There’s no polite way to tell people you’ve had half your stomach removed.

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It doesn’t belong in small talk. You can’t slip it between bitching about the weather and a coffee order. There’s no emoji for it, and I bloody love an emoji. There’s no tone of voice that makes it sound normal. And when you do say it, people pause for just a second too long before the questions start.

So, aside from my closest circle, I mostly didn’t say it.

Not because I’m ashamed. I’m absolutely not. But because people make it strange. They want a before and after, like a home reno update. They want proof of my new discipline. They want reassurance that I still eat cake, and they want reassurance that I am 100% nutritionally perfect because “should you be eating that, given you’ve had.. surgery..” like the lifesaving procedure I had is a dirty word.

But the truth is more straightforward and less satisfying. I had bariatric surgery for my health, not for anyone’s gaze, and definitely not my own. I couldn’t care less about the space I took up. Readers of my substack from years ago will attest to that.

By the time I made the decision to have surgery, my body was no longer quietly coping. Breathing had become hard work. My fatigue had a sound like a low hum that followed me everywhere. I was coughing through my sleep, through meetings, through life. My lungs were losing patience. My oxygen levels hovered in the kind of territory that makes nurses frown.

I wasn’t chasing a smaller body. I was trying to stay in the one I had and not die. I had surgery because, without it, my lungs would have given up.

But survival stories don’t sell well.
Half the world thinks you’re a lazy cheat.
The other half thinks you’re an accomplice to diet culture.
You learn quickly that there’s no way to win that argument. You can only shrug your shoulders and choose to live anyway.

Choose life, lol.

My surgery was well over a year ago, and it didn’t fix everything. No magic happens where you have surgery and wake up healthy. It took six months before surgery and another six months post op of hard work, pain, nausea, and more to get to where I am today. And it is still work today and will be every day. Surgery is a lifelong decision to choose life. Not a single day in the future will I be able to relax where nutrition and exercise are concerned.

I’m not thin. Food continues to be a challenge. But this surgery gave me a break in the weather to start again.

I say starting again because you have to relearn everything. How to eat. How to move. How to feel hunger without panic. How to sit with emptiness, literal and otherwise.

I also had to learn how to walk again without tripping over my now too-fast feet.

Despite all this, I have luck on my side. My background in nutrition, exercise and rehabilitation meant I already knew how to rebuild a body. I just never expected it would be my own. And even with that knowledge, it was brutally hard. Getting up off the couch felt like climbing a mountain when you’re initially living on 200 calories a day. Knowing what to do and having the energy to do it are two very different things.

Most people don’t start this journey with that kind of roadmap, and they shouldn’t have to. That’s part of why I’m here now to make the rebuilding a little less lonely, a little less guesswork.

It’s not the “easy way out.” It’s the hardest kind of out that breaks you before it lets you rebuild.

And somewhere in that rebuilding, I found movement again. Real movement. Not punishment or penance. Not an apology to my body, but a chance to start again.

That’s the part people don’t talk about enough. The quiet, ordinary joy of being able to walk without pain. To lift something heavy and feel strong instead of trapped. To take a deep breath and not feel like you’re borrowing air from someone else.

So yes, I had surgery.
No, I won’t show you before and after photos.

I don’t owe anyone my medical history.
But I owe myself the truth of what it took to get to live today.

And I know it’s wacky. But I have a deep calling to help other people find that joy of choosing life.

Because there’s a whole community of us, stitched, healing, and figuring it out in real time.

We don’t need more transformation stories. We need the truth. We need trainers and coaches who understand what a post-surgery body really feels like. What fatigue really means. What strength actually costs. Because I haven’t found a single surgeon who performs this surgery with lived experience to guide their patients properly.

As a bariatric patient I had all the specialists helping me, but none of them really knew what I was going through.

And so, as a former personal trainer and nutrition coach, I want to say that even though I used to be strong and fit, it doesn’t take much to get sick like I did. I believe my experience on both sides of the fence can help, and so quietly in the background, that’s exactly what I will be doing.

I will share what I know, with people in my situation. I’m building a space for pre and post bariatric patients. Slow, strong, real world fitness for bodies that are fighting hard to survive. If that sounds like you, or you’re otherwise interested, you know where to find me.

This isn’t a confession, but it is context.

So, how do you think it went, when I wrote out a whole very thoughtful and well-researched post on Turmeric for menopause, when my lovely puppy jumped on my keyboard and then this shit happened. And yes I know I should draft in word or docs or some crap like that, but I didn’t. I raw-dogged it and typed straight into Substack, and then, this.

Cool.

It was a good post, by my very average standards. And of course I can’t remember enough of it to rewrite. But the whole thing got me thinking about rage, and about how some parts of perimenopause aren’t hot flashes or hot takes, they’re just deeply average experiences. Or weird. Or fine, I guess.

Help me out. Are these things pretty standard for everyone, or more of a peri thing?

I’ve been wondering:

• Does everyone else tell the car radio to shut up when it plays a song you don’t like or are sick of?

• Is it standard to get so emotionally wrecked by a sick dog in a movie that you have to get up and walk it off?

• Is it normal to call your phone a not very nice name because it autocorrected to “duck” again even though it knows damn well you never mean duck?

• Is it ok to feel genuine betrayal when someone you love makes a sound while they eat?

• What about wanting to cry over a bra that no longer fits the way it used to, even though you now hate wearing bras altogether?

• Is it normal to start googling “menopause rage remedies” before smashing through the emergency chocolate, again?

  (I live in Wellington - most of us have emergency boxes of “things” we might need after an earthquake or other natural disaster, and emergency chocolate is one of those things I have in mine)

I know menopause is serious. I know it messes with our bodies, our minds, and our relationships. But it’s also kind of boring sometimes. And repetitive. And it’s wild that something so universal still feels like a secret.

But back to the turmeric post I tried to write before it got yeeted into the void by my beautiful puppy’s paw.

I was linking to this excellent post by Dr Jen Gunter, who writes about menopause through the lens of real science, because she is a scientist, and a damn good one at that.

The Vajenda

Of Mice and Men...and Turmeric and Menopause

Turmeric has been in the news, or rather, complications from turmeric supplements, as 57-year-old Katie Mohan told NBC News her story about turmeric-induced liver injury, which multiple news sites have since picked up. Ms. Mohan’s age is relevant given the highly targeted marketing of turmeric supplements to women for menopa…

Read more

10 months ago · 593 likes · 35 comments · Dr. Jen Gunter

She also writes here about the trouble with turmeric.

Both of her extremely excellent articles point out that the studies conducted to determine whether Turmeric is beneficial for menopause have yielded disappointing results. For a start, using men for a study about women’s health is immediately questionable, but you will howl with laughter or maybe disbelief when you get to the bit about the rats in the first article.

Aside from several countries insisting on warnings for use, the upshot for me is if you enjoy turmeric in your food, cool. If you’re relying on it to fix your hormones, maybe give it a miss.

And while I was looking into the turmeric, I came across a bunch of others that set off my spidey senses. To be fair, I did not do any decent level of reading on these ones. What do you know? Actually good, or a bit crap?

Chlorella - Spotted this one on TikTok after a charming man said it was the golden cure of all the things. Basically it’s a green algae marketed as detoxifying and energising. There’s no strong evidence that I could see about it doing much for menopause. May help boost your B12 levels if you’re deficient? Otherwise, not much.

Ashwagandha - Apparently this is the adaptogen of the moment. I have this at home because someone somewhere (probably social) told me it was good for ADHD and focus and all that. It didn’t do anything personally for me, that my actual medicine took care of but I think it’s supposed to have a mild effect on meno stress for some people.

Maca root - Allegedly good for energy but I couldn’t find any studies that weren’t funded by maca sellers so I don’t know - jury is probably out.

Black cohosh - May help with hot flushes, but results are mixed and some are saying it can mess with your liver. Some countries (Canada for one) have warning labels on black cohosh products for liver damage. Perhaps worth talking to your doc before trying.

Honestly, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And for those of us who are not scientists, we probably won’t understand a good study from a low-quality one. Tread carefully out there my peri pals..

Signing off with a face of zero accountability.

Lou xx

The truth is I’ve been addicted to food for a very long time.
I’ve cycled through being “good” and “bad” with food and nutrition for years. It's exhausting.

At one point, I truly believed the solution was that someone just needed to tell me exactly what to eat and when, and I’d follow the rules, feel better, and the job would be done.

So I tried that.

I saw dietitians, nutritionists, coaches. I did nutrition science courses. I even worked as a personal trainer and coached others to make “good choices.”
You’d think I’d have cracked it by now.

Nope.

It wasn’t until my health really took a nosedive last year that I got help that actually worked. And when I tell you what the game-changing advice was, you’ll laugh. Ready?

“Eat until you are satisfied.”

That’s it.
That was the missing piece.

I was following plans that prescribed exact amounts, counting almonds for goodness' sake, but they never truly filled me up. So, I was constantly hungry, then crashing, and then face-planting into snacks, wondering why I had no willpower.

However, it wasn’t my perceived lack of discipline.
I just wasn’t eating enough.

But we are already eating “well”, right?

My wild guess is nope.

Midlife changes the game, again.

Just like exercise, what filled you and met your nutritional needs in your 20’s and maybe your 30’s, doesn’t have a shit show of being useful now.

Consider the hormonal shitstorm that’s currently going on that probably wasn’t happening in the same way 20 years ago.

