Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 400: Jameela Jamil on Mental Self-Defense

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

Our guest for our 400th episode is actor and activist Jameela Jamil, who you may have seen on such shows as The Good Place, The Misery Index, and Legendary. Outside of her acting career, Jameela is known for launching a movement and platform called I Weigh. She's also the host of the I Weigh podcast, where she talks to everybody from Reese Witherspoon to Vivek Murthy, the US Surgeon General, to Gloria Steinem.This episode explores: how to develop what Jameela calls mental self-defense; how to be ruthless when it comes to personal boundaries; the difference between body positivity and body neutrality; how she handles the scrutiny and toxicity of social media; and how men can play a positive role in a world with profound double standards when it comes to looks.Content Warning: This episode touches on the topics of suicide, eating disorders, and sexuality. Any profanity has been bleeped out.  This episode is the first in our two-part Anti-Diet Series. In this series, you’ll not only have the chance to reconsider your relationship to food, eating, diet, exercise, and body image–you’ll also learn practical, research-backed tools for approaching all of these things in a healthier, more mindful way. It’s also the subject of our newest Challenge over in the Ten Percent Happier app. In the 7-day Anti-Diet Challenge, we are going to help you build a better relationship with food and your body. The Anti-Diet Challenge kicks off on Monday, December 6, in the Ten Percent Happier app. If you’re not already a Ten Percent Happier subscriber, you can join us by starting a free trial that’ll give you access to the challenge–along with our entire app. Click here to get started.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey y'all believe it or not, you are now listening to episode number 400 of the 10% Happier Podcast. I cannot believe that. I feel like we started this thing just yesterday. Anyway, thanks for supporting the show. And thanks to all the incredible people who've worked so hard on this show. This episode number 400 is a doozy. Let me just step back for a second before I tell you about our guest. As everybody knows, the holidays are here, and as everybody I believe knows, this season can bring up a whole cornyacopia of complex psychological issues. One of the biggies here is food and how we feel about our bodies.

Many of us can get super obsessive about food and body issues at any time, but especially so during the holidays. Pretty much every woman I know will relate to this immediately, but a quick note to my male listeners. Dude, you might think you're immune to this stuff and maybe you are if so, God bless. But I urge you to look closely at the noise inside your dome. How much time do you spend perseverating about what you eat,

how much you eat and how you look as compared to your friendly neighborhood Instagram influencer? Is it possible that turning down the volume on food, slash body preoccupation, self-assessment and self-criticism would make you happier and healthier and free up limited bandwidth to focus on something that is perhaps more constructive? We're launching a two-part series today,

which we are calling the anti-diet series. On Wednesday, we're gonna be talking to an expert in something called intuitive eating, which has had a huge impact on me. Today, though, our guest is Jamila Jamil, an actor and activist who you may have seen on such shows as the good place, the misery index, and legendary. As you're about to hear, she has opinions, strong opinions, which she will express with a lot of conviction, humor, and profanity.

Outside of her acting, Jamila is known for launching a movement and a platform called IWAY, that's WEIGHWAY, not WAYWAY. So IWAY is the name of her organization. And she's also the host of the I-Way podcast, where she talks to everybody from Reese Witherspoon to Vivek Murthy, the US Surgeon General, to Gloria Steinem. In today's conversation, Jamila and I talk about her struggles with weight, fat phobia, and eating disorders since childhood. We talk about how to develop what she calls mental self-defense, and how to be ruthless, and you'll hear, she is ruthless, when it comes to personal boundaries.

We also talk about the difference between body positivity and body neutrality, how she handles the scrutiny and toxicity of social media, and how men can play a positive role in a world with profound double standards when it comes to looks. Before we dive in, just a quick content warning in this interview we touch on the topics of suicide, eating disorders and sexuality, so just a heads up on that. Also as I said, there's a lot of cursing, we bleep all of it, but never have we had to use so many bleeps. It's pretty hilarious actually.

And while the content is serious, the swearing is pretty hilarious. Anyway, we've made it childproof. In case you've got a kid in the car or nearby, whatever. One of the things to say before we dive in, this is an item of business. In conjunction with the Antideit series right here on the podcast, we are launching an Antideit challenge

over on the 10% happier app. In the challenge, we are launching an anti-diet challenge over on the 10% happier app. In the challenge, we're going to give you an introduction to intuitive eating, which I mentioned earlier. By way of background here, my own relationship with food and body image, which, well, it luckily has not been dangerously bad in any way, has often been, you know, more than a little bit fraught. For years, I would watch my diet like a hawk, counting my macros, pushing myself at the gym, only to get to the end of a long day and hose an entire sleeve of Oreos.

A lot of this was driven by the fact that I'm on TV, but I think it's very common among all humans and more common than it is commonly admitted among men. As I got older and my body started to change, I also developed a whole host of subtle, but pretty pernicious mental habits that would crop up every time my past a reflective surface. What finally broke me out of this vicious cycle was something I first learned right here on the show, intuitive eating.

It's an evidence-based approach to food that flies in the face of every diet I've ever heard of. That's why we've been calling it the anti-diet. In this seven-day anti-diet challenge over on the app, we're going to help you build a better relationship with food, better relationship with your body. This approach, as I've said, is backed by science and in classic TPH fashion. It is supercharged by meditation. In the Anti-Diet Challenge, we're going to be working with a phenomenal anti-diet registered dietician and nutritionist by the name of Christy Harrison. She's actually our guest on the podcast on Wednesday. She and I will talk through the principles of intuitive eating in short videos.

And then when the video is done, it will roll directly into a guided audio meditation from Christ T herself. The challenge kicks off on Monday, December 6th, to join. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your app. So we're by visiting 10%.com. That's all one word spelled out. If you already have the app, just open it up and follow the instructions to join. If you're not already a 10% happier subscriber, you can join the anti-diet challenge by starting

a free trial that will give you access to the challenge along with everything else on our, if I say so myself, amazing app. Okay, we'll get started with Jamila Jamil right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier

instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay. On with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl Kiki Palmer. I'm. Okay, on to the show. Hello, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

I would love to get you talking a little bit about why you got so interested in this kind of activism. Why you started IWAY. I mean, IWAY has been through so many iterations just in the last three years, but it's come to be an umbrella organization for mental health, really, and all of the different intersections, all the different things in life that impact our mental health.

And that is because mental health has been on my mind since I was a child, because I grew up around severely mental ill people, and I became a sort of carer to those people from the age of about nine. And it wasn't probably until my 20s that I realised how mentally ill I was because I had spent so much time trying to make sure everyone else was okay. And because I wasn't as extreme in the displays of my behavior as the rest of my family, I presumed I was fine. And I also had a little bit of arrogance as to, I'm the strong one, I'm stoic.

