Dr. Orlena’s Four Pillars for Lasting Health and Wellness

In this episode of Rebel Health Collective, I interview Dr. Orlena, a former pediatrician turned health coach, who helps women rediscover their health by focusing on four foundational pillars: nutrition, exercise, sleep, and emotional wellness. Dr. Orlena shares her journey from practicing pediatrics in the UK to moving to Spain and becoming a health coach. We talk about how she made significant changes in her own life and the lives of her clients by simplifying healthy living into practical, achievable habits. Join us as we discuss how you can integrate these four pillars into your daily life, empowering you to live a healthier and more balanced lifestyle.

In this episode, we cover:

• The importance of demonstrating healthy habits to your children.
• How busy women often put their self-care last and how to change that.
• Why habits are essential for long-term health changes.
• Healthy living doesn’t have to feel like deprivation—it can be enjoyable and sustainable.
• By taking care of yourself, you’re not only improving your own life but also modeling positive behaviors for your family.
• The Four Pillars of Health—nutrition, exercise, sleep, and emotional wellness—are interconnected, and small improvements in one area can lead to progress in others.
• Building healthy habits is crucial for long-term success. Start small, stay consistent, and remember that habits grow over time.

About Our Guest:
Dr. Orlena is a former pediatrician who now works as a health coach, helping women adopt healthy lifestyles that are sustainable and fulfilling. She specializes in breaking down complex health goals into manageable daily habits through her four-pillar approach. She is also the host of the Fit and Fabulous at 40 and Beyond podcast.

Dr Orlena's Social Media Accounts:
Instagram
Facebook 
Dr. Orlena's Coaching Website

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**Disclaimer: Please remember that the topics and information discussed in this podcast are for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. Always consult with your healthcare provider or medical professional before making any changes to your health regimen or implementing any new treatments. Your health journey is unique, and it’s important to work with your trusted healthcare team to determine what’s best for you.**

Transcript

Josh Bostick (00:05)
she is going to be giving us a background on her past and some of the changes she's made in her career and really what she's focusing on and how she's trying to help people live a healthier more whole life by really getting back down to the basics. And so I'll go ahead and turn it over to you Dr. Leana and if you want to start with your back history and go into your four pillars that you focus on and we'll go from there.

Dr Orlena (00:32)
Perfect, well first of all, thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute pleasure and honor to be here. Okay, quick brief history I'll give you. So you may be able to tell I'm from the UK. I trained as a medical doctor. I actually trained in pediatrics. And then in 2011, after swine flu, which was a long time ago, I decided I was going to move to Spain and I moved to Spain.

to keep the long story short, essentially with my eyes wide shut and thought I would just come across here and work, carry on doing pediatrics. That wasn't the case. And essentially I found myself trying to do something online. I had no idea what to do online. And I started off actually writing a blog about how to help children eat healthily because...

I have four kids. At the time, I think I had two kids. Then I had twins. But these children, they didn't seem to want to eat the foods that I gave them. I would give them something like vegetable pasta and they would pick out the bits of pasta, leaving the vegetables behind. And I would be like, what is going on? Why don't you kids eat vegetables? So that was really where I started. And then...

A few years after that I pivoted and I changed from helping kids to eat healthily to helping women lead a healthy lifestyle. One of the reasons being because the best way to teach our children healthy eating is to demonstrate healthy eating and a lot of the people that I was talking to weren't demonstrating healthy eating and that's a really difficult place to be kind of saying, hey, I'm gonna eat like this but you've got to eat in a totally different way and clearly the kids weren't buying it at all.

I really saw that a lot of women were struggling with their weight and a lot of women were busy juggling everything, looking after kids.

having jobs and really putting their own self care right at the bottom. And to be honest, that was where I was as well. Like I thought I was leading a relatively healthy life and I was eating reasonably healthy. Luckily for me, my parents always had vegetables with dinner. We were talking before we started recording about my parents always had a home cooked meal. So things were relatively healthy.

But number one, at this time I started exploring nutrition when I was looking at my kids and really seeing that I grew up in this era of white refined carbohydrates. So, you know.

breakfast cereal or toast for breakfast and then sandwiches for lunch and then pasta for dinner. So a lot of emphasis on what I call white refined carbohydrates. And also at that time I had four young kids and I put myself at the bottom of the pile and the exercise I did was walking around town with a buggy and running after my kids. And my entire life, my entire focus was my children. And I know that that's the same for lot of women. And it was really difficult for me to

take care of myself and I could see myself being this grumpy mum and thinking, wait a minute, you moved to Spain so you could live this dream life, you live where you want to live and yet you're grumpy. Why was I grumpy? Because I wasn't looking after myself.

I wasn't really taking care of myself. And so for me, what I started doing was really looking at the mindset piece and how our mind and emotions work. I forced myself to go to yoga. It was once a week. It started with going to yoga classes once a week. And luckily I have a very supportive husband who was like, your kids are gonna survive for an hour without you. And yes, we can afford a yoga classes. Can you please go? So, but in my mind it was, my goodness.

I can't do this because I've got to do something else. I've got to cook dinner or I don't know, change a nappy or I don't know, whatever it was. And I started swimming as well when my kids started going to swimming lessons. And long story short, again, I essentially started swimming when they were swimming. So gradually I started taking care of myself.

And I could really see that I was not the only person who was doing this. A lot of women live on autopilot, doing everything they can for everybody else, and really their own self-care needs are right at the bottom of the pile. And the problem with this is that at some stage,

you either hit burnout or you get unwell because your lifestyle is leading you to a nasty illness like type two diabetes or heart disease or some cancers. And you can see yourself sort of heading in this trajectory, but feel powerless to make any changes until it's too late, until emergency lights are going off. And really you just kind of wish you could backtrack a couple of decades to fix it all.