Hormones are on a rollercoaster, cortisol is through the roof, and sleep is merely a rumour without melatonin or other supplements helping us out.

It’s no wonder we are feeling like ten bags of shite on a regular Wednesday.

The good news is we can eat our way out of most of this nightmare. And we’re gonna start with protein. HRT is also our friend, but I’m saving that for later.

Protein in every meal.. 30 grams is a good start.

Here’s why.

Protein is our bestie in midlife when we are trying to get through the day without falling apart. First off, we start losing muscle from our mid-30s, and menopause hits the accelerator, so if we want to keep carrying the groceries in one go (or, you know, stand up without groaning), we need to eat protein. It also keeps us full, which means fewer 3 pm raids fuelled by rage and low blood sugar. Plus, protein helps make those nice little brain chemicals like serotonin, so you’re less likely to cry because someone used your good tea towel on the dog. It’s good for bones, too, because estrogen’s leaving the chat and taking our bone density with her, and it helps with blood sugar control so you don’t crash and burn after a carb-only meal.

Protein helps you stay strong, stable, and slightly less feral. Eat more of it.

And it’s not just protein…

To feel actually good in midlife, it’s not just about protein, though it’s definitely the main character. The rest of your plate matters too, especially if you want to stay upright, sane, and regular (yes, we’re going there).

Fibre is your gut’s bestie.

You need more fibre than you think, not just to keep things moving, but to feed the good bugs in your gut, which, by the way, have a lot to say about your mood, immune system, and whether you wake up feeling human or less so.

Fibre also helps you feel full, balances your blood sugar, and keeps snack attacks at bay. You’ll find fibre in veggies, fruit with skin, oats, legumes, chia seeds (those gross little puddings), flax seeds, really grainy bread or brown rice.

Carbs.

There are two kinds of carbs, and even though we have enough complexity going on in our lives - complex carbs are our friend, and simple, uncomplicated carbs are not.

White bread, cereal, and stale crackers aren’t helping. Go nuts on veg, legumes, lentils, quinoa, oats etc will help keep your blood sugar stable, and your mood less murdery.

Healthy fats

It’s not 1992 - we have eyebrows now, and fat is good for us. Avos, even though I personally think they are rank, a bit of olive oil, nuts, seeds, fish, and eggs with the yolk - all help to keep us steady, full, and friendly.

Here’s what it looks like...

I am not a dietitian, it is way out of scope for me to tell you what to eat - remember, only a registered dietitian can do that. But what I can do is show you what I eat and what fills me up. I am not a person who cooks well, so please adjust your expectations accordingly.

Breakfast - Oats and coffee - 30 to 35 grams of protein
- Quick sachet oats made with CalciTrim milk (yellow top)
- A bunch of stuff on top of the oats - you can choose, but I usually have a banana, nuts or nut butter, seeds, sometimes a dollop of skyr yoghurt if it’s not a day where that is making me gag
- Coffee made with CalciTrim milk

Lunch - Nacho bowl thing - 35 to 40 grams of protein
- Beef mince, I bulk make up bolognaise mince stuff and then freeze it into large cubes that I just take out of the freezer and chuck in a lunch box
- Two handfuls of baby spinach wilted down in reheating
- Grated carrot
- Grated cheese
- Medium tomato
- Quest Nacho chips - about half the bag

Here’s a pic because I made this for lunch today (no carrot tho)

Dinner - Lamb stir fry 35 to 40 grams of protein
- Lamb, or whatever meat I have, like 100-150g
- More baby spinach
- Whatever veggies I have but think the big bulky ones - carrots, spinach, cabbage, bok choy, mushrooms, broccoli, cauli..
- Quinoa, or brown rice if I can be faffed with that but I usually can’t be bothered.

The point in all of these is to eat heaps till you’re satisfied, and it might take a bit of time to figure that out. If you’re feeling hungry an hour later, you need more. If you’re stuffed till you’re sore, then ease off. Trial and error, babes, and you’ll get there.

I know you are probably doing this stuff already..

But maybe just not in the right quantity. Maybe not protein lead.

You can scroll through my post archives and see plenty of this stuff - I have been spouting it for years - chicken for breakfast, salads galore! This is all information I learned in my nutrition studies, but the quantities were way off the mark.

And here’s where I was buggering it up.

I was carefully measuring out my food, and it wasn’t enough.

So I can’t and won’t tell you how much of anything you need to eat to feel a bit better. Only you know the answer to that.

What I can tell you is that when I started eating this way - enough food, with proper nutrition, I am a much nicer person.

More importantly:

My blood pressure came down.
My blood sugar stabilised.
My lungs (which were absolutely cooked, holy shit were they cooked) started functioning better.

Wild, right?

Your body is changing. Your needs are changing.
Trying to run on fumes isn’t noble, there is no medal for it, but it will summon the snack goblin and you know her, right. She shows up when you’ve white knuckled your way through a long day without enough food. Often she wants chocolate, cheese, chips, and toast, all at the same.

As I said, I’ve been trying this way for about a year and it’s mostly working. When I eat properly I feel better than I have in years. And yeah, I still eat shite sometimes, that’s life. We’re not robots. We’re not aiming for sainthood, but actual stability. Feeling better. Having enough energy to get through the day without crashing. Reducing blood pressure, sugar in blood, and maybe even improving cholesterol.

We’re not restricting, we’re repairing.

You’re not broken. You’re just hungry.

Feed yourself. You are worthy of good food, and you are worthy of feeling good.

Lou x

If you see this sales pitch, run. Or at least, tread carefully.

This is the classic marketing trope, almost always posted by a cis male trainer or coach.
They’ve built an entire fitness business around one thing - women over 40 who’ve gained weight they don’t want, for reasons they don’t understand.

Why?

Why are young male trainers frothing over older women’s hormonal chaos?

Sure, there could be a plausible reason. Maybe they live with someone going through it. Maybe they’ve seen firsthand how brutal the ‘pause can be, and they genuinely want to help. I will always applaud any man who’s taken his experience and empathy and channelled it into something actually useful.

But my cynical guess?

They’ve clocked that perimenopause and menopause are the latest wellness goldmine.
A hormonal Bermuda Triangle where women feel like shit, don’t know what’s happening to their bodies, and are desperate for relief.

Cue Chadley, standing in a tank top in front of a squat rack:

“Are you upset by weight gain, brain fog, night sweats, mood swings, vision fuckery? Well, have I got the programme for you...”

Give me strength.

It is a trap.

If you’re in the thick of it and looking for support, you do have options.
A great trainer - male or female - will listen, learn, and tailor your training with care.
But unless that guy has actually studied how female hormones work (and more importantly, how they don’t anymore), gap it.

Some of these dudes have built a business off the back of desperate women who don’t know where to turn. And their entire knowledge base?
They read a book.

Probably the same book you could buy and read for yourself.

They’re not experts. They’re parrots.
And it’s the ultimate fitness mansplain.

This isn’t a rant against men in fitness. The good ones? Gold.
They don’t centre their whole brand around your hormonal despair.
They don’t try to “fix” you. They train all the people with empathy, skill, and intelligence.

The difference is easy to spot once you know what to look for.
Just don’t hand your money or your midlife body over to Chadley the Hormone Whisperer.

But seriously, what are we supposed to do when our hormones are stampeding from our body?

You lift.
Heavy, but not for hours. Just enough to build back the muscle midlife is trying to steal.

You move.
Fast and short intervals that leave you breathless but not requiring an ambo, and definitely not bored out of your skull on a cross-trainer or a treadmill.

You rest.
Properly. Sleep is now your CEO and recovery is it.

You eat.
Eat way more than you think you should. Carbs are not the enemy, but you gotta get that protein in somehow.

You are not broken.
You are not a before photo.
You are in the goddamn chrysalis.

So block Chadley. Unfollow the “ten women” ads. Burn the detox tea.

And start showing up for yourself the way these so-called experts never could.

You don’t need fixing.
You need facts. Support. Sleep. Iron. Rage.
And a playlist that makes you feel like you could bench press a small car.

Go lift.
Go rest.
Go rage.

You’ve got this.

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Dear door,
I’m sorry I called you a motherf*ing c**t when you didn’t open. You were doing your job. I just forgot how doors work.

Dear printer,
You jammed once, and I threatened your entire lineage and Googled how to smash you into oblivion. That was uncalled for, probably.

Dear remote control,
I accused you of gaslighting me when you hid in the couch cushions. You did not deserve that level of psychological projection.

Dear heat pump,
You’re not “mocking me with your lukewarm breath.” That was my hormones talking. And yes, I am cold and sweaty at the same time. Shut up.

Dear buttons,
Especially the ones on jeans. I owe you a formal apology for the violent rip-and-hurl situation in the changing room the other day. The lighting was bad, and apparently so was my mood.

Dear supermarket self-checkout robot lady,
I didn’t mean it when I said you had the “emotional intelligence of a wet sponge.” You were just asking me to bag my items. My behaviour was unacceptable.

To everyone else..
If I’ve seemed on edge lately, or appear to have forgotten my name or yours, please know I’m just a woman standing in front of a hormonal shit storm, asking her estrogen not to drain from her body completely.

Thank you for your patience during this minor identity meltdown. I’ll be back to regular programming once I can identify a single emotion that isn’t rage, fatigue, or existential dread.

Perimenopause isn’t talked about enough, especially in professional spaces. So this has been my (possibly unhinged) apology to all the inanimate objects that bore the brunt of my hormonal rage over the last week.

