Best Selling Nutritionist: 6 Things You Must Do To Make Health Feel Easier - Sarah Ann Macklin

0:00We're dying from things that we can try and prevent. Inflammation, stress. We have 80 ,000 thoughts and 80 % of them are negative. We can have the model diet, but if you hate yourself whilst doing it, you will not get the results. Physiology will respond to your mindset. Why do we find it so hard to be healthy? From international model to world-renowned nutrition expert, Sarah Ann Macklin has become a leading voice in science-backed well-being. She's the founder of the Be Well Collective, host of Live Well, Be Well, and author of Healthy Shouldn't Be This Hard. If you look at success, it's fame, wealth, and social status.

0:36At 19, I had all of that. To survive in that world, I disconnected from my body. My body was screaming out with so many signs that it wasn't well. If you're telling yourself, I'm going to live in deprivation on calorie counting. I'm going to be more hungry. You're going to be more hungry. So self-worth is like foundational to all of the choices that we make. The end goal is not to look good. The end goal is to feel good. And how can we make those choices to feel good? So what we need to connect more is to... That requires a lot more work than we think. One of the things that you've done to try and get a better fix for your health.

1:18Sarah, how would you introduce yourself and the work you do? big question how do i introduce myself i well i'm now an author which is very exciting to say healthy shouldn't be this hard um but i guess kind of getting to that point has been a 20-year journey so um i started off as a model when i was 16 at 23 had a bit of a health crisis say a bit landed in hospital um and it was a kind of wake me up moment and that made me pivot my career which was over let me think how many years ago that was now 14 years ago internutritional science and health which back then no one was having that conversation so it was a bit of a self-exploration going back to university doing my bachelor nearly dropping out because I didn't think that I was smart enough to complete it had no self-belief um unknowingly was dyslexic and was picked up within six weeks from my professor.

2:16And I had this like very profound moment where for the first time in my life at 24, someone saw me for who I was, which gave me this urge to complete my Bachelor of Science. I did. I came out of the first and built a not-for-profit organization around mental health. Again, this is like 10 years ago. No one spoke about this in the UK. America, incredible at it. When I lived there, everyone spoke about it. Back in the UK, no one did. But I also had this kind of merge between mental health and nutrition and realizing that the mind and the body are like not separate entities and they're not even two entities, they're one unit.

2:53And so that led me to gather more and more research about understanding really the connection between how our thoughts upstream affect the downstream effects of our body. And so a lot of us today go to the doctor when we have a symptom, go to the therapist when we're feeling low or we're needing help but these are all downstream effects and we're never looking at really like what's causing these downstream effects of inflammation or anxiety and so for me it was to really dial down which is where i am now and say where i am now and hosting the podcast of live well be well for the last five years it's garnered me so much knowledge around the science field that they're not straight verticals they're all aligned but we just don't cross-pollinate them.

3:35And so for me, a lot of my work now dies very much deep into like, what is the antidote to this self-criticism that we all seem to find ourselves in? And I now work a lot within the world of self-compassion as being that antidote, which for years, as Oliver Berkman once told me, and I always have to quote him because he did tell me this, if something makes you cringe, lean into that cringe. And for me, that word being English felt very uncomfortable and actually understanding that there is a host of science and amazing information around the importance of using that and building self-compassion as a muscle in your brain is an amazing foundation and is the foundation of health which I think we have totally lost in the rhetoric of the health and wellness conversation I struggle with the word wellness because it's very what's the word trendy not as scientific anyone can kind of connect to in that space and that sphere but for me well-being and health span is is self-compassion is the foundation to that and in the 8.5 trillion dollar industry that the wellness industry is predicted to be by 2027 we've totally lost that conversation with ourselves um within all of these you know there's so many podcasts so many social media outlets so many linkedin posts on how to be the best version of yourself and all the five things you should do to get fit in the gym fit when you sleep all of these different things and we've lost the narrative that we're telling ourselves so a lot of my work has kind of started in the nutrition world and really kind of connected into more of the mental health mindset field and bringing those two together to see that is the real foundation of well-being take me back to those modern years because i'm a big fan of your work right now but i would like to understand what happened so you become a model at the age of 16 why do you become a model and then what happens at the age of 23 that you decide to change career paths completely yeah i didn't want to be a model so that's the that's the irony um and i say i didn't want to i just it was just not on i grew up like outside of the small town of portsmouth that this stuff just doesn't happen down there and i went to a festival one day and lots of the scouts from from london were down and i was just tapped about five times on the shoulder from lots for different modeling agencies.

5:52So Kate Moss was a model agent, Liz Hurley's model agent, all of these different people. And they were like, we think you could be a model. And obviously I just completely blanked, took business cards because at that point you don't have like proper mobile phones in those days. And went home and just told my mom, all these strangers came up to me and gave me these cards. And she was like, oh, this has happened before. I've just never told you. And when my mom took me to London when I was even 13, I was spotted back then. And so she then took me to London to visit these modeling agencies. And I signed on the dotting line at such a young ripe age.

6:28I still carried on my studies till I was 18. My mom was very strict, thank God, that she did to allow me to finish my A-levels. But I was still shooting huge level campaigns within these two years. And the moment my last exam finished, my agent called me and he was like, you need to be full time. And within three days, I moved to London. And that was it. And within a year, I was in Paris and Milan. And then a year later, I was living in New York. So my career went on a very quick upward trajectory from just this girl from Portsmouth to all of a sudden kind of having all of these elements of, you know, success.

7:07You know, if you look at success, it's fame, wealth and social status. That's kind of how it's defined in the Oxford Dictionary. And very interestingly, at 19, I had all of that. But what comes with that and without the emotional understanding and intelligence and life experience is you don't know who you are. That's such an interesting and important age for any adult, whether you're in the industry I was in or not, to understand yourself. You develop who you are. You develop your identity. And I think the thing with being a model is you're a chameleon. You're told who to be. And you also have to be liked because you're facing rejection every day.

7:49And if you're rejected, your financial worth is rejected. So not only is it just on what you look like, but like your money, your earnings, everything is built on someone not rejecting you. So you work 10 times harder. And I didn't understand my, you know, who I was back then. But I now know I'm like a very type A, you know, I don't like the word optimizer, but I'm someone who always strives for success. So for me, I would do anything to make sure that I was treating this like a business. And it's why I was successful in it. But what I did in relation to that was completely lose who I was. I completely, to survive in that world, I disconnected from my body.

8:31So my mind went one way and my body went another. What do you mean by that? I mean that my body was screaming out with so many signs that it wasn't well. It wasn't strong. Um, it was exhausted. I would get ill all the time. I had like really horrific anxiety. Um, you know, I had like so much rumination in my brain. I had so much self doubt. Um, my, my, I had really bad stomach problems. I was like my, my, everything in my body was trying to tell me that I wasn't okay. And I wasn't safe and not because the modeling industry wasn't safe because I didn't like look after myself enough. I didn't like allow myself to take a break.

9:14There was months where I didn't have a day off. I would be flying all the time. I was getting like three eye infections a week. And, you know, you can't not turn on set because all these people are waiting for you, but then you've got constant flashes in your face. So you're just overriding to keep going. You're getting on that next flight. You're meeting the next team. You're getting up at 3am for makeup. You're finishing at 11pm. You're getting on another flight. You know, you are just, you're not stopping. You're not kind of reflecting on how you feel and every time I got sick I just you know take an ibuprofen or go to the doctor and and keep going and to the point when I was on set one day and I just didn't and I just collapsed and had what you would call as a rye gourd so my kidney kind of went into I had urosepsis basically and it was projecting everything and so my body was going into it looks a bit like a seizure but it's not a seizure but you kind of have these really bad tremors and then I ended up in in hospital with septicemia and e.coli and urosepsis and 10 best cysts in my womb and internally bleeding and you know I kind of say that I had so many different doctors around the end of my bed but I kind of say you know they would give me all different types of diagnosis what I told you like a full body collapse but I you know the real diagnosis is that I just switched off every signal that my body ever sent me.

10:34And you've got to remember, you know, now we're on a personal growth podcast, right? We are also, we have so much information at our fingertips. We're also curious. People talk about this so much more, especially since COVID. COVID saw a shift in conversations, I think way more around this type of area. America are always five years ahead of the UK and Europe. So I was starting to see people have therapy and become interested in health and nutrition, but it was all still quite prescriptive and formalized. But in the UK, it was like not at all. And so I was living in these kind of like weird worlds, like trying to understand myself, but maybe from not a place of like real curiosity.

