Podcast: Radiant Wellbeing: Lessons with Dr. Orlena and Lynda Rose

Transcript of Podcast

Hello, everyone. We are very fortunate today to have Dr. Orlena as a very, very fancy guest. She is going to tell you all about what she does. And how she came to be in the wellness industry.

Welcome. I'll hand it over to you, Dr Orlena to tell us all about you and what you do. Well, first of all, thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me and having me on your podcast.

It's an absolute pleasure. And hooray for technology is what I say, because it's amazing, isn't it? I'm in Spain and you're in Perth and we're just chatting, like we're in different rooms. Who am I? I am Dr. Orlena. I trained in the UK as a pediatric doctor, actually. I worked in Australia for a bit. I love Australia.

My alternate life is in Australia, but I ended up in Spain. I accidentally lost my career, as I say, long story or short story is that it wasn't as easy as I had hoped to work here in Spain as a doctor. And so I turned to online and I originally started doing healthy eating for kids because I have four kids.

And guess what? They were all super picky and didn't do things like eat vegetables. And that was really when two things happened. I started really diving into nutrition and thinking about nutrition. And also at that time, a lot of stuff, emotions was going on for me and I really started looking at, wait, how, how does this happen?

How does this work? Like, you know, I could see myself getting into this negative spiral and seeing myself totally derail and thinking like, I'm a kind of clever person. How does this happen to me? And so that was really like the foundation of But the work that I do with my clients now, so a few years later on, I pivoted really to help grown up people eat healthily and lead a healthy life so that they can lose weight and increase their energy.

And really a lot of it is about health and thinking, you know, I'm standing here. I want to enjoy the rest of my life. I want a vibrant rest of life. And if I carry on doing what I'm doing. That's not going to happen. And so helping people really transform their lives. So they get this healthy life that they actually genuinely love and enjoy and do all the things without having to think about it.

Good. I like on your website that you're addressing lifestyle disease. Tell me a bit more about that. Cause I love it. I love that. I love those words and it kind of puts it in a nutshell. It's interesting, isn't it? That we often don't think of things as lifetime diseases. And I remember. Going back to when I was a, you know, junior doctor, they call them house, house officers in the UK, or as we were fondly known, houseplants.

And at that time, I was doing a little bit of adult medicine. I didn't do much adult medicine, but I remember being in the wards and looking at the wards and seeing all these people who were really sick, so sick that they were admitted to hospital. And actually, when you think about it, a lot of those diseases were, you know, diabetes because they hadn't led a healthy life, or liver disease because they'd drunk too much alcohol, or diabetes.

Smoking related problems because they'd been smoking all of these things that we do to ourselves without really acknowledging how dangerous those things are, because it's not dangerous today. It's dangerous down the line. And that really was sort of like turning point in terms of me thinking, if I could take all of these people back 20 years and teach them how to enjoy healthy living so that we don't feel deprived.

And we don't feel like we're doing stuff that we hate. That we're leading an amazing life. But that is also an amazing life that is supporting our health and our wellness and weight loss if that's an issue for you. It's interesting because I know from the study that I've done, insulin resistance, as far as I know, is the basis of every disease, you know, which is a hyperglycemia, high sugar load in your body.

And it begins to develop, forgive me, sorry correct me if I'm wrong, this is what I understand, it begins to develop. Early in your life, you know, mid twenties, like mid thirties, and it's not till it's been, as you've just said, progressing slowly over time that when you're 35 or you're 45, you begin to show signs of type 2 diabetes or prediabetes.

And it's, it's fantastic if we can get people to understand that in their youth, but when you're in your youth, you're invincible and you think you know everything and you don't have to worry about what you eat and you can go to this party and that party and drink all of this and eat all of this, but it catches up, doesn't it quicker than you want it to sometimes.

It does catch up. And I think the other thing really to acknowledge as well is that we have certain drives, certain human drives that are part of our being essentially. And one of those drives is glucose seeking behavior. Now, if you think about this back in the terms of, you know, when we were cavemen, that glucose seeking behavior was, I'm going to go out and I'm going to pick some blackberries and I'm going to get my glucose rush, which is a handful of berries.