For my peri pals going through it.. I see you, I sweat with you, I swear with you. Remember, you can be damn good at your job, and still want to punch a printer.

A lukewarm, beigey cup of bitter nonsense grumpily slammed down by someone much younger than me. As the coffee spilled over the sides I could tell it wasn’t what I ordered.

The look of the barista could have killed, so I accepted the cup anyway and gratefully took a sip. I’ll deal with the dairy fallout later.

It’s bitter. The milk is burned. No amount of sweeteners is fixing it.

I think my soul was packing up to actually leave my body.

At this point I’ve been awake approximately four hours. I’ve gotten my kids up and dropped at their respective schools, the dog is sorted, the house isn’t a shambles, and I’m on my way to work.

After a night of broken sleep, a well made coffee woulda been the fix.

But apparently today was the day that the cool, edgy barista who definitely hates me and cannot in the slightest relate to my hormonal crisis was in no mood either.

I feel the rage coursing through my veins.

Over a coffee.

I’ve had plenty of bad coffees in my life. Why was I so particularly affected by this one?

I’ll tell you.

It wasn’t just a coffee. It was the final insult in a morning of emotional labour, broken sleep, and a body that now treats dairy like an enemy.

It’s the damned menopause.

It’s super great that we’re talking more about this phase of life. But it’s more than just night sweats and brain fog.

Because it’s a spectrum, some people barely notice it while others are wiped out by a wrath of symptoms that hit like hormonal acid rain.

But did you know, there are over 100 possible menopause symptoms. ONE. HUNDRED. You’d think with that kind of impact we’d get a badge or a parade. Or at the very least, better coffee.

Sadly, it wasn’t to be today. Now, if only I could guarantee a day free of sensory betrayal in the form of clothes tags and synthetic fibres, perhaps we could turn a corner.

Remember, if you’re menopause symptoms are really kicking your ass, go talk to your GP about it. The patches and gel can be hard to get hold of but I have it on very good authority that they work a charm. And if there is a thing that we are able to use that can make us feel better, why would we not?

The group chat IS the village.

They say it takes a village to raise a child. But when you're working full time, the village often ends up looking like a solid ECE, an understanding boss, and a few deeply committed group chats.

As we get older, our group chat names evolve from pregnancy and parenting themes to oddly specific ones like “Netball Mums 2022,” and now (in my case) “Social Girlies,” because my kids are older and I finally have time to do fun things with the friends who’ve been there through it all.

We usually have multiple chats running at once, often with the exact same people but wildly different vibes.

And between juggling work, home, weird medical symptoms, mental health wobbles, teenagers, dogs, ageing parents, and the existential dread of deciding what’s for dinner, the group chat is doing some serious emotional heavy lifting.

But before WhatsApp chat groups, we had Facebook communities. They would start, then someone would post something hideous, several people would lose their shit over it, and a new side group would quietly form in the aftermath.

This month, one of my Facebook groups is celebrating ten years of existence.

Ten years!

It’s a phenomenal achievement!

We don’t catch up that often in person, but when there’s a crisis, the stops are firmly pulled out.

As a group we have experienced several bouts of cancer - of course, we wouldn’t be a group of 50 to escape that! Births, deaths, relocations. Our kids turning into teenagers, families going pear shaped, divorce, marriage, child illness - everything from a persistent cold to multiple hospital admissions.

In 2025, and for ten years prior to that, this has been my village.

It’s a little chaotic. It’s occasionally inappropriate. But it’s real and has saved lives.

So no, it’s not the village we thought we were getting. It’s the one we built ourselves.

Yes, we have friends and family and connections outside of this, but this place we have is our line of defence. It doesn’t matter that we don’t get to see each in person very often. When something’s going down, good or bad, our digital village shows up, tea emojis, solid advice and everything else.

And that’s kind of better.

In other news, did you know..

This weekend is Cuba Dupa! It’s Wellington’s best ever street party and there’s lot happening to see and do. I particularly like how stores get involved like Preloved Charlies which is holding kitten cuddle sessions on 29th from 10-1pm. If that isn’t a Wellington vibe, then I don’t know what is.

If you’ve spent any length of time in London, you’ll know Pret’s coffee deal was a good one. Now that ended last year much to the dismay of its fans of a cheap coffee. However, Wellington’s Eva Garage has just started up a monthly coffee subscription of unlimited coffees for $70 a month!

Most of you agreed with my firm, this is the hill award of best cheese scone to go to Pickle and Pie. However, I wish to highlight Swimsuit just up the lane, does a bloody wonderful long black, and the people who work there are so kind and wonderful. Go there! You’ll have a nice time!

Thanks for reading! I appreciate the time you spend here, and I hope this gave you a laugh or, at the very least, a reason to shirk your responsibilities and sign up for a lie down instead of some other meaningless crap. Future issues will be about general life stuff with humour, honesty, and a good portion of “I can’t be arsed.”

Reply to this newsy if you want to get in touch, or fire me an email direct to loudoreilly@gmail.com

Lou xx

It’s been a year give or take. I thought that by reducing everything I love doing, I would have more time for the things I deemed to be more important, thus become less overwhelmed.

But the past year didn’t play out that way at all.

On reflection, I was burned out and unwell, and I needed to do more of the things that sparked joy, not less. Go figure.

And I love writing.

Sometimes the words are nonsense.

But sometimes they are really good and useful and people like reading them. So I’m coming back to indulge in this joyful part of my life. Why not.

You can expect more of the same unhinged rants as before. Maybe a touch more, with the ol’ pause causing some extra mayhem. I want to talk about the C-word at some stage, too.

If you immediately ask yourself, “Which one?” you are my people, and I am yours.

Even though I have changed the title to' My Back is Sore and Other Stories, ’ you can find everything I’ve ever written at www.louoreilly.nz. Some of it is truly whack.

Let’s crack on.

On leaning in.

We are coming up 12 or so years since Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In came out.

Do you know the book I’m talking about? It’s okay if you don’t. The target audience was privileged corporate girlies, so if that’s not you (like it isn’t me), it might have flown under your radar.

Regardless, I’ve been thinking about that book and how women were encouraged to hustle hard to be taken seriously at work.

How have we fared since then? Did the hustle pay off? Are you bossing it up large?

Or did you read the book, lean all the way in… and then fall over?

Because from where I’m sitting, it feels like women leaned in, hard.

But the system didn’t.

It didn’t do what we thought it would, and now we have a bunch of women who are not just burned out and exhausted but also dealing with complex anxiety disorders, raging menopause symptoms, and, would ya look at that, a queue for the ADHD doctor a mile long.

Maybe leaning in was never the answer. Maybe the problem wasn’t us. Maybe the real issue was that we were told to work harder in a system never built for us.

So if we’re done leaning in.. now what?

We could keep pushing, keep trying to prove ourselves, keep showing up to things that drain the life out of us.

Or maybe it’s time to admit we’re done.

Not with everything, obviously. We still have bills to pay. But maybe it’s time to stop handing over our energy like it’s unlimited.

Yes, this relates to work. But it is also about home life, social life, and all the invisible labour we’ve been conditioned to take on.

What if we stopped saying yes to every little thing thrown our way?

What if we actually cut the crap and started spending our limited energy on things that serve us - the people we love, causes we care about, rather than random obligations that do nothing but drain us?

The system never leaned in for us. Maybe it’s time to lean out and take our energy with us.

In other news, did you know..

The NZ Art Show (client) is happening in Wellington on King’s Birthday weekend from 30th May to 1st June. It’s the longest-standing and biggest art show in the country celebrating 22 years! So if you enjoy arty things, grab a $5 early bird ticket here.

A year ago, support for the disabled community was cut, and the impact has been brutal. Emily Writes wrote this piece—it’s harrowing and grim, but you need to read it.

The ceasefire in Palestine is over. If you want to help, you can donate here.

And if you are in Wellington, you’ll know we are all obsessed with cheese scones. I don’t know why, I don’t question why, but I do know that the best cheese scone is located firmly at Pickle and Pie. Here is a site dedicated to the rating of cheese scones in Wellington. It’s mostly correct.

Thanks for reading! I appreciate the time you spend here, and I hope this gave you a laugh or, at the very least, a reason to shirk your responsibilities and sign up for a lie down instead of some other meaningless crap. Future issues will be about general life stuff with humour, honesty, and a good portion of “I can’t be arsed.”

Reply to this newsy if you want to get in touch, or fire me an email direct to loudoreilly@gmail.com

Lou xx

It turns out that my ability to write regular newsies is extremely low.

I have been internalising a very complicated situation in my head.

Write any old bullshit and sending that out so I meet a regular posting target.

Or

Just write when I have something that might be considered useful or entertaining.

The latter won.

I think all of you who subscribe to my nonsense would be pleased about that.

But for my wonderful paid subscribers, it means I can no longer accept your regular payments. It just wouldn’t be right for you to pay for something regular that I can no longer give.

So, I have gone through and refunded payments made by you to me in 2024. I am still working out how to refund people who paid a lump sum last year. If this is you, perhaps you could reply to this email so we can figure out how to get you reimbursed.

The second complicated situation I have been internalising is the idea of paid media.

I firmly in my heart of hearts I am in the camp of normalising paying for media. There are many wonderful writers and artists out there working very hard to entertain, inspire, and inform. And if you read and enjoy their work, and you can afford to, you should support financially.

My situation is different.

I have a full time, paid job outside of my writing.

Extra cash I make from my writing pretty much goes to causes or people having a rough time. Sometimes it goes to subscriptions of things that I forget I have a subscription for. You know how it goes.

