Adulting - #22 Fat, Fat-loss & Fads with Dr Joshua Wolrich (@unfattening)

Episode Date: December 2, 2018

This week I speak to Joshua - a trainee hand surgeon with a passion for calling out 'Nutri-bollocks'. We discuss his own weight-loss journey as well as how he is using his platform to try and help others avoid the many 'untruths', as he calls them, surrounding diet and exercise on social media. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Please play responsibly. Hi guys, welcome to Adulting. This is the podcast where I try to figure out what it means to be an adult in this day and age and what things affect us as we grow up. And today I am joined by Dr. Joshua Woolrich. Bit of a mouthful. That's close enough. And he is a trainee surgeon.

Is that right? Is that the right thing to say? So doctor, trainee surgeon, also a content creator and hesitant influencer. He's not sure about the word. Just the word. Yeah. And so Joshua's Instagram kind of focuses on his time as Nutribollocks. So it's breaking down kind of made up information that gets passed around media, social media, and all these outlets

that basically prey on people's insecurities to make money whether that's diet industries or things like that would you say that's kind of your focus yeah i think i i'd say it's what makes me the most angry right the most worked up about about social media in general i think is just the way that people have the ability to to tell a large group or a large following something without any responsibility to have to back it up with any sort of truth so you've you've recently come well I don't know how quickly you've grown but your Instagram is quite big now you've got like almost 100,000 followers yeah and how did you come from being I mean obviously you're already pretty busy being a doctor.

That's already quite heavy. How did you get into coming onto social media? How did you find your narrative? And what kind of drove you to talk about this? Well, I think it's definitely changed. I think like anyone on social media, I started it maybe a few years ago now as a way of documenting my journey to lose weight

which I'm sure thousands of people if not hundreds of thousands of people will recognize as a similar story yeah but it's turned into something I didn't quite expect it to so I was just posting pictures of food I always loved to cook I realized that if I was going to lose weight I needed to do that via food so I was posting pictures of food and trying to use it to um have my friends keep me accountable I I never used Instagram before before this at all I don't think I had it on my phone so I downloaded it to do that because I it's turned into a lot less of me posting pictures of food and now a lot more of me posting about certain myths and beliefs that people have around food and diet. And it's really turned into trying to promote one's relationship with food. It was a

phrase I'd never considered at the beginning, and it's now something that I am very much passionate about. When you were on your own weight loss journey, did you fall victim to myths and tricks that you realised would actually brush it? Massively. Massively. Being a doctor didn't mean that I didn't fall into that trap, because I still grew up hearing the same nonsense and as I'm sure people are aware of because it is it is being mentioned on Instagram and on social media us doctors don't really

get that much teaching around nutrition we have very minimal exposure to it during our degree we have six years but we have very little time dedicated to nutrition which does seem silly and some of that is changing and that is good um but because of that I left with relatively the same amount of insight and knowledge as to what I needed to do to lose weight as as anyone else I mean to play devil's advocate it does it might sound like that's ridiculous that doctors don't get to talk about food but you do get to a hell of a lot of other stuff yeah in that time and there are like nutritionists and dietitians who are specific to food-based things definitely so it does make sense but i do agree it is interesting because like my sister doctor my dad's doctor and they i remember when i first started

learning about carbs and stuff my sister was like no that's not true carbs are really bad for you and you think she'd know more so that is a really interesting and i think you're right it's a conversation that's coming up a lot more but i do think sometimes the language used towards doctors who aren't that aware of nutrition is slightly unfair when people get a bit annoyed about it i think there's i think there's there are good reasons for that and i and i do i try when i see stuff like that i try not to i think it got to me at the beginning i think when people said they're a doctor, they know nothing about nutrition. Why are you listening to them? I was like, hang on a second.

But granted, I didn't learn much about nutrition, but I did learn how to critically appraise research. I learned how to be non-biased when it comes to looking at information that's out there so i think i'm i'm really well placed to to be able to critically analyze the information that's out there around nutrition so for example carbs i i'm i think i'm quite good at looking at the research that's available and knowing what to believe and what not to believe and how to analyze the body of research around carbs but i agree there are a lot of doctors who are promoting a lot of crap yeah and unfortunately that gives us all a bad name yes and it's funny because as well you'll get people saying like oh it's so awful you can't believe doctors and yet the great thing about

accounts like yours and people who are coming at it from a more scientific evidential point is there are also just random people online who've started accounts with absolutely no credence or background to be talking about food and are talking about it in a very very assertive assured way and they are just chatting absolute bullshit um briefly before we get on to that because i know that we've got a lot to say a funny question because normally it's never this around but what's it like being a man in this industry and what was it like i don't really hear many guys talking about weight loss or suffering i don't know if you had really bad body image you talk about your relationship with food but that's actually something we don't hear very much um on social media yeah i mean i never really thought of it that much like that until being exposed to the world of instagram and seeing that yeah that the majority of people

that are championing um and to improving that's that was that's terrible grammar there the most most of the people that are championing people to improve their body image um are women and it's great that anyone's doing it but it is slightly disappointing that there aren't as many guys doing it um i think the reason being is that the world has a much more negative view on women's bodies than they do on guys bodies and we're definitely not under the same pressure as as you are in regards to having to look a certain way or having to dress a certain way or you know I mean we don't have makeup for example it's just not a thing yet I guess yeah um so there are so many of those things where we have other issues

we have other struggles that are kind of more guy focused I guess but um our looks something that's not really talked about but I I definitely had issues with my appearance as a kid I definitely had issues with whether I found myself attractive but I yeah I don't really know I can't really seeing as I'm I'm only a guy I'm not both I can't really say that I can't really explain too much as to how mine was different I can explain my experience yeah your experience so not not you don't necessarily comparatively but I guess just that that narrative around men's bodies isn't the same as you say women are very much in life told that you know your parents is everything and so the reason there are lots more women out there promoting body image

which i don't know if that's good or bad i don't necessarily think it's a good thing um is because obviously we're objectified by our bodies but by the same token i think that people don't realize that all the men we see out there online yeah there's a bigger diversity but still guys are still expected to look a certain way um and i don't think that that is spoken about as much because maybe because of the fact that guys aren't always allowed to speak about the fact that they might feel insecure because that's seen as unmanly so there is like layers to the yeah there's the there's those labels as to what makes someone masculine isn't it that is a lot of the time a load of rubbish yeah and being masculine sometimes appear kind of conveys itself as hiding your feelings and

not showing weakness and all that kind of stuff and it's it's it is a load of rubbish but it's it's definitely something that affects guys it's definitely something that affected me growing up um I was always well I turned into a pretty chubby kid um which we can get into I think I messaged you about some of that stuff um at the age of about 12 13 um when my parents split up and there were lots of things that happened to influence my relationship with food which we can talk about yeah um but that led to me being quite an overweight teenager and your teenage years are your formative years aren't they and those are the years when you learn about yourself you or you think you're starting to learn about yourself you start to be attracted to other people you start

then focusing on what you look like because you're like oh but they won't like me if I look like this and it just becomes a big spiral and so as a guy I was definitely exposed to all that kind of stuff how much do you feel like so when you're younger and you put I mean that's probably quite a common story when anyone goes to childhood trauma or anything that's really difficult to deal with we often do turn to food or any kind of I don't want to say headless it's not the right word but something that's going to comfort us but when you then became a teenager and you were slightly aware of your weight and you felt self-conscious how much did you attribute to your parents breakup or did you not really even realize that it was the food that had done it i had no idea yeah this was only something that i

realized really in the last kind of um couple of years yeah and even the other day i mentioned something on my instagram and my sister messaged me was like i didn't know you felt that way and i was like yeah no this is i know we've never spoken about it but this is something that I realized as I've gone on that to give you an example um my uh dad's an alcoholic and he would get um so drunk sometimes whilst making dinner that he thought that he'd fed me so I'd kind of be waiting for dinner and then I'd be told to go to bed and I'd be like hang on where like and this is you know I'm 11 12 I'm like I'm hungry but if I argued I'd get in trouble right and so I ended up having to go to bed and waiting for my

mum to come home and then I'd tell her no we hadn't actually been fed and then she'd give us food and do you know what I mean so it was it was I think my relationship with food was was quite specific due to some of the stuff that happened obviously there are lots of things that happen in people's teenage years and formative years that affect their relationship with all sorts of things but I think mine was I think I had a specific food side of things and so I ended up thinking oh well if I'm if I don't know if I'm gonna have dinner I'll I'll just sort my own food yeah and so I ended up thinking oh well if I'm if I don't know if I'm gonna have dinner I'll I'll just sort my own food yeah and so what does a 12 year old do for dinner he eats Pringles you know he doesn't have any other option like he doesn't know what he's meant to eat he just

eats something easy that's that's yeah like you say that's a really specific and really like sad thing that you went through with food and then on top of that the you just touched on it what i was about to ask was then again we also have no understanding of nutrition this is another thing i have difficulty with because whether or not we should teach kids about nutrition i also don't know because i think especially if it comes calories counting yeah we don't want to do that no um but for instance like my mum was always trying to make us healthy but had absolutely no fucking clue what she was talking about when it came to food so it would be absolutely fine for us to eat like a family of five portions of shepherd's pie and we had to finish it had to sit there and eat it but you

couldn't possibly have one piece of chocolate because in her head her understanding of nutrition was a wholesome meal is fine no matter how much of it you know no matter how much of it you have but sugar is bad so i was so deprived of sugar that when i got to uni i used to buy pick and mix every single day because i couldn't believe that i was allowed to have it when you have so you've not only got i guess your dad on the one side maybe not literally nourishing you but when it was coming from your mum or other people in the family did you also have a distorted understanding of the properties of food do you think i don't think that we i don't think as a family we touch on it that much actually um i think were it not to have been for for some of that very specific stuff that happened i think that my understanding of

