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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Once you come through that door, its about weight and support – not just from your own team but everybody else in the league as well" says Stuart.

Adam attends Man v Fat and is a "Scoffin’em United" player. “I wasn’t somebody that couldn’t do anything with my nine year old but I’d run around the park with him and be puffing. There’s just no judgement here – everybody working together as a team."

"There’s different football abilities - I’m at the lower end of that, but the great thing is I can score goals on the scales. That’s been my motivation because I’m not banging goals in every week but I’m pretty reliable when we have the weigh-ins."

The idea of learning to like yourself being the first step to losing weight is one Shahroo Izadi knows a lot about. She's a behavioural change expert and addiction specialist who used to weigh 19 stone. She's lost a lot of weight and wants us all to give up dieting and start changing how we treat ourselves.

In her book, The Last Diet, (as in the last diet you'll ever do) she acknowledges that changing habits is difficult, but suggests a few things you can do to make the process a little bit easier…

• When you have a blip or deviate from your plan of change, try speaking to yourself the way you would speak to someone you care for. Many of us find it easier to motivate others than ourselves. Try giving yourself the same pep talk you’d give someone who you wanted to encourage to get back on track as quickly as possible. Forgive yourself quickly, and take the same positive, common-sense advice you’d give a loved one if they really wanted to achieve a goal.

• Spend five minutes at the beginning of each day trying to guess what is likely to test you during the day ahead, and deciding how you’d like to respond if and when you’re met with that challenge. Each person will have their own unique combination of daily triggers that makes them want to go off-track with a difficult plan of change. Whether it’s a stressful meeting with someone you don’t like at the end of the day, or the fact you didn’t manage to get enough sleep and are starting the day on a back-foot physically, simply expecting it to test your resolve can make all the difference. That way, you can think “this was predictable. I’ve already decided how I want to respond.”

• Make a list of all the difficult things you’ve managed to achieve or get through in the past, in every area of your life. Reflect on the times when you’ve been met with a challenge or put yourself in front of a challenge, and demonstrated how capable you are. Once you’ve written it all down, take a photo of this list and keep it on your phone. Then, when you’re met with a challenging stage of your habit-change plan, when you’re tempted to throw in the towel because it’s understandably difficult to push through, look at that list and remind yourself that if you can do everything on that list, you can push through in that difficult moment and stay on track too.