Or, you know, if you were really lucky, you could spend the whole afternoon picking berries and eating berries. But because they didn't live in this. The environment that we live in now, food is so easy to get now and so easy, not just in terms of, okay, it's really easy to go to the supermarket and buy some blackberries, but we've got all of this processed food as well, which is like a step up in terms of helping you get diabetes.

Yes. Yeah. , you know, we live in a society where We've kind of been brought up doing this and, you know, I look at my own journey and think I grew up in what I call the carbohydrate era. It was normal for us to eat breakfast cereal. We had sandwiches for lunch and we often had pasta for dinner. And I didn't think anything about this.

And even as a young person in their 20s, relatively active, luckily I also ate. a reasonable amount of vegetables because it was one of the things that my mother did was, you know, we always had a salad, we always had some vegetables and that habit really stuck with me that I would always have, I don't know, spring greens or cabbage or broccoli or something with my dinner.

But it wasn't until I started looking at my children and their eating and thinking, Why do they never eat the vegetables? I provide them with all this amazing food and they just pick out the pasta and they don't eat the vegetables. And I started diving in and then realized that actually this carbohydrate era that we live in, that for me had been normal life is not actually.

the best way of eating and that even those what I call white refined carbohydrates, which are not highly processed foods, they're still not great for you. There are still better ways of eating and we don't have to eat, you know, sugar and flour all the time, even though it's been drilled into us. For me, it was a bit of a wake up call, a bit of a like, Hey, what, what's going on here?

Like really? And it's taken a bit of mindset and years to get used to it, to really get to this place where. I don't care if people eat bread in front of me. Like occasionally I eat bread. I don't exclude it from my diet, but I'm perfectly happy. My kids like bread. They still eat bread. and they eat bread at lunchtime.

I'm more than happy with my delicious healthy vegetables and think why, why would I eat the bread that I know is more damaging for my body than my healthy vegetables when I enjoy my healthy vegetables? Now if bread weren't like that, if bread were healthy then I would go back to eating bread but that's not the truth.

Bread isn't healthy for us. No, it surely isn't. The thing I guess people don't understand as well is that we're marketed to so much about what healthy food is and it's not actually healthy. In Australia, in our food guidelines, which I don't actually like, but we have them we have a recommended daily intake for protein and fats, but carbohydrates isn't even on there.

It's not, it's not a recommended daily intake for them at all. I understand we don't actually need them in our diet to live a healthy life. And I, I have a few every now and then they come in and, you know, like I'll have. I'm just going to pause this conversation a minute, because I think this is a huge area of confusion because when you say we don't need carbohydrates in our life.

Wait, that's not true. We do need carbohydrates in our life. Carbohydrates are the fuel of our body. We need carbohydrates, and we're using carbohydrates all the time. But those carbohydrates can either be healthy sources of hydrocarbohydrates, fruits and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables contain carbohydrates.

That's what we're using all the time. It's the white refined carbohydrates, the issue, the problem. And beyond those, so if we're just looking at sugar, the white refined carbohydrates are going to spike your sugar levels much, much more than the other carbohydrates, the fruits, the vegetables, the slow release ones.

And then beyond that, we've got highly processed foods, which have other nasty chemicals in that do other damage in other ways that, you know, just let's go with it's not great. Yes. There is like this idea that, oh my goodness, we don't need carbohydrates. Wait, no, I eat carbohydrates. My, my, my, unless you're eating a ketogenic diet.

Everybody is having carbohydrates and I agree, I agree. Yeah, I agree about the vegetables and the fruit. I agree. And I also agree it's more about the packaged food and the industrialized food and those kinds of foods that we have at our hands, at our fingertips. When you go into the supermarket, they're everywhere.

You can pick them as you want or choose not to. They're the foods that I'm, that I consider we, we don't actually need so many of. Yeah, basically sugar. We don't need white flour or sugar in our life. We're perfectly capable of living our lives. But there is a mindset shift around that. And a lot of people have this like hole in when they're thinking about preparing a meal.

There's this hole for white refined carbohydrates, which could be bread, it could be pasta, it could be rice. But a lot of cultures have it. And I see people with like, I don't feel like I've had a meal unless I've had that starchy, white, refined carbohydrate. And actually, when you think about what, if I'm eating vegetables or I'm eating that white, refined sugar, flour, what are you getting from it in terms of nutrition?

