Well, hello, they're healthy Ish listeners. I hope you are feeling well metabolically healthy, and if not, you have come to the right place. You of course have tuned into the daily podcast and brod in Soul. I am Felicity Harley, and my guest today is brilliant and she's going to help you determine whether you are metabolically healthy or not.
She's a naturopathic doctor, women's health expert and author of new book, The Metabolism researt Her name is Lara Brydon, and she is going to help us make sense of metabolic health. If you like what you hear from Lara, and I know that you will make sure you're listening to extra Healthy Ish, where we take a deep dive into all things metabolism. You can search for that wherever you get your podcasts. Lara, welcome to healthy Ish. Thanks for having me, and well done on your new book.
Thank you.
It's how do I describe this? It's just packed with so much good info and I feel like it's that put down, pick up kind of book. And so I guess that it took a long time to write.
It did about about a year and a half with some input from various other experts for which I'm very grateful.
Yeah. Well, there is one question that jumped down that I want you to answer for me, and that was from your husband, yerhaps expert, perhaps not, and he asked, in what way is metabolic health different from just health?
I know, think of it this way. Metabolic health is about yourselves having all the energy they need to do whatever it is they need to do. So good. Underlying metabolic health can support healthy immune system, healthy digestion, healthy mental health. There's actually a big metabolic mental health movement going on at the moment, and healthy female hormone health. And so that's the bridge from my previous work because
my real passion is menstruation, perimenopause, female hormones. And from twenty five years of working with patients, plus writing my other two books, I was able to see quite clearly that metabolic health can be a major factor in women's health.
How can you tell, I mean, in a nutshell, I suppose if you're metabolically healthy or unhealthy Because we can't look at ourselves, so what are some size exactly?
You can't actually zoom in and ask your mitochondria or the parts of yourself. I mean that would be you doing are getting enough energy today, but you can feel whether you're getting enough energy. So one of the first signs of something called metabolic inflexibility as opposed to metabolic flexibility, is being less able to access your own body fat stores for energy, and that can lead to finding it very difficult to go between meals without reaching for a snack.
That's a common experience. That's not someone's fault. That's the fact that their bodies, all the nuts and bolts of metabolism are not able to tap into that energy source the way they should be. And of course that's reversible. So that's the point of the book, is to return to a place where you can access your body fat stores for energy. The other aspect, important aspect of metabolic
dysfunction is having something called insulin resistance. I know from experience with my patients and my followers, and everyone half tunes out when they hear that term. It needs a rebranding.
But it does, doesn't it because it sounds very sciencey and oh, I don't even want to think of I know that, how would you rebrand it?
I think it's something in the word resistance that people feel immediately that sounds hard.
Yes, So.
Insulin resistance is the state of having chronically elevated levels of the hormone insulin. One of the most important downstream effects of that is insulin. Chronically elevated insulin impairs fat burning and makes it difficult for all the parts of your body that are trying to get access to your body fat stores to do that. So it is about trying to get insulin down. So maybe chronically elevated insulin might be another term for it.
That sounds a bit more serious.
I guess it does.
Does That could be a good thing.
Yeah, But people are familiar with having high cortisol. For example, I think, oh, yes, high cortisol. That's a thing that sounds bad. It's actually high corsol is related to high insulin. High insulin helps communicate a bit more what's going on, and of course, untreated, it can progress to pre diabetes and eventually type two diabetes. It's also called metabolic syndrome in the science. When I was looking at all the old papers around this, when metabolic syndrome was first described,
the original experts called it insulin resistance syndrome. So it's that central and.
I agree we should go back to that.
Yeah, of course, metabolic syndrome is the cluster of high blood pressure, high tricolystrides or cholesterol, and potentially weight gain around the middle. People can have insulin resistance without having really noticeable weight gains. So there is this disconnect between just body size and what's going on metabolically, which I hope I've managed to communicate in the book. And the
weight associated with insulin resistance is inside the abdomen. It's not the soft kind weight fat you can see on the outside your boy, It's deep inside and it sort of can feel like a like a hardness under the ribcage or sort of a thickening through the waist.
