Podcast appearances and mentions of lauren love

Lauren Love, Director of Student Ministry, leads a panel of Middle School girls as they share the story of  their spiritual journey! 

Anthony and JK discuss compromised running and what it is or if it exists, how to get some movement and volume in when you have no time, Easy runs and are they zone 1 or zone 2, some tips on best wall ball practices, the world's best wall baller in HYROX, and Anthony gives a Lauren Love corner wrapping up with the Deka World Championships! Post DekaFit World Championship interview with Lauren Weeks: https://www.youtube.com/live/bGZ4KbibnE4?si=6Zl9qzC3P2NNu8w4 Join The Hybrid Engine coaching platform: https://app.fitr.training/t/TheHybridEngine/ Join JK Hybrid Coaching platform: https://app.fitr.training/p/jkexclusive

Welcome to this Aphasia Access Aphasia Conversations Podcast, a series of conversations about aphasia, the LPAA model, and aphasia programs that follow this model. My name is Janet Patterson. I am a Research Speech-Language Pathologist at the VA Northern California Healthcare System in Martinez, California, and a member of the Aphasia Access Conversations Podcast Working Group. Aphasia Access strives to provide members with information, inspiration, and ideas that support their efforts in engaging with persons with aphasia and their families through a variety of educational materials and resources. I am the host for our episode that will feature Lauren Bislick, in which you will hear about friendship, yoga, mental imagery and aphasia. These Show Notes accompany the conversation with Lauren but are not a verbatim transcript.   In today's episode you will hear about: the value of friendship in our lives and Mission SPEAK, ideas for creating an accessible yoga program for person with aphasia, and the value of mental imagery.  Dr. Janet Patterson: Welcome to this edition of Aphasia Access Conversations, a series of conversations about the LPAA model and aphasia programs that follow this model. My name is Janet Patterson, and I'm a research speech language pathologist at the VA Northern California Healthcare System in Martinez, California. Today I am delighted to be speaking with Dr. Lauren Bislick, a newly minted Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida, in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders. Lauren is also the director of the UCF Aphasia House, and the director of the Aphasia and Related Conditions Research Lab. Across her work efforts, Lauren investigates the diagnosis and treatment of acquired apraxia of speech and aphasia, the value of mindful body practices such as yoga, friendship development, and interprofessional education and practice.    In 2023, Lauren was named a Distinguished Scholar USA by the Tavistock Trust for Aphasia UK. The Tavistock Trust aims to help improve the quality of life for those with aphasia, their families and care partners by addressing research capacity related to quality-of-life issues in aphasia. Congratulations on receiving this honor, Lauren. Aphasia Access collaborates with the Tavistock Trust for Aphasia in selecting the awardees and is pleased to have the opportunity to discuss their work and the influence of the Tavistock award.    Welcome Lauren, to Aphasia Access Conversations.   Dr. Lauren Bislick: Thank you, Janet, and thank you Aphasia Access for having me. Also thank you to the Tavistock Trust for the review team for nominating me and for selecting me. I'm truly very honored to be a recipient of this award.   Janet: It's a well-deserved award. Lauren, as we said, you were named a Tavistock Trust, Distinguished Scholar USA for 2023. You join a talented and dedicated group of individuals in this award. How does receiving the Tavistock award influence your clinical and research efforts in aphasia?    Lauren: First, I'll say again, I was truly honored to receive this award and was definitely surprised. The nomination announcement occurred at the Clinical Aphasiology Conference, and they didn't give us a heads up that the announcement was coming through, so I was very surprised. I think in terms of how this has influenced my clinical and research efforts as an academic, and as a clinician. I think a lot of people can relate to that feeling of imposter syndrome, and so receiving this award has helped me push that feeling to the side a little bit in some aspects of my work and of what I do. It's also allowed me to feel very proud about what I've been able to do. but more so through my collaborations and my students and the community that we have at UCF. It's allowed me to grow connection. Since receiving this award, people have reached out to me to talk about collaboration or wanting my help in terms of more of a consultant role. It's allowed myself and my lab to reach a larger group of people and has definitely supported that emphasis on quality-of-life work, which is not necessarily the training that I focused on when I was in my doctoral program. That's been something that I've come into in my time as an assistant faculty member or a junior researcher. It feels very good to be acknowledged for that and for these lines of work being supported.   Janet: And well deserved, for certain. Lauren, I would like to begin by asking you about your recent work investigating the role of friendship for persons with aphasia. I believe in the power of friendship and community during joyful times, and also during sad times in one's life. One of the unfortunate consequences of aphasia can be the loss or diminishing of friendships, or the communication skills important to developing and sustaining friendship and community. How did you become interested in this aspect of aphasia? And what conclusions have you drawn from your research?   Lauren: Thank you for this question. One of the things that I talk about frequently in both my aphasia course and the motor speech disorders for our graduate students, is how individuals with acquired communication disorders, whether it be linguistic, or motor based, is that their social circles get smaller, and we know that's a problem in life. Friendship is an essential component of quality of life, and as you said, whether celebrating the good things or you're going through a hard time you need those friends. This is an important area that I believe gets overlooked although now we have a couple of different groups looking at friendship and aphasia, which is wonderful. I actually have to thank Dr. Elizabeth Brookshire Madden for pulling me into this work. She is at Florida State University, and I like to call us aphasia sisters. We went through the same doctoral program, and she was one year behind me. We became very close during that time, both as friends, but also in the work that we do. [Aphasia Access note: Elizabeth Madden was selected as a Tavistock Distinguished Scholar USA in 2024.]   One of the other faculty members at Florida State University, Michelle Therrien, does work on friendship, but in the pediatric world. This grew out of conversations between Liz and Michelle, where they started talking about how we can look at friendship and aphasia. Clearly, we all believe it's an issue, but it hasn't been well investigated. That was shortly before the team Project Bridge Conference, which is really what helped initiate this kind of area of research for our group. Liz and I met at the 2018 Project Bridge conference and started facilitating a friendship group; she took the lead in this area. I got pulled to the yoga group, which we'll talk about later. Liz talked with a number of care partners of individuals with aphasia, and started discussing their social groups, and then friendship. Leaving that conference, she had some really great ideas about where to go next and what was needed in the area of friendship. From there grew her team of myself, Michelle Therrien, Sarah Wallace, at the University of Pittsburgh and Rachel Albritton, who's also at FSU.    In our first study, we did a survey with SLPs trying to ask if SLPs see friendship as being an issue? You know, is this us projecting, or is this something that clinical speech-language pathologists are seeing as an issue? If so, are we addressing it in the field? What that initial study showed us was that, yes, SLPs report that their clients are experiencing loss or difficulty with friendships. They also reported that there are barriers, there aren't assessments that ask about friendships, and there aren't interventions. So, while they see this as an important thing, and something that SLPs believe that this was within our scope of practice, they need a little more guidance as to how to support people with aphasia in terms of maintaining friendships, and then also developing friendships.    Following that study, we then spoke to people with aphasia and also spoke to caregivers of people with aphasia to get their perspectives and their lived experiences. What happens to friendship, immediately after a stroke? In that acute phase? What happens to friendship during that chronic phase? And then where are they now? What we found through these conversations is that many individuals reported that their friendships had changed after they acquired aphasia, both in the acute phase and the chronic stages. The same could be said for caregivers as they are navigating this world as caregivers. They are experiencing changes in their friendships. With aphasia being a chronic condition, this is something that people are living with for the rest of their lives. Friends can kind of be there in the beginning, and that acute care phase where they send messages or come by to say hello and show their support. As they realize that the communication impairment isn't going away, they don't know what to do and may get a little uncomfortable, feeling bad that they don't understand their friend with aphasia, or they don't know how to support them in their communication, or this problem isn't disappearing. This is me projecting, but I believe that's what's happening and what we're seeing is that people with aphasia, and their caregivers are reporting this loss. They also are reporting gaining new friends as they become ingrained in social groups. They meet other people with aphasia or care partners of other individuals with aphasia and develop friendships that way. They are also reporting smaller social groups, smaller groups of friends from their pre-aphasia life, dwindling for a lot of people. We think from our research what we're finding is that we really need interventions that target friendship maintenance and development. Some of that may be as simple as providing education, inviting friends into the therapy room. We do this with care partners, we can also offer this to friends to see how we are interacting with your loved one with aphasia. We can provide key tools to support communication; I really think a big piece of it is education. We've got to find the best way to navigate this in the clinical world. I think that's the next step not only for our group, but for the other groups that are looking at Friendship.    Janet: Lauren, you make some very good points in those comments. I wonder, do you have some brief thoughts or very specific ideas about how as clinicians, we can act in ways to optimize the friendship activities of our clients, or their care partners, recognizing though, that everyone has different styles and needs for friendship? It's like you say, we should not be projecting our desires and our styles and our needs onto our patients, but rather listen to them and figure out what their needs and desires are?   Lauren: Number one, right there, is listening to our clients, listening to their loved ones, what do they need? As I mentioned before, I think education is a really big piece of this. That may mean just having some materials as a speech-language pathologist that you can send home with family members that they can give to friends, right, so not just materials for that care partner, or the person with aphasia, but materials for friends. Here's something that will educate you a little bit on what aphasia is, there are some ways that you can successfully communicate with your friend with aphasia, here's what to expect. I think some of it is people just don't understand. They don't live in our world clinically, working with people with aphasia, working with people with communication disorders. For some, it's that they've never been exposed to, and so there's a discomfort with the unknown. I think education is huge. Also inviting friends. If you're going to have a counseling session with a care partner, and a person with aphasia, and their loved one, would they like friends to be at that table? Ask them. They may not, they may want it just for them and to be quiet and personal, but they may have some really close friends that they know they're going to lean on and want to be there. Opening the opportunity to invite other individuals and also inviting friends to support groups. Bringing friends to support groups, I think, would also be a space where friends then can observe interactions among people with aphasia, as well as their loved ones, and can have an opportunity to interact with other people with aphasia. So those are a few things that I think we can do right now. There are through many of the different resources like ARC [Aphasia Recovery Connection], for example, there are opportunities for education, communication partner training, and those are things that we can also plug friends into   Janet: Those are some very good ideas, Lauren, very good ideas. You have also worked to address the isolation felt by people with aphasia, and severe acquired communication impairment through your lab's Mission SPEAK program. Can you tell us more about this program, please?   