Let me take you back to a restaurant table. Menu in your hand. Waiter hovering. And your brain's already having a full-blown argument with itself before you've even picked a starter. Should I have that? I shouldn't have that, I had a big lunch. I'll have the salad, I'll be good tonight. No actually, sod it, I'll have the pasta. But you won't even enjoy it, because you'll spend the whole meal thinking about it instead of eating it. Sound familiar? Course it does. So I've built

Let me take you to a consultation I had this week. A potential client sat across from me. I asked her the usual, what does she want, where does she want to go, what's actually going on day to day. And she just... listed it all. No water. No breakfast. No steps. Phone until stupid o'clock. No excuses. No dressing it up. Full ownership. And for a second, that stopped me. Because it sounded like self-awareness. It sounded like she'd really thought about it. Like she'd done the w

Organic, grass-fed, sustainable... do any of these words actually mean anything? Let me take you back to a decaf cappuccino after Pilates. I'm sat with my Nicola. We're chatting, like we do every week. And she tells me what she actually does for a living. Professor of evidence-based agriculture and agroecology. I stopped her right there. You're coming on my podcast. Because, I stand in the supermarket like everyone else. Organic this. Grass-fed that. Sustainable everything. A

Let me take you back to two conversations I had this week. One online. One in real life. The first was a woman I follow on Instagram, from Telford. She's been on GLP-1 drugs for a few months now. Every week she gives a little roundup. Lost two pounds, had a takeaway. on two pounds, rubbish week. This week she wrote something like, "I generally feel so much better with less food noise in my head." I banked that one. Good podcast material, I thought. Then, in real life, I spok

Let me take you back to a conversation I had this week. A lovely lady said something to me that I just have to talk to you about. "I knew how to lose weight. I knew how to gain weight. I never knew how to maintain it." That's it. That's the whole thing. Not "I lack willpower." Not "I just can't stick to anything." She'd never actually been taught the maintaining bit. If you've been dieting for years, decades even, this might be landing pretty hard right now. You know how to s

1,500 five star reviews. Zero evidence. Someone sent me a supplement this week. A DM with a screenshot. "Do I need this? Thinking of getting it for me and my husband." £25 for 30 capsules. So £50 a month between them. And 1,500 reviews. I've never seen that many on a supplement before. It stopped me for a second So I did what I always do. I went and had a proper look. PubMed. The actual studies. Not the reviews, not the influencer who posted about it with a discount code, the

Let me take you to a gym car park. With one of my client's. She's four months into her 1-1 journey with me. And she got chatting to some people there. Heavily into their macros. Their tracking. Their training. She said it was like looking at herself. A previous version of herself. Same thoughts. Same rules. Same food fear. She could see it so clearly, because she used to be right there. Now she's not. And she said to me, "I can't believe I was so deep in it." That's the thing

I bought a tablecloth this week. Round, white and pretty big, for The Intuitive Table. It's probably going to arrive creased. I am not an ironer. I never will be. Don't judge me on my housekeeping. I did warn you. Right. Let me take you back a bit further. Can you smell that in the air? That's September energy. Everyone bangs on about New Year being the time to change. I've never thought that. You've battered yourself into the ground for Christmas. You've had that weird dead

Let me take you back to a client call I had last week. She'd tracked every single calorie that passed her lips. For years. And now? She said to me, "I'm just going about my life. I'm not really thinking about food." That's it. That's the whole thing. Not some big dramatic transformation. Just...enjoying life and the mundane. But I know what you're thinking, because I get told this constantly. If I stopped dieting, I'd eat everything. Ice cream for breakfast. The whole packet

Let me take you to the snack drawer. You know the one. You've just walked past it for the fourth time today. This time you go in. Not because you're hungry. You're not even sure why. You just needed something. I had a message this week from a lady who's about to join The Intuitive Table. She wasn't sure it would help with her snacking. Fair question. So I asked her, what does the snacking actually look like? Turns out it's the fridge, then the snack drawer, then a bit more be