food would have would have been actually quite good um my we always had home-cooked meals not that that's automatically better but it does help yeah um so we we rarely ate out but if we did it wasn't seen as a big deal yes um my mum loves chocolate so we would have chocolate in the house and she would we weren't allowed it because it was a treat and it was her chocolate but we would we'd be given it and that'd be fine yeah but it wasn't seen as um it's bad for you therefore you can only have one piece that was never a narrative that took place in our house which i like but that's only something really that's come from um kind of society in general i think that i picked up that certain things were bad for you certain things were good for you because otherwise

if i'd have picked that up in one way i i think i would have felt bad about eating a whole tub of pringles and i never did that's funny because my mum's understanding of food was her own conditioning she i remember her pouring over these magazines where they'd be like are you a pear shape an apple shape or a whatever shape looking at all these bodies i can remember that so clearly and i can see now exactly how my mum went from reading that magazine to feeding us and feeding herself and how even when she was emancipating her own feelings from something she would feed us based off of what she thought and it was all down to like women's magazine i can honestly see that now obviously at the time you wouldn't have known that and even now that conditioning is so strong within people which is why accounts like yours are so helpful because you don't realize how long these stories surrounding

bodies and food and stuff have been so prevalent yeah you have no idea until you look back on it yeah i remember my mum having just said that my mum was quite good at not teaching us nonsense I do remember one thing um and that was uh when I was quite a lot older so I think I was probably 19 20 and I was like mum I need to lose weight and like how do I do this um and she told me that the best way of doing so was to uh make sure that when you bought a sandwich for lunch you looked at the back and if it had less than 10 grams of fat in it, that was fine. Amazing.

And I was like, oh, okay, cool. And I went and bought that. I was like, where's that come from? She denies it now. She's like, I never said that. I remember it vividly. That's what I did for a while. That is amazing.

To this day, my mum will just say, oh, just don't eat bread. Just don't eat bread. Literally always, just cut up bread. I don't even eat bread that much. It wouldn't even make that much of a difference um so going forward so then you are so 1920 i guess the age when you were like right i'm gonna do something about well i think it's oh actually it was a bit earlier than that but i think that was the time when i asked my mum what's for help because she was never she was always quite lithe and that's kind of just part of her body but kind

of body style and just in general so it's i was almost gonna say body type but that's not a thing so let's not get into that um but that's just her um and so she's we all know people that can seem to eat whatever they like and stay thin and you know so I thought I thought oh my mum knows what she's doing that's fine um but you know that wasn't necessarily the case but I definitely tried a lot earlier that's so interesting you said that actually because it ties it kind of ties into everything so on the one hand we've got all this information about how specific nutrition is in terms of like it's not specific foods and stuff it's what they're made of but then there's the other conversation of people's bodies are so disparate like everyone's body does certain things people have different metabolisms and your mum probably because she'd always maybe been slim

probably had a really good relationship with food because in life a slim body is what we see as a healthy good body she would have been less exposed to some of it because she was searching for less and then i think i guess my mum maybe had a bad relationship with her body at some point so she started to look at food and it's all so closely tied in i think sometimes we don't realize quite how politicized bodies are as well as food and there's problems of like money and food sorry that's going a bit like i was just thinking about it was very interesting to realize how much we don't we really don't understand food and we will literally take advice from the person that looks right which is what happens with instagram there are people with very good natural bodies that

look a certain way that might be that they've got really big arms if you're a guy really big bum if you're a girl but it might be that they just look like that yeah your genetics don't mean you know what you're talking about with food unfortunately the way that especially in inception of instagram the way that happened was a lot of it was based off of that it's visual yeah so sorry going back to it so then you start your weight loss journey and then you lose weight and so I tried to lose weight as a teenager because I was at school and I got bullied about it right so uh you know it's I just I found myself being bullied about all sorts of things I don't know whether I was an easy target but basically either my hair was too short my hair was too long I was too fat I was my nose was too big my nose was too small literally it was like opposite things that I still

was hurt by even though I realized that there was no you know rationale behind it um but it meant that I decided that I needed to lose weight um and I decided I needed to lose weight because I wasn't attractive that was that was reason number one yeah I didn't care about I had no idea about health I didn't know about anything else you don't when you're 14 you don't care um ironically i had uh i had long-term girlfriends from the age of like 14 and i i think i was a friend of mine a while back called my called me as a serial monogamist yeah um so i never necessarily had trouble having a girlfriend but i always thought that i wasn't attractive enough obviously looking back on it it makes perfect sense that your personality is far more important yes exactly in the moment

you're like if I don't lose weight I'm going to lose my girlfriend yeah that was the feeling it was it was I'm so unattractive I don't know why this is happening right now I have a girlfriend but it's not going to last very long unless I sort myself out yeah because she'll find and that that led to me being I was a terrible boyfriend yeah because i was a massively jealous boyfriend yeah because i thought that every other person that she talked to was better was better because they're more attractive they were thinner than me so she was going to go um uh yeah so i just if any i don't know if there any of them are listening to this but i'm sorry i mean that's part of the problem of the very small paradigms of beauty

that we portray in the media and like what what attractive is anyway because i think we all know that you probably fancied someone that if you wrote down on a piece of paper what your type on paper is hashtag love island you'd probably write like a really like oh tall dark and handsome but we all know that you can fancy pretty much anyone just off the basis of anything so attractiveness in of itself is a really weird concept that we decide is just about looks when it's very much not um sorry completely gone off on a tangent so anyway so you start your weight loss journey yeah well fast forward i failed massively right but before we fast forward i'd say i'd say the reason i failed massively is because i just tried everything that i thought i was meant to do. Did you do the cabbage soup diet?

No, I don't. I'm not sure if that was a thing at that point. Oh, I did that one. In 2006. I was doing that around 2K10, I'd say. 2K10. 2K10, yeah. Is that how we label it? Sorry, 2K06?

Is that it? Yeah, no, I just did standard things of, um, starving myself. Yeah. Uh, which didn't work cause I got hungry and then I ate and then I starved myself. Yeah. Um, yeah. Start restricting, binging. It's just, yeah.

But I would never have labelled it as that. I would never have seen it as that. Um, I cut carbs, um, and I even cut carbs after starting Instagram, but shh, don't tell me. Oh yeah. Um, cause I still don't know what I was doing. And that didn't work. I tried eating sandwiches with less than 10 grams of fat in it.

Exciting. Surprisingly, that didn't work either. I tried exercising more. I was, I mean, I don't think I deliberately tried exercising more, but I remember exercising quite a lot and going, why am I not, why am I still overweight? I used to cycle from my house in southwest London all the way up to Northwark Park Hospital, which was about 12, 13 miles each way. Oh, wow.

And I used to cycle, that was for one of my university placements as a medical student. And I used to cycle that every day. So it was like two hours of cycling, uphills, all sorts of things. I got really good at cycling. I never lost any weight did you have good fitness anyway yeah my my uh i think kind of i got fit by cycling so i think my my kind of cardiovascular strength and stuff was quite good yeah and my endurance was quite good i could cycle for a long distance despite being quite heavy um i was strong from

the waist down right um but i had absolutely no strength anywhere else yeah couldn't do a push-up save my life but i could cycle yeah 30 miles um so it was a weird but to me that made no sense logically i was like so why am i still overweight yeah um because you assume that people that are overweight don't exercise right you assume that if you're overweight it means you're lying in bed all day well I think another assumption yeah that's not true and also you believe that I see this as well as kind of saying that if you exercise you can't possibly be like how could you put on weight I didn't realize that I used to do the thing when when I first started exercising I'd then eat double because

you'd be like well I've just done exercise it's fine I need more food literally took me forever to realize that that doesn't that's not how it works because you'd be like well now I'm gonna eat more it's like no it's fine i need more food it literally took me forever to realize that that doesn't that's not how it works because you'd be like well now i'm gonna eat more and it's like no it's they go together but also like i think people put well i was about to say people put an undue onus on exercise because i think a lot of people don't realize that you could literally just change your diet and you'd lose weight i think people don't i didn't realize that either i don't know if you felt that way no definitely i i thought that exercise was kind of important, number one, yeah. And I've definitely had, I think I can probably share this

without breaking confidentiality. I had a patient maybe two years ago. That's fine, you see, because you have no idea where I worked two years ago, so it's fine. I had a patient two years ago who um I'm I think so we were met I was working in orthopedics and um she had some joint pain I think it was knee pain and it was relevant at the time that her size was affecting her pain right um to clarify I'm not a doctor who always thinks that somebody's weight is affecting their medical conditions because that's not true.