Lauren: Absolutely. Mission SPEAK stands for Mission to Promote Socialization, Participation, Engagement, Advocacy and Kindness, for people with severe acquired communication disorders. This grew out of a lack of participation among some of our community members who had more severe communication impairments. They felt that they were just unable to be successful in a group setting, and tried some of the aphasia support groups, but didn't feel like they were being heard, or that they had equal opportunity, or were just frustrated by it. It didn't feel right for them. And so, I started thinking about, well, how can we provide an opportunity for individuals who feel this way, or maybe they're just more introverted which could be another piece to why they don't want that large group. How can we provide opportunities where they're still getting to practice communication in a safe space, develop friendships, and just be able to interact to combat those feelings of isolation that people with aphasia and other acquired communication disorders report. Mission SPEAK is a program where the students in my lab, both undergraduate and graduate students, some are CSD, some pre-med, some in their med programs, where they have the opportunity to meet with an individual with aphasia or another acquired communication disorder on a weekly basis to have a conversation. It's all via Zoom. These meetings can take any shape that the person with aphasia or the communication impairment and the student want to go with it. We have some individuals that meet to actually practice what they're learning in therapy and so the clinician has connected with my students to say ‘Hey, can you go over this homework with them or allow them opportunities to practice' and sometimes the clinician will hop on to Zoom as well. We also have opportunities such as one of my students and one of our friends with aphasia are reading a book together and so they do shared reading. In another pair we have a young man who really just needs interaction, so he meets with two different students, and they just have conversations over shared interests. Sometimes his mom is there to help support communication. We see as time goes on that as the individuals are getting more comfortable with each other, and the students are getting more comfortable, there are emerging areas where there are overlapping interests, or maybe the student is learning from the person with aphasia say, about sports, for example. We have one group where our friend with aphasia is a huge sports fanatic. He was meeting with two young women in our undergraduate program who knew very little about some of these sports and so he's taught them. It's really fun. Again, they meet at least once a week. We have one individual that at one point was meeting with three separate students three times a week. The friendships that form from these smaller groups are something special. For some of these folks it's intergenerational, for others they are peers. What you see is that the students don't want to give up this opportunity. I have some students who have been meeting with their friend with aphasia for over two years now. They've gone from their undergraduate programs through their graduate programs, and they've just developed a friendship and don't want to let go of it, which I think is phenomenal. This is something that I would like to see open up as chapters across different universities. Students want these interactions so badly and there are so many people with acquired communication disorders that need an outlet, and that would benefit from this safe space to work on their skills to just have fun. It really can be whatever they want it to be.   Janet: What a great idea. You've got my brain spinning. And I've been making notes about some clients I've been thinking about who would benefit from exactly what you're saying, just the opportunity to have an interaction and conversation. Wonderful.    Lauren, another avenue that you've been interested in is the practice of mindfulness, especially yoga practice. How do you see yoga practice supporting the LPAA philosophy of living well, with aphasia?   Lauren: Love this question. I have to backpedal just a little bit to answer it to say, I was never a yogi until I started my doctoral program. If you know me, I'm 5'11”. I'm tall and I grew up playing all the tall-person sports and pretty much was of the mindset that if you're not huffing and puffing and soaked in sweat, then it wasn't exercise or it wasn't beneficial. Well, I was wrong. In my doctoral program, I was dealing with imposter syndrome. I'm also a first-generation college student. Being at that level, and with all the different hurdles that a doctoral program offers, I was really feeling that imposter syndrome and anxiety that surrounds it. Somebody suggested starting yoga, and it's what got me out of bed in the morning, and really grounded me to face my day and feel as confident as I could in my skin during that time. After doing it for a few years, I just had this aha moment of, wow, I would love to bring this to the aphasia community. It's helped me with my anxieties and my areas of self-doubt and has just allowed me to also be present. I can only imagine for some folks with aphasia the anxiety that they may have surrounding communication, or just feeling okay with where they are in this part of their journey and that acceptance piece. Then I pushed it off. I said, well, I can't do that now I have to wait until I get tenure, I've got to focus on this very systematic treatment development program. I can't do more things.    Then in 2019 when I was an assistant professor, just my first year at UCF, I went to Project Bridge again thank you, Jackie Hinkley. While I was there, there was a small group that consisted of Dr. Amy Dietz and her friend with aphasia, Terry, who were at a table, and they were promoting yoga for aphasia. I was walking around, and I saw that table and I thought it was amazing. I went over there to have a conversation with them. Amy Dietz had just finished a small pilot project looking at methodology of how we make yoga accessible. And so I talked with Amy and I talked with her friend with aphasia, Terry, about their experience, and then more people started coming to that table; Susan Duncan, who is aphasiologist and a speech-language pathologist and a yoga practitioner, and then also a person with aphasia, Chase Rushlow and his mom, Deanna Rushlow. All the whole rest of that conference, we hung together, and started planning out the trajectory of how to bring accessible yoga to people with aphasia and to the aphasia community. Chase had experienced yoga, post stroke, and as a person living with aphasia with his mom, they shared their story about how it brought them together, and how it grounded him, how he found Zen. It was so fruitful being able to have these conversations with people with aphasia, and also their care partners, and them telling us what yoga has done for them. Not only did we all have our own experiences with yoga from myself, Amy and Susan, but then we also were getting this feedback from the rights holders, right from our patient stakeholders. And so this group moved forward.    Sorry, I had to backpedal there a little bit. Since that time, I'm so proud of what we have done as a team and what has unfolded. I was very fortunate to meet a yoga therapist named Karen Cornelius here in the Orlando area and together, we've been able to build an accessible adapted virtual yoga program for people with aphasia. It started as kind of this feasibility study with our own aphasia community group here in Orlando, getting feedback from them, figuring out how to make the language accessible, what visuals are helpful? What do people with aphasia want from a yoga practice, were there things that they liked, or things that they didn't like. We've had this really long but very informative process of delivering yoga from a yoga therapy perspective, caring experience, and then figuring out what to spend more time on and how to present things verbally and visually. Now I feel like we have this ongoing, strong, adapted yoga community that we're able to offer. We offer it every Friday at 11am. And we have participants from all over the US. We still have a strong group from Florida, from the Orlando area, but we've got people that participate from California, we've got folks from in the middle of the state, we've got people from Kentucky, we've got people from Pittsburgh, we have people from up north. And we also have a participant from Bermuda. It's amazing to see all of these individuals who would have never met each other otherwise come together so that they can have a yoga practice. For some of these folks, they participated in yoga before their stroke, and then had a really hard time getting back into it afterwards because of the language impairment, the language barrier really. Yoga is a very language heavy practice. The modifications that we've made have been really helpful in making it accessible. But then we've also brought in others that never looked at yoga before and experienced it for the first time and have heard their report that they reap the benefits of it. What we're seeing in both our qualitative research, and also in our quantitative research is that people are reporting reduced stress after participating in at least eight weeks of yoga, better sleep quality, and increased resilience. Some have discussed better pain management, so they feel like their pain, although it's not gone away, that they are able to go about their daily life without pain taking as much in terms of resources from them as it did prior. The biggest thing to I mean that sticks out is people are talking about self-acceptance. Yoga has helped them accept where they are right now in their journey. The last thing I'll say along these lines is there is something so powerful about having individuals come together in this group and there's conversation that happens at the beginning and at the end, just like you would if you walked into a yoga studio. I think it's that they're all working on a common goal, in this hour, and very little of what's being done is focused on communication, the effort is taken away. They're really just sharing a space with each other, enjoying that space, doing something that's making them feel good. And they're not having to think about their impairment. There's something really special with this group.    This work has now been funded by Orlando Health, which is our one of our big hospitals in the area. We're working with an interprofessional team and actually bringing yoga therapy into the inpatient rehabilitation program. This has been really neat, because Karen, the yoga therapist, and I are working with an interdisciplinary team of speech-language pathologists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, and recreational therapists. We'll have a group of individuals and all of these different professionals in the same room, and we're getting feedback from the professionals about what they like, what's facilitating this program for them, and what are the barriers. At the end, they will be the ones running this program, and they are very committed to keeping it up and running. We're also of course, getting the feedback from the people with aphasia and other brain injury survivors in this group, as well as their caregivers that are coming in and participating. I think now I can say I've done a good chunk of research in my life, and this area is the most fun and the least amount of work. Everything has happened organically. There has not been a moment where it feels like this really is work, or I don't want to do this. It's all just unfolded so beautifully. I feel so fortunate to be a part of this, I'm so thankful that Project Bridge pushed me into this, in a sense, when I thought I had to put it off for years and years to come. It's been a lot of fun. For our listeners, we have an ongoing yoga program on Friday mornings at 11 am EST, that is run by a yoga therapist who is amazing, and well versed in aphasia. I welcome people to join us.   