Episode 1: Welcome to Fat and Fertile
Episode Summary
Welcome to the very first episode of Fat and Fertile! Nicola Salmon is here to share her story and talk about why she’s on a mission to help people in bigger bodies navigate fertility without the pressure to diet or change themselves. She opens up about her journey, the impact of PCOS and weight stigma, and what it means to be fat-positive in a healthcare system that isn’t always friendly to bigger bodies.
What to Expect from the Podcast: Nicola’s plans to bust myths about fertility in bigger bodies, challenge anti-fat bias in healthcare, and share real stories and solid info to help you feel empowered and informed.
Highlights:
Why Nicola ditched dieting and embraced body autonomy
How her background in science and healthcare shaped her unique approach
The importance of support and community on the fertility journey
Links and Resources
Nicola’s book, Fat and Fertile
More info on the Fat and Fertile Alliance, Nicola’s community for folks looking for extra support on their fertility journey
Get Involved
Nicola would love to hear from you! If this episode resonates, share your story, ask a question, or leave a review.
Support the Podcast
If you’re enjoying Fat and Fertile, please share this episode on social or leave a review! Every share helps make this info more accessible to everyone who needs it.
Explore More with Nicola
Support My Work: Buy me a coffee on Ko-Fi to help keep my podcast and free resources accessible.
Follow Me on Instagram: Join me here for fat-positive fertility tips, updates, and encouragement.
Free Resources for Fat Folks: Access a hub of tools designed to support your fat-positive fertility journey, including guides, checklists, research summaries, and my popular Can I Get Pregnant in a Bigger Body? workshop.
👉 Explore all these resources here and take your first step toward parenthood without stigma or shame. I’m cheering you on every step of the way!
-
Hey, my lovely Welcome to fat and fertile, the podcast. I'm Nicola salmon fat positive fertility coach and author of the book fat and fertile. I'm obsessed with helping folks navigate getting pregnant in an anti fat world. On this podcast, we'll explore the complexities that fat folks face when you want to grow your family. If you want to support this podcast, I would love for you to share it on social media or leave me a review on your podcast app. Are you ready? Let's dive in.
Hi folks,
and welcome to the very first episode of fat and fertile, the podcast. For those of you who don't know me, if we've never met before, my name is Nicola salmon. I am a fat positive fertility coach, which means that I support fat folks who want to get pregnant in their current bodies, without weight loss, without dieting, without any of that. Over the next few episodes, in the first season of this podcast, I'm going to be exploring 10 different myths around getting pregnant in a bigger body. Now, this may be information that you've never heard before. It might go completely against things that you've been told by your healthcare professionals, by your doctor, everything that you read on social media or on the internet, but I want to assure you that the things that I'm going to be sharing and talking to you about, I have researched, I have talked to people about, I have gone really deep into the topics. So I'm going to be sharing my resources. I'm going to be sharing the research, I'm going to be sharing folks lived experience around each of the topics, because I want you to be fully informed about what's going on in each of the topics that we talk about, and so that you have all the information to make decisions about your Healthcare and to really begin to believe that your body is capable of getting pregnant and having a completely unremarkable pregnancy. So today, for our very first episode, I'm going to be sharing a little bit more about me, about my journey, about how I've got here to be the very first fat positive fertility coach. So I hope that some of my story resonates with you. You may see yourself in some of the things that I share. And my hope is that by sharing this, that you feel less alone in your experiences and know that there are other folks out there who not only have shared the things that you've gone through, but are also out there trying to make a change so that people in the future don't have to experience the same thing. So a bit more about me. I am 36 I live in the UK. I have two children, two boys. They are now six and eight. I live with my husband, my very cheeky puppy, who is now six months old, and we live in the forest and we Yeah, this is the life I've dreamed about us for a very long time. And we are very lucky to be able to live in the countryside now and enjoy all the wonderful things that that has to offer. Before that, I lived in London. I grew up in the north of England, and when I was about 16, I went to the doctor, and the doctor told me that I had a condition called PCOS, or polycystic ovarian syndrome. Now, before that, I had, I think I started my menstrual cycle when I was about 13, but I'd only had one, maybe two periods between that time, so between when I first