Imagine if everything you had been told about weight loss was wrong!
Welcome to the Real Health and Weight Loss Podcast, where you get real advice from real doctors to help you lose weight and revolutionise your health.
We are here to bust through some myths and give you actionable advice.
Real health and weight loss is a journey and we, your hosts Dr Mary Barson and Dr Lucy Burns from Real Life Medicine, are here with you every step of the way.
You can change your future starting now!
Podcast Episode 136
Courageous campaigner for the truth
The wonderful Belinda Fettke joins Dr Lucy again. In this episode, she unpacks the origins of the first dietetic association in the USA. Belinda is an incredible investigator, and you will learn the reason behind the demonising of animal protein and fats, and let us tell you…it has nothing to do with your good health! They also discuss why the wheels of government grind slowly, and it takes a lawsuit for regulations around trans fats. The harms to our health were known way before regulations were imposed, but vested interest groups got in the way. As usual, this is a thought provoking conversation that you won’t want to miss.
Podcast Episode 135
Understand your emotions and improve your health.
How are you feeling? No, really... How are you feeling? Can you name your feelings? Naming emotions is an important component of emotional literacy. By giving a name to our emotions, we can better understand them and gain greater control over our actions, habits and health. Dr Lucy Burns and Dr Mary Barson discuss how working on your "emotional literacy" can improve your health long-term. How emotionally literate are you?
Podcast Episode 134
Why does your doctor prescribe medication?
Dr Lucy chats with Dr Laureen Lawlor-Smith, a low carb and keto doctor from Adelaide. A few years ago Dr Laureen found herself obese, with fatty liver and poor metabolic health. She was following the advice she gave her patients in being healthy and it wasn’t working. As a doctor this was deeply shameful. They chat about the reasons the current nutritional guidelines don’t work, the reasons many doctors prescribe certain medications and the origins of many clinical guidelines.
Podcast Episode 133
Are you sick and tired of being sick and tired?
Mitochondria, the "powerhouse" of the cell, are vital for energy production. They are also responsible for all kinds of amazing things including regulating insulin signalling and glucose metabolism. Having healthy mitochondria is essential to good health and feeling well.
Impaired mitochondrial function can make us feel sick and tired, and can lead to oxidative stress, inflammation, and impaired glucose metabolism, which can contribute to insulin resistance.
Chronic diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, ischaemic heart disease, and some cancers have also been linked to mitochondrial dysfunction. Dr Mary Barson and Dr Lucy Burns discuss the healthy steps you can take, including a low-carbohydrate lifestyle, to help boost the health of these vital little organelles.
Podcast Episode 132
It's never too late to look after yourself
Dr. Lucy and nutritionist Lynda Rose discuss the five key factors for ageing well: regular physical activity, a healthy diet, good sleep habits, stress management, and social connections. They also highlight the benefits of incorporating strength training and adopting a low-carb eating plan. Remember, it's never too late to start making positive changes for your health. By incorporating these pillars into your daily routine, you are maximising your potential for a healthy and happy future.
Podcast Episode 131
How do I eat to lose weight?
What does the science say about healthy eating and weight loss? It is important to be open-minded about new discoveries and insights in the ever-evolving field of nutrition. Recent research suggests that high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets are effective for metabolic healing and weight loss. These diets prioritise protein intake and recommend around 1 gram of protein per kilogram of body weight per day, which is often a lot more than many of us have been previously told to eat. However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, and it's essential to consider the current science when making food choices. Late-night snacking and cravings are a big problem for many of us! It is totally possible to overcome late-night snacking with the right tools. By healing our physiology with the right kind of nutrition and learning to become aware of our thoughts and emotions you can break free from destructive patterns and establish a more balanced, nourishing relationship with food.
Podcast Episode 130
Living a low carb lifestyle
Dr Lucy chats with low carb enthusiast Emma Martin who, like many of us, stumbled across the low carb lifestyle when she tried “the keto diet”. The improvement in her own health has her shouting from the rooftops. She provides practical and actionable advice on how to incorporate a low carb lifestyle into your daily routine.