Janet: I am moved by your story, Lauren, both your individual journey through your doctoral program and finding yoga to help your own self, and then taking that into the aphasia community. Several times you've used the phrase, ‘your journey through life' or ‘your journey of life'. And isn't that true? We're all on a journey, and it changes year to year, or decade to decade, if you will. It's exciting to know that you're finding a way to connect people with aphasia to a larger community that focuses on yoga, for example, rather than focusing on the impairment that they have living with their aphasia. Thank you for that. It sounds like it's a great success, and I hope it will continue to be so good for you.   Lauren: Thank you.   Janet: Lauren, another area of investigation, you're examining the benefit of motor imagery and home practice, for enhancing treatment outcomes in persons with apraxia of speech. This is a little bit different from yoga and mindfulness. But yet at the same time, it's about what people can do in their own selves, I think to improve their communications and improve their interactions with others. Will you describe this work and your current findings, please?    Lauren: Absolutely. And you really did hit the nail on the head because it does overlap a lot. It's different in that we are working on the impairment here, but the motor imagery piece grew out of what I was seeing with yoga. Many of our participants have hemiparesis, for example, or they might have apraxia of speech or more severe aphasia. When they are unable to produce a certain movement, or unable to say a certain mantra, we tell them just to visualize. If you can't move that arm that is fine, or if you can't move it to the extent that you want to that is okay, just imagine that arm moving. Just imagine or hear yourself saying this affirmation.    Based on what we were doing with the yoga I started digging a little deeper into the research on motor imagery and mental imagery, and that's where this idea arose. Surprisingly, there hasn't been a whole lot of work using motor imagery for rehabilitation of apraxia of speech. There's been a little bit of work in the area of stuttering, and motor imagery is used significantly in sports medicine, athletic training for professional sports, and musical training, and also rehabilitation of limb and gait, but really very little about speech. And so, I found a hole. My thought was maybe this motor imagery piece is a start, it's something that people can do at home without much support, and maybe it will impact their performance, either that day or in a therapy session a few days later. I wrote a grant and it was funded through the National Institutes of Health. The grant focused on looking at the impact that motor imagery has when combined with behavioral speech treatment. My thought moving forward was that I got my Ph.D. not only because I wanted to know more and wanted to create treatment programs, but I wanted to prove to insurance that healing the brain post stroke, or rehabilitation of speech and language post stroke, is not the same as healing a broken bone. It takes a lot more time. It's ongoing. In my time, I have not seen a change in insurance. In fact, I think it's gotten worse. So my thought into this is we've got to give clinicians and people with communication impairments the opportunity to work more from home. What can they do on their own to bolster the impact of those few treatment settings that they actually are getting, if they are treatment seeking individuals. The idea is, the hope is, that through motor imagery, what we're doing is priming the neural network. Patients can go home with targeted stimuli that they're working on, for example, and just imagine themselves saying it accurately, thinking about how the articulators are moving, visualizing themselves being successful. Hopefully, we're priming those networks. Then when they go into that treatment session, those networks are primed and perhaps we see a boost in performance. The hope, the long-term goal, of this is to build a home practice program that can be accessible to people in the comfort of their homes, easily and free of charge. The speech-language pathologist can also interface with the program to put stimuli into it, for example, so that it can support what they're working on in therapy. We're still in the early phases, but we just completed our first qualitative interview after somebody has completed the whole program, and they really liked it. I thought people were going to be bored with motor imagery because we're not yet allowing them to say anything. In the motor imagery piece, we really want to focus on what does imagery add, but they really enjoyed it. Our first participant, what he said was that at first he didn't like it, he thought it was weird. After we went through practice for a few weeks, he would come into the therapy session and we would do a probe and afterwards if I commented that he did really well on that today, or in the treatment session itself, or if I was seeing a lot of success with certain targets, he would say ‘the homework, the homework'. My thought was that he felt like the homework is helping. He was encouraging and felt like it was helping. We've only run a few people through, so right now, it's preliminary findings, but what I'm seeing is a benefit when they are going home and having this opportunity to practice. Even though it's not verbal practice, it's motor imagery, I'm seeing a change when they come into the session. The study itself is funded for three years, and we have the opportunity to provide free therapy for 18 individuals with co-occurring apraxia of speech and aphasia. I'm excited to see what that group data look like, but right now, and with just the conversations that we're having with the folks that are coming through, I feel very optimistic about this program. It will definitely need to grow, I don't want it to be only motor imagery forever. It's a good first step.   Janet: That is very exciting to hear. I look forward to reading the results as you have more and more individuals with apraxia of speech move through your program.   Lauren, as we draw this interview to a close, I wonder if you have some lessons learned that you would share with our listeners, as well as some Monday morning practices, that is actions that we can take on Monday morning to improve our interactions with persons with the aphasia or apraxia of speech.    Lauren: So I think first, and this is reflecting on what I do, I know many individuals out there, whether you are clinically working with the population, or you're doing research, you're in an area where you are giving. We are giving to support a community. The same thing that I tell our caregivers is to do something for you first, that will allow you to continue to give to others. What is something can you identify, something every day. When there's a little bit of something that you can do for yourself that just fuels you to be the best clinician, the best researcher, the best partner, parent, the many hats that people wear, to your community. That may look different for everyone. For some people, maybe it is meditation, for others maybe it's yoga, maybe it's running, maybe it's baking, everybody has their thing, but identify that certain something that gives you the energy and maybe the groundedness to serve your community.    One thing we've touched on, and if you're listening to this podcast, you know this, but listen to our friends with aphasia. Their perspectives give us so much more than we could ever pretend to know. I've learned so much from my friends with aphasia, even moving forward and in my research - thinking that I know what people want, talk to them, and then the realization this actually isn't an issue, this other thing is. Seek better understanding, otherwise, we're going up the wrong ladder and putting our efforts in the wrong area.    Building community through shared interests, that's what I'm trying to do a bit, and also incorporate student involvement; use your resources. With Mission SPEAK we really are trying to build community through shared interests. It's really neat to see how this unfolds. Even when you have a person with a communication impairment or a person with aphasia, who is maybe 30 years older than the student that they're meeting with, there are shared interests. And it's so neat, what they learn from each other and how this partnership grows, and this friendship grows. Then you also have peers, folks who have acquired communication impairments that are close in age with our students, and that takes on a life of its own as well. Try to match people up based on shared interests, or at least having someone that is really eager to learn. Also being open. Building community through shared interests supports what we've done with yoga. Here are folks that are finding peace and community and enjoying this activity together. It could be anything doesn't have to be yoga.   One other is interdisciplinary practices. When we're thinking about our friends with aphasia, not just thinking about the aphasia or stroke, when we're working with our more acute care friends, or those that are still on that rehabilitation trajectory. Stroke Survivors are dealing with more than aphasia, and I think sometimes we can lose sight of that. Making sure that there is an interdisciplinary team or you're offering interdisciplinary supports, asking what else do they need. I find that I've learned so much from my colleagues in physical therapy and occupational therapy. I work closely with an assistive technology professional who has just unlocked for me the world of supports that are out there that help people live well with aphasia, and also with hemiparesis. Supports such as for cooking with hemiparesis, supports for a computer adapted need, supports many things, such as positioning, seating, getting out there and playing sports, again, in an adaptive community. There are so many things that have happened, I think, over the last decade to make things more accessible for people post stroke. Educate yourself on what's out there.   Janet: Those are great ideas. Thank you so very much. And thank you, Lauren, again for taking the time to speak with me today about the Tavistock Distinguished Scholar Award, and about your work in aphasia.   Lauren: Thank you very much for having me.   Janet: You are so welcome.    I would also like to thank our listeners for supporting Aphasia Access Conversations by listening to our podcasts. For references and resources mentioned in today's show, please see our show notes. They are available on our website, www.aphasiaaccess.org. There, you can also become a member of our organization, browse our growing library of materials and find out about the Aphasia Access Academy. If you have an idea for a future podcast episode, please email us at info@aphasiaaccess.org. For Aphasia Access Conversations, I am Janet Patterson, and thank you again for your ongoing support of Aphasia Access.   Lauren, thank you for being with me today and congratulations on being named a Tavistock Distinguished Scholar on behalf of Aphasia Access and the Tavistock Trust. I look forward to learning about your future accomplishments, and seeing how you help people with aphasia and apraxia of speech on their journey of life. References   Madden, E. B., Therrien, M., Bislick, L., Wallace, S. E., Goff-Albritton, R., Vilfort-Garces, A., Constantino, C. & Graven, L. (2023). Caregiving and friendship: Perspectives from care partners of people with aphasia. Topics in Language Disorders, 43(1), 57-75. https://doi.org/10.1097/TLD.0000000000000301    Therrien, M.C., Madden, E.B., Bislick, L. & Wallace, S.E. (2021). Aphasia and friendship: The role and perspectives of Speech-Language Pathologists. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 30(5), 2228-2240. https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_AJSLP-20-00370  Resources   Aphasia Recovery Connection (ARC)        https://aphasiarecoveryconnection.org  Aphasia and Related Conditions Research Lab and Mission SPEAK https://healthprofessions.ucf.edu/communication-sciences-disorders/aphasia-and-related-conditions-research-lab/  Project Bridge     Project Bridge - Research Community in Communication Disorders