And I thought that was a badge of honor that I hadn't had therapy and that I hadn't had meds. And that was because I was f***ing ignorant. And I had a nervous breakdown at about 26 in which I almost took my life and I think at that point I'd hit my official rock bottom and I started what has kind of been like a nine-year experiment to save my own life otherwise I knew I was going to do it again. And so through all the things that I have learned from so many people smarter than me, I decided to share those in case there's someone else out there

who might be feeling the same way I've been feeling my whole life, who maybe doesn't have access around them to people to talk about this with, not just therapists, because obviously that's hugely inaccessible for so many people, but even just family members. Some people just don't have the dialogue for these conversations, and they are nuanced, and they are different for a trans person or a person with a disability, or a fat person, or a rich person,

or a poor person, or a person of a certain age, like we all have our own individual struggles, it's not a blanket topic. And so I think what I tried to do with IWAY was create a safe space on the internet where we could have hard conversations and no longer feel alone. And also, in the last sort of year and a half, because of the rise of very difficult conversations around social justice, there is a very understandable impatience in the public. There is an appetite for speedy repair, and they want people who

didn't understand social justice issues to understand them overnight, and there is a kind of, especially amongst the left, quite an unforgiving impatience. So why don't you already know all of these things? How dare you? You are not ignorant, you must be evil. We cannot separate ignorance and evil. And so we make people, it's not a very encouraging environment in which to learn and to make people feel safe to put their hand up and ask difficult questions. So what I way has also become, aside from a support network and an education platform, is again a safe space, but this time where you can ask the difficult questions and where we don't care where you're at and your knowledge of these issues of things that you may never have experienced in your entire life. We're just excited that you're there to learn.

So we believe in learning and we promote learning. And I don't know about f***ing. And I learn from experts openly on my podcast and don't pretend to already be an expert in these things. And in doing so, we've built a several million sort of strong audience. And it feels as though there really is an appetite for people who just want to feel safe and who want to feel seen and heard. And that's all I'm trying to put out into the world. First of all, that sounds fantastic. The name, though, I way seems to indicate that at least in part your activism had its roots in...

Eating disorders, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think eating disorders originally, the name came from just a moment. I was on Instagram, I saw this picture of Kim Kardashian and her whole family, and there were numbers written across all of their bodies in this group shot of a woman who, whatever you may think of them or how they've made their money,

they are an empire. They have created an unprecedented empire for themselves. They are kind of iconic of our generation. And I certainly don't agree with everything they stand for now. But at the time I looked at the picture and I wondered what the numbers were. I clicked on those numbers and I found out that it was their weight. It was how much they weigh in kilograms. And I just thought, would you ever have a picture of a group of businessmen

with their weight written across their bodies. We don't know what men weigh. We don't know what men are supposed to weigh. We don't care. But we care so much above all other metrics as to what a woman weighs, as to how little space she takes up from the world. That is our merit, is how thin we can remain

and how young we can look for as long as possible. And it was just so depressing that a belief system that I had at 12 was still being upheld in society when I was 32, 20 years at Mumbai and we hadn't really moved on yet. So I just one day snapped on Twitter and said, well, I weigh my orgasms and my relationship with my friends and my relationship with my boyfriend and my activism and all of the struggles I've overcome I weigh the sum of my mother's parts and I had a very small following When I said this and it just went very very viral globally and within three days I had 10,000 responses of

People telling me what they weigh in the same metric and so I started an Instagram account thinking it would just be a very short sort of fad And now it's three years later. we have almost one and a half million followers. We have a podcast, we have a YouTube channel. I've spoken in Congress to try and defend the mental health of children. And we have two other bills currently that we're trying to kick into motion to protect teenagers from eating disorder products. But as I said, once we'd started, we realized that there are so many more people who need help. So we had to expand it from just being about eating disorders to being about mental health issues at large.

Yeah, it makes sense. On the subject of eating disorders and body image issues, are you comfortable talking about your history there? Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't care. I was like, I don't know, 11 or 12 when my maths teacher thought it would be a good idea to teach us about how to collect data in order to make pie charts, etc. and graphs, by weighing all of the girls in the school and then teaching us about averages and my weight as the tallest and heaviest girl was higher than everyone else's. So I was at the top of the board and it had never occurred to me what weight was, or that tummies were bad, or that size of it.

I was such a blissfully unaware child of the way that I looked. And immediately the reaction of the girls in the class, and how everyone was laughing at me and how it kind of led to a lot of teasing and bullying, made me understand that thinness is a marker of status socially. And so I remember going home and telling my parents devastated about what happened.

And they had a similar response of horror as to what my weight was, rather than the reaction to my weight. And so I had a kind of 360 degree view of fat phobia all around me everywhere I turned. I didn't have a single voice to just say it doesn't matter. You're really smart. You have a lot of other things going for you. Don't worry about it.

There are, no one said that to me. Everyone treated it like an emergency that I must become thin and I was put on a very, very strict diet immediately. And so what that did was just the way it was handled. And I was really not a big chart. I'd go back and I look at the pictures of them. I was just, you know, regardless. I just don't think that's a way to was handled. I was really not a big child. I'd go back and I look at the pictures of them. I was just, you know, regardless.

I just don't think that's a way to handle that. And so I was horrendously mishandled by school, by teachers, and even by my family at the time, who have their own fat phobia for, you know, their own reasons. And I developed an eating disorder that I really only cracked about five years ago. So that's 20 odd years of no, God, yeah, 20 odd years of my life gone to a very, very pervasive and quite crippling eating disorder. What form did it take? Anorexia, but then also binge eating, so

binging and starving, binging and I never threw up, not because I didn't try. It wasn't for one to try, I'm just terrified of my own gag reflex. So I was the world's most unsuccessful bulimic at school. I would do all of the binging and then not one single time successfully throw up. So I ended up actually getting quite a lot bigger, 15. And I thank God, because now my teeth and my esophagus are still intact. But I was anorexic, predominantly I would say. And it's not just the anorexia in and of itself, it's also the orthorexia, which is a kind of fear of food.

And how much it just consumes you every single second of the day. It's not something that just occurs to you at meal times. All you think about is meal times as to what you wish you could eat, but what you're not gonna eat and how you're gonna hide it from everyone that you're not eating, or how you're going to avoid that

scenario in which you would be forced to eat in other people. So it's just constant lies and manipulation and they say that a lot of very bright kids are the ones to successfully maintain eating disorders because it involves a lot of scheming because you don't want anyone to find out that you have a new sort of because they might stop you and if they stop you then you'll become bigger. So it was just a very, very exhausting and relentless. You think about your body all day, you think about what's wrong with it all day. It's just this loop of self-hate and you look at pictures of people who are thinner than you and you use those photographs to harm yourself and you're so hungry and you're so tired and you're so grumpy and you're so cold

and you have no sex drive. And it was just hell, but it all felt worth it because I was told explicitly by our society that anything was worth whatever it took to have the great glory and privilege of being thin. I can only imagine this is an unfortunate term to have the weight lifted of you said cracking the eating disorder, how much more bad with was cleared up in your mind to stop this loop

of self hate as you described it. Well, what's pretty interesting is that I have actual metrics in my life that may not be important metrics and value systems, But I have literal legitimate metrics of how my life is improved and that my social life is completely transformed. And I have more friends. And I have a before I spend time socially with people more than I ever did before.