So what I do now is I help women apply healthy living in a way that they love and it's easy and it's doable for them. It's not about what I enjoy doing. I love swimming. That doesn't mean all my clients go swimming. Some of them do, not all of them. But it's really about having a framework so that you can fix it into your life. And the four pillars that I teach are number one,

nutrition, easy, healthy food, which is plant-based. So that doesn't mean you can't eat meat, but really you're focusing on plants. And I specifically teach the Mediterranean style diet, which is extra virgin olive oil. So basically it's fruit and vegetables and lentils and legumes.

And obviously you're getting some protein, nuts and seeds. You may be eating meat, you may not be eating meat, but essentially what we're doing is cutting out on the foods. So either super ultra processed or even those white refined carbohydrates and looking to healthy sources of carbohydrates. It's not zero carbohydrates, which is where people get a bit confused, but it's healthier sources of carbohydrates like fruit and vegetables and whole grains and things like that. So that's nutrition in a nutshell.

Exercise that lights you up and I always say you need an exercise that lights you up because if you don't enjoy it You're not well number one. You're not gonna do it. But what's the point of? Creating a lifestyle that you don't enjoy. It's really about exactly it's about Yeah, exactly

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So exercise that lights you up. Sleep is another one that...

People kind of think, yeah, yeah, I need a bit more sleep. I think if they knew more about why they needed more sleep, they would prioritize sleep. But a lot of people don't prioritize sleep, which means that you're grumpy and tired and you eat more and you exercise less. So these are all connected. And then pillar number four is emotional wellness, which can include your stress level. So many people are super stressed about families, about work, about big important things like mortgages or parents being unwell. But essentially I would say life is busy life and there's always something.

And another part of emotional wellness is actually your relationship with food. So do you turn to food for comfort, which a lot of people do. A lot of people don't see that they're doing it, or they do see it and they don't know how to change it. So those are my four pillars. And once you start applying them and they all like have a knock on effect on each other,

It's really about building habits in all of those four pillars so that you're doing it without thinking. You're not thinking, my goodness, I must remember to eat healthily today. No, it's just how you eat. You just eat this food that you enjoy and get on with your life, essentially.

Josh Bostick (08:06)
and all four pillars that you just touched on, all of those impact my blood sugars. If I have a very poor night's sleep of three hours, my blood sugars the next day are gonna be all over the place. If I'm not out walking, working in the garden, playing basketball, doing something, my blood sugars are gonna be higher than normal that whole next day. the distress side of it, when I have a meeting or a presentation for work,

Dr Orlena (08:30)
Amazing.

Josh Bostick (08:34)
It'll be say 8 a.m. If my presentation is at 11 p.m. Or sorry 11 a.m. It'll start my blood sugars will start creeping up and I can see it just happening and there's nothing I can do about it So I can relate with all four of those pillars and I think they're all Super super important and probably the most important of all those is nutrition I saw something the other day that said why is eating healthy called a diet like it shouldn't

Dr Orlena (08:47)
Yeah.

nutrition.

Josh Bostick (09:03)
There shouldn't be a diet. Everything else outside of eating healthy should be considered a diet of some sort. mean, eating healthy is how it should be always, where a diet is kind of a short-term thing that you're doing. Let's not make eating healthy short-term. Let's make that the base of how we eat.

Dr Orlena (09:20)
Yeah, I absolutely, 100 % agree, but I think there's another really big shift here as well.

I wake up and I go and do some exercise and then I have my breakfast and my breakfast is what I consider to be a decadent luxury. It is full of fruit and nuts and seeds and I have some oatmeal and some yogurt and a little bit of ginger and some cocoa nibs and a cup of coffee and it is amazing and I really feel that I have nourished myself and that I've sat down and had a really tasty amazing meal. Now...

The great thing about that is I don't feel I need to turn to food for comfort. I don't feel when I'm feeling stressed and...

all of those things, my goodness, I need to give myself a special treat. I've already had my treat, I've had my breakfast, I'm already full. And then I've got another amazing meal coming at lunchtime and another one at dinnertime. So I 100 % enjoy all the healthy foods that I eat. Now I do think you need, most people need to retrain themselves a little bit to get there because most people rely on glucose a lot for their treat, basically. But.

I think when you make that shift to actually, really enjoy my healthy foods, it stops feeling like depriving yourself when you're not eating sugar. I don't look at people, I bought some donuts for my kids at lunchtime, we've just finished lunch, and they ate them and I didn't have one.

I didn't feel deprived. I didn't think, my goodness, I can't sit and watch them having a donut. I was thinking, actually, I don't like those donuts. They're kind of disgusting. Sure, they taste good, but they've got all kinds of horrible chemicals in them. My kids don't have donuts very often, so they were like, wow, this is like such a treat.

But I think that mindset shift really to enjoying food and nourishing your body and thinking about your health and your wellness and what you put in your body, I think once you make that shift, it becomes really easy to eat healthily and...

You know, again, you don't have to deprive yourself entirely. There's a lovely phrase that I like, which is nothing is forbidden in moderation. But I think the thing is that that idea of moderation is different for different people. Like it might be moderation. Some people think that means every other day. Whereas my idea of moderation might be, you know, once every five years or something. But yeah, I don't feel deprived and I don't eat really sugar at all occasionally, but it's all about your mindset really, I think. And I think that

really plays into that bit that you're talking about, that diet, people always have, diet means depriving themselves and restricting themselves. Whereas when I talk about diet, when I talk about a Mediterranean style diet, I think about, for me, diet means everything that you eat on a daily basis. So the Mediterranean style diet, some people think, it's about restricting yourself. No, it's not really. It's just, that's what they mean. It's like what you eat, what the Mediterranean...