Lauren Love, founder and CEO of Wise Women's Choice, shares her journey with natural birth control and fertility awareness. She discusses the negative side effects of hormonal birth control and the importance of understanding our bodies. Lauren explains how she discovered neem oil as an effective spermicide and the benefits of using it along with fertility awareness. She also highlights the impact of natural birth control on women's empowerment, pleasure, and overall well-being. Lauren emphasizes the need for accessible and natural birth control options and the importance of educating young girls about their bodies. In this conversation, MaryOm and Lauren discuss the fertility awareness method and its benefits. They emphasize the importance of understanding and embracing our bodies' natural cycles and fertility. They debunk common myths about birth control and highlight the potential risks and side effects. They also discuss the empowerment that comes from knowing and charting our fertility, as well as the impact it can have on our relationships and overall well-being. The conversation concludes with a call to teach and empower the next generation of women to embrace their bodies and sexuality.+ BUY YOUR EPIC NATURAL CONTRACEPTIVE CREAM FROM WISE WOMENS CHOICE 5$ OFF: https://wisewomenschoice.com/?coupon=maryomrose5+ DISCOVER LAUREN LOVE'S NATURAL BIRTH CONTROL COURSE: https://naturalbirthcontroltothepeople.com/ CODE: OrgasmagicKeywordsnatural birth control, fertility awareness, hormonal birth control, neem oil, women's empowerment, pleasure, well-being, accessible options, educating young girls, fertility awareness method, birth control, natural cycles, empowerment, relationships, well-being, teaching the next generationTakeawaysHormonal birth control can have negative side effects and impact women's physical and mental health.Fertility awareness and natural birth control methods can be effective alternatives.Using neem oil as a spermicide and practicing fertility awareness can provide freedom and pleasure in sexual relationships.Natural birth control empowers women to make informed choices about their reproductive health and embrace motherhood with intention.EducaSupport the Show.Thank you friends for listening to your favourite podcast ORGASMAGIC! READ MY BOOK "BIRTH LIKE A QUEEN": https://www.amazon.com/Birth-like-Queen-Matter-Where-ebook/dp/B0CJKGH1Z4BOOK YOUR 1-1 COACHING WITH ME: https://maryomrose.com/1-1-sessions/HIRE ME AS A SPEAKER: love@maryomrose.comUK AGENT: Anthony KoskyBOOK MY SHOWS: https://maryomrose.com/show/BOOK YOUR SEAT for our upcoming show "BECOMING THE MOTHER I WISH I HAD" : https://www.eventbrite.com/e/becoming-the-mother-i-wish-i-had-solo-stand-up-poetry-slam-workshop-qa-tickets-906153307937?aff=oddtdtcreator&keep_tld=1BUY YOUR EPIC NATURAL CONTRACEPTIVE CREAM 5$ OFF: https://wisewomenschoice.com/?coupon=maryomrose5BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY - MAGIC THE MUSICAL: https://magicthemusical.love/Make sure you like and subscribe to get notified and find us on www.orgasmagic.com and www.maryomrose.comWith love Always!

