Before Dieting... Episode 53

Why do we eat?

It sounds like a simple question, but the answer is rarely straightforward.

In this episode of Before Dieting, Bronwyn responds to a listener's question about the Eight Types of Eating. Rather than looking at eating as simply "good" or "bad," she introduces a different way of thinking: eating is purposeful.

This episode is an overview of the Eight Types of Eating, the framework that sits behind many of the stories explored throughout the podcast. You'll discover why eating isn't one behaviour with one cause, but many different behaviours serving different purposes.

Bronwyn introduces:

• Functional Eating
• Secondary Eating
• Dieting
• Restricted Eating
• Social Eating
• Comfort Eating
• Relief Eating
• Conscious Eating

Along the way, she explains why understanding why you're eating is far more useful than judging what you're eating.

If you've ever wondered why your eating can feel completely different from one situation to the next, this episode provides a practical map for understanding your own eating patterns.

Key Takeaways

• • Eating isn't one behaviour with one cause. Different types of eating serve different purposes, and recognising those differences is an important part of understanding repeated weight regain.
  • The purpose of eating matters more than the behaviour itself. The same food can serve very different functions depending on the situation, whether it's nourishment, comfort, social connection or emotional relief.
  • The goal isn't perfect eating. The goal is conscious eating, where you know what you're choosing, why you're choosing it, and no longer feel driven by your eating.

If this resonates, start with the Weight Ecosystem diagnostic.

https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/diagnostics/weight-ecosystem-diagnostic

Please subscribe to this Podcast and leave a rating, so other women can find it.

If you know any other woman who is struggling with weight regain, please pass this on.

If you have any questions, please email me or copy and paste the link below

[email protected]

If this resonates, start with the Weight Ecosystem diagnostic or copy and paste the link below:

https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/diagnostics/weight-ecosystem-diagnostic

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#weightregain, #emotioneating, #overeating, #foodrules, #eatingsystem, #womenshealth,

#midlifewomen, #dieting, #weightlossafter40, #dietcycle, #menopauseweightgain,

#psychologyofeating, #beforedieting, #reliefeating, #comforteating, #emotionaleating, #8eatingtypes

When Weight Regain Returns You to Safety. Kate’s story and the pattern that food alone could not explain. Season 3 Episode 52.

Kate knew how to lose weight. She had done it many times.

What she could not explain was why reaching a lower weight left her feeling frightened, exposed and unprotected, or why familiar eating patterns returned soon afterwards.

For years, she blamed her sweet tooth and lack of willpower. But when she worked through her Weight & Dieting History, a different pattern became visible.

Kate had grown up in a volatile home where avoiding attention helped keep her safe. Being smaller and more visible as an adult activated a discomfort that dieting advice had never examined. Her history also revealed an early connection between secrecy, sweet food and the time she spent with the parent who made her feel protected.

The food was part of the story, but it was not the whole story.

In this episode of Before Dieting, Bronwyn explores why losing weight and understanding weight regain require different lines of inquiry. Kate’s story demonstrates what becomes visible when the investigation extends beyond calories, food choices and whether a woman followed the plan.

In this episode you'll discover:

• • Why successful weight loss does not explain repeated regain
  • How a Weight & Dieting History reveals patterns across separate attempts
  • Why the point after weight loss may contain the most useful information
  • How early experiences can continue influencing adult responses
  • Why secret eating may serve a function that food rules cannot address
  • How changing the question changes what becomes visible

Your weight history is not proof that you failed. It is evidence that needs to be included in the investigation.

Explore the Weight & Dieting History diagnostic: or copy and paste the link below.

https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/weight-and-diet-history-diagnostic

You can also read my accompanying Blog or copy and paste the link below:

https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/post/kate-s-story-when-weight-regain-was-telling-a-deeper-story

Please subscribe to this Podcast and leave a rating, so other women can find it.

If you know any other woman who is struggling with weight regain, please pass this on.

If you have any questions please email me at [email protected]

Content note: This episode includes references to parental alcohol misuse and childhood family violence.

#weightregain, #emotioneating, #overeating, #foodrules, #eatingsystem, #womenshealth,

#midlifewomen, #dieting, #weightlossafter40, #dietcycle, #menopauseweightgain,

#psychologyofeating, #beforedieting, #reliefeating, #comforteating, #emotionaleating, #8eatingtypes

Before Dieting... Most women who regain weight are not beginners. They have followed diets, changed their eating, lost weight and proved they can do it. But knowing how to lose weight and understanding why the weight keeps coming back are two different problems.

Before Dieting is the podcast from the Weighting for Happiness Project that investigates the patterns behind eating, dieting and weight regain.

Each episode begins with a woman's story.

