The Cyclist

This episode contains open discussion about bulimia, disordered eating, body image, pregnancy loss, postpartum haemorrhage, and health anxiety. Please take care if any of these are sensitive topics for you.
Jess sits down with Meg Mansell, beloved New Zealand radio personality from The Edge, mother of two, and as it turns out, Jess's new best friend, for one of the most wide-ranging, raw, and genuinely hilarious conversations The Cyclist has had. They were meant to talk about birth. They talked about everything.
Meg opens up about growing up as a dancer, deeply aware of her body from a very young age, watching the way the world responded to her beautiful mother, feeling the pressure to look the same way, and realising quickly that she hadn't inherited her mum's body. What followed were years of hyperawareness, comparison, and eventually bulimia from around 15 or 16. She speaks honestly about what it's like to carry 36 years of that conditioning while trying to raise daughters differently, telling Daisy her tummy is her favourite part of herself because it made her and her sister, while sitting quietly with the word fraud flashing in her own head.
Then there's Miller's pregnancy, a story that barely exists in the public conversation around pregnancy because it sits in that rare and terrifying 1%. At 14 weeks, Meg woke up covered in blood. She drove herself to hospital alone at 1am while Guy stayed home with Daisy. Blood tests came back showing a dramatic drop in hCG. She and Guy sat in hospital for eight hours grieving a baby they were told they'd lost, making quiet decisions about whether they'd even try again, before a scan revealed a heartbeat. The results had been mixed up with her previous pregnancy. What followed was daily bleeding until 23 weeks, repeated hospital admissions, and a day-by-day pregnancy that somehow made it to 37 weeks.
Miller's birth was its own story entirely. An induced labour, a 30-minute window from five centimetres to birth with no epidural after the anaesthetist couldn't reach her in time, a postpartum haemorrhage of 2.1 litres, emergency surgery, and, in a moment Meg still can't fully explain, convincing the nurses not to tell Guy she was okay so she could roll in and surprise him herself. She has apologised profusely.
They also get into health anxiety, something both Meg and Jess share deeply and personally. Meg describes the particular brand that keeps her awake at night: the constant, exhausting fear that she will miss something and her children will die. The 1am checks. The spiral from a cough to meningococcal. The dog with a bump the vet said was a bug bite that turned out to be cancer. The way being right once makes it impossible to ever believe you might be wrong.
And then Hashimoto's, the autoimmune thyroid condition Meg was eventually diagnosed with after months of blaming herself for her own exhaustion, bone aches, and weight changes. A female doctor who pushed for bloods. A 9am phone call the next morning asking her to come in. Antibodies hundreds of times above normal range.
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Hit play. And maybe clear your afternoon.

CW: This episode contains open discussion about disordered eating, body image, and diet culture. Please take care if these are sensitive topics for you.
In this episode, Jess sits down with Renee Diment, New Zealand nutritionist, REPs-registered personal trainer, NZ Personal Trainer of the Year 2024, and founder of Beyond the Body,  for one of the most grounding, refreshing, and genuinely practical conversations The Cyclist has had about food, movement, and what it actually means to look after yourself as a woman.
Renee opens up about her own story, a 10-year-old on a beach in Perth, looking down at her body and comparing it to the girls in Total Girl magazine. The friend with anorexia at dance class. The restricting that started at 11 or 12. The gym before school at 14. And how 13 years of working with women eventually taught her that fat loss was always just the surface-level goal, and what women actually needed was far deeper than that.
Her business is called Beyond the Body for a reason. She shares how her coaching evolved from helping women lose weight to helping women discover who they actually are. Their values, their why, their relationship with themselves. And how the biggest wins her clients have had weren't about the scales at all.
From there, this episode becomes one of the most practical nutrition conversations The Cyclist has had. Jess asks all the questions she's been holding for years, from someone who knows a lot about nutrition but has spent years lost in the noise of it all. Renee walks through the four phases of the menstrual cycle and how understanding them gives women better body autonomy, not as a reason to stop doing things but as a guide for listening in. She explains the 10-minute rule for those days when you genuinely don't know whether your body needs rest or a push.
On nutrition, Renee introduces the add-in approach: forget elimination diets, forget what you're cutting out, just start adding. Protein, fats, fibre, carbohydrates on every plate. She makes a case for carbohydrates that will make a lot of women exhale, pushes back on the protein obsession dominating social media right now, and makes the case that fibre is actually the thing most women are deficient in and nobody is talking about it enough.
She talks about the fuck-it mode that follows restriction, why sharing a pizza with friends is genuinely better for your health than ordering the salad, and why your body is not broken, it just needs the right support and understanding.
And then there's strength training. Renee is passionate about this in a way that is completely unrelated to aesthetics. Building muscle protects your bones. It helps your body metabolise food. It combats stress and supports your nervous system. A 70-year-old client who broke her pelvis in a car accident recovered in months because of her training. That's the real reason to lift weights. Not Greece, not a bikini, but your 90-year-old self.
She wraps by saying that you do not need to shrink yourself to fit into a box someone else created. You are enough as you are. And when you truly allow yourself to believe that, everything else becomes possible.
Renee is coming back for a gut health and nervous system episode, because they ran out of time and there was still so much to cover. If you want that episode, let them know in the comments.
Find Renee at reneediment.com
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Instagram: @wearethecyclist
Website: wearethecyclist.com
Hit play. And maybe eat something while you listen.