I have a better relationship than I've ever had, a longer relationship than I've ever had. I have more sex now. I have a successful career. I innovate. I just finished my first script, I have a company that I run by myself with just one other human, an amazing woman called Erin Finnegan. We have this huge global company that we just run the two of us together and I'm also

able to do 18-hour days without collapsing on set all at the same time. And so I would never have been able to sustain this. I would never have just been able to train for six months and do jiu-jitsu for Marvel on the kind of food I was eating, or the lack thereof before. So I can see how much my whole life, also just my hair growing back. It's been so extraordinary and worth it,

and it's really nice to have space and time to innovate and to be creative and thoughtful because I'm not sitting there thinking about my f**k self all the time. it and it's really nice to have space and time to innovate and to be creative and thoughtful because I'm not sitting there thinking about myself all the time. It's so boring, it makes you so boring and no one wants it, it's not a choice, it's not a thing of vanity, it's a disease, and only a third of people ever recover from that disease. And it's also, I believe it is the highest cause of death of any mental illness. The opioid crisis, if like they're merged together with drugs and mental illness emerged together, opioid crisis would beat it, but anorexia is the leading cause

of death in mental illness. It needs to be taken more seriously. We need to do more to educate kids and protect them from what we see on TikTok and Instagram. I'm just curious, how do you stay healthy given your line of work? You know, I think most people, and now I'm going to be a little repetitive because you will not have heard me say this, but the audience has heard me say this many times. I think most people deal with some obsessive thinking around food or body image. I don't think I'm enough men to talk about this, but I certainly fall into the category of somebody who's spent way too much time in this boring, shame-filled loop around, you know, where are my abs and

what am I going to eat for dinner and blah, blah, blah. I think it's incredibly common, if not universal. But the rest of us are not having to train for Marvel films. The rest of us are not having our outfits and our bodies picked at on social media all the time. We're not under the scrutiny that you are. So I'm curious, first of all just to hear you talk about what that scrutiny is like and then, you know, a little bit about how you withstand it. When I didn't feel powerful and I didn't feel confident in who I am and the brain that

I have, it was really terrorizing. And I was really bullied over the way that I looked. If I would gain any weight, there would be photographs of me on the front cover of magazines, like tabloid magazines, or paparazzi, like hunting outside my house. And it really does feel like they're hunting you and you are prey, calling me names like fat c***** to try and provoke a reaction out of me, like taking photographs of my bottom when I bend over, just deliberately trying to humiliate me. That was incredibly upsetting and also a terrible confirmation of like your fear as an anorexic person is

that if you gain weight, you will lose everything or you will be shamed and people will think you are lesser than you hoped they would think that you would be seen as bad and wrong and disgusting. And so then to have that affirmed by the parasitic British tabloid culture, it was really dangerous for me. And I mean, I wouldn't say it didn't somewhat contribute to my suicidal episode.

I wouldn't blame it for that because I don't think any one singular thing can, but it definitely didn't help my mental health state, the fact that I couldn't leave my house and just go for a walk or have a cry because I had people following me all the time, deliberately trying to prod at my insecurities. It was a really hard time, but as I've grown older, I've just decided to take more control of the situation and I simply won't take jobs in which I have to lose weight. And I was asked to audition for a show about aerobics, and I knew that if I were to play someone who was an aerobics instructor in the Aces, that I would probably have to lose a lot of weight.

And so I just didn't even go up for it, because I knew that it just, whatever that would be worth for my career or whoever I would get to meet or work with, it would send me straight back down the spiral. So I'm very self-preservational. Even with Marvel, I told them I wasn't going to lose weight. I would only gain weight. You know, I wanted to get bigger and stronger.

I'm playing a very powerful person. And so I don't look at full length mirrors with any got one in the house, and it's in my boyfriend's dressing room. There aren't very many mirrors generally in my house. My social media is predominantly just pictures of words of my tweets or my essays, rather than pictures of words of my tweets or my essays, rather than pictures of myself.

And I cover up a fair bit on most red carpets because I just have to protect myself. But I also have had a lot of therapy. And now nobody can convince me that my worth is tied to my aesthetic. I know I'm more than that. And I know where that comes from. And it is a deeply misogynist patriarchal trope in particular about women. I reserve the right to be as free as most of my male friends, not to say that they don't have their own insecurities, but they are

not pushed towards them the way that women are. Women are kind of forced into insecurity. And even at the good place, I don't do an hour and 40 minutes in hair and makeup. The boys do 25 minutes and so on the good place, I said, do an hour and 40 minutes in hair and makeup. The boys do 25 minutes. And so on the good place, I said, well, then I will also do 25 minutes. So we will have the same amount of hair and makeup time because I don't want to sit and stare at myself for an hour and a half.

And I don't want to lose sleep trying to look like this aesthetic fantasy that women are expected to look like and men are not held to the same standards in Hollywood. So I'm going to do the same as the boys. So I just think micro decisions have just taking back ownership of my own worth and my own right to be happy and free. Also I had EMDR therapy, which is I movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy.

That's what I did that helped me really crack the eating disorder. I reconditioned my brain. And so if anyone out there is looking for a way out, EMDR is a great start. I don't think we've ever talked about EMDR on this show. Can you give us the basics? Well, I will say is that it sort of reorganizes your brain from the impractical to the practical. The EMDR that I did was a ball that was from a light projector that was shooting back and forth across a wall, right? And I was supposed to look at that ball while thinking about my most traumatic thought patterns or memories. And as I would look at it,

repeatedly reminding myself of this terrible thought or memory, over time of watching that ball, that thought that was originally terrorizing suddenly became mundane. It makes your worst fears boring to your brain, which then makes your brain less likely to cling onto it and analyse it and think about it. So it's very, very effective with PTSD. There are obvious links between our eye movements and our thought processes. For example, many people look up when they recall a memory or some people look to that, I think, the left when they lie. And you see when people are sleeping, REM sleep, there's a definite connection between eye movement and thought processes. And so someone cottoned onto that many years ago and realised that maybe if we could manipulate

the eye movement, we would be able to interrupt that thought process. And to interrupt it is to break it. And it's a permanent break, which is fantastic. And just requires much less work from you. Talk therapy, CVT, all these things are incredible and very helpful. But for me, they require a lot of work and constantly reminding myself to not fall into my old behaviors or patterns. What EMDR does is takes away the instinct to even participate in that behavior. It's like the difference between having pills or surgery. It surgically removes the thought process from you.

