Midlife weight loss advice: Liz's pick of what works
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January 31, 2025
TLDR: This podcast features experts who discuss weight loss challenges and strategies for midlife women, with topics like bariatric surgery, ultra-processed foods, nutritional needs change with age, midlife muscle crisis, intermittent fasting, and the potential use of weight loss drugs. Personal tips from the host include protein emphasis, favorite breakfasts and snacks, and experience with intermittent fasting.

Finding it increasingly challenging to lose weight in midlife? In this illuminating podcast episode, Liz Earle dives deep into effective weight loss strategies specifically tailored for midlife women. Featuring insights from leading experts, Liz also shares her own tips for maintaining a healthy weight.
Key Insights from Leading Experts
Dr. Andrew Jenkinson: Understanding Hunger Hormones
- Bariatric surgery impacts hormones that control appetite.
- GLP-1 (Glucagon-Like Peptide-1) plays a critical role in suppressing appetite and improving insulin function.
- Surgery alters hormonal signaling, resulting in seamless weight loss without feeling deprived.
- Diet plays a crucial role in managing insulin and leptin levels, emphasizing the need to reduce sugar and processed foods.
Dr. Chris Van Tulleken: The Dangers of Ultra-Processed Foods
- Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) contribute not just to weight gain, but can also lead to serious health issues like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even dementia.
- The texture of these foods makes it easier to eat quickly without feeling full, affecting how our body signals hunger and satiety.
- Creating an environment filled with UPFs promotes excessive consumption, leading individuals into adverse eating habits.
Aaron Deere: Nutritional Needs Change with Age
- As we age, our nutritional needs evolve significantly. Midlife women require a higher protein intake to prevent muscle loss while managing reduced calorie intake due to less physical activity.
- Hormonal changes in menopause also lead to shifts in body fat distribution, making it crucial to adjust dietary habits accordingly.
Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: The Importance of Protein
- A high-protein diet is vital for midlife women, as it helps build muscle mass and provides overall health benefits.
- Aim for at least 90 grams of protein daily, with a focus on including protein-rich foods in every meal.
Megan Ramos: The Role of Intermittent Fasting
- Intermittent fasting helps regulate insulin levels, which are often elevated in those struggling with weight and hunger control.
- Unlike traditional calorie-restriction diets, fasting preserves metabolic rate and lean mass.
Johann Hari: The Risks of Weight Loss Drugs
- Hari shares personal experiences with weight loss medications and their underlying societal impact, urging that addressing the root causes of obesity, like food environments, is crucial rather than relying solely on drugs.
- The conversation prompts us to reconsider our relationship with food and the dangers inherent in various processed diets.
Liz's Personal Tips and Tricks
- Protein Power: Prioritize high-quality protein sources, such as eggs, lean meat, and legumes, to support muscle health and regulate hunger.
- Balanced Meals: Focus on balanced meals that stabilize blood sugar levels and prevent cravings. Liz recommends starting the day with a protein-rich breakfast.
- Mindful Eating: Slowing down while eating can help recognize fullness signals and reduce overall caloric intake.
- Regular Exercise: Incorporating strength training is crucial for maintaining muscle mass as you age.
- Hydration and Sleep: Prioritizing hydration and adequate sleep supports weight management and hormonal balance.
Practical Applications for Weight Loss in Midlife
- Understand Hormones: Recognize how hormones like leptin and ghrelin regulate hunger and satiety; strategically plan meals to manage these hormones effectively.
- Make Smart Food Choices: Limit ultra-processed foods; opt for whole, nutrient-dense options.
- Adjust Macros: As metabolic needs change, modify macronutrient ratios; increase protein while reducing carbs.
- Consider Fasting: Experiment with intermittent fasting to improve insulin sensitivity and enhance fat loss without compromising lean muscle.
- Community Support: Engage with others who share similar goals for motivation and accountability.
Conclusion
In summary, the podcast episode featuring Liz Earle offers a comprehensive view of sustainable weight loss strategies for midlife women. By understanding the hormonal impacts of aging, making informed dietary choices, and prioritizing protein, listeners can cultivate a healthier relationship with food and weight management. Remember that every small change contributes to the larger picture of health and wellness in the second half of life.
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Hello and a very warm welcome back to the Lizar Wellbeing Show. How is the year going for you so far? Well, congratulations on getting this far anyway, through January, known to be the most miserable month of the year. Things can only get better, as they say, right?
And you are in the best place for a bit of wellness positivity as this podcast is specifically created. Help us all have a better second half, making us stronger, fitter, happier, healthier, and ever. I'm Lizelle and I just love finding ways for all of us to thrive in our later life.
by investing in our health and our well-being today. And I think if we're completely honest with ourselves, our weight is probably a very good foundational place to start to make sure that we are setting ourselves up for that better second half in the best possible way.
What's right for us at 30 or 40 is probably not going to be exactly the same as we're 60 or 70. So we've got to acknowledge that we've got probably a decrease in energy needs. This is a minimal protein diet to prevent deficiencies. And if you put this into context, this number is too little for a menopausal woman.
So one of the features of ultra process food is it's soft. We consume calories at a rate that our bodies can't keep up. Weight loss is sort of seamless. You don't really feel very hungry. You feel as if your body wants to lose 40 kilograms. It doesn't seem like a chore or an effort.
So all this month, we've been looking at new healthy routines, eating well and moving more. I loved hearing from our Olympian, Sally Gunnell, about how transformational lifting weights can be. And then party animal turned biohacker, Divinia Taylor, had some fascinating insights about how eating more fat can help us lose fat from our bodies.
I have to say that was a fun one to record for sure. Yeah, she really is a firecracker that one. So to round off this month, I have pulled together some of the most fascinating and hopefully useful conversations we've had on the show about sustainable weight loss.
because this is something that I get asked about a lot. In fact, Fiona has sent me an email, the address to write to me by the way is podcast at lizarwellbeing.com. And she says, Hi, I'm 41 and have been going through premature perimenopause since my late 30s.
HRT has made a big difference. The main issue I have is my weight, especially on my tummy area. I can be so good for a week. But then the sugar craving start and I can eat a whole packet of biscuits or chocolate or crisps. And then after a couple of days, I'm back to being healthy again. The fatigue at times is also a big problem.