In this episode of THE UNRULE/Y ENTREPRENEUR Podcast, I bring you a beautiful conversation with someone that I knew before her healing transformation. Lauren Eliz Love and I discuss her profound journey of healing and transformation. She shares her transition from being a business coach to becoming a healer, emphasizing the challenges of worthiness and internal fulfillment despite external success. We cover and connect in conversation about the importance of presence, humility, and holding space for others' healing. We also delve into redefining masculine and feminine energies in business, self-awareness, and the resilience needed for personal and professional growth. This conversation is magnificent and she gives us a simple, intentional golden nugget for going viral. Remember you are so resourced, here are the ones mentioned in this episode: Follow Lauren Love on Instagram Conscious Creator CourseBecome A Legend in the Making - 3 DAY FREE TRIALEpisode Outline: Transition from Business Coach to Healer (00:02:22) Acknowledging the Cycle of Unworthiness (00:14:20) Discovering New Gifts Through Presence (00:21:08) Meeting Oneself (00:23:36) Masculine and Feminine Energy (00:26:30) Intentional Approach to Going Viral (00:43:11) Empowerment and Self-Worth (00:48:41) Get the magic of WAP: Wealth Alignment Patterns HERE use code PODCASTWAP for a special discount!Leave me a voicemail HERE with your question for a chance to have it answered on a future episode!Get notifications when new episodes drop by tapping the "follow" button! And if you loved this episode, follow me on Instagram @love_andreacrowder & let me know by leaving a review!

In this weeks episode, Lauren Love is sharing her story of letting go of a 7 figure business and stepping into the new. It's a powerful episode of strength and resiliency. In this episode, you'll hear: Laurens journey of leaving her old brand and stepping into alignment on a new path. How to you handle when your partner doesn't get it. Sharing the messy and vulnerable parts of life and business. Trusting yourself and knowing that it's normal for big expansions to feel uncomfortable. I hope her story really inspires you! Connect with Lauren: Instagram | Website If you enjoyed the episode, leave a review - it means the world to me + helps the show reach more people! Let's support each other! Connect with Taylor on Instagram - @_thetaylorlee Transparent Sales: The Membership is here, join us inside! https://www.thetaylorlee.com/membership

Ryan decided to take Lauren on a very different kind of first date...but it was what was said that threw Lauren off. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this duo episode Paige brings back Lauren Eliz Love to jam out on how much has changed in five years since they first met! Lauren has made a huge pivot in her business and they discuss the pros and cons that come with that, the power of healing & spirituality and ad of course- plant medicine. Listen to this episode today if you struggle with the limiting belief that you 'can't make money being a healer'

Some conversations have the ability to completely change your life.That was the case for me in this podcast interview with Lauren Love.Lauren is a spiritual teacher and self-healing guide for women looking to rewrite their reality.Like many of us, she has experienced extreme hardship around things such as physical health, mental illness, financial destruction, relationship abuse and much more.After a spiritual awakening and a few years of growth, Lauren finally answered the loud calling to become a spiritual leader and I'm so grateful she did!Her energy and her teachings are changing the world.Some of what we talk about in this episode:Spiritual studiesBirthing new identitiesHer HEAL programSurrenderPutting ourselves firstTrusting our knowingLimiting beliefs around needing to “fix” Plant medicineThis episode will undoubtedly touch your soul. Featured FREE Download:Freedom In 5 Formula - Your guide to stress & anxiety relief in 5 minutes or less!Lauren Of LoveInstagramWebsite (with tons of resources)Love the show? Please Subscribe and leave a Review on Apple Podcasts. Make sure you're following me on Facebook & Instagram and visit the My Inner Tiger Website for more FREE transformative resources! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Divine Feminine Revolution Podcast!   Ready to embody your feminine energy?   You get to quit what doesn't serve you!   Lauren Love is a small town Connecticut business owner, podcaster, and educator.   She says, "I have a fire in my heart to elevate the planet by helping women live in their power.   I'm a big fan of house plants, high-vibe crystal shops, and derpy dogs (especially my own three mushy babies.) I've been learning how to be a human since 1989. When I started to grow my business, I realized that my ability to create wealth was deeply tied to my personal growth. The more I worked on myself, the more success I was able to create. I realized that part of my purpose was to help wake women up to the innate power within themselves. I knew that women out there needed the business strategy to create success, but I also knew that without all the inner work and personal development I had done on my own journey, I would not have achieved my goals. So I decided to design a brand that put all of those things in one beautiful place. The Business Babe Brand is a resource for women to learn the strategies of growing a business, how to shift their mindset, and the ways to adapt a spiritual practice. We have courses, online group programs, live events, a book, and a podcast to help women in all three of those areas!" Check out Lauren Love at https://www.laurenoflove.com/   Ready to join the Divine Feminine Revolution Podcast Squad & Win Prizes for sharing and leaving a five star review.   Join for free here -> https://www.fearlessfeminineacademy.com/launch-squad   Come join me in my FREE private Facebook group, Divine Feminine Revolution: https://www.facebook.com/groups/divinefemininerevolution/   Send me a DM on Instagram! https://instagram.com/drmeganmonday

In this ascension series episode Lauren and I tune into the importance of self healing and the power that it awakens within your being. How it leads to finding your purpose and making peace with the uncertainty, while cultivating powerful conscious relationships Check Out Lauren On Instagram! The Ascension Program Enrolling Now https://www.ryleejune.ca/Ascension   GLDN Code Jewelry: Use Code AFF15 to save 15% OFF CLICK HERE     Website Instagram Facebook

Whether you’re grasping at straws or have a pretty good grip on your relationships, here is some godly wisdom that you can hold on to.  #MoLoveHandles

Severing ties with toxic individuals can be very challenging. In this episode of Late Nights with Lauren Love, Lauren offers helpful advice for those struggling with establishing boundaries with soul draining friends and family. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/laurenlove/support

In this episode we are having such a fun and vibey but super deep chat with our gal pals, soul friends and fellow business owners Lauren Love and Coralynn Hazelwood of Badass Business Babe. We dive into creating the space within female friendships and business partners to allow for expansion and growth. This is a super vulnerable, raw and honest convo about the ups and downs we all experience when working with other women. And we show how we are going about supporting one another vs letting our own fears, doubts, wounds and bs stories start to negatively affect such precious relationships. **This is the first part of a 2 part episode. Be sure and listen to the second half on the next episode #25** Go check out Lauren, Coralynn and their amazing Badass Business Babe brand that is transforming businesses & the women who run them: www.instagram.com/thelaurenelizlove www.instagram.com/thecoralynnhazelwood www.instagram.com/badassbusinessbabe EXCLUSIVE 11% LOYAL PODCAST LISTENER DISCOUNT: http://www.spirituallyintimate.com/podcast  To connect with Andrea + Blair: www.instagram.com/love_andreacrowder www.instagram.com/blair_dreessen/ WWW.SPIRITUALLYINTIMATE.COMWWW.INSTAGRAM.COM/SPIRITUALLYINTIMATE If you enjoyed this episode, drop us a review and share with your friends. Make sure to tag us on your IG stories @spirituallyintimate

Episode 19 opens up with Fox & G, sadly no Lauren Love for this one. But the podcast must go on! Another productive episode includes: Finally kicking in those New Year’s resolutions after so long, reaction to J. Cole “Middle Child”, another reaction to The Game spitting some bars about Kim K and having her swallow his ki….wait hold up! Then finally, G & Fox turn the tables and talk about a question that will literally make you think DEEP. If you don’t then we don’t really know how to help you. This episode is, like always, a can’t miss. Sit your self down and let us serenade your ears with Episode 19 “Don’t Be Petty”.