And the answer is carbohydrates. You can just eat the fruit and vegetables, which come along with so many other benefits like fiber and phytonutrients and all of those good things that are also beneficial for us. I notice on your website, you have your four pillars of health, I'm calling them, which is exercise, sleep, mindfulness, and positive intelligence.

So tell me more about positive intelligence. I like that word along with glucose seeking brain. I like that as well. And I keep that in my catalog, but what is positive intelligence? I'd love to. So I just want the four pillars on nutrition is the first one and then what I call exercise that lights you up and then sleep and then emotional wellness, which could be stress mindset.

And in that is positive intelligence and positive intelligence is an amazingly simple tool. And it really looks at your brain in terms of negative brain and positive brain. And we know what negative brain is. Negative brain is when we're triggered, we're stressed, we're upset. Okay. And it's very easy to see it when it's a big upset, but actually that negative brain can be going on sort of trickling about little things that we don't like a lot of the time.

And the problem with negative brain is not only does it come with a negative emotion, but your negative brain, like your flight, fight, and freeze response, it takes over your brain. It hijacks your brain. You know, it's great when you're running away from a tiger. You really don't want to be distracted when you're running away from a tiger.

But when it's a minor thing, like I'm stuck in traffic or I am upset about this one thing, really what we want to do is just let go. Like I'm upset, let go, move on. But that's not what happens. These things like pile on top of us and pile on top of us and pile on top of us, making us feel stressed, Unhappy, miserable, and all of these voices which go, You can't do it, you can't make changes, you can't do this, you're worthless.

All of that. But the negative brain looks like a judge which says, I don't like it. And then on top of that judge, we have nine saboteurs which help us say things like, But they all have different patterns. For example, an avoider, avoiding is a pattern and they've done like studies on this and looked at the different patterns that we have and everybody has these nine patterns, but some people will have more.

Like, you know, two or three will be much higher. Examples are a victim mentality, like blaming other people. Like my kids, they're always like this, like, Oh, it's mommy's fault that I'm late for school or something. A dog ate my homework. Yes, exactly. Exactly. That, so that's an example, another example.

Another example is a hyperachiever. You know, someone who basically sets themselves super high goals and then never reaches those goals because they're too high. You know, goals that they wouldn't set other people. What's another example? Hyper rational is actually one. , for example, using your rational brain when you want to be addressing an emotional issue.

, for example, when my kids come to me and say, I'm really upset about whatever, I'm a hyper rational, and I will try and fix the problem, whereas really what they want is just to allow their emotions to be heard, to be felt, get over that, and then they can fix the problem. We've got all these negative issues going on, and then we've got positive brain, which really is that place of ease and flow and just getting on with things, but, you know, being, doing it from like a Jedi type of Jedi concentration, as opposed to running around like a headless chicken.

There are different aspects of your positive brain as well. The first one is empathy, being able to see something, and quite often we need to have empathy for ourselves. Quite often we're busy beating ourselves up, but empathy for ourselves. Potentially empathy for somebody else, curiosity around a situation.

when I teach people about health and wellness, people often say to me, but I eat healthily and I'm not losing weight as if this is a, you know, Oh my goodness. Well, I'm doing the right things and it's not working. , Hey, whereas actually when you open up into curiosity, it can be more of an exploring and thinking, well, Really, what you want to be thinking about is, what does your body need for you to be able to release that extra weight?

Let's get curious about that and figure out a solution using, obviously, the scientific tools that we have, as opposed to sticking with this idea of, I'm doing it right, it's not working, therefore I'm going to stop. Like, that's not helping. We've got curiosity, we've got innovation, which is you know, just brainstorming, and we've got navigation, which is our own, like inner compass, the things that feel right to us, and then obviously taking action and doing.

And this system is set up by a gentleman called Shirazad Sharmin, who's written a book called Positive Intelligence. And, you know, he runs a coaching program, and I'm qualified as a positive intelligence coach. I'm about to do that course.

. , I asked you about the program and totally recommend it. Oh, cool. I'll know more about it by then. I'm following on with that because on your website, you say that you help clients establish healthy habits and routines. How do you get someone to create or? Initiate healthy routines and habits in their lives.

