Issue No 3: Great reads, sex advice, gift ideas, career know how, Trinny's 3 fail-safe tips & a new immune boosting idea

This is your coffee break treat: we tackle career change, last-minute Christmas present ideas, friendship tips & shopping for vibrators! Plus: life lessons from our wise celeb friends

Welcome to Issue No 3 of our mini magazine.

Jingle Belles! Lorraine & Trish wish you a very merry everything

My fear of the word ‘Fat’ by Trish Halpin

Throwback to behind the scenes of an iconic Versace magazine cover shoot

Try this hot wellness trend to boost your immunity

Career pivot tips from an award-winning midlife boss

A one-pot veggie recipe to spice things up from Sarah Rossi

Three useful things we learnt when we met reinvention queen Trinny Woodall

Six gorgeous stocking filler ideas for you from us

Vibrators tried and tested (because you’re worth it)

When you work with a friend & how to manage it well

Reading Room: six books we love to give and get this Christmas

Me at 33: An extremely helpful voice note for her young self  from author Nina Stibbe 

Why this F word is the one women fear most

The adverts that haunt us still

Trish: A photo popped up on my phone yesterday that stopped me in my tracks. Taken a few months ago it captures my husband Neil and I laughing on a beach in our swimmies on a blustery afternoon in the west of Ireland, moments before running into the freezing Atlantic waves. We’d had a brilliant weekend away together but my first thought on looking at the image didn’t fill me with any of the joy from that day, instead it was simply, ‘God, my thighs look fat’. 

I’m actually a slim person, I get my petite, 5ft 2in frame from my mum and since my twenties onwards my weight has consistently hovered around the eight stone mark. But like pretty much every Gen X woman I know, growing up in the 70s and 80s gave me a deep rooted sense that my body is somehow wrong, that I have to fix it or try to change it and that as women we always need to lose weight, even when we don’t. 

I can still feel the stinging blush of shame from the day I was first called fat, and see my 13-year old self in the school changing room toilets desperately wishing I could disappear. It was the weekly games lesson, and I had been picked as a captain and got to choose my team for a netball match. The other captain was also a Patricia, but she was tall and leggy while I was short and starting to become a little self-conscious of my emerging curves. As the girls headed out of the changing room onto the netball court, I popped into the toilet and that’s when it happened. I overheard a group asking each other whose team they were on, when one piped up: ‘I’m on fat Trish’s.’ I was mortified. I could barely breathe, wishing that Scotty would beam me up right there and then. From that day onwards my body became my enemy and suddenly everywhere I looked, every magazine I read, every TV show, every newspaper my dad brought home from work, there it was in black and white - women’s bodies being paraded, talked about, laughed at and criticised. Oh I thought, this is normal, I’m supposed to feel like this. What else could I do but be on a constant quest for transformation?