An image-conscious wellness influencer has admitted what most people wouldn’t be brave enough to share – that she won’t post photos of her family online because they’re overweight, and she thinks it could damage her own reputation.
Philly Lay, 61, from South Oxfordshire, is enjoying a healthy-living awakening after recovering from the darkest period in her life, which saw her bed-bound, overweight and washing opioids down with alcohol at 8am in the morning – while a friend took her children to school.
The mother-of-two’s downward spiral first began after an accident left her needing surgery on her spine in 2016. Despite the operation, she was left in excruciating pain and the former ballerina’s life began to spiral out of control.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Philly says: ‘I spent two years of my life in bed, addicted to opioids and alcohol while my weight ballooned out of control.’
‘I had lots of chronic illnesses, autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue, chronic brain fog, frozen shoulder and post-traumatic stress disorder.’
Now, with her conditions under control, she says she feels like she’s been given a second chance at life and is terrified that posting images of her overweight family members might undo all her hard work.
The influencer, who once trained as a property designer, has shed five stone and sticks to a strictly organic diet, and has quietly amassed 34,000 followers on her Instagram account, @phillyjlay, thanks to her lively posts and wellness podcast – of which TV star Rochelle Humes is a fan.
However, the people who she spends her life with haven’t embraced Philly’s passion for a healthy lifestyle. They are, much to her frustration, devotees of takeaways, chocolate and crisps.
Wellness influencer Philly Lay (pictured), 61, from South Oxfordshire, refuses to post photos of her close family on social media because she says their diets ‘don’t align with my beliefs’ on what a healthy lifestyle looks like
Her own journey to wellness came only after the accident saw her plumb the depths of despair.
In 2014, a prolapsed spinal disc forced Philly to undergo a spinal fusion but anaesthetists, she claims, missed her spine, triggering years of pain and mental health trauma.
During that period, Philly says she survived on a diet of ready meals, brought up on a tray by family and friends, because she was in too much pain to leave her bed.
She soon no longer recognised her own body. ‘I just ballooned and felt complete and utterly disgusted at myself,’ she says.
Philly, who is 5ft, went up from a size eight – and weighing less than eight stone – to a size 16, and weighing 13 stone.
‘I remember the day I hit 13 stone and just sobbing like a baby’, she recalls. ‘I had no choice what I ate when I was in bed. It was beyond my control.
‘I felt physically sick the whole time, but I didn’t know if that was opioids, I didn’t know if that was food, I didn’t know if it was alcohol, I just felt physically sick the whole time.’
Philly’s normal gregarious character was left diminished.
‘I’d always been this kind of all-singing, all-dancing mother but I couldn’t get out of bed,’ she shares. ‘I just remember I couldn’t bake my daughter a cake. I could hear the happy birthday [song] but I couldn’t even get out of bed and go down. I just sobbed and sobbed.’
After spending ‘two years in bed’ following surgery, the former dancer has transformed her own life, shedding five stone and amassing a following on Instagram with her wellness content
The mother-of-two confesses that she also began to rely on alcohol to get her through her most difficult bouts of pain and reveals that a family friend who had picked up her children from school stumbled upon her drunk on wine, in bed at 8am.
‘She would come and pick the children up and take them to school, and she would always bring them upstairs to say goodbye to me,’ Philly recounts.
‘She would sometimes walk into that room, and I would have a handful of pills and I’d be taking them with a bottle of wine at 8 o’clock in the morning.’
How did she begin to recover? While she was effectively chained to the bed, Philly started reading and listening to podcasts, through which she was introduced to alternative medicine. It was this discovery, she says, that was an ‘extraordinary’ help in her healing journey.
As Philly continued on the road to recovery, she hit a stumbling block – she found a tumour in her throat.
After having it surgically removed, Philly decided she no longer wanted to use Western medicine to treat her illnesses and decided to heal herself ‘naturally’, following the advice of Bruce Lipton, a proponent of such practices.
‘I was frightened so I had it out, but then I thought, “You know what, I’ve got enough information, I can do this,”… That’s what gave me the power [to follow natural healing].’
As the wellness guru began to focus on her diet, the differences in her approach to life and her family’s lives became apparent.
While Philly was trying intermittent fasting, making bone broth-based soups and eating completely organically, her family was consuming junk food, sweets and avoiding salad.
She lost the weight she had put on while bed-bound but her family members, each with their own health complications, continued to eat poorly and ignore their bodies, Philly claims.
As Philly recovered, she began to shed the five stone in weight she’d gained that left her a size 16 (pictured), saying she has ‘sobbed and sobbed’ when the scales hit 13 stone
A recent family gathering to mark her late mother’s 100th birthday left Philly not wanting to share the photographs taken of her family on her social media platforms. The influencer said: ‘I looked at them and looked at how ill they looked and how that shows in their appearance and I just couldn’t’
And the wellness influencer says she has been left frustrated by their decision not to follow her lifestyle and ‘cure themselves’ despite her pleading.
‘All these conversations that we have about growing vegetables and clean living don’t mean anything because they’re also eating Digestives,’ she says.
The holistic healer said that the differences in their lifestyles became too stark and she felt she could no longer picture them on her social media accounts.
Even after recently celebrating what would have been her mother’s 100th birthday, Philly was unable to bring herself to post a snap of all her family to Instagram – despite them all posing for a photo.
‘I took a photograph of all of us together, and I couldn’t bring myself to post it.’
She explained that while she wasn’t ashamed of them, she did think they were too overweight to be pictured.
‘I looked at them and looked at how ill they looked and how that shows in their appearance and I just couldn’t because it’s not in line, not so much with my brand, but my belief system and my belief system is my brand.
‘So sadly, I wasn’t able to post that.’
Philly adds that she understands that health is not always a priority, but she feels her family are damaging their bodies.
‘I respect that they have their lives, and they have their busy lives but when you’re up against your health, you have to take it seriously,’ she says.
‘You have to find out what the root cause is, what’s going on in your body. This is my belief system, and I know it is very different to a lot of people’s belief system and it is my family, which is heartbreaking for me.’
Philly added that she doesn’t find them shameful but that their decision not to lose weight has left her feeling a failure.
‘It’s not so much that it’s not aligning with the brand, I just feel like a failure, because I wasn’t able to help them,’ the influencer explains.
‘I don’t have anybody on my social media that doesn’t align with my beliefs.’
She added that she believes her family’s conditions are fully reversible but that they simply ‘don’t want to know’ and as a result she feels she has to ‘censor them’ from all her social media.