Anchor Baby – the audio

Yes, I’m still on my budget. In theory . Somehow, I’ve still managed to – and you’ll know this if you read my money diaries – spend a zillion dollars a week. Which really makes me feel like… why bother?! If the money gets spent either way, shouldn’t I just be buying all the things I want to buy?!?! (The answer is no.) Anyway, here are the things I’m not buying lately (although I really want to). A...

5-star discoveries from my travels * noise-cancelling headphones for the plane. Life-CHANGING. * James by Percival Everett * this IKEA chair * Foster by Claire Keegan (no, I haven’t seen the film but now want to) * flying to London for a day on your own (10/10, even on Ryanair) * Marks & Spencer’s mid-rise barrel-leg jeans , which are just €39 and excellent (I now own three pairs) * Aimee Connolly...

Here are a few more things I’ve had clogging up my browser tabs for the last few weeks – from an eminently sensible (I was going to write “misandrist” but why would I write something I didn’t believe?!) T-shirt to the perfect windbreaker (a description I never thought I’d write) and the solution to all of my summer-with-kids woes… I’d love to know what you’ve bought and recommend, if anything, lat...

I’ve been having a very up and down time lately in terms of my mental health. There are a lot of factors I could attribute this to. I’ve been working harder than I’ve ever worked before, with less downtime than I’ve ever had at any time in my life, for one thing. I’ve introduced ADHD medication to a cocktail of “bear with me, brain” drugs, a cocktail whose efficacy I was already skeptical about. A...

I’m sitting in the lobby of the YMCA. It’s pretty loud. The air conditioning – or, I guess, the heating (it’s below freezing today, when it was 30C on Friday, which is very typical of spring in the Midwest but never ceases to surprise me) – is running, a steady hum coming from the exposed ceiling. The door opens every few seconds; a man enters, two women, a mum with her three kids, bags and jacket...

Wednesday is both the hardest and the easiest day of the week. The hardest: the working week – or, rather, Brandin’s working week, the week, for me, of being at home with the children, trying to eke out minutes here and there to write or to record (or both) while they nap or are adequately distracted by the TV, or each other – is more than halfway done, but there are still two long days to go. Tho...

Two Saturdays ago was “picture day” at my four-year-old’s soccer lesson, which takes place in the YMCA near our house. I’ve been in the US for six years now, but only recently have I truly started to partake in the “mom” culture I’ve heard so much about (yes, fine, on TikTok): the four-year-old is in soccer and swimming lessons; as soon as we see a 20-degree forecast we plan a trip to the local pl...

I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t on a diet As documented here previously, I’ve been on some diet or other since I first joined Weight Watchers at the age of 14. I remember that first meeting, in Scoil Chrónáin in Rathcoole, in the very room I sat in for my very first year of primary school. Since that first, fateful foray into the diet industrial complex, I’ve tried Slimming World and keto,...

Good bacteria, bad bacteria and violent chocolate bunnies I’m not quite sure how we get on the topic of bacteria, late on a Sunday evening as Atlas eats two slices of toast with butter at the kitchen counter. He once again refused to eat his dinner – a cheese quesadilla, prepared by his Dad, followed by a bowl of spaghetti, prepared by me, followed by a bowl of strawberries, requested by him – eac...

Nobody’s really talking about the cruel downside of losing weight in your 40s. Or maybe they are, but they’re talking about it by a different name: Ozempic face. According to Northwell Health , “Ozempic face… describes the facial changes that can accompany rapid weight loss when using medications like Ozempic… for weight-loss treatment.” Northwell’s own bariatric surgeon, Dr Andrea Bedrosian, goes...

It feels, sometimes, as though I’m the only person in the western hemisphere (am I even in the western hemisphere any more?! I just Googled it. Yes, I am) who hasn’t seen the Northern Lights with her own eyes. This is not because of my weakening eyesight, although that’s certainly an issue. I had laser eye surgery over a decade ago, a freebie offered to me in exchange for an interview with the hea...

This piece – obviously – talks about intentional weight loss, the (totally b******t) BMI scale, weight loss medication and weight loss programmes, so if any of that feels like it might be difficult for you to read, please, don’t. I should also give the disclaimer that I am not, nor have I ever been, over 300lbs, or in the categories of superfat or infinifat. I probably haven’t even been large fat....