11:17And basically, I had to, I had to take a step back from what I was doing to go and understand this. And I just took a really hard look at myself. And it was like, you know, for me to get better, but also to, I think when you go through something that disabilizes your life in such a big way, and you feel lost, like the weird thing is, and I don't know, you know, if anyone listening to this relates to this, or if you relate to this, but when you feel like you have all these outward successes where it's all external like I had this lovely house that I'd bought at such a time like such a young age at 19 you know I had this cool social circuit where I was photographed when I was going out I was on billboards like all over the world you know I had this like outwardly like amazing life but inside I felt so lost and I felt so hollow and I think when you're in that horrible moment of like not being able to express which we would now call emotional granularity to like understand like what you're really experiencing you also are like well I've got all these things so I cannot complain like I have no right to say I don't feel this way so what you do is you just keep telling yourself like you can't express yourself you can't connect to those feelings because you're like look at all these amazing things I have to be grateful for this I have such a lucky life but you're kind of destroying yourself inside because you're going to what you think success in society and capitalism tells you right so that was this like weird identity that I had I was like wait I should be happy I should be grateful this is great but my body ended up just completely turning itself off which I think is a really interesting parallel of when we look at success today and health and and anything whether it's relationships work or any part of our lives we have this like outward projection of what success is yet inside a lot of us can feel very lonely we can be surrounded by people and still feel very hollow and lost and to me i think that's a really important data point that we have to be curious on and that at 23 of my data point i say this now like i had full awareness of this at this point i didn't i was just like i just can't carry on in the way that I am because I will not be here.

13:28So that led me to go back to school, which was again, like the biggest fear. It was like a real Legally Blonde moment. If you've ever seen Legally Blonde, like when she goes back to school, when she goes into school at Harvard and she's dressed in her pink. And I kind of felt a bit like that, like surrounded by all these smart people and thinking, I don't know if I belong here either. But what that did teach me was so much about myself, about my brain, that actually I was smart. You know, when I had this moment with my professor, everything, everything for me changed. I knew I was smart in the creative sense.

14:06So I'm, you know, knowing that I'm now neurodiverse, I know that, you know, my creative outlet is a real strength of mine. And that's what modeling gave me. In a weird way, modeling gave me a bolster to show that I could become something, which I think I needed, but at the same time it broke me. So it was a really interesting parallel. It showed me that I could be successful. But you also have to realize that when you're a model, you're also kind of looked at as in like, oh, she's just this pretty girl or whatever. That's your social currency. That's your social currency. And actually to build a good career as a model, you do have to be smart.

14:41I mean, you have like, you create your own business at 16. I mean, you are switched on. you are and you travel all over the world and you meet so many interesting dynamic people you do create you you do grow up I know models that were very young that you do become very self-sufficient very hyper-independent from a real young age because you have to but I think when I then went into the kind of more the educational side of things I had a lot of shame about that for a long time because I thought people would just go she's just a pretty face so I felt such a pressure to prove myself again. So I was kind of repeating the same cycle, but just in reverse.

15:24And I think, you know, that's kind of been like, I think whenever you have a purpose in life that, you know, I'm sure everyone that comes on here has a defining story. There is a reason why you write a book on something. There is a reason why you give everything to a business and a company because you believe in that mission and if that founder doesn't believe in it then no one else is going to and you know my real like mission on everything I've done for since that point has not only just been like to understand myself but it's also to stop people going through the same mistakes that I went through and just self-belief.

16:01Thank you for sharing this I believe you definitely must have come a long way because you're able to articulate such a difficult moment in a very confident way. So your career back then was growing at a much faster pace than your personal growth. And there was a gap there. And you were overworking and that was having a toll on your body. I'm curious to know if you were also making the wrong food choices, because that seems to be right now where your work evolves around. So talk to me about those choices. Because from the outset, people that are not in the modeling industry, we tend to think that you're constantly being requested to eat very little and stay incredibly lean and perhaps looking good and being healthy.

16:47Don't go hand in hand. They don't. I'm not here to dispel that myth. That is what you're told. I mean, you also, it's a really hard, interesting industry to describe because you are picked a certain way because of how you are. And genetically, a lot of models are naturally just very lean, you know. And I hate to say that, but naturally that is just how I've always been. So I've never had to grapple with my weight. Some girls, when they're scouted, or guys, this isn't just girls, guys also go through the same. because there was a big androgynous phase that men went through where they also had to become very thin.

17:27And then they went the other way. It depends on the trend. But, you know, a lot of girls are scouted at 16 and then they turn into a woman, their metabolism changes. And then that's where you see a lot of women grapple with their weight. And others don't because you are naturally lean. But you obviously have more intensity around certain weeks like fashion week where you do have to be very thin. So you always have a constant pressure, but I think the pressure that's put on even more, even if you are lean, is that's the only thing you can change about yourself. Like there's nothing, you know, if you're an actor, you can improve in your acting skills.

18:01If you're a footballer, you can improve in your technique. With modeling, it is on what you look like. And so you are scrutinizing every part of you every day, as is the casting director, as is the photographer, as is the stylist. so I mean it's so it's so unhealthy to know what every part of your body looks like and when you're at a certain level you have to I mean that is also part of the job you have to be in control of that so that's when it tips to very very unhealthy also the the time that I was in it I don't know if you remember this but like the rise of clean eating was becoming really loud Goop had just launched so that was a huge wellness platform a lot about detox diets and green juices and massaged kale and all of this like explosion of the health food world.

18:51And of course, like I'm in the epicenter of needing to be around this. And so obviously without any scientific credibility or understanding, I'm like straight in. I'm like, right, that's going to make my hair great. That's going to make me look more toned. That's going to make me shine better. But actually it wasn't deprivation, even though that's not what my thought process was. I wanted to do it to look better and feel better, but I was still massively undernourishing. But I didn't understand because the way it's marketed and translated isn't like this is going to make you feel undernourished.

19:25It's like this is going to make you feel great. Yet we're all so different. I'm someone who has a really quick metabolism and I'm on my feet all day and all of those things. And I need a lot of energy to sustain that, to be on set and traveling. But I was reading the media and trying to understand my own navigation of this intense health world. and like the less is more and all of that stuff. So, you know, yeah, I went into food first. That's where my journey started because I was like, I actually do need to understand this because the stuff that I'm told as the model diet, like quote unquote, has made me sicker than ever.

20:02And I think that's really interesting. Like where we look at today, like we're told these diets, these perfect routines, these longevity protocols that are all gonna make us the thing that we wanna be and yet when we don't get there we're like why haven't why hasn't this worked and that's when my research became even more interesting because we can have the model diet but if you hate yourself whilst doing it if you're doing it from an area of depletion you will not get the results and science does show that because your mindset will change how you metabolize that food how your hunger hormones respond all of these different things physiology will respond to your mindset And so the entire time I was living this intense lifestyle of clean eating and, you know, trying to be perfect, I was also completely destabilizing my body at the same time, like how my cells were nourishing that food.

20:57And that's what I find really interesting today. Like the world that I was in 15 years ago, and I'm still connected to the modeling world. It's not like I left it for good, but I took a big step back and I have a very different relationship with it now. I now see that world that was on steroids that I was in is how we are today so now everyone has a mobile phone in their hand that they open up Instagram they open up x they open up LinkedIn everyone's putting up a polished version of their lives whether it's an AI response from Claude onto LinkedIn on the perfect way to talk about being a founder or the perfect health habits that's led them to here and there or it's the like most beautiful reel on Instagram where it looks like somebody's crushing it in life we are constantly in this cycle of comparison and that's what i was in 15 years ago but i only had it i had it in daily life but now everyone has it at every second at the end of their fingertips and what that creates is an intense stress response that creates an intense amount of self-doubt self like dis-self-belief self-criticism so we live in this mindset and that is what's destroying our health more than anything else and so for me I can see this massive like cross parallel of a world where I thought no one would ever understand the world I was in because it was like on steroids and now I'm like wow that is the world that we all live in even though we're maybe not getting paid financially we are in constant loops of comparison about how great everyone else is doing and how we're not doing as great as them I fundamentally agree with you but I do believe that right now we live in a world in which I think we're able to understand, I think most of us that, for example, when we're comparing ourselves to other people in Instagram, and I'll take a slightly different analogy, people that have a great life from a financial perspective, that perhaps money doesn't equate to happiness.

22:53So we're able to, in a way, stay away from that definition of success that is more financially driven. But I feel like this is not the case in the wellness or even beauty sector. So if we see someone with a six pack, in my case, a guy with a six pack, I would think that he not only looks good, but my assumption is that he is healthy. So hence, I'm going to try and reach that. How can we determine if what society tells us looks good is healthy for us? Yeah, I think maybe your perception of that is because that you know that that's not true. But I think a lot of people that have never had the financial success won't also believe that.