It's just an unbelievable shortcut to just a sort of blank canvas, pre-traumatic blank canvas. So, are you saying that you're kind of untruggable now? Oh, about the things that I've had EMDR already for, sure, but there are new things all the time that come in and freak us out or was upset us or traumatize us. I have a predisposition towards mental illness purely just from my genetics. And so it's something that I always keep in my kind of back pocket, something I go back to when I notice my mental health is starting to decline again.

But an example of it is that I went originally just because I was terrified of the dark. You know, I was abused as a child in the dark. And because of that, I wasn't able to be in the dark until I was about 28. And I went to this woman explaining that to her that I was about to move to America. And I didn't want to spend the rest of my life not sleeping. I wanted to be happy in my 30s in a way that I'd not manage to until then. I wanted to fresh start. And so she showed me this light across the wall. And I had to think about all the worse things that could ever happen to me.

And I really felt nothing. And I left their feeling like I've been ripped off and that this was some nonsense that I'd been lured into. And I went back one more time, reluctantly, did it again, still felt nothing. This time felt angry, I was like, I'm definitely not doing this again. And then I went home that night and I didn't even realise that I didn't trip a lock my door afterwards. I didn't check under any of the beds or any of the cupboards and I turned my lights off and just went to sleep without even realizing.

I woke up in the morning and I registered, I'd done all of these things differently. It just kind of fell off me in the night. Like it wasn't dramatic. It was no moment of realization. I just didn't do the things that I had previously done. It was so fascinating to me. So after that, I was like, well, f**king hell. 28 years of my life, no one's ever been able to crack this. Whilst can you do? And so that's when we sorted out my eating disorder and other kind of problems and issues in my life.

And it was unbelievable. I often describe it as the difference between a similar to you, rather, when you step outside of a nightclub. Do you remember nightclubs? Do you remember those? Yes. Well, it's been a while for me, beyond the old. But when you step outside of a loud club or a bar and you're in the quiet street at three

o'clock in the morning, it's only then that you realize how f***ing loud it was inside. You're like, Jesus Christ, I was in that. That's how you feel post-EMDR. You're like the silence and the stillness and the peace is alarming because it used to be filled with so many like hateful monologues and so much fear and terror. I mean, the brain is mostly built to predict and protect. I think we have something like 80% negative thought as a basis of our brain, because our brain is always scanning to predict what's going to go wrong and protect us and prepare us.

And so if you don't really strive constantly to be positive or to think positively or to help your mental health as much as you can, exercise, cutting shitty people out of your life, reducing your social media exposure, not watching the news all at the time. Then you're really f*****. Because it's a fallacy that, you know,

we are supposed to just be happy. It really is a concerted effort. Speaking of, specifically of eating disorders and body image related issues, after all the MDR and the other forms of therapy you've done, are you still susceptible to some negative thinking on that front? Of course, and I still have body dysmorphia. I don't think I can EMDR that away, so I can't see my actual image very clearly in a mirror. Therefore, because of that, I just tend to wear

mostly baggy clothes and to not really look in the mirror very much. And just give myself a break and consistently remind myself that when those thoughts do creep in, that I should just be angry, not with myself, but with a society that taught me that this was worth my f*** time, that this is how I should feel like. To just rob to me of my joy and my pleasure. Capitalism relies on us being unhappy with ourselves and feeling like we don't have enough and that we aren't enough so that we will go out and consume things that will hopefully make us feel better, to fill the void that they created. And so I become angry with capitalism and the exploitative people at the top who have manipulated entire

generations into feeling like s**t so that they will go out and buy products that they don't need to fix something that we've been convinced was broken. Well said. You have spoken publicly about what you call body neutrality as opposed to body positivity. What's the difference there in why neutrality over positivity? Body positivity for me, I think it's an amazing social justice movement that originally was for fat people and disabled people where they were dealing with like medical discrimination, discrimination when it comes to getting work.

And so because the world is being so actively negative towards them, they have to be positive to be able to combat that. However, for many of us, that still means thinking about your body all the time, even if you're trying to learn positive thought. It's just f**king exhausting to me. I don't want to think about my body. I want to think about my interests, my passions, my mental health, my career, my friends. I don't want to spend any time thinking whether or not I love my thighs. I now have started to look at my body as like a car that takes me from A to B. It's my ride or die. It had that house party with me for a straight

month when I was 23. It didn't sleep for like three years when I was successful in England. It's taken me through every high and low. It just took me through a pandemic. Like, I treat my body now like it's my best friend. And so, I have respect for my body in spite of being told to just hate on it all of the time. And that's been very helpful for me. So neutrality just means I'm not thinking about whether I love it or hate it.

I'm just thinking, I don't give a sh**. It's none of my business. It's none of your business and it's none of my business. But as you said, it's not that you just, you don't give a whatever. It's that you respect it, you're grateful for it, but you're not obsessing over every nook and cranny. No, and I wouldn't expect my best friend to look a certain way.

I wouldn't say to any of my best friends, you are too fat for love, or you are too ugly for that opportunity, or you are too stupid to even try to learn something new. So why do I put myself through that? You just kind of got to kill the committee in your head that is holding you back. Much more of my conversation with Jamila Jamila right after this.

Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellasai. And I'm Sydney Battle. And we're the host of Wondery's new podcast, Disantel, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none

is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship. Jamie Lynn's lack of public support. It angered some fans. A lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed

to fight for Britney. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondering app. I know you've done a lot of work, not only personally, but also now talking to all sorts of experts. What do you recommend to the rest of us who are struggling with issues in this zone? What have you learned that would be useful for the rest of us? Try to seek out EMDR therapy. Do not spend money on your outside before spending as much

money as you can on your inside. If you have the choice, if you have that luxury, don't buy that anti-aging cream. A, they don't work. Be they're f**king offensive. Don't spend money on anything before you spend it on your mental health, because that is the single greatest investment you will ever make. It's the only investment you will make that will guarantee to actually maybe fill the void

and actually make you happier. Be very wary of social media, be very wary of the media in and of itself. It's a f***ing stressful world up there, more stressful than as in like emotionally stressful. I don't think it's the worst of times things that obviously statistically better than they've ever been, but emotionally, I think we have too much access to each other,

and we have too much access to negativity, to not only read negativity, but to perpetuate negativity. It's too easy and desensitized now, and we dehumanise each other too fast. So in light of all of this, protect yourself. You know, practice, I refer to it as self-defense of the mind. We think about how to protect our bodies, but we never think about how to protect our minds.

