In this episode our host Amelia Phillips takes us on a journey to how she started her career in health. She shares her highs and lows, including a struggle in her late teens. She also shares some of her biggest learnings in her 24 years in health (and how to navigate with kids!), plus what actionable, easy steps we can take to leading a healthier life for us and our kids.
Below is an unedited transcript of the podcast episode:
I had another mommy fail the other day. It’s the start of a school year and Angus, my five year old has just started kindergarten and so there’s all these staggered times. I’ve got lock in year three, Charlotte, year two, Angus in kindy, and Ella’s still in preschool. And so anyway, it was end of school time for Angus.
He finished early because he’s in. So I made sure I was there five minutes early, scooped him up. So excited. We went and got sushi while we waited the half an hour to pick up my other kids from school. Grabbed them super happy, great day. Bundled them all in the car, clicked them all in, you know, filthy, sweaty, hot day, cracked the air con on, and drove out of the car park to head home.
And I’m just thinking I’ve forgotten something. What have I forgotten? Oh, Ella. I forgot my last born child. Yep. Hadn’t picked her up from preschool, so flew back in, picked her up. Happy as Larry. But it just got me thinking that life is so full as a parent, and sometimes it feels like we’re just on this bolting horse that we just can’t get control of.
And so with my health background and. You know what I’ve been doing for my whole life. I really am on this quest to feel in control of my life. I know my friends feel the same way, and I just wanna regain control of our life, our health, and hopefully my podcast is one little step in the right direction.
This is Healthy Her with Amelia. And welcome to my first episode of 2022. I’m so excited to be back in the booth recording and speaking to you guys, and I’m actually doing something a little bit different today. I don’t have a guest. I am just gonna be free forming with you, my lovely listeners. I had some requests from you guys asking, you know, a little bit of background, a little bit of a story to how I came to be where I am today, and also some of my philosophies and some of my goals with healthy her.
So I thought today we might kick the year off, change things up a little bit, and then we’ll get back into all my awesome interviews and I’ve got some amazing guests lined up for this. I’ve also got some other really exciting news, which is that I have switched platforms. My new producer now is Nova and I’m just so excited to join the Nova Family.
Nova produces some incredible podcasts, obviously has a great reach with all the Nova Radio stations that you are familiar with. Has a really big parent audience, which is who I am aiming to reach. Such a great team. So I’ll be recording out of the Nova Studios in Sydney and then also out of my home studio from time to time as well, and I can’t wait to share some of these episodes with you.
But while I’ve got you here as well today, of course with podcasting, we get our love from your reviews, your subscriptions, and your ratings. So I’d love for you while you’re listening today, if possible at all, subscribe to my show. Leave a rating. Leave a review. I will love you for life, and that just helps Apple and all the podcast algorithms to know that you actually.
So the other thing I’d love is to connect with you on Instagram as well. That’s probably the best way. I’m on there quite regularly. Or of course, you can drop me an email as well, ap amelia phillips.com au. But please connect on Instagram. I love hearing from you and having all your questions answered.
And, uh, on that, I am gonna be changing the format up a little bit from time to time this year as well. I’ll have my long form interviews with my guests, but I’m also gonna be doing some shorter, more snappy and fun formats behind my guests, as well as answering some listener questions. So look out for those episodes.
So I guess where did my connection with health begin? And you know, I think I have always been fascinated with the human body and always been fascinated with how incredible our body is. And I have this really distinct memory. Back in year two of dissecting a sheep’s heart at school, and I’ve got such a vivid memory.
First of all, we put it in a bucket and the teacher showed us, Yeah, I’m sure you’ve probably all did this, and may even remember the same exercise at school, but they submerged the sheep’s heart. They showed us how the heart pumps, they showed us all the valves and the arteries that connected, and it just blew my mind.
And that was probably the beginning of a love affair with the human body and just how incredible it is. I then remember in year six, for the first time in my life, I got a hundred percent on a test and it was a test on the human body. And I don’t know if it was chicken or egg, whether that just made me, you know, love the human body even more.