23:32people think that, oh, this person has, you know, it's much easier for them. They still might not be really happy, but it's way easier for them because they're financially secure. I think when you've gone through something, you can relate and reflect back and go, well, I actually know that doesn't create happiness. But I think a lot of people don't see it like that. A lot of people are like, well, they have all this money. They might not be crazy happy, but at least they've got security in something. I think people always look at what they haven't had. And I think that's the fear of comparison and the cycle it's like this projection on what other people have and what we don't have as opposed to building up what we want the other side always is always is um you know for instance i have really curly hair my hair straight today but i've really curly hair i'm always envious people that have beautiful straight hair i'm sure if i didn't then i'd be the other side we always are kind of wanting what we don't have in the wellness world i think what's really important to understand like the landscape that we lie on is that everyone seems to have like the perfect answer for the perfect healthy life and like the truth is there just there just isn't one like the the actual the truth on that is is actually like feeling calm within yourself when you're feeling like really balanced when you're not in that comparison cycle when you're not like projecting onto someone else you actually make choices based on what your actual needs are but I think we've lost that in a compass of what our actual needs are because there is so much information out there we live in an information diet overload right now like we are bombarded with so many things that we should and shouldn't be doing and it is so hard to assess which one we should be doing how should we do that oh how should we do that a lot of it like the way that I think it's a very individual journey for every single person because everyone's going to have such a different life connected to what their outcome is the reason why i come to self-compassion which is the kind of etric of my book is once we can start being kind to ourselves which is the hardest thing i think to do because we're not taught that we're taught to be compassionate to other people we understand what compassion is and we don't cringe at that because we're like of course i'm going to be compassionate to you why would i want to sit here and be mean to you like that's not that's not what the human behavior is like we naturally want to be compassionate to others right we flip it something blocks with us and it's bizarre because it's like but that's just being that's just being understanding that's just being that's being kind it's not letting yourself off the hook it's also can be quite uncomfortable because you've got to you've got to look at yourself but like be doing it with kindness there's this friction that a lot of us can feel and so how we do that is we start with with self-compassion and if people find that really uncomfortable like we've got to love ourselves that's not that's not what self compassion is um the way that I I talk about it and where lots of people might struggle is I have this thing called the chocolate bar test and so I say to people if you have a daughter or a son or a god child or someone in your life um that you love and that child comes to you and goes mum I want a chocolate bar most parents would go okay you can have a chocolate bar they come back half an hour later, like a normal child would, because they've had this dopamine hit and they're like, I want another one.

26:54And you're like, okay, let me think about that. Some might say yes, some might say no. By the third time that child comes back and they're like, I want another one. Most people would probably think, no, this is not, I'm not doing that. I'm not giving you another one. Now they're not doing that because they want to be mean. They're not doing that because they love that child they're doing that because they love the child they're like this isn't good for you this isn't healthy for you and that comes from compassion that comes from love and that is what we don't do to ourselves we don't have that conversation in our minds with ourselves when it comes to these healthy choices so like that projection of the guy with the six pack is really really healthy like we don't have that conversation with ourselves we don't know what's going on behind that person's lives that you're seeing that's perfectly curated you know and so that conversation that we have for ourselves i'm like what is healthy for me because i really believe healthy it's just like healthy shouldn't be this hard it shouldn't be something that we find so exhausting because the the basics of health which majority of us actually aren't doing doesn't matter how many supplements or protocols or formulas that you're on like the actual baselines of health are not that difficult but a lot of us struggle to do that so we try to outsource why don't we do it why do we find it so hard to be healthy because i think we live in a system right now that demands a lot of us we stop to be mindful we stop to connect with what with us with what we need we stop to slow down we stop to make any time for ourselves so a lot of us especially women who carry a lot of stuff at home as well as in relationships as well as work like we really struggle to put ourselves at the top of a pecking order at any point and we shouldn't always be at the top of the pecking order but most of us will be the last and so not allowing ourselves to make time these things that sound so enticing and you know everyone's very smart marketing sold through fear health is now such a big industry of marketing it's sold through fear so as soon as you hit someone's fear response that's what I want that's the life I want that's how I want to feel because all of us like we all make these choices because we want to feel better and I think that's what we have to give ourselves credit for like we're all trying to do something because we want to feel better about ourselves which I think is amazing but because we put ourselves last in the pecking order because we don't make time for ourselves these things feel so desirable.

29:36And so we chase them. We want them. We spend money on them. A lot of us can chuck money at the situation because we're like, but that's going to make us feel better. But what it does is it makes us feel better for the short term, not the long term. And actually the real health behaviors, they do take time. They do require consistency.

30:00What are the short term things that do make us feel better that you're referring to? And then and then give me some examples of better long-term decisions. Yeah, so the short-term things. So, well, I reflect back on you. Like, what are the things that you've done to try and get a better fix for your health? I had a very complex wellness journey, but years ago I used to count calories and weight my food and then I did have the six pack and the 7 % body fat. And that was what I thought it would make me happy or feel better with myself or more confident. And then I quickly realized that that wasn't it because trying to control that ended up controlling me.

30:34And I needed to learn how to let that go. And that was a process on its own because, yeah, for so many reasons. So right now for me, I do try to make long-term choices. Like whatever I'm choosing today needs to have a long-term benefit, not an immediate effect. So I work out regularly, but I don't make very intense workouts thinking that I need to look great right after the workout something while everything will stack up and it's going to build over time and same with my diet like i don't need to lose a kilo and a half or two kilos this week if i want to lose a kilo let me understand why do i want to lose that kilo and if i want to do it can i do it over time so it doesn't feel too aggressive towards my body so these are the things that i do so perhaps i'm not the best person to ask this guy i know you wanted to understand if i'm doing something maybe wrong but i've done wrong things in the past so perhaps that that serves as a better example yeah and i think it's definitely not about doing something wrong because i think what you've done there is you've got data right yeah it's not about you've done something wrong you've just done a learning process like these are data points this is like god weighing my food and being obsessive about it okay i got i got an outcome but is that is that making me happy and sustainable no that gives you way more autonomy it's allowing yourself to be like wow i did that that had that effect that's not sustainable that's actually not going to be great for me long term you know they have a lot of there's a really interesting term in the book that i talk about um called orthosomnia now there's a there's a term 10 years ago called orthorexia which was the fear of anything that wasn't clean food so in the rise of wellness anything that was ultra processed people you know or anything that wasn't like raw people would be very anxious about and it would create it nearly went into the dsmv5 which is the manual for mental health disorders but it isn't kind of recognized as an eating disorder and in eating disorders like there's a huge spectrum of them it's not just anorexia nervosia or bulimia there's so many different complex types of eating disorders and orthosomnia was one of them and you could even say that you obsessively weighing your food and having the control over it is a type of eating disorder it's a type of very specific controlled way of being nothing wrong with that just really important to be aware of it now orthosomnia very very similar but with sleep so in the rise of like the wellness tech with all the different devices that we have that tell us, I think data points are really helpful, right?

32:57Data points just to know where you are. Like how is your HRV over a couple of weeks? How are you sleeping averagely over a month? Where are your stress levels naturally? Knowing like rough data points can be so beneficial because it gives you somewhere to start. But the problem is where it's tipped is that it's becoming obsessive every day. It's becoming morning and evening. We're checking in with ourselves. We're losing actually like, how do I feel? Because we're now relying on a data point to tell us how we feel. And what we know with orthosomnia is last year it was coined that people that were having this obsessive connection with their technology were having worse health sleep outcomes because they were becoming so anxious.

33:34So people were buying this tech because they wanted to have better sleep duration, but it was actually doing the opposite because it was becoming obsessive. And so this is where the unhealthy balance tips, which is really similar to the food side that you're talking about. And I think this is where we need to like separate like why it's becoming so hard. you know we have so much information of all the things we should be doing and i remember speaking to a founder last year and we were trying to figure out time to meet and he could only meet at a certain point because he wanted to be in bed by 8 p.m because of his whoop he was getting 100 sleep score when things start infringing on your life such as the other parts that make you have a happy healthy life and longevity which we actually do know are really important data points for our longevity, which is community, which is connection, all of these things purpose, when they start being inflicted by the tech-driven devices because you're not going to get 100 % sleep score, it's when we've got to start talking to ourselves.