Josh Bostick (11:52)
you

Dr Orlena (12:14)
people historically ate. I could tell you about how people eat now, which is not the same as historically. I think another thing that people get a bit confused is Mediterranean cuisine and Mediterranean style diet. So people think, Mediterranean, it must be pasta and rice and pizza. And that's not really what the Mediterranean style diet is. That's Mediterranean cuisine, but not necessarily Mediterranean style diet.

Josh Bostick (12:15)
you

Definitely, yeah. And I think it becomes once you make that shift and I think you mentioned kind of retraining. I think you can retrain your taste buds and what you like by making that shift and that commitment. My mom actually has done this recently and she got some blood work back and

realized that she had some work to do and needed to bring her A1C down. And so she literally went home that day, dumped all of the refined, you know, processed stuff out, all of the candies. And she must have gone three or four months straight of just, you know, fruits and veggies and meat and eating healthy. And she was in an airport and it was like 1130 at night and everything was closed. So all she could get access to was a vending machine. And she had,

some potato chips and she said that they just tasted disgusting. She's like, I could, I could taste the chemicals. I just, I didn't want another bite. And so, you know, she's, gosh, she's probably seven or eight months in now and still just going so strong, you know, just eating healthy whole foods. And it's that commitment of taking the first step and sticking to it. And I think you, really do do a 180 and retrain yourself.

Dr Orlena (13:34)
Yeah.

Amazing.

It's amazing. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, entirely. you're totally right. Your taste buds actually, they regrow every two weeks. So actually, you only need a short period of time. So this is, do a two week reboot. I walk my clients through a two week reboot. And so two weeks is a really good time to help you retrain your taste buds, your physiology to sugar response. But totally, I see so many people who say to me, I used to drink pop the whole time. And then I tried this pop and it was disgusting. It was so sweet.

And it's exactly, it's a journey that people go on. The problem is, so many people are stuck at the beginning. And at the beginning, it feels like it's really scary. And you think, what does my life look like without my desired food? And particularly if you have cravings, your whole day can revolve around that particular food, and it's your treat, and it's your way of nourishing yourself. And you're standing there thinking, my goodness, I think I would rather just hang on to this than make any changes.

Actually, when you get to the end of that two weeks, I always say you can do anything for two weeks. Do you know what I mean? It's such a small period of time. And when you get to that end of that two weeks, people go, my goodness, it was surprisingly easy. And actually, I could never go back to the way I was doing it before.

Yeah, yeah, well, they regrow, they regrow every two weeks. you know, it's really interesting. There's, I always talk about this thing called the strawberry test. One Easter, I have four kids. We have chocolate at Easter, clearly, but it's also strawberry season. And in Spain, we have delicious, beautiful fruits and vegetables. We're really lucky here. We had some strawberries. I eat a strawberry. Delicious, you know, flavor bursting of strawberry.

eat some chocolate, because my kids have got chocolate, super sweet, like, you you can't really taste anything other than the sugar. Now go back and eat a strawberry. And that strawberry is the same load of strawberries. It now tastes sour and acidic. And why is that? It's because my mouth is flooded with sugar and I can't taste the natural flavor of the strawberries. And what people are doing is they are doing that on a daily basis. Every time they eat packaged foods, they're making their mouth overrun with, it could be sugar, it could be salt.

happens to both of them and then plus you've got other chemicals as well.

and then you eat some fruits and vegetables and they're just pale in comparison. And you're like, well, why would I eat these fruits and vegetables? They taste horrible. They do compared to these really strong flavors. Once you allow those flavors to sort of wash out of your system and then you go back to fruit and vegetables, you're like, my goodness, these are amazing. I've got this delicious ripe peach or this delicious strawberry or whatever it is. Actually, it's super sweet. And I get my sugar rush. I eat loads of fruit. do lots of activity.

But I eat lots of fruit and I get my sugar rush from my sugar rush. I get my sweet things from fruit basically.

Josh Bostick (17:09)
and then I'd have to use insulin to bring them back down. Whereas if I eat an orange or grapes or something like that, I get the surge and the sugar, you my blood sugar will come up and then it comes right back down to a more normal place. It doesn't stay elevated. So there's quite a difference in, you know, the whole natural sugars from fruits versus a candy bar or something like that.

Dr Orlena (17:13)
Yeah.

Josh Bostick (17:33)
But I get the same, I guess, taste craving now that I don't have the chocolate or Hershey's and things like that. I look forward to eating grapes and I get that same kind of satisfaction from eating those.

Dr Orlena (17:34)
Yeah.

Yeah, and on top of that, you're getting all kinds of good things with your fruit. You're getting fiber, which is really good for you. And you're getting all those amazing antioxidants, which are sort of going around mopping up any damages. And I always think, we talked about mindset, and the way I look at it is you can eat refined sugar, which is essentially, or flour.

because they're both basically the same, is essentially glucose, essentially calories. It may have a little bit of protein in it, but essentially that's what you're getting. Or you can get your carbohydrates from fruit and vegetables where you're getting the fiber, the antioxidants, and it's actively promoting health in your body. Which are you going to choose? If you like them both, are you going to choose the one that is potentially harming your body or the one that is definitely helping your body? And for me, it's a no brainer. I'm like, why wouldn't I eat the healthy stuff? Because it tastes good and amazing.

Josh Bostick (18:35)
Right, and I think some people it comes down to thinking of it as a carb is a carb and there's not much else to it. So I can have, you know, 15 grapes or this Reese's Cup, you know, to make it equal, whatever that would come out to be. But as you mentioned, there's so much more that the grapes and the fruit

positively impact your body versus a chocolate bar or you know cereal or something like that. So I think it's important for people to understand the difference of what's being put into their body and what the makeup of it is and what it's going to do for your body.

Dr Orlena (18:59)
Yeah.

