they're seeing growth within their companies. I've walked away from this conference before getting lots of new ideas, new business opportunities and third-party partners to work with and collaboration opportunities. So that to me is what I'm most looking forward to and I hope that it still happens, especially because it's in Miami in October, which will be a really nice time of year to be there. Stephanie: That's very cool. I'll have to check that out. What are you doing for fun these days? Any passions that you have? Laura: I am actually, after this podcast, going to jump on my boat with my husband and two kids for the first time this season. That is actually our big passion. This is the kickoff to boating season in Maine, Memorial Day weekend. Usually while I'm on the boat, the things that I do is knit. I've been knitting a sweater for four years now, that I am committed to finishing this year. That's my goal. Stephanie: You have to post a picture when it's done, so we can all see it. Laura: I will. I hope it actually fits. I'm kind of laughing at it going, "I don't even know if this is going to fit." I end up probably giving it as a gift. Stephanie: Yeah. My mom got into sewing and knitting and all that. She was trying to make us outfits, just for fun. Sweaters and things like that. She ended making one that ended up having to go towards our Shih Tzu dog because it... She was like, "Oh, this went really wrong." Laura: Yeah. It can go wrong quickly. That's what I'm worried about. I've ripped out a few rows of this a few times and I'm not sure I recounted correctly. So we'll see. I post a picture regardless of what it looks like. Stephanie: Great. It's a journey. Laura: Yeah. Stephanie: The next hard question. You guys at Sea Bags are moving quick. You're having to transition platforms. It's your job to stay ahead on the expectations and your competition and all that. What do you think is up next for e-commerce pros? Laura: Up next for e-commerce pros. I think that we really are going to have to focus on is how to take omnichannel retailing to the next level. I think that that term, omnichannel, is really broadly thrown around. I think that people don't really understand what it is. I think that we need to be able to deliver a seamless customer experience regardless of where they're shopping and figure out, also, how to do it without inconveniencing customers with asking for their information repeatedly. Laura: I think that's one of the challenges in retail, is being able to know when somebody places an order in one of your retail stores, and being able to translate that into their customer profile so that you have, again, that really full 360-degree picture of that journey of that customer and really knowing what their full lifetime value is. Again, so that you can come back and customize and personalize their shopping experience and make it more rich. They feel valued because they know that you're speaking to them in a way that is informed and caring about what value they play for your brand. Stephanie: That's a great answer. Laura, it's been blast. Thank you for coming on the show. For all our listeners, go check out Sea Bags and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Let's help spread the word and spread stories like the one Laura shared today. Laura, thanks. I hope to have you back. Laura: Thank you so much for having me. It was an absolute joy. Stephanie: It really was. Yeah.  

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Todd: OK, we're here with Laura. Hello!Laura: Hi!Todd: Hi! Now, Laura, where you are from?Laura: I'm from Hong Kong.Todd: Hong Kong. That's great. So tell us about Hong Kong.Laura: Well, it's a country for people, and well, when I ask my friends would they love Hong Kong they just say, Oh well, many good cheap things to buy, what, so many, a lot of delicious dishes, what, so.Laura: And Hong Kong is a really big modern city, with tall, tall buildings.Todd: Do you live downtown where all the tall buildings are?Laura: When I'm in the city. I live in the 24th floor.Todd: The 24th floor.Laura: So my brother live in 44.Todd: Wow!Laura: It's amazing, right?Todd: Yeah, that's insane. WowLaura: So just for residential users, we have very tall buildings.Todd: Oh, OK. What's the best thing about Hong Kong?Laura: Well, what do you mean?Todd: Like what's something that is really nice about living in Hong Kong?Laura: Mm!Todd: It's kind of hard. I'm sorry. On the spot. How about the food? Does Hong Kong have really good food?Laura: Maybe a lot of choices. So you have a different kind of cuisine, like Japanese food, Chinese food, Western food, well, a lot of choices.Todd: OK. And the people of Hong Kong, do they all speak different types of Chinese?Laura: Well, mainly Cantonese, but sometimes, well in school they usually speak English.Todd: Really!Laura: Yes, now because well, we are a part of China, so we usually, we have to learn Mandarin as well.Todd: OK, so you speak Mandarin, Cantonese, and English.Laura: Well, you can say that.Todd: That's amazing. OK, thanks a lot.

The Berkeley Bowl CookbookRecipes Inspired By The Extraordinary Produce Of California's Most Iconic MarketBy Laura McLively Suzy Chase: Welcome to the Cookery by the Book Podcast, with me, Suzy Chase.Laura: I'm Laura McLively, and my new cookbook is the Berkeley Bowl Cookbook.Suzy Chase: Epicurious just named the Berkeley Bowl Cookbook one of the it cookbooks for Spring 2018. Tell us about Berkeley Bowl and the owners.Laura: So, Berkeley Bowl is a family-run market. They, Glenn and Diane Yasuda are the owners, and they opened up shop in a former bowling alley back in 1977, so a lot of people think that the store is called Berkeley Bowl because of the bowl alluding to some sort of edible culinary adventure, but it's actually named after the bowling alley, and so they opened up shop there back in 1977 because they used to live behind that location, and Glenn and Diane spent some time living in Japan, and that arrangement really reminded them of how shops were set up in there in Japan, where people had their store front and they lived behind it, and so, they bought the property, turned it into a grocery store that was mainly produce, and from there it evolved into what is now 40 years later a very big grocery store with over 600 employees.Suzy Chase: I found it really interesting that local farmers asked Berkeley Bowl what they should plant.Laura: Yeah, I do too. I think that that's the unique aspect of Berkeley Bowl, and that because it's still a family-run market, they're able to work directly with farmers and local growers to source and ask them to produce items that they want to have in their grocery store, that large grocery franchises can't really do that because they have to provide such huge quantities and take them to a centralized warehouse and distribute them to all the locations. They can't really work with a small farmer to produce some niche item, and so it's a really nice arrangement because in that way, Berkeley Bowl can ask a small farm to produce, for instance, food at hand, knowing that they have a huge customer base that wants that item, and then the small farmer has a guaranteed market for that item. They're not taking that huge risk of growing something that's maybe a little bit wacky or unknown to most people and risking no one buying it.Suzy Chase: The LA Times has called Berkeley Bowl one of the nation's most renowned retailers of exotic fruits and vegetables. Describe the first time you saw an African Horned melon at Berkeley Bowl, and what is it?Laura: So, that's a great question. If you have my book, it's right on the cover because it's such a unique item. It's on the back side, and it's a neon orange orb that is covered in darker orange spikes, and when you cut into it, it literally oozes this lime green juice and all these seeds, and it seriously looks like some sort of spiky hand grenade or a weapon from outer space, and in fact, the first time I saw it was featured on a Star Trek episode, where aliens in outer space are eating this fruit, and it's actually an African Horned melon. It's not something that they CGI'ed or created for the show. I think it's really interesting that it's ...Suzy Chase: That's funny.Laura: it's on Star Trek, but my first time seeing it in the store was I had moved here from Sonoma county. I moved to Berkeley to go to college, and I had heard about Berkeley