Well Fiona, thank you so much for being in touch with your honest story here and I suspect that yours is an experience many, many women will resonate with. So we are going to cover all the areas that you mentioned here, hormones, sugar cravings, menopause, the impact lack of sleep has and lots more besides so that we can truly understand the very best ways to maintain a healthy, happy weight.
So as I said, we will cover weight loss from all angles today, ultra-processed foods, fasting and the importance of protein all coming up. But I want to start with Dr Andrew Jenkinson. He's part of an expert team developing advances in gastrointestinal surgery and has found that bariatric surgery doesn't actually work in the way you might assume it does.
Traditionally, we thought it's because people are losing weight because the stomach is smaller and you can't eat as much. But actually, we now know operations profoundly change the signaling between the stomach and intestines, those hormones that are produced from that area that swim around in a blood stream and are hypothalamus. The brain, which is the weight control center, it's the crucial part of the brain that controls our weight.
And we know that after these operations, there are various different hormones that produce appetite and satiety are totally switched around. Weight loss is sort of seamless. You don't really feel very hungry. You feel as if your body wants to lose 40 kilograms. It doesn't seem like a
a chore or an effort. For instance, in both the operations that this hormone called GLP1, glucagon leg peptide 1, increases profoundly. This dams down your rapid type, but also improves the way your insulin functions. All of a sudden, you don't need as much insulin, insulin blocks the weight control hormone. Suddenly, the weight control hormone is visible again to the hypothalamus.
And the GLP1 Hormand that goes up really, really significantly in this type of surgery is the Hormand that's now being copied and it forms the part of the, you know, the azempic. Right. We go the semi-glutite mungare type drugs that ultra popular these days. So they mimic part of the effect of the bariatric surgery on the hypothalamus. So they're basically an analog or a copy of these hormones. Interesting.
So it works to block appetite. So like having bariatric surgery, but without it, are we talking about leptin here? No, that's a different thing. So leptin is that weight control hormone. Right. But you know, if you have either the surgery or to a lesser extent, it's less effective, but it's still effective, the injection treatment, both for those treatments,
decrease the amount of insulin that you need and that releases the way control hormone leptin to be seen by that. That's one of the ways that you lose weight. Are there other ways that we can increase leptin? I mean, leptin, obviously, we want to increase and we want to decrease ghrelin, but there's no way that I'm going to inject myself with some relatively new drug compound. I mean, we don't know what the long-term side effects of that are, do we?
No, totally not. So to release leptin, to stop leptin being blocked, you know, you need to understand why it's being blocked. So one is that your insulin levels are too high. And that's because your diet might have too much sugar, too much refined carbohydrates and processed foods. You might be snacking too much between meals. If your body is infused with vegetable oil type omega-6,
it's going to affect your insulin signaling you need more insulin and again that's going to cause leptin the weight control hormone to be blocked so by changing your diet away from sugar away from refined carbohydrates and away from you know seed oils and fast foods and processed foods after a while you know leptin will be released and you will seamlessly lose weight
Seamlessly lose weight. Seamlessly lose weight. I think another hormone that we need to know about, which you touched on earlier, is ghrelin. Now, where does that come into? We've talked a little bit about leptin being very helpful. What about ghrelin? That's the other side of the coin, is it? Yes, ghrelin is the appetite hormone. It's a short term appetite hormone. It will work over hours or days. This is the hormone that is produced by the top part of the stomach. We call it the fundus of the stomach.
If we haven't eaten for a few hours, the level of grilling in our bloodstream starts to rise and then the hypothalamus senses this and it starts to, you know, give you that feeling of hunger and food-seeking behavior and calorie-seeking behavior, so bad foods, you know. And this is the thing that, you know, anyone who's faster or anyone who's gone long,
a big low calorie diets, ghrelin is the enemy. It's the thing that is really, really difficult to resist. The weight loss injections and bariatric surgery tend to block ghrelin, I think indirectly, but they tend to block it. But it's really difficult to withstand it. It's just one of our, it's one of the mechanisms the body uses to keep us at its desired weight, which might not be a healthy weight.
But if you understand why your brain wants to keep you with an unhealthy weight, because, for instance, you've got flatting, you've got six in your bloodstream and around your cells and your diet is too full of sugars, carbs and snacking, then once you sort of get that, then it's easier to sort of understand how to lose weight and keep it off.
We'll come back to as epic and other weight loss drugs later on in this episode, so hold that thought for a moment. But I think it's so interesting to hear from a bariatric surgeon's perspective that it's actually surgery that is getting this GLP1 receptor dampening down the appetite and improving insulin function. So once again, we are looking at how hormones are controlling our appetite.
not just the amount of food that we're eating or not eating, and certainly not looking at calorie counting. That was the thing that so many of us grew up swearing by. You know, I even had a paperback pocketbook of calories at one point, took it everywhere with me. So I could count every calorie at every meal. Anyone else relate to that?
That's a sign of our age, I have to say. Well, I think for me personally, better understanding how I can hack my ghrelin, that little hungry gremlin, and make more of the lovely leptin, that feel full for longer hormone, has really helped me understand my own biology. And I do actually think of this as part of my daily circadian rhythm, too. Rather than eating, I think about setting up the right hormonal clock, if you like, at the beginning of the day.
by getting outdoors and seeing real daylight. You will often see me on my Instagram banging on about this, getting up, opening a window, stepping outdoors. And for me, it's a big part of regulating both leptin and ghrelin. And I'm all for hacking interleptins so that my insulin functions better and my weight and my appetite are also far better controlled. Okay, so how might particular foods be impacting our hunger hormones?
Well, you don't need me to tell you that eating lots of ultra processed foods is not gonna help you lose weight. But is it as simple as those foods just being higher in calories? Well, Dr. Chris Van Tiliken says the picture is much more nuanced than that.
There are two separate problems that ultra-processed food are linked with. There's weight gain, but then there's lots of other health problems. So it's not just weight gain. They also seem to be associated strongly with inflammatory bowel disease, metabolic disease like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease like heart attacks and strokes, dementia, anxiety depression, and early death, as well as lots of cancers.
So there's a very wide variety of outcomes. And we don't understand why this food is causing all these problems in a lot of detail, but we are pretty sure that the additives are just one of the many, many problems. So one of the features of ultra-processed food is it's soft.
