125: Almond Moms, Metabolic Diseases, and Pediatric Obesity (Part 1) with Dr. Karla Lester
Today’s topic arouses a host of different feelings and reactions around the term “pediatric obesity.” Dr. Karla Lester joins us to share her expertise as a medical professional and her perspective as a concerned parent. Discussing food and eating habits for us and our kids can send us down a rabbit hole with many tangents. Let’s get some balance and clarity in today’s episode.
Show Highlights:
Parents are victims of diet myths and bad science—and it carries over to our kids.
Having food rules doesn’t mean a commitment to restrictive eating.
How Dr. Karla came to the work she does today
“Almond moms” and “thin privilege” in our society
Fact: It is more difficult to navigate the world in a larger body, and parents fear this for their kids.
Health myths that “almond moms” believe and pass on to their kids
Does thinner always mean healthy? “No, you can be metabolically healthy, or unhealthy, at any weight.”
Comorbidities between addictions and eating disorders
Myths about obesity causing many health issues
Understanding insulin resistance and its causes
A look at the COVID-19 epidemic in a different light
Resources and Links:
Connect with Dr. Karla Lester: IME Community, Dr. Karla, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Dr. Karla's radio show
Connect with KC: Website, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook
Get KC’s book, How to Keep House While Drowning
We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on our website: www.strugglecare.com/promo-codes.
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KC Davis 0:00
,Hello, you sentient balls of stardust. Welcome to struggle care. I'm your host, KC Davis, and today we're going to talk about something that, let's be frank, absolutely, like arouses a lot of feelings and reactions to the term, which is pediatric obesity. Now that's obviously medical language, and there's a good reason why we all feel a reaction to that, but I have in the studio today, Dr Carla Lester and Dr Carla first, I want to say thank you for being here. Thank
Dr. Karla Lester 0:33
you for having me. I've been following you since I got on Tiktok, and your platform has been super helpful to me as a parent. Well,
KC Davis 0:41
your platform has been super helpful to me, and one of the reasons why I really wanted to have you on the podcast is because I feel like as parents, particularly at my experience as a parent, where I've been really in my own journey, kind of situated pretty firmly in the anti diet movement for a while now, when it came to some of the realities of, like, trying to help my kids make choices that are healthy, and I don't want to be an almond mom and I don't want to do diet culture, what I found was there's a little bit more here than just everything. Can be intuitive eating, and it totally doesn't matter. And, you know, and I even recognize, like, with my own ADHD, like, I have some challenges in the way that I eat that, you know, I couldn't find answers to those, just in kind of the intuitive eating side of it, but I don't want to go into the diet side of it. And so I'm kind of, like, I don't even know what to do with my own self. And that kind of also brings this gap for, I think, when we're looking at our kids, where I don't want to be harmful, and I know that weight isn't a measure of health, but at the same time, I think sometimes we look at our kids and there's some real health issues happening, and weight is either causally or tangentially related. And I think as parents, we're like, really afraid. We don't want to do harm, but we don't know what to do. And so I think you thread that needle really well. So I'm hoping that we can talk about that today.
Dr. Karla Lester 2:06
Perfect. That is what I do. So my whole philosophy is, let's meet in the middle, because what I found when I started my platform Miami community, and then I have a metabolic telehealth practice, it's licensed in 15 states, is that parents are stuck pinging back and forth between the extremes, and it makes sense because of how we grew up, all the myths, the bad science we've been taught. So they're either in the which kudos to you for being anti diet, and more in the body positivity and Health at Every Size. You know that's where we want to be to avoid harm, but the ping back and forth between that and believing falsely that that means that we're not addressing health or also ignoring, like you said, that there are some comorbidities and health issues related. We could talk about insulin resistance, but you know, what are the actual health issues that are going on? So there's the kind of do nothing, I'm not going to cause any harm, or the pinging back and forth between, like restrictive diet culture, I'm going to be an almond mom. And diet culture teaches us that it's all or nothing. It's going to be painful, it's horrible. And so what I do is I'm like, we kind of have to just drop everything, erase everything, deconstruct and do that work, because we have internalized weight bias. And so what do we want to do? We want to learn what are the actual health issues that my child or teen is facing? And start with relational health. So you can be like me, be like a soft place to land. Operate with compassion, not compliance. Don't look for a singular fix and solve to your child's body, accept them fully. That's your job, and love them and then also accept you want to make some changes. That's okay.
