Too Hard to Swallow

About the Book

Reclaiming your wellness when medicine runs out of answers

 Chronic illness doesn't just attack your body. It dismantles your identity, your plans, your sense of what's possible. And then — when the appointments are over and the treatment plan is written — it leaves you largely alone to figure out how to actually live with, often, invisible illness.

 Too Hard to Swallow is part memoir, part practical manual, and entirely the guide the medical system never wrote. Written by a former public sector CEO who has spent years unable to eat solid food, it is honest about what chronic illness costs — and clear-eyed about what remains possible.

 This book is for you if...

• You are living with chronic illness and exhausted by the pressure to simply get better
• You are a caregiver, partner, or family member trying to understand what someone you love is really living with
• You have faced burnout, grief, or a health crisis that forced you to rebuild your sense of self from the ground up
• You have felt unheard, dismissed, or invisible inside a medical system not designed for complexity

What you'll discover...

• The Prescription for Wellness — a personalised framework you build chapter by chapter, collecting practical tools as you read
• The Whole-Wellness™ approach — a holistic model spanning physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing
• How to find wellness within illness — not by curing it, but by rebuilding a life that genuinely fits the body you have
• Practical end-of-chapter exercises that accumulate into a toolbox designed specifically for you

What makes this book different...

• It does not ask you to push through, stay positive, or be grateful for your suffering
• It combines unflinching personal narrative with evidence-informed frameworks — lived experience first, research second
• The focus is not cure. It is peace, purpose, and a sustainable way of living — on your terms, within your reality and your capacity
• Written by someone who has been inside the experience, not observing it from a safe distance

This is your permission to stop chasing a cure and start reclaiming your life.

About the Author

Emily Forbes is an emerging inspirational and authentic voice in the wellbeing and self-help space with a deep curiosity for the mind-body connection, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing. Emily writes with emotion, passion and vulnerability about managing chronic illness, multiple conditions and symptoms. She offers lessons learned on how to better cope with chronic stress, burnout, fatigue and life’s challenges too. She now writes about (and advocates for), individual and collective wellbeing, invisible disabilities, emotional and mental health, balancing life and work, reducing stress and preventing burnout. After 22 years in the public sector, (including 12+ in the C-suite), she uses her strategic CEO skills, coaching skills and the science of wellbeing to help women rewrite their own stories, to create and curate the lives they want and deserve. Emily founded Wylde Wellbeing in 2022 to be the very person she needed on her own journey; to help and support women experiencing chronic illness, managing multiple symptoms, burnout and / or chronic fatigue. Emily has already amplified the voices in this arena and is on a mission to inspire people to live well in spite of, and maybe even because of, adversity or suffering (in whatever form that takes). She is passionate about supporting others to find wellness within illness and to find the glimmers of hope and possibility in the darkest of times. www.wyldewellbeing.uk @wyldewellbeingcoaching