Hello, podleters. In their second episode of my special quarantine season, I speak to the wonderful Becky from the anti-diot riot club who you might have heard of and you might follow them on Instagram.

I've actually been meaning to get back home for ages, but I suddenly realized she was the perfect candidate to talk to in this time about how to be wary of diet culture and any kind of conversations that might make us feel negative about ourselves or our bodies or what we're eating.

In a time when we're already under stress and there's kind of that low level hum of anxiety constantly anyway.

So the wonderful Becky and I just discuss ways that you can perhaps talk to family about how you feel around food and change who you're following on Instagram to protect yourself from unhelpful rhetoric.

And lots of just general lovely chat about why food and loving your body and trying to look after self in all ways is so important especially in this time.

I really hope you enjoy it and please do rate review and subscribe. It'll mean the world to me. Thank you. Bye.

Hi everyone and welcome to adulting today. I am joined by Becky from the anti-diot riot club. Thank you so much for joining Becky. We are doing this online sort of very feel very neat for people who don't know who you are and what you do.

Please could you introduce yourself.

Well thanks for having me. I'm Becky I'm the founder of anti-diot riot club which is a rebel community and platform dedicated to fighting back against diet culture, fatso via and all the ways that we experience shame around our bodies and sexuality.

We usually host do this through hosting events, meetups workshops and giving talks and trying to sort of spread the theory and movement of body acceptance and anti-diot.

And we also have sort of built a big online community around this movement and now we're obviously trying to do all of these events online so we do a life drawing workshop last night over Zoom and we're doing a free webinar on surviving diet culture during the corona crisis next week.

So we just try and bring people together and give people a safe space to explore rejecting diet culture and improve, hopefully improve everyone's body image.

I love that you call yourself like a rebel cause that circle. I found you guys for Instagram at absolutely love your page and I think it's a complete tonic for what Instagram used to be and it's certainly such a great place to get to.

How did this all start for you? What was your history and what drove you to want to start doing this?

So like a lot of people and maybe I got especially a lot of women, I have been dieting since I was a teenager so I mean I think I went on my first planned diet when I was 14.

And since then it's just been this career of yo-yo dieting, trying out all the different plans from FAD diets, sort of like the more extreme ways of eating that many people try and do for decades.

And then I got to, and at this whole time I was pretty much basing myself worth on you know whether I was eating well, rotation marks or had lost weight or was being good.

And even though I was quite confident out going person underneath I had this preoccupation obsession with the way I was eating and moving and it was extremely disordered even though I was never diagnosed with having eating disorder.

And then I got to like 26, 27, it was about in 2016 and I actually was traveling and I'd seen the picture myself the year before where I was a lot skinnier and I just completely had this breakdown and was so upset and so so ashamed of myself.

I felt so like I failed once again at like keeping off the weight.

And I was embarking on my next big diet plan and in that process I was looking for hashtag Fitspiration or Thin Spiration on social media and Instagram because Instagram at that time was as you said quite a toxic place it was a place where I went to get inspiration for eating clean and eating less and you know over working out sort of obsessively.

And instead I found the opposite of what I was looking for but it was a complete life changing moment I found this amazing thriving body positive community of that women living unapologetically, putting the middle finger up at diets and saying that they weren't going to live like that anymore and for me that just spoke to me massively and I thought I want to be that kind of woman and I am that kind of person just underneath all the agonizing over menus and you know.

...