KC Davis 3:53
Yeah, I think part of what's hard is, like as a parent, we can't teach something that we ourselves have not been taught, and we can't impart something that we haven't internalized. And, you know, it was really important for me to find the anti diet movement and to find intuitive eating, and to find Health at Every Size which, if anyone's listening and they're not familiar with those, you know, we don't really have time to unpack all of them, but one of the things that I do know is that all of those kind of movements, they are about health like, none of them are denying that. Like you might need to make changes in your diet, in your activity level, you might need to look at health markers. None of them are denying that. So I don't want to seem as though I'm saying that. I'm just saying that me as the person navigating those movements. What I found was I was like, Okay, this is great. Get rid of dieting, get rid of food rules, get rid of all these things. And I really pushed into intuitive eating. And I met with dietitians, and we talked a lot about, okay, you know, how does your body feel when you eat X, Y, or when you eat a, b, c? And I kept being like, I feel nothing. I. I feel nothing. And we, oh, okay, well, we just can't hear. You can't hear. Let's get in. And we kind of kind like, literally, after a couple of dieticians, we got to the point where one finally went, I mean, you've mentioned that you have ADHD, and we know that, historically, that can come with some interoception problems. The truth is, not everybody feels a difference when they eat one thing over the other. And she finally was like you might and that's what it kind of came down to, for me, was I don't want to be in diet culture. But at the same time, I hit my mid 30s and was told I have a fatty liver, and was told that I had some other like health risk factors for some insulin stuff, and was told by a doctor, I need you to make some of these diet changes. And I was like, okay, my only experience with quote, unquote, food rules is this restrictive diet place, and my only experience with Health at Every Size was this, sort of like, throw all the rules out. And I truly didn't know what to do. Okay, she wants me to eat less sugar, she wants me to eat different kinds of carbs, she wants me to do protein. And I don't know how to do that. And I realized in looking at my kids, okay, I'm doing all of the anti diet stuff. I'm serving dessert with dinner. I'm not making them, you know, eat this before that. I'm not doing taboo, I'm not doing whatever. And then I realized, like, my kids might be a little bit like me. And my kids, all they want is sugar all the time, despite the fact that I have done all of the things I was told to do, to not make sugar the number one thing they want. And so then I'm like, Okay, now we actually kind of maybe need some rules around this, but I don't want to do the bad rules, but I need some rules, and I don't, I don't want my kids to grow up and be like me and not have a way. So I know I just kind of like verbally vomited on you, Dr Carla, but all that to say, I feel like you are such a necessary person to thread this needle, and I want to go a little bit into your background. Because what I really want to do with you is I want to kind of talk about these two polar opposite mistakes we can make, about kind of like almond mom diet culture, but then also kind of like saying everything and anything goes and not having any structure. But I want to start because I think it's important for the audience to know your background, and so tell us a little bit about your background and how you kind of got to this place.
