Out Loud With Cindy Schwartz

Ardra Shephard has spent decades learning to live with a body that doesn't always play by the rules. But MS is only one part of her story, and it certainly doesn't define all of it. On this author series episode of  Out Loud , I sit down with Ardra, one of Canada's leading MS advocates and influencers, to talk about her memoir, Fallosophy . We get into letting go of the life you imagined, where he...

What if the thing that finally helped you love yourself was… taking your clothes off? Lyane spent most of her life believing her body was something to fix. Years of doing anything at any cost to finally feel comfortable in her own skin. Something her mother said in the final days of her life shifted everything. Lyane slowly started questioning the beliefs she had held her whole life and began look...

Humanitarienne with Dr. Kirsten Johnson What happens when the girl who once lived in a punk rock house, survived on odd jobs and soup kitchens, and didn't even finish high school goes on to become a physician, scholar and humanitarian? That is just the beginning of Kirsten Johnson's extraordinary story. In Humanitarienne, Kirsten takes us from a difficult childhood and a teenage search for somewhe...

Season 1 taught me a lot. And now I'm taking those lessons into Season 2. After 12 conversations with women I thought I knew, I realized Out Loud isn't just about stories of resilience and liberation. It's about  becoming, and who we are on the other side of coming Out Loud to share our stories.  In this bridge episode, I share what I learned making Season One, and what I'm taking with me into the...

29 years going strong… but it all started with a very questionable courtship.... In this special episode of Out Loud , I'm joined by my husband, Brian, for a very honest, sometimes very funny and sometimes very heartbreaking look back at the first year and a half of our relationship. It was the late '90s. We were young, figuring ourselves out, and navigating a courtship that was… let's just say, n...

There are moments in life when everything seems to happen at once. When the circumstances are so overwhelming that you can't imagine how you're going to get through them, and yet, somehow, you do. This is Jen Smordin's story. In the same month that the world shut down, Jen was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, standing on the precipice of separating from her husband, raising two young children, and s...

What if you grew up believing that most of the people you loved were destined for hell? Casey Rae Nunn was born into what she believed was simply a devoted Christian community in rural Manitoba. From an early age, she was taught there was one right way to live, one right way to believe, and one path to salvation. As she met children outside her community at school, she was told by the adults in he...

What happens when your greatest fear becomes your reality? For Melanie Roy, the fear of abandonment wasn't just something she worried about, it became the defining circumstance of her life. Over the years, she experienced the unimaginable loss of every member of her immediate family, forcing her to navigate profound grief, heartbreak, and loneliness long before most people ever face those challeng...

What if the darkest moments of your month weren't simply PMS, but a serious and treatable medical condition? In this powerful and deeply personal conversation, Christine shares her experience living with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), a severe and often misunderstood condition that affects millions of women yet remains significantly underdiagnosed. For years, Christine found herself trapp...

At just 28 years old, a week after getting engaged, Lisa Braidwood was diagnosed with stage 3C breast cancer and was forced to confront an uncertain future at the very moment her life was just beginning. Twenty-one years later, she is living proof that the story doesn't always end where it's predicted to. In this episode, Lisa shares the raw, unfiltered reality of her diagnosis, treatment, but thi...

What happens when the life you've been told to want isn't the life you actually want? In this episode, Cindy sits down with Erin Marguerite to talk about choosing an unconventional path long before it became trendy to do so. Growing up as the oldest of four children, Erin learned early that her role was to help. She describes feeling "shrink-wrapped" by family expectations, often putting her own n...

Amy Miller spent most of her life wondering why she felt different. Growing up, humour wasn't just entertainment, it was survival. Amy learned early on to use comedy as a way to navigate life's challenges, mask her struggles, and find connection in a world where she never quite felt like she belonged. She talks openly about feeling out of step with others, speaking too fast, thinking too fast, and...

Kat was so focused on the pregnancy and delivery that she never stopped to think about what would come after. Postpartum depression wasn't on her radar. Her story begins when her new baby arrived and the joy she had been promised didn't. Instead, there was a darkness she didn't recognize. Thoughts that didn't feel like her own. A disconnection from her newborn that left her completely lost during...

The conversation wasn't finished. So we went back in. Following the powerful episode 3, Cindy Schwartz and Melanie Richards sit back down,  this time with Robin Glance, Montreal-based registered Anti-diet dietitian, Health at Every Size advocate, and the woman who will quietly change the way you think about food, your body, and what healthy actually means. Robin doesn't do diets. She doesn't weigh...

When Mariana's world was shaken by three unexpected words from her husband, her first instinct was to do what she'd always done, give more, try harder, hold on tighter.  What she didn't yet know was that her anxious attachment style had been quietly writing the rules of her relationships her whole life, tracing all the way back to her childhood.  It wasn't until she stopped trying to fix everythin...

Lana Burton is an educator, a mom of two, wife and rugby referee & one of the most fiercely honest, unflinchingly real voices you'll hear this season. She joins Cindy to talk about what happens when you want something with every fiber of your being, but your body betrays you, and no one can tell you why. Her epic quest to become a mother was fraught with more than a dozen failed rounds of IVF, and...

Most of us have spent years trying to shrink ourselves, and rarely stopped to wonder whether our bodies actually wanted that. Melanie Richards is the founder of Happy Tree yoga, and the force behind Fuck Skinny, a movement based in reclaiming joy, health, and identity from a culture obsessed with thinness. In this conversation, we talk about what disordered eating really looks like, how clean eati...

Beca is a nurse practitioner, yoga teacher, and author of The Third Option, a memoir centered on the final year of her marriage and its unexpected unraveling. In this thoughtful conversation, Beca and Cindy explore the lessons she learned, the accountability she found in examining her role, and the power of narrative that led her to her liberation. It's about so much more than the ending of a 17 y...

After 22 years in a corporate leadership career, Cindy Schwartz faced the question many people quietly ask themselves: Is this really the life I want? She made the bold decision to leave the identity she had built and step into something far more uncertain, but far more aligned. Joined by her dear friends Hilary and Jenn, Cindy shares the honest story behind that leap, unpacking the deeply persona...