34:34To simplify that, so when we're starting to change our, let's say, natural habits, so then we can stick to our protocols, that's when we need to feel concerned, right? Yeah, I can totally relate to this. So I remember vividly that I was making, I was making sort of like plans choices around what I could eat and when I could eat those. And also I completely lost my sort of like internal understanding of when I was full and not full because everything was based on the grams that I was eating or the calories that I've already eaten, but not necessarily on what does feels good. What am I energized?

35:11Is this, is this what my body needs for the day? so then let's say that somebody like like myself those years ago somebody's going through something like that very similar whether it's with their sleep or whether it's with their diet you're at a point in which you can identify yourself changing lifestyle plans based on this you know health or wellness protocols and it's becoming obsessive what do you do then at that point so if you are somebody that is i would i would explain that more as the optimizer so two different people that i talk about a lot the optimizers and the lapses but they're actually very commonly connected, even though they're at the very different ends of the scale.

35:47So a lot of all of this in my belief and where a lot of my researchers come from in this book is self-worth. So self-worth is like foundational to all of the choices that we make. Like why are we becoming so connected to these outcomes? Like, and this is what connects to self-esteem and it's different to self-worth. So let me just explain a little bit about this because I think it allows you to then take the step forward into what to do. So self-esteem is now considered quite a bad metric within your self-worth. So self-esteem is basically reliant on you knowing that you're going to get that outcome from the day on the food.

36:25Now, if your weight fluctuates or maybe your abs start changing or somebody comes along with better abs than you or a better gym regime, you're going to feel shit. That means that your self-esteem is very much reliant on only the outcome. when you walk past someone who doesn't have as good routine as you or doesn't look as good as you guess what your self-esteem is going to go up so your self-esteem is very variable on external outcomes now that's quite dangerous now for instance if I wrote this book and I left and you said yeah I wrote a better book and my book became a bestseller my self-esteem could drop if my book did better than yours my self-esteem would higher it's a really bad variable because we're connecting it to external outcomes.

37:10So when we look at our self-worth, it's really important that whatever those outcomes change, our internal state doesn't change. And that's where the compassion side comes in, right? So I can completely acknowledge that someone else's book is going to be better than mine, but it doesn't distinguish the work that I put into my book. You can also see that somebody else might have a better outcome in their health and how they look, but that doesn't make you any less. And so that's where it's really important to start. so one I would say if you are getting to that stage of the obsessiveness is to take those things out it's the first rule it's the same with any obsession with social media if you're someone who is constantly scrolling through your phone to feel worthy or waiting for external validations you remove it that's what's really really important is you first of all like take those things away you allow yourself to not be ruled and you try to listen something called interception which is like the feelings within your body and I think this is the disconnect that I was talking about a lot before and I talk about it as the wellness disconnect we've disconnected from our internal state of ourselves and this can feel very maybe abstract for people to start to hear because we do run on data points from out on the outside but we've got to start relying on our own data points inside because that's actually truly where we will for it to feel better and start to make better health choices so I would say a lot of the work starts with working into your self-compassion and into your self-worth.

38:37Once you can start harnessing that part of the area of your life, these other things will become less influential. And you are going to have moments where you go back to that for security, but then you need to start coming back to yourself. And so a lot of the steps on self-compassion, and I talk about it in three stages, okay? So step one is self-empathy. So we can all empathize with each other, like you and I can empathize here today I can hear your story and I could empathize with it and you can hear mine you can empathize with mine but it's really important that we connect back to the internal self-empathy that we feel right not very often do we do that so I'd say that as I also note that as seeing so step one is seeing which is self-empathy step two is going into mindfulness so our mindful brain is really important so from evolutionary standpoints the reasons why we're like that is because you would have been an amazing hunter-gatherer, you would have survived.

39:29You would have been on the whole time your amygdala would be firing. That's not healthy in today's environment because our stresses have totally changed. And so what we need to connect more is to the mindful brain, to not go into the overdrive, into the anxious brain, and we need to go into the calmer brain. That requires a lot more work than we think. So when we become self-empathy, once we connect to ourselves that gives us a moment that allows us to connect more to the mindful brain which is more rational and more logical okay the one that's not is more reactive and that's when we never get the great health outcomes the instant oh my gosh that person's doing better than me reactive brain we need to go into the rational brain that's when we can start developing the muscle of self-compassion and then that is the second phase and the last phase which is the shifting phase is the resilience phase that's when you step in to making action you step into the uncomfortable part but that's right for you and those three steps are really really important for developing the muscle of self-compassion and doing it with kindness and the way that I say is using the friend filter right now normally if I came to you and said okay well Alberto I'm like constantly looking at what this person looks like I'm weighing all my food the whole time like it's kind of becoming a big thing obsession in my mind and it's kind of destroying how I'm feeling my emotions are fluctuating depending on what my outcome is what would you say totally unhealthy and then what advice would you give me stop comparing yourself to others but then for example I feel like and I definitely have some friends that fall under that category they don't compare themselves to others they compare themselves to themselves yeah so flip it so then what would you say to that person

41:18I find that advice more challenging because I think everyone should improve it comes down to the definition of improvement so it's losing that kilo really improving so I would reframe it towards that like what is the real goal and this is something that I struggled many years in my life particularly my wellness journey so the real goal is not to look my best but it's to feel my best so it was shifting the target not only the journey but also the target because i also believe that in business for many years i've sort of like shifted my mindset into something that right now feels great i was placing all of my all the value that i was generating in the business into the result rather than the journey and when you when you achieve the result by design by definition that that moment is much shorter but the journey is much longer so I've sort of like was able to learn how to enjoy that journey with everything that comes with that journey right but then in my in my wellness experience particularly years ago I was only happy when I was living under that like body fat percentage but then during that journey and I needed to make several sacrifices don't eat this don't go out to that place like don't go and see your friend because you don't know what they can serve in that restaurant.

42:35They can, I don't know, offer you the food without the sauce and so on. And that journey is not nice. It's not nice for your friends. It's not nice for yourself. So I quickly realized that I could not achieve that goal without that journey. Because if you, and I'll disclose this, and I've been through this fitness journey and fitness experience, if you want to have a 7%, 8 % body fat, especially for for for guys that are trying to achieve that six pack you will not achieve it without a huge dietary sacrifice not only at the gym and that dietary sacrifice it's probably one of the biggest sacrifices you're going to have to do in your life because it impacts everything else that you do because you need to eat three times a day right where do you eat those three different meals so you're you're probably one of them is at home the other one is in the workplace and then the third one could be in a social setting you're going to be restraining those three different environments and how much headspace is that going to take that you could be perhaps investing into anything else in life so that's that's been my my my biggest sort of like discovery i'll sort of like summarize it is it's not necessarily changing the journey it's changing the goal the goal is not to look like that the goal is not to have the six pack the goal is not to have that muscle mass and i feel like women in a different way and have loads of friends that agree with this and also my fiancee they're being told that particular women their social currency right now it's it's beauty and the definition of beauty is quite dynamic yeah one day we're being told that you need to be very skinny and then the models sizes and whatnot they change and now you need to be you could have a bigger a bigger shape or bigger body but then we go back to being skinny with it you know drugs like osempic so it's almost like you're constantly reframing the narrative into what beauty is and particularly women they need to fall under that category so for me that comes down to the the the end goal the end goal is not to look good the end goal is to feel good and how can we make those choices to feel good and this is my question to you what are the choices that we can make what should we eat what should we not eat how should we exercise all of these questions to then feel good yeah so I think like thank you for sharing that because I think so many men will relate to what you've just said and I think this is the thing that a lot of us can feel very isolated in that journey right like these intrusive thoughts that come in and we all just think like we distance ourselves as soon as you know that you're distancing yourselves from social situations or they are controlling your life we know that that's not healthy right so your outcome there is to be healthy but the decisions to get there is not healthy so there's the parallel world that you live in right and that's where it's kind of destroying the health side of things and so the decisions to make to be healthy everything that you described so much of that is where your self-worth sits like that is like the epitome of health in my opinion like the foundation and we can go off into all the things that i believe you can consume to be healthy the the right amount of sleep the right amount of movement we can go through all of those things and a lot of those things are in here but you can do all of those but if you are stressed in the process of doing that if you are in constant self-doubt if you live in constant self-criticism your body is going to react to that not the food and what's really important about that is this is where i think people get lost they get so fixated on if i eat these three meals a day if i am controlled in this way of being if i get my eight nine hours worth of sleep if i get up at 5 a.m and do my cold plunge if i take all these supplements i am going going to be healthy.