What do you think is the key in the lock? Yeah, I said, well, I don't know if there's one key. Well, that's an interesting question. There are two keys to this. And actually there was a Harvard paper. There was a Harvard paper about this a few years ago, which was called how to lose weight. and keep it off.

And actually, if you look at the statistics, the statistics are what I call the dire statistics. Out of everybody who loses a significant amount of weight, within five years, 80 percent of people have put it back on. And that is pretty demoralizing, isn't it? There are two keys. And the first key is to create Define the way that works for you.

Find things that you enjoy that fit in with your lifestyle that you're happy to do, as opposed to doing something for a short period of time and then going back to total doing whatever you want. And then the second key is really having the mindset tools and being able to keep going and keep going.

In a nutshell, what they're saying is create a healthy lifestyle that works for you. And keep doing it, which is not really hugely surprising. , the, the way I do this, obviously it's slightly different for every single person that I meet, because different people are at different places, and some people will be exercising a lot, and some people not so much, and some people will be eating relatively healthily, and not.

The first thing really is to assess where you are, so go through those four pillars, and have a think about, you know, where, where are you with those four pillars. Most people need to start with nutrition. Nutrition, particularly if you're looking at weight loss, is the big key to weight loss. I teach the MedStyle Diet, which, you know, there's different ways of doing things, but MedStyle Diet has good research behind it.

It's not a diet in the sense of restricting yourself. It's a way of eating diet. And I walk people through a two week reboot. We do a two week reboot where you do things perfectly for two weeks. You're relying on the meds. Discipline for two weeks and you're really retraining your mind and your body and going through that process of, Hey, you know what?

It's not as scary as I thought it was going to be to live this way. Then after that, you are, you know, leading post reboot life. And the difference between reboot and post reboot life is a big dose of reality. You know, like. Okay, I've got kids, they eat pasta, I need to go to a party, I've got a wedding, all of those kind of things.

in an ideal world, you'd do the reboot and you'd stick to the reboot and just do that forever, but that's, that's not realistic. Through that process, people are finding out what works for them and finding what doesn't work for them. Some things they'll really, really love, you know, they might try something and think this is amazing.

I totally love this. And then actually I need to modify this a little bit, but a big piece of the puzzle as well is their motivation and seeing like, okay, if I've set this goal that I want and I'm really clear on the goal that I want and I'm really sure that this is where I want to get to and I know that I can get there and I know roughly the path.

You don't know the exact path, but I know roughly what I need to do to get there, then I'm going to keep doing it and I'm going to keep doing it and keeping that motivation alive and basically keep turning up. I obviously have coaching and people come to my coaching and really ironing out those problems because life always happens and that's fine.

But if your, if life happens and you're like, okay, I'm coming to coaching and life happens, you can sort the problem out. But if you're doing it by yourself and life happens, it's six months before you've even noticed that life has happened and then you're like, Oh my goodness, now I need to start again.

Sometimes it is having plan B, you know, saying, do you know what life is? Life is happening and that's fine. Go back a little bit. It doesn't have to be perfect. You need to get through this, whatever issue it is and keep coming, keep checking in, keep coming, keep checking in. And then when you're ready.

We go back to like, come on, let's get this goal. Let's do the weight loss or whatever it is that the goal is. I like, I like that way of thinking. Cause I see that all the time in people. Can you tell me who is your ideal client? Who would you look for as being your ideal client? I love that. Thank you.

Thank you for asking that question. I work with people who, but it's a really interesting question actually. So work with people who. Women over 40, they may have kids. They may be empty nesters. Normally my clients work part time, but really the ideal client bit is not about any demographic or this or that.

It's actually a mindset thing. And it's really about somebody who knows that they have struggled. They've tried things and they may have tried for 18 months or they may have tried for longer, but they know that they are struggling. And they feel almost like they have what I call a doing gap. They know what they ought to be doing.

They just can't seem to do it for themselves. Another beautiful term, yes. Yeah. And they know that the difference between them doing it and not doing it is having some support. So like thinking of one of my clients, her name is Cara, and she's been in my group for a couple of years now. And she has actually, you know, we were talking about lifestyle illnesses.

