In June 2022, Holly drove across the country to move back to Los Angeles from New York after Martha Beck live-coached her into it on episode 14.

The plan was to get to New Mexico by Friday in order to record episode 22 of Quitted (quitting compulsory sexuality!), but then Roe got overturned, and because we were both in the middle of having total life meltdowns already and didn't have much grace or space to begin with, we kind of broke. By July, neither of us had any desire to be talking in public; we couldn't even get ourselves together enough to release a five minute episode explaining why we were quitting Quitted.

In the two years that have passed things have changed significantly for both our hosts in really beautiful and surprising ways, mostly thanks to their shared commitment to remaining in the messy ass middle of their individual transitions from founder/CEOs/influencers to whatever they are now (people??).

This episode is a catch up episode in which both Emily and Holly discuss where they were, where they are now, and what happened when they didn't try to find their next gig, and instead sat in the complete shi^^y mess that is the long in between.

Links:

https://quitted.myflodesk.com/

https://www.emilyonlife.com/

https://www.hollywhitaker.com/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sara Clark Quits the United States

It was meant to be a short vacation to Grenada in February 2020, but then Covid hit, and Sara Clark, who just happened to have all her things in storage (!!), followed her intuition and stayed in Grenada and left the U.S. for good. 

That one terrifying (and she means terrifying) leap led her to an unimaginable quality of life as a Black woman now living in a Black country and as a recovering New Yorker living on an island with just over a hundred thousand people. The move to Grenada along with Covid also forced Sara--a well known yoga teacher at the top of her career in 2020---to take a step back and reconsider her entire career. 

In this episode we talk about those big moves, impossible leaps of faith and terrifying risks, how the voice inside can tell us to burn it all down and how that is sometimes only sane thing to do, the difference between being rich in life and being rich on paper, and what kind of sacrifices we're really willing to make to live well and follow our hearts.

About Sara Clark:

Sara Clark is an international yoga and meditation teacher with over two decades of experience. She has been a Global Yoga Ambassador for lululemon, faculty at Kripalu and has graced the cover of Yoga Journal twice along with Prevention Magazine. Sara has created yoga and meditation videos for Shape Magazine, Yoga Today, and Glo. Known for her compassionate approach, Sara’s teachings merge the physical and spiritual practices of yoga with mindfulness and meditation techniques that support practitioners stepping into their limitless potential. You can find Sara at @saraclarkyoga or saraclarkyoga.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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mar Grace Quits Trying to be Someone

Hi! Holly here. In this conversation between my friend Mar Grace and myself, we mean to talk about Mar being (their words) a “double black diamond quitter,” but just end up talking about our recovery, very different relationships to relapse, hating each other’s work (at times!) but loving each others’ essence, giving up on leaving a legacy or trying to be significant, divorces that you saw coming and break ups you didn’t want to and which is better, being grateful to those who quit before we are ready to, mental illness and being people who have a hard time living in the world, and writing about mental breakdowns in real time. It’s a JOYFUL conversation about all the things.

The intro ends, and the episode begins, at 00:3:20.

About Mar Grace:

Mar Grace (they/them) is a dancer and writer whose work focuses on the self, devotion, ritual, creativity, and art making. Their practice is rooted in improvisation as a compositional form that takes shape in movement videos, books, quilting, online courses, and hosting artists.  You can find their zines, things they make, artists they host, and more at marleegrace.space/home; you can subscribe to their newsletter and advice column at marleegrace.substack.com/subscribe. 

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An Update Episode: Emily McDowell, Now With Even More Quitting!

This week, we’re talking about the big thing Emily couldn’t talk about until now: in April, Em & Friends—the brand she founded and infused with her name, personality and life experience—was acquired, and Emily didn’t go with it. What did it feel like to, finger-by-finger, let go of the future she thought she’d have? WTF is she gonna do now? We get into it all. Big themes include the idea of comfort vs. growth; the feeling of knowing it’s time to go, but deciding to hold on anyway because the unknown is terrifying and security is seductive; and the things we believe keep us safe. 

The intro ends, and the episode begins, at 00:10:45.

About Emily McDowell: 

Emily is a writer, illustrator, keynote speaker, teacher, and entrepreneur who is fiercely committed to not doing all of those things at the same time. She’s best-known as founder of the stationery brand Em & Friends (formerly Emily McDowell Studio), which makes cards and gifts for the relationships people really have. She also co-authored and illustrated the book There Is No Good Card For This: What To Say and Do When Life Gets Scary, Awful, and Unfair To People You Love; and she’s the co-host of this podcast. Find her at emilyonlife.com, and on Instagram @emilyonlife.

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Zach Anderson Quits Everything He Knows

Zach Anderson was raised to be a devout Mormon, with the belief that he could earn God’s favor if he could only be good enough. Obedient enough. Perfect enough. But Zach had a secret: he was gay, which meant his very existence was condemned by the church—and, so he believed, condemned by God. Zach’s specific story is about leaving Mormonism and its community; coming out at age 37 after a lifetime of being told that to be gay was the worst thing he could be; deconstructing his faith and relationship with God; letting go of perfectionism as a survival mechanism. But more broadly: this is a story about the process of leaving everything you know in order to become who you are, and the courage it takes to build a new life that costs you the entirety of your old one. 

The intro ends, and the episode begins, at 00:03:13.

About Zach Anderson (he/him):

Zach is a dad, gay man, attorney, nutrition coach, ex-Mormon, & former collegiate swimmer. He was born and raised in Mesa, Arizona. He grew up in a devout Mormon family amidst a significantly sizeable Mormon community.