But I remember thinking, Wow, like I’m actually good at this and this is really interesting to. And then what happened? Life got busy and I actually had a bit of a blip in high school where I don’t know how, but I slipped into an eating disorder and I look back now, it wasn’t this big dramatic shift. It was more like a quiet inward retreat that somehow I just woke up six or eight months later, a lot skinnier and pretty messed up psychological.
The only thing I can put it down to is it was in the nineties during that kind of heroin chic era, all my friends had these amazing voluptuous bodies. They’d all hit puberty. I think I was the last person in my class to hit puberty. I was kind of tiny, no boobs, nothing going on really yet. And I had all these voluptuous friends, and I think there was a part of me that identified with those super skinny models and thought, Well, I’m never gonna be that gorgeous, voluptuous, outgoing person that all my friends are.
So I’m just gonna go headfirst the other way. And I just stopped eating. I remember my mom blessed, I used to pack these beautiful lunches for me every day, and I would get to school and I would chuck them in the bin. And then it was just a mental challenge with myself to get through the hunger pains throughout the day.
And I felt such a sense of pride and achievement when I overcame, You know, the hardest one for me was. I was always absolutely starving at recess, and I knew if I could get through recess and not eat, then the rest of the day was manageable, and then I’d let myself have a tiny dinner at night, but I usually just kind of push the food around my plate.
I never purged, I never did anything like that. I just basically didn’t eat. It was my best friends, my sort of three closest best friends that alerted my family and the pressure from them wasn’t what got me out of it. It actually was exercise. My sister had joined a gym who I looked up to amazingly, and she joined a gym and she wanted me to join with her.
And so I joined with her and I went to do this exercise class and about 15 minutes in. Pretty much fainted and you know, naturally quite competitive. And I was just horrified and mortified that I couldn’t even get partway through an exercise class. So then I started to negotiate with myself and, okay, well I’m gonna throw three out of my four quarters of my sandwich away and I’m gonna keep one quarter on the days that I exercise.
And. As I kind of fell in love with this exercise and that allowed me to feel in control enough to eat a bit more. It was then the support and the pressure, I must say, from my friends and family that made me kind of snap back into my head and go, Holy shit, what have I done? Why am I doing this? And then it was probably a good three years of therapy.
And I learned to love my body and I learned to respect myself and to be a lot kinder to myself, and I basically became a coach to myself. And look, since then, since the age of 2021, you know, I’ve never gone backwards and I actually feel privileged to have gone through it because I can really relate to disordered eating patterns of lots of clients that I’ve seen in the past.
And I’m just thankful that mine was relatively mild compared to what a lot of other people have to go through. And I think throughout that whole ordeal, I just recognize the power of physical movement to make you feel good. I fell in love with the gym and then from there, you know, my career as a trainer and a gym owner kind of flourished.
So then that’s kind of what happened with my career. At the age of 17, I became qualified as a personal trainer for 13 years. I had a great PT business out of Alain in Sydney, and then I bought a gym in Pit Street in the city and owned that for six years. I was 24 when I bought the gym. That was with the hardest six years of my life,
And that was great because you know, being a personal trainer, you get to see people. In a really raw state when you’re pushing them hard or when they’ve had a bad day, you know, some of the times you see you’re training someone four times a week, you see them what and all. And I really learned so much about resilience, about how to just get that extra 10% out of people how not to push them too far.
How to know when they need to be pushed more, whether they’re more of a carrot or a stick kind of person. And you know, something that really. Struck with me in the early years before I had kids was the difference between mom clients and corporate clients, and I used to observe everyone’s stress levels.
I trained some very senior executives in Fortune 500 companies. They just didn’t seem stress. They’d come to the gym, They’d, you know, have their shirts iron for them. They’d just breeze through their sessions. They had a happy demeanor. And then I’d have a mom fly through the door five minutes late for a 9:30 AM session.