So if you think of supermarket bread compared to like sourdough bread or any traditional bread, traditional bread is hard, it's chewy, it has substance, it's often got some moisture in it, supermarket bread is bone dry, it's spongy, it's an emulsified phone. And it's not that it's particularly poisonous or that the emulsifiers are causing a problem, but soft food, and most UPF is soft,
and dry. We consume it quickly because it's very energy density is often sugary and fatty and there's no water in it. We consume calories at a rate that our bodies can't keep up with so we don't get the fullness signal from our gut until we've already eaten too much and some people think the food is so it's been so disintegrated before we eat it.
It's actually digested before it gets to the bit of the gut that releases the hormones that tell us to stop eating. So that's one way. There's nothing to do with additives. We do think some of the additives are, there's some early signs that that's a bit worrying. So there's good data from mice and rodents that the emulsifiers affect the friendly bugs that are inside us and that lots of other
lots of other of the additives seem to drive excess consumption and inflammation. There's the plastics in the packaging. When you put that plastic in the microwave, we think there's leaching of chemicals into the food that we don't understand, but there are fertility concerns. So there's this laundry list of different possible effects, but for me, the most important thing and the really interesting part of the definition is that these are foods invented for profit.
And so they are engineered to drive excess consumption because the more you eat, the quicker you buy the next product, and the more money the companies make them. So this isn't a sort of cynical conspiracy. It's just a very simple bit of market economics. Yes. If you have two formulations of a breakfast cereal and people eat a bit more of box A than they do if box B and this is how
The cereals are all tested on focus groups. If they eat more of one box, that's the box that goes to market. This has been refined for decades now, so we've got these very addictive products.
That's fascinating what you say about texture and soft foods and of course things that we're drawn to and I guess those perhaps most at risk the vulnerable young children because they're easy to eat, older parents who have difficulty chewing, I had my parents sustain not long ago and I served them some homemade granola which is kind of one of my favourite treats at the weekend full of nuts and seeds and all sorts of things and they complained hugely about it because they just found it really hard on their teeth.
So the chewing stuff is amazing. What we're sure is because I've got a five-year-old and a two-year-old. So my kids also complain if you serve them stuff that's chewing. And we have lots of data now that our faces are shrinking.
So with each passing decades, our faces are getting smaller. Our jaw bones get smaller and our top jaws, our maxillary bones get smaller. And that's because we're not chewing our foods. When muscles pull on bones, it makes them grow. And that's why most of us have had wisdom teeth taken out. That's why most of us have these dental problems like malocclusion that require braces. Our jaws are too small for our teeth.
Eating chewy food is not something we like to do necessarily instinctively. And the softness also may be contributing to addiction. I don't know if you get a lot of comments on this. It's a slippery thing to talk about. But around about half the people listening will recognize that there are products that, although they may know, they're not very good for them. They're associated with weight gain. They find it really hard to stop eating an iron.
Like a fondant fancy. Like a fondant fancy or like biscuits, pizza, fries, burgers, almost all the stuff. And I am one of those people. I struggle to stop eating. I have an addicted relationship with these products. And we think for the people who are addicted, it's always ultra processed food that you get addicted to.
And those products are as addictive as cigarettes or drugs of abuse or alcohol or gambling. So they're really, really addictive if you have a genetic predisposition. And part of that is to do with the speed at which you get the calories into you, that you get a very quick reward. And there's a lot of data saying that that's one of the things that drives addiction.
Gosh, so you're getting that dopamine hit, if you like, and that feel good. I don't know, I guess it's a surge of insulin is it that's giving you a bit of a sugar rush, a bit of a high. The reward that we get from food seems to be very related to its nutritional content.
And one of the features of most addictive substances is that you consume the addictive molecules fast. So cigarettes are a way of delivering nicotine very, very quickly. Cocaine, if it's snorted, similarly, you get a very quick delivery. Now, if you chew tobacco or you chew coca leaves, if you drink shots versus, you know, light ale, the speed of delivery of the drug is important. And we think that sugar fat protein aren't addictive, but they are the molecules
that are driving the association of reward from gut to brain. Start to think carefully about how when you eat them, how do these foods make you feel? And of course, UPS are not just associated with weight gain, but metabolic disease in general.
inflammatory bowel disease, cardiovascular disease, mental illness and so much more. And isn't it interesting that point about how quickly the UPS are delivered into our bodies, you know, driving that association of the gut to brain, that instant fix.
And also, I think later on in that episode, he talked about the role of texture of UPS and how that actually changes the way our bodies respond to and seek out food. There's a lot of talk amongst food technologists about mouth feel. And are we perhaps losing our urge to chew, you know, being targeted with mushy foods? Again, easier to swallow, making it quicker. So that urge to eat more quickly can be satisfied.
We can take another mouthful without any of all that boring, time consuming chewing. And I know dentists and some orthopedic practitioners are seeing changes in jaw structure and jaw health because we're just not chewing anymore. And I think the fact that the UPS make us consume so many more calories so quickly that our hormones don't even have time to signal that we're full and that I guess comes back to
Andrew Jenkinson's point just now. I've heard it actually takes 20 minutes or so from the time that we eat something for that hormonal signal to reach our brain, to tell us that we're full and that we can stop now, put down your knife and fork. But if we're just piling in the mush, you know, the chances are we finished a plate full after 10 minutes or so and we're still feeling hungry because that signal
hasn't been released. So for me, I now deliberately try and eat much more slowly to take this into account. I actually get criticized at the family table because it's like, oh, come on. I mean, it was so slow, you know, and it's like, yes, and there's a reason for that guys. I remember being at Viva Maya, which is a fasting clinic in Austria.
And this was back in the early days and they weren't connecting it to hormonal activity at all, but they were saying you must chew every mouthful 30 times before swallowing. Yeah, 30 times three zero. Okay, before swallowing and get this even soup. We were told to chew. Yeah, even soup. Bit extreme, bit bizarre, but you get the general idea and yeah, it does actually, of course, slow you down.
Well, so far we've been talking about pretty universal biological principles, but how do our nutritional needs change as we age? Well, Aaron Deere is an incredibly accomplished nutritionist, and I invited him onto the show after I'd met him in real life for my own midlife MOT at the Hook Clinic in London.
What's right for us at 30 or 40 is probably not going to be exactly the same as we're 60 or 70. So we need to think about the changes that go on. So number one, we're probably less active as we age. We're no longer chasing our kids around. We're not probably going to train in the gym to the same intensity. So we've got to acknowledge that we've got probably a decrease in energy needs. So we need to have that reflected in our total calorie intake for each day.
