✅ 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.

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.

Click here for the transcript

Explore why diets so often begin with intense hope, fueled by marketing and outside influences.

Understand how the body's unconscious survival system interprets dietary restriction as starvation, often overpowering conscious willpower and forcing diet abandonment.

Learn why abandoning a diet isn't a failure, but instead a predictable outcome driven by biology.

Discover the phenomenon of weight "overshoot," where post-diet weight regain often exceeds the starting point because of slowed metabolism and increased fat storage

Hear why "low and slow" is key to lasting weight changes and how learning from past cycles, rather than forgetting them, can help break the pattern.

Key takeaway:

Sustainable progress requires working with your body's system, not trying to override it. Consulting a qualified dietician may help set up an approach that works in harmony with your biology.

Resource Links

Visit the resources page for a copy of the Diet Hope and Abandonment Cycle diagram and explore the Weight and Dieting History Program for deeper insights.

Free download Diet Hope and Abandonment Cycle

Read my Blog Post

Why you need more than a diet

In this episode, Bronwyn shares the backstory of the Weighting for Happiness project and the journey she took to uncover what really sits beneath a persistent weight struggle. Drawing from over a thousand honest conversations with women, Bronwyn explains why quick fixes and diets never tell the whole story and introduces the three investigative programs she developed to help women finally make sense of their eating patterns.

Key Topics:

• • Why “bite-size” episodes make space for fresh ideas and practical insights
  • The two most common patterns women experience with weight: losing but not maintaining, and feeling stuck despite trying
  • The limitations of diet culture and simple fixes
  • How each woman’s journey is shaped by her unique history, not a universal solution

Development of the Weighting for Happiness Project:

Weight and Dieting History Program:

• Bronwyn began by listening to the lived experiences of women, focusing on what they had tried, what worked (even temporarily), and the factors around each effort. This approach moved beyond advice and numbers, highlighting the importance of personal history.

Family Food Culture Program:

• She then looked further back, collecting stories about how eating habits and beliefs were shaped by family rules at the dinner table. Messages about hunger and the purpose of eating were deeply personal, often handed down and rarely questioned as adults. Understanding these influences gave women a sense of relief and a way to explain longstanding patterns.

Food Choices and Eating Patterns Program:

• Wanting an even deeper understanding, Bronwyn identified eight types of eating. Instead of broad labels, she offered ways for women to sort their eating honestly and without blame. This helped move eating decisions from confusion to clarity, showing how old childhood rules continue to play a role every day.

Takeaway:

Weighting for Happiness isn’t a diet or advice plan. It’s a set of three investigative programs designed to uncover the root causes behind weight struggles and make sense of eating patterns that might once have seemed illogical. This work lays the groundwork for genuine change—giving women more than just another diet, but a practical way to understand themselves before trying again.

Final Thought:

Weight loss is not a simple matter of finding a diet and sticking to it. Complexity lives in our history, our family culture, and our daily patterns. By examining these, new possibilities for lasting change become available.

Read the BLOG What you need more than a diet

Show Notes

Most people think eating comes in two forms, either overeating or dieting. In this episode of Before Dieting, Bronwyn Fletcher introduces the Eight Types of Eating, a framework that makes the invisible visible.

From Functional to Relief eating, Bronwyn explains how each type plays a role in your food story, often operating under the radar. You’ll learn why understanding these types isn’t about rules or willpower, but about seeing the unique system you’ve built over a lifetime. And once you can see it, you can change it—without cutting out the foods you love.

Quotes

1. 1. ‘Relief eating isn’t about willpower, it’s your body and mind working to restore balance.’
   2. ‘When you see your whole eating system, the power shifts from the food to you.’

Other Resources for the 8 types of eating

Download the Cheat Sheet

Check out the Blog

Summary:

In this episode, you’ll meet Amy, a woman who’s spent over half her life trying to lose weight. Using systems thinking, we explore how her relationship with food was shaped by childhood experiences, family dynamics, and unspoken rules about appetite and body size. From stolen snacks to over-catered freedom, Amy’s story shows why long-term weight issues are never just about food.

What You’ll Learn:

• • Why Amy’s weight struggle didn’t start with dieting
  • How childhood rules around food shaped her adult patterns
  • The emotional logic behind overeating
  • Why understanding your backstory is essential to lasting change
  • What systems thinking reveals that diets miss

Key Quote:

“Without realising it, I’ve been performing the ‘fat people are jolly’ act... Every time I laughed, I was abandoning myself.”

If you’ve tried every diet but are still stuck, this episode shows what to do next. Get started by downloading our Free E-Book at Weighting For Happiness

In this episode, we meet Karen, a woman determined to lose 20 kilos and desperate for the next ‘right’ diet. But when we mapped out her weight chart, she saw something she’d never noticed before, the connection between life events and the numbers on the scale.