We can get onto that later if you want. But in this situation, it was a factor into why she was getting knee pain because you've got an increased load on your knees. The weight just makes a difference. And somehow we got onto it. And I think I mentioned it in as polite a way as I could. And she got really, really angry at me and told me that the reason she couldn't lose weight was because she couldn't exercise because she had pain in her knee. And I try. I was like, oh, well, I can try and address this. I was like, you know what? I tried to make it into a really good thing. I tried to make it a positive. I was like, no, actually, it's OK, because as much as exercise is helpful um we really can

change our weight through our diet yeah um and i then got in more trouble because you've been working as well it's just so that you do not realize i didn't even realize until i got old about how money lies you're taught about food especially as a woman and how actually it's really touchy if someone tells you you're eating too little too much it doesn't matter it's really hard it's the weirdest thing but it feels so personal so i can completely imagine why not and i think you're in the right but i can imagine why because of the way and it's not doctor's fault and you should be able to say things like that but because of our conditioning an overweight woman being told by a man to eat that's i was going to say that as a guy i think i was completely in a difficult place

because of the way society conditions you you just feel like and it shouldn't be that hard food shouldn't have such a moral dilemma which is we'll talk about that as well but it's like that should be fine but we just the way that it's because of um places that don't have the right to talk about food i've been talking about food for so long and in such a wrong way it means that your literal physician can't be like this might be helpful without that being a really personal painful conversation but also i think as doctors we need to take responsibility for what we've done yeah not necessarily what we're current although some people still are currently doing but we've definitely produced a narrative over the years of if you're overweight you're

automatically unhealthy yeah um if your bmi is over a certain amount you're automatically unhealthy and every time you go to the doctor it gets mentioned and mentioned about how you should lose weight and that doesn't help and i think we need to acknowledge the fact that we've done more good in the past to be able to move on and still mention it now i don't know how we do that and it's hard and it's going to take time but i agree with you there are times when it is and i believe there are times when it's important to be able to mention it um and to be able to try and address it but we need to make sure that we're recognizing the harm we've done so far yeah and i think with weight and things like i do i do remember like you go to get your pill and they'd weigh you

and i remember i used to hate i don't ever weigh myself now and if i did i wouldn't care i have done it before just being so i'm like oh lol i weigh whatever but i remember going to get my pill at uni and being really stressed because she weighed me and it was a time before i worked out and i was really conscious about weight and it really upset me because i didn't know and i don't know what relevance that had to me getting the pill anyway but at that time they do your blood pressure take away whatever but i don't know how much relevance weight really has now that we know i guess a bit more about body composition and stuff like is weight a necessary thing to measure at every consultation that you have uh it's such a hard question

not sorry i'm just genuinely interested no i know so know. And it is something that I'm really, I am quite passionate about this as well and trying to work out how do we take the good that the Health at Every Size movement has done, which it has done a lot of good, but how do we at the same time recognise that at the extremes of size, it is possible to be unhealthy, be that severely underweight

or be that severely overweight yeah but but the problem is is there's a much wider range of healthy yes than people are willing to than doctors are willing to admit and also people are are aware of and so if we don't fit in that small bracket of what we automatically think of as that's a healthy weight that looks great then we automatically think we're unhealthy and there's definitely a wider range but i think we've sometimes gone the other way i struggle a lot with this especially after like the test holiday cover so i wasn't going to comment on that you obviously saw all this stuff and i did and i commented on it i only did because there were white muscly male personal trainers commenting on her health and i thought in this very instance she's

an overweight woman and realistically your job is to stay fit and healthy one of the most privileged parts of society your job as a personal trainer don't ostracize people for being fat like she is fat everyone knows that the cover wasn't about whether or not she's healthy neither was the piece in the exactly and whether or not when you put in a like a very skinny model which is that argument you get annoyed and it's like but they have done four years put very very very underweight women on magazines and no one's really better than eyelid especially not if they're a celebrity figure she's not a model for the sake of being a model she is like a personality so that whole thing annoyed me because whilst i think that her her weight could impact her size there is the

argument that sometimes it's it's the commentary around it that's more of a problem than the acknowledgement it's like the fact that i didn't think there's a slim white woman that was my place either to talk about it so when it was like these slim white person i mean i don't know what your no yours was yours was a different angle theirs was like vilifying it and i was like you're just doing this for clickbait all you're doing is is capitalizing or commenting on women's bodies which is happening enough already um and i got that point of view but i felt like that's the problem that's why we need the health at every size initiative on the flip side i skirt around i don't talk about anything a lot on instagram really

to do i feel like i can't even say if you wanted to lose weight because you wanted to lose weight for a health. I feel like I can't even say that. It's problematic. Yeah. I took it from a slightly different angle as to I saw and I bought the magazine because I wanted to know. I understand some of the negative connotations that comes with her in the health in quotes community because of some of the things that she said about um at her size it doesn't mean that she's unhealthy and i i get that but at the same time there there is evidence that at somebody of her size continuing that way she might be unhealthy but in one way who cares exactly that's completely up to her and their argument is yes but she's promoting it and saying people

should also be that size and i'm'm not, I don't know. And so I'm not here to comment on that. What I was trying to say was her article was about her being a model. Her article was about her story. She had some really amazing female empowerment stories in that article around all sorts of difficult topics. And it wasn't anything to do with her size she wasn't there going i'm overweight and i'm healthy you should be overweight too that wasn't the point so i basically just said look we've got we've got massively overweight male rappers right on the front of magazines all the time and no one cares about that and people were

like oh yes but they're promoting their music and she's promoting her health. And I'm like, no, she wasn't. She was promoting the fact she was a model. So just stop it. But this is a gender argument. Again, it comes down to everything. It's really funny. Nothing is... Alice Living actually posted it and it was talking about how there's a new initiative to get rid of junk food adverts on trains.

And the question she was posing, like, is this going to do anything? Like, what's the problem? Blah, blah blah blah but the real issue with all of these things is oh i think they said it was to stop the impending time ticking bomb of childhood obesity or something but the real problem that we've got is that obesity and and any other ill health isn't isn't the cause of what where we've gone wrong in society it's a symptom of lack of education which always fundamentally comes down to inequality whether that's like we need redistribution of wealth or whether it's gender inequality but everything we try and like cover things up it's a bit like plastering over a hole rather than filling it in

and i think we start like talk about these surface area problems yes obesity might be a big problem but the the reasons behind that are a lot lot deeper than some it's not because some woman's on the cover of a magazine huge you're some it's not because some woman's on the cover of a magazine huge you're not you're not going to fix the problem by taking sugar out of cereals yeah you know you you might i mean the you touched on the health and of course stuff that's it's a huge topic and it's so hard and i as can't like i i don't feel the need to justify where i was grown where i where i was born and how i was grown up and how i grow up sorry but at the same time i do feel i need to recognize the privileges that i've had and so i know just

from a health perspective for example example, if you are born. So two things. One, if you have more money, you tend to live longer. Yeah. Irrelevant of your size. And secondly, if you're if you're born in the south of England, you tend to live longer than if you're born in the north of England. Irrelevant of money. So if you earn the same amount of money and you live in Manchester, you will live shorter life than if you earn the same amount of money and you live in manchester you will live shorter life than if you earn the same amount of money and you live in cornwall so interesting and it's it's crazy and you're kind of going so you know there's so many reasons for that so many reasons and it's is that access to this is that access to this food is that access to this exercise is that air pollution is that

this is that and it's huge and yeah all we're going is sugar yeah that'll fix the problem no it won't it won't fix the problem it might be helpful to consider but in the right way in a way that's not demonizing food groups in a way that's not making people afraid of stuff you know there's two things that's really interesting because it's only in the last couple of years i've had this whole 180 of understanding where, first of all, we, like you just said, health is affected by air pollution, access to outside air. There's so many things that affect your health that have got fuck all to do with, one, what you look like and, two, how much you can bench. However, we have put those things. Not very much, by the way, to clarify. No, no, no, my legs are much stronger.

But we put those things at the forefront. So when I first got into health and fitness, obviously I was going to believe that the leaner you are the more shredded you are the healthier you are it's only now that i've come around to understanding that actually someone put it to me so well once she said like we get annoyed at people that are overweight and we say like oh but why can't you just buy vegetables it's so much cheaper for your family or whatever but in a world where we have so much disparity of wealth like even if you don't think you're that well off if you're listening to this the likelihood is you're probably in the 10 top of the world like the rest of people are living in you've got time to listen to a podcast yeah do

your second job right so when you think about maybe there's a single mother and your mum might be able to buy you a christmas present or might be able to you might be able to go on holiday but if a single mum can't give anything to her kids and they she just wants to give them a piece of luxury and a happy meal is a pound that is a very easy way that a mother or someone can provide for their family something that feels like a bit of luxury and if that is the only way that you can in a capitalist society which we do live in which is based off of consumerism and taking and then how can we really get annoyed at these people because as i was saying it's a symptom a lot of people and again

this is a generalization but a lot of people who do suffer from ill health are the people who have been more fucked over in society are from a worse background are don't have that advantage so it is a privilege to be able to take care of your health which is why it's such a redundant argument to be so vilifying of people who that argument a few costs the nhs so much is why it's such a redundant argument to be so vilifying of people who that argument a few costs the nhs so much money and it's like well the people who are the healthiest that are saying this probably aren't using the nhs anyway not the people that need it not until they're 80 and they get cancer exactly so long exactly so the people who cost the nhs a lot of money the people who need to use it i know it sounds weird but i i guess that's kind of yeah i mean something that makes a story and a piece of research that makes me so at the same

time so confused but also so excited about the fact that we're learning more and more stuff um was a piece of research looking at um looking at smoking that was done a while back and i'm sure you would agree with me as well smoking is unhealthy like it's yeah it's something we know right smoking bad for your health that being said I did used to smoke like 20 a day but I don't anymore but I did but but it's you know we have we have endless amount of research to say that smoking is bad for you smoking increase your risk of lung cancer increase your risk of bladder cancer increase your risk of cervical cancer all sorts of things.

