Claire Siegel: Welcome back to the Flourish Podcast. Y'all it has been like six months since our last episode, I, I think if I'm doing the math right and honestly it actually feels like much longer. I thought it had been like at least a year, which I think tells you how my year is going. Since we last spoke, a lot has happened.

 If you don't know, in addition to being the host of the Flourish podcast, I'm also the CEO and co-founder of Flourish, which is primarily a nutrition and body image support platform made for women. This company has evolved a ton since I founded it back in July of 2018. So that means we're going on our fifth year, which is wild.

So for those of you who have been following the journey, and I know there are quite a few of you and I appreciate you being here, regardless, I'll do the really quick run through of the timeline. So originally July, 2018, I founded a company called Nutritional Freedom and our core product was this 12 week group coaching program called Foundations.

Then around kinda like the end of 2020, we started this evolution. So we rebranded to Flourish. We went through one of the nation's top technology accelerator programs, which was a blast and a game changer. Then we raised our first round of venture capital. I could do like a whole podcast series on that.

We've grown an incredible team, a small team , um, but incredible nonetheless, and we launched our mobile app. So the mobile app went live in May of this year, and if you're doing the math or tracking in the calendar, that is more or less around the time that the podcast went dark. So that gives you some sense of like how that's been going.

It has been wild and such a learning experience and a ton of hard work and a lot of fun. And again, I'll just say absolutely impossible. The incredible team behind the scenes, maybe we'll through the podcast, be able to like, introduce you to, to our team cuz I just feel like you deserve to know the people who are like behind the products that you're engaged in and everyone is just really such a delight to work with and brings such an interesting point of view to what we're working on here at Flourish.

I digress. I'm a little rusty, so y'all are just gonna have to stick with me. We're gonna , we're gonna keep it together in this episode. But what's been really cool I think, is that through all of that change, the goal and the mission of Flourish has really remained the same. So Flourish exists to help women heal their relationship with food and their bodies so they can sustain healthy habits and that statement is quite specific and it's designed very intentionally, like kind of the order of operations, if you will. And it's really been inspired and impacted by, of course, my, my personal experience, dieting since the age of 13. My professional experience becoming a registered dietician, coaching thousands of women at this point, and, in essence finding that in order to both sustain and enjoy behavior change, it has to come from this foundation of a positive relationship with food, your body, yourself, and your self worth. I'm gonna say that one more time. In order to both sustain and enjoy behavior change. healthy habits, getting healthier whatever it is that you wanna call it, it has to come from a foundation of a positive relationship with food, your body, your self, and your self-worth.

And there's this really powerful shift that occurs from when you go from eating healthy and exercising, as an example, as a means to earn your self worth versus choosing to eat, move, or engage with any other health promoting behavior as a way to celebrate your inherent self worth. Again, this very powerful shift occurs when you go from healthy eating to earn your worth versus healthy eating to celebrate your self worth. And yet there are so many factors that get in the way of our ability or willingness to approach nutrition and other healthy habits in this way. There are biological, psychological, lifestyle social factors. So much more.

So in addition to the Flourish app and the support that we offer there in terms of one on one coaching, group coaching, education, personalized accountability, the Flourish podcast is really just another way for you to engage in this journey of prioritizing and sustaining healthy habits while maintaining a healthy relationship with food and your body.

 I'm thrilled to be back coming at you each week with a new episode to support you on that journey. Whether that's in the form of a nutrition science deep dive, a dose of inspiration from a Flourish coach or member, a behavior change breakdown, or an expert interview. I'm really excited to get more voices on this podcast.

It's gonna be good. I'm really, like I said, really happy to be back and if this is your first episode, welcome. If you're back, if you've been waiting for the podcast to come back, if you've been DMing me on Instagram about it. Thank you. Thank you for the encouragement and the kind words. It really certainly helps motivate me to do the things that are required to put out a podcast each week. But really it's been a labor of love. And again, I have a team to, to thank for how we get here. 

Okay. So with that, I wanna just give you like a little bit of a preview of what's to come over the next month or so on the Flourish Pod. The first episode will come out next week, so we're gonna be kicking things off with a mini series, if you will. Each episode I think will be able to stand alone, but it'll be great to listen to them Back to back, to back to back. We're gonna do a mini series on weight, weight loss, and weight science. And I wanna tell you why. So I've been working with our members a lot lately. 