We have all these locks and bolts and jiu-jitsu moves, but we don't ever think about this incredibly delicate and vital part of our entire lives that we should be protecting at all costs. We just expose ourselves to God knows what constantly and take for granted that it will just sort of self-repair. It won't self-repair. You have to protect it. So I would say that is very important. And then also just be ruthless. Be selfish and be a little bit ruthless. I don't tolerate bad behavior from other people. I will always

give you one invitation to change your behavior to meet me at my boundary. And if you cross that boundary again, I will cut you off. And so that doesn't matter if you are a family member of mine, if you are my entire family who I cut off for six years, if you are friends, if you are old friends, if you are colleagues, I have a zero tolerance policy, beyond my first invitation for someone to be more respectful towards my needs. And I offer that same service for me to other people. Please tell me what I'm doing wrong. I will shift to my behaviour to make you more comfortable. If someone inherently doesn't make any effort to make you more comfortable, they don't care about your comfort, therefore they don't care about you. And so don't feel bad for no longer tolerating someone else's

bad behavior, someone else's inability to go and sort out their own shit, like a grown up with a therapist or with better life habits. You don't have to tolerate bad behavior from anyone. And I think it is a tragedy that people feel as though they aren't allowed to just say goodbye. We don't really have protocols for saying goodbye to your family. We don't have protocols for saying goodbye to your friends. Oddly, it's less stigmatizing to walk away from your partner of 25 years

with whom you have five kids. We have like nothing but templates for that. But we don't really have any other templates for any other kind of, you know, quote, we're going to talk to our uncoppling. You're just sort of expected like, well, we're in this now. There was strapped in and there's no way out. There is a way out. And it's really up to someone else

to change their behavior, to make you comfortable, as long as you're also doing work on yourself. Everyone has to be doing their best to be their best, in my opinion. What does that look like for you? What are the boundaries they get across that where you shut people off? I don't know if there are any specific situations you can describe, but how does that go? Abuse of behavior, manipulative behavior, dishonest behavior, betrayal. These are things that happen in macro and micro ways, constantly amongst family and friends.

In particular, I would say close family and friends, because there is this kind of understanding that blood is thick in the water and that you're never really going to part ways. It's taken for granted that someone's never really going to cut you out of their life. So therefore, you take the piss in a way that you would never with a stranger.

And so I think those are the relationships that we have to be the most diligent around holding people to the same standards we would hold strangers. There's no get out of jail free card for someone to treat you like sh**. It doesn't matter if they are your child, if they are your mother, if they are your grandparent,

if they are your best friend on earth. We are all responsible for our own behaviour and we are not entitled to anyone else's grace, patience, or time. So once somebody's been cut out, is there any room for forgiveness? I don't really forgive. That's a thing of mine. I'm not a forgiver. I can move on from something later, but I will never like forget or forgive the actual incident. I don't extend grace in that area, but I can move on and not bring it up again when I see

that something's really changed. I can accept a that area, but I can move on and not bring it up again when I see that something's really changed. I can accept a new you, but I will never forget what the old you did. And it's important, actually, probably, in my opinion that I don't, because that'll help protect me from anyone else doing that in the future. So I think everyone has a slightly different idea of what forgiveness is, but for me it feels like forgetting or accepting what happened. I don't believe in forgetting or accepting what happened, but I do believe in accepting that someone's changed. I've changed a lot. I can accept that someone else can change,

and I can therefore move forward with them without forever punishing them for what they did. I think in some books that would be understood as forgiveness. You don't have to forget that they did what they did. You don't have to accept that they did what they did, but you can't accept that they're flawed, frail, humans, like you are and you're willing to move on. I think would be some people's definition of forgiveness.

Yeah, that's just my personal thing. I can move on, but the sh** stain shall always remain. Somewhere in my heart, there is a sh** stain. But I believe if you see radical change in someone, you see someone's really made the effort to do the work then yes, but I really have to see significant effort and then I will extend grace.

But they have to put the time in to make significant effort. Someone comes up to me within two weeks being like, I've completely changed. You know they're full of sh**. This stuff takes work and it takes difficult self-reflection. And I know that that's how long it took me. So I never expected anyone else's instant grace. I knew that I would have to prove it to them

that I had changed. And I did. I want to look back to something you said a while ago about social media. In particular, as it pertains to the sort of noxious messages that are spread around our bodies, is there anything more to say about tactically or strategically

about how we can not unplug from the whole world by killing all of our social media but also protect ourselves or as you called it, sort of mental self-defense? I mean, I've had a great time on social media and I never feel as though I'm lacking in anything and I don't follow anyone who makes me feel bad about the way that I look.

Everyone I follow are great comedians or writers or psychotherapists or philosophers. Like my whole feed is just so nourishing and funny and I leave it wanting to share things that I've seen with other people. I refer to it as block mute, delete, repeat. Anyone who triggers me in any way, why do I need to see that?

The world has already sh**. Why do I need to willingly invite more sh** into my brain? The earth is burning. Why do I need to feel worse than I already feel, just trying to make it through the f**king day? Why would I deliberately participate in that? So I find that illogical. So I just delete anyone who makes me feel bad about myself.

And I live in a sweet, happy, nourishing space online. Everyone can do that. You don't have to look at these images that you know are damaging you. I also don't edit my photographs and I know that just specifically to talk about body image, editing your photographs will make you hate yourself more. It might make you feel better for the moment in which you receive compliments, but the immediate afterthought is, well, I'm getting those compliments partially because I edited my image. And when you go home at night and you look at yourself in the mirror compared to this digitally altered image that you've perpetuated out of the world,

there's a big gap between that AI image and the person that you really are, actually like a real human with bags under your eyes or pores or like normal skin, normal metrics on your face. You're just setting yourself up for a fall from a pedestal for more self-hate. It's a very dangerous game to play, the game of editing and toying with your image online. It also creates a sense of pressure. Like, I've got to now look in public the way that I do online. I have friends who sometimes have avoided wanting to see us,

I are their friends, because they feel like they look like sh**t at the moment. And part of what has led them to feel like they can't see their own best friends, you don't care what they look like, it's because there is a kind of inherent fear of their own dishonesty in what they've said they look like. And we don't care. But it's what your brain does to you.

