Hello and welcome to another episode of Iway with Jumea de Jameal, a podcast against shame. I hope you're well. I am.

I'm good. I'm tired. I am in the middle of New York on my own doing pro-mode, doing my job.

And because I've been in bed for such a long time, if anyone of you haven't been listening lately, I haven't been very well since around October.

And I've been in bed a lot of the time and then every so often someone wheels me out to go and join the circus and do my proper job as a media personality and it's really intense and weird when I do it especially after living like a lot of time in solitary confinement in my bedroom.

And even though I live with flatmates, I can't always get up and down the stairs. I spend a lot of time on my own on my phone reading all letters. So that's been great. And I've been making this podcast largely from that room. And so I've been able to keep my mind live because of this, because of what we all do together with this.

And so thank you for listening. Thank you for continuing to listen and thank you for all your letters. They're lovely.

This fucking surreal to keep going back and forth between bedroom silence, not having to be a human, not having to make eye contact with people. And then suddenly it's just like everyone's in your face and it's time square and it's live television.

Whenever I'm live, my brain wants to only say the thing that will upset my publicist the most and cause the most chaos is like the red button. I just want to press it. I just want to fucking smash that button and make everyone else feel as anxious as I feel I think is the truth of it.

So it's odd. It's odd and surreal, but I'm very lucky to be able to do it. And I had a fucking blast and I met so many great people and had some lovely experiences.

One of the things I did this week was the daily show, which used to be hosted by Travener. And this week I was on it with the excellent and hilarious, Desi. And she gave me an opportunity to talk a bit more about this movement I've been doing that I've been building slowly for a few years.

Now with I way where I encourage people to exercise in a way that is unrelated to body image in baggy clothes eating sugary snack dancing to disco music, galloping doing whatever you feel like looking stupid as possible the opposite of what exercise culture is, which is being smooth and controlled and thin and having abs, but not too many abs and being super fit and super athletic and turning up with the gym looking like you've always been going to the gym.

Whole lives that you were two years old. Just fucking intense and sick of it. And it's why I haven't done basic exercise most of my life because the worst periods of my anorexia were when I used to use exercise to kind of purge.

It was almost like my form of bulimia I would punish myself for the eating I had done the day before. So I always looked at it as this like awful punishment and I never looked at it as something that would benefit anything other than my waistline and everything was just calories in calories out of such a boring devastating way to live and.

No one really talked when I was growing up about dopamine or the hormone regulation and the happy chemicals in your brain and stress release and sleeping better and and being able to really alter your body's chemistry fuck your way just really being able to make a significant change in the way you feel mental health wise.

I didn't really get that and even though we talk about that stuff more now.

It's not really going in for the majority of people I know it's not really going in there like yeah yeah it's not happy but really I want a nicer bum or I want a thinner waist or I want a flatter stomach deep down.

It's so hard for most of us for almost all of us to separate it from from diet culture you know as I said on the daily show this week.

But it feels like the diet culture is just shagging the exercise culture now and they're just in bed together and they are as one and I'm just so fucking done with it I'm done with the term exclusive I think it's exclusion area and I think that's a bad thing.

How can we talk so much about inclusion and inclusiveness and diversity and then shut most of the world out or something as basic a right as exercise pregnant people elderly people fat people people with disabilities.

People who just like me aren't very good at moving their bodies you know I'm not elegant I can't fucking dance I can't do anything normally I'm like a wobbly.

Sort of one of those inflatable men that they have outside car sales you know that's how what I look like when I move we all we all weren't born to be in a bloody fitness advert looking amazing we're not all Tom Cruise and fucking mission impossible are we why I'm not maybe you are well done you.

But I'm sick of it and I have been entering the world of exercise from a completely different angle in the last two years since I did she help.

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