Before Dieting...

Bronwyn Fletcher
  • 4.5 (2)
  • Fitness

Investigating Weight Regain Before You Try to Fix It. If you've spent years losing weight, regaining it, and wondering why the same pattern keeps repeating, this podcast is for you. Before Dieting is an investigative podcast from the Weighting for Happiness Project. Using women's experiences as a starting point, each episode investigates a different part of the weight ecosystem, revealing connections between seemingly unrelated experiences and the way we eat. Each episode replaces judgement with understanding, helping you see familiar experiences in a completely different way. The Weighting for Happiness Project is built on one simple distinction: Weight loss and weight regain are different problems. Many women have proved they can lose weight. The unanswered question is what keeps recreating the same pattern. Before Dieting exists to investigate that question. Whether you've tried countless diets or you're simply tired of blaming yourself, this podcast offers a different place to begin. Not by asking what's wrong with you, but by asking what conditions make this eating necessary. These questions are worth asking before you begin another diet. That's what Before Dieting is here to investigate.

  1. 13 hrs ago

    Amy and Monica - What Happens When a Diet Meets Your Eating System

    What Happens When a Diet Meets Your Eating System Want to understand your different types of eating, see our full explanation here AND to check out the diagnostic explore here or copy and paste the links below. 8 Types of eating free explanation: https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/eight-types-of-eating Food Choices and Eating patterns diagnostic: https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/food-choices-and-eating-patterns Show Notes You start a diet, follow the instructions and lose weight. Then ordinary life returns, the diet becomes harder to maintain and familiar eating patterns begin to reappear. It's easy to conclude that you've lost your commitment or need more discipline. But what if the diet has only changed part of what's influencing your eating? In this episode of Before Dieting, Bronwyn Fletcher explores the difference between following a diet and understanding your existing eating system. Drawing on conversations with more than a thousand women about weight and dieting, Bronwyn explains how food rules, learned responses, family experiences and everyday circumstances continue to influence eating, even while you're following a diet. You'll hear why two women eating in response to uncomfortable emotions can be having very different experiences, how a diet can come into conflict with established family routines, and why the diet itself becomes another influence within your eating system. The central question isn't simply whether you followed the diet successfully. It's what the diet changed, what remained unchanged and what happened when ordinary life resumed. A question to consider: Which parts of your eating did your last diet change and which parts did you never really look at? Before Dieting is a podcast from the Weighting for Happiness Project, exploring food rules, relief eating and why diets fail. If you'd like to read my Blog you can visit here: https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/post/when-a-diet-meets-your-eating-system

  2. 3 Nov

    Lisa's story. Hunger, Appetite and Hungering. Why knowing the difference matters

    Lisa’s story: Hunger, Appetite and Hungering. Why the difference matters Is it hunger, something you want to eat, or something you're trying to get relief from? We return to Lisa's story in Before Dieting, to go deeper into her experiences with food, including the difference between enjoying chocolate and eating ice cream to escape an overwhelming feeling of agitation. Her story reveals why the words we use to describe eating matter. Broad labels such as overeating, emotional eating and bingeing can conceal important differences in what's actually happening. In this episode, we explore: Hunger, Appetite and Hungering — three distinct experiences that can all lead to eating.Relief Eating — why eating to end an uncomfortable feeling is different from eating for pleasure or comfort.Hungering → Eating → Resolution — the three phases that reveal how Relief Eating operates.The limitations of labels — why more precise descriptions can uncover patterns that have gone unrecognised for years. Lisa's experience illustrates an important distinction: the same food can serve entirely different purposes depending on what's happening before the eating begins. Ready to understand your own eating? If you've spent years trying to control what you eat without fully understanding why you eat, it's time to investigate the patterns behind your food choices. The Weighting for Happiness Food Choices & Eating Patterns diagnostic takes you beyond familiar labels. Using the Eight Types of Eating framework, you'll work through structured questions and tools to identify the different reasons behind your eating and discover what deserves attention. Stop treating all your eating as one problem. Discover what's behind your different eating patterns before you try to change them. Explore the Food Choices and Eating Patterns diagnostic or copy and paste the link below: https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/food-choices-and-eating-patterns