The holiday season can be tough, with so many opportunities for unwelcome commentary on our bodies, diets and exercise routines from well-meaning relatives. What’s worse, our kids are exposed to it too. Jen, Annie and Lauren get together and discuss how to set boundaries this holiday season so you can enjoy your family time together, free from the discomfort of unwanted opinions and negativity. Learn how to be the change you want to see in the world and find peace among the chaos of diet culture. What you’ll hear in this episode: The damage of body shaming discussion on children The normalization of negative weight related discussions and body judgments in popular culture Reasons to set boundaries around negative body talk around your kids A comparison of the diet industry and tobacco industry’s tactics to normalize something that is damaging Statistics around the prevalence of disordered eating What is your grocery checkout stocked with? Preparing your kids for the road How to set boundaries in a clear, kind-hearted, non-confrontational way How negative body talk is like second hand smoke The role of media literacy in filtering negative messaging Prevalence of weight loss advertising and negative media messages What to do when you don’t feel comfortable setting a boundary Getting curious about where people are coming from with body commentary The discomfort of change Talking to our kids about the diet industry, body image and media messages Raising critical thinkers Free To Be Talks Workshops Effecting change at the individual and community level   Resources: The Habit That’s as Toxic to Children as Smoking Five Stages of Behavior Change Episode 13: How Your Body Image Impacts Your Children with Hillary McBride Free To Be Talks Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Thanks for joining us here on Balance365 Life Radio, I am really excited about this episode and we actually jumped this topic to the head of the line because we felt it was just that important, especially this time of year. Today Lauren, Jen and I discuss the importance of setting boundaries with your friends and your family as it pertains to discussions about bodies and behaviors. Women’s appearance, exercise routines and eating habits seem to be free game and constantly open for discussion and debate. Conversations about who’s gained weight, who’s lost weight, how Aunt Jan has given up carbs or the latest supermodel that got her body back so quickly after baby number 3 can unfortunately be heard across the globe. After working with thousands of women, we know that with the holiday season many of us might find ourselves on the receiving end or at the very least, within earshot of comments of this nature. This unwelcome commentary can be shocking, infuriating but most importantly, it can be really harmful, especially to the little eyes and ears that are watching and listening. On this episode, we dive into the importance of women and mothers setting boundaries around diet talk and body shaming, share ideas on how to respond and address these comments if and when they happen and finally, how to help you and your children process those same situations. As always our free private Facebook group can be a great space to continue the discussion if you so wish, you can find us on Facebook at Healthy Habits Happy moms. We’ll see you on the inside. Lauren and Jen, we are all three together, it’s been a while. Lauren: Hi! Annie: You’re just here for the party, we know, Lauren and Jen, how are you? Jen: Good, I really missed recording with you guys. I was away and you did like 3 episodes without me. Annie: I know, you you were on a little family vacation. Jen: Yeah. Annie: Looked fun, we missed you though. Jen: Yeah, I missed you guys too but it was like my first holiday in, with my kids, in years so it was a lot of fun and I have to say, for the parents listening that it is a whole different world to go on holidays with children who are 5-6 and 9 than babies and toddlers. Lauren: That’s really good to hear. Annie: So there’s hope. Jen: Oh yeah, well it just got, for us, it got to a point where I was like “We aren’t traveling anymore. I can’t do this. I can’t take 3 car seats and a double stroller and a diaper bag on every holiday. It’s too… I might as well just stay home because it’s more stressful on holiday.” So now it was just surreal to just be sitting back and watching my kids handle themselves, like carry backpacks and yeah and just like not have myself loaded down, you know, like, I just had a backpack too. It was amazing. Annie: I heard a comparison made that there’s a difference between vacation and trips and you take a trip with your family. It’s not, it doesn’t always feel like a vacation, it’s sometimes a lot of work. Jen: The other thing when you have little babies and toddlers is we would always do like AirBNB apartments because we just felt like we needed the space and with kids getting up in the night we, you know, we just needed like different rooms etc and but that meant that we were also cooking and cleaning up after ourselves on “holidays” too and I would sometimes be like “Why did we leave home? Like, I just feel like I’m in the kitchen all the time.” So on this trip we only stayed in hotels and we ate out for every meal and I can’t even tell you how great that was too to not cook for 10 days. It was amazing. Annie: Yeah that sounds really nice and the weather looked so nice. Jen: Yeah, it was beautiful. Annie: Yeah, but we’re happy to have you back- Jen: Thank you. Annie: Because we have a really good topic and I think it’s going to be best addressed and best covered with all three of us on board and this is actually kind of a combination of two topics that we’ve discussed either in a podcast or a blog post that we kind of married together and we actually are doing kind of a last-minute recording because we wanted to squeeze this topic in before the holidays because what comes up so frequently in our community, which if you’re not a part of it,it’s Healthy Habits Happy Moms on Facebook, over 40,000 women, it’s a great place to continue the discussion, ask questions get support if you need it but something that comes up in our community often is how to respond to comments about your body or behaviors and how then to set boundaries with family members and with it being the holiday season, it seems like we’re exposed to so many more opportunities to have those comments thrown at us, right? And it’s a really common experience with women in our communities that are our bodies and our behaviors, what’s on our plate, how we are exercising, how we’re talking, how we look, always seem to be free game for discussion and debate and it’s really regardless of your body shape and size because prior to this, when we covered it in a podcast the first time, I did a poll in our community and women of all shapes and sizes has experienced comments and remarks like this and it can not only be shocking but infuriating and they can also be harmful to everyone within earshot, right? Jen: Right. Annie: and Jen, you made, it was, we’re approaching the two year anniversary of the blog post that you wrote that was amazing and it’s still on our blog today, but you made an amazing analogy of the harmful effects of body shaming, disordered eating behaviors, negative body talk as it relates to smoking, can you share a little bit about that? Jen: Yeah, first of all, it’s wild, two years ago. Annie: I know. Jen: And so we are talking about the same things, which is great, we hope it’s sinking in, two years later, so I am the analogy queen in our community and I find that sometimes drawing parallels in other areas of life is what really gets the stuff to stick with women and the other thing, when we talk about disordered eating, I just want everybody to know that in, like, eating disorder, I guess, literature and circles, dieting is considered under the realm of disordered eating, so dieting is disordered eating, so when you are talking about dieting around the Christmas dinner table or Thanksgiving dinner table, you’re actually talking about disordered eating, your disordered eating behaviors and 100 years ago it might have been shocking that somebody would would speak up at dinner to say that they’re purposely starving themselves or cutting out carbs but over the years, it’s become normalized, so it’s part of our normal conversation to discuss these things. So what I compared it to in this blog post was that at one point, smoking indoors used to be completely normal. My step mom talks about how she had my older sister in hospital and they whisked the baby away after and the first thing she did was light up a cigarette in the hospital. And everybody had an ashtray right beside their hospital bed and so this was about 40 years ago. Today, that would never fly. So the damaging health effects of smoking and secondhand smoking is well researched, we know the effects, smoking is banned in public spaces, we keep it away from children. I don’t know what the rules are down there but in Canada, it’s illegal to smoke cigarettes inside of a vehicle if you have anyone in the car that’s under 16. And we have family members who smoke and I don’t think they would dream of smoking inside my house, however if they came over and tried, I would immediately, I would have, you know, no issue with saying “Oh, can you please take that outside, this is a smoke free home.” So the parallel I drew is that we also know the effects of discussing bodies and disordered eating. We know that they have serious long term effects to your own personal health but also to the little ears or the children in the room listening to all of this and setting a boundary with friends and family around smoking is probably not a problem for anyone listening, however it still feels extremely uncomfortable to set this boundary around talking about weight, bodies, disordered eating, dieting but if you really put that into context, “Hey, we know this is extremely harmful.” And if you’re having trouble setting the boundary for yourself, just really think, like, now is the time that you need to step up for your kids and say “Hey, no this is not OK to discuss around our kids. If you want to talk to me about this later, that’s fine but you know, there’s little ears in the room.” Annie: And oftentimes, you know, the difference here is that unlike smoking, many people aren’t aware just yet of the harmful consequences of this type of talk and how contagious it is and how detrimental it can be to the eyes and ears that are watching and listening and I think if people knew, which is part of our mission, right, to draw attention to the negative consequences of dieting and body shaming and weight talk, if people knew like they know the harmful effects of smoking, you know, maybe they would be changing the conversation. Lauren: Yeah. Jen: Absolutely, so it’s sort of like, in the “olden days” they talk about how the big tobacco companies went to great lengths to hide the negative, they knew what the negative effects of smoking were and they went to great lengths to try and sort of cover that up and they were lobbying government et cetera, et cetera, they would have doctors as their spokespeople saying smoking was safe and that, basically, is happening today with diet companies. You have, you know, huge diet companies, they have crazy popular spokeswomen or spokespeople, I should say, fronting their brand but the research hasn’t caught up with the public yet. It’s not common knowledge yet so, but we know, it is well researched, we have decades and decades of research about how harmful dieting is, how harmful body shaming is especially for children. Like, body based teasing is one of the biggest contributors to future disordered eating/eating disorders. So the other thing is that I think I feel like awareness around mental health is just coming to the forefront, I guess, where in years gone past we haven’t talked about mental health as much. The focus really has been on physical health. And now we’re starting to see more talk of mental health and taking care of our mental health and what that means for people but I don’t think talking about mental health is as widely accepted yet either, so it’s quite a big conversation. This podcast, what we wanted to cover and talk about in just sort of bring to people’s consciousness is it’s OK to set boundaries in your home around what you expose your children to. Annie: Right, because it’s, you know, essentially in that blog post, which we can link in the show notes, along with all the research or just a handful of the research that we’ve looked at and essentially, you know, kind of compares it to being trapped in a smoky room, you know. Jen: Right. Annie: When, you know, when you are filling your home over the holidays or your environment with that sort of talk, I mean, it’s, the parallel is there, right? And it’s not it’s not one time that’s going to make or break but it’s that constant exposure, the fact that they don’t have a place to process this, that they can’t escape, that they don’t have an alternative, that there’s no discussion about, you know, the consequences and why you would do this or that, like that’s really what we want to begin to bring to light, right? Jen: Yeah and children are listening, like they want to listen, right? I catch my oldest son, he’s 9, I see him all the time, I can just see him, he’s paying attention to what the adults are talking about, he wants to know, he’s interested, he’s learning how to be an adult, right? And so this is something that we pretty much hand down to our children as acceptable and OK. So what we see today and we see this a lot in our Facebook group and just on social media in general, you hear a lot of women talking about, or sharing stories of somebody commenting about their body and how offended they are, whether somebody asks them if they’re expecting or if they’ve lost weight or what diet they’re on and women are saying, “Hey!” You know, they’re starting to notice, people comment on our bodies all the time but this is learned behavior, right, this isn’t some evil person, you know, or mean-spirited person popping out and just body shaming. It’s learned behavior. We make it acceptable at an early age so anybody who’s making those comments today probably grew up in an environment where it was absolutely OK and I think we’re still in that environment. If you are checking out at the grocery store and it’s full of trashy magazines around you, you’ll see that, we have, it’s open season on women’s bodies and men’s to a degree. You might have a National Enquirer there talking about whose, which celebrities have “let themselves go”, what weight this celebrity is, what weight that celebrity is, who has “gotten their body back after baby”, you know, the quickest. It is open season and that’s the kind of stuff that goes on around us that might not even be, you know, in our consciousness, right, so if you start paying attention, you’ll see it’s not just happening around the dinner table at Christmas, it’s happening everywhere and at some point you need to step up and say “Hey this is not OK” and you need to go to your children and say “This is not OK. This is not what our family values and just because, you know, Uncle Ted, you know, talks about women’s bodies that way, it is absolutely not OK” and you need to set that boundary with Uncle Ted or whoever your uncle is or Aunt, and let them know that’s not OK and if that has to happen in front of your kids, all the better. Annie: I just want to circle back, just in case people aren’t familiar with some of the statistics out there that I feel like we share frequently but you can never hear these enough, in