So, with all of that, I have decided to shift the option of paying for my writing to Ko-Fi so you can give irregular, one-off, non-specific tips if you feel like it.

There’s no obligation. My writing is still here and free as a bird for those who don’t want to do that, or can’t afford to do that.

But having the option makes sense to me.

And so here is the button to click if you want to do that. (Although this post isn’t anything special, so don’t do that now)

All the tips go here!

The other thing that is changing slightly is my writing focus.

For a long time I have wanted to extend my topics - not away from the cooked as wellness industry, but in addition to it.

I want to write about things that make me laugh, rage, cry. I want to write about my fitness which is so bad right now but how I’m fixing it. There’s things I want to share with you that made me laugh till I couldn’t breathe, and other newsletters from proper writers that I want you to know about.

Taking out the trash will be an irregular newsy that you can pay for occasionally if you want to, that is about as wild in topic as my neurodiverse brain is.

The domain name is sweatypals.nz but that will also change in the coming weeks as I’m not a personal trainer under that brand anymore and it doesn’t fit for my writing. I just have to work out how to change the links to all the posts so my stuff can still be shared around. If anyone knows a tolerable way to do that, please come at me because it’s all crickets over here where that is concerned.

Phew!

I think that’s all I needed to tell you for now.

Sharing a pic of my George Cat, though. He is 19 years old, and due to a deluge of health issues, we will be saying goodbye to him tomorrow. Isn’t he just the most handsome kitty cat.

xx

And as a mini reflection on that achievement, I thought about how I’ve grown over the years. Not just in age of course, but in the things that matter to me now that didn’t before. And the things that used to matter to me in a horribly hyper-focused way, that fortunately now, don’t make even a tiny dent on my mental health.

It’s reasonable to accept that priorities and beliefs change with age. But my hot reckon is that when you turn 40, you are handed a magical card that stops you worrying about a lot of unimportant shit. It’s weird really, because for me, it kinda happened straight away. I’m not sure if it was the catalyst of turning 40, or because of a traumatic experience that happened the year before, whatever it was, I got to 40 and I swear I just stopped caring about all the things that caused so much upset prior to then.

This whole thing got me thinking.

What if the things I worried about in my 20’s and 30’s hadn’t been a thing? Would it have helped that wild ride?

Who knows? Maybe not at all and this newsy is a gigantic waste of time.

Sorry about that.

But, on the off chance this voice of reason is useful, here’s six things I no longer care about. Maybe you can stop caring about them too.

I don’t worry about anything physical on or about my body that I cannot change in 30 seconds or less.
I mean this for when I’m away from home, at work, where I don’t easily have access to “things” to fix whatever it is that has gone wrong with my body that day.

I don’t worry about an item of clothing that is fitting tighter or is slightly more uncomfortable than usual. I can’t do anything about bloat or body size in the immediate timeframe so I just choose a different thing to wear. I have clothes in my wardrobe now that are a size or two bigger for this purpose and if you can manage to do this it really does take away a lot of unnecessary worry.

I worry a whole lot less about the natural end of friendships, or partnerships, and try to not take it too personally when it happens.
I’ve found it’s a joyful place to be when it’s ok that people drift in and out of your life. And while it might initially be upsetting, you might miss them etc, accepting the change of the tides and welcoming them back if things play out that way, is refreshing. There are friends of mine I haven’t seen properly in years. It’s ok. So long as they are healthy and happy and progressing in a way they want to - all good. People who have brought trauma to you is a different thing entirely, and as always, feelings are valid.

I rarely give an endless supply of chances to dishonest people.
Sometimes chronic lying is a health condition and that is different from what I mean here. People who intentionally lie and cheat and do things hoping they don’t get caught are not good and valuable people to put effort in to. Are you picking up what I am throwing down? When people show you who they are, believe them. Spending lots of time trying to change people is usually futile.

Is it a victimless crime? I don’t worry about it.
It takes a ten second scan in a neighbourhood Facebook group to see people incredibly agitated by things that don’t hurt them or anyone else. There are plenty of exceptions to the rule, but largely, if people and animals are safe and not harmed, it probably doesn’t matter so much.

Skipping the gym is not the end of the world. Sometimes I have to pinch myself over this. I used to be a Personal Trainer. Before I had kids, the gym was a place I rated. Only a couple of years ago, lifting heavy weights and chasing an increasing number was so important to me. My health is very important to me, and mobility as I age is super important, but I won’t be losing sleep about not attending the gym or doing all the things I’m supposed to where exercise is concerned. Right now it’s not my gym season and that’s ok.

And with that, five things out of a shit load more that continue to take up my brain space. No amount of age or give-a-shit-ness changes these things.

1. Are my friends and family happy and safe?

2. Will this watermelon war ever be over? (using code words, ask me if you don’t know what I mean here)

3. Covid spread, cancer, cures to cancer - my friends with cancer fighting so hard for more time take up mega space. I’m really concerned about disease and how to prevent the spread of.

4. People in general. My friend KD is having a time right now. They are not ok and that worries me greatly.

5. What’s for dinner - it’s not all super serious, but I hate cooking with a passion. I suck at it, and no one eats what I cook. My family’s nutrition takes up an unreasonable amount of my thinking time and brain space. Totally sucks. I hope I get over this one kinda soon because far out it sucks so bad.

Thanks for reading this newsy. I really appreciate the time you give to me for this and I hope you get some value from it. If you have any questions you can reply directly to this email or if you’ve landed here from a link, email lou@sweatypals.nz. You can also follow me on Twitter X here, and instagram here.

Please remember while I am a qualified fitness trainer, and I’ve done some nutrition study, I am not a registered dietitian or nutritionist, nor a doctor of any kind. Information shared here is through my own lived experience, personal study or a peer reviewed study I have nerded out on reading and sharing with you.

Lou xx

Not all Mums lose their shit all the time.

Not all parents are Mums.

You don’t have to be a Mum or a Parent to lose your shit all the time.

You don’t have to be a Mum or a Parent to have an exhausted mental load.

I am a Mum.

I have an exhausted mental load.

I lose my shit all the time.

This is why.

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La Cloche is a cafe in Wellington and I frequent it every week to meet my very good friend. We call our weekly meets “our therapy'“ and it’s a chance to breathe and let off a bit of steam built up over the week - a reset of the mental load, if you will.

My friend and I have declared our weekly meeting an absolute necessity because as busy, working, responsible parents, shit is hard and sometimes our mental load is close to boiling point. We’ve found that our own brand of talk therapy over a coffee works wonders for our the maintenance of a reasonably good standard of mental health.

My friend and I are “good mums”. You’ll see why this is in quote marks later.

To me, a “good mum” is someone who meets and sometimes exceeds the needs of their children.

I’m certainly not perfect.

I fuck up all the time.

To me, being human is also what a “good mum” is.

But being a “good mum” sometimes comes at a price.

We traded in our pre-kid life, for a new life of servitude.

One that most “good mums” don’t have much prior experience in.

And so we’re all learning. All the time. Constantly.

Today for instance, I learned that when my daughter goes on a sleepover, I should pack a battery pack charger thing for her phone. Not a charger, because there might not be a handy place for her to plug into, but a battery charger pack thing. You know what I’m talking about?

Remembering to do this for her next sleepover is added to my mental load. I must not forget this.

How about remembering requirements for school - is it library day? Is it swimming? Is the school fundraising for something and does my kid need to bring “a gold coin donation”? Have they brushed their teeth, is a favourite outfit clean and ready to go? Have they eaten breakfast? Did you make a doctors appointment? Do we need milk? Is my car out of petrol? Lunchboxes, homework, is the cat fed? What about the dog? How much special food for the dog do we have left?

This list goes on.

And this work is invisible. It doesn’t look like a lot to anyone outside of my brain, but when you add it to eleventy billion other things, it shouldn’t be a surprise when the ball gets dropped from time to time. Or in my case - all the time. I’m a “good mum” but I fail all the time due to an exhausted mental load.

And if you have an ADHD brain like mine, with dozens of other unrelated and less important garbage going on in there, adding an exhausted mental load is often the breaking point. And that is when I, and I’m sure others, lose their shit.

So how do we stop it?

That’s the million dollar question, eh.

Experts say increasing communication skills in the home is it. Asking for help when we need it. But asking for help, to me at least, is just another thing I have to do. Sometimes I’d rather be left to my chaos to just get on with things, rather than give the instructions for others. So yeah, nah. Asking for help, isn’t really the answer, at least not for me.

If we want to well and truly trash the effects of an exhausted mental load, I reckon we need to let go of the perfection, or this weird striving to be a “good mum”.

That’s not an easy thing to do when people praise us for being good at multitasking, and being a “good mum” always prepared for every eventuality. Being good at managing all the things, and being praised for it, means we often take pride in it. “You’re such a good mum!” they say.

And as natural born people pleasers, we take pride in being organised and on to it.

And when you’re told you’re good at something, it’s fairly natural to want to chase that praise.

And you know what? If your mental health is not impacted by an exhausted mental load, keep calm and carry on. None of this matters for you.

But for me?

Nah.

My brain is fried, and this year, I’m just not doing it.

I’m not much of a new years resolution kinda gal.

But this year, I will be trashing, not tolerating an exhausted mental load.

I’m pretty sure I can meet and sometimes exceed my kids needs while being an average mum instead of a good one.

What do you think?

Fitness fun and dodgy health.

