Behaviour Change Scientist: How I Lost 120lbs With Kindness: Shahroo Izadi | E222
Steven Bartlett (host), Shahroo Izadi (guest), Narrator
In this episode of The Diary of a CEO, featuring Steven Bartlett and Shahroo Izadi, Behaviour Change Scientist: How I Lost 120lbs With Kindness: Shahroo Izadi | E222 explores behaviour Change Scientist Reveals How Radical Self-Kindness Transforms Food, Life Behaviour change specialist Shahroo Izadi shares how she lost 120lbs and healed a binge-eating disorder not through diets or surgery, but by radically changing how she spoke to and treated herself.
Behaviour Change Scientist Reveals How Radical Self-Kindness Transforms Food, Life
Behaviour change specialist Shahroo Izadi shares how she lost 120lbs and healed a binge-eating disorder not through diets or surgery, but by radically changing how she spoke to and treated herself.
Drawing on her NHS addiction work, she reframed overeating as a coping strategy rather than a moral failure, and applied evidence-based addiction tools to everyday habits around food, alcohol, and self-sabotage.
She argues that weight-loss diets often create powerlessness, shame, and disordered eating, and that genuine, lasting change comes from self-compassion, boundaries, understanding triggers, and focusing on the inner conversation when plans fail.
Her mission now is to prove that kindness "gets shit done" and to end binge-eating and diet-induced self-loathing with her generation so it’s not passed on to the next.
Key Takeaways
Lasting change starts with how you speak to yourself, not with the perfect plan.
Izadi argues people usually fail not because they lack information, but because the internal conversation when plans go wrong is harsh, shaming, and irrational. ...
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Stop putting life on hold until you reach a goal weight or ideal self.
She describes spending years delaying joy, self-care, and even listening to music she liked until she was thinner. ...
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Treat ‘problem’ behaviours as solutions doing a job, not just flaws to eradicate.
From her addiction work, Izadi stresses that overeating, drinking, or using drugs are often functional coping strategies for pain, anxiety, or unmet needs. ...
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Plan for when motivation collapses: design the conversation for ‘when plans don’t go to plan’.
People overestimate the power of long-term goals in the moment of temptation. ...
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Use friction and environment design instead of pure willpower—without outsourcing control.
Rather than relying on motivation alone, she suggests adding friction to unhelpful behaviours (e. ...
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Weight-loss diets often create disordered eating, shame, and broken self-trust.
Izadi calls diets ‘not working’ for many: people finish without the promised body and with binge-eating, all-or-nothing thinking, and terror around food. ...
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Imposter syndrome often feeds on the one area you secretly feel out of control in.
She noticed in herself and clients that professional achievements feel fraudulent when there’s a hidden behaviour—like binge-eating or secret drinking—that carries huge shame. ...
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Notable Quotes
“I wasn’t meant to be making my body smaller. I was meant to understand why I didn’t like myself enough to take the same advice I’d give someone else.”
— Shahroo Izadi
“People don’t have a problem knowing what to do. They feel patronized because what they needed was understanding why, if I have all this information and I want to do this, I’m not doing it.”
— Shahroo Izadi
“Tough love when you’re speaking to yourself often isn’t very smart love.”
— Shahroo Izadi
“I am determined to have binge-eating and powerlessness and lack of trust that people have as a direct result of weight-loss diets to die with my generation.”
— Shahroo Izadi
“Kindness gets shit done.”
— Shahroo Izadi
Questions Answered in This Episode
You describe food, alcohol, and other habits as ‘solutions doing a job’—can you walk through, step by step, how a listener at home could identify the specific job their own binge-eating or drinking is performing?
Behaviour change specialist Shahroo Izadi shares how she lost 120lbs and healed a binge-eating disorder not through diets or surgery, but by radically changing how she spoke to and treated herself.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
In your gastric band experience, what concrete signs—physical, emotional, behavioural—should have been red flags that surgery was addressing the wrong problem, and how can someone today distinguish between a needed medical intervention and a desperate attempt to fix self-worth?
Drawing on her NHS addiction work, she reframed overeating as a coping strategy rather than a moral failure, and applied evidence-based addiction tools to everyday habits around food, alcohol, and self-sabotage.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
When someone is deeply entrenched in all‑or‑nothing diet thinking, what is the very first, smallest behavioural experiment you’d have them run to prove to themselves that one ‘blip’ doesn’t have to become a full spiral?
She argues that weight-loss diets often create powerlessness, shame, and disordered eating, and that genuine, lasting change comes from self-compassion, boundaries, understanding triggers, and focusing on the inner conversation when plans fail.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
You’re critical of weight‑loss diets yet also sympathetic to people who still want to lose weight—how would you design public health messaging and commercial weight‑loss programmes differently so they reduce obesity risk without creating disordered eating and shame?