  3. 27 Oct

    Gemma's Story - The Black Box of weight regain

    In this episode of Before Dieting, Bronwyn revisits Gemma’s story to explore a common but often overlooked factor in repeated weight regain: becoming increasingly skilled at dieting without ever questioning whether dieting is solving the right problem. Gemma is an intelligent, motivated and highly capable woman. Over the years, she has committed herself to countless weight-loss efforts, approaching each new diet with determination and organisation. Like many women, she often succeeds in losing weight. Yet despite the effort and learning invested in every attempt, she repeatedly finds herself back at the same starting point. Bronwyn introduces the concept of “striving but never arriving”, describing how repeated weight-loss attempts can keep people focused on improving their next diet rather than understanding why previous efforts ended in weight regain. Using ideas from systems thinking, the episode explores the distinction between single-loop learning and double-loop learning. Single-loop learning focuses on improving existing strategies, while double-loop learning challenges the assumptions behind those strategies in the first place. Through Gemma’s experience, Bronwyn illustrates how weight regain is often interpreted as a failure of willpower or consistency, leading to an endless search for a more sustainable diet. However, this perspective can overlook the deeper patterns, structures and influences that shape eating behaviour over time. The episode examines the systems thinking principle that “structure influences behaviour”, highlighting how eating patterns are affected by long-standing habits, life circumstances, childhood messages about food and years of accumulated dieting rules. These influences continue whether a person is dieting or not. In concluding, Bronwyn argues that breaking the cycle of repeated weight regain begins with understanding your weight and dieting history. By looking across years of experiences rather than focusing on individual attempts, it becomes possible to identify recurring patterns and the structures that sustain them. Only then can meaningful and lasting change begin. You can see how making your weight and diet history visible is important to solve repeated weight regain: or copy and paste the link below: https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/weight-and-diet-history-diagnostic To read my Blog Post or copy and paste the link below: https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/post/next-diet-maintains-weight-regain

  4. 20 Oct

    The Family Food Culture Behind Weight Regain

    What happens when losing weight changes how you fit into your own family? For Carmela, food was at the heart of family life. After her father left, her mother brought her two daughters together through cooking, baking and generous meals. That closeness continued into adulthood, with Friday night dinners becoming a much-loved family ritual. All three women struggled with their weight. Diets came and went, but their shared enjoyment of food remained. Then Carmela moved to Japan for two years. Away from her family's familiar eating arrangements, she developed a different way of eating and lost much of the weight she'd carried for years. Returning home brought an unexpected difficulty. She still loved her family, but no longer wanted to eat as they did. The meals that had always made her feel included now left her feeling like an outsider. In this episode of Before Dieting, I revisit Carmela's story alongside an unforgettable experience from my own childhood to examine Family Food Culture and how family loyalty can contribute to repeated weight regain without us recognising what's happening. We consider why changing our eating can become complicated when food is closely connected to affection, family identity and belonging. With the holiday season approaching, it's an especially relevant conversation for anyone returning to familiar family meals and rituals. Your Family Food Culture is as individual as your fingerprint. Understanding it may reveal influences on your eating that have remained unnoticed for decades. The Family Food Culture diagnostic gives you a structured way to uncover those influences and consider how they may still affect your eating today. Explore the diagnostic at Weighting for Happiness. or copy and paste the link: https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/family-food-culture-diagnostic If you prefer to read the Blog article, you can here: or copy and paste the link below: https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/post/the-family-food-culture-behind-weight-regain