46:18This is where we've lost the conversation. How do you feel in that process? How are you connecting to yourself? How obsessive are you being about it? How controlled is that? How is your stress levels? Because that level of thinking will create a stress response. Now, all the things that we're dying of today is not infectious diseases. It's the opposite. We've got antibiotics and we're very lucky that we're not dying from that anymore. We're dying from things that we can try and prevent a lot of these come from inflammation the biggest thing of inflammation is stress we're more stressed today than ever before so we have 80 000 thoughts and 80 of them are negative we just like sit with that for one second so we connect that to our health journey all of these things that we're telling ourselves like well we could have done better today that person did better than me i went off plan here didn't sleep very well last night the constant, constant rhetoric thoughts that we all have, and we all do, and some might have them more extreme than others, but we all have them.

47:17If we are having the perfect outcome of our diet, but we're living in that constant straight of self-doubt, self-criticism, that is raising our cortisol levels. That is raising our stress hormones. So I'm going to give you a really interesting study here, which helps kind of identify this. So Ellen Langer is like one of the amazing women researchers at Harvard. And she did this really interesting study called the Chambermaid study, where she took two sets of Chambermaids and she said to them, how often do you exercise? And they all looked at her and said, well, like never, we're on our feet all day, like we don't exercise.

47:53So she said to half of that group, this is how much that you would expend in energy if you were in the gym. This is how much you do every day. So if we think about our gym routines, we go there, we want a specific outcome, right? So she said, this is what you're doing. Changing beds, taking laundry up and down the stairs. This is how much energy you're expending. She looked at all of their biomarkers. So what they found after a month is that 10 % of their blood pressure dropped. And their circumference of their waist to hip had reduced. But they didn't do anything different. They were just telling themselves that they were exercising.

48:26As they were still doing their daily routines. How does that work then? It's your mindset. It's what you're telling yourself. They were telling themselves that they were expending energy. They were telling themselves that all these things that they were doing was making a difference to their body. The other group that weren't telling themselves that, nothing changed. So your body, in this case, is burning calories just from the thought of burning calories, right? Wow, that's so interesting. This is why I keep going back to, you know, when you're saying, like, what are the things that we should be doing?

49:00Yeah. This is why understanding where your mindset sits with your health goals is the most important start. Another study, very similar with Ellen Langer and Dr. Ilya Kron from Stanford, another incredible researcher who looks again at perception of mindset in health behaviors, had a group where she gave them two milkshakes. She said, this is indulgent and this is diet. Two different groups. Then she wanted to measure their hunger hormone. So I just want you to think about this as you're making your own health decisions, right, on the foods that you're deciding to eat. So the ones that had the indulgent milkshake, their hunger hormone rose and said, I'm full.

49:40And she could see it because they took blood pressure. They took their blood measures. The ones that were in the diet shake, their hunger hormone didn't rise, which meant that they still felt hungry. The shakes had identical calories in. Neither of them were different. Neither one was indulgent. Not one was diet. They were both exactly the same amount of calories. But their body responded to what they were telling themselves. So when we're looking at health choices, if you're telling yourself, I'm going to live in deprivation on calorie counting. I'm going to be more hungry. You're going to be more hungry.

50:17Even if I'm eating exactly the same quantity of food, but I wouldn't tell myself I'm in deprivation mode or I'm on a diet. Yes. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah. And that's why this is the most important step. So we should never be on a diet as a psychological framework. We should never be on a diet. So meta-analysis is show, which is the hierarchy of all research, right? You have your observational and epidemiological, and then you go to your random control trials, and then you go into meta-analysis, which look at all of the studies done in that area. What they looked at is all different diets done over 12 months.

50:51So from the DASH diet, Mediterranean, all the different diets that people will look at. People all lost weight. they all had improved measures within two to three months but in 12 months they all returned to their baseline so it works short term we were talking about a minute ago right it works and then they go back to where they were at baseline so diets don't work like we need to create lifestyle changes right you are if you think i try and think about life um health as a lifespan and you're just telling me about like this incredible journey that you've been on as an entrepreneur before we sat down all the highs the lows the wisdoms the things that you've learned health is so similar health is not meant to be a formulized metric that you can measure and be specifically controlled with every day because that is not what life is like you need to know the things that you can put in to make sure that you support yourself to try and get adequate amounts of sleep to try and make sure that you're nourishing yourself with good foods that you can make the right choices, but you're not meant to be so rigid that you live in a mindset where you tell yourself that you need to be doing better and better and better every day.

51:56Because that is what's going to affect how your body's responding to that food. So you can have the best diet in the world. You can have the model diet like I had. But when I found out all of this research, there's no wonder why I ended up in hospital. I had like the perfect, perfect diet, but my body gave up. What is the model diet? Can you describe it for me? well I kind of put that in quotes I don't know if people are listening to this in audio so the reason why I'm doing that is because you know I had the the green smoothies I had the personal trainer I had all the supplements you're meant to have I had like all of the vegetables and reduce my meat I had like the calorie controlled perfect diet but my body gave up on me and so the mindset piece if you're telling yourself you're not good enough if you're telling yourself you need to improve if you're telling yourself every single day all of these constant thoughts in your brain this is what's trickling down to the downstream effects that we're all trying to control this is changing ourselves it's changing the way our hormones our hunger hormones all of these things are responding and like this is what science is now showing and so we're so fixated on like this like what should i be eating exactly what i should be eating how should i be training but if our mindset is having a different response then that's going to be changing us on a physiological level and then how can then we define maybe let's not use the word diet but a nutritional plan for ourselves that is that is good for us yeah so how can we define so i think first of all i think we're it doesn't matter what camp you sit on in the food side of things we will all come to the understanding that like just general ultra processed food is the main bulk of our diet is not good every single person will probably agree with that right but two-thirds of our shopping baskets are full of it.

53:42And I think this isn't just to say that, you know, this is like the big, the large, large percentage of the population. It's also things that are like the protein bars. You know, I have so many people coming into my clinic and saying, I don't eat ultra processed foods. And I see their food diary, and it is full of ultra processed foods. Now that's not demonizing that and saying you shouldn't have that. Can you give me, sorry before, sorry for interrupting you. Can you give me some examples of ultra processed foods that people may not think they're ultra processed and they think they're making the right choice when they're buying them?

54:13Yeah. So there's never been like a real clear definition in scientific literature of really what ultra processed foods are. Because you can also have processed and ultra processed and they're also quite different. So for instance, bread is processed. Okay. Sourdough is processed, but you can also get more bread that's more processed than sourdough that can have more than three and four ingredients. so the way that I get people to try and understand processed foods and ultra processed foods the ultra processed foods the ones we need to stay away from pick up the back of whatever you're buying how many ingredients does it have on the back of that list what's the first three ingredients they're the most common ingredients in that food so if you can't even describe what the ingredients are then that's probably a sign that like it's going to be an ultra processed food sometimes there's a list of like 20 different ingredients um so that's like a really fast easy way but a lot of these things that are like healthy protein bars or healthy breakfast bars they're not healthy breakfast bars a lot of them are full of like sugar and so many different foods that are going to spike your blood glucose and aren't sustainable you know things like oats for example are processed but they're not ultra processed they don't go through constant rounds of manufacturing and added ingredients in.

55:28So we need to be really careful that when we're navigating in a supermarket, we can start making distinctions. Now, marketing can be really amazing. And it can put things like high fiber, high in B vitamins, high in CoQ10 or whatever. And it can put these stickers all over a certain product. And your brain immediately, because you make three seconds to make a decision, this is going to be good for me. That doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be good for you. Even some supplements can be filled with so many different bulking agents that they're not good for you and so it's about just using a little bit more of that curiosity when you're buying a food just because it's saying that it's really healthy doesn't necessarily mean it is doesn't mean that it's going to sustain you you know there's a lot of things now that we've gone to drinking our calories as opposed to eating our calories like we've lost the crunch in our lunch which i think is really important because that is what helps connect you to your satiety signals to your hunger signals that you said that you lost right so a lot of us might grab a protein shake thinking like oh I've just fueled myself, but it confuses the signals within our body.

56:28And so there's a lot of like meal replacement drinks now that people will drink. Like we're losing the fiber that is so important for our gut microbiome. The fiber is the fertilizer, feeds the gut microbes. That's where your immune system is built. So if you're just drinking endless calories, your brain is not registering that you've had enough to eat. Your brain is confusing all of these things that you're consuming because you've not had any crunching or lunch, not having the fiber that you need in your in your day and so but then what we might be saying is i'm adding a fiber supplement in but that's fine but are you consuming enough fiber in your day and so making sure that you have enough diversity within your diet is like one of the number one things that we most of us will agree on when it comes to health and so there was a really interesting study done years ago that looked at meat eaters versus vegetarians there's always been a massive debate between these two kind of subgroups of people.