Your brain is like, well, I've set the standard for myself. Now I have to meet it. And that's where Botox and Surgery and Philos come in. We literally have proof. We have surgeons and cosmetic statisticians coming out and saying, most people bring a filtered photograph of themselves or a face tuned photograph of themselves

and say, please, can you make me look like this? It's just never a simple harmless act. And it's not just that it does harm to the people who look at your images. It does the most harm to you. And I think if we could start to really fundamentally understand that people would stop editing their images. I think you already partially, if not more, answered

this question, but I just want to try to hit it very directly. Well, first of all, it's incredibly valuable for somebody in your position to be talking about these issues. I think it normalizes it and is empowering to lots of other people. And there are probably, some people listening to this and thinking, well, Jamila, she's upset justifiably at the message of society sense. At the same time, you've benefited from the societal consensus about beauty standards. I may be listening to this thinking, well, society is pretty much an agreement that the body I was born with through no choice from my own. It does not

conform to those standards. So it's harder for me, some might think, to make peace with the way I look than it would be for Jemila. Any thoughts on that line of thinking that I'm sure you've heard before? Yeah, of course. I mean, there's a lot of nuance to it. First of all, the funny thing is that when I first entered this industry, I was not considered any kind of standard of beauty and we didn't see any South Asians on any magazine covers or on any billboards.

We were never the romantically eat and anything. We were not considered desirable., we were not considered desirable, our features were not considered desirable. Only the most Eurocentric versions of us were accepted. So over the course of 10 or 11 years, it's been hilarious to me to see myself go from being called a monkey to now being told, you have too much pretty privilege to speak about pretty privilege or to speak about the harms of our

beauty obsessions. I've lived the experience of being erased and being explicitly told that what I am fundamentally, how I've been born, what my heritage is, is ugly and not good enough, and too unattractive to even be shown anywhere aspirational. So I guess I'm speaking from a place of experience there where I understand how that feels. And because I understand how that feels, and I see how flippant it has been that over the course of this decade,

all of a sudden they've adopted a brand new beauty standard, I know what this system is, and we have to call it out to stop it from continuing on. This like weird manifesto of beauty that comes out, especially for women, every 10 years of like, now you have to be this way, you have to be this skinny with no bottom and no breasts, and you have to have your hip bones jutting out.

And then 10 years later, they're like, right, all of those things, but now with abs, you're like, okay, fine. And then 10 years after that, size zero, and then 10 years after that. Now you have to be that thin with your ribs exposed, but you have to also have big breasts and very thin size, but somehow big buttocks, which doesn't really make sense.

The vast majority of people are not born looking like that. And because we have a lot of aesthetically enhanced celebrities who have not owned up to the surgery they've had in order to make them look the way that they do, and then on top of that that they photoshop their images. We think that's a possible beauty standard. It's f***ing nuts. And I'm in the middle of this industry, kind of like a Trojan horse, witnessing all of this,

witnessing the things that people do to look the way that they do, and just trying to lift the curtain back and show everyone what's really going on inside. Like, how much work goes into this, how much disgusting privilege there is, how ridiculous it is that when it comes to aging, you have women growing up alongside these like famous women, right? They're the same age, they all kind of like

experienced life at the same time. Well, I'm trying to say is like, let's look at some of the members of the cast of Ocean Day, all of whom I love. It is not their fault that they were airbrushed to the point where it looked like the emoji movie. And on their covers of magazines, they all look 15, whereas in real life, of course they don't, they're all stunning, older, aging women. Ten years older, they may be me. Like we're all getting older. That should be wonderful and embraced. When you see Josh

Bowlin on the cover of magazine, they shoot him in HD so they can show exactly how many wrinkles he has and they're considered sexy and why it's undignified, but on a woman you erase any sign that she's dead to age. So then you've got women growing up at the same age. As these women thinking, I should look like that. These women who are airbrushed, who sometimes have fillers and and surgery who also generally have easier lives with more sleep and more help and they don't have to have three jobs to support four kids on their own. They're eating more nutritious food, they have access to a better and easier lifestyle that shows on your face. Why the f*** are we expecting the average person to compare themselves, I'd feel bad about themselves, compared to the most privileged people on earth, who are on top of their own privilege,

perpetuating a vastly false beauty standard. And so I'm just trying to kind of whistle blow for as long as I'm allowed to stay here, because all this destroyed me as a child. I thought all of these things were true. I had all of these toxic belief systems, and that's because there was no one to interrupt that belief. And so all I'm trying to do is trying to use what I have and what I'm seeing to report back to the 12 year olds who are just like I was and say this is all

and I totally accept the fact that people are like, well, now you have pretty privileged, you can't speak about it, but that is also like an old trope used to silence everyone, right? We take fat people, for example, and if they complain about fat phobia and beauty standards and eating disorders, etc. we say, well, you're just lazy and you're just bitter and jealous and you are unable to achieve thinness.

So therefore, that's why you're speaking out about this. We're going to silence and discredit your opinion because you're speaking from a place of failure. But then we take a thin person who talks about those same damaging infrastructures and we say, well, you're too thin to talk about this issue. So you can f*** off as well. So then who is left? Who's allowed to have this conversation? It's a very clever way of us all being muzzled in silence. So while I have the mic and the opportunity, and at least I was a fat person, and at least I was considered ugly with this same exact face 10 years ago, and now I am not,

I feel as though I am uniquely positioned with the amount of power and privilege I have to uplift other voices in the same field of conversation, but also to use this moment with the megaphone to scream until everyone understands. And however many mistakes I've ever made, no one can deny that I've had a ridiculous impact on the diet culture industry. I've made a massive dent in that industry and I have harmed it and interrupted it

and reminded people that this isn't normal and this culture is damaging and distressing and disgusting. And, you know, there are s**t unless celebrities hawking diet products to us now, because everyone's afraid that I'm gonna come after them and I'm so annoying that no one wants that. That's why I do what I do in spite of the fact that I sit in a place of privilege.

You're in the belly of the beast. Yeah. You have this amazing opportunity to report back to the rest of us of what it's actually like behind the scenes. And you know what it's like to be on the other side of the beauty standards. And I don't photoshop my magazine covers and I don't photoshop my billboards and I walk the f**king walk and I don't put out pictures of me that I think would trigger other, I try

not to anyway. I don't sell diet and detox products. I do totally benefit off of the way. I look, of course, I understand that. But I don't promote products that I think are damaging for the mental health of other people. I've lost millions of dollars in campaigns that I could have done that I thought would have had any kind of negative impact

on the way people feel about themselves. I don't believe in using shame as a tool of sale. I think you can make someone aspire to have something, maybe want something because it'll make them feel good or it'll be fun, but I don't need you to have a shame someone to be like, you need this or the way you're a worthless piece of s***. Should we rethink their cosmetics industry? Yes. I assume you have to wear makeup for your, you know, I don't know if you wear it in a walk-in-around basis, but I'm sure you have to wear it for work. I think there are two different ways in which you can wear makeup for your, I don't know if you wear it in a walkin' around basis, but I'm sure you have to wear it for work. I think there are two different ways

in which you can wear makeup. And I think there's a fun celebratory way in which you can wear makeup, where you feel like your face is a party, a bit more like David Bowie used to wear makeup or Grace Jones wears makeup, it feels like celebratory and fun and creative. I'm a proper makeup artist

and I love creating all these colors and shapes on someone's face, but what I don't do is obsess it like where thick, thick layers of foundation, there's nothing wrong with doing that. I completely understand why anyone would. I'm just saying that I don't think that using makeup as a tool to cover up what you have is a healthy mentality. I think they're in lies the dangers of makeup, but I think if we can teach people to instead accentuate what you find fun about your face, the makeup's great. It's so fun, it's so interesting and exciting and creative, but I think this new trend in order to sell as much makeup as possible of a layer of primer and then a layer of foundation and then all this different, like, more tisha-addoms level contouring and then another layer of makeup on top of that contouring, so it doesn't look like obvious makeup.