She designs the dress women wear on one of the most important days of their lives. And getting to that day herself was anything but straightforward.
In this episode, Jess sits down with Trish Peng, Auckland-based wedding dress designer and founder of her eponymous bridal brand, now stocked globally after 12 years in the industry, for a conversation that wanders beautifully between fertility, loss, molar pregnancy, Chinese confinement, and the logistics of changing a tampon in a cathedral-length gown.
Trish opens up about a journey to motherhood that started with something most people have never heard of. After falling pregnant on what she thinks was a trip to Paris, she didn't test until week seven, she finally went in for a dating scan at week nine. There was no baby. 
What followed was a diagnosis of a complete molar pregnancy, a rare condition affecting just 1 in 1,200 women, where an empty egg is fertilised and the body produces all the pregnancy hormones without forming an embryo. Trish's body thought it was pregnant. But there was nothing there.
She explains what that actually means: the D&C, the monitoring of HCG levels over months to watch for cancer cells, the terrifying spike in December that sent her into pre-Christmas conversations about chemotherapy, and the Christmas miracle bleed that cleared everything before chemo became necessary. Then the six-month wait before they could try again. Then falling pregnant almost immediately and miscarrying on Tim's birthday. Then another six-month wait because of the molar pregnancy history. A full year between their first loss and being able to try again.
Jess and Trish talk honestly about grief, about the strange experience of sitting with brides in beautiful gowns while going through something so quietly devastating, and about the psychic in the UK who told Trish in January that something was happening in November to do with her fertility, and who turned out to be right.
Now 36 and a half weeks pregnant with a baby boy, Trish shares how this pregnancy has felt: smooth sailing physically, right up until a scan that morning revealed a double nuchal cord (the umbilical cord wrapped around baby twice) and a conversation about elective C-sections. She talks about her plans for the first month postpartum, her mum's version of Chinese confinement, and what it's actually like to run a global bridal brand while preparing to become a first-time mum.
There's also genuinely practical advice in here, including a sperm-friendly lubricant called Pre-Seed that Trish credits with both of her successful conceptions, a discussion about the emotional experience of finding out the gender of a miscarried baby, and tips on getting stains out of a wedding dress with micellar water and Wonder Soap.
This one is warm, funny, raw, and deeply real.
Find Trish at trishpeng.com and on Instagram @trish.peng
Follow and connect
Instagram: @wearethecyclist
Website: wearethecyclist.com
Hit play. And congratulations Trish.

