Busy Woman's Guide to Wellbeing

Weight loss does not have to mean ‘diet’. And yet we have been led to believe that we can’t have one without the other. However, there are some absolutely fundamental things that we need to put in place first if we want to see successful weight loss (i.e. not just losing some weight and then putting it straight back on again, but actually sustaining it for the long term).  And this is exactly...

Let’s be honest. Most of us spend good chunks of our lives in either the role of the Martyr or the Princess.  In the first role, we’re the put upon woman, who is dealing with everyone else’s s**t, doing all the things that everyone else in our lives needs and never ever doing anything for ourselves. In the second, we’re blaming external circumstances every single time we’re not getting the th...

When it comes to a healthy body - one which isn’t in pain and which moves well to support your life and your training, we sometimes just focus on either high intensity exercise or stretching. Or a bit of both. And that’s an amazing place to start. But sometimes we need a bit more than that. So when I talked to Eoin Everard in this week’s podcast episode (yes, my very first male guest!) I got the l...

I’ve spent years trying to work out how to be more productive. And honestly for far too long I thought I just needed to power through, to hustle and that eventually I would get through the to do list. But this mentality just meant that I stayed stuck in the same cycle, wondering why I could never quite manage to get out of overwhelm mode and safely to a place that felt a bit calmer and where I was...

Sugar can be such an emotive thing, can’t it? It's our quick energy fix, our comfort, our indulgence, our reward. It can be one of our favourite things. And yet it can also be a source of real resistance and guilt and struggle. We may have tried to get rid of our sugar addiction many many times over, but we always end up back at the beginning! Well this week I’m going to be giving you a very diffe...

This year I’ve made ONE really simple change to my own workout routine that’s helped me to go from feeling a little bit uninspired on my fitness plateau, to feeling refreshed and revitalised. So, I’m using my own fitness journey and that one small change to inspire you to see how you can refresh your workout routine without having to tear it all apart and start over again. Today, I’m revealing: a...

This week I’ve got my first repeat guest, Samala Bygraves, and we had such an amazing chat. We talked about her book, Spiral, and her experience of healing from trauma, but we also got into so much more than that, including: how the way we see ourselves, the actions we take and the way we relate to the world can be so heavily influenced by our past experiences how our past can affect how we feel a...

As the saying goes, find some exercise you love and it will never feel hard. But is that really the whole story? I’m going to be exploring this question today and talking all about what we’re missing when we just focus on this, as well as why it may be doing you a bit of a disservice. This is not about saying you shouldn’t find something you love, BUT it is about allowing yourself to be open to th...

We all know that better nutrition, more exercise, self care are good for us. But what about when we think we’ve made the decision to make changes in those areas, but those changes just aren’t happening, in spite of our good intentions? We can end up existing in a limbo, stuck between what we want to change and the reality of where we are in our lives, and it can just make us feel stuck. This is wh...

If you’ve ever tried to introduce a good habit or kick a bad one, you’ll know that it’s easier said than done. And frustratingly even when we know that changing that habit is going to be really beneficial, and even when we really want to do it for ourselves, it just isn’t as simple as making the decision and doing the thing. So today I want to dive into this and I’m going to be talking all about:...

Creating the right environment for change and for getting the best out of yourself is one of the simplest and yet most powerful things you can do. Hacking your environment and circumstances can really smooth the path, reduce the amount of thinking you have to do, increase the automaticity of your actions and minimise the friction that makes it that much harder to work towards healthy new habits. S...

This week it’s all about the midlife. That transition that begins from our early 40s and can last well into our 50s, where we are not only experiencing physical symptoms of the peri to post menopause. But we are also entering into a new phase of life. And this can come with some resistance and feelings that we don’t necessarily know what to do with. So, today I’m joined by Laura Valenti, who’s goi...

We all have busy periods in our lives. But what about when the busy never seems to end? When you’re constantly feeling overwhelmed and just want life to slow down? Well today I’m going to be sharing some of the strategies that I’ve used (and continue to use) that have helped me to recover from overwhelm and burnout, to find a bit more calm and balance within my life.  This episode is all abou...