Yeah, entirely. also another big thing I see is people think, I'm hungry. Therefore, I need to eat food. Well, there's lots of things that we can talk about this in that actually a lot of people have trained their body to and their mind to think, I'm hungry. I need to eat something. Actually, when you're hungry, your body is perfectly capable of going and getting some stored energy and using that stored energy.

But talking about fruits and vegetables, actually you can eat loads of fruits and vegetables because they fill you up and you never really need to feel hungry during the day. You're still getting all the energy your body needs and you're not getting these spikes that you're talking about. But for example, think cabbage is a really good example. If you think about a packet of, I call them biscuits, you probably call them cookies. But like it's really easy to eat a packet of biscuits because you just eat them and there's like, the packet's gone.

And I don't know, that might be like, depending on the size of the packet, let's say 400 to 500 calories. Now think of a cabbage. Now I love cabbage. I think cabbage is one of the best things that you can get. It's so versatile, it's so easy. I just, one simple change that everybody can make in their life is just add a little bit more cabbage. It doesn't have to be cabbage, it could be any vegetable, but buy a cabbage because it will last you all week. You get so many portions in a cabbage. So you can eat it raw, you can cook it. I love cabbage, but I have never in my

life sat and eaten an entire cabbage in one go because it's just impossible you can't do it so you can eat as much as you want you're never going to be able to eat more cabbage well I guess somebody is gonna try and prove me wrong but it's difficult to eat more cabbage now the other thing about fruits and vegetables as well is they don't have that super appealing

Do you know what I mean? You can eat until you feel full up and then you feel satisfied and then you don't think, my goodness, I just have to eat a bit more because it's so amazingly delicious. And those are the really dangerous foods that, side note, all these food industries spend billions of dollars testing to make sure that they produce that food that we want to eat, that bliss point that they talk about. And so you're feeling totally full up and you've got this food that has been scientifically proven to make you want to eat

more of it and hey guess what you want to eat more of it eat more than your body needs but when you're eating fruits and vegetables your body's just like no I'm full up I don't want any more thanks that was great I loved it but I don't want to eat more because I feel satisfied and I feel full up

Josh Bostick (21:48)
That's totally true. mean, I'll pull a carton of strawberries out of the refrigerator and, you know, just cut them up real time and eat them. And after five or six, I'm full. I'll close the carton and put it back, but back.

in the day, you know, if I had like a one of the many sleeves of Oreos or something like that, if I ate four or five of them and there was one or two left, I'm going to eat the one or two. I'm going to finish that whole thing. So I've never thought of it like that where, yeah, I kind of just eat till I'm like, all right, I'm satisfied. And then I put the fruits and vegetables or even nuts and things back. And it's not like a

Dr Orlena (22:12)
Yes.

Josh Bostick (22:24)
I've got this much out, I need to finish it. And I feel like that is the mindset that comes with some of the packaged foods.

Dr Orlena (22:31)
Yeah, well, it's partly mindset, but it's partly, that's why they market them. They've scientifically proven that we want to just have, you know, we have this word, I don't know if you have it in American English, Moorish, you know, that you'll just eat more and more and more. And part of it is chemicals, you know, they put things like monosodium glutamate into things, but they test these things. So if you buy these foods, you're gonna want to eat more and more and more, hence the word Moorish.

Josh Bostick (23:10)
my wife is in a very similar place to where you were talking earlier where she puts me and our son above herself day in and day out every single day. And I know that our friends are experiencing that as well. Can we dig a little bit more into some of the clients that you see and some of the ways that you think that someone can kind of redefine that and

Dr Orlena (23:40)
Yeah, and I think...

To be fair to your wife, it's totally natural after you have a child. When you first have a baby, somebody hands you this baby and as a mother, you are responsible for it 24 seven. Now, if you're lucky, you've got a partner who helps you and you may have people around you that have helped you, but you basically feel that it's your responsibility the whole time. Now what happens is the baby grows up and can go to nursery, but we kind of get stuck in this rut of, need to be there for my child. But there comes a time when your baby is

a little bit more able to go and do things. And that's the time you really need to take that opportunity to go, actually, now I need to take care of myself. Now, it might be that you're lucky when your baby is young, depending on your circumstances, that you may be able to, if you've got family close by, do other things. And at that time, again, it's that mental bit, that's really difficult bit. But I think the bottom line is this. I saw myself being a grumpy mum because I...

my energies were low. And children are challenging and I can explain why children are challenging, but basically let's put it down to mirror neurons and emotional wellness that none of us really learned very much about at school. Most children are very challenging and the way to deal with children essentially is to take care of yourself and your own emotional wellness, to have your batteries full. Because if your batteries aren't full, you are gonna end up in a place

with that child that you think, this is not where I want to be. I want to enjoy being a parent, not fight about being a parent. Now, having said that, even if you do that, you're still gonna have challenging kids, but, well, you may have challenging kids. Your children are still gonna have challenges. There's gonna be challenges along the way. You're much better off with your batteries full, looking after yourself.

than having them drained and going, do you know what? This is not the way I want to deal with things. So I will say to people, if you can't do it for yourself, do it for the people around you because they would much rather have happy energized you than grumpy tired you. And that's basically the difference.

Josh Bostick (25:52)
That's really eye-opening in a sense because it's, guess there's gonna be a baseline that your child's gonna be your child. There's not a whole lot that you can do as they're learning and they're going through obstacles and they have those challenges, but you can either go at it rested and in a good mental head space, or you can be totally drained, running on E, and when they're having a fit or something, instead of having energy to say, all right, let's go outside, let's do something

else, let's do some sort of a reset, you're just gonna be at your wits end and say it is what it is and either turn the TV on or go put them in their room for a little bit or something like that. that makes a lot of sense where you can't necessarily change what they're going through in their experiences and what they're feeling, but you can change how you react to some of the hardships that are without a doubt gonna happen.