You know, there are loads of things that it does and it's bad for you. No one would sit down and argue that it's not. However, this goes back to context matters and it's so important. There are a group of people in which smoking is healthy for them. And I know you're giving me that look, but it's weird. The reason why is down to the fact that there are so many different things that affect health, not just the stuff we put on our body. So they did a look at single mothers living on estates. I don't know where exactly it was, but it was in the northern half of the UK. And they looked at the single

mothers who smoked versus the single mothers who didn't and they looked at the impact that smoking had on their stress levels right and their overall biomarkers and their overall social stuff as well exactly and so that what they actually found was that the single mothers who smoked were healthier overall than the single mothers that didn't because it affected the way that they lived their lives in other areas it gave them you know they're almost all of them work two jobs it gave them time to relax in between you know during their jobs it gave them five minutes to relax during the shift and we know stress is a massive massively important thing for health it gave them a social aspect of being able to communicate and meet up with other people who also smoked and that we know

that social connectivity is hugely important for health as well that then had a knock-on effect of of them being able to sleep because they've had time they've had less stress during the day they're able to sleep better and so actually if you if you took those people at a gp surgery for example if they came in and you went oh you're smoke we should we should refer you to a stop smoking service because that seems the right thing to do right like smoking is bad then i guess just to caveat this that the level of health perhaps that those they had still wasn't like a very high level of health no afterwards so so going the other way like it's not so i'm not saying that you should take up smoking yeah but what i'm saying is it's really important to make sure that we're not dogmatic about these

things where we go smoking is bad for you everyone that i see that is smoking i need to tell to stop yeah so being overweight is bad for you everyone i tell everyone i see that's overweight i need to tell them to eat less probably not i think that's that other thing though like i remember seeing something where it's like if someone smokes and they have lung cancer you're not constantly going out on about how bad their lungs are you try and tell them to stop smoking whereas when people are overweight i think there's a massive bonus just to keep going on really fat and it's like well don't mention i think there's studies to show that people do much better in if they have health implications caused by their weight they're much less likely to be able to lose weight

if the doctor doesn't mention their weight but mentions the lifestyle factors that affects the way that they put on weight or lose weight and i know that sounds so blatantly obvious and simple but a lot of the time people will go to the doctor and the doctor will go well you need to lose weight and to the lay person as you just said and i know it's really hard to lose weight if you have no idea what you're doing and what's the first thing you do you open a magazine and read you open Instagram and you go oh okay I'll cut carbs yeah see if that works exactly so then I think that that's really interesting if you look at lifestyle factors so that's coming on to let's talk a bit about what you do on Instagram then what what do you find you're coming up at loggerheads most frequently or what's the thing that kind of

gets you the most the biggest lie i mean there's so many out there are a lot um at the moment over the last month i think the main thing has been um all of the different things that people claim can cure cancer whether that be a vegan diet causes cures cancer whether that be um eating cranberries cures cancer there are all sorts of things uh whether that be and this was literally yesterday or the day before whether that be wearing a bra with underwire in it causes cancer i've seen that before that's been a thing before it's so upsetting and the problem is is that just to touch on very briefly because i know this might sound boring for some people but how research works we if research is done to try and figure something out is to try and look at correlations between things

and try and get enough research that we can make an accurate assumption of causation yes the problem is is that whenever you do research you're always going to have results on both sides of of the of the situation so if i took if i took a coin and did a piece of research where i was i flipped it 100 times i may get heads 80 times and so my research might say that this coin is more likely to flip heads than tails yeah we know that's not true because it's 50 50 but looking at one piece of research you might be convinced yeah that you know flipping a coin gives you heads and so you look at one piece of research wearing bras with underwire and you might

be convinced that they cause cancer yeah because you've seen a link and you're like oh okay the problem is is that we need lots of pieces of research to even that out so that if we have say a hundred studies looking at flipping a coin we will the more studies we have the closer and closer and closer we'll get to the real answer which is 50 50 and so whenever we look at one study that's the problem is that people will make these claims and they'll grab one study and go see look science proves i'm right and you're going but that's really poor evidence i can do a study that will show whatever I want if I do it enough times and we need it doesn't mean we can't trust research

but it means we need to trust people that know how to look at research yeah and that's what I was saying earlier about I think that I'm quite well placed to be able to critically analyze stuff like this because I understand that one piece of research doesn't solve the problem it needs a much wider a much wider breadth of knowledge and a much wider a number of pieces of research and studies well it's a bit like what you're saying about the smoking thing I remember reading something explaining it might have been Hazel Wallace who shared this but it was explaining how to read research and things and she was saying how there could be a study say in the Daily Mail that said women who drank orange juice were much less likely to get cancer or whatever but if you look deeper into the study women who bought freshly

squeezed orange juice or whatever it was will be from a higher socioeconomic background women who have freshly squeezed orange juice for breakfast were more likely to go to the gym women who'd blah blah blah so whilst as you say you take one piece of evidence in a very nuanced conversation and go that's why when realistically if you spread that out and look at all the other factors there'll be a whole other reason which is why when we look at health again it makes so much sense to not go oh you're overweight you're unhealthy you may be unhealthy and overweight but we can't say that those two things directly impact each other and i remember reading that and being like oh that is so helpful I just don't know why.

But, I mean, that isn't that sexy to talk about. That isn't going to sell papers. And it also doesn't make an Instagram square. Yeah. It's really hard to explain that stuff. Really hard. Well, I mean, you do quite well with your, you've got that kind of, you've got a really good narrative on your page where it is quite obvious and people start to get it. Do you get people that are quite kind of affronted? Or is everyone quite behind you? How do find it no i do well obviously everyone's in their own bubble right so the people that follow me agree with me most of the time yeah um i did however

annoy a few people with my post about bone broth um because um and also vitamins and supplements um so those two have annoyed people that follow me. What was wrong with the bone broth? Well, the bone broth, there's nothing wrong with it, but what I've been seeing recently is a lot of people, I personally think it's a fad, and people got annoyed at me using that word. Right.

But essentially, bone broth is stock cooked for slightly longer. And the problem is that stock is great for you. It's a great way to, if we're talking health economics as well, it's a great way to create more meals out of out of a whole chicken for example you can boil the bones up you can make stock you can use it for soup the next day it's great it does have some nutrients in it as well it's great for hydration for people that don't necessarily drink enough water you know it's all this kind of stuff so yes it's great drink soup make stock make bone broth or whatever you want to call it that's fine however the problem I had was that people, and the problem I do have,

is that people are starting to make random health claims about it. I think that's been around forever though. Maybe the reason you touched on it isn't bone broth rather than a fad, a wives tale. Hasn't that been around forever? Something about bones, I'm sure. Yeah, so chicken noodle soup cures everything and that's basically stock. And yeah, it is a thing but the problem is is that it's become over the last month it's become an instagram thing oh they're

loving it i haven't seen that yeah you're see unfortunately i follow the people so you don't have to that's what i say so i do some so don't always look at who i'm following and follow them as well because sometimes i'm following people deliberately to see the other side of the nonsense so that i can correct it i know that people follow all sorts of people without realizing oh yeah um and so one of the things that's been going around a lot is collagen and how collagen if you eat collagen your skin will be better your hair will be better your joints will be better you'll fix your arthritis and so people are saying because bone broth has collagen in it because you're boiling down bones and the collagen comes and all this kind of stuff um that it's really healthy and therefore bone broth will improve your skin health and it

will turn into any brand selling bone broth yet has that happened yeah there are lots of brands yeah yeah loads of them there are loads you can you can buy just like uh kombucha used to just be something people would make themselves right now it's a massive massive industry where people sell kombucha you can go and buy it from sainsbury's yeah um other brands are available um you can uh you you can buy bone broth now yeah more in america than the uk but i'm pretty sure you can buy it here too um but the problem is i don't have any problem people drinking bone broth at all or stock or whatever you want to call it what i have a problem with is people worsening their relationship with food by believing things that aren't true and therefore using those beliefs to change what they choose to buy and consume

people can drink bone broth people can drink stock they can make soup out of it that's great but if you if the only reason you're doing it is because you think it's going to make your skin health better that's not evidence-based and it's not true and if you're doing it is because you think it's going to make your skin health better that's not evidence-based and it's not true and if you're more likely to believe that you're more likely to believe the other stuff and i know it's a possible extrapolation but there are so many so many stories about people believing alternative therapies for cancer and stopping the therapies that we as doctors know work and people die because of the fact that they believe someone about an alkaline diet, for example.

Which is not a thing. You can't change your body's pH balance. You can't. It's physically impossible. When people are really sick and they come into hospital, the majority of the time the pH of their blood is either acidic or alkalotic and it's one way or the other and that's when people are really ill if they're not ill it doesn't change there are lots of really complicated mechanisms in our body that that keep our ph between 7.35 and 7.45 when people are unwell if i could just give them kale and change their ph that'd be amazing yeah

doctors aren't hiding this this secret like it's we're not hiding it to make money from you like and especially not in this country because we don't make money from you anyway but we um but but you know like this it doesn't work we can't just give people in itu in intensive care drinks you know green smoothies and an alkaline diet it's just not a thing and people are being told it's a thing and people being told that it was cure cancer and people are stopping chemotherapy treatment to go on alkaline diets because it feels better and of course it does because chemotherapy makes you feel horrible but so does cancer you're dying so it's you know it the reason why and people asked me the other people had a go

at me the other day about the the the uh the underwire bra thing and saying so what who cares if people are choosing not to wear bras i'm like no that's fine yeah but the more you believe the stuff that's not true the more likely you are to believe the stuff that will end up really harming you and we need to be addressing it from the easy points first if i go and only address alkaline diets i'm missing out that's quite a high-end thing as well because not everyone believes that but it's like i used to believe although i can't remember i'm going to say this now and i can't remember if it's been disproved but i remember everyone used to go on about eggs and how you could eat the cholesterol in the eggs. And I remember this nutritionist, Rhiannon, who I really like.

