As well as the opportunity to meet Julie Walters, women attending the day could benefit from an indoor marketplace, meeting exhibitors offering a range of services to women, and enjoy various talks and workshops.
I’m always honoured to support the work of My Sisters’ House and over the past few years this has included running a charity fundraising fitness day at Her Garden Gym, contributing various essential toiletry donations for women in need, and delivering a Menopause Workshop. My daughter Saffron, who is currently studying Creative Writing at University, also supported the charity in a volunteer role over the summer last year, lending her writing skills to the creation of a blog. During her time she was especially privileged to interview Julie Walters at the official opening of My Sisters’ House new premises.
It was wonderful to meet the many women who attended my session.We kicked off the session looking at three important things we could do, without leaving the room, to promote physical and mental health. So I got everyone up out of their seats and onto their feet! Reducing sedentary behaviour is one key way we can improve our health markers, as a sedentary lifestyle can lead to numerous issues such as weight gain, back pain, and inflammation. Having got everyone up and moving I invited the women to find someone they didn’t know to introduce themselves to. This is an important way to build mental resilience as we know social connection is valuable to avoid feelings of isolation and loneliness. Once everyone was seated again we discussed the sensitive issue of stress incontinence. Acknowledging this affects as many as 1 in 3 women I talked through options, including how to perform pelvic floor exercises correctly.
Having completed these first three challenges I moved on to highlight what we can learn from some of the oldest people on the planet who live in the Blue Zones. The Blue Zones are pockets in the world with a higher percentage of people who live beyond the age of 100 years old and in good health. We moved onto look at how we can implement some of the lessons from the Blue Zones in our own lives.
The final part of my talk focused on specific advice for women approaching the menopause and my Blueprint for female health.
We started the session with connecting
The audience were engaged with practical and interactive activities
I enabled some sensitive female health issue conversations
And
The women who attended left feeling empowered, and knowledgeable on how they can impact their own health
Mirroring My Sisters’ House strapline and ethos
It truly was a marvellous day for women, by women.
Special thanks to Julie Budge and the staff and volunteers at MSH for letting me share in your day, and creating such a wonderful event. A photograph album capturing the days highlights can be found here.