57:22And you've got to remember that like everything within food is an identity and a storytelling. You know, the carnivore diet is a very masculine diet. You know, the detox diet is the very like feminine and purity diet. And so we all tell ourselves these stories of identities that we want to follow, right? Because it gives us like a place of belonging. But when you actually like bring it down to science and they looked at these two groups they wanted to look at the gut microbiome and the meat eaters actually had a more thriving gut microbiome not because they ate meat but because they have more diverse plant foods in their diet than the vegetarians so it isn't about sitting in one camp or another it's actually about like the amount of diversity that you can create in your diet so like how many whole grains how many different types of like herbs and spices can you put and people forget that's like your how many do we need well i don't want to scare people because in the uk we would say it's like you we have this like big public health campaign that's like eat your five a day science shows that we need around like nine different types of whole foods fruit and vegetables a day but you can get that in so many different types right you can put that in with spices with herbs with legumes it's not just about having different types of broccoli and carrots and all those things in your plate is all the different types of diversity and I think Indian and Israeli cuisine does this amazingly because they are so full of different types of spices and herbs and they mix them all together and I always talk about building your plate as building it like a Japanese like Buddha bowl type of way and I think when you can mix all of your different protein and fiber sources together like in a big Buddha bowl you get that diversity I think so many of us are like I'll have a slab of chicken and then I'll have some potatoes and then I'll have three portions of veg and that becomes actually not as abundant as you think and also becomes quite boring and so thinking about mixing it into like a Buddha bowl and having diversity so having your protein from things like legumes and then maybe prawns and then maybe some quinoa that's in there you're getting a mixture of your protein sources all of them in the same meal yeah not not split across different you mix them into like a Buddha bowl type of way of eating so you're getting an abundance and i think when it comes to food and nutrition we've got to be thinking about an abundance mindset not about a depleted mindset one it's going to change the way that you feel with that food and how you physiologically react that we know that we've just spoken about that but two like it's so much nicer to think about an abundance right and so i say to people like every time you go shopping like if that's once a week you can do a big shop add a brand new whole food that you've never cooked with before into your trolley one a week after four weeks that's four new whole foods over six months and you're doubling that by the end of the year you've got all of these new foods that you've not stressed yourself out about and the more that you add in the more goodness and the more nourishment you add in just the natural stuff starts to fall out without you having to obsess about it i think when people go to uphaul their lifestyle their diet their nutrition they go in with all guns blazing and they're like right i'm I'm just going to, just stripping this all out.

1:00:32I'm buying all of these supplements. This is my protocol. This is what I'm doing. And that's why it doesn't last because your brain is like overwhelmed with the amount of information. It's like me now leaving here and saying, here's 20 books to read. Go for it. You're like, I can only do one at a time. It's the same with our health and nutrition. We cannot uphold all of it at one go. It's really important to build in consistency because that is what's going to sustain you long-term. And I say to anyone within health and food, if you actually want to make a change, learn five to 10 mils over the next coming months.

1:01:06That when you're tired, when you're exhausted, you don't have to think something new. Your brain is so lazy. You'll naturally know something so quick and easy to make because it's within your routine. The things when we fall off track and off balance is when we don't have those systems in place. so if you've got five to ten meals under your belt that you know take you 20 minutes and you're not really going to think about have that that creates you a kind of a backup plan that we all need so nutrition and health is so much about consistency right so much about awareness you have to make time for it but not so much time that like overhauls your lifestyle

1:01:46What are your thoughts on different forms of fasting? Oh, there's so much research on this out there. It's very different for men and women. I think that's one of the most important things. One of the biggest things that I've got to understand over the last couple of years is that so much of the data today is based on men's health and not on women's health. We're getting so much better at it and we're doing a lot more studies around women now, which is amazing. But the reason why women haven't been studied on is because we have menstrual cycles, right? So we fluctuate in our hormones all the time.

1:02:20And so it's very hard to do a controlled study on a woman when you can't control the outcome because their hormones are fluctuating. A man's hormones don't fluctuate like a woman. So you get much more of a controlled, isolated outcome. So that's why so many studies have been done on men. So one of my mentors, and he even wrote the foreword for my book, is Dr. Stacey Sims. and she's like one of the world-renowned nutrition and fitness experts within women's health. And she has really got me to understand how much women shouldn't be fasting, especially before they train. Now, I think fasting, you also have to think about like, well, how do we define fasting?

1:02:56Dr. Satyapanda was the first person who did the 16-8, right? You normally finish your evening meal, you fast overnight, you might break your fast at like 8, 9 in the morning. Is that intermittent fasting? Or is that just time-restrictive eating? They're two very, very different things. And so finishing a meal at 7 p.m. at night and having a 12-hour fast would be known as, could be called fasting. Or you could be going to one o 'clock in the afternoon. Now, for women, we know that it's really, really important to not fast before you train. It's really important. It doesn't give you the good health outcomes.

1:03:29So women, the research is like, don't fast before you train. Make sure you have at least 20 to 30 grams of protein. So even if you struggle - First thing in the morning. Yeah. So even if you struggle to consume, a lot of people can struggle to consume food in the morning. I get it. I can be one of them. So you can use a protein coffee. So you put a couple of tablespoons of protein powder into a cold coffee, mix it together, you put some milk on top, and then you have that. It's giving you some fuel for energy for when you go to the gym. For women, that's amazing. Men, very different. Men can intermittent fast.

1:04:02Men can train fasted. And the health benefits there are shown. um where intermittent fasting really started was with the gut microbiome and people that really struggled with you know Crohn's and colitis and um ulcerative colitis things like that and what they found there is that people that actually did have prolonged points of not eating actually had a better healthy gut microbiome so it's really inconclusive into like each area and that's why I think there's like not one resounding answer overall. Men, it's not as detrimental. Women, I would really advise against it. When it comes to the gut microbiome, really important to work with a specialist and gastroenterologist to see if this could be something beneficial because it allows your gut time to repair on its own.

1:04:47But I think more important than intermittent fasting, the most important thing is to actually, and I think this is what I believe, to look at your snacking. So the reason why people are so obsessed with intermittent fasting is because we haven't let ourselves time for our gut to rest so actually something that is really healthy is finishing your dinner at seven and then not going to the you know cupboard at nine ten o 'clock at night when you're like oh a little bit peckish and sometimes you want to and sometimes that's okay but a lot of the time it becomes a habitual and so then you're snacking late at night that's going to be affecting your sleep because your blood is going to your digestion to then digest that food as opposed to allowing it to go to the brain and so rather than being the extreme the first thing I would say is like try and reduce the snacking try and stop your eating after dinner and then resume it again at breakfast and then how do we know if we are in that snacking example how do we know if we're making the right health choice from a mental perspective from a mental health perspective so how can I determine if my body actually needs this snack or this is an emotional snacking situation how can we know that it's hard it's hard that's becoming more in tune with yourself so one it's listening to your hunger signals so you mentioned earlier you were like am i doing am i full am i telling myself i'm full so there's something called the hunger scale that you can look up it's also in the book we should be sitting between five and six like not fully full still feeling like we've got a bit of space the japanese do this amazingly like the 80 full but we've lost contact with our hunger signals we've lost 80 full after every meal yeah yeah interesting so you shouldn't be getting to the point where you're like unbutting your trousers and going like god i feel so full yeah we've all been there and sometimes it's fine to be there if you're really enjoying something but like not getting into that habit we've lost connection with like our true true hunger signals the other thing that loses connection with the hunger signal so one it's getting to the 80 % full feeling that you've had enough the way I also say that is you can also start with smaller plates right your perception of your food is a really big thing so a lot of us now over the years our plate sizes have changed and so especially when you go to America you notice this even more that the plate sizes are huge but the perception of the plate will change your hunger for your hunger signals so if you've got a massive plate and you put a small portion on there your brain's like that's not going to fill me up if you make more of a medium-sized plate and you put the same amount of food on the medium-sized plate your perception is like yeah that actually feels like pretty good so first of all looking like what are you serving it on is really really important and then actually allowing yourself 20 minutes post eating for your brain to catch up with your gut so it takes 20 minutes for your brain to receive the signals from your gut to tell you how much food you've consumed so normally what we do is we eat really really really quickly we eat mindless instead of mindfully and then we're like oh i'll go and get seconds or I'll have some more bread on the table or I'll have some more whatever it's going around well we've like not connected to where we are like our brains like still trying to receive these signals well so we're still eating so one it's like slowing down like that's why having dinner with someone else is amazing because you're in conversation you're talking you're not obsessing just about the food your brain's allowing time for your gut to say ah I'm better I'm oh that's just okay I've just had some pasta I'm now yeah I'm feeling like quite comfortably full but your brains had time to connect and then after 20 minutes like if you still feel actually i'm really still hungry then that's your body saying go and have some more but don't do it five minutes after so allowing that time which is why the mindfulness the part that i spoke about in the second phase is really really essential we live in a world of like go go go like how many times will you eat walking along the road like drinking a shake along the road like grabbing something as you're going into a taxi, like cooking as you're on the phone, talking to somebody, like we're so disconnected from what our body is telling us.

