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Quitted

By: Holly Whitaker & Emily McDowell
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  • Summary

  • Quitted is a podcast about quitting, hosted by Holly Whitaker and Emily McDowell.


    What happens when you don't want to be who you are anymore?


    For all of us, there comes a time when in order to thrive (or simply survive!), we have to walk away from something that represents a huge piece of our identity. This could be a career, a relationship, a religion, a long-held dream, a social norm, a gender–whatever it is, it’s a massive part of who we are, and letting it go comes at great personal cost. Quitting means disappointing all the people invested in our staying; it requires giving up the security of what we know, and stepping into a liminal space where we’re not sure who we are anymore.


    Unlike growing and building, which our culture obsessively celebrates, endings are quiet and lonely, because we don’t talk about them. Quitting is synonymous with failure. We’re conditioned to believe perseverance is a virtue, “winners never quit,” and giving up means losing. Quitting is only acceptable when it's a waypoint to something greater, some imagined bigger and better future. But what if that’s all a lie?


    We’ll talk with guests who have quit all kinds of seemingly impossible things, about the decision to quit, but even more importantly, about what happens after that. Quitting doesn't mean going directly from being one thing to being another thing; in between, there’s a middle space, a transitional space, and that space is hard, confusing, and groundless. We'll talk about navigating that space, and everything surrounding it, in order to help provide insight, permission, and illumination for others seeking the courage to risk everything to find a truer north.


    We’ll also explore the concept of quitting itself, how it came to hold the meaning it does, its inextricable links to late-stage American capitalism, and how a shifting narrative around giving up could be the key to a different future.

    Become a Quitted supporter on Patreon

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Holly Whitaker & Emily McDowell
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Episodes
  • Diane Sanfilippo Quits Diet Culture Part 2

    Diane Sanfilippo Quits Diet Culture Part 2
    Jun 30 2022

    Diane Sanfilippo Quits Diet Culture Part 2


    Last week in our interview with best-selling author of diet books and former-diet-entrepreneur-turned-anti-diet-activist Diane Sanfilippo: we got deep into how after 20 years of dieting and building a whole VERY SUCCESSFUL career steeped in diet culture, Diane found she couldn’t make herself lose the same x pounds yet again. Last week we dug into what diet culture is and how that came to define Diane’s existence. This week we go deep into the implications of that decision. We talk about changing our minds in public, being true to our integrity at the cost of the public’s understanding or agreement; the dreaded liminal space and what happens when you’ve got ADHD and nothing to keep you structured, and committing to the truth over consistency.


    About Diane Sanfilippo: Diane is the owner and founder of Balanced Bites - a wholesome food company that creates frozen meals, organic spice blends and snacks - all shipped nationwide. She's a certified holistic Nutrition Consultant, and two-time New York Times bestselling diet book author turned anti-diet advocate. Diane co-hosts Full Plate, a weekly podcast about healing from diet culture, setting boundaries, exploring mental health, and finding body liberation. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Scott, and two fur kids.

    You can find Diane on Instagram: @dianesanfilippo

    and via her websites balancedbites.com and dianesanfilippo.com 


    Support us:

    Quitted is listener-supported, made possible by us and by you; you can support this podcast by joining our Patreon community at patreon.com/quitted


    Music: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

    Sound engineering + edits: Adam Day, https://www.adamdayphotography.com/

    Producer: Cathleen Kisich


    Become a Quitted supporter on Patreon

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    46 mins
  • Diane Sanfilippo Quits Diet Culture: Part 1

    Diane Sanfilippo Quits Diet Culture: Part 1
    Jun 23 2022

    Diane Sanfilippo Quits Diet Culture: Part 1


    During the pandemic, Diane Sanfilippo got on the scale and saw a number that was more than when she started dieting twenty years before; and she realized she couldn’t make herself diet again. This isn’t entirely exceptional, it probably happened to a lot of us, except in Diane’s case she was the author of six bestselling diet books, from Keto QuickStart to Practical Paleo to The 21-Day Sugar Detox. So it wasn’t as if she was just done dieting; she was also done with her career, livelihood, an entire identity. 