It's not just a headache. Not even close.
In this episode, Jess is joined by Ellie Fitzgerald, The Cyclist's most regular guest and, as it turns out, a fellow migraine sufferer, for a conversation that is equal parts validating, practical, and genuinely funny. If you've ever had someone tell you to just have a Panadol and drink some water, this one's for you.
Ellie takes us right back to her very first migraine at nine years old, Easter weekend, a backseat full of chocolate, and three days bedridden. From there, migraines became a constant presence in her life through primary school, intermediate, and beyond. Two or three days a week at her worst. Vision loss so complete she couldn't see the paintings on the wall in her classroom. A 40-minute aura that gives her just enough warning before the headache, the nausea, and the numbness down her left side set in. At 35, she's still navigating them.
Jess shares her own experience, three years of chronic tension headaches so severe she couldn't see properly, a visit to the headache clinic, and the medications she's tried along the way. They compare notes honestly, including what works, what doesn't, and what they wish people around them understood.
This episode covers the full picture of what living with migraines actually looks like, the aura, the attack, and the migraine hangover that sometimes hits harder than the migraine itself. The triggers that are impossible to fully pin down. The jobs affected, the opportunities missed, the wedding day fear that it would all fall apart. The moment Ellie's boss wouldn't let her go home while she was vomiting behind the shop counter, because her boss had never experienced a migraine and just thought she had a headache.
They build a practical migraine toolkit together, what Ellie always keeps in her handbag and what's always waiting at home, including the eye mask, the full sugar Coke, the salty fries, the peppermint roller, sunglasses, earplugs, and electrolytes. They also talk about Cadence Head Ease, the riboflavin-based supplement Jess and Kat developed for exactly this community, which Ellie has been on for three months and credits with reducing the severity of her attacks.
This is a short episode, intentionally so, because Jess wants you to send it to someone. A partner, a friend, a boss, anyone who has ever minimised what you go through. Because understanding is the thing that makes it easier to live with.
Find Ellie on Instagram @ellie__haines
Find Cadence Head Ease: https://www.cadencewellbeing.com/products/headease
Follow and connect
Instagram: @wearethecyclist
Website: wearethecyclist.com
Hit play. And send it to someone who needs to hear this.

Two gut girlies sit down to talk.
In this episode, Jess is joined by Tessa Stockdale, co-founder of Nomu Matcha, the award-winning New Zealand ceremonial matcha brand she built with her mum Karen, for a conversation that started, fittingly, over a shared obsession with gut health.
Tessa takes us back six years to when her gut issues first started showing up in her mid-twenties. She was in advertising, early mornings, late nights, plenty of alcohol, high-intensity exercise on an empty stomach. The kind of lifestyle that looks pretty normal from the outside but, she now knows, was putting enormous stress on her body. What followed was months of severe bloating so extreme her mum asked if she was pregnant, constipation, brain fog, thunderclap headaches, and a histamine response that felt like boiling water in her gut.
She walks us through the medical journey, the gastroenterologist referrals to rule out stomach and ovarian cancer, the $250 specialist appointments, the lack of holistic perspective in the system, and then the moment she drove to Hamilton to see applied kinesiologist Kate Moffat out of sheer desperation. The session that changed everything, where the pressure of a hand on her leg identified leaky gut, an estrogen imbalance, IBS, and candida overgrowth, and finally gave her somewhere to start.
Tessa shares what the anti-candida diet actually looked like, how twelve weeks of eating nothing from a packet during COVID lockdown taught her more about food and inflammation than anything else had, and why the healing process, while transformative, also came with unexpected consequences. Developing a peanut anaphylaxis allergy. New intolerances she hadn't had before. A fear response around food that nobody warned her about. The exhausting mental tax of navigating every meal, every restaurant, every dinner with friends.
The conversation moves into the gut-brain connection, why 90 to 95% of serotonin is made in the gut, why anxiety and gut issues are so deeply intertwined, and why Tessa's move from Auckland to Mount Maunganui last year has given her something she says she's never had in her adult life: a balanced nervous system.
And then there's Nomu. Because Tessa's caffeine sensitivity, a direct result of her gut journey, is what led her to matcha, and a blunt comment from a barista at 7am who raised an eyebrow at a decaf order is what started it all. She and Kat talk about building a business while managing a chronic health condition, why hustle culture is not the only path to success, and why showing up well for yourself is actually what makes you show up better for your business.
This is an episode for anyone who has spent years trying to figure out what's wrong with their gut, anyone running a business while managing a chronic health condition, and anyone who has ever felt like healing one thing just opened the door to something else.
Find Tessa and Nomu Matcha at nomumatcha.com and on Instagram @nomumatcha_
Follow and connect
Instagram: @wearethecyclist
Website: wearethecyclist.com
Hit play. And maybe make yourself a matcha first.