1:08:51So that's really, really important. The other thing that's really important that people really get confused about when it comes to hunger signals is thirst. So when you're 2 % dehydrated, your thirst signals will switch on, which means that you're already dehydrated. So a lot of us confuse hunger with thirst. So I always say before any meal, drink like one big glass of water, like 30 minutes before. Because what that does is it creates satiety for your thirst signals. So you're then not mixing hunger and thirst. A lot of us will like go towards food because we're really, really thirsty. And it's one of the most like simple health hacks that's out there.

1:09:29Like we don't drink enough water. We need to be drinking water every hour, all the time. And if we're not doing that, we get confused with our hunger signals. so having a big glass of water half an hour before you eat is like one of the biggest determinants to also not overeating um and i don't think half of us are conscious of how much water we drink and so that is like one of the most important things when it comes to how much water should we drink a day depends it's variable on like your exercise rate how much energy you're expending how much sweat you're releasing so if you're someone who is like an endurance athlete or you're doing saunas all the time or you're somebody who's doing hot yoga every morning, you need to be consuming a good litre more than other people.

1:10:14People say it's anything between like one and a half to two litres a day. But if you're doing a lot of endurance, you know, up to three litres a day, if you're excessively sweating, have electrolytes. But if you're not, do not consume electrolytes. Why not? Well, it's full of sodium. So the one biggest thing that we say to reduce blood pressure and heart attacks is to not have too much salt in your diet. Electrolytes are full of sodium. So you're just consuming a lot more salt within your diet that you don't need. You only need that to replenish the salts that you've lost. So if you're somebody who's had like really bad diarrhea for the last like three days, so you've got like a really horrible like gut bug or you've got food poisoning, we need electrolytes, right?

1:10:56You're losing too much. If you're someone who's just done a really intensive sauna or you've just run a marathon or you're running over like an hour a day, you need electrolytes because your salt balance is depleted. We have enough salt in our diet. We do not need to be adding more sodium into our diet. And there's very different things, like things like POTS. This is like another autoimmune condition. That can also be quite helpful. So there's very specific. So again, this is like very top level. There's always going to be anomalies. But I think saying that everyone is an electrolyte every day is just like not helpful advice.

1:11:28Is there a place in our lives for sugar? well that hits with dopamine receptors um which are very overwhelmed right now we need more oxytocin in our lives than than dopamine um sugar can be there for joy i think like we've got to remember the happiness in our lives right we've got to remember the things that give us i i love chocolate and i'm not i'm not cutting that out like that makes me feel happy i don't have it every day but like sugar is a currency amazing for endurance right if you're running a marathon I would like you to have sugar. I need you to get off that start line. I need a quick glucose response from you.

1:12:04It's also very condensed. It's not going to make you feel heavy when you're running a marathon, right? So sports drinks are full of sugar, but they are there because we need to get that into that athlete, that person who's running that's so integral for their performance. We're just burning that off. That's not staying in your system. Excess sugar, too much sugar is also not healthy right so consuming syrups and having your latte with a hazelnut syrup in it not a great choice not going to make you feel great um i think it's a very nuanced conversation i think we have way too much sugar in our diets you know there's a really interesting part of chapatis which is like a a country that never had any coca-cola or fizzy drinks and they had zero rates of diabetes coca-cola infiltrated the country and within 30 years they've got like a huge obesity and diabetic epidemic, you know, so it's all driven towards sugar.

1:13:01So we are now in a situation where type 2 diabetes now is becoming more prevalent than ever before. My father had it, I speak from experience, and I really changed his diet and we reversed type 2 diabetes. Like sugar isn't the healthiest option, but it's also not important to demonize sugar. Like I don't think we should be living in this rhetoric where it's like sugar is poison like sugar can also bring you joy sugar if you're somebody who has a lot of energy and you're burning it off it's not going to be detrimental to your health there's like such a fine balance between these conversations and i think anyone that's like sugar is poison or sugar is amazing it's like it's way more nuanced than that i think again like being aware of like how much is in your diet is really important and people might not be if you're consuming a lot of ultra processed foods or if you're consuming a lot of low fat foods that will be replaced with sugar and so like looking at your diet and thinking am i relying on sugar because too much sugar will also affect your mental health how so too much sugar creates a lot of like high and low blood um blood glucose spikes and dot and dips and so we shouldn't ever be having like just one glucose spike like this and it shouldn't also be like this it will go like this that's just natural that's really healthy just to go up and down like small mountains but we shouldn't be having huge spikes and what sugar does is it gives you the huge spike it's like a crack for the it's like crack for the brain and then very very quickly because it has a short life it drops again very very quickly and so living on a lot of sugar your brain goes oh my god i want more of that like that gave me a good hook that made me feel great so naturally you need a quick release in carbohydrates so your body is going to want to have more of that so making sure that you're aware of like how much is in your diet and are you relying on that if you're somebody who is anxious if you're somebody who has like struggles with mental health that's going to be affecting your mental health there's such a big link between diet and mental health and so knowing that you're creating a stable blood glucose response having your protein having your clompex carbohydrates having enough water is hugely going to affect your mental health like there was an amazing study done by dr felice jacket who did the smiles trial and it was the first ever RCT placebo trial that looked at people that had clinical depression versus non-clinical depression and she put them into control groups so she gave one group the modified Mediterranean diet but it was basically a lot more than what people would normally be eating so it's between like five and eight portions of whole grains a day which is a lot right but it's based on the Mediterranean diet and the control group didn't make any changes to their diet they just saw a befriender not a therapist someone that they just spoke to about things that they loved and enjoyed every day the participants that changed their diet in the modified mediterranean diet had a 33 remission in their clinical depression symptoms just by changing their diet funnily enough the befriending group they also had an eight percent improvement but they didn't change their diet they just spoke about things they love and i was like this is amazing because 33 % of people who have lived with clinical depression, which is debilitating for people for their entire life, 33 % went into remission just from changing their diet.

1:16:17The 8 % also changed, but they didn't change their diet. And I thought, well, imagine if you added in talking about things you love, being compassionate, being kind, and changing your diet to the Mediterranean diet, imagine the clinical outcome you could have also with mental health. It could be profound. And so that's why these go so hand in hand. But looking at things like the Mediterranean diet is such an amazing way to support your mental and physical health. And that's where most of the data really sits within the scientific literature of good health outcomes. And alcohol? Should we be consuming it at all?

1:16:55And if so, how frequent? This is such a hard one to answer because there's a two-pronged approach, right? So if you want to dial it down to like take mental health and joy and socializing, which are also really beneficial for your health out of it, if you actually just want to look at like the cellular outcome, alcohol doesn't give you any good outcomes with your health, with your gut microbiome and things like that. It does create inflammation. It does create dehydration. And so we know that now from research, there's not really any benefit to alcohol. People will say red wine's got polyphenols in and it creates all of these good things.

1:17:38The research isn't that supportive in the area of how good it is for your actual functioning of your health day to day. Flip side of that. Alcohol also brings connection. It also brings joy. It also makes you socialize. it also creates laughter these are also massive health metrics of longevity and so what i think when it comes to alcohol is it's about just being really conscious about how much you're consuming it's about being aware of how much you're consuming when you're consuming it not over consuming it and not having it every day and not doing it on your own i think there is zero health benefits of sitting at home drinking a glass of wine because you're not getting that connection right but if a really good friend wants to go out and have a drink with you and share stories and laugh then I do think there's a really good health benefit to it so I think it's quite nuanced but I think having the self-awareness of like how much you're consuming is really really important.

1:18:30I want to talk about supplements because right now we live in a world in which we're being told to consume four grams of creatine every morning and your protein shake from my very basic and probably even binary understanding of what processed foods are it seems to me that most of the supplements are processed should we be taking them and if so which ones should we take supplements are really interesting um they're really interesting well for me especially as a nutritionist right now i think it's what one is so individual on the health metrics of that person so like without looking at someone's biomarkers you have no idea of what supplements that person should be taking For instance, I do believe everyone should be taking a vitamin D3 if you're living somewhere in the northern hemisphere where you don't get very much sunlight.