But from that, we also need to think about our protein requirements, because if we were to cut our calorie intake by 30%, we may not want to cut our total protein intake, because avoiding that sarcopenic muscle loss is so important as we age. Absolutely. I remember listening to a great quote actually from Joan Collins, who has retained the most amazingly youthful figure.
even in her 80s and beyond. And she was saying, you know, actually, it's a hard fact, but you just need to eat less. You know, use a smaller plate, cut your portion size. And I deliberately do try and do that for myself. But at the same time, to your point, increase the amount of protein. You know, protein is the first thing that I think about when I'm planning any meal, you know, breakfast, lunch, tea, whatever it is, it's like, where's the protein and then build everything else around it.
Yeah, definitely. So, you know, the relative proportion of your macros definitely needs to, most for most people, definitely needs to go up as we're kind of looking at the requirements of nutrition for aging.
And when you get midlife women coming in to see you, is menopausal weight gain something that you often see? Yes, definitely. And there's a lot of frustration around it as well because... Yeah, you're telling me. What might have worked previously doesn't seem to have the same effect, but we have to consider that all things aren't the same anymore when we're talking about menoports because there's such a change, obviously, in hormonal levels.
So we also need to consider the metabolic change. So metabolism slows down, back to what we were saying. You're probably doing less exercise, less moving about than you were when you were 30. So that's the same for both sexes. Metabolism slowing down. That's not just linked to hormones. That's just simply a fact of our aging. Yes, exactly. But then we need to rate that back to calorie intake.
So, you know, you can't continue to eat the same volume of calories to maintain your body weight if you're doing less activity. So, this is an adjustment that needs to be made. We also need to think about the fact that this change in hormones leads to a change in the signaling of fat distribution. So, less of the peripheral storage and more of the central as a result in this change. So, middle-aged spread, that muffin top is a real thing.
Yes, definitely because the reduction in estrogen, which is a signaler to store body fat peripherally, like a glutofamourally, obviously drops off and then you're left with more. Unless you're on HRT, obviously. Yes, exactly. I'm a flag waver for that one. Yet another reason to take it.
And another big one is sleep disturbances. Okay. You know, a lot of women report disordered sleep during menopause, postmenopause. And that's a key moderator when we're talking about body composition as well, because, you know, like we were talking earlier, or sleep is actually has an effect like being a stressor on the body.
Can I just circle back to a point that you made earlier? You use the word macros. I'm interested in that. A lot of people talk about counting their macros, particularly as you know, people coming from the sports world. You know, can you just explain very briefly what that is? And is that something that most of us in general life should be aware of, counting macros?
When we use that term, we have 2,000 calories that we take on board in terms of energy for the day. It's about how we partition that into our three major groups, protein, carbohydrate and fat. If we take some of the Mediterranean diet, about 50% of that 2,000 calories will be taken up by carbohydrates.
15% by protein and about 35% by fat. So different diets, eating plans will have different macronutrient distributions. And then there'll be different requirements for different people. So it's not like there's a one size fits all for macronutrient prescription. It has to fit the person's requirements.
So could you give a general outline, say for, you know, midlife women, you know, if you've got an average, I know there's no such thing really, but if there was an average, you know, western female, you know, in her 50s, what would be the expected sort of proportion of macros?
I think the Mediterranean diet is probably a pretty good framework because we know that there is a reduced incidence of diseases, et cetera, that's associated with this, and it's quite realistic and able to be statistic to. The bit I made question is the protein at 15%.
I was going to say it sounds low. Yeah, I think this needs to probably come up a bit and maybe move up to kind of the maybe 20, 25% and perhaps the carbohydrate come down a little bit. But the choices that they're making in the Mediterranean diet, I think that that is the type of diet plan that I think is would be essential for that middle aged female group.
Well, I so relate to that, you know, because I definitely became much less active as I got older and I work primarily as a writer. So I spend most of my days sitting. I'm actually sitting, of course, recording this. And if I'm not careful, I can spend all day sitting. I have to remind myself to get up. Sitting is a killer. It's actually been described as the new smoking in terms of danger to our bodies.
Yeah, moving is really important. And I think, hormonally, of course, being now in menopause, post-menopause, that obviously has affected my metabolism and the weight change. And I think particularly weight distribution. This was interesting that Aaron affirmed midlife weight gain around the middle is a thing, that middle age spread. And we now know that estrogen controls fat distribution.
So when we lack estrogen, fat deposits shift, and they might go from other parts of the body and get deposited more around the middle, contributing to that famous muffin top, you know, poking over the top of our genes, that kind of thing. And putting estrogen back into the system, HRT, for example,
can be very helpful. Now, it may make you bloat a little bit at the outset as your body readjusts to the hormones coming back in. But generally, as the months go by, women do find that they get their waistlines back. And I can categorically say, hand on heart, that that is something that I have personally experienced. And of course, it's much healthier to be a pear shape
So a smaller waste and a larger backside than an apple shape where you have much more visceral belly fat predisposing us to heart disease and stroke and other degenerative disorders. And then of course, talking about macros, you know, I have to say, I'm not very big into measuring my macros. Maybe it's a younger person thing. I never grew up with it. It was kind of a serious gym bunnies that idea of tracking your proportion of carbs and proteins and fats.
However, I would say that the common perception of macros, I think, needs to be adjusted for midlife women. You know, I would personally go for far fewer carbs, you know, more like 20%, than 40%. I would go for much higher protein, maybe 40, 50%, and maybe around 30% fat. So personally for me,
I'm aiming for higher protein, plenty of healthy fats and fewer carbs. And then of course, I think we can't finish that conversation that we had there without touching on sleep because that definitely does have an impact on our hormones, of course, you know, for better or worse. We know that lack of sleep
or poor quality sleep is much more likely to have us craving carbs and leading us to make poorer food choices the following day, whereas if we have a good night's sleep, then we will feel rested, will be more in control of our hormones, will be feeling more balanced and less likely to overeat. And that's a fact.
Well, one of the macros that Aaron talked about was, of course, protein, and we will really get into that after this short break, as well as having a chat about the benefits of fasting and why more and more of us are turning to weight loss injections.
Well, as I say, Aaron made a point of how important protein is as a macro nutrient. And in fact, one of my favorite conversations from last year was the one that I had with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, all about why midlife women in particular need to prioritize protein as protein is what builds muscle. And it's muscle that determines almost everything.
about the trajectory of health and ageing, so should we all be eating a high protein diet?