Right now we have a program going on called Connection Club. We are actually about to get into the fourth week of the program. It's a four week program and it's been. Awesome. It's been so much fun if you're a Connection Club member listening to this. Hey. So we've been leading Connection Club and I've also actually been taking on some one-on-one clients.

I have not done that, it's been years and years and years. I work with our clients each week through group coaching, but I haven't taken on one-on-one clients in forever, but we're preparing for some serious upgrades to the Flourish experience, and I just wanted to get my hands dirty. , if you, if you will um, really get that firsthand experience so that I can better support our, our team as we, we create these upgrades for the product.

But anyway, all of this to say I've been working with people on food stuff and body stuff a lot, and I'm noticing a pattern and I'm wondering if this pattern will resonate with you. So a lot of the women I'm working with right now, they feel stuck. Okay. So they're in this place where they recognize that diets or, you know, short term extreme attempts at weight loss don't work.

And like I'm of sitting here like, duh. don't we all know that? I think like more and more and more, it's really becoming common knowledge that diets don't work. Everyone I believe is bought into this idea that diets don't work. And then, the sort of like response to that of, this history of having years or decades spent dieting only to end up in this cycle of terrible relationship with food, terrible relationship with your body and weight cycling or repeated bouts of weight loss and weight gain, the reaction is to "just not diet."

And usually this process of "just not dieting" is self-guided and it's informed by what you're seeing on Instagram, TikTok, maybe even some podcasts. Okay. And what "not dieting" often looks like is rebellion. Rebellion from all health promoting behaviors. So like nutrition is deprioritized, there is conscious overeating, unconscious overeating, emotional eating, no semblance of a movement routine.

And I also wanna bear in mind that the pandemic is obviously a huge confounding or even a causal factor of this kind of like swinging of the pendulum from extreme dieting to what I'd call extreme non dieting. And the result of this, especially after two plus years of doing it, which a lot of, again, a lot of women that I'm working with personally are coming out of is that they don't feel good.

Their body's hurt. They have low energy. They're experiencing, weight gain as a result. Their clothes don't fit. They don't feel as confident. They don't feel at home in their bodies as they are today. And yet, they feel stuck because obviously they learned through years and years of dieting that didn't work for them.

It damaged their relationship with food. It damaged their relationship with their body. And at the end of all of it, typically what they had to show for it were repeated bouts of weight loss and weight gain. So that clearly isn't working. But then again, this sort of like reactive "just not dieting," the other side of the pendulum swing isn't working for them either, and so they have perhaps this vision of something in the middle, something more sustainable, something more value aligned, something more flexible, but something that does prioritize health promoting behaviors and the desire for weight loss is there.

But they feel stuck. They don't know where to go or how to get there because it kind of feels like in the world, , um, or at least on social media. It's like you're in one camp or the other. You're either extreme dieting or you're extreme non dieting. And so again, they desire this middle ground approach.

But they don't know how to get there and they often don't feel like they can talk about it or that they can't talk about their desire for weight loss. And listen, you don't need me to tell you or I hope I don't need to clarify that I am such a proponent for what we've seen socially in terms of the change around like more body acceptance, more representation of all bodies.

And I've noticed like it perhaps unintended side effect of this is that women fear speaking to what they really want and need for themselves as individuals. So we're gonna talk about it and I think you're gonna like it. If our podcast listeners are at all representative of, or I guess if our, if the people coming to Flourish are at all representative of who's listening to the podcast, or if who I'm interacting with on TikTok is it all representative of who's listening to the podcast, then I think you're gonna like it.

And I wanna give you a permission slip to want what you want for your body. And I want you to make decisions for your body outside of this label of dieting or not dieting. I want to give you permission and encouragement and support to make value aligned decisions that are sustainable, that are supported by evidence, that feel good for you, and I want you to do it in a way that implements compassion and self respect and self kindness.

Okay, but we're gonna talk about it. We're gonna talk about weight and weight loss and the science that underlies it. And my hope here is that by teaching you how your body works, you will be better equipped to make those decisions, to make those value aligned, sustainable decisions as you pave your path somewhere in between extreme dieting and extreme non dieting. 

And of course this goes without saying, this is the Flourish podcast after all, the Flourish app is here if you need extra support. If you want one-on-one support, personalized accountability and guidance, we're gonna have the link to download in the show notes below. Your first coaching session is free, no credit card required, and otherwise, I'm gonna see you next week on the Flourish Podcast.

All right, I am so happy to be back. Thank you so much for being here. Have an awesome week. Bye y'all.

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