Before Dieting...

podcast artwork

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.

Latest episodes

episode artwork

20 October 2026

The Family Food Culture Behind Weight Regain

Carmela’s story reveals what can happen when changing your eating also changes how you fit inside your own family. After years of sharing rich, comforting meals with her mother and sister, two years in Japan reshaped her habits, and her weight. Coming home meant facing an unexpected tension: she still loved her family deeply, but no longer wanted to eat in the way that had always bonded them. This episode explores how family loyalty, belonging and long‑standing food rituals can quietly influence repeated weight regain

00:00

14:54

episode artwork

13 October 2026

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

Kelli’s story shows how lifelong weight criticism fuels repeated dieting. Family pressure, judgment and food‑culture clashes shape her eating far more than willpower ever could.

00:00

15:40

episode artwork

06 October 2026

Judith's story - Relief Eating vs Comfort Eating

Judith could lose weight. What she couldn't understand was why relief eating kept returning. In this revisited story, we look beyond willpower and examine the repeating pattern around Judith's eating and weight. Using systems thinking, we explore the elastic band effect, the hidden function a troublesome behaviour can acquire, and how a solution that works in the short term can contribute to the problem returning later. Judith's story also takes us into childhood food experiences, private comfort, visibility, agency and the unexpected significance of a cheese toasty.

00:00

11:00

episode artwork

29 September 2026

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

Melissa’s story shows that permanent weight loss needs to go deeper than a diet. Through the iceberg model, she discovered that her lifelong pattern of eating chocolate wasn’t just about cravings, it was about survival. If lasting change is the goal, we need to look below the surface and address root causes, not just food. Visit Weighting for Happiness to start uncovering your own blueprint.

00:00

06:56

episode artwork

22 September 2026

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

A thirteen-year-old secretly taking food from the pantry can look like a straightforward problem with self-control. Add Amy’s hunger, food restriction and limited authority over eating, and the behaviour hasn’t changed, but the explanation has. Amy’s story shows how the frame we put around eating determines what information is available to understand it, and why the usual frame around repeated weight regain can be too small.

00:00

09:33

episode artwork

15 September 2026

If You’re Only Looking at Your Last Diet, You’re Missing the Story

Karen was approaching fifty with a persistent 20 kilograms she wanted to lose. She had tried Weight Watchers, intermittent fasting, meal replacements and more diets than she could remember. When approaches that had previously helped her lose a few kilos stopped working, she blamed perimenopause. But Karen’s most recent diet was only one small part of a much longer history. In this episode of Before Dieting, I use Karen’s story to examine the difference between tracking what is happening now and charting what has happened across time. Calories, food logs and weigh-ins can give us useful data, but repeated weight regain asks us to look beyond the latest attempt. When we stop treating every diet as a separate event and put the history together, a different pattern can become visible.

00:00

09:17

Copyright © Before Dieting.... All rights reserved.

Powered by