I think that we first have to define what we mean by high protein. And the current recommendations are set at the minimum to prevent a deficiency. And that would be .8 grams per kilogram, body weight. And for those who don't want to do math, it's .37 grams per pound of body weight. If an individual is, for example, 115 pounds, that would be 45 grams of protein.
at the minimum to prevent a deficiency. Most people take that number as a maximum.
Yeah. We should also explore where that number came from. That number, 0.8 grams per kg, is from 18-year-old men who are eating a high-quality protein diet and the way in which the nitrogen balance studies were determined, it was determined the minimum amount of high-quality protein to continue to keep up with their growth.
where they were able to maintain their muscle or their body weight, etc., their growth.
So it's not huge, irrelevant for say, female. No, female. It's not relevant. How is that relevant? It's not relevant. It's not relevant. It's not relevant. And that number, unfortunately, people have determined that anything above that number is considered a high protein diet. And this is semantics. This is not true. This is a minimal protein diet to prevent deficiencies. And if you put this into context, this number is too little for a
menopausal woman to keep up her skeletal muscle. If we were to double that, so we go from when you double a minimum, that doesn't mean it's a high amount. That would be considered a moderate amount. So that would be talking what, like 90 grams a day. Right. So that would be considered a moderate amount of protein, not a high protein diet.
Certainly 90 grams is something that I aim for. I mean, we're hearing a lot at the moment about the 30 gram rule that you have 30 grams of protein on your plate with every meal. Is that something that you would advocate? It depends. And I cover that in my book. I do have one track. I have three tracks in the book. One is for longevity, one is for weight loss, and one is for hypertrophy. That is the track that I use for weight loss. One does not have to do that.
However, it is a very good strategy for an individual who wants to lose weight because it will keep blood sugar stable. So that's the main focus, is it? That's the main role of having a high protein plate in front of you, is it's going to stabilize your blood sugar, which is in turn going to help with
weight loss. That is only one reason. The 30 grams three times a day really came out of some early research from my mentor, Dr. Don Layman and Doug Patton-Jones, a handful of these protein researchers that looked at muscle protein synthesis, which is basically the, it's a biomarker of the health of skeletal muscle. Is skeletal muscle doing what it should be doing and laying down new tissue?
and this is a surrogate marker for skeletal muscle health. And the way to turn this process on is to get a minimum of 30 grams of protein. Do you need to do that three times a day? No. Should an individual do it two times a day at the minimum? Yes. The first and the last meal are most critical. If someone doesn't want to eat three meals a day, that's okay. The amount of protein understanding, and I recommend one gram per pound ideal body weight.
Now, I would call that a optimal protein diet and the literature would suggest double the RDA would be more optimal and that there's no harm in going above that 1.6 grams. Yeah, 1.6 grams per kg. So 0.7 grams per pound of body weight, which again, you calculated out would be around 90 grams. That would be considered your minimal range.
for optimization. That's hard. I mean, I talk on my social media all about starting the day with high protein, having eggs for breakfast, Greek yogurt, good healthy fats, cheese, that kind of thing. But most people, let's face it, are getting up and having a bowl of cereal and a piece of toast, which has negligible amounts of protein.
Probably the worst advice I would ever give somebody. Yeah. If you can nail, if the listener does one thing and they hit between 30 and 50 grams of protein at that first meal and that could be a scoop and a half. So we'll make it easy. It could be a scoop and a half of a weight protein shake. That's nothing.
That's a glass of, that's a one protein shake. You don't have to put anything in it. You literally are getting a complete protein with immunoglobulins. It is a wonderful food matrix. You're stimulating skeletal muscle. You are providing your body with amino acids that it needs. The first meal of the day, easy.
That's going to have a protein. That's literally glass of milk or whatever you want to mix it with and your protein powder in. That is so easy. That's very durable. Yeah, it's doable. If someone, again, I, depending on what time I'm eating, I might have a handful of eggs and no dietary cholesterol does not affect blood level cholesterol. They took this out of the guidelines in 2015.
I really love that 30 by 30 by 30, 30 grams of protein three times a day, so easy to remember and such a helpful strategy for successful weight loss. We do know that a high protein diet will help to stabilise blood sugar which will then help with weight loss but you know it was also that point about the muscle protein synthesis, the laying down new muscle tissue
and improving skeletal muscle health. We've overlooked that, haven't we, I think, for midlife women as part of our conversation. It's all about being thin, maybe being toned if we're lucky, but we haven't really focused on muscle and strength. So since I've been working in the world of wellbeing, particularly over the last few years, I have definitely upped my protein. I wish I'd known about it sooner, to be honest. I'm in my early 60s and I think it would have been more helpful for me, frankly.
I've known about this in my 40s. So for me, I always have eggs in the morning. It just seems a really simple, easy thing to do. I actually keep boiled eggs in my fridge as I kind of grab and go.
because it even forgot no time for anything else. I can just grab a couple of those, shove them in my pocket and eat them in the car or walk up to the train station or whatever. And I also have protein powders. I know that Gabrielle was talking about the benefits of protein powders. They are ultra processed, but I think you can find the ones that are simply pure protein without lots of additives and emulsifiers and stuff.
And I think those can be really helpful and probably more important to focus on the fact that we are increasing our grammage, if you like, of protein. And interesting, wasn't it, that she said that the first and the last meal is critical. Not so bothered really about what goes on during the day, and I would definitely concur with that.
And I don't really measure the amount of protein. I think I go instinctively, what kind of 30 grams looks like. I have to say, in the early days, I did download an app called Protein Pal, which is really helpful because you can just simply upload what you're eating. You just tap in and you can save various, various favorite things. If you've got a favorite breakfast, for example, you know, mine was, I think, Greek yogurt.
with some ground almonds and a few frozen berries, maybe topped with some sunflower seeds. And I just had that as my standard morning and I saved that in the app. So whenever I edit, I just sort of tapped on that and it would automatically give me the amount of protein grams. And if I was falling short, I could just stir in a bit of protein powder into the yogurt and it's kind of tasteless and it just increases the amount of protein that you're getting.