Together, we examine what happened, investigate the patterns hidden inside her experience, and uncover what becomes visible when we ask different questions.

Along the way you'll discover:

• why weight regain follows patterns

• why your weight history contains valuable information

• how food rules learned decades ago can still shape eating today

• why relief eating makes more sense when you understand what it is doing

• why knowing what to eat isn't the same as understanding why you eat

• how to investigate your own story before starting another diet

Hosted by Bronwyn Fletcher, Before Dieting... brings systems thinking into the weight conversation to help women see what has been hidden in plain sight.

Because your weight history is not proof that you failed.

It is information you have not been shown how to read.

Before another diet, investigate the story your own experience has been trying to tell.

New episodes

Tuesdays, wherever you get your podcasts. Please leave a review so other women can find the podcast.

Download my FREE e-book Why diet's work until they don't or paste the following link

https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/e-book-request-form

And if you know a woman who would benefit from hearing this information, please pass on the link to this Podcast or the e-book.

You can leave me a message at:

OR directly email me any questions to [email protected] or copy the link

[email protected]

#weightregain #emotioneating #reliefeating #comforteating #overeating #foodrules #eatingsystem #womenshealth #midlifewomen #dieting #weightlossafter40 #dietcycle #menopauseweightgain #psychologyofeating #beforedieting #8eatingtypes

Childhood Food Access: When you weren’t allowed to choose.

Episode overview

Most women assume that as adults they should know what ‘enough’ food looks like. But portion confidence, stopping cues, and self-trust don’t appear automatically. They’re built through early experiences of choice, permission, and authority at the table. In this episode we explore Agency: who decided what and how much you ate and how those early meal dynamics can shape adult patterns like dieting dependence, private overeating, and fear of judgement.

This episode continues the paired theme with Access, because these two factors (Access + Agency) often work together to build the blueprint for lifelong eating.

In this episode, you’ll learn

• What food agency actually means (and what it doesn’t)

• Why food confidence is often a developmental skill, not a motivation issue

• Why eating differently in front of others is a protective response

• How secrecy becomes a substitute for choice

Key takeaways

• Agency is authority at meals is for choice, portion sizing and stopping

• Private overeating is often the system restoring autonomy

• The dinner table taught rules that still shape eating today

If agency was limited in your early life, dieting won’t solve the root issue; it only temporarily overrides it. The Weighting for Happiness Project helps you investigate your specific blueprint and diagnose the true drivers behind weight regain, so lasting change becomes possible.

If agency was limited in your early life, dieting won’t solve the root issue; it only temporarily overrides it.

The Weighting for Happiness Project helps you investigate your specific blueprint and diagnose the true drivers behind weight regain, so lasting change becomes possible.

Please leave a review or rate the Podcast so other women can find it.

Download my FREE e-book "Why Diets Work Until They Don't" using the link below:

https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/e-book-request-form

And if you know a woman who would benefit from hearing this information, please pass on the link to this Podcast or the e-book.

You can leave me a message at:

LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bronwynfletcheratweightingforhappiness/

Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/beforedieting.podcast/

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61587755296729

OR directly email me any questions to

[email protected]

[email protected]

Cheers

Bronwyn

#weightregain #emotioneating #reliefeating #comforteating #overeating #foodrules #eatingsystem #womenshealth #midlifewomen #dieting #weightlossafter40 #dietcycle #menopauseweightgain #psychologyofeating #beforedieting #8eatingtypes

Podcast Episode 50 - Show Notes

​The real drivers of weight gain start in childhood, long before dieting ever entered the picture. In this episode we explore Childhood Food Access.

This is the autonomy you had (or didn’t have) to obtaining food outside regular meals, and how it shape lifelong patterns like urgency eating, secrecy, and scarcity thinking.

​This isn’t about blame. It’s about understanding. Because you can’t change what you can’t see.

​Access:

🙋🏻‍♀️who decided when you weren't allowed to eat.

​In this episode, you’ll learn:

1️⃣ How focusing on reducing on current weight prevents you discovering the root cause of repeating weight patterns

2️⃣ The difference between access and agency (and why both matter)

3️⃣How restricted access builds survival strategies around food

4️⃣Why secret eating isn’t a moral failure, it’s a system response

​Key takeaways

🔍 Food access is about permission and autonomy

🔍 Many adult eating patterns were once childhood solutions

🔍 Shame blocks the information you need to change your weight permanently

If this episode has connected dots you’ve never connected before, you’re ready for deeper investigation.

​The Weighting for Happiness Project helps you investigate your specific blueprint and diagnose the true drivers behind weight regain, so lasting change becomes possible.

Please leave a review or rate the Podcast so other women can find it.

Download my FREE Guide Why diet's work until they don't or use the link

https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/e-book-request-form

And if you know a woman who would benefit from hearing this information, please pass on the link to this Podcast or the e-book.