And then powder, so you're talking like seven layers of makeup on someone's face. I don't think that that's good for you. I don't think that many chemicals going into your skin, a good for you. And I think it tells you that, oh, I need to be hidden away. The real me needs to be hidden away. That's not the way I wear makeup. Much more of my conversation with Jamila Jamil right after this. What do you say to men? You talked about the double standard before Josh Brolin is

lauded for his wrinkles, not to pick on Josh Brolin. I like Josh Brolin. It's got great wrinkles. Yeah. But so does Judy Dench. Let's see more of Aaron, you know, folks. Yes. Well said. In terms of men, though, what would your vice be two men? Because yes, men do get obsessive around, and there's some data to support that are

pretty reasonably well represented among those with eating disorders. And there's lots of ways in which body dysmorphia shows up among men, counting your macros, and things like that. Having said that, I think we can both agree that women get the worst of it here. How can men be useful and helpful in this context? Well, first let's talk about the sh** that men are going through, because I also don't think it's fair to ever, for anyone to dismiss them just because women have it worse. So what we're seeing is just the precipice. Like, I feel like I'm watching what women went through

when I could see it creeping in in the 90s is now happening to men. So it's very important that we interrupt it while we can see it, because I know this pattern very well. They've basically run out of real estate on a woman's body that you could monetize. I mean, I think at earlobe, Blasty, an armpit lifts, they realize we were probably done.

There's no new way you can teach a woman to want to hate herself. And so they've had to move on to men. I genuinely think that's what's happened. They're like, f*** now, we've gone after their eyelids, their eyebrows. Every single part of a woman has now been monetized and there's been a fix created for the ways in which we've been told is broken. Now we're seeing the on-straught start start on men and now they're also supposed to look like Hem's'worth brothers. And you see a huge rise amongst in cells in their own

self-hatred because they're being told that without this certain male Instagram beauty aesthetic they will die alone and never have sex and never be wanted or loved by anyone. We're seeing a huge rise in men's disorders, and so I hope that men will take the similar advice I gave earlier that I was talking about that maybe more women thought they had to pay attention to. Protect your mind and do not think that any of your worth or your loveability lies in the way that you look.

I've been with people of all heights and sizes and sh** doesn't matter. Chemistry is something that you cannot create in a gym. But when it comes to women, a really big way that everyone could serve us all is to no longer give algorithmic attention to the companies that perpetuate these myths, these beauty myths and beauty ideals.

When we like pictures that represent unattainable beauty standards, when we follow magazines that perpetuate those standards, when we follow companies and individuals that perpetuate those standards, we are reaffirming that they need to exist. We are reassuring them that there is a demand for what they are supplying. We own them. They are nothing without us.

We have all the power. It is a fallacy that we have come to believe that they have the power of our race and we will eat what we're given. No. They will make what we ask for. We just have to learn how to ask for the right thing. We've seen it pivot with like overt, fat shaming and tabloid culture. It used to be so much worse 20 years ago and the people finally took their power back and fought back against those tabloids that tabloids all went out of business. And now there are only like three and they've massively changed tact. And when they talk about bigger people, it might still have some sort of like insidious pass of aggression, but it's no longer beached whale written across a grown academy award-winner's body, who's just minding her business on the beach with her children.

That's what they wrote across Queen Latif as body. I couldn't believe it, that's what we used to see. I saw a picture of René Zellweger after the second bridge of Jones Diary with the words Too Fapt for Love written across her body. That doesn't happen anymore because the people thought back. So don't give attention and don't give relevant or reassurance or reaffirmation to these companies and individuals that perpetuate the

stammering standard that might come after you. It might already have come after the women that you may love in this world or the children that you may have regardless of their gender. We are funding it. We need to defund the Diet culture and unattainable beauty standards. That's the first thing that I think men could do. I'm just trying to think about how to phrase this, but it feels like men can indirectly fund the Diet culture even through their romantic choices, because the beauty standards are

pounded into our neurons by just being a participant in the culture. And that can impact who you ask out on a date or who you swipe right or left on whatever the tool to use dating apps, but whatever. And so it seems like it would be hard to break out of complicity. Totally, but I also do think that I mean, God, there's not a lot in it for my mates

who now have become so conditioned by Instagram and pornography to only find this like one type of beauty appealing. They end up finding themselves quite lonely because not very many of those women exist in real life and look the same in real life or necessarily have that much in common with them. As I said earlier, chemistry, pharaoh modes, like specific interests and experiences,

you're missing out on so many different individuals that you might have a sexual connection with because your brain is telling you that you're only allowed to pick one type of human. It's not good for you and it's not based on anything real and it will just set you up for loneliness and disappointment and a lot of my friends found themselves lonely and disappointed and then stopped watching porn and stopped going on Instagram, completely changed their Instagram feeds and unfollowed everyone and then found themselves suddenly being able to have a range of different people they were attracted to and they're in, were able to then establish these unusual, wonderful and loving and exciting relationships that previously

they're not been able to access because they've made their dating pool basically just like a little sort of puddle. And you're really confident that this mental self-defense you're describing, which can involve EMDR, traditional therapy, reprogramming the way you interact with social media, can really get down to the fundamentals that will change the way we interact with

a culture that sends us toxic messages. Well, I can only say it from my own experience and that of those who've made similar decisions that I was, and I don't say this word like hyperbolicly or in a way that's attempted to offend anyone. I mean, this very literally I was insane nine years ago, absolutely off my f***ing rocker. And so to have gone from there to being a relatively stable and happy person who

still sometimes you can struggle with depression because the world is sad and hard. But generally, I would say I am 100 times better off for all of these decisions. And as I said at the beginning of this podcast, I have literal metrics of life to be able to prove that. So every time I take a step back and I start to feel low, I'm able to look at those things and be like, no, I've really turned shit around. And I could not have done that without all of these different significant maneuvers.