I think some of the other things that I do is I sneak in protein powders or bone broth powders, for example, into shakes, into smoothies, even into cups of coffee. And I do feel better for it. I certainly feel stronger. My weightlifting is getting heavier. I mean, I'm definitely not an Olympian by any stretch of the imagination, but I am lifting ever heavier weights, which I guess has to be a sign of
progress and a sign of success. And I think other high protein things that we can think about if we're looking to lose weight, the good old egg, it's inexpensive, it's easily available, it's very versatile. Chicken obviously is a good one, Greek yogurt I mentioned, popping out a cheese into a roll, you can put tofu into a broth, there are lots of ways I think. And just have a look online, just look up protein rich recipes and I think you'll be amazed actually at the
The variety and of course not forgetting things like chickpeas, hummus and the beans, but you know do bear in mind they're not complete sources of protein. So you do need to be careful how you match those to make sure that you get that full breadth of amino acids. And I did love that point at the very end, which I am going to say again because it's an important one.
Dietary cholesterol does not affect blood level cholesterol. It was out of the guidelines in 2015. Big sigh. Okay, so if you're worried about eggs, please don't be. Dietary cholesterol does not affect blood level cholesterol. If you want a very simple 101 on why that is,
It's because the body makes its own cholesterol. It's very clever at balancing cholesterol. So if you eat a lot of cholesterol rich foods, the body makes a bit less. If you don't eat as much cholesterol in your diet, the body will make more. Why does it make more? Because we need it. We'll be coming on to that. I'm sure at length in future episodes.
So I hope by now we are hopefully a little bit clearer on what we should be eating. But how about when? Well, I asked clinical educator and researcher Megan Ramos, what it is about fasting that's aiding weight loss in particular, apart from the obvious? Is it just about reduced caloric intake across the day? Or are we going to come back to talking about hormones again?
It's very hormonal on nature. It actually has nothing to do with caloric intake. So in general, people have obesity because they have toxic levels of insulin in the body. And insulin acts as a guard for our body fat, preventing us from losing it in the first place.
So when we fast long enough, we suppress our insulin levels long enough that we're actively able to burn our body fat, but it's a little bit more nuanced than that. So when we think of calorie restriction diets, we reduce our caloric intake by a certain percentage. So imagine your household income was reduced by 30%.
So 70%, still a good amount of income, but it's a major change to your household to have your income reduced by 30%. So maybe for the first month or two, you overspend and you go into a bit of debt, but eventually you learn how to cut costs, maybe transportation, entertainment, dining. You go through all these various systems that you have and you cut costs and you learn how to acclimate.
to having a lesser income and then you saw going into debt. It's very similar with calorie restriction. You reduce your caloric intake if you think of the calories as metabolic dollars and at first your body is overspending and you lose some body fat, but over time your body doesn't want you to waste away. So what it does is it says, okay, we're still getting 70% of our income.
We know how to budget off of that. We can absolutely sustain life on that amount. So we're going to cut costs to cognitive, respiratory, reproductive functions, so our different systems. And then our metabolism slows down and we stop losing weight and then we start to feel pretty awful. And this is where people stall, feel awful. They're not losing weight anymore. They don't feel good and they
You know, end up eating all of these other foods are going back to the previous way of eating. With fasting, you're literally giving your body nothing. So it can't figure out how to budget on nothing. Like maybe you give it 35 calories from a cup of coffee.
40 calories from a cup of broth. It's all fairly negligible. So your body then has a nervous system, hormonal response. So it activates our sympathetic nervous system, which then in turn produces these counter-regulatory hormones, which allow us to access our bake stores.
So our fat cells. So these counter-regulatory hormones, nor adrenaline, human growth hormone, they open up our fat cells and they liberate pre-fatty acids for us to fuel off of. And sort of one of the great things about this is that we've got a lot of money in our fat banks. So if our daily caloric expenditure or metabolic caloric expenditure is something around, say, 2,500, just a random number,
Then we've got that in that bank. We have Bill Gates' money and our fat songs. So we don't have to start cutting costs. Our body says, oh no, Megan's got plenty of good fat, so we can get that whole $2,500 today.
and the norogenylin and human growth hormone facilitates the release of those funds. So this is why when we look at randomized control trials in medicine, the gold standard, albeit they're not without their faults, nothing's perfect. But that compare true alternate daily fasting to calorie restriction, we always see the fasting group, there's no change in metabolic rate, there's no change in lean mass, lean masses well preserved and maintained.
versus in the calorie restriction group, we see a clinically significant reduction in wrestling metabolic rate. Every time we see less fat loss, we see less maintenance of lean mass. All of these RCTs that have come out, and a lot of them, you know, in the last 15 years, have come out replicating the same findings that we do not see this catastrophic loss in metabolism. We have no change in metabolism.
With fasting, we get more fat loss. We see more lean mass retention compared to traditional calorie restriction diets. And it's all due to this nervous system response and the production of these cancer regulatory hormones.
So when I first started talking about fasting, this was many years ago, actually, I was writing my book, which is The Good Gut Guide, and that's all about resting your microbiome. So it has more of a chance for the Good Gut microbes to proliferate. I actually found it mentally, I think quite challenging, more so than physically, because, you know, I'd grown up for 50 plus years being told about the importance of breakfast. You know, we're told that, aren't we? You know, you breakfast like king, you lunch like a queen, you die like a pauper.
So, you know, get up and immediately eat something. Well, I don't know whether that was just the likes of Mr. Kelloggs or whatever, trying to sell us more cereal. But, you know, for me, it was deeply embedded in my psyche. And when I actually decided to delay my breakfast, I kind of almost went into slight panic mode. And I had to really use a bit of mind over matter. I had to convince my brain that my temporary hunger or my slight anxiety about what or when I was going to eat again
really didn't matter. Yes, I was going to eat again, not right at that moment. But let's face it, I'd gone to bed after dinner with a full tummy. I hadn't done much part from sleep at night. Okay, my body was working on a cellular level, but I wasn't running around, you know, picking up stuff from kids or whatever. So I wasn't exerting myself massively.
It didn't really make any sense that I needed to jump out of bed and scoff a large bowl of syrup or anything else. So delaying it by a few hours really was this mental process.
And I found that aside from helping to regulate my weight, which I think it definitely did do, it actually gave me much more energy and much more clarity. And I think one of the reasons for that is that when we're not pouring glucose into our body, this is something that Devynia Taylor talked about recently on the pod, you know, we're running then on ketones and on fats. And that makes our brain sharper. And I do find that if I'm involved in a big writing project, for example,
to actually do a period of fasting beforehand makes my brain work better. And I do go and do a longer fast once or twice a year if you're interested. In my experience on that, you can find it on the Lazar Wellbeing website where I write a lot actually about fasting.
