Episode 15: Rediscovering Joy in Fat Positive Fertility - Exciting Plans for 2025
Episode Summary
In this episode of Fat and Fertile, I open up about my journey from 2024 into an exciting 2025, sharing both personal and professional highs and lows. From grappling with neurodivergence and finding support to winning a prestigious fertility advocate award, it's been quite the roller-coaster! I hope this episode reassures you that joy and passion can be rediscovered, even amidst challenges, and inspires you to embrace self-discovery and empowerment on your fertility journey.
What to Expect from the Podcast
This episode covers my recent experiences and plans for the future. Dive into understanding how embracing neurodivergence has reshaped my path, the joy I found in cold-water swimming, and a new venture on Ko-fi, aimed at fostering a nurturing community away from the constraints of social media.
Highlights:
Embracing Neurodivergence: ADHD and Autism Insights
An Award-Winning Year: Best Fertility Advocate 2024
Launch of the Ko-fi Community: A Supportive Space for Fat Folks
Plans for Fat and Fertile's Second Edition
Links and Resources
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
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Hey my lovely. Welcome to Fat and Fertile, the podcast. I'm Nicola Salmon. Pronouns. She and her. I'm an award winning fertility advocate and fat positive fertility specialist. And I am so passionate about supporting fat folks who feel excluded or dismissed by traditional fertility spaces. On this podcast, we'll tackle weight bias within the fertility industry. We're going to explore how to navigate your fertility journey without diets, shame, or stigma, and empower you to trust your body and take control of your reproductive health. If you're looking for more support, be sure to download my free Fat Person's Guide to Getting Pregnant or Join My Coffee Community. It's a space for fat folks to connect, share, and find compassionate support. You'll find all the links in the show notes. I'm so glad that you're here. I'm in your corner and we've got this together. Well. Hello. It has been a while. So I am recording this in December 2024. But hopefully if all goes according to plan, you'll be hearing this in January 2025. And I think I recorded maybe four podcasts in 2024, so I am hopeful that 2025 is going to be more fruitful in terms of podcasting. So consider this a bit of a roundup, a bit of a re acquaintance, if you will, with what fat, positive fertility and fat and fertile the podcast is all about. I really want to share what I've been up to, some really exciting things that are going to be happening this year. And yeah, just having a bit of a chinwag because maybe you've heard of me and know me and have. We've had lots of lovely times on the internet before and maybe we haven't. So I am going to just start by sharing what's been going on with me. So I have been pulling along in my business. I think. Mrs.. Maybe the 11th or 12th year. I've been in business now and probably the I want to say sixth year. I've been doing specific work around fertility and around weight stigma and fat liberation. And, and I have to admit that it has been a bit of a slog this year. I lost so much joy and so much love and so much passion for my business. I was just exhausted. And I think what I'm coming to realise now is that a lot of it is tied in with my neuro divergence. I've been exploring that a lot today. I'm still on the flip and wait lists for for the formal diagnosis. But yeah, I'm pretty confident in my own self-diagnosis that I have ADHD and autism, so that has been a wild ride in uncovering what that looks like for me in my life and my business and my family life. Huge impacts. And really, this is the first time in my business that I have really allowed myself to seek support for those needs in terms of looking at and admin support within my business and a coach for myself, and that has made such a huge difference, which is why I am hopeful that 2025 will be the year that I'm able to be a bit more consistent with podcasting coming on. Being able to share more with you about what I'm doing, about what's going on so we can make a bigger change in the world and have much more impact in terms of changing the landscape for fertility. So that's why I've been a bit quiet. That's why I've had to take a step back from social media for a while. But I am hopeful that 2025 is going to be the year that I'm better supported in my business, which means I'm going to be able to show up so much better. I'm hopeful. I'm touching all the wood. There's a wooden desk, I'm touching all the wood. So apart from that, business wise, I won an award this year or last year, 2024, I won my very first award as Best Fertility advocate at the Facility Care Awards. And that has to be one of my like, biggest like pinch me moments of the year. Apart from my book as well. Probably one of the biggest moments in my career, and I was so sure that I wasn't going to win. But I didn't go to the award ceremony in Amsterdam. I do not know what I was thinking. I was like, oh, I'm tired. I'm definitely not going to win it. And that is not the right kind of thinking. Nicola. So lesson learnt. Next time when I'm invited into an award ceremony, I will be there with my fanciest clothes on, trusting that it's possible that I will win it. And so that was like