Dr. Karla Lester 7:13
Okay. And thanks for sharing what you shared, too. I just want to say, when you have insulin resistance, you know Intuitive Eating is not going to work. Okay? These are med makes me feel these are medical issues. These are medical issues. And also, there's, I did a radio show on, I have a radio show on insulin resistance is central, so it's in your brain. So you've got all these things going on in our brain with central insulin resistance that contributes to the fatty liver or the mash, and then you've got ADHD. And so we have our food system. So as parents, please understand we don't cause and control. We've been blamed and shamed, and we have as parents, there's so much pressure on us, but we live in this really messed up food system. There's powerful neuro marketing tactics. There's so much food cue reactivity and food noise, so let's just have a lot of compassion. These are medical issues. My background is that I Well, I'm a pediatrician. I'm a mom of three. I get all this. I've had to deconstruct a lot of this stuff myself. I've gone through a lot of health changes myself and growing up, I had a high aces score. So I really feel like, once I got to a certain age, I'm 55 now that my body just like wore my trauma. I mean, it's like that stress just has to go somewhere. So I'm a big advocate in my community if people want to advocate, because I think, you know, once we address these issues in our home and feel more agency around these health issues with our own children, then we can be advocates in the community. But I was on the board of the food bank, but with my nonprofit, my office was at the Health Department's a big public health advocacy I'm at the capital. Most people know me not as like just the childhood obesity doctor. They know me as a fears advocate for children on all sorts of issues, gun violence prevention, Medicaid access, and, you know, it's been an awesome career. I'm glad that I've been able to do all this stuff, but I really noticed with my practice, all these issues, these kids with aces, these kids with looking at social determinants of health, looking at health disparities that have become worse in the pandemic. And what happened for me was I had built my career up to where I was a leader of a population health center and founder at the Children's Hospital here, ended up having really intense whistleblower retaliation, and my attorney said, you're out, you're going to resign. It was effective immediately. That was five years ago, and then I got offered these jobs to build that for us, and I said, You know what? Like I have to get back. I haven't been helpful enough, especially for teens, because it. You look at the data and the media framing of especially adolescent obesity, it's like the severity of it keeps going up, and then they witch it, and the media blames. They'll tell a story, maybe about a teen, and it's this just weight blame and shame, and it shifts it onto them, and it's like we're not getting anywhere. And I knew in clinic teens, they don't show up, they drop off, they don't adhere, and they share nothing, you know. So once I started coaching them, I was like, Wow. I mean, they're in pain, like they are suffering, with hours on end of body, judging, almost dysmorphia, focusing on their stomach or their arms. Anyway, I found this food noise constantly. They feel like I shouldn't be eating. They've told me that time and time again I shouldn't be eating. They restrict, they binge. And I was like, this is way more severe than I ever knew about doing all this work. So I kind of had to, like, I'm asking parents to do recognize we're at a loss, kind of erase everything we've done. Yeah, sure, I can say, Oh, I'm proud of this. I'm proud of that, but the reality is, we're kind of at a loss. And so then I started seeing parents who were like, Oh, my daughter is body confident. She's size six, she dances, she has tons of friends, but I just can't help but think she wouldn't be better at a size zero. And I was like, What's going on, you know? And then I found out, I'm like, I think the parents have untreated issues. And then I saw the almond mom thing with Yolanda Hadid, and I was like, Whoa. You know, they're like subsuming their teen into this. You know, what they say is health, but is really a pursuit of thin privilege, the social capital of thinness, and it's so hard for parents, because that exists in our society.
KC Davis 11:58
That gave me goosebumps when you said that, because I feel like part of what's so difficult about having to help our kids navigate food choices, and you know health choices, is that, like, we have so much as parents, we have to deconstruct, and there's something really powerful when you said, like, we can watch a child, and I think a lot of parents will watch A child maybe put on a lot of weight or even some weight, and feel fear. And like you said, there is a social capital of thinness, and a lot of parents their quote, unquote, health fears have a lot less to do with health and a lot more to do with I don't want my child to lose thin privilege. Now I will stop and say, I think that there are two sides to this. There's kind of like a malevolent side, and then there's kind of like a side that I have a little bit more empathy for. Like, I think we hear that and we think, Oh, these superficial moms, these, you know, they have undiagnosed eating disorders, and they're being so they're pushing this on their kids, and I totally understand that. But I think as a parent, I understand that, like it is, in fact, more difficult to navigate the world in a larger body, like there is more discrimination, there is more stigma, there is more pain, and I don't think that every parent that feels fear around watching their child gain weight is necessarily just acting out of this kind of superficial I think there's this fear of, I don't want my kid to get bullied. I don't want my now that doesn't obviously justify doing something harmful and engaging in diet culture, but, but yeah, so let's start there. Let's start with almond moms and kind of this fat phobia and this and so if anyone doesn't know this thing about almond moms was people started posting online on tick tock videos of their moms, of kind of like, what their moms would eat in a day. And the joke was that, like, the mom would eat a handful of almonds and then be like, No, I'm good. I'm full. Or they'd go to a restaurant and they'd be like, This is what I'm eating. It'd be like a burger and fries. Be like, this is my mom's eating. And the mom would have, like a burger, no bun, and they'd be cutting, like the tiniest little sliver of meat and eat. And they like, I'm just so full. And I think it was kind of an awakening, like people realizing I thought this was normal, or I thought this was just my mom and kind of realizing, like, oh, fully grown ass women are not supposed to just be eating a handful of almonds, and realizing how many of our mothers were disordered. I mean, I feel privileged that my mom wasn't an almond mom, but tell me a little bit about some of the health myths that almond moms believe and perpetuate with their kids.
