Talking with Emma: Stop fighting food & weight
Talking with Emma is the podcast for women who are tired of obsessive food thinking, struggling with body image and feeling like food and weight is the one thing they can’t get sorted.
I’m Emma Wright — feminist health coach, author, and someone who knows exactly how exhausting it is to live like not matter how much you try, your health is never quite “good enough.”
After years of controlling my weight, focusing on food, exercising harder, and constantly feeling like a failure, I discovered something different — and more powerful:
Coaching tools that help you trust yourself again - and take charge of your health the way you want to.
Each episode, I’ll share the tools I use with clients who want relief health feeling so confusing — and who are ready end emotional eating, stop thinking about food all the time and improve their body image.
If you’re ready for those things, this podcast is for you.
📥 Want to go deeper?
Download the Self-Assessment — a free tool to evaluate what’s really going on beneath the food and body thinking.
Curious about working together?
I’m currently welcoming new 1:1 clients. Book a no-cost consultation where we’ll talk about how to achieve the health goals you have and what kind of support you need to do that, and of course, whether coaching with me feels like the right fit.
Talking with Emma: Stop fighting food & weight
49: Body Image and Mental Health (Specifically Bi-Polar) with Katie Rickson
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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
- 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.