Speaker
Jo Foley
Jo Foley is an internationally acknowledged authority on Wellness and Wellbeing. She has held the positions of Executive Editor of 'The Times', Managing Editor of the 'Daily Mirror' and Woman’s Editor of 'The Sun'. She draws on her insights gleaned from countless interviews with doctors, therapists, experts, healers and charlatans. She shares her expert onions on how many beauty trends and traditions are holistic and healing, and how many are sheer hocus-pocus.
About Jo Foley
Jo Foley helps audiences unravel the mysteries of the “Wellness Business” and make informed decisions about their own personal wellbeing. In addition to her journalistic and speaking career, Jo has written books on diet, lifestyle and beauty as well as travel books for American Express. She wrote ‘Shipwrecked’, which accompanied the Channel 4 series of the same name and ‘Great Spa Escapes’ in which she examined the most luxurious and opulent Spas in the world.
Jo Foley is an internationally acknowledged authority on Wellness and Wellbeing. A freelance writer, editor and media consultant, she is a former editor of ‘Woman’, ‘Options’ and the ‘Observer Magazine’. She has also held the positions of Executive Editor of ‘The Times’, Managing Editor of the ‘Daily Mirror’ and Woman’s Editor of ‘The Sun’. For over quarter of a century, Jo has been visiting and reviewing Spas, Sanctuaries and Wellness Centres on four continents and has written about the associated health issues for publications as varied as the ‘Financial Times’, ‘Conde Nast Traveller’, ‘Tatler’, ‘Harper’s Bazaar’, the ‘Sunday Telegraph’, ‘Woman & Home’, the ‘Daily Mail’, ‘The Times’ and ‘InStyle’.
Always informative and often irreverent, she is remorseless in her assessment of those practitioners who can truly cure and those who merely con. She has observed as Fat Farms have morphed into Pleasure Palaces and Health Centres into Holistic Hideaways. She has experienced rather more than her fair share of ayurvedic retreats in India, Traditional Chinese Medicine programmes, Hay Baths in Austria and Inca inspired Temezcal sweat lodges in Mexico. Other experiences include Native American Hopi Candle therapy in Arizona, Thai massages, Balinese baths, thalassotherapy hosings in France, mud treatments in Morocco, detoxes in Italy, and hammams throughout the Middle East.
As a seasoned, often cynical journalist, she has witnessed the constant re-invention of the spa to accommodate the increasing demands of cash-rich-pamper-poor clientele. Once the preserve of middle-aged women, spas now cater increasingly for the male market with a spectacular increase in wellbeing retreats, which offer everything from full medical examinations to stress management, from sleep clinics to weight loss.
Whilst anti-ageing treatments are hugely popular, she has tracked the growing interest in traditional healing therapies from China to Indonesia, via Africa and India. Indeed, in her tireless attempts to acquire authentic, first-hand experience, Jo even lived with Kalahari Bushmen to learn about their traditional healing and massage methods.