Bowl, and I immediately went there because I wanted to check it out for myself, and I was, of course, struck by the variety they had. Even though I'd heard about it, I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. They had so many amazing fruits and vegetables that I'd never seen before, and I think, by far, the most extreme one is the African Horned melon, and I picked it up. I looked at it. There happened to be one that was cut in half, and I smelled it, and it just, it was kind of intoxicating. It smells like lime and banana and melon and cucumber all mixed together, but something in me didn't feel like I could take it home and eat it. It was almost like all these unusual fruits and vegetables that weren't part of my culture, I almost felt like I didn't have permission to take them home and cook with them, like they weren't mine. And it wasn't until years later, after an experience of living in Spain and having a cooking club there, where we were basically just challenging ourselves each week to cook with something we'd never cooked with before, it wasn't until coming back from there that I was really yearning to continue that spirit of adventurous cooking, that when I went back to Berkeley Bowl for the first time, and I saw these fruits and vegetables in that new context, I was like, well, hey, why aren't I doing this now? Why don't I continue that spirit of adventurous cooking from my own home? And so that's when I picked it up, brought it home, and played around with it and had so much fun developing recipes for it that I decided to start a blog where I would chronicle my adventures with doing that with each and every item in the store I could find.Suzy Chase: Yeah, before we talk about your blog, you have a line in your book that says, "Foods unfamiliar to me are as much a part of someone else's everyday diet as tomatoes are to my family."Laura: Exactly. Yeah, and so that fruit, every fruit and vegetable in my book is normal to someone, right?Suzy Chase: Yeah.Laura: And for good reason, so these things are really amazing, and they may be popular in other cultures, other countries, but even within the United States, other regions, and once you get over that fact of, once you realize that fact that these things are normal to someone, it kind of [inaudible 00:06:18] some of the intimidation in working with these fruits and vegetables because maybe at first glance they look like, oh, well I've never seen that before. I wouldn't possibly know what to do with it, but someone somewhere is cooking with that, otherwise it wouldn't be in the store, and it's probably for a very good reason.Suzy Chase: That's a really good thing to remember.Laura: Yeah, I think so.Suzy Chase: So, you chronicled your journey cooking with the market's ingredients on your blog called My Berkeley Bowl. Tell us about your blog.Laura: So, my blog was really just a personal challenge. It was a ... where I just chronicling my own personal challenge. Like I said, once I brought my first exotic or unfamiliar food home and had so much fun developing a recipe for it, I sort of just challenged myself to make my way through all the unfamiliar fruits and vegetables at Berkeley Bowl, and I thought, why don't I chronicle this adventure because there's bound to be some interesting discoveries and mishaps, which there were, and it could be some fun, and so I really was just writing for myself, and I was surprised that when I posted my first entry, it's kind of crazy how the internet works. I don't know how someone found it, but within a minute, I had a like, and I was kind of like what? How did someone find it? It's been ... At that point, I didn't even know how to tag my posts in a way that they were searchable. It was really just so fun, and so I was surprised to see it kind of grow, and people starting to comment and saying they really liked the concept, and even on Wordpress you can see in which countries people are reading your blog, and so really quickly, there were people all over the world reading it, and I don't know if it's maybe because they were excited to see maybe something that they grew up eating being featured on a blog, but it was really neat to see that it was being appreciated outside of the Berkeley area, and so I did that for ... Let's see. I started it in spring of 2015, and it was that December of the same year that Parallax Press approached me about turning it into a cookbook, and it just seemed like a great idea because it was such a finite project with a very specific aim of cooking with unfamiliar fruits and vegetables, and it just really seemed like it would work as a cookbook because part of what I wanted of this is to see, to really shine the spotlight on these fruits and vegetables, and so to have a beautiful, almost coffee table-like book with luscious photos by Erin Scott, that really capture how beautiful these fruits and vegetables are, is sort of a dream come true for me.Suzy Chase: In the book, the recipes are organized by type and ingredient. Talk a little bit about that.Laura: So, I didn't go the traditional route of organizing it by courses because this is really an ingredient-driven book. That's how my process was for developing the recipes, and so that's how the cookbook is laid out, so what I mean by that is I literally would walk into the store not knowing what I would find that day because it's different every day, based on what's in season, and I would pick up something new and bring it home, and after trying that one item in a jillion different ways, I would develop a recipe for it, and so it makes sense to me to organize the book in a way that really honors the fruit or vegetable itself rather than organize it by course because that's not how I developed the recipes. And in addition, I think it's really, it's kind of a poetic way to think about these things, but in a chapter, that if you want to delve into a chapter, you're working with spores and succulents, or you can work with flowers, seeds, and pods, and so I think it's a kind of poetic way to think about these things and just to treat them as the superstars or as the hero of the dish, rather than as an ingredient in a breakfast or in a dessert or in a dinner.Suzy Chase: You have a whole chapter dedicated to stems. What exactly are stems?Laura: Stems are basically anything that would be the stalk or the stem of a plant, and so, some examples in the book are things like Bạc Hà, which is the stem of the Elephant Ear plant, so it's a really spongy stem that once you cook it, it's like a sponge. It literally soaks up the broth, so it's really commonly used in, for instance, hot and sour soup type dishes, and I use it in a Spanish-style garlic soup. Other stems that maybe don't even look like stems are, like one that surprises people who are familiar with it is kohlrabi. The kohlrabi is, people think it's the bulb of the plant or the tuber, but it's actually a stem that's kind of in a round shape, so that one is, that's the kind of surprising one in that chapter. And then I have things like white asparagus and lemongrass, which is in a lemongrass coconut ice cream, [inaudible 00:11:44], cardoons, rhubarb, so all different colors and shapes and sizes that when you weigh them out, and if you have the book, you can see them laid out in the spread, and it's like art. It's these beautiful different shapes and sizes and colors.Suzy Chase: When I go to an ethnic market that has exotic produce, I'm so intimidated by the fruits or vegetables that I can't identify. What advice would you give someone like me, who's daunted by the unknown?Laura: Have some fun. There's no harm in making mistakes, and there's really, you really can't make mistakes first of all, but if you take it home and you try using it in a way that you don't like, no harm, no foul. You can just try again, but I think I would say that you would quickly find that the fun of doing it outweighs the fear of the unknown, and there's also of a lot of resources available to you. One thing I would say is if you're at a market and you're looking at something you're considering cooking at home, but you're not sure what to do with it, just stick around and wait because someone is bound to come up and reach for it, and it's a great way to interact and to share between cultures because you can ask the person, hey, what are you doing with that? And that's what I often did at the store, is I would sit around and