She's reversed her glaucoma. Yeah. Thanks to, I know it's amazing. She's obviously lost weight, reversed her glaucoma. And what she clearly says is I know that I wouldn't have been able to do it if it hadn't been for these sessions, which keep me coming, keep me coming, keep me coming, keep me on track. I think that is the key.

It's somebody who, really is fed up of trying to do it by themselves and wants somebody to help them and to be guided by somebody and that somebody also keep them accountable. And, you know, they're open to trying new things. They're like, okay, so I'm interested in the positive intelligence and the mindset and understanding about my emotions.

And I want to get excited to get there and try all these different tools. Yeah. Oh, excellent. I didn't realize you could reverse glaucoma. That's, that's nice. I like that. Well, her doctor said to her, we don't think you'll be able to reverse this. And she did. I mean, we don't 100 percent know that it's because of the weight loss, but the chance is.

I noticed on your website as well, you've got a risk of diabetes tool or a quiz. What do people need to look out for when they might be developing diabetes? What do you think the key points are so they know that they need to go and get checked? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I have to confess, I did that quiz so long ago, I can't even remember the questions I put in the quiz.

Well, I didn't get the questions. Yeah, so you sign up and it gives you a quiz that you can go through. But the big thing really to look at is your abdominal weight and looking at your waist circumference. People get worried about weight. And it's not so much weight, obviously weight is important, weight and body mass index can be kind of difficult to measure because that doesn't really give us a true picture of like, you know, if your total muscle is fat, you may actually have, you know, a higher BMI.

than if you're much less muscle but you've got a lot of fat. But one key indicator is your waist circumference. And if you've got that abdominal fat, that's not a good sign. You don't want fat around your, your middle. But obviously other things to think about, you know, your age, how you eat, your family history, which you can't change.

You can't change your family history. But what you can do is if you have got a strong family history is think, okay, I need to start thinking about this and think. Do I need to go and get tested? And yes, you may need to get tested, but if you eat healthily and you start doing healthy living, things should reverse anyhow.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. What do you think are the biggest obstacles that your, your clients face when they're trying to make lifestyle changes? Is there anything that comes out of the, you know, like obviously all the time is the same thing or what, what do you think about that? I would say there's two big things.

There's your mindset, so that all of those negative saboteur voices are saying something. And those, those negative voices are so strong in all humans, not just, it's not like, oh my goodness, I don't have a negative brain. It's like, oh, if you don't have a negative brain, you haven't met your negative, you haven't acknowledged it yet.

Yeah. And I do have some people going, oh, well, I just don't have a judge. Okay, we'll stick with that and let's see if we can find your judge because it's there. It's just about recognising it. And so, actually, the negative brain is much, much stronger than the positive brain and it tells you all different things.

And often it comes to people as, I'm not worthy, I've tried it so many times, it's not going to work for me. All of that kind of stuff. That's, the emotional mindset piece. But also there are logistics. Do you know what I mean? Like people are busy. They've got kids. They've got jobs. The kids have got extra activities.

And that's part of the system is finding a system that works for you. And sometimes you need , I think it's important to think about the two separate systems because I don't know, you've got a summer system and a winter system or a school system and a school holiday system. Yes. That you sometimes need more than one system or life is going well system and life isn't going so well system.

But those logistical things as well, and the two of them go hand in hand together. And sometimes when we look at habits, it can be a combination of two. I'll give you an example of a lady. Who I worked with a few years ago, actually, and she was a dentist. She lived in Australia. Sorry. She, she was Australian, but she lived in London and she would stop on the way back from work to buy some chocolate.

Now she's a dentist. She knows how the body works and she can see that this isn't helping her lose weight. But she said, you know, I was just unable to make these changes myself. And when we unpacked looking at the emotional mindset piece of it, She felt tired and feeling like she needs to be looked after, like, nobody is looking after me.

I'm coming home from work and I just need a reward. And on top of that, she had young kids. , , the minute she steps in the door, I've got young kids and I just need a little bit of time to myself. Those were the mindset pieces. And what we did was we, what she wanted to do was do some reading and some running, which helped her de stress.

Yeah. She reframed the drive home from work. Thinking,, the drive home from work can either be I'm stuck in traffic, it's so stressful, or it can be a little bit of time to say, do you know what, I've got this time in between work and home to regather myself, to listen to some music, to listen to my favorite podcast.

