Tag Archives: leah segedie

ShiftCon Proves GMO Shift is Already Happening

“Shift Happens.” That’s the message Leah Segedie wants to get across with the ShiftCon Eco Wellness Social Media Conference. Thanks to her and some of the other ShiftCon bloggers, shift is already happening.

ShiftCon 2014

The past year has already seen brands announce they are reformulating their products to go GMO free. They include:

  • Dole
  • Kashi
  • Barbaras
  • Chipotle
  • Cheerios

Cheerios and Chipotle have made their shifts to GMO-free products fairly well-known, but other brands are doing it a little more quietly. Segedie added ShiftCon bloggers are looking at big brands including Kellogg’s, General Mills, PepsiCo, as well as specific products within certain company’s line.

(more…)

Posted on January 13, 2024 by Elizabeth

The Best of 2024: From Fearless Selfies to Fitness Leaders, the 26 Must-Follow Names in Wellness

I don’t know about you guys, but we had a really great year over here at DietsInReview.com. We certainly felt the love — hello you named us a Top 50 Health Blog for 2024! — and tried every day to show it to you, too. Together we celebrated some tremendous weight loss successes, fitness milestones, and met so many more of you out there who make this a fun place to be in here.

Along the way, we found a few people who made the Internet a healthier place to be, even enlightening and holding us to a higher standard. They should be recognized, and you should consider following them. There’s a lot of brains, talent, and heart in this bunch of 26 brands and people in our 13 categories, covering food, fitness, and even social networks.

Without further adieu … meet our picks for the best of 2024!

THE SELFIE

kenlie alan

It was Oxford’s word of the year, you don’t think we’d pass up a legitimate chance to use it, did you? We selected two individuals who are using their selfies to better themselves and those around them. Plus, their selfies are duck-face free, so we can actually stand to look at them!

Alan Ali — @Sweating_It_Off

Kenlie Tiggeman — @ALLTHEWEIGH

VIDEOS

One hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every MINUTE. It would take longer than four days to watch a single minute’s worth of new video content – and no one has time for that! So we saved you the potato couchin’ time and sorted through to find the very best new clips from this year. Honestly, you’ll put them on repeat.

Dance Walking Fitness by Ben Aaron

Prancercise on YouTube (more…)

Posted on December 16, 2023 by Natalie K

ShiftCon to Bring Together Health, Wellness and Environmental Bloggers

Next October, Los Angeles will be the home of the world’s first international social media focusing on wellness, health and environment. Presented by Bookieboo and Mamavation, ShiftCon Social Media Conference will bring in bloggers from all over who write about wellness, health, the environment, food, fitness and natural living.

ShiftCon 2014
Leah Segedie, the event’s founder, hopes that it will provide these bloggers with a way to connect and share. “ShiftCon was born out of the idea that together we can create a profound impact on the world around us. We can literally shift how we eat, raise our families and our impact on the environment,” Segedie said. “That shift has begun, and now it’s time to come together and leverage our collective influence to accelerate that shift.”

As the first conference of its kind, ShiftCon was created in the spirit of providing wellness and eco-friendly bloggers with a chance to network, share ideas and learn from industry experts. Robyn O’Brien, author of Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It, is already slated as one of the keynote speakers. (more…)

Posted on October 17, 2024 by Elizabeth

Coca-Cola is the Wellness Sponsor at BlogHer 2024, Bloggers Unite to Protest on Twitter

Coca-Cola has been named the “wellness” sponsor for BlogHer 2024, an annual conference that celebrates the best in health, family, entertainment, sex, DIY, and political blogging by and for women. Coca-Cola will be hosting their Steps to Wellness challenge and campaign at this weekend’s conference, but not without a bit of backlash first. Even though Coke will be handing out pedometers to all BlogHer attendees (speaking of pedometers, it takes 40 minutes of walking to burn off the calories in a can of Coke), their presence under auspices of being a health brand is rubbing the wellness community the wrong way.

Leah Segedie, a health blogger and founder of Mamavation, is calling out BlogHer, which did not return our request for comment, for choosing the soft drink brand as the wellness sponsor. Tonight, she is hosting a Twitter party to spread the word.

“I don’t know why they chose to accept Coke as a sponsor, but this marketing ploy is consistent with what they’ve been doing all year with other conferences, commercials, and outlets,” said Leah. She cited Coke’s falling market share and lawsuits (this week it’s VitaminWater for deceptive labeling) as the main motivation to “make people feel better about drinking their product again.”