wait for someone to reach for the burdock root, and I'd ask them, what do you do with that? Also, the staff at those places are usually very knowledgeable, and so you can ask them questions, and if they don't know, someone else might know, and they'll go grab them, so that happened a lot at Berkeley Bowl, where the staff is diverse with the community and is diverse with the offerings at the market, and so I was always able to get an answer from them. And then, of course, most of us have iPhones or smart phones, and so you can look it up. There's some great resources out there. You can find a lot of them on my blog, My Berkeley Bowl, but also Specialty Produce is a great website that has a lot of information on specialty produce as well.Suzy Chase: Yeah, I took the book with me to Chinatown because there's a bit of a language barrier, and that helped a lot, getting the produce that I needed to make some of these recipes.Laura: Oh, good. Yeah, I was hoping ... I'm hoping this book can sort of be a companion because of the nature of the items in it, a lot of times they have a short season or you have to go to a specific market to find them, and so my idea is that you just pack this up and take it there because you don't really know what you're going to find until you get there, so it's better to go see what's there, and then maybe look it up, and in the back there's a key, where all of the produce is pictured with numbers, and you can look up the name of it so that you can easily find it and identify it and make sure you're picking up the right thing.Suzy Chase: As a food explorer, and I love that title, how did you determine how to cook a mysterious fruit or vegetable? Walk us through how you developed these recipes in the book.Laura: Generally, once I got the item home, I started a process of what I call playing around with it, so generally I would try it raw to see what it tastes like in its pure form and really identify its flavor, and if it's something that needs to be cooked, I would usually cook it a couple different ways, and not necessarily the most, the way that it's most commonly used in that culture. So, I wanted to see if there were other ways to bring out its structure and flavor, so I'd broil it or braise it or roast it, grate it. I'd try as many ways as I could to see how I liked it the best, and then once I identified the way in which it, the way which truly honored its texture and its flavor, I was usually inspired by that point to incorporate some other flavors, so for instance, something like a green papaya, when I tried that on its own, it's really bright and acidic, and I knew I wanted to have it in a gazpacho because gazpacho should be very bright and acidic. So, from there, I fiddled around with what I wanted in the gazpacho. I threw in some avocado for creaminess and some cucumbers and limes and ultimately tried and tried and adjust and adjust until it's to the point where it can be tested, and then I would send it to a huge team of friends and recipe testers, I think there's about 35 of them all over the world, and someone would try it at least three times, and we would adjust it from there.Suzy Chase: So, I made a few things out of this cookbook. First was the pickled kumquats on page 197. The flavor was definitely different. I expected the kumquats to be very sweet.Laura: Yeah, I think a lot of people expect oranges but they're not ...Suzy Chase: Yes.Laura: ... as many oranges.Suzy Chase: Exactly.Laura: Exactly. So, I think what I love about pickled kumquats is that they're not sweet, and it's not supposed to be candied or like a fruit that you would eat on its own. It's really meant to brighten and add acid to pair it with, so I always had a jar of pickled kumquats in my fridge to throw in salads. It's really great to throw on a salad, or just something to make it more beautiful and acidic and tangy, and guests are always surprised because they sort of look like cherry tomatoes, but the Sun Gold tomatoes, so when they bite into them and instead they find this citrusy, pickly taste, they're always like, wow, what's that? And then they're also really great on a cheese plate because creamy cheeses like Brie or Camembert can really finish it from having a little touch of brightness and acid.Suzy Chase: Yeah, they were definitely tangy. I'm going to try them on a cheese plate.Laura: Yeah.Suzy Chase: I also made the purple cauliflower quesadilla with curry crema. Try saying that three times fast on page 73, and I cooked the cauliflower until it was super, super soft, and the curry cream was such a nice surprise with it.Laura: I'm so glad you liked it, and yeah, I'm glad you brought up that recipe because, actually, both the recipes you brought up. One thing that people have told me when I tell them that I have this cookbook is they say, "Oh, I'm not a good cook. I probably shouldn't cook anything out of your book," and I'm always surprised by that because just because ingredients are extraordinary and unique and sometimes look intimidating doesn't mean that the recipes are. I'm a home cook. I'm not a classically trained chef by any means ...Suzy Chase: Me, too.Laura: ... and I'm cooking for my family, right? So it's like these are things that I should cook, and purple cauliflower quesadillas is about as easy as it gets, so the things that are meant to be accessible and to take the intimidation out of these fruits and vegetables.Suzy Chase: And my 11 year old loved this quesadilla. It's really a great weeknight fast dinner.Laura: Good, I'm so glad that you're daughter liked it, too.Suzy Chase: He's a son, but that's okay.Laura: Oh, sorry. Yeah.Suzy Chase: So, I also made the starfruit almond torte on page 198, and I didn't have a springform pan, so it was rough getting it out, but it was really delicious, and I was surprised by how almondy, is that a word,? Almondy it was.Laura: Yeah, that ... This tart was inspired by Tarta de Santiago, which is the St. James cake that they serve in Santiago de Compostela, which is the end of the pilgrimage that you can do across northern Spain, and so when you arrive in this town, there's sort of cake in every window, and it's an almond based cake, and I've always loved it, and my mom used to make it when we were growing up, and it's really simple to make, too. It's kind of a foolproof dessert, and so when I saw the starfruit, I knew I wanted it to decorate the top of the cake, but rather than just laying it on there raw, I thought it would be really cool to bake it into the cake, so there's like a pineapple upside down cake and flip it over, and so there's a sort of a combination of those two things, and I think it comes out beautifully, and if you serve it to guests, they can be like, oh, my gosh, how did you cut the fruit in that beautiful shape, and they don't realize that it just comes that way.Suzy Chase: Yeah, it's really pretty. Last night, I made the broiled pomelo with cinnamon crème-fraiche on page 172. Now, what's the difference between a pomelo and a grapefruit?Laura: A pomelo is much larger, and it has a much thicker rind and pith, whereas grapefruit is obviously smaller and has a thinner rind. I also think pomelo is a bit sweeter. It's sweeter and it has less bitterness, so if you always wanted to like grapefruit, but you just can't get over the fact that it has that bitter taste, you should try pomelo, and the reason I like it in this preparation is because when you slice it in half and you broil it, there's more, the pith is bright white, and it just looks prettier than grapefruit. It has that nice contrast between the pith and the fruit, and it kind of caramelizes and burns a little bit on top, so I think it works really well in this recipe.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on social media?Laura: So, my social media, my Twitter handle and my Instagram handle is @myberkeleybowl, and I have a Facebook page as well that's My Berkeley Bowl. My website, the blog is myberkeleybowl.com, and you can also me on my personal website lauramclively.com.Suzy Chase: With this cookbook as your handy guide, sourcing produce is fun. Thanks, Laura, for coming on Cookery By The Book podcast.Laura: Thank you so much, Suzy, for having me.Suzy Chase: Follow me on Instagram at CookerybytheBook. Twitter is IamSuzyChase, and download your kitchen mix tapes, Music To Cook By, on Spotify at CookerybytheBook, and as always, subscribe in Apple Podcasts.