This is a bit of a digression, but I was interested to see when I was looking at some of the materials for I way that you talk about cancel culture and you're critical of cancel culture. Can you say a little bit about that? I think cancel culture is like incredibly important and valid and was very needed because pre-cansol culture, there was no other way for us to express our disdain or to change systems or to challenge people who would otherwise have just continued to slip under the radar

and carry on their pervasive abusive behavior. So cancel culture has given a voice to the people. The people previously were told, again, as I said earlier, just to eat what they were given. And now they have some sort of f***ing power against the powerful. And so I think cancel culture as a concept was incredibly important. What I'm critical of is the fact that it just doesn't feel very organised. It doesn't feel like we have a plan for cancel culture, like there's no rehabilitation, there's no redemption, and there's also no sort of tear system of what is bad and what you can come back from versus what is egregious and irrevocable.

We just lump everything in. It's completely lacking in nuance sometimes, and there is a will to not forgive. We've stopped having faith in people. We don't actually think people can get better. We kind of don't want people to get better. We just want them removed from society, and I just think it's impractical. So I think the birth of cancel culture was important and excellent, but I think it's being turned into the stocks and a weapon. I also think it's important to distinguish between being cancelled and called out and I find it very upsetting and boring and embarrassing when very powerful people speak from their positions of privilege that they still have after being called out or piled onto and they say that I'm a victim of cancel culture, you're not. Being cancelled means having

things taken away from you, having your platform taken away from you, your money being socially ostracized amongst your own inner circles, that's what being cancelled is. That doesn't really happen for the very powerful. And so they consider being criticized now, because that's how f***ing power mad we have all been. That even people dating to criticise us on mass means some sort of crime is being committed against us.

There's no accountability there. You're not being cancelled, you're being called out. There's a difference. I don't consider myself cancelled, even when I've been piled onto by the world, because I still have my f***ing money, my jobs, my friends. I don't sit there bemoaning the fact that people who were upset with my behaviour had something to say about it. But what's disturbing to me about cancer culture is that, as I said earlier, we aren't able

to differentiate between the crimes. And I think that is not helpful in the long run because we're kind of devaluing progress. We're saying progress doesn't exist. And we are saying that there's no merit in becoming better. And if human beings don't think that there's any kind of merit or point in becoming better, then we're not going to improve. And if we don't improve, we're going to continue to cause harm to one another. And so I think we just need to add some more organization and redemption into cancel culture and then we'll be fine.

Yeah, it sounds like you said this at the beginning of this interview that you in terms of using I way as a place where people can get together and talk, you want to create a sense of, look, you may get criticized, but we're not going to ostracize you permanently if you say something insufficiently PC. Yeah, and we're not testing you and scanning you. We're in a current time where you can even have the right thoughts, but if you don't say them in the perfect way, I think Neil Brennan was talking about this recently.

You have to now not only have the perfect thought, but you have to speak about them perfectly. Not everyone is well-bursed enough to do that. It also becomes quite classist and quite presumptuous of these people, predominantly these people on Twitter, of people who live in the kind of big cosmopolitan cities where they're exposed to this sort of stuff and these cultures and these conversations constantly, and they're considering everyone in the world regardless of where they're from or what economic background they come from or who their parents might be, we don't even think that someone could possibly be a product of their environment. We just label them as evil and hopeless. So we have to be careful about that. And I think that accountability has only happened and change has only happened as a response to public-cantle culture. And so I'm very grateful to Council Culture for that. I just think

now that we have that. Great. Let's refine it. Just a little bit about I-Way before we close here. You've been able to have some policy wins and other kinds of wins. Can you talk a little bit about the achievements you're most proud of in the last three years? I think changing Instagram and Facebook globally to no longer show minors, things about diet and detox products. That was a huge win for us because these things have Viagra and then they have speed in them like Amphetamine. They have laxatives in them which can impact your digestive system for the rest of your life.

And then a lot of people die as well from these things. They have toxic heavy metals in them. So it's kind of poison that's just being put in pretty packages and sold by pretty influencers in the Photoshopped captions and photos online. So that was cool. I think, like I said, being so annoying and relentless that I've made powerful people no longer even want to promote diet culture, that's something I'm really proud of. I'm proud of the things that we're working on, currently, speaking in Congress, when I'm hoping to get to the Supreme Court and with the other bills to protect teenagers. And mostly I'm just proud of my community because without them I couldn't have done And mostly I'm just proud of my community because without them I couldn't have done this.

I'm not this like lone wolf achieving all of this by myself. I've won and a half million people who are pissed off screaming behind me. I started a petition to band diet and detox products for minors. And within three days I had 250,000 signatures. That's because of the people who are with me in this fight. I learn a lot from them. I'm very proud of the podcast. We just hit 10 million listens in our first year and like I feel

like that means that we're engaging people. We're learning from them. They're learning from us. I love what I weigh represents. I'm really proud of it. I'm proud of the people who are involved in it. I'm proud of the community. I'm proud of the fact that our comments section is so kind and loving when most social media, it would feel dangerous to put up a picture of a trans person or a disabled person who's being glorified without mean, vicious, desensitized comments. Underneath, we don't have those in our way. It's genuinely loving, wonderful, uplifting community.

And I think that's so rare and extraordinary. And I feel proud to have a starting point, to create a starting point. Our generation is very obsessed with perfection, it's very obsessed with being all-knowing and omniscient. And we look down on starting points. Everyone needs a starting point. Everyone needs to start learning somewhere.

And I'm really proud of sticking to my guns and refusing. Learning is cool, it's noble, and it's hard, and it should be celebrated and encouraged. Let me ask you one last question. Can you please plug everything you're doing, all the resources you're putting out into the world that you want my listeners to be aware of? I think mostly our Instagram, which is at I underscore WEEI, GH, not to be confused with Iwayway, always f**king cramping my style. So it's just Iway on Instagram and mostly our

podcast. I think it's a really great podcast. It was a real, diverse guest, anyone from kind of the surgeon general of the United States to Jane Fonda, to Gloria Steinem, to all these incredible human beings, also like Reese Witherspoon, Kelly Roland, and then Doctors of Optimism, all these kind of different people, dieticians, et cetera. It's a very diverse podcast where I am able to learn from some of the finest minds in the world. It's an open space, it's an easy listen,

and it has helped a lot of people. And so I'm proud of that, and I hope more people find us and join us. Bravo, Jemila, thank you so much. proud of that. And I hope more people find us and join us. Bravo, Jamila. Thank you so much. Thanks, mate. Thanks again to Jamila. Thank you for the insights and the record setting rate

of profanity, all very much appreciated. And just to say this before we go, if you want to put everything we just talked about into practice, join us for the anti-diet challenge. Over on the 10% happier app, the challenge starts Monday, December 6th. Download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps and start a free trial to join that challenge.

The show is made by Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justin Davy, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartelle, and Jen Plant, with audio engineering from our friends over at UltravioletAudio. We'll see you all on Wednesday for part two of our anti-diet series. Our guest will be Christy Harrison, who's also the star of the anti-diet challenge. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus

in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at 1dory.com slash survey. short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.