Dr. Karla Lester 14:45
Well, they're very tied into the energy balance theory. So that's the calories in, calories out. So we, you know, have to give ourselves a major break and have gentleness and compassion, because we were taught that in 1970 Seven Dietary Guidelines for Americans came out, and they pushed the false lipid hypothesis of Ancel Keys and who was responsible for BMI as well. So thanks, and that taught us to those guidelines were developed by politicians, but said, you know, let's demonize cholesterol. Let's demonize dietary fats. Eat low fat and high carbohydrate. And then we had, you know, the food pyramid came along. And so, you know, our bodies, we were taught are just like a, you know, calories in, calories out, machine, and I'm Gen X, and I talk on my radio show about how to deconstruct toxic 80s diet culture. And a lot of this stuff did come from the 80s. And then I play epic 80s music. So that one thing is they're very stuck in that. So it's very much about cause and control and like cause and effect. And then the myth is that, you know, a lot of these people have metabolic health privilege. Give me a break, you know. And a lot of it is like, you know, thinness is better, and they've, I'm sure they have had privileges, and a lot of it is tied into patriarchy keeping women silent. And you know, when you look at the body positive movement Health at Every Size, I mean, it's rooted in making sure that the silencing stops of marginalized voices. And
KC Davis 16:20
it does seem to be two things, right? Like, there's that social stuff of it's like this myth that thinner is better, thinner is more beautiful, that thinner always means healthy, that health is morally superior in all instances, right? And so it's like, okay, if I believe that socially, and I've been sold this lie scientifically, right, that all I need to do is eat fewer calories than I'm expending to maintain that thinness. And I would also guess that, like if I had those beliefs then and I was eating a certain amount of food, and I wasn't either maintaining thinness or losing weight, then the only conclusion I would have to draw is I should be taking in fewer calories. I should be taking in fewer calories, or I should, or should be exercising more. And so you get people moms in these bodies where they are or are not thin, but they've kind of like whittled themselves down to these, like, 912,000 1200 calorie days, right? Because that's what they have to do to kind of maintain that plate. So it makes sense to me that there's, like the social myths and the scientific myths. And I saw a tick tock one time that I thought was really funny, where it was talking about moms being really overly concerned with their daughters not being petite like they are. But the punch line was, she was like, it's always this petite woman who married this, like, linebacker Mom Dad, that's then, like, shocked that their daughter doesn't come out super petite. That's like, You married a linebacker, and that's neither here nor there. I just thought that was a funny observation. So observation.
Dr. Karla Lester 18:02
I've seen this. I get those parents,
KC Davis 18:07
yeah, I've heard you say before this kind of you bust this myth by basically saying that you can be metabolically healthy at any weight.
