Have you ever cancelled plans because getting dressed felt too hard?

Did standing in front of the mirror, trying things on, and seeing your body from every angle suddenly make the whole evening feel overwhelming?

In this episode of the Talking with Emma Podcast, Emma Wright explores the hidden emotional pattern behind why so many women struggle with body image, confidence, and getting dressed for social situations.

Many women believe that body confidence will come once they become more disciplined — eating better, losing weight, or exercising more.

But behaviour science tells us something different.

Our actions are driven by emotion, not discipline.

That means the moment in front of the mirror is often less about how your body looks — and more about how you feel about your body.

In this episode, Emma shares the story of a client who regularly cancelled plans because getting dressed triggered shame and self-doubt. Once she understood the emotional pattern behind this behaviour, everything changed.

In this episode we explore:

• Why getting dressed can feel emotionally overwhelming
• The hidden body image pattern that leads women to cancel plans or avoid social situations
• Why discipline and confidence often miss the point when it comes to body image
• How thoughts about your body trigger emotions like shame and anxiety
• Why your nervous system tries to escape those feelings
• The surprising power of body neutrality
• How understanding your emotional patterns can help you feel more comfortable in your body

Take the Body Image Score Assessment

If you recognise yourself in this episode — avoiding photos, feeling anxious about getting dressed, or cancelling plans because of how you feel about your body — the next step is understanding your current patterns.

Take the Body Image Score assessment to see how thoughts and emotions about your body may be influencing your confidence and behaviour.

The assessment only takes minutes and includes a free Body Image Guide and audio.

Take the assessment here

Curious about working together?
I’m currently taking private coaching clients. Book a consultation to discuss what you want to achieve and create a clear step-by-step individualised plan to achieve it. Whether I can help you archive your goal or not, you’ll leave knowing what the next steps are.

🌐 Emma's Website
📱 Follow on LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review. Let’s help more women stop fixing their bodies and start trusting them. 

In this episode, Emma shares a powerful insight from a recent talk where not a single woman in a room of 90 had never tried to lose weight.

That moment reveals something bigger than personal struggle.

It reveals a culture.

If nearly every woman has tried to shrink herself — and most still feel dissatisfied — the problem is not individual failure. It’s the system we’ve been trained to participate in.

Emma unpacks:

• The powerful link between self-worth and sustainable health behaviours
• The four components of body image most people don’t understand
• How “thinking first” coaching creates change that actually sticks

If you’ve tried to action your way into feeling better about yourself — and ended up exhausted — this episode will help you understand why.

And more importantly, what to do instead.

Mentioned in the episode:

Download the Midlife Body Image Guide to get a picture of your current body image, thinking and eating patterns. 

Curious about working together?
I’m currently taking private coaching clients. Book a consultation to discuss what you want to achieve and create a clear step-by-step individualised plan to achieve it. Whether I can help you achieve your goal or not, you’ll leave knowing what the next steps are.

🌐 Emma's Website
📱 Follow on LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review. Let’s help more women stop fixing their bodies and start trusting them. 

In this powerful episode, I talk with Jane Guy, about how women are socialized to think about money and success. 

Jane brings a unique perspective on what keeps women stuck around money - their internal stories, cultural narratives and black and white thinking.

We looked at how similar our money stories are to our body image stories and how both keep us playing small in smiliar ways. 

Jane helps women rewrite their relationship with money through her business coaching where she turns the intellectual into the practical. 

This conversation is a bold reminder of the impact of our socialisation on every aspect of our lives.

It was also a hugely hopeful episode where we help women navigate their way to a very different relationship with money and body image to impact a more postive sense of worthiness. 

What you’ll learn in this episode:

• Where our money stories start 
• How to change our money story so it's more empowering
• The link between how we feel about our bodies and how we are with money
• The best place to start to make change stick

Mentioned in the show:

Jane guy business coach helps women articulate their value so their work is clearly understood, recognised, and resourced. With over 20 years of experience supporting women and a reputation for sharp, no-fluff strategy with a huge side of laughter, Jane helps women move from being busy and capable to being known as high-impact problem-solvers and leaders. 

Find Jane on LinkedIN, Instagram and Facebook

Get on her mailing list here

Also mentioned in the show:

Download the Midlife Body Image Guide to get early access to workshop details and ticket release dates. 

Curious about working together?
I’m currently taking private coaching clients. Book a consultation to discuss what you want to achieve and create a clear step-by-step individualised plan to achieve it. Whether I can help you archive your goal or not, you’ll leave knowing what the next steps are.

🌐 Emma's Website
📱 Follow on LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review. Let’s help more women stop fixing their bodies and start trusting them. 

This episode is about how stress eating, night eating and unconscious eating are biological responses, not a weakness you need to overcome.

Emotional eating a topic the wellness and nutrition world often makes out is a personal weakness - stress eating or night eating or unconscious eating - but is a very normal biological response. 

Knowing this takes a huge struggle out of your eating and ends the battle you have with yourself. 

Mentioned in the episode:

The Emotional Eating Solution Workshop: Learn a powerful tool to end night eating, unconscious eating and stress eating. Feb 19 | Noon | Recording avaiable

Download the Midlife Body Image Guide to get early access to workshop details and ticket release dates. 