the biggest thing that happened in my business. So I got my support. I won an award and in personal life things have been taking on. I've been doing a lot of cold water swimming, which I love, really helping me grounding my body. I just love the community. There are so many other people in bigger bodies that go cold water swimming. It's just fantastic. It just makes me feel so comfortable in my skin. I love the feeling of just being so present in my body. It's probably one of the only things that makes me feel really grounded, really aware and just in my body, which is why I love it so much even though it's so flipping cold. But yes, loving that. And also, I got a new tattoo last week, which I'm really excited about, I have. Dabble, shall we say, in having a couple of tattoos on my body? I got my first one the day before my 21st birthday as a very, very, very mild rebellion. Tiny mile, just like a tattoo is maybe like three millimeters long. So yes, this was this was the extreme extreme of my rebelling as a young adult. But yeah, I love it and I'm really excited to get more. I want a whole sleeve and that just feels so much more like me. I feel like I'm really filling my boots, if that makes sense. Really coming and feeling comfortable in my own skin. And I'm really excited about what else that looks like for me. And I've also been exploring the concept of rest with my coach. And something that really blew my mind when we were talking was about the idea of what rest looks like, and we talked about this idea of pretending to rest, and it has just been noodling in my mind ever since. Like, I'll sit there and I'll be like, this is what people do to rest. They sit down and then they do nothing. And for me, for the way my brain works, that doesn't feel very restful. I do not really feel energized after I've done it. And so I'm really exploring ways that I find things that feel restful and what those activities might be like, what is going to fill my cup, what is going to make me feel rested, and the thing that I have wanted to experiment with and try is playing the piano. So I used to play a very little amount maybe in my late teens. I started playing for a little bit before I went to uni, um, and loved it. And then during the pandemic, I tried with an app, you know, one of those piano learning apps, and I loved that so much. It was one of the things that really helped me just be present. So I'm going to try it again. I found a book that I love to play from. I'm going to try and have a lesson maybe once a month. So not like with any real regularity, but just enough for that external accountability. And I'm going to try and see if it helps me rest. I would love to know about rest for you. Like, do you pretend to rest? It sounds like such a bizarre concept, but I would love to know what your relationship is with rest. And if you have things that you find that really do help you feel more rested, that aren't just like sitting down and looking like you're resting, if that makes any sense at all. So that is a little update as to what I've been doing. I'm still living in the forest. I'm still loving being a forest forest dwelling. Toddler I call myself often because I went around in dungarees and and I'm loving it, loving it, loving it. But yeah, in terms of what's coming up for 2025, which is also what I wanted to talk about today. The thing that I am most excited about is I am setting up a space on a website called Kofi, and I may not be pronouncing that right. It is coffee, maybe coffee? Coffee. Who knows? I say coffee, I'm going to go with it. And the aim of this is to really create a place that feels awesome to be in, and it's going to be a wonderful space where I'm going to be sure to share all the resources that I want to that I used to share on Instagram. But Instagram got so wild with its algorithms and people weren't able to find the resources. And it's just going to allow me a space where I'm going to be able to actually create a bit of an intentional community away from meta, away from the algorithms and the adverts and all of that. And so the things that I'm going to be able to share is just going to be so wonderful and supportive, and I cannot wait to create this space. So hopefully when you listen to this now, it's going to be available. It is going to be a place where I regularly post places where you can ask questions, and I'm going to be in there answering them personally. There's going to be extra podcasts on there, at least one a month where I'm answering people's questions. There is going to be tools and resources and courses that you can access. I'm hopeful there's going to be a few extra things in there. I'm not promising, but a couple of the other ideas I've had are things like a book club. And when I say book club, I mean it in the lightest way in terms of I have a whole shelf of books that I've bought and want to read, but my ADHD has not allowed it. So I am hopeful that with a little bit of external accountability and the form of you lovely folks, that I'll be able to sit down and read maybe a book a month, I'll share what book I'm reading. You can read along if you want to or not, and then I'll share what I got, what I gained or gleaned from the book at the end of the month. Just a little way for me to be reading more books to share what I find is interesting, and if you want to join and come along to that would be