Dr. Karla Lester 18:16
Yeah, yes, you can be metabolically healthy at any way. You can be metabolically unhealthy at any way. You can have insulin resistance and be thin. You can have type two. I mean, some people produce more insulin. Some people, it's super interesting science. Some people produce more, you know, glucose, and so they're going to be more like, have more diabesogenic or obesogenic. And so when you look at genetics and risk factors, you shouldn't base it on weight as much as you should say, does anybody have type two diabetes? Did they have pre diabetes? Did they have fatty liver disease? They have metabolic syndrome? Did they have hypertension of early cardiovascular disease? You know, let's just get into the actual health issues, and then what are your metabolic health numbers? You know, what's showing up on your exam, but also what's the data? And then, what are the causes, comorbidities, contributing factors? That's what I focus on in my practice. It's different for everybody, and it changes over time too. And so it's much more interesting way of practicing. And obviously it's not going to be a singular fix and solve. So we look at all sorts of ways that we work on it. But the thing is, it's healthism, right? The almond moms get into what's healthism, and a lot of people, I've seen a lot of videos that say my mom's an almond mom, and they're actually just kind of a healthy, health conscious person, which is fine, and they absolutely don't even put it on their their daughter or their child at all. So they're like, do you? And they. Cook and this stuff. So I'm like, I've put in the comments they're not an almond mom, you know. And then some mom and mom people say, Yeah, my mom's an almond mom during the day, but then she binges at night, you know, in secret. And then some have absolutely, that's an eating disorder, it is. And that's a lot have. These are just, you know, is it really parent who has an untreated eating disorder, and then they're subsuming their child into it, because that's very attractive, and it's with this is my main concern with the compounded meds. That's what we're seeing. It's my biggest fear right now is that these almond moms are getting these compounded meds for their adolescents and maybe even younger children, and some nefarious companies are giving them out. And it's just very scary. Yeah,
KC Davis 20:51
let's talk about that for a second. You know, I worked in addiction for a really long time, and there's a lot of comorbidity between addiction and eating disorders, and we, what we know is that the most lethal mental health disorder in the world are eating disorders. That is the most deadly mental health issue that you can have. And what's frustrating to me around the discourse of GLP one medications is it's I don't think that they're a panacea. I don't think that they're evil. I don't think anything about that. I just wish there was more conversation about the risk factor of the interplay between those medications and eating disorders, because using medications in eating disorder is not new. We had tons of clients that were using tons of laxatives that would drink a ton of coffee for the appetite suppressant of the caffeine that would get on certain medications on purpose for the appetite suppressant. Like, those things aren't new. And what's so interesting to me, like, I went to the doctor one time, like, so I have an addiction history and one of the most but I also have a problem with one of the discs in my back, and every once in a while, like once a year or whatever, it compresses a nerve and gives me like, level 10 pain, and it is so incredibly difficult for me to access pain meds. And I have 20 years of sobriety, and it literally took me 15 years before I was even willing to go on pain meds for surgeries, right? And it is so difficult to access pain meds, even when you need them, when you are disabled, when you have chronic pain, when you are post surgery, especially as a woman, because nobody believes women about pain and the roadblocks that I had to go through to try and access needed pain medication. And here's the thing, it was like, I get it because it's a reaction right to the opioid epidemic that we caused when we were not being thoughtful about prescribing narcotic medication, but we've almost like over corrected. And what I think is interesting is that it is so difficult for me to access narcotics when I legitimately need them, and I've had multiple doctors offer me GLP ones without doing any lab work first. Wow. And it's kind of bananas, right? And listen, what like this was me kind of talking about some like, hormonal issues that I have, some metabolic issues that I have, and that's come up in conversation, and I don't have a like fundamental feeling for or against using them, and I'm willing to have that conversation. But it was wild to me that you know you could jump on an app and in 30 seconds somebody will prescribe it to you. You can have a doctor offer it to you and not even do lab work first. And I'm like, How are we not making the connection? I can't get pain meds when I need them, and yet this medication has been being offered to me before we're even getting to the point of trying to figure out if I need it. And it's