More because you mentioned already that there’s a lot going on in the wellness industry.
You don’t think that you can necessarily make loads of money straight out of the gate doing your wellness events and stuff.
So I do want to talk about it because I think that the wellness industry has pros and cons to it.
There’s definitely some bad rep and obviously some great rep.
I think that it seems like everyone is running a retreat now.
I must have met like 10 people this week who apparently have a retreat.
It’s like, what is going on?
Why is everyone running a retreat?
And then obviously the fitness craze and wellness craze on social media is such a big thing.
Everyone seems to be an expert.
Everyone’s launching a recipe book and all these techniques.
What is going on?
How on earth do you position yourself as a legitimate, science-backed company and actually get the respect that you deserve when there’s all this bullsh*t out there?
What do you do?
Yeah, it’s a good question.
I mean, there is a lot of bullsh*t.
I think broadly it’s good that wellness is on the agenda and people are talking about it.
I think we probably have Gen Z to thank for that, and that’s okay.
But there’s a lot of bullsh*t within that.
For me, what bullsh*t looks like in this industry is people, whoever they might be, influencers, fitfluencers, who will come at you and preach that their way is the only way.
That, to me, is the antithesis of true wellness.
For me, every single person’s body and mind is different.
That’s how I’m coming at it with Elevate.
It’s unique in the sense that there’s a lot of one-on-one support and a lot of tailoring to your particular needs and your particular body type through the fitness side and through the functional medicine side.
I have this conversation every time I run a retreat, with my chefs or with new venues.
I explain that I’m not interested in an all-vegan venue, and I’m not interested in hiring someone to facilitate who’s just going to have everyone do a load of burpees for an hour.
That’s just not helpful, and it’s not conducive to longevity.
There’s that approach, and then there’s the fact that…
How do you establish yourself as a credible business in this field?
The facilitators that I work with are truly the crème de la crème.
I feel like I can say that with conviction because I have been a client of all of them for years.
As you can probably tell, I’m very Type A, pretty skeptical, and hard to impress.
I’ve had a lot of trainers over the years.
I’ve done a lot of health stuff over the years.
The people who I’ve brought on this journey with me are the best in the business.
My trainer Scott is the Head of Movement for Chelsea FC Women’s Team.
He had a lot to do with the Lionesses’ win.
He’s incredible.
He’s honestly got me through so many niggles and injuries that every other practitioner under the sun couldn’t touch.
Within a month of lifting weights with him in the right way for my body, I was out of pain.
The same goes for Lara, my functional medicine practitioner.
I’ve had a myriad of health concerns.
To be frank, I’m talking IBS, recurrent UTIs, skin issues, hormonal issues.
She was the first person to explain to me that all of those are linked.
When you go to your GP with that kind of thing, they’re just trying to put you in a box.
Here’s a cream for that.
Here’s some antibiotics for that.
She was the first person who introduced me to this concept of functional medicine and genuinely healed me of things that I’d had since childhood and thought I would never recover from.
The proof is in the pudding, so to speak.
The same goes for Leo and Lisa.
Lisa was my life coach.
The NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming work that I did with her, which I alluded to earlier, is literally why I think I’m here now.
She helped me uncover what my values were and what my limiting beliefs were.
She does a lot of that work with us on retreat.
Then Leo does multidisciplinary mindfulness work, breathwork, cold water therapy, and all that stuff.
Because of him, I’m in my ice bath every morning on my terrace, and it has changed the game for me.
The same goes for when people come on my retreats.
It’s taking on a bit of a life of its own now because people come away saying, “This has been transformational.”
The connections people make, the decisions they make in their own lives, and then they come back to me a year later and say, “Because of you, I was able to quit the job I hate. I was able to make these changes in my life.”
I think the proof is in the pudding there, in the testimonials.
I think it’s amazing.
You’ve just listed a bunch of people who you obviously really, really believe in, and you can tell by the way you’re talking about them.
I think that’s the key for everything.
If you genuinely have good people, then anything’s possible.
You’re going to be doing so much better.
It’s the same thing in every industry.
If you just have the right people around you…
I joke about the wellness industry and all the bullsh*t out there, but saying there’s only one way to do things is exactly what it is.
I see that on Instagram all the time.
It’s the same in business.
I get so fed up when people go, “This is what you do. This is how you have a morning routine. This is how you achieve XYZ.”