Dr Orlena (26:35)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. There's gonna be challenges both ways. The other thing is that's really important to put into this equation is that we want to teach our kids, we want to teach our kids healthy eating and healthy living, but we also want to teach our kids emotional wellness, which is really about not getting hooked into the negative emotions. Like, yes, we feel negative emotions. All emotions are telling us something, but there are some emotions that we...

don't have to hold on to. So for example, you're watching a movie that's scary, your body feels physical fear, but then your brain can go, hey, do you know what? This is just a movie. Like you're not in any danger and you can then let go of that fear if you choose to. You can choose to carry on being scared if you want to enjoy the movie in that way, but that's the kind of self-awareness that you need that you can see your emotions. Take.

what the message is that you're getting from your emotions and learn how to navigate them as opposed to, you're not controlling them entirely, but you're learning how to respond in.

like an emotionally aware way. Now, the vast majority of us were not taught this at school. And now I do see schools, well in Europe, they are being more emotionally aware, but how do you learn this as a child? Basically, you learn it by being demonstrated it. So if you wanna teach your kids healthy eating, what you need to do is start eating healthy yourself. If you want your kids to grow up being reasonably, you know, movement and doing a bit of exercise, what you need to do is do some exercise yourself. And equally, if you want your children to grow up

emotional wellness, you need to demonstrate it. And as a side note, actually, there have been studies that show for children that as an indicator of how well you're going to do later on in life, emotional intelligence is more important than IQ.

Well, it makes sense, doesn't it? Because you can be super smart, but if you're super smart and every time your boss tells you to do something, you throw a fit, you're gonna get sacked. Whereas actually, you don't have to be super smart to, you don't have to be super smart, like in maths terms, to manage people. And actually the people who manage people can communicate with people, can sell things. Those are the people who are gonna do well in life basically. So in my opinion, it makes sense.

Josh Bostick (29:02)
Totally, you know people that you work with or manage. mean whatever the case may be Everybody's different, you know, and you have to have the emotional intelligence to say Joe just he wants it straight to the point He wants to know exactly what you want from him doesn't want to do small talk But you know Jeremy may want to talk about his day and his family and then get to business and if you don't have the wherewithal to know that you're not gonna be able to be successful down the road I completely agree with that and

Dr Orlena (29:24)
Yeah.

Yeah, and I think the bottom line is there's always going to be conflict in your life. And if you can't manage that conflict, then how far are you going to get? And the answer is, well, unless you're the person with all the money, you know, leading the business, not very far.

Josh Bostick (30:24)
Just, and I don't know if he actually had the knowledge to know that, I made this, but just being a part of the process, for whatever reason, he definitely is way more open to eating foods. And it's kind of just the terrible two toddler fun phase, but you know, we can put an apple with some peanut butter on our plate and eat that. just the fact that it's not his, he's gonna want it. So just by us having healthier snacks,

Dr Orlena (30:32)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, it's fabulous. And I think just getting them on healthy eating right at the beginning is so much easier than doing not so healthy eating and then trying to change them later on in life. That's just far more difficult, basically.

Josh Bostick (31:28)
Yeah, and that's what we were hoping to instill earlier on.

having to do a 180 down the road. we still definitely do things like you mentioned you got donuts today. We'll do that once a month. And he loves those. mean, you can just tell that it's a special Sunday morning when we do that. And it's almost having something like that is really great. It's a lot of fun to have that once a month. And it is special. It's not something that you get every other day or something like that.

Dr Orlena (31:59)
Yeah, and I think understanding as well that...

All humans have a glucose drive. Like one of the driving forces that we have in our body is a glucose drive. And kids have it on steroids, you know, like if you talk to kids and even my kids eat healthily, but if I ask them what they want, they will say cake and chocolate. Like they always want things like that. They don't get them very often. They get enough of them such that I don't feel that they are deprived of all of these things, but still they could ask for ice cream every single day and want ice cream. But here's the bottom line is that humans are glucose seeking missiles.

We're constantly looking for fuel. Glucose is basically our fuel. But we live in this society where it's so easy to get glucose. You just go to your cupboard and you open whatever packet you want. Whereas back in the day, in order to go and get glucose, you had to go and pick some blackberries and get your glucose. So it's a really different situation now. And it's almost like we have to train ourselves to be aware of this and go, I've got enough fuel. I don't need to keep storing more.

don't live in a time where food is scarce, I live in a time where food is hugely abundant and I have to be aware of that human drive basically.

Josh Bostick (33:13)
and it's almost I'm trying to think of how to word it correctly it's almost an unfair advantage it's like the the cards are stacked against you in some senses where you think I'm hungry there's a vending machine right there or you know kind of like a snack well there's a gas station right there full of just junk food and it's it's so readily available that it just it's not even like a thought to what you're mentioning where before you wanted something sweet like that you'd have to go and and work

Dr Orlena (33:27)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly, and this is one of the reasons that I was talking about, you know, people get this idea that when they're hungry, they need to eat something. And really, what happens to people, but obviously people who are overweight, they eat something, they store that.

energy as fat or you can store it in different ways but ultimately you're storing it as fat and then you eat some more and then you're doing storing and then you eat some more and you're doing storing. Whereas really what you want to be doing on a daily basis is eating, you fill up your stores so you fill up the stores in your muscle and your liver which is not fat.

And then you use that energy and then you fill it up again by eating. So it's like filling and emptying. It's a bit like a battery. You know, we talk about mobile phone batteries and we say, we really want to empty our battery before we charge it. We don't want to keep our phone constantly charged at 95 % because the battery life dies. And we're a bit like that as well. We want to deplete our energy storage so that it's low and then we fill it up again as opposed to it basically being full the whole time. And then...

Then when you're putting more energy in, you're then storing it as fat rather than storing it as glycogen, which is what we want to be doing.