A 12-ounce serving of Coca-Cola is a 140 calorie and 39.9 gram blast of high fructose corn syrup. Coca-Cola is not a healthy beverage, and meanwhile more than one-third of Americans are obese because they drink too much of the stuff. Additionally, the soda contains artificial dyes, GMOs, and has traces of BPA from the aluminum can, a known obesogen. High fructose corn syrup can lead to diabetes and diet soda has been proven to increase your waist size, not to mention a bevy of other health-related side effects from drinking the caramel colored syrup. (more…)

Posted on July 23, 2024 by Patrick

Moms Petition Similac to Remove GMOs in Infant Formula

“They say that moms with children with food allergies do more research than the CIA, and I think that’s true,” quips Leah Segedie at the opening of a three-minute video she’s using to get the attention of moms and and baby formula giant Similac. She wants the company to get rid of the GMOs they put in their line of formulas, something Similac (Abbott Laboratories) decided not to do at their recent annual shareholder meeting.

To join Leah’s fight and let Similac and its competitors know you won’t stand for this, sign this petition at Change.org. Also, join us on the #SimilacNoGMO Twitter party Wednesday, May 22nd from 8-9:30pm EST, where you’ll join host Leah @BookieBoo and @DietsInReview as a panelist. (more…)

Posted on May 21, 2024 by Natalie K

KFC and Moms Blasted for Using Bloggers’ Children to Sell New Kids Meals

It’s a very common practice amongst mom bloggers to accept products from companies to review or promote to their audiences. The bloggers get everything from candy bars to mattresses and vacations for free and the brands benefit because, for what is usually no more cost than samples of their product, they get a lot of highly influential publicity.

This weekend, some of those mom bloggers came under quite a bit of fire from their peers. Several moms were invited by Kentucky Fried Chicken to visit the restaurant’s headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky to learn about their new “healthy” kids meals and in turn promote them to their followers using #KFCKidsMeals on Twitter. That’s pretty standard, but where eyebrows raised on this publicity event was that the company invited the moms with their kids.

The health of our children is a hot button issue right now, and the #KFCKidsMeals hashtag was practically high jacked by moms condemning both KFC and the participating moms for subjecting their children to what is no better than chemically laden, nutritionally void food.

Leah Segedie, known best as @BookieBoo and the leader of Mamavation, was one of the moms on the outside of #KFCKidsMeals tweeting in. Any time you intersect kids and nutrition you’ll find Leah, and this campaign was no different.

“I basically took control of it to make sure it was done in a fair way without attacking the bloggers involved,” she told us. “But I can’t control what people write on their blogs, obviously.”

Leah spent this weekend tweeting out questions to the moms involved. She wanted to know about MSG, sodium, carcinogens, and other chemical ingredients in the food. Who better to ask than the people sitting right inside KFC HQ? As far as we could tell, no one got back to her with those answers; although, one tweet implied that the company would get in touch with her. (more…)

Posted on March 25, 2024 by Natalie K

The 50 Healthiest Tweeps You Should be Following

If you care at all about what you eat, how you workout, or just like some good old-fashioned inspiration, then there are a few people you need to follow immediately. Fifty to be exact.

Each year, Mamavation hosts the Top 50 Most Inspirational Healthy Tweeps list to recognize those people and organizations doing the most good on Twitter. In years past, the list has been entirely crowd sourced, with people voting up their favorite follows to determine a top 50. This year, Leah Segedie decided to do something different. She appointed a panel to make the final decision based on votes by the community. DietsInReview was proud to be a part of that panel, joined by members of Mamavation Leadership and Segedie’s husband, Mark.


After weeks of watching the nominations come in, the top 10 Tweeps in five categories have been revealed. Rather than a single list of 50, this year the list was organized with five categories of 10 winners. This allowed us to recognize a broad range of personalities and purposes. The 50 winners were divided across Fitness, Food, Weight Loss, Inspiration, and Activism. And based on community nominations, we broke the list down to recognize some pretty awesome people and organizations.

You can see the full Top 50 Most Inspirational Healthy Tweeps 2024 list here at Mamavation, but we’ll highlight a few from each category who’ve had the biggest impact on DietsInReview.