    What happens when the thing you believed in stops aligning? What if that thing is a decade’s worth of best-selling books that don’t represent your current value system? What if you’ve been the poster child of dieting and you’ve decided to not just stop dieting, but become a visible and active critic of diet culture itself? Or what about this: what if you’re career kept your life together, kept you structured, and all that just goes away and you’re left in the vacuum of what’s next? 


    In this first part of a two-part series, we get into a lot: What diet culture is, how it keeps us distracted and forever chasing acceptance within patriarchy instead of burning it down; what about using diets to actually not feel horrible or to improve our health and the spectrum of anti-diet to diet positive; whether sugar addiction is real!; how in 2021 Diane realized after getting on the scale and seeing she’d “undid” all her work and that she couldn’t diet again or spend the rest of her life managing her food, and what came from realizing she was part of the problem. 


    In next week’s episode we get way down into what happened after Diane walked away and how she’s managing a pretty extreme liminal space. 


    About Diane Sanfilippo: Diane is the owner and founder of Balanced Bites - a wholesome food company that creates frozen meals, organic spice blends and snacks - all shipped nationwide. She's a certified holistic Nutrition Consultant, and two-time New York Times bestselling diet book author turned anti-diet advocate. Diane co-hosts Full Plate, a weekly podcast about healing from diet culture, setting boundaries, exploring mental health, and finding body liberation. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Scott, and two fur kids.

    You can find Diane on Instagram: @dianesanfilippo

    and via her websites balancedbites.com and dianesanfilippo.com 


    Support us:

    Quitted is listener-supported, made possible by us and by you; you can support this podcast by joining our Patreon community at patreon.com/quitted


    Music: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

    Sound engineering + edits: Adam Day, https://www.adamdayphotography.com/

    Producer: Cathleen Kisich

    Host: Holly Whitaker, https://hollywhitaker.substack.com/

    Host: Emily McDowell, https://emilyonlife.com


    Become a Quitted supporter on Patreon

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show more Show less
    1 hr
  • An Update Episode: Holly Whitaker and the Lost Place

    An Update Episode: Holly Whitaker and the Lost Place
    Jun 16 2022

    An Update Episode: Holly Whitaker and the Lost Place


    This week, we’re checking in with Holly, who in 2021, basically removed her skin and left it in the closet of her former life. She lost the thing she’d thought she’d do forever, and the person she thought she’d be forever; in her first “who’s Holly Whitaker?” episode that we recorded back in January, she was deep in the long, humiliating, humbling, sucky journey of surrender through the lost place. In this episode, we catch up on where she’s at, and talk about her shifting perspective, the completion of cycles, and the surprising peace that eventually came from living in the quiet of the in-between – and from getting to really, really know herself.


    We didn’t do an intro for this one; we just get right into it.


    About Holly Whitaker: Holly is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol. Her work has been featured in Vogue, The New York Times, Time, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and many others. Holly's work focuses on understanding the intersections of systems, culture, and individual experience and identity through the lens of addiction and recovery. She writes the newsletter Recovering on Substack, co-hosts the Quitted podcast, and posts three times a year on Instagram as @holly.


    Support us:

    Quitted is listener-supported, made possible by us and by you; you can support this podcast by joining our Patreon community at patreon.com/quitted


    Music: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

    Sound engineering + edits: Adam Day, https://www.adamdayphotography.com/

    Producer: Cathleen Kisich

    Host: Holly Whitaker, https://hollywhitaker.substack.com/

    Host: Emily McDowell, https://emilyonlife.com



    Become a Quitted supporter on Patreon

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show more Show less
    56 mins
Social Sciences
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Profile Image for A. Jones

It's really great, guys.

I declare that based on the first episode alone. The conversation was what I needed. I've had very little appetite for self-help and coach-y stuff the last couple years...but this really resonated and was what I didn't know I needed to hear. Listened to the back half again because it was that good. Like I might go back and listen again. Very real and feels like relief to my little human soul who is so very tired.

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Profile Image for Amy Mallat

What I needed

In the midst of quitting a job I love but got totally burned out on, this podcast has been absolutely everything I needed to hear. Love love love Holly Whittaker, Quit Like a Woman was the first sobriety book I read when I first was quitting drinking. Five years later she is still my touchstone and probably my spirit animal as I walk through this really painful but empowering space of changing myself and my life. Thank you Holly and Emily for being so honest and vulnerable, I hope making this podcast was as healing for you both as listening to it was for me!

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