Anyone who has followed my weird ramblings for a while will know that the origins of this blog was the road - my road - to getting fit and healthy in an anti diet, HAES-adjacent way.

I started it as a nutrition coach and personal trainer. I shared recipes, exercises, how to get off the couch, how to just do a few exercises at home. Exercise snacks. And then it evolved to a varied approach of writing about lots of different things. My business life, my mum life, my doggo, a bit of exercise, no recipes. And then it changed again to me taking out the trash. Squashing rubbish theories. Sharing peer reviewed studies. A how to do a life inspired by feeling good rather than measuring up against anyone else.

However.

Some of you know last July my health markers took a nosedive. I won’t go into the details here, but after what felt like dozens of medical professional opinions, appointments, and various medicines a diagnosis finally came about.

Essentially, my metabolic health isn’t in good shape. And that was causing my respiratory system to become unhappy. And that caused some of my previous excellent health markers to no longer be excellent.

So.

This year, starting today actually, I am working with my good friend Tara from Allergic to Sugar, to get those health markers back on track to where they need to be.

The food I eat needs to change. The amount of movement I do needs to change.

And I thought I might take you along the ride with me, if you’re keen on all that beginner level exercise, nutritionally dense food eating, and increasing strength and mobility in a sustainable way.

No diet talk. I hate diet talk.

But there’ll be a fair bit on how to get more veggies in. How to prioritise protein. How to drink more water. How to get my steps up. It’s a repeat of the journey I started back in 2017. I have the skill, the experience, and now, the desire to turn my health around. I’ve done it all before, and now, I’m doing it all over again.

Join me?

Thanks for reading this newsy. I really appreciate the time you give to me for this and I hope you get some value from it. If you have any questions you can reply directly to this email or if you’ve landed here from a link, email lou@sweatypals.nz. You can also follow me on Twitter X here, and instagram here.

Please remember while I am a qualified fitness trainer, and I’ve done some nutrition study, I am not a registered dietitian or nutritionist, nor a doctor of any kind. Information shared here is through my own lived experience, personal study or a peer reviewed study I have nerded out on reading and sharing with you.

Lou xx

It’s also responsible for hosting a tonne of health related trash that we are sometimes susceptible to lapping up and making it our brand new thing.

The thing that popped up on my screen and then continued to for weeks was the idea that we store emotional trauma in our hips, and if we buy this specific exercise programme, we can learn to release the emotional trauma in our hips, which will then lead to things like happiness. And weight loss. Wellness folks love them some good weight loss.

So, I have spent the last few weeks looking for even a shred of evidence of this, and unsurprisingly found a total sum of none.

Because of the lack of evidence, I have virtually nothing official to go on. I read a couple of articles that made sense to me, but nothing from my trusty peer reviewed medical journal sites had much insight.

So my take on it, is that without really knowing why, some emotional trauma can have a physical response. The emotional trauma itself is not stored anywhere other than the brain. Like we can’t point to our hips and do a bunch of exercises and expect that the traumatic event has now been released into the wild and is now gone.

My feel on this is that any lingering trauma or memories from a traumatic event that either does or does not manifest in physical pain, really can’t be healed without psychologist or psychiatrist help.

Physical pain manifesting from either an emotional trauma, or a physical trauma, can feel better with body movement - we know with lots of studies that body movement gives us lovely endorphins which help us to feel super - even for just a short time.

Again without sighting any proper research, I weirdly feel confident the reason for pain in our hips is from the shortening of the hip muscles (hip flexors) from sitting at a desk or in a car for long periods of time rather than emotional trauma being stored in the muscle or joint. I am so willing to be proved wrong, if anyone can point me in the direction of a paper or even a half baked thought about this, please do - I am genuinely interested.

So in summary, buying an exercise plan and doing the plan might help you feel better in terms of how moving our bodies makes us feel good, but I am highly sceptical about exercise programmes that tout for emotional trauma release from the hips and I urge caution if you are in position of considering a purchase purely for the hip trauma release gig.

As always, reputable, and qualified physicians are the best people to see about dealing with emotional and physical trauma. If you are suffering, I hope you are able to get good quality help and assistance and have the strength to not purchase from unqualified charlatans.

Update - July 2025
When I wrote this back in 2023, it bothered the heck out of me that I couldn’t find any real science for or against the whole “trauma is stored in the hips” thing.

I did eventually find this journal article - a systematic review of Somatic Experiencing (SE), which is a body-based trauma therapy. It found that SE seemed to help a bunch of people with trauma symptoms, which is cool.

But does that mean trauma is literally stored in your hips?
Nope.

My reckons - do what makes you feel good. Move your body. Stretch. Dance. Cry in pigeon pose if you must.

Just maybe don’t hand over a stack of cash to anyone promising to extract your trauma through glute bridges and a $999 e-course.

End of sermon.

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Thanks for reading this newsy. I really appreciate the time you give to me for this and I hope you get some value from it. If you have any questions you can reply directly to this email or if you’ve landed here from a link, email lou@sweatypals.nz. You can also follow me on Twitter here, and instagram here.

Please remember while I am a qualified fitness trainer, and I’ve done some nutrition study, I am not a registered dietitian or nutritionist, nor a doctor of any kind. Information shared here is through my own lived experience, personal study or a peer reviewed study I have nerded out on reading and sharing with you. Or in this case, pure reckons based on not very much.

Lou xx

Every time I’ve tried to write something useful, it hasn’t turned out well. My mind wanders from loosely health related things to the utter atrocities happening in Palestine right now.

How can I write about health-ish stuff while over the other side of the world, thousands of people are losing their lives, their children’s lives, their homes and communities.

Like most of the world, I am hoping for a ceasefire soon.

I’ve chosen to donate money to Doctors without Borders. There are plenty of organisations to donate to, but here’s the link if you want to do the same.

https://msf.org.nz/article/project-news/gaza-wounded-are-danger-dying-next-few-hours

I have so much to write about, so many topics to cover, about 17 drafts in my folder of things I’ve started, things I’m researching - you know how I roll.

I was away this weekend for a conference and it was interesting to see a number of speakers talk about what concerns them health wise at an older age. It’s not dropping weight or fat, or fitting into smaller clothes. It was staving off dementia. It was training their bodies for mobility reasons, not vanity projects. It was keeping a close eye on their mental health and having a plan for when things should go pear shaped.

I’ve written about functional exercise before. It’s one of my favourite topics, so I’ve added centenarian olympics to my ever growing list of things to write about.

While I get back on track and pop the wheels back on, perhaps you’d help me with some direction on what topics you’re most interested in reading about so I know what to focus on.

Thanks so much,

Lou xx

Thanks for reading this newsy. I really appreciate the time you give to me for this and I hope you get some value from it. If you have any questions you can reply directly to this email or if you’ve landed here from a link, email lou@sweatypals.nz. You can also follow me on Twitter here, and instagram here.

Please remember while I am a qualified fitness trainer, and I’ve done some nutrition study, I am not a registered dietitian or nutritionist. Information shared here is through my own lived experience, personal study or a peer reviewed study I have nerded out on reading and sharing with you.

Lou xx

Chronic illness SUCKS!

I haven’t been to the gym in weeks. And while I’m definitely not the fitness gym bunny I used to be, I’m sad I’ve lost the small amount of strength and fitness gains made earlier this year.

In terms of getting better, resting works. But the utter bore of chronic illness is that if you do a half arsed job of resting, you don’t get any better, you actually get worse. Or at least in my case, that’s exactly what happened.

However, while I’m doing all this frankly boring resting, exercise for me cannot be off the table completely. But my goals have changed somewhat.

Everything from the neck down - out.

Exercising purely for good mental health - in.

The longer this bullshit illness hangs around, the sooner a sharp decline in my mental health will come knocking.

So my plan is to cut it off at its knees!

I may not be able to box with my trainer, or throw around heavy weights right now, but there are small things I can do that will help.

• Walking - taking my dog on sniffari walks is super slow and good for us both.

• Exercise snacks - using my body weight only to do short, sharp sets of 3-6 reps for the achievement factor.

• Consuming uplifting content - TikTok is full of mental health survivors and advocates to help me not unpack in misery land.

• Eating super nutritionally dense foods - gotta get the 5+ in.

• Drinking a tonne of water - my favourite drink bottle is at work, but I’ve just seen a dupe at Kmart so that will be a job for my daughter to pick up next time she’s there (probably today).

• Continue to take the plethora of medicines I have on my dance card right now

What have I missed?

I have three topics I’m reading about and working on (I’m not a researcher by any stretch) at the moment. No idea when I’ll be finished, but hopefully soon!

• Bariatric surgery - this one is huge and complex, but I’m dabbling in creating a piece on it because it’s important.

• Somatic exercise - this one piqued my interest after seeing an ad for it on social media. The ad itself was trashy, but a quick read across one of my favourite nerd sites - Harvard Med, shows some interesting empirical evidence so far and I thought I would do a personal experiment and see what happens for me.

• How to start running when you suck at it, but really what to be a runner - I’m doing this because I hate running, but I’ve always wanted to be a runner. I know, go figure. Couch to 5K didn’t really work for me, so I’m investigating other ways.

Thanks for reading this newsy. I really appreciate the time you give to me for this and I hope you get some value from it. If you have any questions you can reply directly to this email or if you’ve landed here from a link, email lou@sweatypals.nz. You can also follow me on Twitter here, and instagram here.