Let me take you back to yesterday morning. Actually, let me take you back to every morning. Alarm goes off. And straight away it's not about you. It's shoes on the kids, out the door, go go go. No breakfast, because there genuinely isn't a spare five minutes for it. Lunch is whatever's fastest, eaten at your desk, in the car, standing at the chopping board. By 3pm you need a coffee. Not want. Need. By the time you're home, cooking feels like one task too many. So it's somethi

The supplements draw. The one with magnesium in, the one with vitamin b12 in, the one with the mushroom gummies in and the one with the menopause supplement in (that you don't actually know what's in it and you can't work out if you feel better or not). Instead of going through the ingredients and telling you what you need and what you don't. We are going to go deeper (obviously - it is me after all!). And I'm going to ask you what you wanted to solve with each of those supp

I was on a coaching call this week. One of my ladies has been dieting for decades, not years...decades. She's done the shakes. The app where you photograph your dinner. The one where Tuesday's your free day. She's got the t-shirt. A few of them, actually. At one point she said, "I've tried everything, Cara." I stopped her there. Because she hadn't. She'd tried every diet. Sounds like the same sentence. But it really isn't. Diets give you structure. Rules, points, macros, cl

Right, let me take you back. All the way back to The University of Leeds and my Sports Science degree. Sport Science has four bits to it, biomechanics, psychology, anatomy and physiology. I could tell you exactly how a muscle contracts. Exactly how a joint moves. All of it. But it didn't matter one bit if I couldn't actually do anything with it. Knowing was never the hard part. It's never the hard part. Doing is. Fast forward to my PT days. Women walking through the gym door

Remember going to a nightclub and everyone was smoking, your hair and clothes would stink. Then do you remember the smoking ban coming into place? People saying that it was the nanny state getting involved, that all the pubs would close, people would still smoke anyway. But they didn't. And now 19 years later, smoking is so anti-social, I don't know anyone who smokes - I know vaping is popular but I'm talking about the smoking ban. Well, what if I said what happened with smok

I was chatting to a lady who had done every diet going. She was telling me about the time she lost 2 stone, put it back on and some. Then did another one which actually made her snacking worse. Then she told me about what she was going to do next. And about how she goes to Chub Club every Tuesday with other ladies who were doing the same thing. And I thought to myself, wouldn't it be good if these women went somewhere where they could learn about being a mindful eater, about

Sometimes the best ideas come to me in the most random places. I was standing in a Boots queue last week, waiting to pay, minding my own business. And something on the shelf caught my eye. The branding reminded me of Skinny Tea. Remember Skinny Tea? And I thought, where did that go? I haven't seen an influencer flogging it in years. No one's holding it up in a gym selfie with a discount code in the caption anymore. It just... disappeared. Which got me thinking. Where did all

Let me take you back to when I was a freshly qualified PT. I signed up to one of those 8 week fat loss programs. You know the ones "eat what you like" and drop a dress size. If I'm being totally honest, I wanted to see how established PTs were doing it. So I paid £125. In return, I got a spreadsheet. Just a spreadsheet. It told me how many calories to eat, how much protein to hit, and how many calories to "burn" that week. The target? 1,300 calories a day. So low. I'd been tr

Think about the last time someone's body came up in conversation. At the dinner table. In the group chat. A comment someone left on a photo. It probably felt pretty normal, right? Just chat. Just banter. But... The language we use about other people's bodies doesn't just affect them. It shapes the way we think and feel about our own. And in this week's episode of Chatting with Cara, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Why does the language even matter? We're surrounded by

100 episodes of Chatting with Cara. I know. I can't quite believe it either. I nearly did a normal episode this week. A tips one. Something useful to screenshot and save. But then I thought, no. You don't get to 100 and just do a normal one. So instead I’m sat in my stepdaughter's bedroom, hiding from the noise, and I just talked. No notes (yes I do normally have notes). Nothing planned. Just me telling you the whole story. Because the more you know me, the more everythin