my opinion but I think as you said the research is out there, it’s our kids are listening and some of the statistics about it are just shocking, I mean as it pertains to adult women, approximately half of women engage in disordered eating and risky dieting practices, including one 3rd of women report purging. Jen: Right. Annie: 75 percent of women report that their weight interferes with their happiness, which, I’ve been there, that’s been me at various points in my life. A study of 5 year old girls, a significant proportion of girls associate diet with food restriction and weight loss and thinness, like, how do they know this? Where are they learning this? Jen: Right. Absolutely. Annie: 37 percent of girls in grade 9 and 40 percent in grade 10 perceive themselves as too fat, again, where are they learning this? Why do they think that? More than half of the girls and a third of the boys engage in unhealthy weight control behaviors, for example, fasting, vomiting, laxatives skipping meals or smoking to control their appetite. Again, like, they’re listening, they’re watching, they’re observing. Jen: Absolutely. Lauren: Mhmm. Jen: And by the time a girl is 17 to 18 years old, that stat is up to 80 percent, so 80 percent of 17 and 18 year old girls believe they need to lose weight, like these aren’t like, you know, these aren’t like, outliers. This is the majority of our population and again, this is all learned behavior. Annie: Righ. And it’s, you know, we have a little bit of control over here and that’s why we’re in the business that we’re in because it’s not just enough for the three of us to parent our kids, like we need everyone on board to really make a really big impact. Jen: Absolutely. Annie: So that’s the part of our mission, to like, create this big wave, this ripple effect, like everyone’s on board and everyone’s promoting healthy balance lifestyles without all this other unnecessary, unhealthy behavior. Jen: Totally, I look at my local supermarket and the changes that they’ve made to have a healthier physical environment for my children so when I take them shopping there are, they’re called, like “junk food free aisles” so that you don’t have to deal with, like, your kid seeing the treats and wanting, you know, asking for treats so you can choose to go down those check outs instead of the ones that are lined with candy and also, in my local supermarket, they have a basket of fruits and vegetables for kids to just take for free to eat while you’re shopping and so I think “Wow, look at these changes they’ve made for our children’s physical health, right, taking away the less nutritious food and offering more nutritious food. So now let’s take it a step further and how can they support my child’s mental health?” So it’s one thing to have an aisle that’s free of junk food, but now I have to take my kids down this aisle that is instead stocked with magazines full of body shaming and my kids can read now and so I’m going, which is worse? You’ve taken away the junk food, you’ve replaced it with this basically, junk for your brain. Annie: Right. Jen: Essentially, yes. Annie: But, you know, as we said, I remember when you wrote this blog post and you and I had this conversation and I think we came across the saying “Prepare your kids for the road, not the road for your kids” because this is unfortunately part of our culture, you’re going to be outside of your bubble, especially in the holiday season or you know, even as summer approaches, you know and more skin is shown and you’re at barbecues or you know, year round, it happens, you’re going to be outside of your little bubble, inside of our community it’s like, this stuff doesn’t happen, right? Lauren: Right. Jen: Right. Annie: But when we leave our homes it’s like, or we go to the grocery store, it’s like “Oh my gosh, it really is everywhere.” It’s going to happen. So what do you do when it happens? You set a boundary. You can set a boundary and as you said, it can be so uncomfortable to think about setting a boundary for yourself and speaking up for yourself, but if you put it in terms of like, “I’m standing up for my kid” then it’s like- Jen: Totally. Annie: As a mother it’s like, “Oh”, it becomes so much easier, right? Jen: Yes, then it’s like “Roar!” Annie: Mama Bear, right? Mama lion. Jen: Exactly. Annie: Yeah, so, you know, setting boundaries, let’s talk about how to do that because it can be uncomfortable. It can be scary but I think you, in that blog post again, you gave a couple very concise, clear, non-confrontive, kind-hearted responses and I think you could just put these in your back pocket, you can put your own twist on them. The first one is “Hey, I understand that you’re struggling with your eating behaviors right now, can we save this conversation for when little ears aren’t around?” and I think that’s perfect, you know, so I picture myself at the buffet table, you know, and my Aunt Jan’s putting stuff on her plate saying “I shouldn’t have this many carbs and I’m just so excited to eat this and I’ll just have to work it off afterwards and it’s going to go straight to my butt” and you know, like that sort of talk. Jen: Yeah, total disordered talk. Annie: Right. Jen: Totally normalized in our culture. Annie: Oh yeah, like, I mean, 4 years ago I probably would have been like “Ahahaha!” Jen: Right. Annie: Now I’m like “Oh no, no, no, no, no, no!” Jen: Yes. Annie: “Could we save that conversation for when little ears aren’t around” and it’s, the three of us have had this conversation so many times, we feel very comfortable being like “Yeah, I’d be happy to talk with you about how to balance your meals, more sustainable practices for your health and wellness and how that talk isn’t really serving you, like we could talk that all day.” Some of our listeners might not be willing or interested in having that conversation, that’s totally cool too, but I think that just acknowledging little ears are listening and we’re just going to zip it, right now, right? Jen: Yeah, like if somebody, I mean, I know we all probably swear a little bit but if somebody like came roaring into the kitchen and was just like dropping F bombs every second word and your kids are sitting there you might be like, ” Hey, there’s little ears here, maybe we could cut that back” Except Annie’s giggling, because she’s like, “No.” Annie: Yeah, yeah. Jen: Don’t tell me how to talk. Lauren: Well, Jen, I think the second hand smoke analogy was so, so good because I’d like to coin the term now “secondhand dieting” because like, that’s basically what it is and if you’ve listened to the podcast you’ll know I started dieting when I was 12. Jen: Right. Lauren: And it’s because secondhand dieting was constant. It was a constant topic of conversation in my family, especially on one side compared to the other, but it was it was constant and I would never, you know, blame my family for any of that, everyone’s, as we know, we’re doing our best, no one’s doing it on purpose, but it’s how, it’s how, like, my grandma’s generation and my mom’s generation was raised. Jen: Absolutely. Lauren: And they didn’t know any better, just like before we don’t know any better about smoking. Jen: Right. Lauren: And so when I think back to that, like, I would sing the Jenny Craig song like- Jen: Oh my goodness. Lauren: Like I knew the Jenny Craig song, right? Jen: Let’s hear it, Lauren. Lauren: 1-800-Jenny-20. That’s all I remember but like I would sing it and I just cringe now thinking about all the stuff I listened to and that’s kind of what I draw from, if I ever have to set that boundary for my kids, like my daughter just turned 5 so I’m at the point now where it’s going to, I’m going to have to be more intentional and more careful about it moving forward and if you’ve listened to the podcast you’ll know last year we already had like our 1st incident with that at preschool, talking about, you know, good food versus bad food and I had to start that there earlier than I even thought I would, but at this point going forward, it just gets, you have to be more and more intentional about it. Jen: And it’s everywhere so as Annie had mentioned before, like you can’t, you can, media literacy is one of the most powerful tools in this sort of disordered eating/negative body image crisis we are in with our children and I can’t always be there to filter for my kids but I can teach them how to filter, right? Lauren: Right. Jen: And so one thing I noticed, we haven’t had cable for years and last Christmas we were up at the ski hill here where we live and we were staying there over the Christmas period, staying at a hotel and we would watch T.V. in the evenings and I was shocked at how many diet commercials came on what we’re watching T.V. and I probably wouldn’t even have noticed this 5 years ago because it was just part of my life, it’s part of everybody’s lives, where now I’m so conscious of it and suddenly I’m going like “We are muting the T.V. during commercials because this is ridiculous.” Every single commercial break there was a Weight Watchers ad and just horrible toxic messaging. I remember just. in particular. one woman saying “I can eat whatever I want and still lose weight” and I was like, “Oh! My kids are taking this BS in.” Like, so then we started muting it during commercials because I just, I just do not, and I’m like, you know how kids are, they just, like, stare at a T.V. and they’re just zoned out, whether it’s the TV show or the commercial and I was just like, this is not something I want them hearing over and over and over every commercial break, it’s like, they’re like hypnotized by it, being brainwashed. Annie: And I think that goes back to, you know, just that awareness that you said before, Jen. Sometimes you don’t know how well prevalent it is until you start listening and you just, like that might just be your first step, you don’t have to take any action, maybe you don’t set a boundary this holiday season, maybe- Jen: Right. Annie: where you’re at is you’re just starting to pay attention and you create awareness and you know, you know how, like, when you’re pregnant or maybe you’re trying to get pregnant and all you see is pregnant women? Jen: Right. Lauren: Yeah. Annie: Like, that’s what this is. Jen: Yeah it is. Annie: The power of suggestion. Once you see it, it’s everywhere. I mean, I swear, I tell people, like, “What do you do for a living?” “Oh, I’m a personal trainer” and it’s like, all of a sudden they go to confession. Jen: Right. Annie: It’s like, “Oh my gosh, I haven’t been to a gym in years, and I ate, oh my gosh, I need to get back and I need to do” and I’m like “It’s OK, I’m not, like, you don’t have to repent your sins to me.” Jen: Right, right. Annie: And it’s just, yeah, like it’s the magazine titles, it’s the conversations with your hairdresser when you’re getting your haircut, you know, the woman that’s evaluating your food at the grocery checkout line, like “Oh is this a good food? I heard this was healthy for you.” You know, it’s like, it’s just everywhere. Jen: You can’t, you have to be really, you have to be, and that’s why it’s so important to hand those tools off to your kids to be critical thinkers about it, right, so my son when we were on this holiday, we’re talking about at the start of the show, we were watching, again T.V. in the hotel room and this, we’re in San Diego, California and one thing I’ve noticed from previous trips to California is weight loss advertising is cranked up there compared to where I live in Canada, which might just be the culture of California, so it’s like, it’s on the radio, everywhere and I just found it, like, “Whoa! it’s definitely not as prevalent where I live” so the commercial that came on was like a freeze the fat thing, like, it’s like a, I don’t know if it’s like a liposuction procedure or whatever, it’s just a commercial and it came on and I was like “Here we go!” and my son was like, “This is ridiculous. It doesn’t even work.” I was like- Annie: Nice. Jen: Yeah! So you can, right, you can teach them and I try and just say to my kids like, you know, we obviously don’t shame people who are dieting or whatever, you have to be careful of that too, as well, but I just say, like, “You know that stuff doesn’t work and there’s a lot of companies out there who will take advantage of people who are struggling and with how they feel about themselves but you know this stuff does not work and there’s a lot of fake things that go on behind the scenes that trick you into believing it works but it doesn’t.” So, yeah. Annie: Well and to add to that, just as there are people in my life that I love dearly and I look up to in many ways, they also smoke. Jen: Right, absolutely. Annie: There’s a lot of great people that are also stuck in diet culture and body shame and weight talk and that doesn’t mean that they’re bad humans or they are terrible, you know, like I love them just as much and they don’t need shaming. Jen: No. Annie: You know, my mom smoked for years and I hated that element of her but I loved her, I hated that behavior, I should say, but I love her dearly. Jen: Well, you know, if you go back to our stages of change podcast where people are with smoking is OK, the awareness is there, it’s not good for you, the tough part with smoking is that it’s an addiction, right, so they are constantly and I mean, I think pretty much all smokers are in the cycle of change, most smokers are probably thinking of quitting all the freaking time, it’s just so difficult. Where, when it comes to dieting and disordered eating, there’s not an addiction there but if you’ve listened to previous podcasts about the diet cycle, it almost mimics one where you just can’t stop trying to diet, like, you just keep going back to it, you get stuck in that cycle but most dieters are not even, the awareness isn’t even there that this is something that is unhealthy for them and that they could even stop doing it. It’s just part of their everyday life, like, that’s what we do, we diet or we don’t diet, we’re on the wagon or we’re off the wagon and that’s what their whole life is, right? So when you are setting this boundary with people, just keep that in mind, like, this could be brand new information to them, it likely is, that this is, that your family doesn’t diet, your family doesn’t body shame, your family doesn’t sit around talking about your own weight or other people’s weight and it’s harmful. It’s harmful to you and it’s harmful to children to hear ,that will be brand new information. So if you decide to set that boundary, go gentle, as Annie said, you don’t have to set that boundary, that is an option, I would personally talk, if I was in a situation where I felt very uncomfortable setting that boundary, I would make sure to speak about, I would speak to my children about it later “Hey, you know, when Grandpa was saying this or that, like, just so you know ,that’s not what we believe in, that wasn’t accurate.” Annie: You’re jumping ahead a bit. Jen: Oh, I’m sorry. Annie: You just got so excited. No, I think that’s a great segue, just to circle back to setting boundaries, you know, like comments, if you need some actual statements, I always have a hard time putting words on my emotions and my feelings, so I like to have these one liners to put my back pocket that I can practice saying and it can be, you know, like I said before, “Can we save this conversation for when the kids aren’t around? My child can eat what he or she wants, eyes on your own plate, please. Can we change the subject? Simple as that and then as far as comments made to you about your own body or about someone else, whether they’re in the room or not, I mean, one of my personal training clients talks about how