Life has never felt quite as messy as it does right now – and I’m including the years I spent freelancing as a writer, podcaster, radio presenter, TV stylist and magazine stylist all while trying to nab the man of my dreams*, going to the opening of an envelope a minimum of three times weekly, while living in a one-bedroom house with no hot running water. (My landlord: “Can’t you just boil the ket...

I meet a friend for coffee on a Friday morning at The Hive, one of a handful of coffee shops in Fort Wayne that has a play area for children. At one end of the seating area, they have a play kitchen, a table, a shelf full of books and a little egg chair, all in varying sepia tones. The aesthetic is not what I’ve chosen for my own home – thinking that children deserve fun and colour, and shouldn’t...

hunger (həŋ-gər) noun a: a craving or urgent need for food or a specific nutrient b: an uneasy sensation occasioned by the lack of food The small meal wasn't enough to satisfy his hunger . c: a weakened condition brought about by prolonged lack of food died of hunger 2: a strong desire : CRAVING a hunger for success I’d never heard the term “food noise” before the emergence of GLP-1s, or, rather,...

You’d be surprised how much culture I’ve been consuming over these past few weeks, in between furiously preparing my house to be listed, and dying, over and over again, in Donkey Kong Country Returns , so I thought I’d share with the group, in case you, too, need a break from tossing your large gorilla avatar into the depths of a perilous mine shaft. Anchor Baby is a reader-supported publication....

Well, let me start by saying: WOOF. I have a lot of complex, complicated and, frankly, confusing feelings about My Brain on Mounjaro. This is probably not all that surprising, but it’s been hard to get my head around what to say, and how to say it. The best way for me to get all of this down – and free up space, so to speak, for a more thoughtful, robust examination of all of this, coming soon – i...

I’ve always, as my mother is fond of telling me, been a jealous person. “You’re like my friend Allison*,” she’ll tell me, referring to a friend of hers who died of cancer in her early forties. “She was always very jealous, even when we were children.” That Allison is dead makes no difference to Mum’s assessment of her – truly, the two things I know about her are that “she was always dyeing her hai...

No, we are not pulling any punches here because I. Have. Had. ENOUGH. We’re all (too) familiar with the classic influencer trope of “don’t worry, fatties! I have rolls too!” that’s been doing the rounds ever since IG was founded by a pair of entrepreneurial tech bros in 2010. (Do you think they knew what it was going to do to us all ? Forgive me but I suspect two thin white dudes didn’t give much...

Before we get started, I know weight loss content isn’t for everyone. It might not be for you! If that’s the case, but you’d like to keep reading the rest of my content, you can opt out by heading to the Anchor Baby newsletter home page, clicking on your avatar on the top right and hitting “manage subscription”. In there, you’ll see exactly what you’re getting emails and notifications for, and you...

Anchor Baby is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Fried bread reminds me of my granny. White bread in a hot pan, fried in bacon grease or dripping or a combination of the two; her fridge was never without a small bowl of Frytex into which she’d add the hot fat from whatever food she was frying that day. For breakfa...

This post contains quotes from threads on Tattle that are dedicated to discussing me. They’re not the only posts on there – some are complimentary! People post about how they like my writing, or our podcast; sometimes they berate meaner posters for what they’ve written about me. But, as tends to happen with these things, it’s not the nice posts that stick with me. It’s the rest of them . She’s nex...

Early on Saturday morning, I drive over to my sister’s house to meet her and a friend for a trip to Markle, a town about 20 minutes south of Fort Wayne where, I’m told, there’s a large antiques “mall” worth checking out. I hear this from a woman on Facebook Marketplace from whom I’m buying some vintage kids’ wallpaper, a Sandra Boynton zoo print with corresponding borders which – to the surprise o...

It’s been over a month since the AI Barbie trend took over my algorithm – and yours, too, I bet – and I’m still thinking about it. I didn’t partake at the time, because I have complicated feelings about AI. I don’t think we should use it for things we have, up to now, used artists for ; I worry about the environmental impact of asking Chat GPT what we should have for lunch; I’m concerned about the...

There are some books which, while reading, make me start to think about their potential as movies, TV shows or, since 2022 I guess, “limited series” (when and why did we start calling TV shows “limited series” and how different would our lives have been, had My So-Called Life been marketed as such?). When I read JM Coetzee’s Disgrace , for example, which was assigned reading in one of my college E...