like, Well, what we're probably going to do, honestly, is eventually when we realize, culturally, what's happening. I'm afraid we're going to do the same thing we've done with the opioid epidemic, and overcorrect and now people that need the medic like it's just really frustrating, and it was so ironic to look at the interplay. And they're similar in some ways, in terms of they serve a medical purpose, but we need to be aware that they can be used detrimentally in the course of a lot of mental health issues. Anyways, I forgot why I brought that up, but I think we were kind of talking about the science myths that almond moms kind of cling to, and this idea that skin, if thinner, is always healthier, then that means that anything you do in pursuit of thinness, like, ergo, that's okay, and that's healthy, and that's not going to be detrimental. And then can you talk a little bit about, because I feel like one that I was raised with that is that, like, it kind of goes with, like, I always thought that weight gain is what caused type two diabetes. And so when doctors would say, like, you really need to lose some weight, otherwise you're going to get type two diabetes, this idea that like weight gain is causing and you'll see it, they'll be like, oh, people who have this much adipose tissue are this much more risk. And it's almost like this conflation of cause and correlation. And can you unpack that a little bit? Because that was a big turning point for me. Yeah, such
Dr. Karla Lester 24:56
a great question. I do want to clear. Verify that. I do have several patients who do really well, and the parents do on the medication, and it does help address their metabolic health issues, and we're looking at biomarkers, and it's reversing their insulin resistance. They're more responsive, and weight loss can be there or not, but we anyway so it can be. And the also, the cost of the medications is a huge barrier to access. And I think we're in this toxic consumerism. I mean, everything is consumerism, singular fix and certainty, right? And
KC Davis 25:41
I think one of the myths that I think is kind of central to talking about what almond moms believe, is that like weight gain causes health issues, and that like obesity causes and by the way, I want to just side note I'm using the term obesity because that is like what the medical language uses, and it has like a medical definition. I am aware that it is not a term that many of the movements that I associate with, like, used. So I just wanted to say, like, I'm aware of that I'm not intending to offend or not be nuanced. But I just feel like, you know, talking to a doctor trying to refer to, like, the medical definition, this belief that it is the cause of type two diabetes, or, you know, I've even been told, because I have PCOS, that like losing weight cure my PCOS, right? And so talk to us a little bit about how those are myths,
Dr. Karla Lester 26:29
yeah. So the cause of type two diabetes is insulin resistance. And there was a scientist, Gerald ravine. He was at, I think that's his name. He was at Stanford, and he won the Nobel Prize for his research that showed that showed metabolic syndrome X that became insulin resistance. Metabolic Syndrome is the cause of these metabolic diseases and cardiovascular disease. And it's so interesting to see, if you follow the literature and you know how these myths take hold, and the attachment to energy balance theory, I fight the gym bros on tick tock about this, because they're obsessed with it. Get a new calorie deficit, calories in, calories out. And you just need to lose weight to resolve these issues. It's just really interesting to see how that in the medical field, especially in healthcare I find still today, a lot of even specialists endocrinologist they don't address insulin resistance in patients, and they don't know enough about insulin resistance. We talk about how doctors we don't get any training in nutrition, which is true in medical school or residency, but that we don't have training in insulin resistance. We don't have training in focusing on what are the actual metabolic health issues that are happening? And then we give out, eat less, move more advice. Bullet point, like compliance advice and like BMI, for instance, we've used that as this just one that was chosen in, I think, 1994 so that we would have a screening tool so we could assess and that was recommended by the expert panel for pediatrics to follow BMI. So everything was put on it as a screening tool, and then you would be based upon the percentile of BMI that would determine your risk factors, like what labs are ordered, and then BMI decreasing BMI is the goal, and it just, I have to say, it's a horrible way to practice medicine, because, you know, I was following these expert committee recommendations for years, and nobody was getting better. It's exhausting. You're doing these notes. You're like, why am I here?
KC Davis 29:00
And is it true that the weight itself is what causes things like type two diabetes or cardiovascular disease? Or do we have that relationship? Wrong?
Dr. Karla Lester 29:10
I believe that no type two diabetes is caused by insulin resistance, okay,
KC Davis 29:16
but is gaining weight what causes insulin resistance?