Josh Bostick (34:59)
One the doctors that I first met with when I was diagnosed with type 1, he gave me an example of a suitcase. And so you've got a suitcase. It has so much room that you can fit things inside it, right? And so you fill it up and then you realize, actually I want a couple more shirts. You can grab those shirts, you can put them on top, and you can really push down and try to get the zipper in, right? And then you think, I forgot these pairs of shoes. You can get those shoes and then you can stand on top of the suitcase and try to get the zippers closed.

and you know, I forgot my toothbrush and all my toiletries. Eventually you're gonna run out of room, but for a certain point of time, you can keep packing things in there, but that doesn't mean it's the right way to do it. You need to get rid of some of the other baggage that's in there. And he was trying to relate that to food, and that's kind of where my mind has been, you know, I sure, I can keep eating and keep packing things in there, but do I need to? I mean, do I need 50 shirts for

Dr Orlena (35:41)
Yeah.

Josh Bostick (35:59)
three day trip? No, I can be realistic about it and only pack or eat what I need to without the extra struggle of trying to fit more in and the damage that comes with that.

Dr Orlena (36:14)
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. you know, even people who are thin have about three months of stored energy on them. Now, I'm not suggesting that you don't eat for three months, but this mindset that we have of, my goodness, I'm hungry, I have to eat because if I don't eat, I'm gonna collapse in a heap. It's not true. And it's one of the things that I have really...

that worked on myself. So I now exercise in the morning and I love to exercise before I eat. So I exercise before I eat, but I swim.

and I swim in the sea and I used to years ago make sure I had a banana or something like that. And then I thought, I wonder what happens if I don't eat that banana. And part of my body, part of my brain was like, but you're gonna swim out and then you're gonna like totally have no energy and then it's gonna be really difficult to swim back. And that's not what happens at all. I swim and I swim back. And I do know that like basically you have about an hour's worth of energy stored in your body, like active energy of doing exercise. I do know that if I go on a swim,

for two hours without eating. In the second hour, I can see myself going slower, but I can still swim. It's not like I sink or anything like that. So it's interesting to know what happens to your body when you put them in this situation because you want that confidence to say, do you know what? If I go for a two hour swim and I haven't eaten anything, I know I'm gonna be okay. And I'm not recommending that you do that, but it's just understanding how your own body works, not just in theory, but seeing it.

Josh Bostick (37:43)
Again relating back to the type ones or the type one diagnosis. I work out in the morning as well usually in a fasted state So we'll have you know dinner at 5 30 6 p.m. The night before We'll not eat anything unless I need to correct for my blood sugars and then I usually wake up at 4 30 and I'm at the gym by 5 and I can do Whatever workout. I mean it could be a rowing workout. It could be running. You could just be weights It could be some sort of a class

and my blood sugar is gonna be just totally stable the whole time. Depending on the class if I'm doing like a hardcore HIIT workout or some hard intensity rowing, it may come up just a little bit. But for the most part, I can do any sort of workout, no problem. But if I go, if I miss the gym in the morning,

and I go in the afternoon and I've had breakfast and lunch and you know had to have some insulin and I go in the afternoon I have to have some sort of a snack beforehand or my blood sugar is just gonna drop and it's just it's interesting how you think it'd be the other way.

Dr Orlena (38:51)
Well, because for you, but for you, because your insulin isn't there, actually all of that morning bit is the same as anybody because the insulin doesn't come into that picture. So it would be the same as me or anybody who does have insulin that basically your body is providing you glucose from your stored energy and maintaining your glucose levels. But when you add the insulin in, it's getting complicated then.

Josh Bostick (39:12)
It definitely is yeah, and it's it's that's definitely outside the bounds of a normal person You know that isn't relying on external insulin But I was when when I started working out in the morning I was like this is so weird like my blood sugars are so good usually I would have to have you know like a Gatorade or something sugary with me for halfway through my workout Because I was just taking my numbers were going so low so

Dr Orlena (39:19)
Yeah.

Josh Bostick (39:35)
was a real eye opener for me where it's like, I don't have to eat something every time I go to do something active. Like I can just go out and do it for those two hours. Like you mentioned it is. Yeah, it's, I mean, I, and I've actually incorporated that into other aspects. So like, if we are going to the zoo or something like that, I won't eat breakfast or lunch just because I know that my, numbers are going to stay flat. have enough energy.

Dr Orlena (39:47)
Yeah, yeah, and it's very empowering, isn't it?

Josh Bostick (40:04)
I'm not gonna just collapse and wither away at the zoo because I didn't have breakfast. And so yeah, I'll use that strategy in some other areas of like being active as well. If I know I'm gonna have a really active day, I'll, you know, not eat carbs for the most part and just stay towards like a protein with nuts and meats and things like that. Do you...

Dr Orlena (40:26)
Perfect.

Josh Bostick (40:27)
Do you recommend or practice any kind of fasting? Or do you stick to more than three meals?

Dr Orlena (40:33)
So I do do three meals, but what I recommend is that people do at least 12 to 14 hours. So for my clients and myself, I make sure I have 12 to 14 hours. when you finish, it's quite easy to do. If you don't eat anything after dinner and then you have breakfast, so I tend to have breakfast about 9.30 in the morning.

then it's kind of easy to do that. I do have some clients who want to do more fasting. So I have one client who does a 24 hour fast once a week, which is again for her relatively easy. she will...

finish eating dinner on Sunday and then skip breakfast and lunch and have her dinner. And that's actually a 24 hour fast. I have other people who might skip breakfast and have lunch. And I think it's really about finding what works for you and what you enjoy doing. Obviously as well, if you have children, it does make things more complicated. So the way I eat is...