I’d burst into tears. She’d be this lovely sweet person. I’d get her on the punching bags and she would just go absolutely mental. And I remembered thinking to myself, number one, gosh, parenting must be hard, . And number two, the impact of stress management and how we can have such a different demeanor when we’re able to manage our stress levels or manage our schedule.
And let’s face it, having children makes that a lot more difficult. So I did that for 13 years and then the year I sold my gym, I actually got a great, it was a, it was a , a perfect gap year, I called it, where I trained Barry Humphreys. You remember day and average. Barry’s an amazing performer and. We went on a one year long tour around America in Canada on his show tour, and I was his trainer and cook throughout the year, and that was a great year for me because it was really stressful having my gym and selling it.
And it was almost like having this great gap here to just chill out and meet this amazing man. And he really is such a genius. He’s also such a cheeky bugger. He loves nothing else than to set you up for jokes and trick. You know, he would just do quite horrific things sometimes. I, I remember this one time we used to stay at quite fancy hotels and this hotel in San Francisco, and he loved to embarrass me.
So we’d get in this, the lift doors open and there’s this beautiful, very glamorous couple. She’s dressed in a furs and a diamonds, and he’s got his, you know, full tuxedo on. They’re obviously out to the theater. And Barry shuffles into the lift with his head down and he just starts making this kind of monkey noise like an eek.
And he just starts it quietly and you kind of see this couple shuffling over to the right and then he just gets louder and louder and louder and basically has a fit. And I’m just so embarrassed. And this couple are looking at us like, What is going on with you two? They couldn’t quite work it out and.
Things like that happen on a regular basis with Barry, so you just had to hold on for the ride. But he was and is an amazing man. We became great friends. He came to my wedding and he really is such a special person and I learnt lots from him other than how to embarrass your friends. The other thing I did during that year was I got into online coaching and in my downtime when I wasn’t warming Barry up for the show or cooking for him or training him, I would coach online and get into blogging.
And that was really where my love of online health kicked off. And when I came back, I was friends with Michelle Bridges and. Bill Moore, her husband at the time, and Mish was the group fitness manager at the gym that I had sold. So she had just kicked off Biggest Loser and she’s like, Mills, I love what you’re doing online.
It would be so good if you know I’ve got this gig with Biggest Loser. I’ve got a book coming out. I’m not really doing anything online. If you think of anything we could do together, wouldn’t that be. And I don’t know, it’s almost like the closest thing to a light bulb moment. I remember Tim coming to me and saying, meals, This was on a, on a different day meals.
Why don’t you do a 30 day challenge on your blog with all your followers? And there could be meal plans and challenges and workout plans. And then I was just, it was like a lightning bot. I was like, Oh, stuff. Doing it with my very small network. This is exactly what we need to do with. And that was the beginning of 12 W B T.
She had this incredible book called Crunch Time, and so we basically partnered the four of us and came up with the Michelle Bridges 12 week Body transformation, and this is back in 2009. So it was really a. Right when Facebook was taking off, no one else was doing anything like that. You had the Biggest Loser Club and that was about it.
And it just took off. Personal trainers like Michelle and myself, like we get an absolute kick out of helping one person achieve a goal. But here we were helping tens of thousands of people and we had such an incredible 10 years together. And then Tim was the ceo. You know, we worked really hard in the business.
Three of my four kids, Oh, actually maybe I had all four of my kids during that 10 years as well. And then in 2018, Tim and I kind of had a rethink about our lives. We decided we wanted to move out of Sydney a little bit. We decided 10 years is good innings and so we sold our share of the business. And Miss is still going strong with 12 W B T, and it’s still a program that we are just so, so proud of because it does change lives and it works.
So that was my 12 W B T decade, and throughout that I was doing media work on the Today Show as the nutritionist. I also did my master’s. I’ve got an undergraduate, a science degree in exercise science, and then I did my masters while I had baby number three and baby number four. It’s interesting doing your masters while you have a baby.