In this jam-packed 65th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Kira and Rob talk with author and ghostwriter Laura Hanly about book writing and publishing. We met Laura a few months ago and after grilling her over breakfast, knew she’d be a great addition to the show. In this discussion we cover: •  how she became a book writer and publishing consultant •  what you need to think about before you write your book •  Laura’s thoughts on who exactly needs to have a book—if you are in a commodified service business, the answer is “yes” •  who needs to be on your book writing team and who should be your early readers •  what a realistic timeline for writing a book looks like •  price ranges and what she does to charge $40,000 per book project •  what you need to do to promote your book •  common mistakes writers make when they write their book •  the differences between self publishing and traditional publishing •  how to publish with Amazon Create Space and KDP •  the design options to consider when you’re ready to publish your book •  how to find clients as a ghost writer of books •  whether you should get a byline with the books you ghost write •  the mistakes she sees over and over on book projects We also asked about the rates she charged when she first started out (they were way too low), the mistakes businesses make when they “do” content marketing, who is doing content well today, and what to keep in mind when promoting your content. Ready for this? Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Telling Your Brand Story (Rob’s book) The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (Mark Manson’s rudely titled book) The Martian (Andy Weir’s book) Gary V Ramit Sethi Digital Marketer CreateSpace 99designs Laurahanly.com Content that Converts Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: Kira: What if you could hang out with seriously copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea to inspire your own work? That’s what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Rob: You’re invited to join the club for episode 65 as we chat with author and book consultant Laura Hanly about the process of writing a good book, how to choose between self-publishing and a formal publisher, what it takes to write a bestseller, and the tactics, strategies, and systems for promoting your content. Kira: Welcome, Laura! Rob: Welcome! Laura: Thank you so much! Very exciting to chat with you guys. Rob: I want to jump in and just say that we met at a mastermind event, and you and I, I think, had the opportunity to sit down at breakfast and for about 45 minutes or so, you sort of walked me through a lot of the process of writing a book and as we were chatting, it was one of those things where like, “Laura, we got to have you on the podcast!” Because there are a lot of people who listen to us that need to know the things that you know! So we are really excited to have you here. Laura: Yeah, I think it’s a big opportunity for a lot of people at the moment so I’m excited to talk about it. Rob: Cool! Well, why don’t we start with your story? Where did you come from; how did you start doing what you’re doing? Laura: So, I grew up in Sydney in Australia. I studied writing and publishing at university and worked at a big publishing house there in Australia for a few years. And I think about 2011, the industry really started downsizing and they weren’t kind of learning the lessons that we had all seen go down in the music industry in terms of, you know, adapting to the new technologies that were becoming available, and I thought, mmmm, I really need to get myself organized and become a bit more independent. So I moved online,

The Market is not a quiet place. Thousands of people stroll the streets and sidewalks, chattering and calling to each other... Street musicians sing and play guitars... Vendors proclaim their wares, and customers barter for better prices on beans and broccoli... For one long moment, it all stopped, sucked up by my mother's sharp intake of breath. "Peggy Manning," she said. "I thought you were dead." -- Leslie Budewitz, Killing Thyme I am thrilled to have the opportunity to chat with Leslie Budewitz, whose Spice Shop Mysteries and Food Lovers' Village Mysteries are always on my must-read list.  First things first: check out her website for info on her books, upcoming events, and recipes -- definitely do NOT miss those! In addition, she is on Facebook and on Twitter. Writers out there, she also has an Agatha Award-winning nonfiction book, Books, Crooks and Counselors: How to Write Accurately About Criminal Law And Courtroom Procedure. Just sayin'. Leslie gives a shout-out to some of her favorite books and authors, including Sheila Connolly, who writes the Museum Mystery cozy series, and Cleo Coyle's series, the Coffee House Mysteries, set in Greenwich Village -- recipes abound there as well! Plus talent runs in the family: Leslie's cousin is New York Times Bestselling Author Laura Childs. Leslie and I both recommend Sisters In Crime for both published and yet-to-be-published writers. Leslie is a SinC past president and credits much of her success to being a member of The Guppies, the online chapter of Sisters in Crime.  And finally, here are Leslie's two series, in order: Food Lovers' Village Mysteries 1 - Death Al Dente 2 - Crime Rib 3 - Butter Off Dead Spice Shop Mysteries 1 - Assault and Pepper 2 - Guilty as Cinnamon 3 - Killing Thyme I'm sorry to all the other writers out there, but "Crime Rib" = Best. Title. Ever. Enjoy! - Laura ************************* Transcript of Interview with Leslie Budewitz Laura Brennan: Leslie Budewitz blends her passion for food, great mysteries, and the Northwest in two light-hearted mystery series: the Spice Shop Mysteries, set in Seattle, and the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries, set in northwest Montana. Her books focus on strong women who share her passions, and have a talent for finding trouble. Leslie, thank you for joining me. Leslie Budewitz: It's a delight. Laura: So, normally, I write my own intros, but yours was so good that I just shamelessly stole it off of your website. It so accurately captures your heroine -- strong women who share your passions. And get into plenty of trouble. I love that so much. Leslie: When passion leads you into trouble, gosh, that's when a great story develops, don't you think? Laura: I do. I absolutely do. So before we talk about them, I want to talk about you. You do not get into trouble. Leslie: Not the same kind of trouble is my characters. Laura: But you are a lawyer. Leslie: Yes. Laura: That's how you started out. Now, is that fun? Leslie: I enjoyed the practice. But I will say that I enjoy killing people on the page more. Laura: So you weren't tempted to write legal thrillers? To use your legal background? Leslie: No, I never really was. I've been practicing law for about 30 -- oh good heavens -- 32 years. Now very part time, doing civil litigation, meaning personal injury work, business litigation and some employment law. And I have had some great experiences, met many wonderful people, met some not so wonderful people as well. Which is great because that gives me fodder for other stories. But I didn't really want to go into the courtroom world in my fiction. I have a lot more interests than just the legal world. And so it's been great fun to explore other things. If there are lawyers in my stories they tend to be herbalists, or retired lawyers who make fudge. People who have found other ways to make a living beyond their practices. Laura: Well, I love that about your books,

Under the name Connie Archer, my guest today writes the Soup Lover's Mysteries. Under Connie di Marco, she is launching a new series on June 8th, the Zodiac Series. Whatever name she uses, Connie is a terrific storyteller with a lot of heart, and I am thrilled to be talking to her today. We cover a lot of ground, from the allure of cozies to creating memorable characters, to the true-life crazy things that can happen in a small town. And we talk about her blog tour, which you definitely want in on, since every stop generally involves a Madness of Mercury book giveaway. I link HERE to Connie di Marco's home page for more info on the Zodiac series, and HERE to the page that has links to all her blog tour stops. Connie Archer's website can be found here for you soup lovers (you can find one of her recipes at Cinnamon Sugar and a Little Bit of Murder). Here, in order, are the five books in the Soup Lover's Mysteries series: 1 - A Spoonful of Murder 2 - A Broth of Betrayal 3 - A Roux of Revenge 4 - Ladle to the Grave 5 - A Clue in the Stew For her latest book, The Madness of Mercury, book one of the Zodiac Series, Connie was inspired by someone who lived in San Francisco at the same time she did: Jim Jones, of the Jonestown Massacre. Very creepy. On a slightly less deadly note, we also talk about the Rashneeshees and their poisoning of a town in an attempt to win elections (luckily, no lives were lost, but it was a close call). Connie also gives a shout out to Sue Grafton and to cozy writer Nancy Parra, who writes (among other things) a gluten-free cozy series. If you'd rather read than listen, the transcript is below. Enjoy! Transcript for Connie di Marco/Connie Archer interview: Welcome to Destination Mystery, a podcast for readers who love a good mystery. I'm Laura Brennan. Laura Brennan: My guest today is a bestselling mystery author with a double identity. As Connie Archer, she writes the Soup Lover’s Mysteries, set in the village of Snowflake, Vermont. As Connie di Marco, she has a new series, the Zodiac Mysteries, which debut with The Madness of Mercury on June 8th. Connie, thank you for joining me. Connie di Marco: Thank you, Laura. Laura: So you are