I want to share with you a message I received as part of my job:

“I’ve done some pretty crazy diets over the years. It started from age seven…and I wish I could go back and tell my younger self: “DON’T EVER TRY TO LOSE WEIGHT ”

This is just 1 of 100s of stories of people who have spent their lives ‘on a diet’ never feeling good enough. Never feeling thin enough. Never feeling healthy enough.

How has restrictive dieting and diet culture affected you?

I want to hear from you! If restrictive dieting or fad diets has effected you, I want to hear your story! Head to Facebook or Instagram and direct message me your stories. Just tap the microphone button and record your 60 second message, because I want to share it on my podcast.

Why? Because I’m on a mission to share the stories of men and women who have been effected by restrictive dieting and diet culture. I want to use your stories to bring awareness to the fact that ‘fad diets’ and the advice of unqualified individuals are damaging people’s long term health, wellbeing and relationship with food. And it’s got to stop!

This mission is NOT about demonising the desire to be healthy, through changing your eating habits. This is what I help people do for a living and I passionately believe in good nutrition as being a tool that helps us do life well.

This mission is to highlight the pain and struggle of individuals who feel the guilt, shame and disappointment of failing fad diets, the frustration and obsession with food that often leads to disordered eating and the constant pressure to look a certain way that destroys our body image.

My vision is to set people free from food stress and teach them how to eat well for the rest of their lives.

A part of reducing this stress is highlighting to people that there is another way. That healthy eating can be a part of their lives without the guilt, stress and perfection that fad diets demand from us AND that they are worthy and precious humans despite the size of their body.

Awareness is the first step to change

To bring awareness to the stress of restrictive dieting, the re-launch of The Daily Dollop, is all about telling your stories. Our culture glorifies starvation (called fasting), binging (called treat yourself), sticking to low calorie diets (called bikini body comps) and food anxiety (only eating ‘clean’) and we joke about these pains and frustrations in the media and pop culture, writing them off as being a normal part of our lives. Our culture is rife with it. Diet talk thats seemingly innocent, but devastating in its effects.

Because it’s not normal. It’s not healthy. Many people are hurt by these processes, never to feel good about food and their body again.

My story is this.

As a 21 year old, I did a bikini body challenge, my first ever restrictive diet. I though I’d be a better person, more disciplined and more attractive if my abs showed. I thought I’d be healthy if I ‘quit junk food’ and cut out all my favourite foods. I thought that I’d be a better person because I was strong-willed and had the body to show it!

That diet sparked years of disordered eating, of starting a diet every Monday only to end up binging by the weekend. It lead to a self image that plummeted into self-loathing. I was constantly thinking about food. Constantly feeling guilty about what I ate when it wasn’t right. Hating every part of my body in the mirror. I wasted years of my life in this headspace before I came to realise that health was much more than sticking to a restrictive diet. And since then, my life’s mission is to help others do the same!

Tell me your story!

Send me a private message via Facebook or Instagram, tap the microphone and record yourself speaking and I’ll share it on The Daily Dollop’s re-launch episode! You can remain completely anonymous or share who you are. Either way, your story will help others know that they are not alone. And together, we can change the narrative.

I can’t wait to hear from you!