With Shape House, Sophie Chiche sweats Americans

"The body is like an old car. If we do not take care of him, he does not work anymore."At 50, Sophie Chiche appears ten less. And she owes it to a life project that materialized with the creation of Shape House in 2013, a sweat house. At the end of December, she opened her fourth location in West Hollywood (after Larchmont, Santa Monica, Pasadena).

How does Shape House work? After being hydrated and dressed in cotton, customers are placed on a bed and covered with a blanket for one hour. Exposed to a high temperature, the body will self-regulate and sweat massively. "This allows to "detoxify" our body in a natural way. The number of calories lost is equivalent to a jog, without building muscle", Explains Sophie Chiche.

Every month, 5,000 people visit Shape House to lose weight, stop smoking, improve the elasticity of their skin or help them sleep.

One of Sophie Chiche's most loyal clients is none other than singer Selena Gomez. She promoted this sweating, which annihilated the effects of her autoimmune disease (lupus) on television. "But I do not help people in a medical way, just to feel better", Says Sophie Chiche.

Los Angeles fell at age 17, the Parisienne, a former freelance writer, spent a degree in psychology before working on the international development of her husband's counseling box.

But everything is not rosy for Sophie Chiche. "I had gone around the scale, I was over 145 kg. I ate every time I was sad, she says. I found myself in the fridge in the middle of the night and I thought it was enough. It was twelve years ago."The French then decides to take control, and loses 80 pounds in a decade by changing his eating habits.

As she can not exercise because of her build, she finds the solution to sweat. She arrives at the idea of ​​Shape House and opens her first home in Larchmont four years ago with personal funds.

Responsible for about fifty employees today, she was joined by several investors. Sophie Chiche plans to open a local in New York in 2018. "Many people believe in the project. One of my clients wants to invest. I want to have Shape House in all urban environments"She says. Before that, she plans to continue growing Shape House in California, and to open four more in 2017: one in the Valley, San Francisco, San Diego and Orange County.

She also wants to publish an autobiographical book: "I found ways that make sense to lose weight, I want to share them."