The Diary of a CEOBehaviour Change Scientist: How I Lost 120lbs With Kindness: Shahroo Izadi | E222
CHAPTERS
- 0:00 – 2:00
Introduction: From Diet Culture to Behaviour Change Science
Stephen Bartlett introduces Shahroo Izadi as a behaviour change expert and bestselling author known for ‘The Kindness Method’. She immediately frames her mission: to end binge-eating, powerlessness, and broken self-trust caused by weight-loss diets within her generation.
- •Overview of Shahroo’s work in breaking bad habits and addiction.
- •Media positioning: called “Britain’s answer to Brené Brown”.
- •Declares mission to let binge-eating and diet-induced powerlessness ‘die’ with her generation.
- •Sets tone of conversation around kindness versus traditional dieting and self-punishment.
- 2:00 – 7:00
Childhood, Bullying, and the Origins of Self-Hatred
Shahroo shares her upbringing as the child of Iranian parents in North London, early trauma responses, and severe stammering. Being overweight as a child in the 1990s, combined with bullying and doctor-prescribed diets, laid the groundwork for a vicious internal dialogue and very low self-esteem.
- •Family background: Iranian parents, moving between UK and US, first language Farsi.
- •Development of a stammer and anxiety at school.
- •Early obesity and cruel treatment from peers.
- •Doctors recommending diets for a bullied ‘fat kid’ in the 90s.
- •Emergence of a ‘really mean relationship’ with herself and extreme self-loathing.
- 7:00 – 12:00
Binge-Eating, Gastric Band, and the Limits of Shrinking the Body
She describes how food became a drug and a full-blown binge-eating disorder, culminating in secretly having a gastric band fitted. The band caused physical complications and deeper shame, and eventually had to be removed in emergency surgery—without ever addressing her relationship with food.
- •Binge-eating as using food as a drug, not just overeating.
- •Secretly getting a gastric band due to desperation at 126 kg.
- •Band caused new problems: lying to friends, shame about ‘taking the easy way out’.
- •Emergency removal after she kept overeating against the band’s limits.
- •Realisation that making her body smaller didn’t change her self-worth or habits.
- 12:00 – 16:00
Discovering Addiction Science and Reframing the Problem
Working in NHS substance misuse services, Shahroo was trained in evidence-based approaches for opiate and alcohol addiction. She realised she was addressing her own situation the wrong way: the real work was understanding why she didn’t like or trust herself, and applying addiction tools to her own binge-eating.
- •Academic path: psychosocial sciences undergrad, psychology postgrad.
- •NHS role as assistant psychologist in substance misuse.
- •Learning evidence-based tools for deeply ingrained behaviours.
- •Insight that the problem wasn’t her size, but her self-worth and self-trust.
- •Therapy helped her accept she wasn’t ‘broken’, after which habits changed quickly.
- 16:00 – 22:00
How Diet Culture Hijacked Self-Worth
She explains how her value became entirely tied to the scale and appearance, shaped by 90s diet culture and narrow images of ‘successful women’. Kindness and self-care were conditional on being thin, leading her to postpone joy and even basic habits until some future, slimmer version of herself arrived.
- •Self-worth completely wrapped up in weight and how she looked.
- •Belief that she didn’t ‘deserve’ self-care or feeling sexy until thin.
- •Media and generational messaging: water bottles, wardrobes, and ‘goal weight’ fantasies.
- •Not seeing women who looked like her living full, valued lives.
- •How conditional kindness made it harder to adopt healthy behaviours in the present.
- 22:00 – 27:00
Therapeutic Turning Point: ‘What If You Never Change?’
A key therapy session where her therapist asked, ‘What if you never change?’ initially enraged her but became transformative. Acting as if she would never become thinner forced her to stop deferring life, build boundaries, and adopt self-care now—paradoxically enabling the very behavioural change she’d chased for years.
- •North star had always been ‘future slim self’ who’d finally start living.
- •She avoided enjoying life, even music or holidays, until she was thinner.
- •Therapist’s provocative question challenged the idea that life began after weight loss.
- •Experimented with living as if change would never come: started doing ‘on hold’ things.
- •Realised she needed to work on boundaries, impulse control, and trigger–response gaps.
- 27:00 – 31:00
The Mechanics of Behaviour Change and The Kindness Method
Shahroo outlines her view of behavioural change as ‘doing things in a row until they get easier’ and how kindness amplifies this process. She introduces core themes of The Kindness Method: focusing on assets rather than defects, zooming into single choices, and using self-compassion as an evidence-based tool, not a ‘soft’ luxury.
- •Habit change = repeated actions until they become easier and more automatic.
- •Starting from deprivation makes it harder to create space between trigger and response.
- •People over-focus on outcomes and underestimate the importance of daily, granular wins.
- •Importance of having ‘evidence’ of your strengths ready for moments of doubt.
- •The Kindness Method systematises these tools for private, self-directed habit change.
- 31:00 – 38:00
Why People Fail at Change: Outcomes, Shame, and Tough Love
She analyses common reasons people don’t sustain change: over-reliance on long-term goals, ignoring how behaviours serve them, and practicing ‘tough love’ self-talk that’s neither kind nor effective. Using an exercise where clients write what they’d tell a loved one, she exposes the gulf between that and their self-talk.