If you get good sleepers, you just stick ’em in the papo. We were actually in Byron Bay when I did my big thesis. So I had this routine where I’d drive to the library while the other kids were in preschool and Ella was in the Papo, and I would change her nap in the boot of the car and give her a big feed in the local cafe.
And then I would, uh, go into the library and she would sleep in the poo while they worked. And then two hours later she’d get a bit riy. She’d need a nappy change. So we’d go out, have lunch feed, change the nappy in the boot of the car, and then we’d get back in and voila. After that I had, you know, 20,000 words written.
I was like, . Wow. Thank you for being such a good baby, Ella. So then after 12 W B T sold and I finished my masters, I’ve been doing some consulting too. I kind of wanted to move into product development because we’d been online for 10 years. I don’t know. I had this urge to produce a business that actually produced product and and wellness product.
So, um, I consulted for a great company called, That did weight management, soups, shakes, porridges, and now I’m consulting for an amazing manufacturing company called Australia Health Vitality. That also makes a whole bunch of wellness products, including vitamins, powdered products, protein shakes, weight management products, and that’s been really fun and innovative to be in that product development space.
And of course, I still do my media work and my podcast, which I love. So, But I must say that, you know, as I’m getting older and my kids are getting older, the balance between working and looking after four kids and they do say bigger the kid, the bigger the problem. And I feel that with my children, I feel that, you know, no longer it’s just about meeting their needs, keeping them, you know, safe, fed, clothed, bathe.
But it’s so much more about being that emotional support for them. And I, I get that real challenge that moms face between work and parent. For many, it’s not a choice for many. We have to work for many. We feel like working makes us a better parent and I’m on a quest to help find that balance and hopefully through some of these great interviews I do with these amazing guests, we’ll be able to strike that balance together.
So I guess why I feel like I was born to podcast . Besides the fact that I love talking, I feel like I’ve had a really. Interesting career. That puts me in this segue between being able to disseminate research that comes out, being able to share the lived experiences of helping, supporting and witnessing hundreds and thousands of mostly women, transform, change, manage.
I mean, 12 W B T was like a massive social experiment where we really. To see and dissect and analyze the highs and lows of transforming your body. And so I feel like I’ve got the education, I’ve got the science and the research and able to disseminate it, but then I’ve also got that lived experience of, yeah, but how does that actually apply in the real world?
And that’s what I’m trying to pull together with this podcast and with my guests, because a lot of my guests, they’re not. All the time through the mum lens. So I’m trying to ask questions through that mum lens, and I remember interviewing David Gillespie one or two seasons back on screen time. He’s an interesting man and he’s very hardcore about screens, but I realized after that interview, That I needed to go harder on him because the advice that he was giving was not practical enough for moms.
And that was a moment for me where it’s like, no, I have to hit hard with my guests to say, Well, that’s just not doable. I mean, the advice that he had, for example, was basically around, You cannot give your child a mobile device. The only device they can use is a desktop that sits on a desk out in the kitchen area or somewhere visible for you.
They cannot have a device, and I mean, you try telling that to any 11 year old. I mean, my nine year old’s asking for a phone now, there’s no way I’m gonna get. To 16 without giving him a phone. So I’m gonna continue to improve myself and to keep trying to ask those questions and get my experts to really look at it through the mum lens.
And I always like to make sure my episodes are very practical as well, that have at least one, if not more, take home hacks that you can implement straight away. Some other things I’ve learned over my years. Just more observations of some of the biggest traps that I feel like we can fall into and what I observed on 12 W B T and also with my clients over the years.
Number one, inherently across all my work morning exercises are more consistent. And if you’re someone that wants to really consistently exercise, trying to carve out that time in the morning, I’ve always observed that it becomes more of a. Exercising any time of the day is great, but morning exercises tend to stick to their routines more.
The other thing I saw a trap a lot of people could fall into is that victim and blamer mentality. And I saw this a lot where, and it goes across life, across everything. You know, if it’s somebody else’s fault or you’re feeling like the victim, you’re feeling like this has happened to. To be in that mindset.