You can leave me a message at:

LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bronwynfletcheratweightingforhappiness/

Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/beforedieting.podcast/

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61587755296729

OR directly email me any questions to

[email protected]

[email protected]

#weightregain #emotioneating #reliefeating #comforteating #overeating #foodrules #eatingsystem #womenshealth #midlifewomen #dieting #weightlossafter40 #dietcycle #menopauseweightgain #psychologyofeating #beforedieting #8eatingtypes

Ready to investigate your own blueprint?

The Weight Ecosystem is the first diagnostic in the Weighting for Happiness Project.

It steps back from food and helps you examine the wider conditions your weight and health sit within before moving on to the deeper patterns that shape eating.

Click here or copy and paste the link below.

https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/weight-ecosystem-diagnostic

See the end of the show notes for other downloads.

One of the limitations of most weight loss advice is, it is all focused, on eating.

What you’re eating, how much and how often.

So, when it comes to relief eating, by the time the eating occurs, a great deal has already happened.

In this episode, Bronwyn expands on food rules and food stories and introduces another part of the Eating Blueprint: the Eating System.

Through Moira's experience, we explore what happened when she stopped concentrating on the chocolate and ice cream she was eating and became curious about the sequence leading into it.

What she discovered was that relief eating didn't begin when she opened the freezer.

It began days beforehand with emotional agitation and a narrowing attention.

This episode challenges the idea that overeating is triggered by a single event and it introduces a different way of understanding relief eating.

In this episode

• • The difference between Hunger and Hungering
  • Moira's discovery that her relief eating began days before the eating itself
  • The early signs that an Eating System has become activated
  • How widening the boundary changes what becomes visible

The read the Blog associated with this episode, click here or copy and paste the link below.

https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/post/eating-systems-explain-a-woman-s-weight-regain-moira-s-story

AND

For a copy of the 4 layers of eating, click here or copy and paste the link below.

https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/4-layers-behind-eating

Download the Four Layers Model that explains Sylvie's story: Four Layers Infographic: or copy and paste https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/4-layers-behind-eating

Begin identifying your own Blueprint; start with my first Diagnostic: ‘Understanding your weight ecosystem’ or copy and paste https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/weight-ecosystem-diagnostic

In this episode of Before Dieting, I take listeners inside the first two layers of the Four Layers Model. The Food Rules and Food Stories and show how these layers shape eating in ways most women never realise.

Through Sylvie’s story, we see how a lifelong pattern of junk‑food eating wasn’t about food at all, but about a feeling that began decades earlier at the family dinner table.

This episode helps women understand why certain eating patterns feel immovable and how uncovering the emotional logic beneath eating can change everything.

What You’ll Learn

• • Food Rules describe what someone does with food.
  • Food Stories explain why the behaviour formed in the first place.
  • Childhood experiences often shape adult eating in ways women don’t recognise until they look back.
  • Removing a food doesn’t remove the problem it is solving.
  • Relief‑eating is the response to internal tension, not a lack of discipline.
  • Work stress, conflict, pressure and emotional load can recreate the same internal conditions that shaped early eating patterns.
  • Understanding the story behind eating opens the door to permanent change.

Sylvie’s Story

Sylvie, a woman in her late forties, has spent years trying to understand why she keeps returning to junk food, especially when she’s alone. Her car has become a mobile dining room, filled with wrappers by the end of each day. She promises herself she’ll stop, but the pattern repeats.

When she traces her eating back to childhood, she remembers tense family dinners where arguments erupted nightly. She learned to eat quickly, stay quiet and avoid attention, a Food Rule formed for safety, not nutrition.

Later, when the house was quiet, she found relief in sweets. The knot in her stomach came first; the chocolate came second. That knot, not the food, was the beginning of the sequence.

As an adult, her job now recreates the same emotional conditions: complaints, conflict, difficult conversations. Different setting. Different people. Same knot.

Once she sees the connection, her eating finally makes sense.

Key Insight

When women focus only on the food, they miss the deeper story. Food Rules describe the behaviour. Food Stories explain the emotional logic behind it. And once the story becomes visible, the eating stops looking irrational and starts looking understandable.

Next Week

I'll take you into the third layer of the model, the Eating Blueprints and explain how repeated experiences, Food Rules and Food Stories organise themselves into larger patterns that guide eating, long after childhood has ended.

See my Blog for more information about understanding your Food Story by reading about Sylvie's or copy and paste the link: https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/post/sylvies-weight-regain-story

Diets tell you what to eat. Understanding the Four Layers Behind Eating explains why.