Her mission now is to prove that kindness "gets shit done" and to end binge-eating and diet-induced self-loathing with her generation so it’s not passed on to the next.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
For high achievers with imposter syndrome whose ‘secret’ is chaotic eating or substance use, what are the ethical and psychological pros and cons of disclosing that struggle to close colleagues or partners versus keeping the work strictly private at first?
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Transcript Preview
Imposter syndrome. How does one move past it?
Ah, sit back. Sheroo Izadi.
She is an expert in breaking bad habits and beating addiction.
Women's Health magazine has called her Britain's answer to Brené Brown, and she's also an author, including the number one bestseller, The Kindness Method. I am determined to have binge eating, and powerlessness, and lack of trust that people have as a direct result of weight-loss diets to die with my generation.
Why?
I started dieting from a really, really young age. And I was using food as a drug. When I got to my heaviest, I was like, "That's it. I'm done."
How heavy?
126 kilos. And it eventually culminated in secretly getting a gastric band fitted. I started working in addiction treatment, and I started realizing that I was going about this the wrong way. I wasn't meant to be making my body smaller. I was meant to understand why I didn't like myself enough to take the same advice I'd give someone else. When someone you love is struggling to get back on track, you don't pretend that what they're trying to do is simple, and you don't tell them to throw in the towel. And that's where people feel super disempowered, 'cause they're not taking the advice they'd give another person. I think people feel patronized because what they needed was understanding why, if I have all this information and I wanna do this, I'm not doing it. What I always tell them is...
If you were to try and identify why some people are unsuccessful in their change, what are, like, the overarching themes?
One of them is...
Sheroo, can you, um, tell me what your sort of academic professional bio might say?
Yeah. I did a undergrad in psychosocial sciences in Norwich, and then a postgrad in psychology, and then I went on to work for the NHS. I did an, uh, one-year placement as an assistant psychologist in substance misuse in North West London.
Mm-hmm.
And then during that time, I was trained in all sorts of different, um, evidence-based approaches that I use to help people to change really ingrained behaviors around, mainly around opiate and, um, alcohol addiction.
Now what about your, um, your personal context? So take me below the age of... Uh, you know, I, I'm a big believer on this show that that ori- that origin story and our childhoods really shape who we become. Um, tell me about that.
Well, um, I was born here. I was born in North London. And my parents, um, are from Iran, and they came after the revolution, or during the revolution. And, uh, my first language is Farsi, so I learned how to speak English. And then I moved, uh, to the States for my dad's work for a little bit and ended up coming back. And during that time, I started to struggle. I s- I started to struggle with, um, trauma responses to things, and I started stammering to the extent that I found it really hard to speak at all at school. And then we came back to the UK, and I started going to school here, and I didn't have a great time. I was, uh, really overweight. Kids weren't super nice to me about it. And then I started dieting from a really, really young age, 'cause of course it was like that's what doctors were recommending at the time. And I started to have a really mean relationship with myself. Everything from the way I spoke to myself, to what I thought I deserved, to how un-boundaried I was, to, like, behaviors of just, like, low, really, really low self-esteem, to the extent where I had a lot of really shameful behaviors. A lot of codependency, a lot of anxiety, controlling stuff. I just didn't have the best time at school, to be honest. And I didn't like myself at all, like really didn't. And now that I work with people who don't like themselves, I can say with confidence that sadly I was on the more extreme end of things. And I developed what I now realize was a binge-eating disorder. And where I was eating myself, I was using food as a drug essentially. I didn't know that at the time. And I was just eating and eating loads, and then it eventually culminated in me kind of secretly getting a gastric band fitted, which gave me all sorts of other issues. Lying to people, lying to my friends about it, feeling ashamed, like it was a easy way out. And then I had to have it removed by emergency surgery, and it was terrifying. And when I think now about the lengths that I went to, and weirdly, the fact that I never thought to change my relationship with food. I always just thought if I was smaller... The world was telling me, "If you're smaller, everything will, everything will sort itself out." Um, so that was the angle I was going in for. Plus, I, I seemed to think that getting smaller would teach me how to change behaviors, which is ki- kind of does a disservice to the whole science of behavioral change anyway. And then I went to work in addiction treatment. Uh, long story short, when I, you know, I did my... Went to uni, made the same friends I have now, and I started, uh, I started working in addiction treatment, and I started realizing that I was going about this the wrong way. I was going about this completely the wrong way. I wasn't meant to be making my body smaller. I was meant to understand why I didn't like myself enough to take the same advice I'd give someone else, or I didn't like myself enough to think I was worthy of liking food. Um, I didn't trust w- I didn't trust myself. I felt powerless. Like, these were the fundamental things I should've been dealing with. Um, so I went to therapy, and I started getting on board with the fact that I didn't need fixing, and then my habits started changing really, really quickly, and I was like, "Wow."
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