not just one author, you are two authors. Connie: Well, one author with two identities. Laura: So tell me a little bit about how that happened. Let’s start with soup. The Soup Lover’s Mysteries, how did you start writing those cozies? Connie: Well, I had been very lucky to find an agent pretty quickly, which I later realized was extremely difficult. And my agent loved the concept of my first book, and the book did not sell. They liked it, but it was also partly economic reasons, too, because it was 2007-2008 and a lot of the major publishers were laying people off and the economy was really going south. So, I wasn't actually surprised at that, there was no negativity in the rejections, it was just like, well, we don't think this is quite what will sell. Undaunted, I continue to write. And my agent called me and she said, would you be interested in doing this series for Penguin? And I said sure, because mostly because I really wanted my agent to keep working for me. And that's how the soup lover’s mysteries came about. I was born in Boston, I grew up there and I certainly know New England and I also love to make soup, so it seemed like a really good match. And it was released in August 2012, A Spoonful of Murder. And it was an amazing success. People seemed to really like it and seemed to really connect with the characters. Laura: One of the things, for me, that I really love about it is the recurring characters. You give the whole town such enormous personality. One of the great pleasures is coming back to every novel. Did you base any of those people on people you knew? Connie: No, I guess -- I did grow up in New England, I’ve certainly seen a lot of smaller towns and villages,

Laura Martin. Photo courtesy of Laura Martin. Episode 6 features Laura Martin, expert parent, mom blogger at Joseph at Home, and the Director of Parent Communication and Engagement at Graham’s Foundation—a non-profit organization that supports parents of premature infants. During the episode, Laura shares her son Joseph’s story of prematurity and survival including his near fatal bout of late-onset NEC and the multitude of life-long complications that have resulted. She discusses: The extremely premature birth of her twin sons, Joseph and Campbell, at 24 weeks—four months early, and Campbell’s passing at 23 days of life, How Joseph developed late-onset NEC and lost two-thirds of his small intestine, Several of Joseph’s secondary diagnoses including Short Bowel Syndrome, Auditory Neuropathy Spectrum Disorder, Eosinophilic Esophagitis, and multiple food allergies—all resulting from NEC, How hers and her family’s experience with prematurity led to her work at Graham’s Foundation, Her personal blog where she documents her daily life as an expert parent of a child with special needs. Copyright © 2015 The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, Inc. This episode was produced in part by the TeacherCast Educational Broadcasting Network. [powerpress] STEPHANIE VAUGHAN, HOST: Welcome to Episode 6 of Speaking of NEC—a free, audio podcast series about Necrotizing Enterocolitis. Produced by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, and funded by The Petit Family Foundation, Speaking of NEC is a series of one-on-one conversations with relevant NEC experts—neonatologists, clinicians and researchers—that highlights current prevention, diagnosis, and treatment strategies for NEC, and the search for a cure. For more information about this podcast series or The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, visit our website at morgansfund.org. Hello, my name is Stephanie Vaughan. Welcome to the show. I’m the Co-founder and President of The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund. NEC is the leading cause of Short Bowel Syndrome or Short Gut Syndrome. The amount and location of intestine lost can result in life-long medical complications. Up to now, we’ve discussed NEC and its most common complication from the perspective of the neonatologist or surgeon. However, I feel that it is equally important to share the parent’s perspective. I’m privileged to have one such expert parent as my guest today. Laura Martin is the mom blogger at Joseph at Home, and the Director of Parent Communication and Engagement at Graham’s Foundation. She is also the parent of a fellow surgical NEC survivor. Laura will share with me today her son Joseph’s story of prematurity and survival including his near fatal bout of late-onset NEC and the multitude of life-long complications that have resulted. During our conversation, she will discuss in varying degrees: The extremely premature birth of her twin sons, Joseph and Campbell, at 24 weeks—four months early, and Campbell’s passing at 23 days of life, How Joseph developed late-onset NEC and lost two-thirds of his small intestine, Several of Joseph’s secondary diagnoses including Short Bowel Syndrome, Auditory Neuropathy Spectrum Disorder, Eosinophilic Esophagitis, and multiple food allergies—all resulting from NEC, How hers and her family’s experience with prematurity led to her work at Graham’s Foundation, Her personal blog where she documents her daily life as the parent of a child with special needs. With that in mind, let me introduce my guest today. This is Laura. Hi, how are you? LAURA MARTIN, GUEST: Hey, good. How are you? STEPHANIE: Good. Thank you for joining us. And Laura is a blogger at Joseph at Home and the Director of Parent Communication and Engagement at Graham’s Foundation. So I will let you introduce yourself and talk to me a little bit about your experience with prematurity and Necrotizing Enterocolitis. LAURA: Yeah. Our twin boys were born at 24 weeks gestation on Halloween morning in 2009. It came as a big surprise. It had been a perfectly clean, normal pregnancy. I had just had an appointment three days before, woke up with a dull backache about midnight. And Joseph was born first at 7:41 and his twin brother Campbell at 7:42. No rhyme or reason for the prematurity. It just happened. Campbell, unfortunately lost his battle to prematurity after 23 days of life. He just had a lot of complications from prematurity that he just couldn’t have overcome. Joseph went on to spend 228 days in the neonatal intensive care unit before he came home. He is now five and a half. He just started kindergarten. But it’s been a long journey to get here. We were two days from coming home when he was 5 and a half months old. He was about eight weeks adjusted. We had everything set up at home. We had oxygen. We had G-tube equipment. We had everything. We were ready. His room was ready. All of the clothes were washed. Two days before discharge, we got a call from the NICU that he was gray and bloated. And they were putting him on a ventilator. Let me back up a little bit. A few days prior to that, he had been showing some signs of infection. But nobody really knew what it was. He just had vaccines. He was running a little bit of fever. We contributed it to that. This pushed discharge back a little bit. But just two days before the initial discharge, when they called and said he’s gray and bloated, and they were putting him on a ventilator. You need to get here immediately. Our world kind of turned upside down, because we thought we were two days from home. And here we were not knowing what was going to happen. This was a Saturday, the day before Palm Sunday, 2010. And we didn’t know what was going to happen. The doctors kind of watched him throughout the Saturday, were taking X-rays every few hours. A little bit after lunch that day, one nurse practitioner came and said, his X-ray looks a little bit like NEC. Do you know what that is? And we said, of course, we know what that is. We’ve been in the NICU five and a half months. But he’s eight weeks adjusted. Why would be looking at NEC? We’ve been told once you get to your due date, you cross that off your list of things to worry about. And so, as the day went on, the night went on, it became very evident that he had Necrotizing Enterocolitis. They had seen this one other time in the NICU with a baby this old. He went through Saturday night. Things were not looking good. And on Sunday morning, the surgeon came to us and said, I’m going to take him to the OR. I’m going to open him up. And I’m going to see what happens. We don’t know what we’re going to find. So, on Palm Sunday, 2010, the surgeon took him to the OR. He was gone for several hours and came back halfway through surgery and sat us down in a room and said, here’s what I found. He has 41 centimeters (16 inches) of salvageable intestine. He said, he has 28 centimeters (11 inches) below his stomach, and he has 13 (5 inches) above his colon. Everything else in the middle is completely gangrenous. He said, we can take out the gangrenous intestine. And he’ll have two stomas for a while. Then we’ll go back in and reconnect. But he also looked at us and said, we don’t know what life for him is going to be like. It’s probably going to be very rocky. He may die before the age of two waiting on a liver transplant, because he’s going to be TPN dependent. If you want to close him up and let him go, I’ll respect your wishes. And, of course, we looked at him and said, no way, we’ve gotten this far. We’ve already lost one kid. We’re not doing this again. Go in there. Do what you have to do and save his life. So he went back. He was gone for several hours, came back to us. We saw Joseph, and it was amazing. Even though he had stomas, and he had just lost two thirds of his small intestine, he looked so much better than he had right before he went, because the infection was gone. A few days after that, they went in and placed a central line, because he was, of course, totally TPN dependent. He already had a G-tube before NEC, because of aspiration to