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exclusively on FanDuel Casino, where winning is undefeated. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Please play responsibly. I always eat eggs, and after a while I was like, can you just tell me? And she was like, no, you can't eat the cholesterol it doesn't work like that the cholesterol in a food doesn't naturally transfer to your cholesterol in your body so we thought it did we used to think it did and the research that was done initially around dietary cholesterol um seemed to suggest that heart disease was linked

to it and there are reasons for that. They're very complicated reasons. But looking at more research, we now know that dietary, and there's another thing that got people annoyed on my page recently, dietary cholesterol doesn't directly correlate to blood cholesterol. There is some evidence that it can in some people, and it's about a third of people, it's not everyone either, about two thirds of people aren't affected at all. A third of people their their overall cholesterol levels might go up slightly

from eating a lot of dietary cholesterol but it doesn't go up in a ratio that's necessarily harmful for one because there's lots there's lots of nuance this is the thing about medicine is people just go cholesterol it's bad for you and actually there's a whole load of reasons there's different types of cholesterol there's different types that are actually protective for us our body makes cholesterol every day our liver makes cholesterol but we're not we don't think our liver's going to kill us but we think eggs are going to yeah so there's all sorts of things that make it really complicated and make and make my job difficult because i can't explain all this stuff every single time yeah um but yeah you're right basically eggs aren't the devil that we used to

think it was um the what the health excuse for a documentary that was on netflix that said that it was a bad for you smoking five cigarettes a day is utter bullcrap but also that was made in america where their food regulations are completely different from but also it was all about cholesterol in food it's still even with different even with different regulations, it's the same lie. It's the same untruth. Yeah. And it just, it gave vegans a bad name everywhere. If you want to be vegan, that's fine. I massively respect your ethical decisions

and your morals, and I'm not there yet. But I don't appreciate when people use lies to sell an agenda. Well, I was about to say, the worst thing of everything i think the culpable the thing about it is it's the morality that we put on food that's the real issue it's about the fact that people are making choices based on the fact that certain foods are seen as good or bad whether that's like because they're good because they're low carb low sugar make you

skinnier make your skin better whatever the fact is that foods don't have a moral identity. We impose this. And then you have people going, I mean, it's just everywhere. Oh, I'm so naughty. I ate this, I ate this and it's bad. That narrative, that language is what perpetuates so many problems with food, both sides of it.

People becoming obese and people becoming anorexic. Either way, in this Western world that we live in, when we do have a abundance of food. People ruining their relationship with food. Yeah, that relationship with food fundamentally is, and when you think about it, becoming anorexic either way in this western world that we live in when we do have a relationship with food yeah that relationship with food fundamentally is and when you think about it when sometimes i talk about food and i actually feel awful because we're so much privileged with food we have so much food that we're able to literally starve ourselves or binge eat and in the grand scheme of things that is gross when you think about the way that food is in the world but

on a very small scale it's also just one of the biggest the biggest issues that we have like that that understanding of food so i don't know i don't know how to follow that i yeah we're going back to inequality again i massively agree it's just with the moral with the moral compass on food do you think that in's that good bad yeah well definitely i think people are i mean you see it on instagram all the time right you see people talk about bad carbs and good carbs and uh well there's a classic one that happens all the time about um like healthy food swaps oh yeah right so like swap this for that and going okay um great i mean in the small minutia

maybe that one has slightly more nutrients than the other one but does that make you healthy because you refuse to eat full fat milk and you and you just drink skimmy semi-skim milk that's rubbish yeah it's not true we need fat too like if people are drinking gallons and gallons of it and they switch it they might end up losing weight because they've got less calories now but that's got nothing to do with the fact that it was full fat milk this is the funny thing about calories i remember when i always used to cut out carbs and i always craved sugar and because i didn't know that glucose is carbs and that's what it all was i would just constantly think i just wanted sweets but it was because i never

ate carbs i literally would just eat which i thought was better to cut out carbs it wasn't because then i would eat sweets which would add up to more calories than the carbs that i should have been eating but for some reason had decided were really bad for me and that really basic fundamental understanding of what foods are actually made of and when you're having a craving there's probably a reason you probably need it there's probably a reason why you feel like I really want sugar. You probably need some carbs. But whereas instead you get Instagrammers being like, if you fancy a cookie, you can just make kale.

They say it in that voice as well. No, they do. And I think what we're about to get onto. No, you're not strong enough to curb your cravings. Yes. You just need to be stronger. It's that moral thing again yeah i just need to be you need to just you know it's all about willpower yes but i remember

thinking i was younger that i didn't have enough willpower to be anorexic and that really annoyed me i remember thinking i can't starve myself why can't i do that i'm not good enough why can't i not eat everyone else seems so that's so twisted isn't it so twisted but back then as well when i was like 13 14 i don't even think that would have been a bad thing to say i don't think anyone would have been worried about that women were literally told not to eat no one was now we the worst it's almost worse now because we dress it up what was that nothing feels as good as skinny nothing tastes as good as skinny feels and back then in those days no one was accepted no one challenged that

think people thought it was an awesome quote put it on t-shirt exactly but that's what i mean so back then people were literally going yeah eat one... That was accepted. No one challenged that. People thought it was an awesome quote, put it on T-shirts. Exactly. But that's what I mean. So back then, people were literally going, yeah, eat less. Whereas now, people are saying eat less, but they're pretending it's about health. Actually, what they're doing is, this very basic argument that I do think people are getting now, it's calories in versus calories out. All that matters, it doesn't matter what you're eating. If it's about losing weight, it's...

Yeah, in the short term, it doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter. But the worrying thing is sometimes with Instagram instagram the clean eating fad was people were making it moral worth about like this food's good this food's bad blah blah blah but all they're saying fundamentally at the end of the day is exactly the same thing eat less which is fine if you know that's what they're saying but if you're not it dresses it up in a way that kind of might make it a bit more damaging because you don't actually realize that's what you're doing my mum to this day will go you eat so much really a bit more damaging because you don't actually realise that's what you're doing.

My mum to this day will go, you eat so much. Really worried that I'm eating so much food as if that's like an awful thing when actually what I eat, one, it's really healthy, but even it shouldn't matter how much you eat. Her understanding of food is so... Or nutrient dense. Yeah, exactly. I eat a lot of nutrient dense foods, but I also eat less nutrient dense, more calorie dense foods as well.

But I will eat, I like foods. I eat a lot and she's looking at my plate of it could be like butternut squash and loads of veg and aubergine but it's piled high and to her because it's loads of food she would look at that and be like that must be a million calories i can't believe it whereas she might look at something that was less nutrient dense, more calorie dense, but was smaller and be like, oh, that's good. Do you know what I mean? It's just we've just been taught such weird things about food. We have. And I think that links on to something that I get asked as well about, is calorie counting a good idea?

And it's everything that we do is problematic. Yeah. It can be problematic and my main response to that sometimes has been for me it helped me learn about that stuff it helped me learn about calorie density of foods it helped me learn about nutrient density foods i had no idea about but i at the time of doing it i was in the right place mentally i had the right motivation to want to lose weight at that point so I haven't mentioned this but the reason I personally think the reason why I ended up succeeding at what I believe to be a healthier

weight for me is because of the fact that I wanted to do it to be a better doctor not about my appearance anymore right so I ended up getting to a point yeah massively I ended up getting to a point two years after graduating where I didn't feel comfortable mentioning weight to patients because I felt like a hypocrite myself right that's really interesting it was almost like let's say you're going to a stop smoking service and as you're walking in you see someone smoking loads outside and then 10 minutes later that person walks in and is the person running your service yeah you're not going to believe them you're not going to listen to a thing they say you're like hang on but you're smoking yourself what are you doing telling me to stop smoking yeah so i felt the same way that i felt like if i was if i was a

and and some of that was based on what i thought unhealthy was and so that's a perhaps a longer conversation but i felt like if i was in if i was unhealthy myself in the size that I was that if I was if my job as a doctor was to try and help people's health there were going to be situations that came along where I needed to mention weight and food and therefore I couldn't do it so I was like I need to sort this out I need to lose weight because I'm limiting my ability as a doctor and so it really changed from I'm I'm and some of that I'm ugly was still there yeah but it was it was a lesser focus now it was more just like hang on I want to be a better doctor and so I started doing it from that perspective which I think put me in a right mind frame to be able to do this kind of stuff and it's

I would say don't don't necessarily it doesn't necessarily mean you have to wait to find the right mind frame i think i was really lucky and privileged to have that change in mindset um you can get there along the way but it is important to try and figure out a reason why that's not because i'm ugly yeah because i'm on because i i don't i'm not attractive i 100 agree and i think the interesting thing about calorie counting is you're completely right it's so contextual if we didn't have this social conditioning around food, I actually don't think, and we didn't have this weird thing about numbers, like a woman should be,

how many times they say in the press that Kim Kardashian is 116 pounds. What is 116 pounds? I don't even know. I'm really lucky I've never heard that. Now I know. Literally, all the time. Does she never change? Is that every day? No, but whenever she's that way, I almost think she

must pay them to put it in it's very weird but i remember when i was younger i thought you had to be seven stone and then it was eight stone and then i remember hadn't weighed myself for ages and i there's these really random numbers by the way i'm weighing myself i'm five foot three my friend who's six foot one we all believed you had to be the same weight makes no sense i believe that this weird conditioning wasn't there calorie count not necessarily calorie counting but macro tracking or whatever wouldn't actually be that much of an issue because everyone could just be like oh it would be useful for me personally to have this much i'll have that much and it's not a lifelong thing right so it's so something that might help people listening i every so often i do it but i stopped deliberately about a month ago. I was working with someone who I kind of wanted to try and improve my gym stuff.