  5. 13 Oct

    Kelli's Story: When Criticism Becomes Part of the Weight Regain Problem

    What happens when losing weight becomes as much about stopping other people's criticism as changing your weight? Kelli had been dealing with weight criticism since childhood. At fifteen, she began dieting after a boy told her he would date her if she lost weight. Years later, after having two babies within twenty months, she found herself under scrutiny from her husband's family, who believed the solution was straightforward. Her husband suggested running every day. Her mother-in-law gave her a gym membership for her birthday. Family meals included food specifically intended for dieting. Behind these apparently helpful gestures sat three familiar judgements: wanting, willpower and weakness. But Kelli's eating history was considerably more complicated. Her Greek immigrant parents had experienced food scarcity before moving to Australia. Packaged supermarket foods represented prosperity, opportunity and fitting into their new country. Kelli grew up surrounded by abundant food, with few restrictions on how much she ate. As an adult, she found herself caught between the food culture she'd grown up in and another family's expectations about weight. In Episode 65 of Before Dieting, Bronwyn examines how criticism can become part of a repeating weight-loss and regain cycle. Kelli's efforts to demonstrate that she was doing the right thing became intertwined with her attempts to lose weight, while the history of her eating remained largely unexplored. In this episode: the three ‘w’s of weight criticism, how apparently helpful advice can carry judgement, the reinforcing relationship between criticism and repeated dieting, and why understanding your family food culture can provide information that another diet cannot. Your next step: Examine your own Family Food Culture Kelli could tell you about every diet she'd tried. What she hadn't understood was how her childhood food culture had influenced the way she learnt to eat. Your family food culture may be entirely different from Kelli's, but it has its own history. The foods available in your home, the rules around eating, who made the decisions, and what food represented to your family are all worth examining. The Family Food Culture diagnostic gives you a structured way to examine that history and identify what you learnt about food and eating long before your first diet. If Kelli's story reminds you of a woman who has spent years being criticised for her weight, please share this episode with her. If you've repeatedly regained weight, another set of dietary instructions won't explain that history. Your own evidence is where a different understanding can begin. Explore the Family Food Culture diagnostic at Weighting for Happiness, or, copy and paste the link below https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/family-food-culture-diagnostic

  6. 6 Oct

    Judith's story - Relief Eating vs Comfort Eating

    Judith was good at dieting. An engineer by profession, she liked order, research and understanding how things worked. She could learn the rules of a diet and apply considerable discipline to following them. What she couldn't understand was why relief eating kept returning. From the outside, the pattern could easily be interpreted as self-sabotage. Judith would lose weight, people would begin commenting on how good she looked, her eating would change and eventually the weight would return. But what happens when we stop looking only at the eating and examine the whole repeating pattern? In this episode of Before Dieting, I return to Judith's story and use a systems-thinking lens to go much further than we did the first time. We follow connections between her childhood experience of food, limited agency in the kitchen, private comfort, visibility, dieting and adult relief eating. We also examine the counterintuitive possibility that something Judith desperately wanted to change had also acquired a useful function within her system. You'll hear about the elastic band effect, and how a solution can work in the short term while creating pressure that eventually pulls the system back towards its previous state. We also look at dieting as a fix that fails: something capable of producing weight loss without necessarily changing the conditions involved in its return. Judith's story is particular to Judith. It isn't offered as an explanation for anybody else's weight or eating. Instead, it shows what can become visible when repeated behaviour is examined as part of a larger system rather than treated as an isolated failure of control. If you've spent years applying increasingly simple solutions to eating or weight that keeps returning, this episode offers another place to look. Weighting for Happiness® Diets change what you eat. Diagnostics reveal why you eat. See how understanding your weight ecosystem will help manage weight regain, OR copy and paste the link below: https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/weight-and-diet-history-diagnostic You can read my Blog Post here, OR copy and paste the link below: https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/post/weight-regain-relief-or-comfort-eating

  7. 29 Sept

    Melissa's Story - When chocolate is the Solution not the Problem.