It can be incredibly frustrating when we’ve committed to making change within our life, such as more exercise, upping our nutrition game or slowing down and spending more time on self care, and yet we just can’t seem to move the needle. Believe me, I’ve been there and it’s really bloody annoying! So today I want to help you get unstuck if you feel that there are areas where you’re not quite reachi...

For a lot of us, our menstrual cycle has been nothing more than an annoying, inconvenient fact of life for the last 10, 20, 30 years. Or even a source of pain and frustration if we’ve suffered with problem periods. But what if our periods could actually hold the key to helping us to be more productive and creative, if we could harness them to help us enhance our lives? Well the amazing news is tha...

The Christmas goodies are finished (almost) and we’ve maybe not exercised (or even moved!) very much for a while. So this is usually when we start thinking about how we’re going to “sort ourselves out” and when we go for broke in the gym, start diets and basically punish ourselves for all the indulgence of the holiday season. But we all know that has all usually fallen by the wayside by Febru...

I’ve sneaked in an extra episode to accompany you in twixtmas. As well as an invite for you, I’ve also got a few tips on how to plan for a fabulous 2023, to ensure that you bring all of the things that you want into your life in the new year.  And if that includes wanting to feel fitter, stronger, healthier and more energised, then come and join me inside The ChickFit Members Club - taking al...

As this is the final episode of 2022, I wanted to round up a few of the key messages from this year and leave you with a few very important things that I want you to remember. This is all about sending you into Christmas and the New Year with lots of positive feelings. My Christmas Message to you if you like! Resources: Join the ChickFit Members Club - www.chickfit.co.uk/membersclub My website htt...

As humans we are actually programmed to focus much more on the bad than on the good. We shrug off compliments, but obsess when someone says something not so nice about us. We’re much more likely to focus on the stuff we don’t like about our bodies than on the things we do. And we hear way more bad news than good news. But as the saying goes - where attention goes energy flows. And so the more we f...

Does day-to-day life sometimes feel like a battle that you’re just not winning? A battle to get through the to-do list, a battle to lose weight, a battle to keep up with work? I feel like so many of us are in this place and have been for a long time - but now more than ever. And it’s exhausting. It’s also not our fault because there’s lots of ways in which pressure is heaped on us from outside. Ho...

We’ve all heard about mindfulness, and the premise of it sounds amazing doesn’t it? Becoming more tuned into the here and now, learning to enjoy life more and less worry about what comes next all the time. Especially when we feel run ragged with endless to do lists, demands and things that need our attention. And when we’re in that place where we can’t see the wood for the trees, mindfulness can f...

As a recovering perfectionist myself, I know all too well the pressure we can put ourselves under to do everything perfectly, and without ever making any mistakes. But for many of us this drive for perfectionism can end up leaving us really stuck. I know, because I’ve been there many times myself. So, this week’s episode is all about giving you the permission you need to be perfectly imperfect. I’...

Procrastination. A feeling a lot of us are very familiar with. And something that often stops us from doing the things that really matter, but which may push us out of our comfort zone. Whenever we have a big, important thing to do, we can always find at least 17 other small, easy tasks that need doing first. Am I right? Well today we’re going to dive into this. I’ll be sharing with you: Why we pr...

Hands up if you’d love to get into regular exercise and start feeling fitter, stronger and more confident. And hands up if you’re not quite sure where to start - and this is putting you off getting going. Maybe you’ve never really done any regular exercise and the idea of getting started is feeling really daunting. Or maybe you have exercised in the past, but you’ve been out of the game for a whil...

Is weight loss without diets even possible? And if it is how do we go about it? There are literally millions of women out there who I know would love to give up a lifetime of diets. But they also don’t want to give up on the dream of weight loss. Which means many of us are stuck in a catch-22. Miserable being on diets all the time even though we’re often not getting the long-term results that we c...