Why Wellpodz is reinventing how people lose weight, why does this matter and what's the journey been like so far?

I'm normally pretty active on LinkedIn (having a past life as a head hunter dictated high activity levels on here!) but over the past year I've been building a new breed of weight loss company with my team (yet to be announced). So I thought I'd use the platform I spent so many painstaking years building a connection base of high reputability, to share the story of my company and how we're now changing the lives of thousands of people in a completely unique way.

This all started 9 years ago with my Mum who, as a trained and very experienced cognitive hypnotherapist with a clinic in London's medical district, Harley Street, began to notice there were a huge number of people coming to her with really warped eating habits, behaviours, and an awful relationship with food. Not only did they have a terrible relationship with food, they'd been using diet and weight loss programmes for several years but they still found themselves overweight or obese. The knock-on effect of this was extremely low confidence, poor body image, depression and the mentality of "i'm a failure" because they'd be forever yo-yo dieting (losing weight and then putting it back on again).

The stark reality was that people who had been victims to years and years of yo-yo dieting had formed a deep, unconscious relationship with food which your traditional weight loss programmes just can't change. The fact is most diets require lots of willpower to succeed, they require conscious effort and control (counting your calories, sticking to the diet plan), and arguably most importantly, they don't change your unconscious's relationship with food (binge eating, stress related eating, emotional eating). Shockingly, 95% of weight loss attempts fail. 95%!!

We realised this is an enormous pain point for so many people. You'd not believe how many people we've met who have said something along the lines of, "I've tried every diet and weight loss programme out there but they're all the same. They all, in some way shape or form, force me to diet and I just hate it".

So how are we solving this pain point?

We're not a diet and we're at the intersect of mindfulness and weight loss.

Wellpodz is the market leader in unconscious weight management. We've developed a 12 week programme that changes your brain's unconscious relationship with food using a technique called 'Unconscious Persuasion'. Our users listen to a series of 9 minute audio recordings (very much like Headspace or Calm) which gently retrains the brain to instinctively (unconsciously led) choose a healthier lifestyle and exercise more. We've taken away the need for willpower, it's completely effortless and means that for the first time in years- and for some people it's literally 15-20 years- they feel like they have complete freedom from food. They're now not constantly thinking about food and they're relationship with them self, first and foremost, is the best its been in years.

The beauty about this programme is it harnesses the psychology of positivity, behavioural science principles (including Robert Cialdini's 'nudge' theory) and neuroscience to drastically improve our user's mental health around their weight. We think this is one of the most crucial attributes to successful weight loss attempts. If you think you can, you will... especially if your unconscious mind thinks you can. We change people's unconscious, instinctive attitude towards food... something which, to our knowledge, isn't being done by anybody in this market at scale. We also improve people's mental health, self-confidence and habitual patterns so they can live and breathe positivity at an unconscious level. 80% of our day to day lives are lived mostly in an unconscious state. A healthy unconscious is often totally overlooked because it's incredibly difficult to get there. We change that.

We also take a very different stance on the process of weighing oneself. We ask our users to drastically (some even throw them away completely) reduce the amount of times they stand on the dreaded scales. The scales are a huge source of anxiety and stress for people losing weight and often cause a culture of continued failure. We've got some case studies who used to weigh themselves twice a day. They were a slave to the scales and any increase in weight was hugely demoralising for them. Being able to shift their mindset away from being dedicated to their weight to being dedicated to how they feel in their body, clothes and their mind is enormous. It's also one of the most liberating aspects of our programme.

We've been working with the NHS in Manchester and Birmingham to help patients and NHS staff to lose weight. 1.4 million people are employed by the NHS and a whopping 700,000 staff are estimated to be overweight or obese. Our work with the NHS was featured in a Channel 4 documentary and covered in the national press across January, February this year. So exciting! We've also just started a 12 month clinical trial and a 4 month trial with the NHS on orthopaedic patients and pre-diabetics respectively. We're so excited by this because it will be the first clinical trial of its kind using this sort of product. Groundbreaking!

Our product is still in MVP stage which has its moments but we've been working (and bootstrapping!) so hard over the past 3 months to get through the next stage of the development process to launch version 2.0. Version 2.0 of the product will capture data across the lifecycle of the user's weight loss journey, both in terms of weight defined metrics and their unconscious behavioural change journey.

I'm currently raising a seed round of funding- which is as hard as everybody says it is to raise (this will be a post for another day)- so I've been speaking with the Angel and VC community who fancy the challenge of working with us to solve this enormous pain point in an enormous industry.

Whilst fundraising for this kind of product can be deemed difficult because, as one investor kindly put it "it's a bit woo-ey", we've had some fantastic conversations with some amazingly engaged investors so far and most excitingly, they're totally focussed on helping us continue to change people's lives with our product. More to come on this front (I hope).

Whilst we've made some amazing progress over the past 18 months, there's also been days where you sit back and think 'why the hell am I doing this?'. Going from receiving a pay cheque every month to next to nothing: Late nights and early mornings trying to wade through the uncertainty of hitting next month's revenue targets and the constant pressure of whether we can pay for continued development of the product next month. Not to mention the many 'no's' from prospective investors on both sides of the Atlantic. I thought I had relatively thick skin but nothing could have prepared me for the constant mental battle you face when it comes to fundraising. What I'm learning is the 'no's' only strengthen your resolve to succeed and it's so vital to celebrate the 'yes's' when they come around.

Even though there are several days when I've looked back over how I and my team have felt and we've been fed up with lack of progress or we've not had a great revenue month, we come back to the same set of values: we will continue to change people's lives through complete mindset change and give them the mental empowerment to make the healthiest decisions for their lives, based on their unique model of the world.

There's some seriously exciting stuff on the horizon with our product, clinical success and helping the NHS to change its wellness strategy. And, most excitingly, working out how we take this product to the US markets. We've got a great early team with a team of 5 dedicated advisers who tell me when I'm being stupid!

If anyone reading this wants to find out more about what we're doing and why we're doing it, please reach out. I'd love to grab coffee or chat.