FITNESS

We’ve had the pleasure to work with @MizFitOnline and @LisaJohnson over the years on a many different projects. Bright, energetic women, they each motivate in that very real way that isn’t preachy or condescending. They’re in the trenches next to every other woman with time that’s too short and to do lists that are too long. (more…)

Posted on December 6, 2023 by Natalie K

Special K Diet and Mamavation Helped Lindsay Chung Kick Start Her Weight Loss

At the start of the new year Lindsay Chung decided it was time to get serious about her weight loss. On January 2, Lindsay weighed 176.2 pounds and says she couldn’t stand the sight of the number. Se knew she had to do something to change it. However, Lindsay’s number one obstacle was her addiction to food. “My only real obstacle was that I’m addicted to food – plain and simple. I like to eat whether I’m full or not,” she told us. Lindsay is not alone, there are people who cannot get enough of food and this contributes to their weight gain.

One day Lindsey joined an online community called Mamavation, a website set out to challenge mothers to makeover their lifestyles. The site and program were founded by Leah Segedie of BookieBoo.com, who has also shared her True Weight Loss Story with us. Soon after joining Mamavation Lindsay started their 2 Week Challenge, which consists of six days of hardcore workouts and one day of rest. After the 2 Week Challenge, she found a love for exercise. (more…)

Posted on July 13, 2024 by Samantha

Fitter Moms Have an Opportunity to be Better Moms

By Cat Poland, a work-at-home mom blogging at CatPoland.com.

Car doors closing quietly, subdued greetings, sneaker-laced feet shuffling as stretches begin, hands slapping at mosquitoes eager for an early-morning snack. At 5 a.m. on a weekday morning, these are the sounds of the Fitness Junkies, all mothers (or grandmothers) who are committed to pushing their bodies to the brink of collapse all in the name of getting a good workout.

I went once, puked twice, and haven’t returned. That was before my second child, and despite my utter and complete failure during my first go-round, I’m considering giving it another try. Why?

Well, I have a confession to make. Sometimes, I want to run away from my children. No, not “Thelma and Louise” style running away, but good, old-fashioned, feet-pounding-pavement running away. I just want to escape, feel blood coursing through my veins, and just be alone. Completely and sweetly alone.

Of course, I would eventually run back (if I didn’t collapse somewhere along the way). I love my darling babies, but as a new work-at-home mom, I need “me” time. Not only that, but I need more energy (and strength, mental clarity, etc.). I went from sitting at a computer for 50+ hours a week, to chasing around a one-year-old and three-year-old overnight. As much as I love my new gig, I’m not physically prepared! (more…)

Posted on May 16, 2024 by GuestBlogger

Georgia’s “Fat” Shaming Billboards are Coming Down

After a lot of criticism and the #Ashamed Twitter chat party to raise awareness of the Georgia ad campaign by Strong 4 Life addressing childhood obesity, the ads are coming down this month. If you haven’t heard about this campaign, it features black and white billboards of overweight elementary-aged children with guilt-inducing text. The billboards are targeted at the parents of the one million obese children throughout the state of Georgia, but the concern is that kids will see these messages and feel an incredible amount of shame, ridicule and guilt about their weight.

The efforts of those protesting these ads have paid off and they will all be removed sometime this month. While the fight against obesity is a very important one, the fight must be against obesity and not obese people. “Obesity prevention campaigns are a good thing, but they need to be done humanely. Partnering with families to help them instead of throwing daggers at them is the most humane way to get this done,” said Leah Segedie, the mom behind BookieBoo and Mamavation who spearheaded a campaign against the billboards. (more…)

Posted on March 1, 2024 by Descygna

#Ashamed Twitter Chat Puts Pressure on Georgia’s Strong4Life Childhood Obesity Campaign

It might be Friday, but we stayed in tonight. We participated in Leah Segedie’s Twitter chat, #Ashamed, to raise awareness for the Georgia advertising campaign by Strong4Life attempting to curb the rampant childhood obesity epidemic in the state. If we’d been at the bar like everyone else celebrating TGIF it would have been standing room only. According to Leah there were 544 people tweeting on #Ashamed tonight. “I worked harder on that party than any I’ve ever done,” Leah told us shortly after the chat ended.

To show just how powerful social media is, or maybe how powerful Leah Segedie at BookieBoo and Mamavation is, this Twitter chat was organized practically over night and had a lot of interest, as that count of 544 shows. Additionally, Leah shared other stats, like 13 million impressions and 4859 tweets posted in the one-hour chat.

Leah told us she had two goals for #Ashamed. “First, to petition Strong 4 Life to take the billboards down. Second, to talk about the issue in a way that’s not shameful and gets the word out.” The public outcry over this campaign has been loud enough that some have already been taken down. The hope is that tonight’s nearly 600 voices on Twitter will remove them from the remaining areas, like Atlanta.

“Just take the damn things down,” Leah shouted. “It’s over and done with.” (more…)

Posted on January 28, 2024 by Natalie K