Josh Bostick (41:20)
you

Dr Orlena (41:30)
hugely dictated by my children and their school. So here in Spain, they do this slightly ridiculous thing where they don't come home till three o'clock. So they don't eat lunch. So basically we're starting a new routine and we eat lunch at three, like dinner at three o'clock now. But one thing I personally think is if you can choose whether you want to have your food more in the morning or more in the evening, I personally think more in the morning is better. But again, it's a personal...

choice and it's about playing around with things and finding what works for you and what works for one person isn't necessarily going to work for another person.

Yeah, definitely. I think, yeah, exactly, exactly. I think everybody should do that. Like you should basically stop eating after dinner. Now here in Spain, they eat dinner ridiculously late, but I would recommend you want to have dinner like six or seven and then stop eating after that and then have a gap overnight and whatever time you have breakfast because that's when your body is fixing itself. It's when your gut is cleaning itself. So that's the bare minimum that you have. And on top of that, if you want to try out fasting,

And it might be that you do want to try out fasting, but you have kids and it just feels a little bit complicated. So you might want to wait until it feels like a better fit. So for me, I would like to play around a little bit more with fasting, but I think I'm gonna wait until my kids have left home. They're have left home in six years. So I'll play around with it bit then. I do know people who have done it when they're still...

Josh Bostick (42:52)
you

Dr Orlena (43:11)
you know, looking after their kids, so they're providing food for their kids and then fasting. But it works for them. Again, it's about what works for you, essentially.

Josh Bostick (43:20)
Definitely, yeah, and I have talked to a few people that, you they started fasting and they would do some of longer fasts, whether it was a day or so, and they'd have younger kids and they'd be like, why aren't you eating? And, you know, so there's that side of it where...

Dr Orlena (43:33)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it is about the messages that you're giving your kids and are they old enough to understand those messages? We do have to be like most children are well actually what happens to a lot of people is they're overnourished in terms of calories but a lot of people are undernourished in terms of nutrition because they aren't getting the micronutrients, the vitamins and the minerals and the things that they need because they're, so we've got this sort of like paradox that people have that actually they're overweight but undernourished but.

You do have to be careful with children as they go through puberty. You want to make sure that they aren't going, my mom's fasting, I'm gonna fast. You have to make sure that they're getting their nutrients then because otherwise they're not gonna grow.

It is a bit of a tricky message. And obviously if you're providing food for your kids, it's a difficult, I think one of the things you need to be aware of when you're fasting is that your emotions are heightened a little bit. So if you think about it, when you eat a big meal, you know, after Christmas dinner, you're sort of like, I'm just going to sit and do nothing. And your emotions are just like, I'm basically fast asleep here.

Well, it's kind of the reverse when you're fasting that your emotions get a little bit higher. So depending on the emotional state of your kids, if your kids are very emotional and have big emotions, you're gonna then reflect that back at them if you're in a fasted, slightly emotional state and it can make life a little bit tricky. So there's all of these things to kind of think about.

and think, well, what works for me? What do I want to do? How can I present this in a balanced way?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Josh Bostick (46:07)
85 % of your foods very nutritious and that kind of stuff and have a sweet here or there to stay on the path you're on so that you don't get burnt out two weeks into it and you know I think that a lot of people are just they want to take that first step they take it and then whatever tactic they're trying doesn't work and they're just like it's it's not for me I can't do it this is too hard I'm gonna go back to the way it was

Dr Orlena (46:34)
Yeah, exactly. think.

There is, it's, again, it comes down to balance. You want the balance of, this works for me, this doesn't work for me. We're looking for things that work for you. But there is always a little rickety bridge to go over. In England, we have these things called humpback bridges. I don't know if you have them in the States, but they're, like, you go over them and they go, pshh! And there is this little, like, bridge that you go over when you start doing something. So for example, when you start exercising, people go, I don't like exercising because I feel sore. And it's like, yeah, that's because you're using your muscles and you haven't used them.

for a long period of time. So now you're going to feel sore for a little bit, but actually if you keep going, you're not going to feel sore. I don't ever feel sore when I'm swimming because I never stop swimming. If I do stop for a period of time, I know that I have to build up my fitness and I've got that period where I'm going to feel a bit like, my goodness, I haven't. So like over COVID, for example, when I went back to swimming after that, I was like, I'm really unfit and I could feel it on my muscles.

And then you just get to a stage where you just do it, you maintain it, and your muscles are just used to it. And it's the same with any change that you make. There is a transition period. Human brains do not like transitions. Human brains do not like changes. They like things to stay the same. But once you've got over that, then you've got a new normal, and then it becomes normal again. I remember my sister said to me,

suggested she might go swimming and she said but I'm not really the kind of person who hangs out in swimming pools and I'm like well how do you become one of these people who hangs out in swimming pools and the answer is you go to the swimming pool and then you go again and then you go again

Thank you.

So I think there's two types of exercise. You've got your cardiovascular exercise and then you've got your resistance, muscle building exercise. All movement counts. It doesn't matter. You can easily get your movement in. If you've got young kids, I had a double buggy and I would push the double buggy around town. I was getting a lot of steps in. And then obviously if you're throwing your kids around, you're using them as weights, that's perfectly fine. That counts as doing some resistance training. That's absolutely fine.

don't have to go to the gym, don't have to do running, you don't have to do like a conventional exercise.

I think look at all the movement that you do and you can get watches that measure them. Different watches measure them in different ways. The Apple Watch measures movement rings, which is really good because it will measure everything and give you an everything goal. Whereas some of the other watches, so for example, my swim watch says, you've been swimming and you've been cycling, but you know what? You've only done 5,000 steps. And I'm like, my goodness, I think I've done enough movement for the day.

Josh Bostick (50:09)
Right.

Dr Orlena (50:11)
But because it's not measuring all of those things, what it's focusing in on is the steps. So if you can measure all of it, that's great.