his lungs. So we were fortunate with that that he already had the G-tube. But, as the weeks wore on, they were able to slowly decrease TPN, increase feeds, and decided after four weeks, he was ready for intestine reconnect, which was shocking. Nobody expected after four weeks he would be ready for intestine reconnect. So four weeks later, they went in, reconnected the intestines, told us we would probably be in another two to three months. He again amazed everybody—came off TPN very quickly, increased G-tube feeds to the point that they pulled his port before he came home. He never came home with a central line. And four weeks after his reconnect surgery, he came home—after 220 days in the NICU. STEPHANIE: That’s amazing. LAURA: So that’s how NEC came to be. Again, the hospital had seen one case of that. And it had been years and years and years. And people say, are you sure it’s NEC? Are you sure it was NEC? Yes, pathology confirmed that it was NEC. But who knows? Who knows why he had it at five and a half months old. STEPHANIE: Right, right. So just to back up, I’m curious what you knew about NEC before his surgery. You know, you had said that you had been in the NICU for now almost five months. And he reached his due date, so you were crossing it off the list. So I’m just curious, in general terms, what you knew up to that point. LAURA: NEC was one of those things that I remember learning about really early on in our NICU stay. Having 24-week twins, we knew that it was a very rocky journey. They both had less than 50% chance of survival. But my husband and I were the type that we wanted to know everything. We wanted to know what are things we have to look out for. What are things we need to be worried about? What are things that we don’t have to worry about? And it was within the first 24 to 48 hours that the nurse said there’s a thing called Necrotizing Enterocolitis. It doesn’t happen a lot. But it’s one of these things we watch for. We stay on top of it. So we knew about it from the beginning, but we had always been told that once you reach the gestational due date, you didn’t have to worry about it anymore. And while that is so true 99.999% of the time, there is a very small chance that it can happen later. And it’s almost one of those things I wish we had never been told—oh, yeah, you don’t have to worry about it when you hit 40 weeks. Because we did—we had completely crossed it off Right. So we know about it. And we knew what the warning signs were. We knew what to look for. Yet, again, when we look back on it, he had some of these warning signs two to three days before he got really, really sick. But why would—none of us thought it could be NEC. We thought, well, he’s had some GI issues. He has the feeding tube. He’s had his vaccines. It could be any other bug he’s picked up. He’s still in the NICU. But we knew what it was, but it was still just a huge shock that—I mean, he was 13 pounds at that point. He was a big kid, you know, for being in the NICU. STEPHANIE: Right, right. So he came home now, you said, four weeks after he had been reconnected. So talk to me a little bit about, I guess, those first days and first months when he was coming home—you know, again, sort of thinking from the perspective of things that we want to let parents and caregivers know, questions to ask, sort of things to look out for—so anything that you want to talk about, you know, his transition home and getting settled. LAURA: Yeah, he came home on complete continuous feeds via G-tube. So he was on feeds 24 hours a day because, of course, having NEC left him with short bowel syndrome. So he had a lot of dumping episodes, where it was out of control at times. We couldn’t really go anywhere because of the dumping syndrome. As the days went on, the weeks went on, the months went on, that got a little bit better. We were in and out of GI every 8 to 12 weeks, just checking in, making sure he was gaining weight. But a lot of doctors also didn’t really know what to do because he wasn’t TPN dependent. A lot of kids who come home with short bowel syndrome are TPN dependent. But here you have this kid who has only a third of his small intestine, but for the most part he’s tolerating formula well. He’s tolerating G-tube feeds. He’s gaining weight. He’s not going to need a port. Everybody was convinced he would have to have his port put back in. He never did. So that was actually, to be honest, a frustration for the first several years, is finding doctors who understood that, yeah, he is doing well. But he’s also not doing well. He only has a third of his small intestine. His weight gain is very slow. He still has periods of severe pain even today, from school. He still has periods where his belly is very distended. It took some time to find doctors who really wanted to help and say, yes, there really is still a problem here—with a kid who only has a third of his small intestine. That first year that he was home, he was rehospitalized five or six times, most of those with a GI bug. If he got any sort of stomach bug, we were in the hospital, because his body just couldn’t handle it. And so we were back in. Usually it would lead to a respiratory infection. He would spend a good week, 10 days, in the hospital. That was the first year. After that, I quit my job teaching, because we knew he had to stay home. He had to be healthy. And he had to grow. And as he’s gotten bigger, he’s gotten healthier. He has not been in the hospital for a GI bug in 3 and 1/2, 4 years. It’s been awhile. STEPHANIE: Oh, that’s great. LAURA: Yeah, now his body can tolerate it. You know, it’s not pleasant still. But we know what to do. But, as he’s gotten bigger, it’s gotten better. So, yeah, that was the first few years out of the hospital. STEPHANIE: We don’t have nearly the after-effects, but I remember Morgan’s transition home was pretty chaotic. LAURA: Yeah. STEPHANIE: His brother came home after 85 days, and I’m guessing was a much simpler transition, even just holding him in hands-on care and changing diapers. Morgan was very traumatized, I think, from being in the hospital and having the surgery. And we saw a big, big difference between him and his brother. So it was very scary as a parent that even simple things that you have to do was traumatizing to him. LAURA: Right. And then they can’t communicate with you to tell you that. And that’s what was so hard to watch early on, was you knew he was hurting. You knew he was in pain. But I didn’t know what to do to help, you know. So that was hard. Yeah. STEPHANIE: So, I guess, now that he’s getting a little bit older—you said he started kindergarten. That’s great. So how is he doing, I guess, developmentally? And are you seeing anything—you know, secondary diagnoses, I guess, maybe, strictly because of NEC or because of the short bowel or other issues that he’s having? LAURA: Yeah, he has several things that are going on. He did just start kindergarten. He’s in a special needs kindergarten. As a result—well, when he had NEC, he had to receive Gentamicin, which of course is an ototoxic drug. And the surgeon said, if we give this to him, he will probably lose all of his hearing. But if we don’t give this to him, he’s not going to live. Well, of course, it was a no-brainer decision. Before that, he had not passed his newborn hearing screening. But a lot of preemies don’t. So we kind of thought, well, we’ll get out of the NICU, he’ll pass it. He never did. While he was still in the NICU—this was in between NEC and the reconnect surgery—he was diagnosed with Auditory Neuropathy Spectrum Disorder, which is a hearing loss that comes and goes. It’s almost like you’re trying to tune a radio and there’s static. And that was what his hearing was like. So he received his first cochlear implant when he was three—three months after he turned three—because his hearing was rapidly deteriorating in his left ear. Just, not even two weeks ago, he received his second cochlear implant in his right ear. And we always go back to say, his hearing probably would have never been that great. But it’s definitely a lot worse post-NEC, because he had to receive the Gentamicin, the ototoxic drug, in order to kill the bacteria. Some other things that he has—July of 2014, he was diagnosed with Eosinophilic Esophagitis, which has been in question for several years. And we could not get the GI doctor to agree to do an endoscopy. He hated to do the endoscopy, because it meant putting him under sedation. Due to asthma, he didn’t want to do that. But at the same time, we’re battling with this increased amount of food allergies, knowing that that has to be a problem. Finally, they agreed to do the endoscopy. And it was clear that he had Eosinophilic Esophagitis. As a result of that, he has 15 food allergies. I’m happy to list them all if you want. But it includes all of the top 8 plus beef, chicken, rice, potatoes, watermelon, strawberry, pineapple, and a whole slew of medications. And I always tell people asking—it’s hard to know whether he would have had that regardless. Probably not. But having the Short Bowel Syndrome made it worse. He would not have had Short Bowel Syndrome if he didn’t have Necrotizing Enterocolitis. So to me it’s all sort of related. STEPHANIE: Right. Right. There’s definitely a domino effect. LAURA: It’s a domino effect. One thing has led to the other, which has led to the other. So it’s hard to know, some days, if you’re battling GI issues because of Short Bowel Syndrome. Or are you battling GI issues because of the Eosinophilic Esophagitis? Or are the white blood cells growing because he’s eating something he’s allergic to? Is there a new allergy? So some days we really struggle knowing what is what. And then you’ll have periods where he does great. And he’s like a normal