Out Loud With Cindy Schwartz

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...