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Women In Wellness: Emily Fata on The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing

An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

Understand that putting yourself first isn’t selfish. We’re conditioned to believe that putting ourselves first makes us bad people, when this just isn’t the case. As clichéd as this sounds, you can’t fill up those around you from an empty cup. It’s similar to how in airline safety guides, they tell adults to put the oxygen masks on themselves before helping any accompanying child; if you’ve passed out from lack of oxygen, how can you help the child with you survive?

As a part of my series about women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Emily Fata.

Emily Fata is the CEO and Founder of Between Our Thighs, an online resource dedicated to making sexual health and wellness accessible to everyone. Emily has a background in psychology, specializing in adult development and women’s and gender studies. Between Our Thighs was started as a passion project in March of 2022 and launched officially in July of that same year.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?

Absolutely, I’d love to! For starters, I have a background in psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University, where I ended up focusing my academic studies on sex and gender. Throughout my years in the world of academia, I had become not only incredibly open to discussing topics surrounding sexual health and wellness, but really enjoyed speaking on these subjects and having candid conversations with people about it. It’s one of those taboo topics that people want to talk about, but feel embarrassed or ashamed to dive into with others. Even their own partners!

That said, after entering the workforce as a freelance copywriter, I always kept myself in the loop with studies and information continuously developing in the academic world.

Between Our Thighs was officially launched to the public toward the end of July 2020, but the idea came to mind at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of that same year. At the time, while I had still been regularly keeping up with academic research, I was also perusing articles about sex and sexual health online. I noticed that a lot of these non-academic sources — including very popular, mainstream sites — had a lot of inaccurate information or were missing crucial elements that are necessary for a ‘green’ reader to get the full picture of what it is that they’re reading; after all, most people don’t have an academic background in sex.

Plus, information was very gendered, very hetero-normative, and seemed to give the overall feel of not being entirely inclusive.

The idea came to mind to create a platform of my own, a community, where I could take academic research and make it digestible for the everyday person to understand and benefit from. Eventually, this evolved into incorporating my love of creative writing (I started including weekly erotica stories on the blog), fetish spotlights (a weekly ‘Fetish Friday’ post), and a podcast, too.

While we offer tons of different viewpoints and perspectives now, including opinion-based guest posts, our in-house content is all fact-based and caters to no specific gender or sexual orientation, unless relevant to a particular article.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?

Recently, I started working with an amazing sexual health and wellness startup that focuses on fostering intimacy between couples, particularly long-term couples. Through research conducted by the founders, they came across Between Our Thighs as a resource and reached out to me as a result.

I’m now a staff writer on their team, creating and writing fictional erotic stories, couples’ guidance, product write-ups, and informative articles (among other things)!

The fact that Between Our Thighs connected me to this team of amazing people on an equally incredible mission is a clear indication that I am accomplishing exactly what I set out to do with the website.

Can you share a story about the biggest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Setting expectations too high and pushing myself to meet lofty deadlines despite simultaneously having a full-time job was not the wisest decision I made in those early months. I learned fairly quickly that I had to set realistic deadlines and not be so hard on myself when I missed deadlines. While it’s an important thing that I am doing, and there’s no doubt about that in my mind, I also have to be mindful of my mental health and schedule; burnout can be damaging!

Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?

Short and sweet, Between Our Thighs is creating a safe place for people to learn about and — if they want to — discuss topics pertaining to sexual health and wellness. This is a subject society often shies away from, which can result in information being unavailable or, perhaps even worse, false information circulating and being shared as ‘fact.’

Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.

When it comes to making ‘lifestyle tweaks’ to better support your wellbeing, there are a handful of things that folks should keep in mind.