That is a bit of me time for me. And then combined with, because habits are very geographical, actually, I'm going to drive home a slightly different route, so I'm not going past that exact same Yeah, exactly. I'm not going into that same garage. If I go into that garage, I find myself walking out without thinking about it.

But if I go to a new garage, I go in with a fresh brain and I can create a new habit, which is to avoid I mean, obviously, she has to fill her car up with fuel. And all of that just combines to Actually, you know what? You can stop eating chocolate quite easily. I know, it's a bit like finding yourself in the pantry and you don't even know how you got there.

And you're nibbling on bits of chocolate or, you know, a handful of nuts that turns into a cup of nuts. And you don't know why you got there in the first place. It's an interesting concept, isn't it? It's just mind over matter, as you're saying. Well, it's habits. It's habits. And habits are super strong. And they're amazing.

But the thing about habits is we do them without really noticing and that's why we want to rewrite them and be intentional about our habits. So we're doing all of these things that are supporting our health rather than all of these things that are sabotaging our health. Sabotaging. Sabotaging. I started, I took up running only a year ago.

On my 60th birthday, I started running. Congratulations. Yeah, because I teach Pilates to an, a retirement village and a few other classes around the place. But the retirement village, they're all aged between 77 and 94. And some of the younger crew, Actually do park run and they said you need to park run.

It was these beautiful souls that encouraged me to park run. I started park running and then I joined a running club. I've never been a runner. It's just not what I do, but I can tell you now I'm off running by myself occasionally, but it's easy enough for me. If I think about the running and the process of the running, sometimes it's easy for me not to go.

And if I just go, then I go. But if I try and plan it, I sometimes can talk myself out of it so quickly. It's interesting. Yeah, but it is interesting. And I think It's just about building up habits. So when you're first building up habits, you do kind of need to talk yourself into doing it. You need to set it up so that it's easy for yourself to do it.

And you almost need to detach the start point to the decision points. You make the decision and set yourself up and then you start doing it and you start doing it and you start doing it. And then you get to this point where it becomes easier. With any new exercise, there is a little hump of, okay, I feel unfit.

And I have to get over that because that feeling unfit and pushing through it, You can either feel it as agony and awfulness, or you can feel it as, hey, my muscles are getting stronger and I'm getting fitter. But either way, there's a bit of discomfort. Yeah. And so you get over that until you get to this place where actually You feel energized by it, and that it lights you up.

Now, different people have different exercises. I personally think running is the hardest. It is. It's hard. It is. It is hard. And not only is it hard, a lot of people have problems with their knees and things like that. You do have to be a bit careful with running, as opposed to, I swim. I swim a lot.

Swimming is much gentler. I mean, there are issues with swimming. You do have to be careful of your shoulders that you don't, over to your shoulders. You don't want a repetitive strain injury with shoulders because then you can't swim. It's getting that balance right. But where you want to get to is where you think, Oh, hooray, I get to do my exercise today.

I'm so excited. And when you want to do something, when you see all of those positives, and you enjoy it, and you want to do it, it stops being a chore. It starts being a pleasure. That's true. And that's what we need. We need more pleasure, don't we? Nutrition and children, where did you work in England, just with nutrition and children, or are you still in that space?

It's a beautiful space to be in. No, no. I didn't work in England. I was working as a pediatric doctor, so I wasn't working specifically with nutrition. It was only when I had my own children. And you know, I, so when I was a pediatric doctor, I would see so many kids who would come to me with abdominal pain and I would chat to them and go, do you know what?

Your child has got constipation. In fact, I remember my worst ever case was when I was working in Australia and I met a child who had not been to the toilet for an entire year. Oh, no, no. And ab they were fine. They, they were fine in the end, although I suspect it did long-term damage to their their bowel.

But being in Australia, not in the uk, they came in with a CT scan so we could see it. Obviously in the UK that CT scan takes eighties to come through. Oh, okay. So, you know, I would say so many of these children. I would say to people, you know, Oh, actually it's not such a bad diagnosis. All you need to do now is increase your vegetable intake.