- •Over-focusing on long-term outcomes and ignoring daily process and evidence.
- •Viewing behaviours only as ‘problems’ instead of solutions meeting a need.
- •Lack of compassionate curiosity when they relapse leads to ‘I must be weak’ stories.
- •Tough, shaming self-talk is not only unkind but strategically bad advice.
- •Exercise: write how you’d motivate a loved one, then apply the same to yourself.
- 38:00 – 43:00
Updating Old Narratives and Limits of Instagram-Style Positivity
Stephen asks whether some trauma-based narratives are simply too powerful to change. Izadi declines to make blanket claims but criticises simplistic social media advice like ‘just replace negative thoughts’. She emphasises gathering evidence to disprove old stories and using a blend of tools (including affirmations) rather than magical thinking.
- •She refuses to generalise about trauma with a large, anonymous audience.
- •Critique of shallow online content that trivialises deep-seated issues.
- •Encourages appealing to our need for evidence: systematically disprove old beliefs.
- •Affirmations can help, but only as part of a broader, personalised toolkit.
- •Exercise: write down what you say to yourself when you fall off track; much of it isn’t even your own language.
- 43:00 – 50:00
Self-Talk in Relapse and the Myth of Motivational Consistency
They explore the kind of harsh narratives people default to after slips—‘I’m weak, I always fail’—and how these differ from how they’d treat others. Shahroo reframes relapse as an inevitable testing ground where the most crucial variable is the quality of the inner conversation, not the absence of mistakes.
- •Typical self-talk after relapse: weak, stupid, powerless, ‘might as well give up’.
- •Contrast with how you’d speak to a loved one: perspective, encouragement, context.
- •If paid to motivate someone, no one would use the self-abusive scripts they use on themselves.
- •Her job is to make herself redundant by teaching people to run this internal process alone.
- •Advocates teaching habit-change and self-talk skills in schools to avoid crisis-driven change.
- 50:00 – 56:00
Imposter Syndrome, Hidden Shame, and Allowing Difficulty
The discussion shifts to imposter syndrome and how it’s magnified when people secretly feel out of control around food or substances. Izadi notes that allowing yourself to find something ‘simple’ (like not bingeing) genuinely hard, without equating that with stupidity or weakness, can massively reduce imposter feelings.
- •Imposter syndrome: inability to internalise achievements, sense of fraudulence.
- •Managing binge-eating and anxiety transformed her own imposter syndrome.
- •Clients often say, ‘I got a pay rise, but they don’t know how I behave when no one’s watching.’
- •Her own ‘hard mode’ achievement: starting a binge and being able to stop.
- •Letting yourself acknowledge that some things are genuinely difficult for you allows self-trust to grow.
- 56:00 – 1:03:00
From ‘I’m Worthless’ to Honest Baselines and Snapshot Letters
Stephen asks how she’d work with someone who believes they’re worthless and is abusing substances. She explains starting with a brutally honest but non-judgmental baseline (‘snapshot letter’) and then mapping the gap between who they are now and the advice they’d give someone else, focusing on why they’re not following what they already know.
- •Most people don’t need instruction on what to do; they need to know why they’re not doing it.
- •First step: Snapshot letter capturing ‘here’s where I am, fed up, but starting from here’.
- •She avoids prescriptive A/B plans; asks instead what the person actually wants.
- •Typical past attempts: extreme restriction, environment control, punishment, all-or-nothing.
- •Introduces questions people rarely ask: What are you afraid you’ll have to face if you change? What if it’s not as good as you imagine? What doubts will you have to disprove?
- 1:03:00 – 1:08:00
Planning for the Dip: Relapse, Triggers, and Reframing Challenge
They tackle how to prepare for inevitable dips in motivation, highlighting the futility of expecting to ‘stay motivated all the time’. Izadi says the key is assuming plans will fail at points, reframing those moments as opportunities to practise capacity, and deliberately crafting a calm, firm, compassionate inner dialogue.
- •Motivation is not a constant; planning as if it were sets you up to fail.
- •Assume you cannot preempt every trigger or challenge.
- •Reframe setbacks as chances to demonstrate capacity voluntarily (‘Here we go—let’s see what I can do’).
- •Central tool: the conversation you have with yourself when plans don’t go to plan.
- •Aim for self-talk that is both firm and compassionate, so you feel smart, calm, and proud of your choices.
- 1:08:00 – 1:12:00
The ‘Crying Child’ Analogy: Firmness and Compassion Together
Using a vivid analogy of a child expecting a daily treat that’s suddenly withdrawn, Shahroo explains how to hold compassion and firmness simultaneously. You anticipate the ‘tantrum’ (cravings), validate it, make the experience as tolerable as you can, but still don’t give in—repeating this until the nervous system learns it’s safe.
- •Analogy: child expecting an 11am treat; caregiver knows it’s unhealthy and stops.
- •You expect the child to cry and don’t blame them; you comfort but don’t relent.