    In today’s episode, you’ll hear Melissa’s food story and the insight she gained from examining her long-term weight struggle, using the iceberg model. “Chocolate wasn’t and isn’t her problem; it is her solution. As a child it was the only comfort in a home that was never safe. And now as an adult that solution sits beneath the waterline, hard wired in to give relief in times of fear or overwhelm.” Using an iceberg as a visual aid can help us see the hidden layers beneath complex challenges like weight loss. It shows why the obvious solutions of dieting and calorie-cutting, only work temporarily as they don’t address the root cause of excess weight. Melissa, is a 49-year-old tech support specialist and mother of two, who has battled weight since her second child was born. Despite countless diets, she found herself stuck in a loop, losing and regaining weight, believing chocolate was the reason. But when we mapped her patterns and traced her chocolate eating back to childhood, Melissa realised it wasn’t just about taste, it was about safety and comfort in a home marred by violence. Through Melissa’s story you’ll see that the path to permanent weight loss begins by turning the iceberg upside-down and finding the root cause, before starting another diet. Ready to discover your own eating system? Visit Weighting for Happiness to start your discovery using the Weight EcoSystem. or copy and paste the link below: https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/weight-ecosystem-diagnostic First Published on September 2, 2025 at 16:28

  8. 22 Sept

    Weight Regain: The Frame We’re Using Is Too Small - Amy's Story

    What does a thirteen-year-old secretly taking food from the pantry tell us about her eating? On its own, it seems easy to explain. But Amy’s story changes as more information comes into view. She remembers being constantly hungry. Her food was restricted from childhood. Her dinner was served on a plate barely bigger than a saucer. She wasn’t given pocket money because of concerns she would spend it on food. Then, at eighteen, she left home determined that nobody would ever tell her what she could and couldn’t eat again. The secret eating hasn’t changed. What changes is the frame around it, and with that, what becomes available to explain it. In Episode 62 of Before Dieting, Bronwyn uses Amy’s story to introduce an important idea from systems thinking: the boundary we draw around a problem determines what information we include in our investigation and what we leave outside it. Weight regain is usually examined within a very tight frame: what was eaten, how much was eaten, whether the diet was followed and when it stopped. Those facts matter, but they can describe what happened without explaining the eating that produced it. Amy’s story shows why putting more context around eating can change an explanation without changing a single fact. In this episode: Why apparently straightforward eating behaviour can become less straightforward when more context is included What Amy’s childhood hunger, food restriction and limited access to food add to the story of her secret eating Why food freedom at eighteen meant something different when viewed alongside what came before it How a systems-thinking boundary determines what becomes available for explanation Why widening the frame doesn’t mean calories become irrelevant The important difference between describing eating and explaining it Why a factual account of weight regain isn’t necessarily a sufficient explanation Start with Understanding Your Weight Ecosystem: If Before Dieting has you thinking there’s more to your story than calories in and out, the Weight Ecosystem gives you the questions and pathway to begin reframing your weight regain. Start with Understanding Your Weight Ecosystem: If Before Dieting has you thinking there’s more to your story than calories in and out, Understanding Your Weight Ecosystem gives you the questions and pathway to begin reframing your own weight regain. Or copy and paste the link below: https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/weight-ecosystem-diagnostic Read the Blog or copy and paste the link below: https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/post/weight-regain-the-frame-is-too-small

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4.5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Investigating Weight Regain Before You Try to Fix It. If you've spent years losing weight, regaining it, and wondering why the same pattern keeps repeating, this podcast is for you. Before Dieting is an investigative podcast from the Weighting for Happiness Project. Using women's experiences as a starting point, each episode investigates a different part of the weight ecosystem, revealing connections between seemingly unrelated experiences and the way we eat. Each episode replaces judgement with understanding, helping you see familiar experiences in a completely different way. The Weighting for Happiness Project is built on one simple distinction: Weight loss and weight regain are different problems. Many women have proved they can lose weight. The unanswered question is what keeps recreating the same pattern. Before Dieting exists to investigate that question. Whether you've tried countless diets or you're simply tired of blaming yourself, this podcast offers a different place to begin. Not by asking what's wrong with you, but by asking what conditions make this eating necessary. These questions are worth asking before you begin another diet. That's what Before Dieting is here to investigate.

Information

  • Creator
    Bronwyn Fletcher
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    69
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    Before Dieting...