It's so easy. Something totally natural. Some people needed a little bit of medication to help them. Other people didn't. But then those mothers would say to me, my kids don't like vegetables. And obviously I didn't have heaps of time and resources to help them, but, you know, would. point them to various websites and stuff like that.

And then I had my own kids and I would give them healthy foods, as I say, like pasta with vegetables at the time, like I hadn't gone through this whole, like, wait, pasta is a white refined carb thing. But even so, pasta with vegetables is not unhealthy. It's not that bad. Except they would pick out all the pasta and they would leave the vegetables.

And I would be like, what's, what is going on? And that was really what triggered me to sort of figure out, well, how do we help our kids eat healthily? And it depends on your children. Children are very, very different eaters. At one scale, we've got like really picky eaters who, you know, they, they almost put up walls in their mind of, I don't like this, I don't like that.

And, you know, sometimes they haven't even tried things and that often comes along with anxiety. It may come across with other, you know, neurodivergent issues. But, as I say, that's also a spectrum. You've got picky eating here. And then on the other end, you've got adventurous children who will eat lots and lots and lots.

And they are actually much easier to feed. But the problem with them is they're more likely to overeat. And actually, those children are more likely to end up being overweight as adults because they're so used to eating everything. The picky eaters are less likely to be overweight as adults because they're so picky and, and quite honestly, they often just get to the stage of, I'd rather just not eat than eat something that I consider not acceptable.

Like my kids will, if I say, if I gave them food that was not acceptable to them, They would just happily just go, whatever. I'm not going to eat anything. After all your hard work of cooking it all and finding it, you know, finding, yeah. And I think a lot of parents go through that. Like I've spent so long cooking and it's heartbreaking.

You've cooked something with your child in mind, you present it to them. And one day they love it. And the next day they're like, yuck, I'm not eating this. And you're just like, Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness, what's going on? What's going on? Yeah, it's important, I feel as well, to work with the mothers of those children because then you can, if you can initiate good, healthy understanding of food with the mothers, it passes down to the generation to the children, doesn't it?

Generally. Absolutely, absolutely. And the, the, and this is where I kind of got to when I pivoted from kids to adults was a lot of times I was seeing people were coming to me and saying, I want to teach my kids to eat healthily and realising that actually the adults weren't eating particularly healthily.

And so it was really like, actually, we have to do a lot more work, which is retraining you about what is healthy. It's not just that your child is picky. Your child is picky amongst a not so healthy diet. If you haven't got that healthy diet, and you've got a picky child, it just makes it worse and worse and worse, you know, all they're eating is the junk food, and then they're refusing all the other stuff.

Whereas If you're teaching them healthy eating, and yeah there's a little bit of junk food, a little bit of treats, but they get the limit of that right. They're also eating, like my kids eat vegetables, they eat fruit and vegetables, they're still picky and it still drives me up the wall from time to time.

But they are eating a healthy, balanced life, even a healthy, balanced diet, even if they still, you know, what they would prefer to eat is cake and spaghetti and anything basically that contains flour or sugar. It's interesting. What do you know about body composition and muscle, keeping, keeping your muscle as you age?

What do you know about that? Is that anything that you've been exposed to? Okay. Well, in terms of like are you talking about how our muscles deteriorate over time as women? Well, not just as women, as men actually, but because I don't work with men. Oh dear, good. Yeah, basically by the time you hit 30, 40, so when you're in your 20s, well my 15 year old son, he is busy going into his growth spurt, he is doing not very much, lying on his bed, and his muscles are busy getting strong, strong, strong, all thanks to that amazing hormone testosterone.

Yeah. Women don't have as much testosterone, so we're not as strong. In our 20s, we're in our sort of peak of life. We have what I call strength of youth. And then in your 30s, 40s, it begins to diminish, to diminish. Now, obviously it depends what you're doing to maintain your muscles. Obviously, the more exercise you're doing, particularly resistance exercise.

I think that's where I'm going. The resistance. Yeah. Okay, fine. , you do need to do some resistance exercise to keep your muscle bulk up. And you can do that in different ways. You can obviously lift weights, but there are other things that you can do. So you talked about Pilates and yoga. You're actually using your body as a weight.