- •Translate this to body and cravings: ‘You scream all you want, that doesn’t mean I’ll do what you want.’
- •This is how to hold compassion (understanding) and firmness (boundaries) together.
- •Repeat until the body learns it survives cravings, reducing their intensity over time.
- 1:12:00 – 1:17:00
Friction vs Abstinence: Environment Design and Late-Night Eating
Discussing late-night snacking and similar habits, Izadi differentiates between total abstinence and adding friction. She prefers empowering people to feel they can coexist with temptations by creating small disruptions in autopilot and planning for predictable high-risk times, rather than permanently removing all cues.
- •Her stance: for most of the general population, aim for coexistence, not total abstinence.
- •Impose friction: remove saved card details from apps, move the sweets drawer, add steps.
- •Disrupting autopilot gives you time to remember why you didn’t want to act on an urge.
- •Also remove friction for positive habits: e.g., sleep in gym kit to reduce barriers.
- •Simple but powerful suggestion for late-night eating: don’t be hungry then; basic structure (meals) matters alongside psychology.
- 1:17:00 – 1:25:00
The Last Diet: Why Traditional Diets Fail and What Replaces Them
She explains why she wrote ‘The Last Diet’ and why she’ll never diet again. Traditional weight-loss diets, she argues, don’t just fail to deliver lasting weight loss; they actively create binge-eating, scarcity mindsets, distorted nutrition beliefs, and profound distrust around food.
- •Title ‘The Last Diet’ reflects her vow never to diet again and her desire others won’t need to.
- •Many clients now care less about weight loss and more about ending powerlessness and lack of trust.
- •Weight-loss diets often lead to eating disorders and obsession, not sustainable health.
- •Her ‘last diet’ is actually about learning to trust yourself and follow common-sense advice you’d give others.
- •Example of diet distortion: believing spray cream is ‘better’ than a banana because of diet rules.
- 1:25:00 – 1:33:00
Gastric Band Aftermath: Shame, Surgery, and Retrospective Compassion
Returning to her gastric band experience, Shahroo details how it worsened her relationship with food, triggered another eating disorder, and filled her life with shame and secrecy. She reflects with compassion on the younger self who felt she had to endure such pain to be acceptable.
- •She overate against the band and kept tightening it, leading to severe pain and emergency removal.
- •Weight loss from the band didn’t equal health; it was driven by extreme restriction, not care.
- •External praise (‘we were so worried about you before’) confirmed her worst fears about being fat.
- •First edition of ‘The Kindness Method’ omitted the band story; she hadn’t yet forgiven herself.
- •Now sees it as tragic that she assumed others would be ashamed of her instead of seeing her struggle.
- 1:33:00 – 1:40:00
Managing Anxiety: Evidence Logs, Breath, and Predicting the Spiral
Shahroo shares how she handles anxiety around public speaking and daily life. She tracks predictions versus reality to build evidence that her fears rarely come true, uses breathing and understanding of anxiety’s protective role, and pre-writes letters anticipating post-event rumination to depersonalise the process.
- •Practices writing or voice notes of worries, then reviewing to see how often they come true.
- •Uses evidence (‘the last 100 times, it didn’t happen’) to calm future anxiety.
- •Breathwork and psychoeducation about anxiety’s function (keeping you safe).
- •Preempting post-event anxiety: ‘After this podcast you’ll second-guess everything—expect it.’
- •Creates a sense of not being alone with her thoughts but ‘with herself’, observing and guiding them.
- 1:40:00 – 1:48:00
A Peaceful Relationship with Food and Body Fluctuations
She describes finally having a calm, enjoyable relationship with food, where body changes no longer dictate self-worth. Lockdown weight gain became an important test of this progress, proving she could gain and then later lose weight for ordinary reasons without slipping back into shame or obsession.
- •Now looks forward to food and doesn’t justify or moralise her choices.
- •Lockdown led to weight gain without disordered eating; it reflected lifestyle, not self-neglect.
- •Post-lockdown she got more into fitness and lost weight, without feeling better or worse about herself.
- •Before, being bigger almost always meant she was in a state of self-abuse, not just enjoying food.
- •She occupies a nuanced stance: supports people doing what they want with their bodies, but wants to dismantle the diet-induced eating disorders many now live with.
- 1:48:00
Mission: Proving Kindness Works and Ending Diet-Induced Binge-Eating
In the closing segment, Shahroo clearly articulates her two core missions. First, to demonstrate that kindness and taking your own good advice ‘gets shit done’; second, to end binge-eating, powerlessness, and broken food self-trust created by weight-loss diets, so these patterns don’t pass to the next generation.
- •Mission 1: prove that kindness is a powerful, practical behaviour-change tool.
- •Mission 2: eradicate diet-induced binge-eating and self-distrust with her generation.
- •Recognises parents her age don’t want to pass their own diet trauma to their children.
- •Answers a legacy question about whether it’s ever appropriate to hurt someone’s feelings: yes, when sharing necessary truths that aren’t all yours to carry.
- •Closes with mutual appreciation and Stephen’s reflection on learning the hard way that kindness is often the real solution.