menstruated till about 16, and at first my GP, my doctor, just kind of dismissed it and said, No, there's no problem. It's really normal. That's really fine. And my mom helped me to keep pushing for answers, and eventually we went to a different GP who did an internal ultrasound scan and took some blood to look at my hormones. And it was then that I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome. Now this was 20 years ago, so this was before we had the internet, before we had groups of people who you could talk to or find people who shared similar experiences. I had no idea what PCOS was. I didn't know anybody else that had it. I. I was told a few things. I was told that I would never be able to get pregnant because of my PCOS, and I was told that weight loss and going on the oral contraceptive pill would be the cure. So I was sent on my merry way, started on the oral contraceptive pill at 16, and this kind of sped up my dieting journey. So I'd already, before this point, had a few kind of comments made to me about my body by people, people starting to police the food that I was eating because I was a slightly bigger body than my sister, who was younger than me. So yeah, this really ramped up my dieting. And I'm sure that it will be a familiar story to many folks listening that I tried all the diets, all the things in the UK, we have Slimming World, we have Weight Watchers, we have rosemary Connolly, we had the low carb, the low fat, the Keto, you know, I could go on forever, but yeah, the the words of the doctor said was really the, the main driver behind a lot of the desire and the desperate need to change my body, because when they told me that I wouldn't be able to get pregnant, that had such a negative impact on my self esteem, on my self just Every aspect of myself like I can remember around that time, like, doing really well in school, and then all of a sudden, the next year, not doing so well. It impacted my confidence around, you know, the opposite sex, around people, like who I chose to be partners with. Like, romantically, it impacted how I felt about myself and how identified it myself, where I thought I was unlovable. I thought that nobody would want to date me, to be with me, because I was broken in some way. I thought it meant that I wasn't a whole person, because I had this thing that was wrong with me that I didn't really understand, and it also meant that I wouldn't be able to go on and have kids. So yeah, like, it changed me as a person, and it impacted how I grew up and what I thought about myself and how I showed up in the world. From then, I went to school, I did my A levels, I went to university and studied science. I know it sounds really random. It was like this science degree where you could go and pick whatever science things you wanted to do, which was amazing. But that was when I moved away from home, and I moved to London, and I then went on to do a master's in medical engineering and physics, which sounds like a mouthful, but it was really, it really set me up to learn more about Western medicine and research and building up all those skills around science, which are invaluable to me right now. It was around then that I met my husband, or my soon to be husband, and I got a job. I was a clinical scientist for a little while within the NHS, and then I started working for the civil service. Which of those of you who not in the UK, is like our government systems around Medicines and Healthcare. So again, those kind of jobs really gave me a foundation in reading about science, understanding science and research, which, unbeknownst to me, put me in a really good position for where I am right now. It was around that time that I was unfortunate enough to experience a traumatic incident. So I saw somebody get shot outside my flat, where I lived in London, and that had it kind of changed the trajectory of my life. So at that point, I was working at hospital, and I really suffered from post traumatic stress disorder. I try things like CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy and antidepressants, but they didn't really help. And I tried, I have no idea why, but I tried acupuncture, also at that point after I was kind of getting a bit desperate about things that would help me feel better in myself, and it really helped me, really transformed my mental health and my, yeah, how I was able to kind of go back to work and show up in the world, and it took this kind of hold on my brain of like, wow. How did this work? How did this happen? I'd never tried acupuncture before. I had no idea about its history, about its mechanism, about. Anything around it, and I was fascinated. So without much research, without much kind of thought into it, I signed up for a four year diploma in learning about acupuncture, and that's how I started working in the fertility sector, because so many folks sort see soup,