Curious about working together?
I’m currently taking private coaching clients. Book a consultation to discuss what you want to achieve and create a clear step-by-step individualised plan to achieve it. Whether I can help you archive your goal or not, you’ll leave knowing what the next steps are.

🌐 Emma's Website
📱 Follow on LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review. Let’s help more women stop fixing their bodies and start trusting them. 

Here are the details:

Learn a powerful tool to end night eating, stress eating and unconscious eating
 

12 noon | Thurs 19 Feb | 60 mins

recording available

Register here

In this episode of Talking with Emma we're going to unpack emotional eating from a unique standpoint, so that you can see that it may not be the problem you feel it currently is, and you can actually do something about it.

The Emotional Eating Solution Workshop: Learn a powerful tool to end night eating, unconscious eating and stress eating.

Feb 19 | Noon | Recording avaiable

Mentioned in the episode:

Download the Midlife Body Image Guide to get early access to workshop details and ticket release dates. 

Curious about working together?
I’m currently taking private coaching clients. Book a consultation to discuss what you want to achieve and create a clear step-by-step individualised plan to achieve it. Whether I can help you archive your goal or not, you’ll leave knowing what the next steps are.

🌐 Emma's Website
📱 Follow on LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review. Let’s help more women stop fixing their bodies and start trusting them. 

The pursuit of weight loss is almost universally talked about in positive terms. But it has huge costs. 

This episode outlines many of the side effects that women are unaware of or not told about when they embark on weight loss behaviour.

It goes through 38 side effects over four categories: Physical, Social, Psychological, and Behavioural. 

Mentioned in the episode:

Download the Midlife Body Image Guide to get early access to workshop details and ticket release dates. 

Curious about working together?
I’m currently taking private coaching clients. Book a consultation to discuss what you want to achieve and create a clear step-by-step individualised plan to achieve it. Whether I can help you archive your goal or not, you’ll leave knowing what the next steps are.

🌐 Emma's Website
📱 Follow on LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review. Let’s help more women stop fixing their bodies and start trusting them. 

In this episode we talk about weight gain in a way you've probably never heard it discussed, especially if you're a midlife woman. 

This episode is for you:

• You dislike diet culture but still fear weight gain
• You feel uncomfortable in a changing body
• You want relief from body-related fear, not another plan

In this episode, you’ll explore:

• The cultural beliefs that teach women to feel like weight gain is a moral failure
• Why dieting is an amazing emotional coping strategy if you don't have another way to feel hard feelings
• How control what we eat can feel safer than uncertainty, even when it costs you
• How to get what you want - confidence, self-respect, feeling good enough - without 'having' to lose weight

You’ll also hear why wanting weight loss does not make you shallow or wrong.

Mentioned in the episode:

The Normalising Weight Gain workshop on March 21.

• Half-day workshop
• Recorded and available by replay
• Focused on tools, not mindset forcing
• Designed for midlife women who want relief, not control
• Limited to 15

Download the Midlife Body Image Guide to get early access to workshop details and ticket release dates. 

Sexual wellbeing often changes in midlife. Bodies change. Desire changes. But you don't have to settle for being dissatisfied. 

Yet very few women are given tools to talk about it without shame, pressure, or self-blame.

In this episode, I explore the often-overlooked link between body image and sexual wellbeing — and why your thoughts and emotions play a bigger role than your appearance ever could.

Drawing on insights from a women’s and sexual health doctor, alongside my own lived experience and coaching work, I break down:

• Why the brain is the most important sexual organ
• How cultural messages about women’s bodies shape intimacy
• Why pressure, duty, and “shoulds” kill desire
• What body image actually is — beyond the mirror
• How shame quietly impacts connection and communication
• Why working with thoughts and emotions changes what’s possible
• Practical ways to approach intimacy 

This episode is for you if:

• You feel disconnected from your body or desire
• You feel a bit hopeless or frustrated and like you have to settle
• Communication feels hard 

Mentioned in this episode

Talking with Emma – Episode 24: How to Handle Anxiety
A deeper dive into working with intense emotions like anxiety and shame, and how to stay present instead of shutting down.

A free 50-minute consult to do a short body image assessment to see where it is getting in the way, look at what you want and create personalized step-by step process to achieve it. Whether we work together or not, you’ll know your next steps. 

👉 Book your free consult here

Want to connect with Emma?

The best way is to download the Midlife Body Image Guide. You'll also get first access to free masterclasses on emotional eating, body acceptance, and getting obsessive food thinking out of your brain.

These two shifts are based on what I’ve been seeing in clients I coached in 2025—the wins and the challenges the women faced going about their day-to-day lives.

These are not wellness trends or research insights. They are what I've noticed women saying from their lived experience. 

That’s where today's podcast comes from.

The two shifts I’ve noticed: 

1. Women don’t want more information. They need support to make change sustainable.
2. Weight loss drugs have changed the body image conversation.

Want to connect with Emma?

The best way is to download the Midlife Body Image Guide. You'll also get first access to free masterclasses on emotional eating, body acceptance, and getting obsessive food thinking out of your brain.

Links & Resources:
🎧 Download the Midlife Body Image Guide + audio guide. 

Curious about working together?
Emma is currently taking private clients. 

To see if coaching is for you, book a consultation where you discuss what you want to achieve, what you’ve currently been doing, and you’ll leave with a clear step-by-step individualised plan to achieve it.