Please remember while I am a qualified fitness trainer, and I’ve done a couple of nutrition papers, I am not a registered dietitian or nutritionist. Information shared here is through my own lived experience, personal study or a peer reviewed study I have nerded out on reading and sharing with you.

Lou xx

Four years ago almost to the day, I got a nasty bout of pneumonia and it was legit the sickest I have ever been in my whole life. Fortunately my doctor was able to load me up on all the drugs and I got better. The only souvenir was a hacky cough that didn’t go away for three years. The docs said it was an asthmatic cough, nothing to worry about, just annoying, yada yada.

Last year I got covid, and when I recovered, so did the cough. Amazing, right? This bullshit annoying cough I’d had for three years - goneburger.

Did covid kill the cough?

Unlikely.

Did the buckets of rest I took, in my attempts to not get long covid kill the cough?

Probably.

What’s my point and what does this have to do with the title of the story?

About four months ago, the cough came back with the exact same symptoms as the pneumonia I’d had four years ago. And almost to the day.

Spooky, huh.

A doctrine of doctors confirmed they couldn’t hear any fluid sloshing about in my lungs like they could the last time, but an x-ray showed a spot on my lungs, and a random elevated health marker in a blood test that was consistent with an infection of some sort.

Two lots of antibiotics, and two lots of steroids later, still coughing, still unwell, and still highly frustrated with it all.

This is why I’ve been MIA. Sick as a dog.

But pals, I had an epiphany.

I slept and rested like I was channeling the laziest of koalas when I had covid.

So I thought I would try it again.

Plain, simple, sometimes rather boring, rest.

And during this rest, I have smashed full seasons of Below Deck, Kara and Nate, and a bunch of old movies.

And.. I think I’m getting better.

This is not rocket science. We get sick, and we rest, and things usually resolve themselves. We know rest is important, yet I’m certain I’m not alone in having seriously muddled priorities when it comes down to it.

I seem to only take rest seriously when it feels like a serious situation - covid, pneumonia etc. But what about other times. What else is rest good for?

Those of you who’ve been reading my nonsense for a while now, can probably guess.

I went straight to the medical journals of peer reviewed research to see what studies had been done.

Maybe I can convince myself to rest more, even when I’m not coughing my lungs out, if there was a benefit to it.

Turns out, there is.

By allowing our bodies time to recover, rest helps prevent injuries and improve overall performance. It also aids in muscle repair, reduces inflammation, and supports a healthy immune system. Additionally, rest helps manage stress levels and lowers blood pressure, contributing to a healthier heart.

I read about six papers on this, I’ve cited some below but they are not easy studies to consume. The sum of them in my opinion basically concludes with:

• Too little rest isn’t great, too much rest also not great

• Routine resting better than random resting - catch up sleep causes more chaos for the next night’s sleep than good.

• Sleep and rest when you’re sick helps T cells (white blood cells) to grab on to infected cells and destroy them.

So what’s left to do?

Take a nap? Coughing on a consistently persistent basis is exhausting, so while I am in this state, rest is being prioritised heavily with my fluffy doggo as company, and a stack of old movies.

A couple of other things I wanted to update you on.

The big study I’m working on is about Bariatric Surgery. It’s deeply complex, so it’s taking me a while. If anyone has intel or lived experience or interest in bariatric surgery, please drop me a line about it.

Remember the Happy Mammoth experiment I ran? The results are in and it did absolutely nothing except flavour my smoothies with vanilla. For the $100 cost of the powder, that lasts approximately 30 days, you could buy a nice vanilla extract from Heilala or similar for a quarter of the price, and use that instead.

The other thing that utterly shits me about Happy Mammoth, is the Zoolander complex they have. The product I bought was once touting belly fat melting, has changed tack and is now a bloat minimiser! It’s the same product, the same look!

Here’s the entire range. If you can tell me the difference between all the products, I’d be so happy to learn about them.

Thanks for reading this newsy. I really appreciate the time you give to me for this and I hope you get some value from it. If you have any questions you can reply directly to this email or if you’ve landed here from a link, email lou@sweatypals.nz. You can also follow me on Twitter here, and instagram here.

Please remember while I am a qualified fitness trainer, and I’ve done a couple of nutrition papers, I am not a registered dietitian or nutritionist. Information shared here is through my own lived experience, personal study or a peer reviewed study I have nerded out on reading and sharing with you.

Lou xx

This post talks about calories and intentional weight loss.

Intentional weight loss is not my bag and so if you’re looking for weight loss tips and discussion, it isn’t here. But the calorie burning conversation has been giving me an allergic reaction and so it needs to go in the trash. Please take care reading this.

This is how fucked the fat loss industry is.

The energy (kcals, kjoules) written on the back of packets of food can be out by 20-50%.

So if you are attempting to lose weight by counting the calories of the food you eat, perhaps by scanning barcodes and using My Fitness Pal or similar, you’re immediately not off to a great start.

Nearly twenty years ago a book came out into the world called Skinny Bitch.

It was horrific.

It was abusive.

And when Victoria Beckham was photographed buying a copy, sales of it went up something like 37,000%.

The 90’s and early 2000’s were an era of thinness and non existence eyebrows.

Thankfully we’ve recovered some. Our eyebrows are definitely better!

And while we seem to have chilled on the obsession with being skinny, there has been a resurgence of fat loss coaches on TikTok and they are frothing at the mouth over calorie deficit.

What’s annoying is that what they are spouting over calories isn’t wrong.

But it is taken completely out of context.

We digest food, we don’t incinerate it. The ideas of ‘burning’ calories isn’t accurate at all. Our body reacts to foods in entirely different ways. The cooking of food in different ways has a different reaction for different people. Nutrition labelling isn’t a perfect system, either. At best it’s a confusing mess unless you’re a food scientist working in a lab.

If it were so easy as eat less and move more, everyone trying it would be successful.

But it isn’t easy.

Especially when you are not in a healthy state to start with.

Dehydration, crap sleep, stress. Perhaps perimenopause. Perhaps you have a leaky gut. Perhaps you have absorbent issues. What if you are deficient in nutrients, or your sugar in blood rate isn’t doing well. Is your iron shot to hell? Blood pressure through the roof?

The list goes on.

For the TikTok fat loss coaches, losing fat is easy when you are not fat to begin with.

And the billion dollar wellness industry seems to think that if you reduce your size all of the problems above will go away and you’ll become healthy.

Many of the frothing fat loss coaches have realised they can’t get away with talking about thin bodies for funsies anymore. So they say it’s for health reasons.

And so they’ve brought out their air fryers (which are rad by the way, no shade there), and they are air frying the shit out of kilos of chicken, and covering it with low cal sauce to have some demonstrable evidence, that if people just ate kilos of chicken and kilos of high protein yoghurt, they’d all move some fat off their bodies and everyone is happy again because they have achieved ‘health’.

Are they right?

Like, no babe. They aren’t. Health is unique to an individual person, not a group of people sharing a weight range. You cannot look at one person or a group of similar people and know they are healthy or unhealthy.

Size does not equal health.

If it’s health you want to improve, focusing on intentional weight loss isn’t it.

• Moving your body is.

• Getting good sleep is.

• Eating well, so we are hitting all those nutrients that our body is craving for.

• Drinking a shit tonne of water during the day

• Reducing stress is huge if not the most important out of all of these things.

And I get that my view on this whole thing is super polarising. Sorry, not sorry.

Quit telling people to lose weight.

If the TikTok fat loss coaches want to be really useful, they will find out ways to help with the things that actually matter. And if weight loss comes as a result of that and the person is ok with it, then good.

You can be a range of sizes and be healthy, just as you can be a range of sizes and be super unhealthy.

I’m not convinced that if you live in a bigger body, that it automatically means you’re not healthy. I’m also not convinced if you live in a smaller body, that it automatically means you’re healthy.

Firstly, we should probably define what healthy is. This isn’t hard or fast here, exceptions exist all over the place, and I’m also not a doctor.

For me, (personal reckons ahead!) a good state of health is most of us being able to move freely because our bodies were kinda designed for that. It’s also having a healthy heart that doesn’t have to work too hard to pump blood around your body. It’s also having reasonably clear arteries and I say reasonably because when you get to mid-age, pretty much everyone has some sort of plaque present in their arteries. Good health to me is having a manageable level of sugar in blood.

Even if you don’t have those things above, you can’t move freely, and your blood pressure is super high - does that make you unhealthy?

Nope.

Who am I to tell you what is healthy and what is not.

You can be hitting all of those random health markers above, but your mental health is supremely fucked. Are you healthy? Probably not.

If you’ve been following along for a wee while, you’ll know it will forever be my life’s work to stop the bullshit in this utterly cooked health and wellness industry.

But… people can do whatever they want. Just because I know intentional weight loss sucks a lot from so much lived experience and what I know from my minimal study, we still have to give courtesy to people who feel otherwise. Right? People can change their body however they wish. I like to change my body with tattoos, others like to change their body via its composition.

I apologise for the late delivery of this post. I aim for a post a week, but sometimes life gets in the way and in my case a nasty chest infection.

The next piece I’m working on is bariatric surgery. You’ll be surprised on my reckons on that!

Ngā mihi, take care

Lou xxx

Thanks for reading this newsy. I really appreciate the time you give to me for this and I hope you get some value from it. If you have any questions you can reply directly to this email or if you’ve landed here from a link, email lou@sweatypals.nz. You can also follow me on Twitter here, and instagram here.