amazing. I'm also going to share blogs and research on there as well. I have dabbled with sharing blogs on my website, but I feel like this is going to be a much more. Joyful place to share them with a much more kind of community feel. And yeah, more informal rather than a blog. So I cannot wait to share all this stuff over there. It's going to be so much fun, and I've tried to make it as accessible and affordable as I can, with a sliding scale for folks to be able to choose what you're able to pay to join. So I would love, love, love to see you over there. And it's also a little great space. Like if you enjoy the podcast, which will hopefully become more regular if you have gained anything from the work that I do, from the resources I share, a place where you can just go and buy me a coffee and just go, hey Nicola, I really appreciate the work that you do. So yeah, I'm really excited about this space. I am so filled with excitement and passion again, which is something I have really missed in 2024. So yeah, come over, come and say, hey, come and see what's over there. And for the rest of this month, December when I'm recording this, I'm going to try and add in some resources. So there's a few things in there already when you join in Jan. And so you can get an idea of the things that are going to be up there, so you can decide if it's a good investment for you. And also something else, which I'm really excited about is the podcast is named after my first book, Fat and Fertile, and I wrote this in 2018. Now the book is still for sale. I still love the book. It still brings me so much joy and brings other people so much joy, and I'm so proud of it. But I wrote it six years ago now, and even when I first hit publish, I knew there was things that I needed to change in that book, but it was such a labor of love. It was so hard. As a self-published author with no editing experience, no writing experience, that, to be honest, to put a book out in the world. I did it because I knew it was needed. But I know that if I can tend to that book more, it could be 20 times better. So what I'm asking also on Kofi is I have put together a little fundraiser so that I can raise enough money to be able to pay for an incredible editor to help me through the process and really make the book what it absolutely deserves to be in the second edition. So if you don't want to join the community, but you feel like you'd really love to support me in creating that next edition, then I would love that. And as a thank you, I'm going to write everybody's name in the book who is able to support me with that project. So if you want your name immortalized in a book forevermore, then head over and just, you know, give me a few pounds, a few dollars to be able to work towards that goal of of being able to. Hire an editor, a fat editor, of course, to to be able to support me in editing that book and getting it published. I think it will take about a year for me to edit it properly, so I'm hopeful that that is going to be something that's going to be happening in 2025, and I'll be able to share all of the updates in the coffee community and on the podcast of how it's going. When we get up to that target dollar, I think I'm about 4% of the way there so far in terms of I put a little money in there to get it going. So yes, I will keep you updated with how that total is going as I record podcast episodes. But yeah, I am hoping 2025 is going to be the year that I try and make things a little bit easier for myself, that I'm at a label to be a little bit more consistent with the support that I've put in place, and that I'm just going to be able to show up in the way that I did when I was really new and really green to this work. But with all of the wisdom and experience that I have accumulated over the past six years. I'd love to know what you think 2025 like, what are your hopes? What are your dreams? What are you bringing in from 2024 that's going to serve you? What are you letting go of? It is such a sticky time. The new Year, especially when we're coming from the old ways of diet, culture and new year, new you and all that bullshit. So I know it can feel like such a tricky time and, you know, so many family things going on. But I just want to send you so much love, so much compassion. And yeah, here's to more fat and fertile in 2025. Take care, my love. Thank you so much for joining me today on Fat and Fertile. I hope you found encouragement and support as you navigate getting pregnant in a bigger body. If you're looking for more resources, don't forget to grab your free Fat Person's Guide to Getting Pregnant. And if you'd like to support my work or connect with a loving, kind, fat, positive community, join me over on Kofi as a member, you'll get the chance to ask me anything and I answer all of your questions personally. There's exclusive bonus podcast episodes every month answering some questions, a supportive place to connect with other members who are also navigating the same issues that you are, and access to some of my most loved courses and tools. So whether you're trying to get pregnant or just want to support fat positive fertility advocacy, then we'd love to have you over there. The links to everything are in the show notes. Until next time, take care and remember you are absolutely worthy of all of the support and love that you need in order to grow your family.