Dr. Karla Lester 29:19
No, it perpetuates a cycle. So what happens is it starts. So if you have a genetic predisposition, which is the most powerful thing, then we've had bad recommendations for what to eat, and we have our food system with high processed carbohydrates, refined sugars, trans fats and salt, and they created this addictive trifecta, and there's a lot of food politics that goes into this. And then what happens is we've been eating low fat, high carbohydrate, which has and then we should eat frequently. That's what we've been taught. And so that's what's contributed if we didn't have our food system and the lousy. Is advice and a bad science, then we wouldn't have as many people struggling with insulin resistance. So insulin resistance, so Insulin is a hormone we think about when you think about blood sugar. Insulin resistance is an adaptation of the body. The body can adapt. We just want to keep status quo. That's what our body wants status quo. There's no agenda that our body has. So when we eat anything, our blood sugar goes up. Blood glucose goes up. Insulin is released from the pancreas to connect to insulin receptors on the cell membrane, and then opens up a channel the blood sugar, blood glucose is led into the cell so that we can make ATP, our body's energy source. When the blood sugar goes down, there's a feedback loop, so then the pancreas is kicked in to stop releasing insulin. It's how it's supposed to work. We're insulin sensitive. We're insulin responsive when we have insulin resistance, so maybe we have a genetic predisposition, and there have been some, a ton of studies on insulin resistance. It's just interesting, like what gets out in the media, what's taken hold in healthcare. We could have had it differently. We could have had a more effective way of approaching it, and it makes me sick, but anyway, we're doing better now. So what happens is, when we are told to eat high carbohydrates, so more insulin is going to be released when we eat sugar, right? And then it's going to spike up, and then our blood sugar is going to crash, and then we're going to feel like, like one donut begets another donut, right? It's like the sugar Chase. And so we're going to eat and then, so eat more, and then, so what's going to happen is Insulin is a powerful storage hormone, and what if we have high insulin levels around all the time? Well, we're going to be very dangerously hypoglycemic, because insulin lowers blood sugar. So what happens is there's a change on the of the receptor on the cell membrane, so it's just not as responsive. It doesn't let as many glucose molecules in to flood the cell, and you're not dangerously hypoglycemic. So then in your bloodstream, you have higher levels of insulin and you have higher blood sugar. So what does your pancreas do? It kicks out more insulin to overcome it. Then that kicks in the obesity cycle, because insulin is a powerful storage hormone. It stores everything is fat and keeps your fat stores on a lockdown. The best book is the obesity code by Dr Jason Fung. I mean, if you want to learn about all the hormonal stuff, because, you know, a lot of my viral posts are on it's hormonal. It's not simply caloric. It's not You're not a calories and calories out machine. Once the cycle starts, then you get the effects of obesity on your body too. So then we're getting inflammation. We have more risk for cancers and some of the chronic issues and diseases that are associated with obesity. So, but it starts with, you know, and it can be really complex interplay,
KC Davis 32:55
yeah. And I'm curious like, how many of those health things, like, I'm thinking back to COVID, where they used to talk about, you know, people who had a certain amount of body fat percentage were more likely to have these high risk factors. And I remember there was this discourse around, you know, that everyone took that to mean, C It's unhealthy to have a bigger body. But nobody was really talking about, like, You talk a lot about weight stigma in, like, the medical world that, like, it genuinely affects the quality of medical care that you get, so that, like, a good percentage of that isn't, oh, their body is just, you know, more broken and is going to get COVID, like, going to die from COVID. It's like they're not getting the same quality of care that a person in a thinner body is getting when they have COVID. And that actually might be the main risk factor, right? Or that, you know, there are underlying health issues that are causing the weight gain, and it's those underlying health issues that are the risk factor, not the literal amount of, like, body fat composition someone has,
Dr. Karla Lester 34:04
yeah, I mean, it's tricky, because there are definitely issues. I mean, we're looking at, like, with COVID, there's so many pulmonary I mean, it's a virus that affects your lungs. You know, that was an issue. And so for people who have obesity and struggle with that, that's really tough. That made it really hard. That was my first really viral post was medical gaslighting due to weight stigma and bias during COVID is dangerous because there was a comedian on Tiktok who went in thought he had COVID. It was before we had vaccines or anything, and so he was he said, Why is everything any super funny? I had been following him. Why is everything about weight, you know, just watch the weight with the doc. He's like, Doc, I gotta, you know, I got a fever, I got a cough, I can't breathe, you know, it's like, everything looks good. Just watch the weight. You know, it's like, I'm not gonna test you for COVID. I'm not gonna. And I was like, Wait, that's like, wrong. I mean, that was weight bias. And so, yeah, I mean, our society. Agriculture, we shouldn't be surprised, unfortunately, and even in the medical system that they're going to weaponize it. I mean, there's so much weight bias. And my daughter and I actually did a kind of a qualitative study on that viral Tik Tok post about medical gas lighting. And because I woke up to, like, 1000 comments of similar experiences due to weight, and a lot of them were gender based during pregnancy with, like, postpartum depression. They were saying, you know, they were really struggling. And they were like, you just need to lose your postpartum weight, your baby weight, COVID, PCOS, you know? I mean, it's just like, on and on and on, these really chronic people with lupus who had been ignored, people with cancers, who had been told you just need to lose weight and then your problems will go away. And they ended up having, you know, some advanced cancer. And so I think we're obviously very messed up there. Yeah,