Please remember while I am a qualified fitness trainer, and I’ve done a couple of nutrition papers, I am not a registered dietitian or nutritionist. Information shared here is through my own lived experience, personal study or a peer reviewed study I have nerded out on reading and sharing with you.

Lou xx

Kia ora, I’m Lou O’Reilly and I take out the worst of all fitness and nutrition takes and put them firmly in the trash. If you’ve landed here from somewhere random, welcome! You can subscribe right here, if you like what you see.

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Just for funsies, let’s hack exercise so you can put in the least amount of effort possible and still feel good for it. You may think I am taking the mick, but I promise you these exercises are valuable and worth doing even in teeny tiny amounts.

Shall we dive in?

Almost anyone can go to the gym and follow their nose. But what about if you don’t wanna go to the gym. I frequently do not want to go to the gym. But I still need to move my body so it doesn’t seize up and stop working.

So here’s some exercises you can do when you don’t really want to. I’ll list them from lowest to most effort, and y’all can fill your boots!

The I can’t be arsed getting off the couch but probably should exercise.

Start from a sitting on the couch position, and sort of slide yourself onto the floor. (Or just get up from the couch and sit on the floor.)
Next, get up from the floor to a standing position, and repeat. Sit on the floor, and stand up. Make it harder by lying down on the floor and getting up from there. You can do this while watching tv, talking on the phone, or playing candy crush. Do this for as many reps as you like. And if it’s easy, make it harder by not using your hands, or using weights, and try different floor placements to switch things up a little.

This exercise comes from a boss move called The Turkish Get Up, but made easier so most of us can give it a crack.

This exercise is awesome for mobility and uses pretty much every muscle, and joint you have, which in turn is excellent for being able to move well as we age. Because at the end of it all, being able to move without help for longer is really the important bit of all of this. Pro tip, if you think you will struggle to get yourself up from the floor, make sure someone is at home to help you if you need it, or that you have a chair or something to assist.

The I want to feel virtuous for multi-tasking exercise with a self-care task, like making a cup of tea exercise

One of my favourites because I like making endless cups of tea, is using the kitchen bench as a push-up prop.

We love a self-care cup of tea, and now, you can do some sneaky exercise while you are waiting for the kettle to boil.

First, get all the things ready to make a cup of tea (or whatever you like) and then while the kettle is doing it’s bubbly joyful thing, put your hands on the edge of the kitchen bench and do a few push ups against it.

Push-ups against a wall or bench are infinitely better than pushing up from the floor on your knees, because the knee push ups (when you can’t do a full one yet) is a completely different move, and if the goal is to do a full push up from the floor, using your knees probably won’t help you as much as pushing up against a wall or a bench etc.

I like to try as many push ups against the bench as I can do in the time it takes for the kettle to boil. If push ups against the bench doesn’t float your boat, try a squat instead.

The make the most of an average to long hallway and bodily function exercise

Love this one too. Great for heading to the bathroom, or maybe on the way back if you’re kinda busting a bit.

Start at one end of your hall way, and lunge your way to an empty bladder! Or, lunge back to where you were after you’ve done what you needed to.

Super good for a short term goal. It’s a fixed distance, so the end is in sight if this one is particularly challenging. We’re looking for a steady forward lunge here, or you can make it harder and lunge backwards if you like. Maybe let your house pals know what you’re doing and why so they can either join you but preferably not be too concerned about you.

The I have a treadmill at home but find it super boring exercise

I love a treadmill. You can just stop when you’ve have enough. Some people find it boring though, and endless when they fix a nonsense time frame to it like 30 minutes or seven hours etc. Any amount of time on a treadmill is beneficial. Got three minutes? Cool. You can get a long way in three minutes.

But back to the boredom busting.

Instead of setting a time goal, set an entertaining length goal.

Instead of saying you’ll do 30 minutes on the treadmill, say you’ll listen to one half of a podcast, or a whole one. Or you’ll listen to three of your favourite songs. Or another thing that’s positive and fun. Using that as a timer kills the boring time away.

But also, if you just want to just feel the after effects of a really good treadmill walk. set it to an incline of 12 - yep that’s super steep, but slow it right down to like a 3 or 4 speed or similar. You’ll get the same workout and sweaty endorphins, in a shorter timeframe. Winning!

The gym and exercise needs a damned rebrand.

Whoever the almighty tool was who said the gym and exercise are for wEiGhTlOsS needs a bloody good talking to.

How much cooler would those sweaty big box gyms be, if we took wEiGhTlOsS out of the equation and left the sole purpose of going to the gym and exercising to be getting fit, getting stronger, and increasing our mobility and flexibility.

Super cool, that’s what.

You really can’t exercise your way out of nutritionally vacant diet. Like, the two things are just not on the same vibe at all.

Exercise is for being able to carry and put away my groceries when I’m older. It’s for keeping my heart as healthy as possible for as long as possible. It’s for not needing help to get up from a chair.

A nutritionally dense diet is for filling up our body’s bucket so it works really well, helping us sleep better at night, and keeping us free from colds and viruses and other gross things like that, more often.

Thanks for reading this newsy. I really appreciate the time you give to me for this and I hope you get some value from it. If you have any questions you can reply directly to this email or if you’ve landed here from a link, email lou@sweatypals.nz. You can also follow me on Twitter here, and instagram here.

Please remember while I am a qualified fitness trainer, and I’ve done a couple of nutrition papers, I am not a registered dietitian or nutritionist. Information shared here is through my own lived experience, personal study or a peer reviewed study I have nerded out on reading and sharing with you.

Lou xx

The next time you are judging yourself and think you’re not fit enough, small enough, eat the right foods enough, ask yourself what would be enough?

And if you’re one of the few who can answer that, what happens when you’re ticking off the things that are enough?

Are you getting more sleep? Earning more money? Have your teenagers miraculously started speaking to you again?

Probably not.

So what’s the point?

Are your clothes not fitting as well as they used to?

Are you feeling sad or shame over that?

Your feelings are always valid here, but also, there’s nothing you can do in that moment to change how your clothes fit.

There’s an abundance of clothes in the world.

You can always acquire different clothes that fit better.

You can buy new ones. Swap with friends and family. Sell what you have, buy from others.

Clothes are not the problem. Fitting our worth up against the clothes is absolutely the problem.

Self care

Self care can be foreign to a lot of us. We’ve either never had the space for it, or didn’t think we deserved it. If you’re my age or above, even the term self-care probably won’t make sense to you initially.

Self care to me, is just putting a stop to the bullshit, intrusive thoughts that I’m not good enough. That’s it. I start by taking a deep breath. I tell myself none of it matters. I remind myself that my kids health and happiness is what matters. That my family and friends are well and thriving. That people who don’t rate me as worth more than the shit on their shoes, really don’t matter. Because they don’t.

A hot shower, a new lipstick or hand cream, and an early night does the trick here, too.

TikTok

My glorious Tiktok algorithm - she and I are becoming fast friends. She’s been delivering the goods lately, and a vid that’s been doing the rounds has been so great for my self care. The upshot is:

“If you have a problem with me, call me. If you don’t have my number you don’t know me well enough to have a problem”

And given that we communicate with people mostly not via text, but by any number of messaging apps, it rings true. Only my close mates (and my wonderful clients) have my number and feel empowered to use it.

Fitspo people

Fitspo people utterly hate me and what I’m trying to do with “taking the trash out”.

And honestly, if an unhinged and sometimes hysterical woman was trying to bring my business down, I’d probably not love them either. But I actually love business. I will help anyone stuck in a terrible job to create a life of their own with a business that can support them and their families. And without getting all braggy on it, I’m quite good at businesses, starting, developing etc. Lord knows I’ve had a whole bunch of my own and have failed hard enough to have some good lessons.

Anyway, given I spend an unhealthy amount of time scrolling TikTok, I have come across so many fitspo people positively frothing at the mouth over the size of people’s bodies. And it got me thinking.

What if we were able to help these coaches turn their businesses around, from being obsessed with chicken and air fryers and the size of people’s bodies, to self care agents. Ones who can gently help people into exercise that works for them. Can give gentle ideas on things to eat that will help people feel better. Things like that.

Would you pay a coach who just had nice things to say to you?

I would.

Polls

I have about 17 draft articles that I haven’t posted because I’m not wholly certain they are topics you would find interesting or welcoming. Can you please vote for the ones you are interested in so I know to release them, or send them to the trash?

Thanks for reading this newsy. I really appreciate the time you give to me for this and I hope you get some value from it. If you have any questions you can reply directly to this email or if you’ve landed here from a link, email lou@sweatypals.nz. You can also follow me on Twitter here, and instagram here.

Please remember while I am a qualified fitness trainer, and I’ve done a couple of nutrition papers, I am not a registered dietitian or nutritionist. Information shared here is through my own lived experience, personal study or a peer reviewed study I have nerded out on reading and sharing with you.

Lou xx

My make up free face, complete with un-styled, messy hair

To be absolutely clear, my business partner who sits opposite me, the one who would be offended at my plain, pale face and messy hair, gives zero fucks about what I look like and looks more irritated than offended when I’m on this weird face apology bent.

One of my fabulous peers, her name is Rachel Klaver, she said to me once when we were on a zoom and I was again, apologising for my face.

She said “You can’t kill a person with your face, so quit apologising for it”

And I thought that was pretty spot on.

Definitely the kick up the arse I needed. So while I still apologise for my face to David and sometimes other people I’m on a zoom with, I’ve found channeling Rachel’s very bold statement is helpful. Try it?