He attended Brigham Young University and served a mission for the Mormon Church in Eugene, Oregon. While at BYU on a swimming scholarship, he had a prolific swimming career. He was a three-time All-American and placed in the top 16 at National Championships five times. He attended Creighton University Law School where he met and converted his ex-wife of 9 years.

Beginning in 2015, he started to address some significant internal issues he had with Mormonism. In 2020, he actively started to deconstruct his relationship with Mormonism and chose to affirmatively remove his membership records from the Mormon Church.

This was particularly done at the prompting of the expected birth of his daughter; in 2020, his daughter Maeve was born. Being Maeve’s dad caused him to deeply ponder how he could better love himself, and help equip Maeve to live a life of joy and fulfillment. And to actively remove her from a religion that caused him significant trauma and harm.

In September 2021, after nine years of marriage to his best friend, he finally came out as a gay man. Zach and his former wife divorced in March 2022.

Find Zach on IG @motionsustained, and at https://www.motionsustained.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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

PART TWO: Martha Beck Quits Lying

Author, speaker, teacher, legend, Oprah-endorsed Martha Beck is known for quitting a lot of things: her family of origin, her religion, marriage, heterosexuality, academia, multiple versions of herself…the list is long. But the thing she quit that has had the most profound and rippling effect was lying. And we mean, lying about anything at all. Years ago she made a resolution to not tell one lie—to herself or anyone else, even the pleasant little lies we tell to make other people feel better—for an entire year. It was through this one commitment that Martha conceived that if we all quit lying and told the truth ALL THE TIME we’d meet our most authentic, liberated selves. (We tried it; it’s hard.)

In this second episode of a two-part series (if you missed part 1, listen to that first; it aired last week), we continue our conversation about, well… how to be a person. We talk about how the only intention you need is to feel a little better, and how to get there – hint: get out of the mind and into the heart, because our minds are dumb and limited – and the difference between what we want and what we yearn for, and why the things we want won’t actually make us happy (even if what we want is a yacht, and we get it!). Also covered: how to recognize a soul teacher; the idea of abandoning both hope and fear; and the breakthroughs and benefits that come from trying on the opposite of our deepest beliefs. (Martha references “The Work of Byron Katie” here.) 

The intro ends, and the episode begins, at 00:12:40.

Dr. Martha Beck is a New York Times bestselling author, life coach, and speaker. She holds three Harvard degrees in social science, and Oprah Winfrey has called her “one of the smartest women I know.” Martha is a passionate and engaging teacher, known for her unique combination of science, humor, and spirituality. Her newest book, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self, was an instant New York Times Best Seller.

Find her at marthabeck.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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Martha Beck Quits Lying

Author, speaker, teacher, legend, Oprah-endorsed Martha Beck is known for quitting a lot of things: her family of origin, her religion, marriage, heterosexuality, academia, multiple versions of herself…the list is long. But the thing she quit that has had the most profound and rippling effect was lying. And we mean, lying about anything at all. Years ago she made a resolution to not tell one lie—to herself or anyone else, even the pleasant little lies we tell to make other people feel better—for an entire year. It was through this one commitment that Martha conceived that if we all quit lying and told the truth ALL THE TIME we’d meet our most authentic, liberated selves. (We tried it; it’s hard.)

In this first episode of a two-part series, Emily has just quit her job and greeting card company, and tells this to Martha right after Martha—one of Emily’s heroes—tells Emily how in her household they know her as the greeting card goddess. 😩 From there we dive right into burning down versions of ourselves that no longer work (even if we’re goddesses in them), how sometimes we would rather die than face what life is asking of us, how when we tell harmless little people-pleasing lies we become exploding doormats, and how if all of us stopped lying our sexist racist patriarchal society would stop functioning. (!!) It’s a fucking gut punch of an episode we promise will make you want to burn some shit to the ground.

Dr. Martha Beck is a New York Times bestselling author, life coach, and speaker. She holds three Harvard degrees in social science, and Oprah Winfrey has called her “one of the smartest women I know.” Martha is a passionate and engaging teacher, known for her unique combination of science, humor, and spirituality. Her newest book, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self, was an instant New York Times Best Seller.

Find her at marthabeck.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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Koa Beck on Quitting Self-Optimization

Koa Beck made it to the top of her field: she was the was the editor-in-chief of Jezebel and before that was the executive editor at Vogue.com with many other coveted roles held along the way, before she left to write a book that guaranteed she'd never be employable by those institutions ever again. But this isn't the story of how Koa managed that transition--it's not her quitting story. It's the story of white feminism and the lie that self-optimization will save us from a system designed to crush us. If we want a different future, there's a lot of things we're going to have to quit individually and collectively; this is a conversation about that. 

About Koa Beck:

KOA BECK is the author of the acclaimed nonfiction book White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind (Simon & Schuster, January 2021), praised by feminist writers Gloria Steinem and Rebecca Traister. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of Jezebel, the executive editor of Vogue.com, and the senior features editor at MarieClaire.com. Patrisse Khan-Cullors, the cofounder of Black Lives Matter, describes Koa’s work as “intellectually smart and emotionally intelligent” while the Boston Globe has deemed her “a perceptive cultural critic” and “a visionary.” She is currently working on her second book and lives in Los Angeles with her wife. 

Find Koa at her website, Koabeck.com or follow her on Instagram @koabeck

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

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

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

Producer: Cathleen Kisich

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

Music: Michael Blumenfeld, mikebloomstudio.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.