Before Dieting...

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Podcast by Bronwyn Fletcher

Before Dieting...

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.

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Latest episodes

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25 August 2026

Repeated Weight Regain Is a Complex Problem

Repeated weight regain is a complex problem. Not because there are simply lots of things involved, but because those things are interconnected. Change one part and you can change the conditions surrounding another. That matters when we look at a history of dieting. Each weight-loss attempt becomes part of the history you bring to the next one. The food rules you've accumulated, the restriction you've experienced, what worked, what didn't, and what happened when the weight returned don't disappear when the diet ends. So by the third, fifth or tenth attempt, you're not necessarily starting from the same place. And this is where our judgement can become misplaced. We keep expecting ourselves to solve a complex problem as though it were a simple one. Weight regain isn't a simple overeating problem with a simple dieting solution.

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18 August 2026

Interview with Lanette Helene - Pilates and being in your body

Women often move through life increasingly disconnected from their bodies. In this conversation with Pilates practitioner Lanette Helene, we explore how focused attention, breath and deliberate movement can rebuild that connection. Pilates becomes less about exercise and more about noticing how your body moves, where it feels restricted and how to inhabit it more fully.

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11 August 2026

When One Diet Leads to the Next

What happens after the diet ends can tell you more than the weight loss itself. In this episode, Bronwyn examines the idea of maintenance, the biological response to calorie restriction, and why difficulty keeping weight off can so easily be interpreted as a failure of willpower. Through Vivienne’s story, we see what becomes visible when years of dieting are brought together rather than viewed as separate attempts, and why repeated weight regain needs a different investigation. One question to take away: What have all my previous diets been trying to tell me?

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04 August 2026

The Questions Diets Never Ask

Most women can describe every detail of a diet, how long it lasted, how much weight they lost, and why they think it failed. But very few have ever been shown how to investigate what happened after the diet ended. In this episode, Bronwyn explains why the post‑diet period often contains the most valuable clues about repeated weight regain. Using real questions from listeners, she shows how looking closely at what happened afterwards can reveal patterns, surprises and overlooked evidence that diets never address. You’ll hear why the Weighting for Happiness Project takes a collegial approach to understanding weight regain, combining your lived experience with tools and questions that make those hidden connections easier to see.

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28 July 2026

Weight regain and fear: Why looking more closely can feel so frightening

Weight regain often feels frightening not because we don’t want answers, but because we fear what those answers might demand of us. We’ve been taught that understanding means giving something up. But looking closely can be an act of compassion, not punishment. What if the real question is: What is this eating helping me cope with?

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21 July 2026

Eight Different Reasons We Eat

Most conversations about eating reduce it to two categories: good eating and bad eating. But what if there are many different reasons we eat? In this episode, Bronwyn Fletcher answers a listener's question about the Eight Types of Eating and introduces the framework that underpins many of the conversations on Before Dieting. You'll discover why eating isn't one behaviour with one cause, why understanding the purpose of eating matters, and how recognising different types of eating can change the way you think about repeated weight regain. If you've ever asked yourself, "Why do I eat so differently in different situations?" this episode is for you.

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