So it was a separate reason for doing it. But I kind of just stopped contacting him. And I should probably message him and tell him, sorry. But essentially, I was like, I'm under a lot of stress at work and the stress is increasing. And if I continue to try and track my food, I'm going to explode. It's just not going to work. And so even myself, who people look at and go, oh, you've got such a great relationship with food. Now, I'm like, yeah, but that this was this was context dependent. Like I got to this point where, yeah can I can track food and and not affect my

relationship with food but at that moment in time it was starting to affect it and I realized that and I went absolutely not I need to stop so I stopped counting my calories and I just went back to eating as intuitively as I could and I've done that for the last month and yeah on the scales I've put some weight on but who cares like it's not the point and the point was I took the rest of my health into consideration I went I'm I'm at a really stressful point in my job. If I continue to do this, it's going to start being harmful for me. And even though I've got this good relationship now or so it appears on the outside, it's still important to keep to just you. That's why the whole dogmatic thing doesn't work. Calorie counting is the only way you can do it. You have to say for some people it might work. Even even for me a month ago it was a bad idea yeah it's just so important to recognize that

i haven't tracked calories for years and i wouldn't go actually again but i remember when i got into finish at that point in time it was the only thing that was available everyone was like you have to and it was really revolutionary as well and everyone thought it was a really um because it was if it fits in macros as well a lot that was going on so it was very early stages of trying to unpick the narrative around good and bad foods however now that i've not tracked for ages and realize that actually life is so much easier and if anything i actually eat better because i'm not thinking about food so much that i literally will go and just eat whereas before i would be so conscious of what I ate

that it might end up in me overeating and undereating. It was very, very calculated, literally and metaphorically. And now it's just not an issue. I am intuitive. That has taken me literally years, though, when you think about this time frame of this, to get here. And again, from a privileged perspective, we're both in a body size that people would probably look at from the outside

and say yeah but you don't need to worry about that yeah but i mean i wasn't always no of course exactly but so so to clarify that we weren't and yeah now like i think that's why intuitive eating is really important yeah it's important that people look at it as a as a really valid method um it is very much against anything to do with calorie tracking yeah but as a method i think it's great and there are going to be some situations where it's really important to start learning to listen to your body yeah well not not some situations all situations we need to be better at eating intuitively massively and i think but i think

there's also this idea that so i don't even because i've been very very competitive lean i don't look at myself as lean i know my body so well to know that this is a very comfortable place for me to sit but obviously that depends on someone smaller than me might think I'm big someone bigger than me might think I'm absolutely tiny depending where you're looking at it so I'll still get messages from people going because I'm in a fitness industry they will automatically assume that I don't eat certain things that I definitely track my food that I don't drink and i'm like why do you think that my body we've we've almost made things that are attainable people believe that unattainable there's such weird narratives around what health looks like and how you achieve it my surgical consultant the other day joked that i didn't want cake today and i was like what do you mean give me

the cake yeah i want cake i don't care it's 11 a.m give me cake yeah yeah but you won't post it on instagram i was like yeah no i will this is the whole point you don't follow my instagram you just sort that out but i was like this is the whole point like that you can eat cake it's not nothing out of boundaries no if i only ate cake might be a problem yes but uh but that's not the point no i literally i did a whole post about cake once because i have cake probably once a week because one of my favorite things to do with my boyfriend is go and find a new cake shop and have a slice of cake every time I do that everyone absolutely loses their mind as if I've like I'm like no this is just I really like cake and it's fun to find new cake shops I haven't thought about it there's been no planning it's 11 o'clock on a

Tuesday no there's no yeah because you just learn but I have a lot of the time get clients now like all of my clients are women I can train men they just don't seem interested and these guys come to me and the first thing they say is i've been tracking for years and i can't stop and they'll stop and they'll be like just so because i think for women it was such a big thing and then you realize that even if you do put on a bit of weight as you said life's just a bit better when not everything is focused on even for men it's stressful i promise yeah it's it's stressful no matter what sex you are tracking everything you eat is is stressful because and it's a luxury as well yeah i mean again you have to have the time for i was like i'm i'm still privileged i'm still you know middle

class i work as a doctor you know i have a full-time job but i'm still finding it too stressful to do that right now yeah i'm like i can only imagine what it's like for people that are not that way and you tell them that they need to start tracking everything yeah yeah like it takes time i think i think the fundamental thing of what's coming out of this that we're basically trying to say yeah but also it's just that everything comes down to the fact that food shouldn't be as complicated as what everyone is trying to do it's the same with anything in the world is market it make it into a business turn it into something that's packageable and sellable and printable and articles

line yeah there is no such thing it's just eating we need to take it back to the realization that we're like sustaining ourselves we're human living walking breathing beings the fact that we have prescribed this idea of beauty which very frequently reduces people to not be able to do a lot of things because they feel like they literally can't eat is not natural or healthy and if we repair our relationship with food that way first yeah the other stuff becomes so much easier and so much less problematic yeah if we repair our relationship with food using calories for two three months to perhaps lose some weight if need be for health or for an operation or for whatever that then becomes a lot more problem a lot less problematic because you've looked at your relationship with food first and that's the

reason why i don't post meals with calorie counts on them anymore i used to i can't believe you did that either because it was so redundant and i used to look at calorie i used to look at cooking books and go why aren't they posting the calories yeah that's really unhelpful when i make a cookbook i'll have calories in it also you'd get people posting stuff with calories and it would be a girl and she'd post one meal in the day and it would be like 960 and you think fuck she eats loads and then you get someone else posting one meal out of their day that was 300 calories now that information is so unhelpful because yes she might have eaten one meal for 906 but that might be the only thing she ate all day but it creates the illusion because we automatically in our minds think they're eating

three meals a day they must eat that many calories people lie there was a massive stage you'd see these girls literally bullshit there's no way they were eating 3500 calories a day and staying at 14 body fat but at one point in time there was like a it was like a currency to kind of be like i eat so much food it's always been around actually there's always pictures of very skinny girls eating loads of pizza and cake and that's not helpful well there's pictures of them holding pieces of pizza and cake how much of that they eat after the photo's been taken yeah or if they're eating are they eating anything else not that i want to vilify any women out there but it's just that if you saw a fat person with a slice of pizza everyone would be like you're disgusting what are you doing let's stop attaching these kind of like sets either sexually gratifying or

like vulgar ideas between food and people it's just food but so i think that was what's really unhelpful everyone would do these what i eat in a day but what eat in a day it's like all the other things that we've been talking about contextually what you ate on one day at 365 days of the year not useful no because it could be completely context it's what you're it's what what you're trying to do at that time it's yeah it's you at the moment it's how much exercise you're doing it's your body size your height it's like if you try and copy someone else someone asked me the other day can you can you tell us what you eat in a day and i replied back and i just went um no because if i tell you you'll copy it and i don't want you to copy it i also don't know why it's not helpful no like it's like

can you can you post what you buy at the supermarket i'm like uh like i used to yeah and actually i get it it's not as bad it's not so it's quite useful to look at what ingredients you can yeah people people are asking that like oh well for a certain amount of money i want to kind of have an idea as to what kind of health you know like nutrient dense foods you buy and stuff it's like fine but the other thing is there will be some people who will just copy it yeah and they'll just be like oh i need to buy this many heads of broccoli this week because he buys that much and it's we we want to copy each other far too much because we think we copy each other we will look like each other yeah and it just doesn't work like that no and i think that's the problem with why well it's why fitness influences are such big things why i managed to

get into it when i was really lean like very lean i had absolutely shredded abs now genetically my sister she did do sport but she never does exercise she's a doctor it's quite funny she literally never goes she should go to the gym just because we i think it's really good for you to exercise yeah it's it's i don't actually exercise for anything to do with what i look like now exercise is literally for mindset if i ever thought i wanted to lose weight the thing i would adjust is my food because like i can't if does that make sense and i'm always going to exercise irrelevant of what's going on when i think it's like a hobby as and i know shona's been on your podcast yeah as she said there's 99 reasons to exercise and weight loss

is not one yeah exactly you have to be there's so many other good reasons yeah you should just do it but she if she's in a bikini pretty much has abs our family is very like genetically athletic and sporty and everyone would be like still to this day i have abs i don't train abs everyone's like what do you do if i want to know i could sell an ab guide and probably make quite a lot of money yeah it would be such a waste of time because if you're not predisposed like genetically predisposed to have abs it's probably not going to happen but we do this with bum guides and whatever else it is but it's so prescriptive it doesn't work like that find the best way to be the healthiest you and you honestly when i'm when you're your happiest you probably you know when you get into a new relationship and you start putting on weight but you're just so happy with

that person the last thing you care about is whether or not you look fat maybe after a few months like fuck i've gone a bit of weight whatever but at that moment of happiness you will realize that what you look like or how fat you are really has no bearing on how your life is i think a lot of the time though because of the way the world's set up when you are feeling down the first thing you do is think how can i change my looks you break up with the boyfriend you get a haircut you feel a bit shit in job you try and lose weight but isn't it funny that we just immediately go to that answer but actually realistically look after your health it's a bit like the thing of looking after the pennies and pounds look after themselves it's that with food and fitness but i think the more we realize what impacts our health aside from nutrition the more

we realize that the better i think we're going to have with those kind of things yeah the more we realize that sleep the more we realize that exercise yeah that social connectivity actually having friendships and spending time with other people yeah the fact that you know if you don't sort those three out you can you can eat as well as you like but you're not going to be healthy no i wrote i wrote a blog actually an article for this new um paper called like drugstore culture and it's online so can you write a piece for us about like what self-care really is i was like i cannot fucking wait really long piece and basically all i talk about at the end i'm like so the things that you need to do i talk about all the things on

instagram the way that the health industry in the uk has gone from like millions to billions all the stuff and i'm like so what you've got to do drink water eat a nice varied diet sleep eight hours read matthew walker's why we need to sleep have sex have friends do social activities you don't that is it it doesn't cost anything if you're from a privileged background have access to these things but realistically to have good health it's not at all about what gym kit you're wearing which gym you go to you can go outside run for free try and source locally sourced vegetables try and make friends with people that are nearby we are humans it's all very tribal it's a lot more basic than instagram might have you believe um and i think

that's that's that's what's missing i think we went so far into this portal of trying to find health that we completely forgot that we've just got to move and eat and act like we were designed to does that make sense just looking at me I'm soaking it in so last thing we'll do actually before we go can you tell me I've never done this before I've just decided okay kind of like a quick round what is the the things that everyone can avoid there's absolute obvious bullshit so for instance detox great yeah you can't detox your body with food or drink not a thing your liver does it your kidneys do it you can help them by eating a varied diet you can help them by helping your body work in general better but there is no specific thing that will detox your liver or your kidneys and if medical medium ever listens to this

you're a charlatan you need to stop promoting crap basically so all detox teas yeah rubbish absolute bullshit stop wasting your money um you cannot cure cancer with any particular diet yeah it's not a thing um again you can make your body feel better if you start if you change your diet to a more nutritious one a more varied one but it's not going to cure your cancer and nothing that you do with your diet has caused cancer that's really important to say as well oh interesting so you can't people because the problem is is that it's not just it people think that they can cure it by doing it it's that people are like oh shit i ate too much of this in my life that's the reason i've got breast cancer or it's my fault because i wore underwire and never a cause of cancer it's an it's a contributing

factor if with like epigenetics and stuff is it that kind of thing yeah it's a contributing factor and there are certain things so for example uh a a diet massively high in red meat does increase your risk of colon cancer but eating red meat every so often doesn't when you if you get colon cancer in the future that's not going to be that's not going to be in the course and so we we go too far as to start labeling problems and causes cancer is so massively influenced by so many different things. What is your opinion on, and I think I know, but those DNA testing kits where it tells you what you're allergic to or what you're intolerant to?