What looked like sabotage turned out to be survival. Her eating wasn’t a failure of willpower; it was a system at work. One that had kept her going through grief, stress, and pressure.

What You’ll Hear:

• • Why Karen thought her body was working against her
  • How a weight chart uncovered the emotional landscape beneath her eating
  • The turning point where she stopped asking for a diet and started asking deeper questions
  • Why clarity, not control is the real solution

Key Insight:

Food can become a solution to life, not just a problem to fix. Seeing your story visually may be the missing link.

If you want to make your weight loss efforts more successful, joining our weight and dieting history Program.

✅ Podcast Show Notes

Episode Title: Appetite, Hunger and Hungering: Why Knowing the Difference Matters

In this bite-sized episode, Bronwyn is joined by Lisa for a conversation that untangles three terms that are often used interchangeably but have very different meanings: hunger, appetite, and hungering.

Together, they explore:

• • How hunger is about the body’s need for food
  • How appetite is about the want for a particular food, regardless of need
  • How hungering signals something deeper and unrelated to physical hunger

You’ll hear Lisa’s experience and learn why common labels like 'binge eating' don’t help realise what underpins our eating.

🎧 Listen in to discover how new language can unlock new understanding and help you take the pressure off your willpower as an answer.

👉 Tune in now and subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next.

For a FREE copy of the e-book 'Why diet's work until they don't', head over to my website.

WeightingForHappiness.com.au

Episode Summary

In this bite-sized episode of Before Dieting, Bronwyn Fletcher introduces the idea of eating systems, the quiet, often invisible forces that shape our food behaviours and keep women stuck in the cycle of weight loss and regain.

If you’ve ever thrown yourself into a diet, followed all the rules, seen some progress only to watch the weight creep back on, this episode will help you understand why. It’s not about willpower. It’s not about motivation. It’s about the personal, complex eating system that lives beneath the surface of every food choice you make.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• • What an eating system really is, and why it matters more than any food plan
  • How simple food rules like “finish everything on your plate” can evolve into complex, emotional eating patterns
  • The difference between eating for relief vs. eating for hunger
  • Two key signs that your eating system is driving your weight
  • Why diets fail, not because you’re doing it wrong, but because they ignore the system that’s already running your eating
  • How systems thinking offers a new pathway to long-term change

Key Takeaways:

Everyone has an eating system. It’s shaped by childhood experiences, role models, and family rules and most of it operates below the level of conscious awareness.

You can’t override a system with willpower. Diets and food plans only work when they align with your system, and most don’t.

Eating systems aren’t broken. They’re intelligent. They were built to keep you safe, even if they no longer serve your goals.

Understanding your system is the first step. When you see how it works, you can finally stop fighting it and start changing it.

Who This Episode is For:

• • Women who are stuck in the cycle of weight loss and regain
  • Anyone who’s followed diet after diet without lasting results
  • Listeners curious about the deeper reasons behind their food patterns
  • Health-conscious, capable women who know something’s not adding up, but don’t know what’s missing

Coming Up Next…

Join me in Episode 2 when I'll talk with my friend Lisa to explore appetite, hunger, and hungering, and how eating systems respond to each in very different ways. This eye-opening conversation will help you decode your body’s signals and make sense of the urges you often feel around food.

Subscribe & Share

Enjoying the podcast?

• • Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen so you never miss an episode.
  • Share it with a friend who’s stuck on the dieting roller coaster, it might be exactly what they’ve been looking for.

For more resources, visit:

WeightingForHappiness

Before Dieting… is the podcast that finally makes sense of why weight is so hard to lose, no matter how many diets you’ve tried.

Hosted by Bronwyn Fletcher, a systems thinker who has spoken with more than a thousand women stuck in the same frustrating cycle. This show will turn everything you thought you knew about weight on its head.

If you’ve ever started the day eating healthy but finished it inhaling chocolate and hiding the wrappers, this is where you’ll find the reasons.

Using systems thinking, Bronwyn gets to the causes behind the causes, so you can stop chasing temporary fixes and finally break the cycle that dieting never will.

Here you won’t be told that food is the enemy, or that dieting is the only answer.

Instead, you’ll discover that your weight story runs far deeper than calories or willpower. Every episode unpacks the hidden food stories and invisible eating systems that determine your relationship with food. These are the stories and systems that keep recycling the same weight outcomes.

This is not a diet podcast; it’s a major reframe of how you gain weight in the first place. Because when you uncover the system that drives your eating, those ‘illogical’ food choices will make perfect sense.

Here’s where lasting weight solutions start, Before Dieting…

New episodes

Tuesdays, wherever you get your podcasts.

More information https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au