kid. He does still have a G-tube. We were told he would lose the G-tube by two. But here we are almost six, and we still have the G-tube. Many days I wish we didn’t. But there are many days we couldn’t do without it. And if he doesn’t feel like eating or he’s in pain, we have the G-tube. And it’s literally been a lifesaver. And if he’s been sick, we can always get fluids in him. I would love to see it go. But I don’t see it going any time in the future. He doesn’t know life without it. He’s had it since he was four months old. To him it’s second nature. He gets his G-tube feeds at school. He gets them at home. They travel with us. But it’s truly a lifesaver for him. But it helps him gain weight. It’s what helps him actually be on the growth chart as a short-bowel kid. Many short-bowel kids, I think, are failure-to-thrive. He has never even been remotely considered failure-to-thrive, which is huge. So, yeah, there’s a lot of complications as a result—what I feel like, had he not had NEC, wouldn’t have led to X, Y, and Z probably. He does have development delays. But a lot of it is that he spent so much time in the hospital. Then there was the hearing issue, but he could not get a cochlear implant because he wasn’t healthy enough to have surgery. So it was just sort of this domino effect, and a spiral of getting out of it, and getting him healthy enough to be able to have surgery. And then you’re trying to catch up. You’re trying to catch up with language, fine motor, gross motor, it all, as well. But the kid we were told would never walk or talk, walked into kindergarten last week. So there’s so many things to be thankful for, and so many things that he’s doing so well on, that those are the days you really have to hold onto on the days he’s feeling really, really bad. You have to know that he’s going to get through it. Life will turn around, and it will get better. It’s just going to be interesting to see as he continues to grow, how much of this is just going to continue to get better. Will there be a decline at some point? We don’t know. Nobody really thought he would even make it to this point. STEPHANIE: Now, I’m just curious, sort of, personally, but also as a fellow parent of a NEC baby, have you talked to him at all about being in the NICU? Has any of that come up yet? I mean, I know he’s still sort of young. But I’m just curious. LAURA: Yeah, he knows he was in the hospital. When we drive by the hospital where he was born, he’ll say, that’s where I was born. That’s where my sister was born. He has seen pictures. He’s seen videos. But I don’t think he quite cognitively wraps his head around it. When he had a cochlear implant put in 10 days ago, it was at the hospital where he had NEC. And so we were able to kind of say, you were in the hospital here when we are a baby. A couple of the nurses stopped by to see him—they took care of you when you were a baby. But the cognition is just not quite there too. He sees his pictures. And he’ll say, I was very sick. And, yes, you were very sick—because he knows that his baby pictures look very different from his sister who was born full term. So he knows. He knows he has a G-tube. She does not. And so he’s starting to really realize those differences. STEPHANIE: Right. Yeah, I don’t think we’ve quite reached that yet. Shaymus deals with asthma. So he gets his puffs and he has, you know, different things. But I don’t think they’ve really lined up and taken notes on, you know, your picture has this. And my picture has that. Or you have this and I have that. But, yeah, sort of, it’ll be interesting to talk to them about it when they start to ask. Like, they just figured out that they’re twins this year. LAURA: Oh, that’s so funny. And my husband and I have talked about it. Gee, at what point in their life are they going to realize everything that they went through as a baby. And all these odds that were stacked against them. And all the times that they shouldn’t have lived. And will they be teenagers? Will they be adults? Will it be when they have their own children? My husband and I talk about this a lot. It’s just going to be interesting to see at what point do they kind of go, oh, wow, yeah, that really was what mom and dad went through and what I went through. It’s just fascinating. STEPHANIE: Yeah. So I would also like to let you talk about the work that you’ve done now because of having preemies and Joseph’s diagnosis. So you are the Director of Parent Communication and Engagement at Graham’s Foundation. So I’m happy to let you plug them away, and also to talk about your blog, which is Joseph at Home. LAURA: Yeah, I'll start with Graham’s Foundation first. I started working for them, gosh, about three and a half years ago in a different capacity. And it was one of those things that I was staying home with Joseph. And I was trying to figure out a way that I could give back to the preemie community. But I knew I couldn’t go into the NICU, because here I was with this child who got sick easily. And I knew that that couldn’t happen. So I started working for Graham’s Foundation, which was such a great outlet to be able to connect with other preemie parents, and sort of share stories—share stories with families who lost their child, with families who went through a long-term NICU stay, families who went through a short-term NICU stay. People will say, well I was only in the NICU 10 days. You were in seven and a half months. One day is one day too long for anybody to be in the NICU. And that’s what I always say to people. Nobody should have to go there. And if I can provide any sort of “it’s going to be OK,” I would love to do that. And so now, I serve as the Director of Parent Communication and Engagement. I do a lot of the writing for the blog for Graham’s Foundation, which is something we’re really trying to get off the ground. And through that, I also serve as a NEC mentor. So if parents come across our website and are looking to talk with someone who has experienced NEC, in no way am I a medical professional but I'm able to say: This is what we experienced. This is what we’re experiencing now. These are some questions you might be able to ask the doctor. And it’s been really nice to connect with people. Also, being five years out, to say, I promise you are going to get through this. When you’re dealing with, all along, doctor’s appointments, and you feel like you’ve got 18,000 things going on in one week. I’m here to tell you that I promise you, it gets better. The appointments get less and less and less. And it’s been so nice to connect with parents, and to offer that support from home, while I can still stay home with my kids and be able to work from home. And then also I have my personal blog, josephathome.com, which I started when I found I was pregnant with twins. I didn’t even share the blog address with anybody. My husband and I thought, oh, this will be great. We’ll update it. We’ll send it to friends and family. So as the pregnancy rocked along, I would sort of update it. I could never send out to anybody. And then when they were born Halloween morning, 2009, at 24 weeks gestation, I knew I didn’t have the energy to tell the same story over and over and over about what was happening. The texts were too long to send the information of what was going on. We had two of them, and I just couldn’t do it. And I was, like, oh, I’ve got this blog. This will be a great way to update people, so the long days of sitting in a hospital, my husband worked on our family tree. And I worked on the blog. That is just what we each sort of did to take our mind off of what was going on. And it was a great way, if somebody asked me a question, I would just say, read the blog. It’s on the blog. Just read the blog. I could share pictures—it just—because I wasn’t really in the mood to talk. We would talk to family, immediate family, and share with them what was going on. But it was just—it was so draining to tell the same story over and over and over. And if I just wanted to get something out there quickly, I would put it up. So, when Joseph came home, and I thought, well, I’ll keep it going. We’ll see what happens. It’ll probably die by the wayside. Well, five and a half years later—it’s almost six years later—it’s still going. And I write a lot now just about, of course, about prematurity, but also raising a special needs child and what that looks like, because we’re in this short-bowel world. We’re in the eosinophilic world. We’re in this hearing-loss world. We’re in the cochlear-implant world. We’re in the vision-impaired world. We’re in the mild cerebral palsy world, food-allergy world. And it’s just been nice to be able to connect with other parents and just to write about our real life and what it’s like. What it’s like. How do we deal with insurance? How do we deal with medical supplies? How do we travel? How do we do this, that, and the other? And it’s just a great outlet, too, just for venting, you know. And if I don’t want to talk about it, I can write about it. So we’ll see where it goes. It’s been a really nice outlet. But it’s also a great way to show Joseph, hey, this is where you started. This is where you are now. And it’s almost like a scrapbook, really, of his entire life, because it started the day he was born, and has everything. I just hit my—over 1,100 entries on it. STEPHANIE: That’s great. I commend you on that. I attempted, when I first came home from the hospital, to start recording things. And, I think, honestly, it was just too hard. I sort of thought to myself, I don’t want to remember this piece of it, so I sort of stopped. And I had scraps of paper where I would write down stats every day. You know, they gained this, and literally had, like, a pile two inches thick, by the time they came home, of daily