  1. Understand that putting yourself first isn’t selfish. We’re conditioned to believe that putting ourselves first makes us bad people, when this just isn’t the case. As clichéd as this sounds, you can’t fill up those around you from an empty cup. It’s similar to how in airline safety guides, they tell adults to put the oxygen masks on themselves before helping any accompanying child; if you’ve passed out from lack of oxygen, how can you help the child with you survive? Likewise, taking care of yourself mentally and physically is paramount to your very being. If you don’t have the energy (or even the willpower) to do something, don’t do it. Pushing your limits is not always the way to go, when it comes to self-growth. Many times, it’s knowing your boundaries and sticking to them.
  2. Know that your mental health is as important as your physical health. It’s easy to forget about mental health, as it’s more ‘invisible’ (so to speak) than a physical ailment that might present as a limb in a cast, a cut or scrape, or even a bruise. That doesn’t mean that one’s mental health is any less important, though. That said, mental illness and romantic relationships (or non-romantic relationships) can co-exist; self-care and communication are pivotal. Just remember that love can uplift your mental health, but should not be used as a repair tactic.
  3. Take yourself on dates…alone. One thing I find so incredibly important is to take myself on dates as frequently as possible. It allows me to get comfortable and embrace alone time, as well as treating myself the way that I want to be treated by others (both platonically and romantically). Most recently, I bought myself season tickets to the opera and attended each show by myself after going for dinner at an upscale restaurant — on my own! While this is just one example of a more lavish gift that I gave to myself, my self-dates typically consist of going to Starbucks with a book and sitting for a couple of hours while I sip an Oat Milk London Fog and read a novel I recently picked up.
  4. Remember that exploring your sexual desires is not only normal, but healthy. First off, if there’s one thing I hate in the world of sexual health and wellness, it’s kink shaming. Thankfully, I’ve not come across it too often in my work with Between Our Thighs, within the community, but it’s something that pops up in comments on the blog and social media every now and then — and gets commentors removed and blocked immediately. As a teenager, I often felt shame about being a sexual being, particularly as a young woman. It wasn’t until I was in university and began shifting my academic focus on sex and gender studies that I really began feeling comfortable having open and frank discussions about sexuality with those around me. In fact, this was when I realized that it’s such a normal part of life and speaking candidly about it all actually makes it easier to talk about!
  5. Don’t be ashamed or embarrassed of your sexual fantasies. Know that there are others out there with the same kinks, fetishes, and fantasies that you have. You’re never alone! One of my favourite things about the Between Our Thighs community are the folks that share their personal stories and advice with others.

It’s the people who reach out asking me to write about a particular topic because they’re keen on learning more, who volunteer to speak on our podcast, or who send us a simple message thanking our writers for an article that helped them see that there are other people out there who share their kinks.

If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?

I’d love to foster a movement where people feel genuinely comfortable speaking about their needs, however that may look for them, and then to feel confident going out and doing whatever it takes to achieve that level of comfort. This can be sexual, emotional… you name it.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?

Prior to launching Between Our Thighs, five things I wish I had known were:

  1. You’re going to make a positive impact on people’s lives through the information that you provide, by making factual information more accessible to the general public.
  2. Running a blog as a passion project takes a lot of time, effort, and time management skills — but it’s 100% worthwhile.
  3. It’s okay to take a break, when you’re feeling overwhelmed with your workload, as well as to seek out guest articles to supplement in-house articles.
  4. You’ll find some amazing products along the way, through partnerships and relationships you foster with companies.
  5. You’re going to find some incredible clients through your work, thanks to the folks you meet during this journey.

Sustainability, veganism, mental health, and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?

This is such a hard question to give a concrete answer to, as they are all so near and dear to my heart. As a vegan, I feel that it ties so well into sustainability and environmental changes, as animal farming is not just an issue of animal cruelty (which is why I initially stopped eating meat years ago), but also detrimental to the world that we live in, in terms of its negative environmental impacts.

That said, it also ties into your health, and you typically can’t have optimal mental health when you’re not in optimal physical health; the two are intertwined in many ways.

What is the best way for our readers to further follow your work online?

Readers can find us on our website, BetweenOurThighs.com, as well as on social media:

We’re always open to feature new guests for our podcast and folks interested in submitting guest posts on our blog!

Thank you for these fantastic insights! We wish you continued success and good health.

It’s been such a pleasure. Thank you for this great conversation!

Women In Wellness: Emily Fata on The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.