No.
There are so many other ways of doing this.
That is definitely bullsh*t.
I think it’s so exciting to hear about all these people and how you feel like you’re a new person.
I’m coming on your retreat, and I hope that same thing happens to me.
Although I’m terrified of getting in this ice bath, actually.
You’re going, “Oh, it’s going to change your life.”
Honestly, if I end up having an ice bath, I’ll be shocked.
But let’s see what happens.
Absolutely.
Do you want to touch on some of those health things that you mentioned too?
Because that’s a lot of stuff.
I know that a lot of people listening are aware of things that they’ve had.
You mentioned the GP, and the GP is even worse than that now.
You can only talk about one thing.
I’ve been there so many times and said, “Well, I’ve also got this.”
“Oh no, one thing only.”
I’m like, “But they could be linked.”
Actually, if you know about the other things, it helps get to your diagnosis quicker.
They don’t do it.
It’s actually ridiculous.
I feel like lots of people out there have health concerns or health problems and are either ignoring them or aren’t aware of them.
Talk me through some of those health issues that you’ve had and how they’ve impacted you.
Because you’re obviously super grateful for where you are now, but you weren’t always in this place.
You weren’t always as healthy and as great as you are now.
Tell me some about some of the dark times that you’ve been through and how you managed to get through those.
Yeah, I mean, from a physical health perspective, some of the stuff I described I’ve honestly had since I was a young child.
I had digestive issues from childhood.
My mom suffered with them, and I think there’s an element of genetics in there.
As you age, that ties in a lot with hormonal stuff, skin issues, and everything else.
It’s been pretty debilitating at times, honestly.
I’ve tried a lot of different medications, which probably actually exacerbated things, to be honest.
That’s been super hard.
Then on the mental health front, which is what brought me to the mindfulness aspect of what we now deliver through Elevate and all the other stuff I’ve done, I’m a big believer in the notion that nobody comes to mindfulness without having gone through some pretty dark bullsh*t.
If you haven’t really experienced anything difficult, you kind of have no reason to turn to those tools.
My rock-bottom moment was coming up to three years ago now.
Friends tell me I should write a book about this because it’s just so nuts.
Everything went wrong for me in my life all at once.
My partner left me.
We were in a difficult situation in terms of me and my physical state.
I won’t go into the details of that, but I was in a very vulnerable position physically when he left me with no warning.
Two weeks later, my house flooded and I lost every single thing I owned.
This was a house I’d hustled to buy a few years prior, again with no help.
I lost every single thing I owned kind of overnight.
I called on my recent ex to come and help me.
He was the only person I knew in London at the time.
He had a big car, and he just ignored the call.
My neighbors and I were evacuated from our homes on boats by the fire brigade.
Then within another week of that, I ended up essentially in a whistleblowing situation at work in a relatively new role.
I was being asked to do some dodgy stuff and refused to do it.
I was forced out of that job.
So within a matter of weeks, I had lost my partner.
I had lost my home.
I had lost my job.
These were all of the pillars of my identity.
Especially work.
My home was my safe space.
I was a really home-oriented person.
I was sitting in this flat that my insurers were paying for in Fulham, with none of my own stuff, looking at the smoking embers of my life and thinking, “What is the point?”
Not in a suicidal sense, but just like everything that defined me is gone.
So what’s left?
Weirdly, that’s kind of what led me to where I am now.
Very gradually building the pieces of, okay, who do I want to be?
How do I want to show up in the world?
It led me to a lot of these practices.
It led me to life coaching and NLP.
It led me to meditation and breathwork.
It led me to functional movement.
Honestly, without it, I wouldn’t have discovered some of these techniques.
I probably wouldn’t have healed from all of the physical health stuff.
I wouldn’t have started Elevate.
Honestly, I just wouldn’t have.
So I’ve got to be thankful for it, weirdly.
That was a big story.
That’s a lot of stuff to have happened.
We won’t go into man-bashing or anything.
I feel like that’s a conversation over a glass of wine we can have.
But it’s not even that.
It’s just when people let you down, it’s so disappointing and so isolating.
You’re going through the hardest time.
Like you said, you literally lost everything.
Your home.
People weren’t there for you.
You said, “Oh, you know you’re so down not in a suicidal way but even if you were that wouldn’t even be so farfetched considering that