looked up acupuncture for fertility. So I was getting a lot of folks coming to my practice, once I qualified, who were really interested in using acupuncture for fertility. So I did a lot of training in that. I did a lot of research around that. And, yeah, I was amazed how much acupuncture was able to help folks with their fertility. And it wasn't only the acupuncture side of it, it was the having someone to support you. So having someone that you went to see every week who would help you and support you with your fertility. Often, that aspect of kind of care and support had a big contributing factor to it as well. So around that time, I decided to train as a coach. I really wanted to help folks beyond just sticking needles in them, I wanted to give them tools and support to kind of help beyond just the weekly appointments that we had. So I decided to train as a coach, which was really useful, a fertility coach, specifically. And yeah, so that was my practice. That was my business for a while, and then I was ready to start having babies, and wanted to grow my family. And I thought it was going to be really hard. I thought that it was going to be, you know, this big undertaking that we were going to have to go through treatment, that it was going to be, you know, years and years before we were, if ever able to have our family. But that's not how it worked out for us. What happened for us was I was ready to go on another diet. I was ready to try and make my body smaller again, and we'd stopped using contraception, and it just happened, and I was blown away. I mean, obviously I felt very lucky that we didn't have to go through any issues, but I spent the whole nine months of my pregnancy, anxious and worried about what was going to happen because of what I've been told about being pregnant in a bigger body, every single thing that could go wrong, I thought was going to go wrong, and it wasn't an enjoyable time that it should have been because of these expectations that I had that things were going to go wrong, and they didn't. Nothing happened. It was completely unremarkable and very boring. Nothing happened. And that first planted a seed in me. It that was my first thought of like, oh, well, if it was so easy for me to get pregnant, and it was so easy for me to have a pregnancy in a baby. Like, why was I told that stuff? And that was that first seed of like, Oh, why? Why did that happen to me? And I hadn't cured my PCOS. I still had 100 plus day cycles. I wasn't even really tracking my cycle at that point, I didn't have the cycle literacy that I have now, but yeah, I was like, how did this happen? Like, how it just made no sense to me. And it was also during that first pregnancy with my eldest son that I began to experience a lot of weight stigma. Before then, I hadn't really spent a lot of time going to the doctors. I was lucky that I didn't need to, and I wasn't really managing my PCOS very well in terms of, I wasn't getting regular medical care, I wasn't getting medical support. I was just taking the pill, and that was it. So it was the first time that I'd ever been, you know, in this scenario, where I was seeing a medical professional regularly, and I had, you know, desires. I had choices about what I wanted my birth to look like, and I decided that I wanted a water birth, and I decided I wanted to birth at home, and that I was told that that wasn't okay. I was told that I was very high risk and that there were going to be problems, and those options weren't available to me, but I researched it. I was comfortable with the very small risk that there was, which is present for all people who want to birth at home or want to birth in water, it wasn't any more risky for me as a person in a bigger body. So I had a conversation with the head of midwifery at the hospital where I was birthing, and I kind of said all this stuff, and it was very hard, because I'd never been taught how to advocate myself. I'd never said anything apart from yes doctor to any health professional. And it was, it was scary, but it was really empowering, because in the end, we decided that, yes, I was going to have this birth at home with the water birth or the water pool, and that was going to be okay. And I it was the first time that I really understood that actually they couldn't make that decision for me, that I had full autonomy over my body, and I got to make the decision. About what happened to my body, both during birth and beforehand and afterwards. And that was the first time that I'd ever really understood that concept. And thinking back now, that blows my mind, that it took up until I was 29 before I understood that I was in charge of my own body. And yeah, again, that planted another seed of like, wow. Like, how did it take me so long to understand that concept? How was I not taught this as a child? And it was only after the birth of my son that I decided to give up dieting. I decided that I didn't want to pass on this relationship that I had with food and my body to my son. I didn't want him to hear me talking about my body in a derogatory way, talking about how fat and how I hated this bit, and I wanted to change this bit. I didn't want him to absorb those messages, and I didn't want him to hate food. I didn't want him to struggle with food in the same way that I did. So that was when I kind of made this commitment and promised to myself that I wasn't going to die anymore and I wasn't going to weigh