weights and charts and things. Yeah, I mean, I’ve seen many of your posts. And I think they’re great. And I think it’s a great outlet. And, again, sort of that you’re not alone. And, you know, people are better off than you. People are worse off than you. And everybody’s sort of on their own journey. And I know preemie parents tend to minimize amongst other people, but your struggle is really your struggle and your family’s struggle. And no one should have to struggle. LAURA: No. And that’s what I’ve always said to people is, somebody out there always has something worse going on. Like, on Joseph’s worst day, somebody else has something worse going on. And that’s what I always say to people is, yeah, this is just our life in a little nutshell. But we’re so thankful for what we have. And, again, it could always be worse. You can just turn on the news every day and see that. But if it’s just, you know, if it can help one parent to say—and even sometimes I think people don’t like to say, well, this is not fair. You know what, sometimes it’s not fair. And it’s OK to say that and have a little pity party and then move on. And I enjoy being able to say to people sometimes. STEPHANIE: That’s great. So, I guess, is there anything else that you would want to mention if you had somebody in your position, however many years back, thinking to ask the doctors about, or transitioning home—coming home—how you sought out your specialists, if you’re not getting the answers that you think you should, how you proceeded, any sort of big-sisterly advice. LAURA: Yeah, I know, really. I think the big thing is to trust your instincts if you know that there’s something not right. We’ve gone through our fair share of doctors. Because if I feel like my child’s not getting the care that they need—and any parent would feel this way—I’m not going to settle for mediocre. I’m not going to settle for “he’s going to be fine” when you know in your heart that there’s still a problem. We were having some issues last year around the whole eosinophilic diagnosis. And I felt like we had run out of options where we live. And so I reached out to a doctor eight hours away. And he said, if you’re willing to travel, I’m willing to see him. I said, of course, we’re willing to travel. And so we did. He got us in. And we made the trip. And it was so nice to just connect with somebody who was a specialist in that field of Short Bowel Syndrome, to be able to say, yeah, he’s doing OK. I see that there are some problems. But you’re doing the right thing. And I think that’s become sort of my mantra is, don’t stop until you have the answers that you need. And there may not be answers. But I am not going to rest until I know that we have the answers we need. Like, we’re having some eosinophilic issues, so we’re working on getting into a top eosinophilic clinic. I don’t care how far we have to travel, because that’s what Joseph needs and it’s what’s best for him. And that’s what matters. It matters him feeling good. It matters him being healthy. It matters him growing. And he deserves to have the best life absolutely possible. And that’s what I would tell somebody if you’re just coming home. If you feel like something is not right, keep going and keep going and keep going. Yes, it’s exhausting. I think there are many days I’m asleep before my head even hits the pillow. But you have to do what’s best for your kid, because they can’t do it for themselves. You are their advocate. And that’s one thing that the NICU nurses taught us really, really early on—is you have to advocate for your child. Nobody else is going to do it for you. They can’t do it for themselves. You just have to keep going. And, again, it’s hard. You may hit brick walls here and there. Because goodness knows we’ve had our fair share with doctors. And it’s OK with doctors to speak your mind and say, you know, I don’t think you’re right on this. I think there’s more to it. You may upset them a little bit, because there’s no doubt I’ve upset a few. But it’s OK. It’s OK. Yes, they’re doctors. But they don’t have all the answers. You’re the parent. You live with your child day in and day out. You know their idiosyncrasies. You know what’s right and what’s wrong with them. And I think standing up for yourself is so important. And that’s what I would tell somebody coming out. You can’t be shy when it comes to advocating for your child who has special needs. STEPHANIE: I would agree. Yeah, we’re transitioning through preschool. And the boys were kindergarten eligible this year. But they’re actually being given an extra year of pre-K. And we had sort of that, uh, I’m not sure about this. I’m really not sure about it. I’m really not sure about it. And in the end they saw that—their teachers agreed with us. And the educational system agreed that, yeah, they’re a little bit immature. And probably going to kindergarten isn’t the best idea for them. And they really need the extra year. You know, they’re smart. Yes. But good enough isn’t good enough. We don’t want them to sort of eke by. We want to give them the best opportunities that they can have. So I agree with you wholeheartedly. LAURA: And it’s tough as a parent. I’ve had this conversation with a lot of people. My husband’s a teacher. I’m a teacher also. I’m not teaching right now. Hopefully one day I will be again. But it’s hard as a parent. It’s hard as a parent-teacher to have a child who has special needs and who needs that IEP (Individualized Education Program). It’s tough to sit on that end of the table as a parent. I mean, I’ve sat on the other end of the table as a teacher countless times. But, as a parent, it’s a tough pill to swallow, to say—and we know—I mean, Joseph started kindergarten. But we know full well he may need to repeat kindergarten. And while that’s tough to say, it’s a reality. We hope that he does great. But he may need to repeat. And if that’s what’s best for him, then that’s going to be what’s best for him. It’s tough to sit in an IEP meeting and hear how far behind he is. Or these are all the goals. And up to 21 pages now of his IEP. But it’s what he needs. And it’s what’s best for him. But I always go back to the day when one of our favorite NICU nurses—this was a long time ago—said, you know, one day he’s going to pull out a picture of him with all those tubes and wires and on a ventilator and say, see, mom, you remember this. And I have to think back to that, because, yes, it’s hard. And I kind of want to wallow in self-pity about, oh, I wish he was just in a regular ed class. He shouldn’t even be here. And that’s what I have to remind myself is, we had many days where we weren’t even sure we would see pre-K. And I know you’re the same way. We weren’t even sure he would see kindergarten. But here we are. And let’s just make the most of it. He’s loving every second of it. And that’s what matters. And so, being a preemie parent, as you know, it’s a journey that I never expected. But at the same time, I’m grateful for it, because it’s opened my eyes to a whole new area of life. STEPHANIE: Right. Well, I really appreciate you talking to me. And I think you’ve given some great advice—preemie parents or not, and NECs parents or not—on advocating for your child, and in every facet. So I really appreciate your time. And thank you so much. And if there’s anything else that you want to add, feel free. LAURA: If anyone wants to contact me personally, I’m happy to answer questions if there’s something that anybody wants to know more about. STEPHANIE: So great. Thank you. Thank you so much. LAURA: Thank you. STEPHANIE: For more information about Laura or to follow her blog, visit: josephathome.com. A direct link can also be found in this episode’s show notes. You can also email Laura directly at: laura [at] grahamsfoundation [dot] org. In closing, I’d like to share a few thoughts about today’s conversation with Laura. According to Dr. Besner, with whom I spoke about Short Bowel Syndrome in Episode 1, “if we estimate that a newborn baby has approximately 200 centimeters (78.74 inches) of intestine, they have to be left with at least 40 centimeters (15.75 inches) in order to be able to nourish themselves and get off TPN.” As a result of his bout with NEC, Joseph had only one centimeter (0.4 inches) more remaining. So first, I would like to take a moment to celebrate Joseph’s survival, courage, and strength. And that of his family. Both Joseph and his parents have shown remarkable resiliency while dealing with the daily effects of his bout with NEC. Second, I would like to reiterate that I strongly believe that a cure for NEC, once found, will have a far reaching impact not only on Gastroenterology (the digestive system and its disorders) as a whole, but also all of the patients like Joseph, and families like Laura’s. Show your support for our smallest and most fragile babies, those who have the greatest risk for developing NEC. Show your support for continued research in NEC. And join our effort to raise awareness about, and funds for research in NEC by making a donation to Morgan’s Fund at morgansfund.org/donate. If you’ve had a personal experience with NEC and would like to share your story, or have a question or topic that you’d like to hear addressed on our show, e-mail us at feedback@morgansfund.org. We’d love to hear from you! Copyright © 2015 The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, Inc. The opinions expressed in Speaking of NEC: Necrotizing Enterocolitis (the Podcast series) and by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund are published for educational and informational purposes only, and are not intended as a diagnosis, treatment or as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis and treatment. 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