Podcast Episode 129
You can change your mind
Dr Lucy and Dr Mary discuss the way our brain works and how many of our responses are automatic learned responses. Our brain has two jobs. One is to keep us safe and the other is to make us feel better. Many of our behaviours can be traced back to these two concepts. They chat about the meaning of being triggered and what that feels like in our body and what it does to our brains. Best of all Dr Mary gives you a simple tool that you can use when you are triggered that will help you feel calmer and make decisions that ultimately serve you better.
Podcast Episode 128
What should children eat?
In this world of confusing dietary and health messaging, Dr Lucy chats with nutritionist Claire McDonnell-Liu about her work in children’s health.
Claire's passion is helping schools improve the food they offer children at canteens and school activities. She started her work after her own children developed medical conditions that required dietary intervention. As a mum, she realised how difficult it is to navigate this path in an environment that is not set up to support families and now it is her mission to change that.
Podcast Episode 127
Is food simply the sum of its nutrients?
The processed food industry would like you to believe this is true, however food is not simply the sum of its macros and micro nutrients. There is plenty of evidence that consumption of ultra processed food (UPF) is detrimental to our health. Join Dr Lucy and Dr Mary as they discuss the mechanisms by which processed food is harmful to health and why we should limit the amount of UPF we eat. They also help you detect some of the sneaky health messaging on processed food and again, bring it back to the simple basics of eating real food with minimal processing for the majority of your diet. You can nurture yourself back to health with the power of real food.
Podcast Episode 126
A dietitian going against the grain
Join Dr Lucy as she chats with low carb dietitian Nicole Moore. Nicole has lived experience with the current dietary advice she was taught and implemented. She found that despite adhering to the guidelines and eating brown rice and legumes, she was unable to manage her weight.
Like many of us she was looking for a solution and tried low carb - initially as a weight loss diet - but ultimately she felt so well that it became her lifestyle. Her health improved and now she lives and breathes the low carb lifestyle.
Nicole is a wonderfully engaging speaker and many of you will relate to her story.
Podcast Episode 125
Why do we fail time and time again?
The idea of failure is familiar to many of us. We try to lose weight, things go awry and we go back to where we started – along with a few extra pounds. Today Dr Lucy and Dr Mary discuss the reasons why this happens, and for the majority of us it was that we were given bad advice. The wrong advice resulted in physiological hunger and the thinking that we just needed to be stricter or more disciplined. Unlearning this harmful approach can be so liberating. Managing physiological hunger then gives you the space to deal with emotional hunger. Unlearning those stories is where the magic truly happens.
Podcast Episode 124
Is Carnivore Healthy?
In this fabulous episode, Dr Lucy Burns and special guest Dr Anthony Chaffee discuss the issue of misinformation in nutrition and the limitations of studies linking certain foods to disease. They delve into the carnivore movement and Dr Chaffee shares his unique journey with diet and nutrition as a former professional rugby player and neurosurgical registrar. The doctors highlight the importance of being cautious when interpreting the results of nutrition studies and the influence of funding on scientific research. A must-listen for anyone interested in understanding the truth behind the nutrition world!
Podcast Episode 123
Love yourself on Valentine's
Today Dr Lucy Burns and Dr Mary Barson chat about why it can be so hard to embrace the phrase, “love yourself”. They chat about the concept of self-love and why you cannot hate yourself thin or berate yourself well. As usual, Dr Lucy has a beautiful dog analogy to explain why self-love is so important, and Dr Mary gives some tips on how you can start the nurturing and nourishing process of loving yourself back to health. Happy Valentine's Day!
Podcast Episode 122
What's the point of weight loss?
On the surface this may seem like an obvious question but in fact it is much more nuanced. In this episode Dr Mary and Dr Lucy chat about why the process you follow to achieve weight loss is important for good health.