her father always comments about women in the media and their bodies. Jen: Right. Annie: Like it doesn’t matter because somehow they are immune because they can’t hear us and they’re celebrities and like they don’t count. Jen: Right. Annie: But it’s still worth addressing in my opinion but the first step is decide if you want to have that conversation or not. And sometimes you may not want to, it might be the wrong time, the wrong person, you don’t have the energy and in fact, Lauren and I remember you talking about a family member that you were just like, “This just isn’t a conversation I’m willing to have with her at this point in my life, in her life,” do you remember that? Lauren: Yeah, there’s a lot of my family members actually that I do not really speak about nutrition or whatever unless I’m asked and so as far as I go, it’s like a boundary unless I’m asked about it. Annie: Right. You know, and then the second option, I think, too is, if someone makes a comment to you, I think Jen, you gave this suggestion a couple times to be curious and just simply say, “Why do you ask that? Why do you say that? Can you tell me more? That’s interesting” and just see where they’re coming from and see where that goes because so often, you know, someone makes a comment to me and again, years ago, you know, 4 years ago Annie would have been like “Ugh!” and I would have been offended and embarrassed and ashamed and angry and infuriated but so often, like, that’s not usually how conversations, like, end well. Jen: Yeah, or “Why does, you know, why does that matter to you? Why is this relevant? How does that affect your life?” Annie: Yes, am I reacting this strongly because I’m worried that there’s some truth in what they’re saying, is this about my own body shame and my own negative weight talk and all that, you know, is this the baggage I’m carrying or is this theirs? And now I’m clearly, like, they make a comment about a body or my body and it’s like “What Susie says about Sally says more about Sally than Susie”, like they’re separate, like that’s on them and yeah, that has nothing to do with me. But decide if you want to have the conversation, then be curious, you know, I think that’s a great way to, if you’re not super confrontational, if you don’t want to be confrontational, like, “Why do you say that? Like, that’s interesting, why do you ask that?” and then find your voice. You know, Jen, I think we’ve talked about, like, you tend to be a little bit more like, “No, I don’t want to do that, like, we’re not going to talk about that, let’s change the subject” where I would be like, “Hey, look, squirrel! How about the Cubs?” like, you know, like something like just totally redirect or you could be super sincere and honest and say “I’m sure you’re coming from a place of love and you care but your comments are hurtful, your comments are alarming, they’re concerned, fill in the blank.” Jen: Or “I’m really uncomfortable discussing my body or other women’s bodies in a setting like this or period.” Annie: And you know what? It might get awkward. Jen: Yeah that’s the the thing but- Annie: It might get a little like- Jen: But change is uncomfortable, right? So, you know, we talk all the time on this podcast about needing a cultural shift or we hear it all the time on social media, society needs to change. Well, guess what? We are society and change is uncomfortable so this is going to be uncomfortable but it doesn’t have, discomfort doesn’t mean mean-spirited, discomfort doesn’t even necessarily mean confrontational, it just means uncomfortable and I think if women paid attention, they would actually see that there are many areas of our lives where women take on discomfort in order to not make the people around us uncomfortable and I’m at the point where I’m like, “Why? Why do I have to take on that discomfort all the time?” Annie: Yeah. And as we’ve said numerous times already on this episode, if you can’t find the courage to do that for yourself, maybe you can find the courage to do it for your kids. Jen: Absolutely. Lauren: Yeah. Annie: And if you’re not there yet, if you’re just like creating awareness and like, kind of getting your feet under you and kind of deciding what, like, where, how you feel about your body, where you stand, like, that’s really cool too, like this wasn’t an overnight process for the three of us. It’s not like we just jumped from 0 to 100 and now we’re, like, “Chop chop! Like, no, we’re not going to do that!” Like, this was like a, this is a process- Lauren: Definitely. Annie: Where we grew in our comfort to have these conversations. Jen: Is there time for me to share a quick personal story about just this as a reality? Annie: Yes. Jen: So this is based on my own history of very disordered eating and lots of weight talk with my sisters and the effects of that. So my kids are a bit younger and I’ve been able to be on the ball with them from a younger age which has been great. My sister’s children are older, my younger sister, my older sister’s children has children as well, but I’m speaking about my younger sister’s children and so her daughter at 9 years old, she came to me once I got to the house, she came to me and she had just sprouted up. And you know, different kids have different growth patterns but what with my nieces she kind of plumped out first and then she shot up. So what happened when she shot up is that her jean shorts became too big on her around the waist and it happened in just a matter of a couple of months so I get there one day and she comes up to me and she’s like “Auntie, look, Auntie, look!” and she was trying to show me the gap between her denim and her waist and I realized she’s trying to show me and basically bragging at validation and connect with me that she has lost weight and she’s 9 years old but I also was hit with this just feeling like I wanted to throw up, thinking of all the times I had shown up at their door to talk to my sister and the first thing out of my mouth was “I lost 5 pounds last week” or “I put on 5 pounds” or, and my sister’s oldest daughter had just grown up with her aunt, who she loves and admirers and looks up to so much, I’m pumping my own tires here but I’m pretty sure that’s how she feels about me. Annie: Naturally. Jen: She has grown up with that “cool auntie” speaking like that around her so of course she’s now coming to me at 9 years old and trying to connect with me over it the same way she sees her mother and me connecting and she’s just trying to be part of our crew and I was devastated and so not OK with it and so had to take a hard look at myself and go, “This is not OK .This is not OK that our family talks like this and I have been a big contributor to it and I will not do this anymore.” So that was about 5 years ago now, so very happy to see it going in the other direction and what my sister says now, because now we’re these empowered women fighting diet culture, she can’t believe that her daughters have gotten to the age they have and not talked about dieting with her yet, where my sister remembers dieting at a way younger age than even her girls have, so there’s hope, there’s hope here, right, we can make a huge impact. Annie: Absolutely and you know, I just had a little lunch talk a couple weeks ago and it was with a group of about 10 or 12 women, mostly moms and they cannot, they kept expressing concern about how to say the right thing, like, they’re so worried about saying the right thing when it comes to body talk and how we talk about how to take care of our bodies and how to respond when they’re talking about weight loss or how their body looks or they want to wear makeup or they want to wear certain types of clothes. They’re just so worried about saying the right thing that they sometimes don’t say anything at all. And I think, you know, when they were asking about what to do and how to approach this, the first thing that came to mind was what Hillary McBride and her Mothers Daughters and Body Image podcast which, if you haven’t, if this is a topic that concerns you, if you haven’t listened to that, please listen to that, but she pretty much hammers home that perfection, in this situation isn’t required, it’s intention and consistency that make the most difference and so you don’t have to say the right thing all the time. It’s really your intent to have the conversation behind it and just as I said, you can just be curious about when people make comments about your body you can just be curious about what your kids are saying, like, how does that feel when this happens? How do you feel about that? Did you enjoy that food? How’s your body feeling? How did you feel when Aunt Jan or Uncle Ted made that comment about me or about your body or when Gramma said that about your plate? Did you think about that at all? Like, it can just be as simple as that. Jen: The thing is if we talk about diet culture brainwashing children and us, we don’t want to be on the other end, brainwashing our kids, right? Like I want to raise critical thinkers and the way to do that, I think, is to ask them these questions and ask myself these questions and maybe and you can even process it together, right? Like that is totally OK. Annie: Yeah, but I think the key is, you know, is setting the boundaries when you’re ready and when you’re comfortable and then to keep having these conversations with your family members, with your community, with your kids, like, they’re hard conversations, they can be uncomfortable, it can be a lot of emotional ties and baggage that come along with some of these conversations but it’s worth it. It’s totally worth it and I just want to kind of wrap up by just acknowledging, again, that we’ve kind of touched on this but there’s work to be done kind of on sort of 2 levels here: at the individual level, you know, like our own selves deciding what our own biases, acknowledging those, creating awareness about our own behaviors, our own talk, you know, like, how many days, how many times a day do you talk about someone else’s body or are you reading about someone else’s body or are you listening to comments about someone else’s body? At one point in my life that consumed me. I talked about other people’s body all the time. Jen: Right or what articles are you clicking on where, you know, there’s those little like click baity ads at the bottom, “How this mom got her body back in 3 weeks” or “What this mom’s abs looked like at 4 weeks postpartum” and then the picture just like cleverly hides and you’re like, “I gotta click on this.” Lauren: That was me constantly reading about every single diet. Jen: Yeah, right, where now I just, you know, I know it’s all B.S. and I know the more we click on it, the more we are telling these marketers that we want to see more of it, right and they’ll just keep showing us more, so I’m like “Nope” and on Facebook when I see stuff like that I report it as inappropriate. Annie: So yeah, there’s definitely work to be done on an individual level, you know, our own behaviors, our shame, our conversations that we’re having and then at a community level, you know, and community can mean just in your own home, you know. That’s- Jen: Yeah, so speaking of that, I’ll just share what I’ve been up to since my holiday is that I just completed my Free To Be Talks facilitator training and I’m going to be teaching body image workshops in my children’s school and I am trained to be able to talk about this to kid boys and girls in grade 6, 7 and 8 and so that was me, that was on my vision board last year where, you know, we were doing all this work through Balance365 and I was like, “You know what? I really want to be out there in my community and I would love to start talking to children about this when they’re younger.” So I just did that training and that’s my way of contributing and being part of the conversation in my community and I would encourage anybody who is interested in that to to check out Free To Be Talks. It’s a nonprofit organization out of Vancouver, Canada but when I was on the training there was lots of women from the States on the training as well who will be doing this in their schools but you can and that’s a thing, like don’t, do not, you know, we read these stats to you guys and it’s shocking and you can sometimes feel powerless, like how can I even stop this? But you can and you can make a difference in your community and if all of us had that attitude, the change would come. Annie: I just get chills and for verklempt, like we could do this, guys,! Yes! Jen: Yes! Annie: I think that’s awesome, snaps for Jen. Jen: Thank you very much. Annie: Yeah, anything to add, Lauren? Anything you want to add before we wrap up? Lauren: No, I think you guys hit it all, I know I was just kind of a more quiet bystander, but you guys were just right in your groove and I think you guys hit it out of the park. I’ll just note that as someone who experienced secondhand dieting, and then the path that it led me down, that fuels me to be the change and not be afraid to stand up and say “Hey, this isn’t OK, we’re not going to talk about this.” Annie: Oh yeah, I think that’s, I mean, I don’t want to speak for you, Jen, but I think that’s why the three of us are in the business we’re in, we’re trying to be the change that we needed when we were younger. Jen: Yeah, totally. Lauren: Yes. Annie: Like, the voice, the message, the solution, the opportunity that we needed when we were younger and that’s, you know, how we are paying it forward, so to speak and I’m going to start crying so I’m going to stop talking. Yeah, so anyways, just to wrap up, when you’re out of your bubble this holiday season, moving into the new year, moving into summer, spring and summer, don’t be afraid to have a conversation. It doesn’t need to be confrontational, argumentative it could just be like “Hey, could we change the subject. I don’t want to talk about this when my kids are in earshot and you know, just start creating awareness and shifting the conversations that you’re having within your home and with your girlfriends and with your family can make a really, really big impact. To me, it’s, I picture waves of an ocean and you know, what one wave just kind of moves right into the other and it’s like, we just all connect to each other, eventually. Lauren: Yep. Annie: And if we’re all in the same page, if we’re all moving the same direction, we can make a really, really big impact on our own lives and more importantly, the lives of our kids so they don’t have to grow up in diet culture and negative body image and weight talk and all that junk. Jen: Yes, we do not have to normalize for them what was normalized for us. Annie: Alright, awkward ending. Lauren: As usual. Annie: You know what, that’s going to be on my topic, on my to do list today, so find a way to wrap up the podcast that’s not extremely awkward. Jen: That’s not like, “OK, bye!” Lauren: Okay, bye! Annie: No. But, alright, thanks guys. Lauren: Love you, bye! Annie: It was fun, kay, bye! Jen: Bye. Lauren: Bye. The post Setting Body Talk Boundaries Over The Holidays appeared first on Balance365.

The trio is back again for Episode 8 but this time with a twist. Joined by the hilarious Jazz from the Hatch Group we discuss how to show a potential partner that you're "the one" without doing too much. We dive into the ongoing issue of homophobia, down-low men, and suspect photos. Jazz explains why he's anti-relationship, G gives his opinion on bitch-made men and Lauren Love explains how being a fake lesbian is detrimental to your health. Follow us on IG @currentlyunavailablepodcast and our special guest @thehatchgroup

Stories from Stephanie Parker, McKenah Larson, Ashley Cunigan, Lauren Love, and Samantha Thornton.