Have you ever set a goal, genuinely wanted it, done all the right things and still found yourself not following through? You're not lazy. You're not lacking willpower. And you are not the problem.

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In this episode of Talking with Emma, cognitive behavioural coach and Intuitive Eating coach Emma Wright shares the real reason most women struggle to stick to health and wellness goals, and why the usual advice of habit stacking, accountability, and pushing harder almost always makes it worse.

Emma opens with a personal story: years of trying to get to the gym regularly, despite truly wanting to go. She tried every productivity trick in the book. Nothing worked until she stopped trying to force herself and got curious instead. What she found surprised her. She wasn't avoiding the gym because of laziness or lack of discipline. She was avoiding it because it felt lonely.

That insight made going to the gym straightforward.

This episode introduces a simple four-question framework rooted in cognitive behavioural coaching that helps you understand what is actually driving your behaviour around health goals. No willpower required. No shame involved. Just a genuinely different way of looking at why you do what you do.

Emma walks through each question slowly and in depth, with real examples, so you can follow along and apply it to your own life before the episode is even over.

This episode is for you if you have ever felt cynical about your ability to change. If you have tried the plans, the apps, the challenges, and the habit trackers — and you are starting to wonder whether the problem is you. It is not. But understanding what is actually going on is where real change begins.

What you will learn in this episode: why health and wellness goals fail even when you genuinely want them, how diet culture has trained us to treat ourselves like productivity problems rather than human beings, what cognitive behavioural coaching reveals about avoidance and behaviour, the four-question framework for understanding what is really driving your actions, and how to stop fighting yourself and start working with yourself instead.

Topics covered include: goal setting, behaviour change, diet culture, intuitive eating, cognitive behavioural coaching, body image, health and wellness, women's health, motivation, habit formation, and food noise.

If this episode resonated with you, share it with a woman you know who has been hard on herself for not following through on her health goals. She needs to hear this.

Subscribe to Wait, What? — Emma's free Sunday newsletter for the woman who has become cynical about health trends because she has tried so many things. Every week Emma takes you down the diet culture off-ramp with personal stories that will make you think: wait, what — I've been lied to? Subscribe here.

What happens when life-saving medication changes your weight, but the medical system keeps focusing on it?

Katie Rickson lives with bipolar. She has been hospitalised. She has been through the years of misdiagnosis - depression, anxiety, ADHD - before finally getting an answer that made sense of her life.

And having been to the doctor, seriously unwell, a psychiatrist noted in a report that she was a "slim young woman."

So we talk about it.

Katie is now, by her own account, the heaviest she has ever been. She is also the most mentally well. In this episode, we talk about what it actually takes to get there — and what the medical system, and diet culture, gets wrong along the way.

In this episode we cover

• What bipolar disorder actually is — and why it takes an average of 9.5 years to diagnose
• Why Katie's mental health is better now in a bigger body than it ever was when she was slim
• The real reason bipolar medications cause weight gain — and why that is not a side effect to simply fix
• Being offered weight loss injections by a doctor who was not asking the right questions
• How Katie learned to separate nutrition from body size — and what she asked her dietician to focus on instead
• The Spoon Theory — a practical tool for understanding your energy capacity on any given day
• The "grand bargain" Katie has with the people close to her, and why it matters
• Emotional literacy — what it is, why most of us were never taught it, and how to start
• How changes in appetite can be an early signal that something needs attention
• Why food belongs in the coping toolkit — and how to use it consciously rather than shamefully
• Practical ways to protect yourself in medical appointments when you know weight will come up
• The self-compassion practice Katie credits with changing her relationship with food and her body — including the work of Dr Kristin Neff

Find Katie

• Katie's website
• Business in the Bath
• LinkedIn
• Instagram: @katie.writes.edits / @businessinthebath

Find Emma

Emma's website · Follow on LinkedIn

If this episode resonated with you, please share it with a woman you love. The more we talk about leaving diet culture, the more women get to stop fighting themselves and start living the way they want to.

What does it look like to leave diet culture behind — to truly walk away from it?

Lotta Dann did it with alcohol. Then, a few years into sobriety, she found herself deep in a diet hole — losing weight, receiving praise, feeling like she was "floating on a cloud of thin." Inevitably, it all fell apart.

In this conversation, Lotta and I talk about what happened next: how she found anti-diet content, what helped her see the lies diet culture has her believe, and what it actually took — emotionally, practically, and culturally — to leave.

This is a conversation I have wanted to have for a long time.

In this episode we cover

• How Lotta went from sobriety to a strict diet — and why the language of addiction made it seem like the answer
• What "floating on a cloud of thin" was so compelling, and what it cost
• The moment she stumbled across anti-diet content and why it clicked so fast
• The biggest lies diet culture tells us — and the one Lotta found most heartbreaking
• How leaving dieting compares to leaving alcohol — and where it is much harder
• Why weight gain is almost always part of the process, and how to navigate it
• The behaviours to stop immediately, and the practical steps that actually help

"Thinness is highly valued in our culture — you're deemed a success regardless of your mental health or how you're actually functioning day to day."

"I refuse to feel bad about my body size. I've built a fierce defence against it — and it took time, mantras, and a lot of practice to get there."

— Lotta Dann

Mentioned in this episode

• Mrs D is Not on a Diet — Lotta Dann's book on leaving diet culture
• Living Sober — Lotta's free online community for people quitting drinking
• @mrs_d_alcoholfree — Lotta on Instagram
• Midlife Body Image Guide — Emma's free guide for women ready to stop fighting their bodies

Emma's website · Follow on LinkedIn

If this episode resonated with you, please share it with a woman you love. The more we talk about leaving diet culture, the more women get to stop fighting themselves and start living the way they want to.