Absolute bollocks. Yeah. So food intolerance tests don't exist. The reason why you can't go to your GP and get one is because they don't exist the reason why you can't go to your gp and get one is because they don't exist so the main thing that these tests are testing for is something called igg which is an immunoglobulin which your body makes in response to an exposure to something okay so if you are exposed to a certain type of food your body will make that immunoglobulin to it the problem is people say

that means you're intolerant to it that's not the case if you it all it means is that you've eaten it it doesn't mean that you're intolerant okay so people are measuring something that is irrelevant there is no evidence that that links to intolerance and when people say oh yes but i got told this and i cut it out and i felt better that's. Doesn't mean that the test was right. And I guess the other thing is, if you're going through your life and you're never gathering any really uncomfortable bowel movements or feeling really sick or having any actual physical symptoms of intolerance,

then why are you going to look for a problem that you haven't had and then changing your diet based on that? If you find certain foods that don't work well with you, you know that. You don't need a blood test to tell you. Then eat less of them. And if you eat less of them and't work well with you, you know that. You don't need a blood test to tell you. Then eat less of them. Exactly. And if you eat less of them and you feel better, cool.

Perfect. Done. You don't need to tell anyone that it's bad for you or good for you for you to actually listen to your body and work that out. That is one thing you do, is a massive thing that I've learned. I actually do know I can pinpoint foods that I know I can't have too much of because it will upset my stomach or whatever. And I've literally done that just from becoming more conscious and mindful of what I'm eating

and that's fine I still eat it all if someone tells you that kale is incredibly healthy for you but it doesn't work well with your body you don't enjoy how you feel when you eat it don't eat it yeah it's fine and you don't need to drink celery juice also not a thing but you don't if you don't like celery and you don't like the way it makes you feel stop drinking it i don't understand you don't need to push yourself through feeling shit just because somebody told you it was healthy just like the keto diet and the keto flu if people start feeling crap because they've cut out all carbs yeah that's a sign that perhaps you should stop it yeah it's not something to push through with willpower but also the other the other thing that i know sounds really funny but i like i sometimes feel a bit

dairy intolerant but sometimes i'm going to eat a whole tub of ice cream and it's worth it like sometimes in life you just make a decision based off of like feeling good it's not going to kill you no next up okay we've done detox teas what about slimming teas what what does that even mean um teas that so you've got the detoxing ones that you say cleanse your liver but then the yeah the weight loss teas um also not a thing no um it's just tea yeah uh they'll put things in it like capsaicin for example which is the stuff that's in chili peppers right um that's meant to increase your metabolism uh it might do by about 10 calories a day.

That's irrelevant. I remember putting loads of chili on eggs. You can sneeze and burn 10 calories. Doesn't mean we should start sniffing pepper to lose weight. It's not a thing. So yeah, you can drink whatever tea you like, but it's not going to make you lose weight. The only thing that's going to make you lose weight

is by having less energy than you're expending it's it's simple biomechanics it's simple thermodynamics so yeah that if you have more energy going into your body than your body is using over a period of a day or a week or even a longer period of time over that whole period if you work it out and you're having less going in than you are spending just like a bank account you are going to lose weight or lose money there are so many things that would affect that your gut health will affect that the there's all sorts of things but and we can make it really complicated but by boiling it down to something simple why would a slimming tea work it just doesn't i mean i know it doesn't but it just from a certain from from someone who doesn't necessarily

know how to look at research or this or that just take what they're saying and go does this affect my calorie balance i'm putting something new into my body and they're telling me it's going to make me be in a deficit well it's the problem of they all say they make you lose weight because one they use made-up photos but two it makes people lose water weight because they have like diuretics and laxatives in them some of them do make you yeah some of them do have laxatives there's like an actual danger to having laxatives like frequently aren't there because you can get dependent on them and well if you're specific if they are so some of them don't even have laxatives in them some of them are literally

just tea literally they're all they are is tea and some some herbal root from somewhere in the in the amazon that has meant to improve your metabolism that the majority of them are actually that yeah some of them that do make you go to the and those tend to be the detox ones rather than the same ones actually the detox ones tend to do that because it makes you feel flushed out and if they are diuretics and you are having diuretics on a regular basis, you can become dehydrated, which is not great. You can lose all sorts of electrolytes in the fluid that you're losing. And yeah, there are cases of people that have become incredibly unwell and people that have died from taking laxatives there's a reason why some people use it as a as a as a some people take diuretics um and laxatives deliberately to try and lose weight knowing that's what they are

and it's really unhelpful and it's really dangerous okay um what else is next up what other things we've seen recently uh keto intermittent fasting yeah all of the all of the the different the new best way of losing weight yes um unsurprisingly rubbish uh there these are all methods not solutions yeah so one method is to uh to to eat whatever you like and keep an eye on your calories one method is to um do a keto diet but the only way that will make you lose weight is if you're having less calories than you were previously. Yeah. One method is intermittent fasting, which basically is skipping breakfast with a fancy name.

I actually do intermittent fasting, not to lose weight or anything, but just because I like eating later on in the day. Because if I get up at six and go to the gym at six and eat breakfast at seven, want lunch by 10 and dinner by four and then by eight o'clock i've eaten about 12 meals so i do actually tend to start my day off later but that's just that's lifestyle that's nothing to do with weight loss yeah and i've and i always i always say on on any post that i do on my page i always say i don't have a problem if you want to do a keto diet if you want to do it and it fits your lifestyle it's sustainable for you that's fine but do you not need is there not some necessity to carbs just surely some people will be they're very not be very good at keto yeah well they're very helpful i i you know the problem is is that keto doesn't rule out fibrous carbs like veg.

And so you are getting some carbs. You're just not getting the starchy carbs like potato, pasta, rice, all that kind of stuff. So there is, I mean, I do think personally, I do think there are going to be negatives to cutting out starchy carbs. But the main thing, though, is that outweighed by if somebody's unhealthy is that outweighed by the weight loss that takes place if it's a short time thing i guess the problem is with any diet it's adherence so like you might be able to do that keto diet for three months and lose loads of weight but the minute you stop doing it you go back to eating quadruple

what you ate on that diet it would be a completely redundant thing to do and i all of us have done that i think pretty much anyone who's tried to lose weight has gone through the diet the yo-yo diet thing it's sustainability yeah and it's if people people always ask me when i was losing weight they're like oh what diet are you doing and and i always sounded really really pretentious by saying it's not a diet it's a lifestyle change and you sound like a twat when you say that but it's true yeah it is true and if if i'd have dieted like i tried to previously and we all know that diets don't work because diets are short-term changes of behavior to do a certain thing yeah and yeah they work anything like anything works if you do a week of drinking soup and nothing else it will probably work if you do a keto diet and and you are on a

deficit it will work if you do intermittent fasting and only eat for six hours of the day it might be hard to fit more calories in there than you were usually doing so it might work but unless you're going to do that for life yeah what's going to happen when you stop if you haven't learned anything if you haven't improved your relationship with food in the meantime and i don't think by cutting a macronutrient like carbs that you have to do on the keto diet yeah i don't think that's a good way of improving relationship with food and when you stop you will put weight back on because you won't have nothing would have changed so as soon as you can eat carbs again you're adding it back in you will and so you'll end up being in a surplus again not that not

because carbs are bad but because you don't understand it won't it won't make sense to you the whole balance of nutrients and calories. And so you put stuff back on and it's not a harmful. It's not a it's not a neutral intervention. diet and put weight back on and then you lose weight and put weight back on every time you yo-yo every time you lose weight and put it back on that weight goes back in different places so you don't put the fat back on in exactly the same place in your body that's so interesting fat fat the reason why this whole there's a different rate there's a whole range of healthy weights is because fat can be harmful for our cardiovascular system and our health, depending on where the fat is. Do you mean if it's like visceral fat or subcutaneous?

Exactly. So fat, subcutaneously, fat around the hips, fat in the bum area, that has very, very little impact on our heart health. It has very little impact on our risk of diabetes. It has very little impact on our health in general yeah and so you may weigh a lot on the scales because you have a lot of fat around in a pear shape which isn't a thing but it's a descriptor yeah so that's why a pear is technically healthier than an apple because fat around that area of the body doesn't affect your risk of these diseases fat around your liver fat in your abdomen that increases your risk of diabetes increase your risk of heart disease it changes a lot of things but you won't necessarily be able to see that

right no so you could be slim with exactly loads of that fat and that's why people go oh yeah but what do you mean what do you mean fat causes diabetes it's sugar because i have a slim friend and they've got diabetes now yeah but that's but you don't know how much fat they have around their liver. The reason why the South Asian population are more likely to get diabetes at a lower body weight is because genetically they hold more fat around their livers. It sucks, but that's just truth. That's how it works genetically. And so we need to be looking at these kind of things.