🔦 Download your free comprehensive Infographic, "The 4 Layers of Weight Regain" here

https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/4-layers-of-eating

🔦You can read my Blog for this Podcast here

https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/post/the-four-layers-of-eating-why-weight-regain-isn’t-about-willpower

And please leave a review of this Podcast so other women can find this information.

Show Notes

In this episode of Before Dieting, Bronwyn introduces the Four Layers Behind Eating Behaviour; a way of understanding why some eating seems easy to change while others feel out of our control.

Drawing on conversations with more than a thousand women who have experienced weight regain, Bronwyn explores four distinct layers that sit beneath eating behaviour:

1. Food Rules
2. Food Stories
3. Eating Blueprints
4. Eating Systems

Using practical examples, this episode introduces a new way of seeing eating behaviour. One that moves beyond calories, discipline and self-control to uncover the deeper structures shaping your everyday eating.

In this episode

✔️ Why new concepts and language are essential when solving complex problems

✔️ The difference between Food Rules and Food Stories

✔️How Eating Blueprints set the pattern for all eating

✔️ Why some eating behaviours feel flexible while others seem impossible to change

✔️ Why restriction is often one of the strongest triggers for relief eating

Three Key Takeaways

🖌️ Not all eating operates on the same layer.

• Different eating behaviours have different drivers. Understanding the layer you're looking at changes the explanation and the solution.

🖌️Rules describe behaviour. Stories explain behaviour.

• Food Rules tell us what someone does. Food Stories help explain why those behaviours became important in the first place.

🖌️Relief eating is not a willpower problem.

• Relief eating is the behavioural expression of an Eating System attempting to reduce emotional pressure and restore equilibrium.

The weight regain boundary problem

The Weight Ecosystem link I reference in the episode that can start your weight regain solution.

Today we look at:

Why do weight regain explanations begin and end with calories?

In this episode Bronwyn introduces one of the foundational ideas behind the Weighting for Happiness Project: boundaries.

In systems thinking, a boundary determines what gets included when you're trying to understand a problem. And what sits inside that boundary strongly influences the explanation you end up with.

Most weight-loss approaches draw a very narrow boundary around food and calorie intake.

But what happens when the boundary expands?

What happens when weight history, family food culture and long-standing eating patterns are included in the investigation?

Bronwyn explores why expanding the boundary changed the way she understood weight regain and why we need to broaden our investigation more than calories.

Key Takeaways

• • Boundaries determine solutions.
  • Calories aren’t the entire problem.
  • Weight regain occurs within a larger life context.
  • Expanding the boundary changes what becomes visible.

If you want to read my Blog that accompanies this episode, you can do so here.

Also, you can contact me or connect with me by: [email protected]

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#weightregain, #emotioneating, #foodrules, #eatingsystem, #womenshealth, #midlifewomen

#midlifewomen, #dieting, #weightlossafter40, #dietcycle, #menopauseweightgain

#psychologyofeating, #beforedieting, #reliefeating, #comforteating, #emotionaleating, #8eatingtypes

Why does relief eating feel so overpowering, secretive and difficult to interrupt?

In this episode of Before Dieting, Bronwyn Fletcher explores relief eating through the lens of systems thinking. Instead of framing eating as a simple problem of willpower or self-control, this episode examines how relief eating forms as a repeatable system designed to solve tension, overload and emotional discomfort.

Using Meri’s story, Bronwyn walks through the hidden logic beneath late-night eating, food secrecy, rigid food rules and the constant internal tug-of-war many women live with around food.

This episode also introduces the three stages of relief eating: Hungering, Eating and Resolution, showing how patterns that feel chaotic often follow a very structured process once they are slowed down and examined closely.

Rather than asking ‘How do I stop eating like this?’, this episode invites a different question:

‘What relief is this eating giving me?’

Key Takeaways

• • Relief eating is not random; it operates as a repeatable system.
  • Food can function as relief, escape, rebellion or nervous system regulation.
  • Childhood food experiences often shape adult eating systems.
  • Shame reduces understanding; observation increases insight.

Start Here

If you want to understand what’s shaping your eating, start with the Weight Ecosystem diagnostic, or copy and paste the following link:

https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/weight-ecosystem-diagnostic

Read the Blog here or copy and paste the following link:

https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/post/relief-eating-and-weight-regain-the-hidden-logic-inside-the-eating-system

Please subscribe to this Podcast and leave a rating, so other women can find it.

If you know any other woman who is struggling with weight regain, please pass this on.

If you have any questions, please email me at [email protected]

#weightregain, #emotioneating, #overeating, #foodrules, #eatingsystem, #womenshealth,

#midlifewomen, #dieting, #weightlossafter40, #dietcycle, #menopauseweightgain,

#psychologyofeating, #beforedieting, #reliefeating, #comforteating, #emotionaleating, #8eatingtypes