And it’s so, so hard because we all feel like that at times, but when we’re in that mindset, it takes the power away from us. It’s deflating, it’s negative, and it’s really hard when you’re stuck in that victim and blamer mindset, you feel out of control. And so trying to reframe that and take back control, and it can often be just like really small steps at a.
I saw multiple times people come into 12 W B T kind of feeling that way, and then a light would turn on in their head and they would take that control, whether it be just prioritizing their exercise or they were eating, and it tended to have this upward compounding effect where when they took control of one part of their life, then they were taking control of another part of their life, and then they were taking action.
And it led to a lot more positive and optimistic self talk, and you could see this change happening, which I found really inspiring. Self-loathing is another observation that it’s really scary how many people self-love and it can be when we are younger, you know, very dramatic. Whether it expresses itself in things like eating disorders or cutting or if it’s just horrible self-talk.
But even in adults and in moms, we would see this self-loathing and it again, is a sucker of energy and exhausting and can lead to anxiety Depress. So that was another observation of people that were able to recognize that in themselves and then do the exercises around that. And I’ve got some great episodes coming up on how to reframe that self talk, cuz that really does make a difference.
The other observation is the all or nothing principle, which we all fall prey to at times, but that I’m either gonna exercise six days a week or I’m gonna exercise zero days. A. But it really is amazing, even if you’re just doing one little thing and that 10% improvement where you’re just, You know what, I’m just gonna take that one afternoon snack that I always seem to go and reach for the chocolate bar or the chips.
I’m just gonna focus on that one small 10% out of my whole diet and really work on that. And it’s making those small compounding improvements over time that I noticed a really big change in clients other than just doing a major over. So look, I think they’re kind of the main elements I wanted to chat to you about today.
I guess just to wrap up, you know, what am I most excited about with the series coming up? Definitely time. I mean, it’s just so great to have 30 minutes to be able to dig deeper into some of these topics, and I appreciate your time and your 30 minutes, whether you’re out for a walk or driving in the car or cleaning the.
Or maybe just having some downtime laying on the couch. I would love that with a beautiful herbal tea. That just sounds beautiful. Of course, I’m so excited about my experts. I have spent months searching for the best experts that I can find shamelessly knocking on doors on really mom specific topics, many of which we have to go backwards and forwards, trying to merge schedules and finding studios in capital cities.
But some of the guests I’ve secured for this season, Our guests I’ve been dreaming about. So I’m absolutely pumped to get those interviews to you. I think another thing I’m really excited about is merging science and application. You know, in my research it’s so often very high level and you know, the day to day is so often gut feel, so I’m really excited to merge these two together to see what we can come up.
I love when I do get to interview guests and they, they give me the science behind it, but then usually they’re a bit lacking in what the practicalities of this mean. So I love digging deeper and really going, Okay, but what does this actually mean on a day to day level and how can we implement this? And of course, mostly I’m excited to aspire to help moms out there and, you know, if, if I can just give one of you a little sparkle of motivational or joy or insight.
Or hack that you can take away and try. If it’s just even one of you get something out of my episode, I’m so, so excited. If more than one of you do, then I’m beyond over the moon. I’ve just always gotten such a massive kick out of people saying to me, Thanks. You know so much, Amelia. You either made my day or you changed my life, or anything in between or just made me smile.
I’ll be happy with a. I’m definitely not perfect. And you’ll see that I’m pretty candid throughout these chats and I’m more than happy to throw myself under the bus on many occasions cuz I’m definitely not perfect. So let’s be in this together and support each other together, . And on that note, Please do subscribe to my podcast so you’ll get notified every time a new episode drops.
Please connect with me on Instagram. Tell me your mommy fail. Ask me a question about anything to do with health parenting kids. I won’t know the answer necessarily, but I’ll absolutely be able to point you in the direction of the people that do, or I will turn it into an episode just dedicat. To you connect with me on Instagram or reach out to me@apameliaphillips.com.au my email, and I will see you again very soon in the studio.
Bye.
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