From glam launches to helter-skelter school runs, Sally Obermeder is a woman on the move. Quite literally. In the past year, the former TV presenter has relocated both her family home and the headquarters of her booming online wellness brand, Swiish, and managed to clear out an
overfilled storage locker at long last. “Finally! I got a guy from Airtasker, and when he sent me a pic of the empty unit… ahhh, the relief!” says Sally.
“I’m usually quite ruthless, but I was in a period of no clarity – the girls [Annabelle, 11, and Elyssa, six] were very young, the strain of the surrogacy process [for Elyssa] still lingered...” (Sally and her husband Marcus’s decision to have their second child through an American surrogate came with its own setbacks, and ended up taking two years.)
No wonder Sally felt enveloped in an exhausted fog: Clearing out that storage locker was a fitting bookend to a period of turbulence.
Changing Her Mindset
“I’ve grown a lot in the past three years – and I like who I am on the other side of what’s been a tricky period,” says Sally, 49. In 2020, the Seven Network cancelled chat show The Daily Edition, which Sally co-hosted, effectively ending her 15-year career at the station. This coincided with huge, but demanding, growth at Swiish, which she runs with her sister, Maha Corbett, as well as Elyssa starting primary school during lockdown constraints. How did she manage it all? “I started to do a better job of not putting myself last,” says Sally.
She refers to something most women are intimately acquainted with: the idea that you’re too busy to make time for self-care because somehow your gain must mean another person’s loss. “It’s natural, to some extent, to first make sure that everyone else is fine,” says Sally. “But I had a mindset shift during this period: it’s not about ‘me first’, it’s just ‘me as well’. I started to not treat myself as an afterthought.”
She did this by focusing on small daily actions and reminders (‘I’m important, I want to look after myself, I want to feel good’) rather than big changes. It took Sally time to accept that actions don’t have to be major in order to make a difference, but her mindset shift paid off, not least in the gradual loss of 22 kilos over the course of 12 months, an unexpected side effect of her slow-but-steady self-care routine.
Walk This Way
That switch to self-care began when Sally discovered the benefits of walking. “Even before my body got fitter, my mental space expanded,” she says. “I felt more clarity. I needed that space to process – I still do.” At first, Sally’s walks were accompanied by podcasts or audiobooks, but
silence soon became what she appreciated most.
“I sometimes compare my brain to a pinball machine: you try to follow a train of thought, but you can’t because you’ve already moved on to another. Walking helped me slow down and check in with myself, which in turn quieted the chatter.”
Not that Sally ever manages to switch off entirely. “It’s not in my character. I have an active mind, and I need to make sure I don’t become a workaholic. You know, me going on holidays is the worst time in Maha’s life – I’ve had a breather, I get inspiration and ideas, and I call her all the time. She’s, like, ‘I hate when you’re on holidays, it’s the worst!’” Sally says this with a gleeful relish that gives a glimpse of the give-and-take between two sisters, who’ve worked together to build a much-loved brand and are still going strong.
“I often say to Maha that I couldn’t have done [Swiish, founded in 2012] with anyone else,” Sally shares. “We’re so different: I drive her crazy and she drives me crazy, and it’s perfect. Maha helps me to slow down and she’s more risk averse than I am. So, we balance each other out.”
Building Resilience
Sally’s weight loss coaxed both compliments and criticism on social media, with former fans ‘regretfully’ unfollowing her due to ‘changing aesthetics’. (“I always find it funny,” Sally says, smiling. “If you decided to swap shopping at Woolworths for Coles, would you march into Woolies and announce that you were leaving?”)
The constant trial by social media can get exhausting, though. “I don’t take it personally,” says Sally. “I came to TV later in life, so I’m very sure of who I am. I know that I’m a good person and that I haven’t changed, even if my weight has.” Her tone firms. “When people comment on my weight, I’m not afraid to give them this same answer every time: it’s not okay to comment on someone’s weight. We’re so much more than the size of our clothing or the number on the scales. It’s not like I morphed into someone new at size 14, 12, 10, 8... I’m absolutely the same person – as stubborn and as loyal as I was before.”
Sally’s resilient, too. It’s a characteristic shaped by a strong, inspiring mother and honed by life’s challenges, such as being diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer back in October 2011, just a day before her eldest daughter’s birth. Her response to the devastating diagnosis is best illustrated by the story of a coffee table that still causes her and Maha much mirth: “When I was seven or eight years old, my favourite thing to do involved this wide coffee table,” she explains.
“I’d always say to Maha, ‘I bet you think I can’t jump over it! Okay, then, I will rise to the challenge!’ So, yeah, a bit of resilience is probably part of my DNA. I like to think that strength is similar to a cup that gets filled, and every time you go through something, you just get stronger and more resilient, like a muscle that gets worked.”
Asking for help
That strength means Sally’s also not scared of calling for time out when needed. Last year, during a period of rebranding her business, Sally was often working until 3am. It was time to slow down. “A few days after the launch, I slept for 20 hours,” she says. “I realised that I don’t need to be sick or unwell to give myself permission to rest.
I feel that I’m so much better at listening to my body now, and checking in with myself every day, with no judgement.” Sally’s also become better at asking for help than she used to be. “I went through a long period of never asking for help when I was sick,” she says. She recalls repeatedly declining her girlfriends’ offers of help during her cancer treatment, until one of them took control and started a dinner roster.
“It was a pivotal moment for me because it showed me that asking for help helps everyone, and that it’s okay to be vulnerable. Now, when people say to me, ‘My friend has cancer,’ or ‘I’ve been diagnosed, what should I do?’, I always say: ‘Ask for help! You’ll resist it, you’ll say no, you’ll insist you can get through this, but you still need to ask for help.’”
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Saying yes to life
Given what she’s learnt, conquered and achieved, what wisdom would Sally gift her daughters to carry in their own lives? “The understanding that the power rests within them,” she says. “None of us go through life alone, and we do need other people. However, I learnt much later in my life that life is a solo sport. It’s a bit like boxing. People can be on the outside of the ring cheering you on and bringing you oranges at half-time, but only you can do it. And that’s just the truth.
I want my daughters to know that that’s not a bad thing – it’s actually a liberating thing. You’re not waiting for somebody to do it for you! “People sometimes say, ‘Ah, you’re so lucky with what you’ve achieved’ … but there’s no luck involved. I’m not super special. I’m not smarter or prettier or richer than anyone else. I came from a very normal background. I’ve got immigrant parents, grew up middle-class, went to a public school, there’s nothing special about me at all. I always say that there’s no one like you but you, and that’s your secret sauce in life.
“Motherhood does change you, no question,” Sally continues. “In your twenties, and in your thirties a bit, everything’s fun. Someone says to you, ‘Hey, do you want to come watch a band 17 suburbs away? Sure! Do you want to meet on Tuesday at 9.30pm for a cocktail? No problem!’ But, once you start having kids and just generally more responsibilities, the world gets smaller and smaller. Suddenly, five suburbs away is too far, and everything happens in a shorter time frame.”
Sally’s ready to change things up, though. “It’s time to bring back a bit of fun, a bit of looseness!” she says. “So, next time someone says to me, ‘Hey, do you want to come to something seven suburbs away?’, I won’t say, ‘Oh, no, maybe another time…’ This is the time, these are the days, every day you have is a gift.”
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