Find your people

I took a sick day yesterday because of an endo flare up, and also an asthmatic cough I’ve had for weeks now is really zapping my energy. I wasn’t well, I looked like hell, but life goes on, right? I needed to pick my kid up from school.

And as I waited for my child to exit the school gates at a glacial pace, I got some looks from parents who had a bit more time and energy to present themselves better than I did. And you know when you feel like shite and you look like shite, and people politely smile at you with pity and maybe a bit of disgust, and you’re doing your best to deal with those feelings appropriately, and then your mate also picking up their kid sees you and says “fuck me, you look terrible, what happened?”

And at that moment, you’re just full of gratitude for people who are your people.

The ones who can tell when you’re an inch away from a total meltdown and know how to pick you up from the floor.

The ones who give it to you straight if you’re actually the asshole, or when you’re actually not.

The ones who when you’ve completely run out of steam and you just can’t take it anymore, remind you to go and pay money to talk to someone about it.

If any of this stuff rings true for you, can I make a recommendation to somehow find your people so you don’t have to feel any kinds of shit from other people who are definitely not your people. Those people can get in the trash.

Moving on to posture.

Treading warily and carefully here, because I’ve only just started reading about this stuff, I don’t have linked evidence yet, but also because I know most physiotherapists are in the camp of good posture equals healthy back. Some of my best mates are physios, so y’know. Don’t come at me just yet.

Here’s the article that got me interested in this. And it was shared by Lauren Slater who is a rehab and injury coach in the UK. Lauren is planning on sharing more of their research, and when they do I’ll pass it on, but for now, here’s the article.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/aug/06/good-posture-back-pain-how-to-avoid

It’s free to read, but you’ll have to register a free account to get all of it. Summary of it here though.

The article quotes Peter O’Sullivan who got his physio ticket from Otago!

He is a physiotherapist by trade, but has also done a stack of time back at school and is now a professor at Curtin University. He shares his lived experience of having a wonky back from a ski-ing incident, being told to stand up straight and being in immense pain from doing so. When he slouched in a more comfortable state, the pain went away.

He was so interested in this anecdote, that he went back to university to study posture and came to the conclusion that there is no good evidence to suggest that good back health comes from good posture, and that actually, good back health comes from all the other things that lead to generally good health - exercise and moving our bodies, eating well, sleeping well, managing stress etc.

Am I surprised?

No babe, not even a little bit.

Your spine is like a kinda S shape, yeah? Not surprisingly if you try to make that less of an S, things aren’t gonna go too well for you. This article is so good! It just spells out common sense, everywhere!

It does say in that article, that there is some evidence of head position and back of neck pain we get, but so much more research is needed as no one’s sure how that pain is manifesting.

Here’s Lauren. (Link goes to her insta post on this whole subject)

Lauren is wonderful. I’ve been following her for years. She is no nonsense about everything. Her coaching techniques pretty much cancel out anything taught by under qualified personal trainers and her way of explaining all the things is golden. Please go look at her instagram account, give her a follow etc, it will really help with separating the fitness trash out come bin day.

Thanks for reading this newsy. I really appreciate the time you give to me for this and I hope you get some value from it. If you have any questions you can reply directly to this email or if you’ve landed here from a link, email lou@sweatypals.nz. You can also follow me on Twitter here, and instagram here.

Please remember while I am a qualified fitness trainer, and I’ve done a couple of nutrition papers, I am not a registered dietitian or nutritionist. Information shared here is through my own lived experience, personal study or a peer reviewed study I have nerded out on reading and sharing with you.

Lou xx

Lord help me.

I won’t say who authored this, but if you were thinking a 20-something year old dude in a home gym with social media game, you’re on the right track.

I asked a couple of times on the Facebook ad - what, pray tell, was a high functioning woman, or more specifically, how did women qualify for this lofty goal of function.

He said “busy women. 40+”.

“Are the bodies robbing banks?” I asked.

“And how are they out of control, so I’ll know whether your programme is the right one for me and my out of control body?”

And.. blocked.

Sure, I might have been trolling a bit. And you can call me cynical, but a wee bro in his early 20’s looking to help busy women control their bodies from an unspecified “out of control” act, has an odour to it that I just can’t put my finger on.

Bullshit.

That’s it.

What this wee bro wanted to do, is first make vulnerable women feel like their bodies are wrong in the first place, and then make bank on a made up solution to an entirely invented problem. Out of control bodies, for goodness sake, have a day off!

And this wee bro is merely one of thousands out there, tricking vulnerable women into handing over a stack of cash in the hope they’ll feel better.

But they won’t feel better by wee bro, because women in their 40’s, that also feel like shit are generally suffering from two things.

1. They are burned the fuck out. Exhausted from an exceeded mental load. Maybe working out how to be a parent really well, and have a job. Maybe running the lives of other people, not just kids, and actually, there’s no more gas in the tank to do a good job of all the things required of them. So they do a good job of some things, and a super shit job of everything else, and then guilt enters the chat.
   

2. The spectrum of menopausal symptoms. Honestly, when it comes to this shit show of mid life, you don’t know what you don’t know, until the symptoms hit you like a sack of bricks, and then you know.
   I’d love to be corrected but you probably can’t gym so hard and eat a salad to be free of the feeling of hormones draining from your body. You certainly can’t pay a wee bro a bunch of cash to give you an exercise challenge to feel better.

Endorphins from exercise is one of the best feelings. Moving our bodies is good for health. Eating a colourful range of fruits and vegetables and getting enough protein carbs and fat, can certainly go a long way to mitigating feeling shite. I just don’t think you need a wee bro to tell you how to do that, and you’re probably already doing the best you can in terms of exercise and eating well. Am I right? Aren’t we all out here just doing our best?

Keep your cash, don’t give it to wee bro or any one else who claims to know all the things. If you’re burned out, give it to a specialist who knows how to teach you some coping strategies. If it’s menopause, give it to an endocrinologist who specialises in when hormones go a bit pear shaped.

And if you don’t know what’s up, give it to a travel agent because there is not a single woman over 40 who doesn’t need a break!

Thanks for reading this newsy. I really appreciate the time you give to me for this and I hope you get some value from it. If you have any questions you can reply directly to this email or if you’ve landed here from a link, email lou@sweatypals.nz. You can also follow me on Twitter here, and instagram here.

Please remember while I am a qualified fitness trainer, nutrition is an interest of mine, I am not a registered dietitian or nutritionist. Information shared here is through my own lived experience, personal study or a peer reviewed study I have nerded out on reading and sharing with you.

Lou xx

This greeting is from the wonderful Cassie Roma who writes which is a collection of musings and poetry and other nice things. Go and have a look. I think you’ll like it.

Remember the experiment? Let me update you.

So far I have not brought myself to try on the shape wear scuba gear stuff. I might do it later tonight, but honestly out of all the things I sign myself up for in the name of science, this is the thing I really can’t be arsed doing.

I have been using the toxic fat melting powder that is Happy Mammoth, however, aside from a terrible headache on day one, it has done precisely nothing. Are we surprised? Not even a little bit. In fact the only reason I’m still persisting with it, is because it is a nice vanilla flavour that I like in my smoothies.

If anything magically happens over the next few weeks, I’ll be sure to update you but I’m not holding my breath. The lesson here is that if you are on the fence about buying a supplement that is promising the world on a silver platter to you, know that the reviews are likely paid for, and that a supplement will probably not change your life. We need to find joy in other places rather than in things we cannot change with solutions that don’t work anyway. You’ll be ok. I’ve got you.

The thing I wanted to talk to you about today was exercise.

Whether you walk, or dance, or play sport, or go to the gym - the specifics doesn’t matter, we know moving our body is good for us - I don’t think anyone is disputing that. But if I had to pick two exercises to do, that would be the most beneficial for me as I age, it would be walking, and deadlifts.

Walking is the single most underrated exercise you can do. It is free, easily available, uses pretty much every muscle group and every joint. And most importantly it is scaleable. You can walk a long way, or to the end of your driveway, and all of it is beneficial. Yes, you read that right. ALL of it, no matter the distance, is good for you.

And if you tend to go to a gym, the single best exercise you can do there is a deadlift. Whether you use a 20kg bar, weighted or not, or a set of dumbbells, the action of a deadlift uses all the muscles and joints. There’s obviously hundreds of other equipment types to use at the gym, and you’re free to use whatever you like. But for easily overwhelmed people (like myself) knowing I can do one exercise for six sets, increasing or decreasing the weight, and then go home, is music to my ears.

Fitspo people, don’t fight me on this. You know I’m right. Deadlifts are the main character and for people who are not in the gym every day for two hours, not training for a specific sport or activity, are perhaps just regular people looking to get stronger and a bit fitter, deadlifts and walking will see you right.

Even though I no longer work on the gym floor, I am ALWAYS happy to help people with a programme if deadlifting isn’t your thing. Comment below and then maybe your question might help someone else, or if you’re a wee bit shy, that’s totally cool, reply to this email and I’ll be glad to help.

Thanks for reading this newsy. I really appreciate the time you give to me for this and I hope you get some value from it. If you have any questions you can reply directly to this email or if you’ve landed here from a link, email lou@sweatypals.nz. You can also follow me on Twitter here, and instagram here.

Please remember while I am a qualified fitness trainer, nutrition is an interest of mine, I am not a registered dietitian or nutritionist, and information shared here is through my own lived experience, personal study or a peer reviewed study I have nerded out on reading and sharing with you.

Lou xx