Weight loss at any cost is goal driven where the only outcome that you measure success by, is the number on the scales. Weight Loss that is process driven means the focus is on doing the things that are good for you. Focusing on things that are lovely and nurturing for your body and feeling good along the way rather than using punitive measures is super helpful. In this way you feel good along the way, rather than waiting until the destination to feel good about yourself. You cannot hate yourself thin, you cannot berate yourself well, and you cannot use punitive measures for real health and sustainable weight loss.
Podcast Episode 121
Sugar nearly killed me
We are all aware of the effects of sugar on our physical health but did you know it can affect our mental health too? Dr Lucy is joined by a real-life woman, Nerida Jelinek, who shares her story of sugar and carb addiction and its devastating effect on her mental health. She shares with us the remarkable transformation she has experienced, from being suicidal and wishing her life would end to now looking forward to her future and fulfilling her dreams. This has happened without medication simply by changing what she eats. Nerida is a living breathing example of the food and mood connection. Sugar and processed carbohydrates were literally stealing her life and whilst she has indeed lost 18kg, the joy of life she is now experiencing is the real revelation for her.
Podcast Episode 120
Make the right thing easy, make the wrong thing hard
Research suggests that 40% of our behaviours come down to habits, so with that in mind Dr Lucy and Dr Mary give you some tips and tricks to help you form good habits. They chat about some of the helpful things you can do to cement habits and the reason you need to be kind to yourself whilst you are forging new habits. You cannot bully yourself into good habits, although many of us try. Good habits come by working with your brain and looking at your identity as means for behavioural change.
Podcast Episode 119
This little light of mine
Penny Armour was judged about her body size her whole life. For decades the messaging from well meaning (and not-so-well-meaning) people was that thinner was better. As a child Penny believed that unless she was successful with weight loss, she was not good enough. She believed that she was unworthy of love unless she was “normal size”. This set her up for a life of yoyo dieting, self hatred and years and years of low self esteem. Consequently, Penny developed perfectionism. If it wasn’t perfect, then it was a failure. If she wasn’t perfect then she was a failure. She put everyone else’s needs above hers and as a result she got sicker and sicker. Listen to Penny’s story as she tells how the kindness of strangers made her recognise that she was worthy of love and good health. Penny discovers the power of self compassion and is able to let go of perfectionism. She is no longer an “All or Nothing" person and her health transformation is nothing short of spectacular.
Podcast Episode 118
Sneaky Sugar
Dr Lucy and Dr Mary discuss the sneaky ways sugar has now saturated food products found in supermarkets. Foods that you may not realise even have sugar in them have now been infiltrated by the sweet and savoury versions of sugar.
They discuss the reasons excess sugar is harmful to health and the devious ways processed food companies disguise the sugar in their products.
Podcast Episode 117
Why are Doctors Overweight?
In this episode Dr Lucy Burns and Dr Mary Barson share their own stories around how they found themselves overweight, with poor metabolic health. They discuss toxic diet culture and the harm this process does to both our physiology and psychology. They chat about how they healed their physiology with low carb nutrition. They stumbled upon the miracle that low carb eating reduces hunger and only when this occurred were they then able to address their psychology.
Long term health involves changing your relationship with food but most importantly changing your relationship with yourself. For many of us, the desire to be smaller has been ingrained for decades. This can result in low self esteem and self loathing. Changing this to one of self acceptance is a fundamental mindset shift, and one needed for good health.
Podcast Episode 116
Momentum in the New Year
Happy new year! The idea of a clean slate and a new start is highly alluring, yet we know that most New Year's resolutions fail. How can you turn your resolutions into real change that actually improves your life, your health and your well being? You can do it by setting intentions. Intentions require planning, scheduling, commitment, prioritisation and celebration of the process (and not just the desired end point). At first glance they do not seem as much fun as wispy, magical and dreamy resolutions. However, setting proper intentions is how we achieve the change that brings us real joy and real health and what we really want. Change is so much easier with the right support.