So what's your I mean is what's your advice around determining whether you're insulin resistance as a matter of just going getting you know, triglycerides tested, cholesterol, et cetera, et cetera. Is that the first stop.
Triglycerides are an excellent starting place. I was just I just read a Twitter thread this morning just saying, you know, don't ever complicate things. High triglyss rides are a really good surrogate biomarker for insulin resistance. But I dedicated a whole chapter two testing, so I talk about some other common tests that people might already have on their reports from their GP. You can also measure the hormone insulin,
and I talk about that in the book. But just an important takeaway is that having a normal blood glucose or a normal what's called HbA one C cannot rule out insulin resistance.
Oh interesting, Yeah, Actually, I just wore a CGM for a few weeks, a continuous glucose poster because I was really I mean, I love trying everything, and I just wanted to see whether it's you know, what my insulin was doing and how my blood sugar levels were when after I ate. Do you think that's a good.
Thing or right? So that's measuring glucose. Yes, sorry, insulin. Yes, a lot of people do kind of conflict.
Oh, there we go. Yes, but they just completely joined.
The two importantly with insulin resistance. With chronically elevated insulin, people can and do have episodes of low blood sugar. Oh interesting, So it's not synonymous with high blood sugar. I talk a little bit about the cgms or the continuous glucose monitors in the book. I think if people are interested and can afford it and want to put it in the right context. It can be a tool, but there's lots of ways to assess metabolic health and get healthier without having to go that route.
Yeah, I just want to mention something else in your book that I actually really enjoyed and think is really valuable. And you talk a lot about taking the shame out of well metabolic dysfunction and that it's not our fault. Can you expand on this, Well.
It started through generations ago because of something called epigenetics, which is we've only discovered we only known about epigenetics for twenty five or thirty years. It's the fact that what we're exposed to in terms of food and stress levels and toxins, we can pass on to our offspring. So something changed with the food supply about anywhere between fifty to seventy years ago, and we're now seeing an amplifying of that. Every generation is born with a greater
risk of insulin resistance compared to the generation before. And of course that doesn't mean you know, it's written in still and people can still do something about it and still reverse it. But of course the scientists are scrambling to figure out what went wrong with the food environment. I dedicate a chapter to that to try to survey all the different possibilities.
And I think you take the just takes a bit of the guilt, the self guilt out of But I can't make healthy decisions all the time. Well, no, because we live in this environment where signs are shouting at us, prices are low. You know, there's not enough fresh fruit and veggies around us.
And another takeaway, one of the most important symptoms of metabolicists function or insulin resistance is feeling abnormally hungry, like abnormally high hunger. So given that's a common almost everyone who has insulin resistance is probably going to have that symptom. Given that fact, how cool is it that we just tell people to try to eat less?
Yeah, cruel? Now, just quickly before we go, what's one key thing we should all be doing today to improve our metabolic health?
What I do isn't necessarily what's going to work for every single person. I mean, just as an example, I was thinking about this this morning. I often try to have leftover dinner for breakfast, like I have meat for breakfast, just because I find that really stabilizes my energy throughout the day, and I personally enjoy walking and yoga, but that's not the right fit for everybody, so I guess, as you know, the book is a troubleshooting manual to try to find what are the next best steps for
each individual person. But a really simple one that probably everyone needs to do if they're not doing it already, is to cook at home most of the time. Ah good, I know that's hard, but doable.
Lara, thank you for coming on healthy Ish.
Thank you.
Do you feel you want to know more? After hearing from Lara, She's great, isn't she. I really enjoyed chatting to her. Well, there is more and it is in the book, her book, her new book. It is called The Metabolism Reset, and it is out now. If you did enjoy this chat, we encourage you to jump on rate and review it, or of course, you can subscribe to this podcast, share this set with a friend, Share the healthy Ish, love anything else. Head to body and
sooul dot com dot you for us and socials. Grab our print edition, which is out in your local Sunday paper, and until tomorrow, stay healthy Ish