Review: Inside Out Weight Loss

I love to listen to podcasts when I'm running, and one day I had run through all the recent episodes of my old standbys (Two Fit Chicks, RadioLab, This American Life, The Biggest Loser Fan Podcast, etc.) and went searching for something new.  I found a few weight-loss related podcasts (some crazy fan of Jillian Michaels even took over her old podcast feed, so now you can get breathless discussions of JM gossip, news stories, etc., plus some of her old episodes).  I downloaded two or three episodes of each one, but Inside Out Weight Loss was the only one that really interested me.

What I love: This podcast is all about how to stop struggling with weight and make the process easier and more intuitive. The strategies seem simple but also powerful.  For example, she says that if we had no internal conflict about losing weight, we would have already done it by now. Some part of us must have a reason to want to keep us from succeeding.  We've heard that before, right? Well, here she also discusses strategies on how to get your whole self into alignment, including figuring out what the "gift" of being overweight is, and finding another way to getting the same thing.

What I hate:

1. Only the last three episodes are available in true podcast form.  To get the rest, you have to figure out how to manually download them and then, annoyingly, the episodes are not available under "Podcasts," but are treated as songs by iTunes. I had figured out a way to manually get them from the RSS feed.  Now it seems that this feed has been taken down. It looks like you now have to listen to them one-by-one from the Personal Life Media site. There is a way to buy episodes in batches, or for $9.99 you can download a handbook with the basic information from Renée Stephens's website. I know that I shouldn't be surprised that the author wants to make money from her content, but I would rather that she set it up as a paid subscription through iTunes than all of this fiddly business.
2. This is one reason I might not recommend buying the podcasts: Each of the early episodes has a long introduction that runs through a summary of all the episodes that came before it. Midway through the podcast there is a "break to support our sponsors." At the end, Renée promotes her consulting and speaking services, recommends that you log in to her Yahoo! site, etc.  So in each 30-minute episode, there might be 15 minutes of new content. I am hoping that in later episodes this format changes a little.