myself anymore. And yeah, it's been eight years, and I haven't done either of those things, and it's been transformational for my mental health and my confidence in myself and my life. Because, yeah, the world is very different now in my life, I am I after that, started putting the pieces of the puzzle together in terms of my business, and once I wanted for that like so at the time, I was doing fertility coaching mainly, and also doing some acupuncture, still, but I was starting to set up an online business because I thought I could help more people. And the more I kind of got into the online fertility world, around seeing what other people were talking about, the more I realized how damaging it was to fat folks, how desperate the situation was in terms of support for fat people, because there was nothing you were told to lose weight and go away, and that was it, that was everything. And the more I understood and learned about the health every size movement, intuitive eating, kind of a weight neutral approach to health, the more stark it became and clear it became to me, how that phobic the fertility industry is, and how there are so many dietitians and nutritionists out there who are promoting Weight Loss for folks who want to get pregnant, and how restrictive and so many barriers for people who are in bigger bodies who want to access fertility, care and support. And at that point in my business, I was like, I can't not talk about this anymore. I can't not make this the focus of my business, because it is so important. I often think about like a parallel universe where I wasn't able to get pregnant, and I know that that could have been me so easily, having to navigate a scenario where I wouldn't be able to access support and I wouldn't be able to afford to pay privately to get health care and to get fertility support, and those the choices that you have to make around you know, do I have to lose weight in order to access NHS help in the UK, or do I have to travel miles and miles away just to find a clinic that will treat me in my body? So I knew from that realization that this was the work that I was here to do, and I've been doing a lot of it since then, I've been learning, I've been researching, I've been focused on trying to uncover what's really going on for fat folks, because it doesn't make sense the situation as it is, most folks in bigger bodies will go on to have completely normal and healthy pregnancies. There is a slightly higher risk of things happening during folks pregnancies. But I don't think it's to do with the fat on our bodies. I think it's to do with the systemic ways in which the healthcare system is set up to to be biased against fat people and to discriminate against fat folks. So whilst a lot of my work is supporting folks one on one and through workshops and through giving them information that they might need, some of my work is also to change those systems, because it is not your fault that you are having to navigate these issues. You know, in a bigger body, it's not your fault that
you are told that you need to lose weight in order to get pregnant like it is not your fault. It is the fault of the systems, the healthcare systems. The culture that we live in that you aren't able to access the health care and the support that you need in order to grow your family. So that is what we're going to be talking about for the next 10 weeks. I'm going to be picking a different myth every week that I hear so often from folks who've experienced this, who've been told it by their health care providers, who have had this thought going around their head over and over again. And we're going to explore it. We're going to look at people's lived experiences. We're going to look at the evidence, the research, and I'm going to try and piece together what I think is really going on from all of the different pieces of the puzzle that we have so far so that you can better understand what's going on, why the doctors are saying, what they're saying, and practically what you could do to give yourself the best chance of navigating this with your mental and physical health intact. So I look forward to exploring those with you over the next few weeks, and I am always here. If you have any questions, if you want any advice, just pop in the show notes and send me an email, because I'm so so open to hearing your experiences and sharing this path with you. See you soon.
Thanks so much for joining me today, for fat and fertile to continue the conversation and get support from me and other fat folks who get it. I'd love to invite you to join the fat and fertile Alliance. The Alliance is a group of folks brought together by their shared desire to grow their family and a world that oppresses fat people. We're all different and have different lived experiences, but we come together to support one another and create a space where we feel included, supported and cherished, because you deserve all the support you need in order to grow your family. Check out the link in the show notes for more information. See you next time you.
Apologies in advance for any typos: transcribed by https://otter.ai and it can make mistakes.