So I think the body does adjust very quickly. If you're interested in trying it, you may hit a wall at the beginning and you may have to talk yourself through that. If you find that you do get hungry, my tip is to have a little bit of MCT oil or a little bit of bone broth powder or collagen powder that you put into a shake or a cup of coffee, MCT oil, of course, being the medium chain triglyceride, these healthy fats that we've talked about before, because that really does take the edge of hunger. And it also, again,
As I said, makes our brain run clearer because it switches. So from using glucose, it switches it to burning fat or ketones for energy. So I think these are all really useful hacks actually that we can build in. I think there's possibly no one answer to how do we lose weight? How do we keep it off? But I think all these become really helpful strategies when we build them together. They're like each one of them individually. I see in my head a little Lego brick.
and they kind of, together, they build into this really strong structure that can be super helpful. I think another key really is to not snack.
And to give ourselves that resting period, because that's what a fast is, isn't it? Basically, it's a period of time without food. And I think society has led us to believe that we need to be constantly grazing. Everywhere you go, you come across snacks. Don't you stop for petrol? It's like, oh, I can't come out of a petrol station without buying a chocolate bar, a bag of crisps, a roll of whatever it is. And the same with the supermarket check out, or they catch us at those vulnerable times.
And I don't quite know when it's become just acceptable to keep snacking all the time. You know, I grew up with a mantra, you know, you don't snack in between meals. Don't have that now. You'll ruin your appetite. You know, I don't think we kind of hear that now, do we? And I think what's been mentioned by pretty much all of our guests today is this importance of managing our insulin response and blood glucose levels. That really seems to be very much the common thread here.
that is dictating obesity and making us all end up much more likely to be an unhealthy weight.
OK, well, as I promised, I am really not sure that we can end this conversation today without talking about the weight loss injections and the drugs, such as Empik. So Johann Hori is a journalist who's written a book about his own personal experience of being on the drug, having been, in his own words, overweight his whole life, as well as researching all the potential pros and cons,
It's a really interesting read actually and I asked him whether these drugs are just a way for us to ignore and not have to deal with the bigger underlying environmental causes of why we're putting on so much weight in the first place. And his conversation here is Frank funny and completely fascinating.
This was the thing that brought me closest to stopping to take the drugs. And to explain that, I've got to pull back a bit and explain something else if it's okay. So I would just urge everyone listening, unless you're driving, stop for a moment and just Google something for me. Google photographs of beaches in Britain in the year I was born, 1979. And just look at them for a minute. You look at them and at first glance, they seem really weird to us.
because everyone looks like they're skinny or jacked by our standards. Just a healthy way, don't they? Where was everyone else on the beach that day? Was it like a skinny person convention? And then you look at the figures. So in the year I was born, 6% of British people were obese. It's now nearly 27%.
So it's really important to understand how strange that change is. You have about 300,000 years where human beings exist and obesity is incredibly rare. It exists, but it's very unusual. In my lifetime, obesity is more than triple globally according to the World Health Organization. And you think, well, why would that be? That's really weird. What's going on? And we know why it happens. Obesity blows up everywhere that makes one change.
is where there's a change in the food supply system so that people move from mostly eating fresh whole foods that are prepared on the day to mostly eating processed and ultra processed foods, which are constructed out of chemicals in factories in a process that isn't even called cooking. It's called manufacturing food. And this is the food I've eaten all my life, right? And we know the science is very clear that that new kind of food, which didn't exist essentially before my lifetime, except in very small amounts.
affects our bodies in a completely different way to the way that whole foods do. And there's an experiment that really distilled this for me. It's carried out by a scientist I interview called Dr. Paul Kenny, who's the head of neuroscience at Mount Sinai in New York. And Dr. Kenny explained to me, so he did this experiment. It's very simple. He got a load of rats and he raised them in a cage.
And the rats were given nothing to eat, but the kind of healthy whole foods that rats evolved to eat over thousands of years. And when that's all they had to eat, the rats would eat when they were hungry and they would just stop when they were full. They seemed to have some natural nutritional wisdom and it said, Hey, rat, you've had enough stop now. They never became overweight or obese. Then Professor Kenny introduced them to the American diet. He fried up some bacon, he bought a lot of Snickers bars, he bought a lot of cheesecake and he put it in the cage.
and the rats went crazy for the American diet. They would literally hurl themselves into the cheesecake and eat their way out and just emerge, just completely slick to a cheesecake. And they ate and ate and ate and ate and all that natural nutritional wisdom that they'd had before completely disappeared.
and they all became severely obese. Then Professor Kenny tweaked the experiment again in a way that was a bit cruel to me as a former KFC addict. He took away the American diet and left him with nothing but the healthy food. And he was sure he knew what would happen. They would eat more of the healthy food than they had at the start. And this would prove that
junk food expands the number of calories you eat in a day. What happened is much weirder. Once they'd had the American diet, they refused to eat anything at all when it was taken away. It was like they no longer recognized the healthy food as food. It was only when they were starving, they finally went back to eat it. Now, to me, I think we're all living in that experiment, right? The food we're eating is profoundly undermining our ability to ever feel full. I don't think I'd ever really felt full until I took these drugs. Now,
when i learned all that i went to one of my best friends and i said i've got to stop taking these drugs this is bullshit i write all these books about how we got to deal with the deep underlying causes of our problems not just deal superficially with the symptoms and here i am with the problems obviously got deep social causes and here i am treating the symptoms with a drug i've got to stop doing this and she said to me so
This is my best friend. Eight years ago, she got very bad breast cancer. She nearly died. It was horrendous. She's a single mum. It was a nightmare. I was there with her all through the double mastectomy, the hysterectomy, the chemo. She said to me, Yohan, when I got...
Cancer, we knew that breast cancer has environmental causes. Something really weird is happening in Britain. One in seven British women get breast cancer. That's not happening in other countries. In Japan, it's one in 38 women. It didn't happen in Britain in the recent past. Something weird is happening in our environment.
You could have said to me, wait a minute, the environment has poisoned you and given you breast cancer and now you're injecting yourself with another poison. This is crazy, but you didn't say that to me. You said, well, we've got to make sure you survive to fight another day. If you survive, we'll try to figure out the environmental causes and be part of a campaign to put that right. But if you're dead, we can't do that.