But the yo-yo dieting, if people have a lot of fat subcutaneously under the skin around the hips and they lose a whole bunch of weight and then they put weight back on then they lose a bunch of weight they put it back on the body is going to try and protect itself and by that it's not going to put you in some salvation mode because again that's not a thing yeah but what it is going to do is it's going to put the fat back in places that are harder to get rid of because it wants to protect itself it's easy to it's easier to get rid of fat subcutaneously but it's harder to get rid of fat viscerally so if you yo-yo diet exactly if you yo-yo diet the fat won't get put back on your bum again it may do partially yeah but it will also be put preferentially around your organs can i ask you a? Which then leads to all that health problems.

Am I right to think that we're born with all of our fat cells? And then it's not that you get more fat cells, the fat cells get bigger, the fat goes into the fat cells. Unless you're pregnant, that's the only time you can grow more fat cells. Have I just made this up? I can't give you a 100% answer to that, but that's roughly right. So the majority of the time, the fat cells that we have get larger rather than the most pliant number. Right, so is that why some people are more predisposed to be fat,

because they could be born with more fat cells? Can you be predisposed to be fat? I think it might be slightly simplistic in terms of... Yeah, I did just make that up. I'm not convinced about that. I just thought it sounded good. terms of use there are so many different reasons i'm not convinced about that to be fair i think one of the main reasons and one of the things that the science is looking at the most at the moment is is your gut and actually how um say say you've got and again i don't always go back to calories but let's say you eat a thousand calories of a certain type of food whatever it is some people's guts

will be incredibly efficient and so you'll eat a thousand calories your gut you will you'll digest it you'll break it down you'll absorb all thousand calories or close to some people's guts will be incredibly inefficient and so you'll eat a thousand calories you'll break it down but you'll only absorb 600 of it and so people that we all know we all knew the person that could eat 10 pizzas and never put weight on maybe that's why what they've got shit gut no not shit it's just less that they're bacterial makeup and that's also a reason why perhaps genetically it runs in families that they're that the bacteria in their gut isn't as efficient at absorbing all the calories so they would do rubbish if we lived

3 000 years ago when we had not much food right because that wasn't a good thing to have genetically yeah um it was genetically advantageous to absorb as much nutrients as possible as possible but that's sometimes the reason why people and there's loads of research going into it but that's why that's sometimes more likely to be the reason why some people are born with an easier ability to store fat than others because they have an easier ability to absorb nutrients than others so you're actually better adapted if you can maybe you're better adapted to to to what we used to have to deal with when we didn't have an abundance of food yeah yeah so you're an advantage i know it doesn't feel like it but but people that

you know find it easy to put weight on are at more of an advantage than people aren't in in the genetic you know kind of grand scheme of things yeah yeah amazing i feel like we've covered so much all the stuff yeah was there anything else that you particularly wanted to talk about uh i would say one thing and this keeps coming to my mind as well you mentioned earlier about how people saw you as tiny and therefore thought that you must not eat anything yeah and i know you changed your name a while back from tiny tank to unani um i haven't actually mentioned my name on instagram yet um but it happens to be unfattening oh yeah which might sound slightly um hypocritical welling, which might sound slightly... Hypocritical?

Well, yeah, maybe. It might sound slightly problematic for what I talk about. And I've considered changing it. But I'm not doing it just yet. So I just wanted to reassure people that the reason I called it that is not because I think fat is inherently bad. It was a descriptor that I thought was slightly catchy at the beginning of my journey

but actually at the moment i find that it it kind of attracts people in who are on a journey that they want to wait to lose weight and actually i like the fact that i get a lot of those because it i then feel i have more of an impact because i'm i'm catching the people that are going oh unfathoming that'll help me lose weight and then they sit and go oh and it kind of challenges their perceptions as to what weight loss is so at the moment i'm keeping it please don't attack me for it i do have some people message me and go why are you called that it's problematic i'm like i know i know um i've actually just realized because i realized that when you did it it's probably because you were losing weight right but now looking at it and what everything you post it

kind of sounds like what you're saying is not all of the stuff that you think is fat news fattening if you read it that way because because all your posts are usually about reclassifying the way we look at food, I actually think that when I read it, I see it as you going, this isn't fattening, even though you think it is. And you say this, Shona said this, and I do this too. I'll write a whole post about relationship with food,

about healthy eating, whatever, and I'll hashtag fat loss hashtag weight loss because i want people who are looking for those hashtags to come and read this because they'll go to read a fat loss post hashtag low carb yeah and expecting something and then hopefully they'll read my post and go oh i don't want to always be in my bubble yeah i do want people who are wanting to look at improving their relationship with food to be to be in the community that I'm trying to build because it's it is so massively important. And I don't get it right every time. I promise. I still you know, there are still posts that I that I'm kind of like this might be problematic. And I think one example of that was there was one that that from a from a numbers point of view did quite well the other week about about intuitive eating and donuts and i wrote something on it about how intuitive eating

means that you can you can eat a donut it's fine you can eat whatever you want you know you have unconditional permission to eat donuts i also wrote the same time that just because you have permission to eat 20 donuts does that mean that you should and i got flack for it and i'm still slightly interested i'm i i get where people are coming from that it's that it's not unconditional permission if you put conditions on it but again i do think it's important to see both sides of some of this stuff that yes we have permission to eat whatever we like but at the same time we are also wanting to be healthier individuals we are wanting to do that kind of stuff everyone's in different stages of their journey it may be important at the same time we are also wanting to be healthier individuals we are wanting to do that kind of stuff everyone's in different stages of their journey it may be important at the beginning

of your journey to to not to give yourself permission to eat 20 donuts that's absolutely fine in a week's time you probably won't want 20 donuts but yeah some people in their journey it might be important or might be useful for them to hear that they can that they can eat donuts but that eating 20 might be unhealthy but again i i'm happy to be wrong and i'm happy for people to to challenge me on anything i will listen i might always agree but i do care more than you think but but the funny thing is we it's only when it's food that it's this pernickety this careful this personal and it's attacking because if i said to you obviously you could not go into work and drink four bottles of wine if you wanted. Realistically, you know that I need to go into work

because I've got to earn money. It's my job. I can't let other people down. I can have a glass of wine and we can make all of these rational understanding. Even if you might want to stay at home and drink wine all day, you'll be like, I know.

With food, we don't seem to have the same rationale. We don't seem to be able to make these decisions and it is because of all the social conditioning. That's how I responded to one person that she said that. She turns me on on and i said i get that but in the same vein you have unconditional permission to never exercise yeah but if i told you that was okay i wouldn't necessarily feel right about it because if you exercise it's great for you and so just because you have permission to do whatever you can doesn't mean you should yeah

but at the same time i get it it can be problematic and so yeah just feel free to come and challenge me i like challenging but it's very hard because you get you'll see this with me because i will actually write captions that have got six comments below them because i can't physically in the comment section fit what i'm trying to say no paragraph breaks either i know sorry i got very excited i don't know how you do that shit. Mine unformatted. It just makes it harder to read. I know, but it's so difficult

because you have such a small amount of time and I've written this, I wrote this in a post the other day, but the person reading my post could be anorexic, obese, with mental health, there's so many people that I'm speaking to

that no matter what you say, it's problematic to someone or some group. And I do commonly say... So the best you can do is try to caveat as much as you can but you're going to miss some loopholes and i commonly say if i make you feel worse about your food even with good intentions unfollow me yeah i'm okay with that

yeah like that's fine yeah you need to look after you and i think i'm i'm doing good if i'm not doing good for you get rid of me yeah go and follow someone else who is far more anti-diet than I am. I think it's the same with anything, whether it's consuming stuff online, your diet, how you're making friendships, media, newspaper articles, whatever it is. We need to consume consciously and relative to ourselves. And I think you're doing a great job of doing that. Thank you. And if people would like to follow you, you just mentioned, but where can we find you? My Instagram is at unfattening yeah um there is a facebook does much go on there well there is now so the facebook page

itself no it's just unfattening on facebook but i do have a facebook group now called team no nutri bollocks which is my nutri bollocks is essentially my way of describing um non-evidence based information around nutrition and health yeah that is usually used to try and sell you something yes so stuff like detox teas would be nutribolics for example so i have a there's a facebook group now where it's it's great it's it's amazing because i can't i can't necessarily spend 20 minutes replying and talking to every single person that messages me i do reply to everyone at the moment and i talked to this he said i'm crazy um but i i try but i don't have the time to be able to go in depth with some of that stuff and it's great because in the group people are posting their stories and other people are helping them and it's brilliant so there's there's

a great little facebook community on there and then i do have a website that i don't use that much but it's just unfatting.co.uk amazing and i'll put some more stuff on there at some point but again i have a full-time job yeah you are i mean it is hard exams coming up so you know yeah well thank you for taking your time to join me i mean i literally most of my job i'm gonna do other stuff too is social media but i for the life of me don't know how you're a doctor and on social media it's actually baffling my girlfriend tells me oh fine i'm trying not to sorry but no i've really enjoyed speaking to you i feel like i've learned a lot it's actually baffling my girlfriend tells me off oh fine I'm trying not to sorry but no I've really enjoyed

speaking to you I feel like I've learnt a lot have you enjoyed this experience? it's been great amazing thank you so much for listening guys do make sure to follow Josh

I will link you in the box below so people can find out more and I will see you next week thank you very much thank you bye bye bye Fanduel Casino's exclusive live dealer studio has your chance at the number one feeling, winning.

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