You're doing resistance. Yes. Another good exercise is Tai Chi actually. Tai Chi is supposed to be very good in terms of helping you maintain muscle and balance later on in time. Yeah. Balance is important. Yeah, exactly. And, and obviously balance is part of strength. If you're not, if your muscles aren't there, then you don't have the strength to correct yourself.

You know, later on, so, you know, if we look at an elderly population, one of the big problems is falls and a fall can trigger, but you know, basically the end of life for many people because they fall down they fall down nastily. They hurt, break their hip. They end up in hospital. They're in hospital for months.

They can't really get back on track. And then it's a downward deterioration as opposed to if you've actually got the muscle strength and the balance you catch yourself and it's, and it's not a big deal. And the whole disaster is. is avoided, but also in terms of weight loss as well, muscle bulk is important because the more muscle bulk you have, your metabolism increases.

And actually you want, we want more muscle and less fat. And so sometimes, you know, people who are working on muscle and reducing their fat, they're like, my weight is static. And actually, if they look at their body composition, their body composition is changing. Their fat is going down and their Muscle is going up, but the scales are staying the same because that's all they're measuring.

The way around that is number one, you can measure your waist circumference because most people, the issue is the extra fat around their waist. And as you're losing that fat. You, that measurement should go down. Obviously, if you're feeling a little bit bloated, then that might change it. You know, these things aren't a hundred percent accurate.

And the other thing you can actually do is you can get scales, which show your body composition. So they say, and they're not that expensive actually. So I don't think they're a hundred percent accurate in terms of, you know, they may fluctuate a little bit. Yes. But as a, a rule of thumb, as a guide, as a base, they're useful.

Yeah. I think base guide, yeah. If you go to a gym and, or you go to a hospital where they've got better equipment, they're gonna give you different, more accurate one. But just those ones that we buy at home and in the uk, in Europe, they're like $30. They're not, they're not overly expensive. They're not overly expensive.

Where can people find you? Where are they, do you, you take clients from all over the world? Is this what I'm hearing? I'm hoping. I do, well, most of my time, actually I have clients in Australia, and then I have clients in America, the East Coast of America. I have one client in Western America, and then Europe.

So the UK. Well, thank you for asking. Number one, I have a podcast called fit and fabulous at 40 and beyond, which comes out every Tuesday. And I think of it as my little dose of inspiration. Me in your ear, just trying to remind you, come on, you can do this. You can do this. You know, you want to do it.

Yes, gorgeous. And I have a website, DrAulina. com, and I have a lovely Facebook group as well, which is, you know, a really nice place to connect with people, because people can ask questions, and we do Facebook Lives and chats, and there's lots of resources in there. Those are the three places that I really hang out at, at the moment.

I will I will put those listed. I think we've got, I've got all those in our little Captivate booking, I'm hoping. Otherwise, I will ask you for them again. How do you like living in Spain? I love living in Spain. I have my, what I call, life of luxury. And, you know, you live in Australia, so you have a life of luxury, I'm sure, as well.

But, you know, my life of luxury is, I really love my work, and it's flexible, and I get to provide an amazing service, and I see, I'm so privileged to see these women transform their lives. Yes. But I also get to do the things I want, which, for me, is swimming in the sea, and cycling. Walking in the woods and things like that.

So amazingly lucky. And I love it. Which, which part of Australia did you live in? When I was in Australia, I was in Brisbane.

Is there anything else you would like to share? You've got any top tips or anything? No, only that I think. Most, I think most people feel scared of, like, what do I have to do to get this amazing life and increase my energy?

And that's, like, it feels scary. But when you go on the journey, it's actually, most people say to me, oh, it's surprisingly easy. And I'm not saying there's no obstacles. Of course there will be obstacles. But that big shift is not as scary. It's not as horrible. It's not about, oh, life is going to be bleak and disastrous.

No, actually the idea is you enjoy your life more, but You're doing things intentionally and enjoying it more and most people don't realize how close they are to theirs. They think it's a big, big change and it's not really. No, it's not. It's not at all. It's just that little tweaking and then finally you're where you think you could be.

Exactly, exactly. Cool. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and your patience with me today and I will make sure I get this out soon and I will let you know so you can tag it on all your, put it on all your posts if you feel like you want to and share, share the world, share you with the world.

Perfect. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.