She said to me, if your house is on fire, it's maybe a very good idea to say, you know, we should build houses out of less flammable materials. Let's change the building code. Let's say you've got to have sprinklers in your house. That's a good idea. But if your house is on fire, that's no damn used to you. You've got to find the fire brigade and douse the house in water. And then you can worry about building a better house next time. And I found that point hard to argue with. For someone like me, I'm 45. I've been screwed over by this food. I'm in a trap.
These drugs are a trapdoor. They're pretty risky, like I said before, a pretty risky trapdoor. But I've experienced all the physical and biological and brain changes that happen when you eat this shitty diet from when you're a baby, right? Now, you're absolutely right in your question, Liz.
That does not have to be the case for our children. I went to Japan. There is virtually no childhood obesity in Japan. I've got to tell you, it's a really weird experience. I went to a school in Tokyo, a normal school, a thousand children. I'm walking around. I said to them, where are your fat children? They don't have any. I said, what do you mean? There are a thousand kids here. They're like, oh, we've got one. They showed me the one kid discreetly. That kid would not be considered fat in the school that my God's sons go to. Right?
Why is that? It's because they did not allow their children to be poisoned with processed food. I go through in the book how they did it, how they have profound measures in place. We can do that if we want to. Japan is a fictional country. Can feel like that a bit of times, but it's not. I think it's really interesting, isn't it, that Johann started talking there about pictures of people on the beaches in the 1970s. Seriously, do go and take a look because you do wonder, you know, where are all the fat people?
You know, in Johann's words, you know, were they having a day off that day? Did they not get the memo to come and have their picture taken?
And I do find it completely staggering, as I said earlier, that this change in the food supply system has meant that we snack and we eat all day long. And I love the way he calls it what it is. He talks about fat children. And for some of us listening to that, you kind of do a double take. And I used the word fat earlier. I had to think about that because normally we'd be using other words such as unhealthy weight, which I guess is more politically correct.
Do you think it would be more helpful if we went back to using the word fat to describe the excess blubber for one of a better word on our bodies?
Are we doing ourselves and others a disservice by not calling this out? What do you think? Let me know. As I said, everywhere we go, it's snacks, snacks, snacks, eating in public. There's no shame. It's just expected, accepted. Every meal deal includes a bag of crisps or a chocolate bar and a can of fizzy drink every day. You know, when I was a kid, sorry, I'm sounding like a broken record here on time sounding like my mom or some kind of old person.
reminiscing back to the good old days, but it wasn't actually that long ago. I'm not that old guys, but I do remember when a chocolate bar was a rare treat, you know, genuine rarity. It was a reward for something. Okay, it probably shouldn't have been a reward, but it was, you know, and how on earth did we let our dietary habits get so trashed? I think it's a big society question that we need to address. And very interesting to see what's happening across the pond in America, for example, when I know
you know, the incoming head of the FDA and kind of changes there that will be happening. So watching with keen interest to see their lead on all of that and how we can perhaps distill some of that over here as well into our own public health policies. I think bottom line, one of the questions I'm asked is, would I inject myself with GLP1?
And I have to say, no, I wouldn't. I view it as Russian roulette. We just don't know the outcome. These drugs are increasingly linked to all kinds of issues, gastrointestinal issues with the first ones.
followed by pancreatitis, the most recent studies linking them, even possibly to blindness. Besides, you have to keep taking them forever. And you're not taking the time to develop healthier habits that do so much more for us than just register what's on the scales. Of course, I think I would caveat that in a similar way to Johann there, that if somebody is morbidly obese,
and highly likely to die as a result of being the weight they are, then yes, I can see the risk benefit analysis actually works in their favor, of course. But for those of us who could just do with dropping a stone or two, seriously, you've got to mess with a potential outcome that we don't know about. Listen to that whole episode of Johann, if you're considering this, because he talks about conversations with neuroscientists who confess they've got no idea
what this overloading of GLP1 is doing in the brain. No idea. So for me, I would go with high protein foods we've talked about before, eggs, of course, my favourite, poultry, fish, plant proteins like tofu, edamame. Interestingly, these all help support our own natural production of GLP1.
So you can look at them as, you know, kind of natures as epic, if you like, as well as other things like resistance starch. This is quite interesting because this is things like cooked and cooled pasta or potatoes. So things like potatoes salad, for example, or cold sushi rice. When you cook a starch like that and then you cool it so you don't eat it straight away hot, you cool it, the starch changes into this form of resistance starch.
which is better for our gut microbes and also is helping with this GLP1 production. And then we can also look at beans, of course, we'll do a similar thing. And then fermented foods, yogurt, kefir, you know, those have all been found to be GLP1 positive. I would cut the carbs, ditch the packaged foods and the UPFs, hydrate with more water. That's a really important thing, easy, free, really important.
Get out of bed an hour earlier. Look at the daylight. Try and set up that circadian rhythm more effectively. Get out for a 10-minute stroll after every meal. Simple, simple hack. Small lifestyle changes that carry great benefit overall when you put them all together and zero risk to our health and our longevity.
Well, I really hope that you enjoyed my roundup. I hope you found that a fascinating listen for all those pearls of wisdom strung together. And I do hope that that's given you also good idea of where you might need to start making changes in your lifestyle. And of course, if you would like to listen back to any of the full episodes that you've had parts of today,
then there will be links in the show notes for each and every one. So let's come together. You know, let's keep each other accountable this year, come and join the community, the conversation on Instagram. We are at Lizzo Wellbeing, there's a team and I'm on there too personally at Lizzo Me. And as I said, you can also send us an email
And you can even voice note. Yeah, go on, pick up the phone, leave me a message. You will find all the details on how to do that really easily in the show notes. So next month we are going to be doing a deep dive into disease prevention. Everything from eating to beat disease to learning more about cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis.
If you would like to hear those episodes, add free and 24 hours before everyone else, then do subscribe to the Lazar Wellbeing Show Plus. That is on Apple Podcasts and it's a very small monthly fee. Okay, until the next time we chat to go very well and continue to have a very happy new year. Goodbye.
The Lizzo Wellbeing Show is presented by me, Lizzo, and is produced by Anushka Tate for fresh air production, with thanks to our editorial director, Ellie Smith and social media manager, Rachel Andrews.
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