But yeah, you want to be getting in some cardiovascular because that's where you get fitness. And once you start doing that, that's really where you get energy from. And you you feel energized if you're doing that and it has other benefits as well. Like for example, if you aren't type one diabetic, helps your insulin, it helps your response to sugar basically. So you don't have to release so much insulin. Women also, well men as well, but obviously I focus on women.

After the age of 40, our muscle begins to, like we begin to lose it. So we do need to maintain it by being conscious of that. And there are different ways of doing it. Obviously going to the gym is one, but something like Pilates or Tai Chi or yoga, you can also maintain your muscles as well. And some people want to grow their muscles. You don't have to, but you do want to maintain them.

It's about having a routine that works for you basically. And I would say you want to look at it as a long-term thing. Movement is super, super important. Like movement basically is life, is, know, how do we define what's living? Well, essentially one of the things is about movement and having muscle later on into life is really one of the key factors that is gonna determine how healthy or not healthy you are. And, you know, talking about weight loss.

you're actually better off being active and having a reasonable bout of muscle and being a little bit overweight than you are being super slim and not having any muscle. So movement, exercise, it's all.

really, really valuable stuff. If you're not doing it now, don't panic. You've got time to start building it in. Like I have a client and she had young kids. She came to me because she wanted to lose weight. And so for the first year we focused on emotional eating and nutrition, but she just had no capacity to add in extra movement. Now, a year later on, we're working on, okay, bringing in the movement. But you know, it can be really difficult if you're juggling a job and young kids and how do you add in that extra movement? Particularly depends

depending on where you live. If you live in Canada where it gets dark in the winter and you can't go out because the days are really short and you're far away from a gym, there are circumstances where people find it really, really difficult essentially.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Yeah, no, it's like that in Spain. So in Spain, I swim in the sea and then basically hide for the rest of the day. And then in the evening, I might go back to the sea again. But you know, I can't go, I can't do any gardening, for example, like, you know, I can't weed my garden because I'm like, there's no time of the day where you go out in the middle of the summer in the evening and you're like, it's ridiculously hot. I can't do weeding now. But yeah, so extreme temperatures, they can complicate things, either extreme heat or extreme

cold can make it difficult for people.

think really, wrapping it all up, we've talked about the four pillars. I think really, and we haven't had a chance to really talk about habits, but it's all about building habits in these four pillars so that you're doing it without thinking about it. And when it's a habit, it's just something that you do naturally. It's not like you think, my goodness, I have to eat healthily. I don't think, my goodness, I have to eat healthily. I just eat food. I don't think, my goodness, I have to go swimming. I'm kind of normally thinking, when's my next swim? When can I go swimming again?

Or you yeah exactly and you know the other day there was a big storm and an electrical storm and my friend was texting me going are we going or I think I might go for a walk or the sea might not be great and in the end my brain is just like I can't think about this and I just find myself doing what I normally do which is cycling to the beach to go swimming

That's the default, that's the power of habits is you just go, my goodness, I can't think about it. What do I normally do? This is what I normally do. That's where like habits are just things that you do automatically. And when you're intentional with your habits, you pick habits that you enjoy and that support your health and wellness goals basically. And that's the end of the story. Like once you've got there, it all just happens and you're doing it all without thinking about it and enjoying it.

Well, that's interesting. Basically, they say 66 days, but it depends on the habit because I presume that's a habit that you're doing on a daily basis because habits are actually really interesting in that they may be something we do every day, but something like voting is a habit as well. Am I somebody who votes? And you can lose the habit of voting if you move and then you don't register yourself. But also habits are how we think about things. We have habits in our emotions as well and how we feel about things. So...

And the bottom line is, the way to retrain yourself is just to do a different thing over and over and over again, but those old habits do come back. And I always say, I think one big mistake that people make about habits is they mistake what I call oak tree habits for sort acorn habits, for oak tree habits. So you start doing something new and you think, okay, I'm doing this new thing. And then you get sidetracked and then you go back to your old ways and you think I had that habit, but

didn't work for me. No, you didn't have the habit. The habit is the thing you do when life is busy. When life is busy, life thing, those are your habits, not the things you like your habits are things you don't think about. So if you're still thinking about it, it's not a habit.

Josh Bostick (56:17)
Okay, so maybe it's not so much a time frame per se because like you mentioned it could you know a habit could be going to Mountain bike once a month that could be a habit

Dr Orlena (56:28)
Yeah.

Josh Bostick (56:28)
but you're not doing it every day so it may take longer to build that habit because once every month you have a free sunday that you can dedicate to mountain biking or something okay i like that

Dr Orlena (56:33)
Yeah.

Yeah, I used to have a great habit which was going and having a massage every month and I've totally lost this habit. Why have I lost it? Because, well the lady moved and I haven't found another person who I like going to and on top of that, like now I feel like I'm looking after myself. Back then, I didn't feel like I was looking after myself. So it was my way of helping myself look after myself. But I've totally lost this habit. I think I need to regain this habit of having a massage every month. But it's a good example of something that we don't do all the time. I used to be in a habit of every month booking

myself a massage and I have got out of that habit.

Josh Bostick (57:10)
Okay, I like that. I'm glad I'm thank you for bringing back I forgot we didn't touch on the habits. So thank you for looping us back in and including that So well, I've got your information

Dr Orlena (57:16)
Thank you for this fascinating time. My pleasure.

of this is.

Perfect.

I do, thank you for mentioning. I have a podcast called Fit and Fabulous at 40 and Beyond. It's a weekly inspiration, it's a weekly me just going, you can do it, you can do it, you really can do it, you can still do it, let's keep doing it.

No, it's on all of them.

Josh Bostick (57:52)
Okay, perfect. Well, I will link that into the show notes as well. So if anybody has enjoyed your conversation and your expertise, they can continue listening to you. Perfect. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it and I learned a lot.

Dr Orlena (58:03)
Thank you so much.