1:19:19Even if it's sunny outside, 90 % of us spend time indoors, and the only way that we get this vitamin is via the sun, right? And we need to have our arms and everything out for 20 minutes to get that adequate sun exposure. We now put so much sunscreen on that we're also blocking that injection of vitamin D because it's actually a hormone. It's not a vitamin. Should we not put all that much sunscreen on? Not for the first 20 minutes going into the sun. Because it's really important that you make the conversion of vitamin D. So that's really important. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't wear sunscreen.

1:19:49Like you should be wearing sunscreen, but you need to be getting your arms out on it for 20 minutes to allow that to absorb into the skin. So it's really, really important. When it comes to creating, creating monohydrate is one of the most kind of researched supplements out there at the moment. And also it's got some really good, interesting research around women, which I find really interesting, especially for postmenopausal women. If you're having a lot of meat in your diet, if you're having a very good balanced diet, you might not necessarily need creatine. A lot of us have looked at it for muscle growth, but it's also been really, really, really beneficial for our brain and cognitive functioning.

1:20:27So a lot of people will advocate creatine monohydrate. I do think it's important to have your blood levels checked to see where your creatine markers are it's definitely not going to be a detrimental supplement unless you have gi effects if you have a poor tummy it also can create a lot more excess diarrhea and tummy problems so it's really important if you start creatine you start on three grams and you build yourself up daily yeah don't start at the five to ten grams a lot of supplements a lot of studies will show that you know there was one recently that for postmenopausal women up to 20 grams a day could be really beneficial for some to help with their sleep and things like that that needs a lot of build-up and you really should be seeing somebody who can kind of help you on that kind of journey with you it also doesn't mean that it's necessarily for everybody so i think like going in and first of all like i think everyone should have their blood tested once a year just to see where they are i think we fill ourselves with so many supplements yeah and sometimes it's more detrimental um so having a look at that but i do think the ones that are really important are vitamin d i do think creatine monohydrate is very um research so i do think it's a very safe supplement protein i would love you to be getting it not from a protein shake i'd love you to be getting it from actual food um i think it's way more beneficial and also you're not just getting protein you're going to be getting if you're having that from salmon you're going to be getting omega-3 long-chain fatty acids you're going to be getting all the other things that come with that as opposed to just the supplement so i think that's when food is is really really critical is making sure that you're not relying on the supplements to give you the 30 grams of protein in the meal you're relying on the meal to give you the 30 grams of protein

1:22:12i want to ask you a few personal and more reflective questions if that's okay when you look back at your younger self in modeling what do you feel for her right now um what do i feel for her i feel

1:22:36i i feel gratitude for her actually how so because i think she's going to go on a wild journey and i think sometimes if we live in a victim or sadness mindset of things that happened that maybe didn't go I don't think it's healthy I think I'm I wouldn't change any part of my life because it's made me have a purpose and and explore this way more and I think I don't know I think you need that to build resilience I think it's essential I feel some people don't go through things they don't build resilience they don't I don't know they don't go forward and I I think like I I feel great I have I had amazing experiences as much as there was hard times I had experiences I would never change and I'm so grateful for so I feel yeah I think I think I've had a very colorful life and I wouldn't change that so I had a little gratitude for her what has been the darkest period in your journey oh these these are these are tough questions I'm So darkest period.

1:23:45I would say, I mean, to be fair, the 23 burnout was pretty bad. I also had another one when I was writing my book. I came out of a really hard relationship and then had a bad obstruction at the same time whilst trying to juggle all of the stuff that I was doing. and that felt really hard because I was like, I shouldn't be back here again. I'm writing a book on self-compassion, but I was still learning about it. You don't write a book about something, I think, unless you are very curious about it. It made the book a 10 times better book, but it was a really hard period for me. What did you learn from it?

1:24:27I learned self-compassion. I learned to be kind to myself. I learned to see myself in a different light. I gave myself so much self-belief. I did, for the heart, I had more success from that than ever before. And that's because I like, I didn't let it drown me. I like, I rose and I didn't see a victim. I saw like a purpose from that. And I think that's like the self-belief is what it gave me. It gave me compassion. It gave me to be nice to myself. How did you used to see yourself?

1:25:03um i think that's been fluctuating i don't think that's a static answer i think like you fluctuate in how you see yourself and what your life's reflecting at the time um i mean i definitely used to see myself as not smart i definitely used to see myself as um

1:25:26yeah that's pretty how I used to see myself and that's probably when I went off to prove myself a point and then I got to a point where I don't need to prove myself anymore like I I actually know that of myself um so yeah probably that how did you get to that new state of mind and through well I guess through going through the hard times like going through I mean retraining restarting a whole new life like rebuilding being aware of who I surrounded myself with I think when you believe more in who you are and you understand who you are like I I went into understanding who I was I understand how my brain works I I think when you get to that point where you're like this is who I am this is how my brain works you attract like the right things for you I put myself in the right environments like I took myself out of the wrong environments and I think naturally that's that's how you get to that point what would you say to someone that is right now struggling with self-worth we're all struggling with self-worth at some point like you always will at some point but detaching from the external and reattaching to the internal is so so powerful and knowing that everything is temporary everything's temporary in life you shouldn't look back on the past and you shouldn't look forward and worry like you should just be with where you are right now because I honestly believe like no one knows what's going to happen in the next year no one knows what's going to happen in the next week and building up you like you are going to have the longest relationship with yourself more than anyone else like we always are looking for a partner or a business partner or some type of validation that's going to make us finally feel like secure and worthy and like the truth is that never happens you've got to like you've got to do that with yourself that's the most important step in life you're gonna have the longest relationship with yourself than anyone else so being your own best friend being your own parent being your own co-partner is i think it's really important if you could talk to the 16 year old version of yourself what would you tell her

1:27:41make every single moment count are you happy how do you define happiness how do you define happiness happiness is fleeting to me it's not a static term in my understanding it's not something that i think you can define as an outcome happiness is something that comes in moments of knowing your mom's still here and she can call you every day knowing that I can get up and do something that I love like they're fleeting they're small moments they're also mixed with worries through the day they're also mixed with joy they're also mixed with sadness so I'd say I definitely have wonderful moments of happiness in my life maybe the word is like am I feeling like content yeah I feel like very lucky to be able to do and speak about something that I love and have a career dedicated to something that I believe in is it easy no do I have worries yes do I have self-doubt yes but like I think that's human behavior and that's everyone like that is human um am I an AI robot that has pure happiness every day no do I want to be no So that's probably my answer.

1:29:05Thank you. My final question to you is the following. If you had to compress all your knowledge into one essential piece of advice that we all must implement in our daily lives, what would it be? Be kinder to yourself. And there's nothing else I can say to that. I think it's got to be compassionate to yourself. Like, treat yourself as you treat your best friend. it's it sounds so easy but try it's really hard sometimes but if you do that you will build a self-worth you will build you will build what you want to in your health outcomes and I think essentially that's probably one of the most important learnings that I've incurred in myself but also in my research Sarah thank you so much thank you so much for so many things.

1:30:00In this show, I have the absolute pleasure and opportunity to speak with some of the greatest experts on planet Earth about various different wellness topics. And it's very interesting to see the reasons why people get into those studies and those lives. And most of them, they enter for scientific reasons. And what I believe is so humbling, so inspiring, and so beautiful to see and witness is that you're approaching this from a very emotional angle. So you were struggling with something and you don't want other people to struggle from that. So I find that beautiful. So I thank you for that. And I thank you on behalf of everyone that benefits from this, that maybe perhaps they don't get the chance to tell you in person.

1:30:41I think as we were discussing earlier, right now we are chasing a definition of success or a version of ourselves that is not healthy for us. And we're being told that once you look like that, And once you get that house, once you have that partner, once you get that promotion, you're going to be happy. Everything will make sense. You are going to be enough. And then sometimes we put in the work, sometimes even the bad work to achieve to those situations. And then we arrive there and it doesn't feel the way we were promised. So I very much appreciate every single advice that you've shared with me because it's hard to give advice in a way that can be applied by everybody but at the same time you want it to be personalized so I appreciate tremendously everything you've shared and I know that it will resonate deeply with everyone that right now is struggling with their food choices and their nutritional life definitely helps me and I look forward to having you again on the show and there were so many other questions that I had so many other topics that I think we could have gone for another hour or so so I would love to have you again on the show thank you and thank you for being so open and vulnerable and a wonderful host