Can you combine wellbeing and weight-loss?

"I'd been down to London and asked to do some modelling for a body diverse company and I was on such a high coming back on the train. But the minute the train set off from Kings Cross the guy sat next to me said "well I'm not sitting next to this fatty for two hours" and moved. And whether he thought it or not doesn't matter. The fact that he said it out loud like I wasn't even in the same carriage was disgusting."

Frankie Haynes, founder of the group Size You, aiming to empower people to be themselves regardless of their shape or size.

It was incidents like that that led Frankie and her friend to set up the group Size You. They decided they'd had enough of diet culture and body-shaming and instead wanted to empower people to be themselves regardless of their shape or size.

"When I came out of the dieting industry I was at a real low with my mental health and then I started to think there's more to me than just my weight."

"For me setting up Size You was about creating the safe space that some slimming clubs provide but taking away the pressure or praise around weight loss".

Frankie thinks diet culture has a lot to answer for. "There's a lot of people making a lot of money from people who want to lose weight and think they have to be smaller in order to be accepted, to be respected and potentially loved. Its just not a great thing."

Since Frankie started running, she noticed a difference in her resilience, and was able to set herself challenges that weren't just about improvement.

"In the diet industry praise is from improving, and improvement is about weighing less or being smaller. With running its been a very different experience" she says. Sometime it's just a case of getting out and running for her, sometimes its about trying to get a bit quicker and achieve a personal best.

In 2019, Frankie had a big holiday on top of the usual birthday and Christmas celebrations and observed that for the first time, she hadn't come back from those events with a weight gain. "When I was attending a slimming club, I could see big weight gains in a week, whereas now my weight is stable and I've not seen any change for at least a year."