Dr Rupy: My guest today is health coach and former paediatrician Dr Olena Carrick, who works with many clients to help them lead healthier lives and teach their kids healthy living habits. This is going to be an episode that will help busy parents with childhood nutrition and particularly those who have picky eaters. We talk about what picky eating is and why it's so common, how demonstration, routines, systems and repetition can help. We also talk about our changing taste buds throughout childhood and adulthood, and also the keys behind habit change that's more for the adult listener. So, creating a vision of what the healthiest version of you looks like and then putting in processes to ensure that you stick to those as well. You can check out all of Olena's books and content at drolena.com. And if you're in the market for habit change, you should really check out my weekly newsletter, Eat, Listen, Read. You can subscribe on the website at thedoctorskitchen.com. Every week I will share with you a recipe and something to inspire you to lead a healthier life. It might be something to listen to, something to watch, something to read, something that will definitely brighten up your week. I really hope you enjoy today's episode. Without further ado, this is my conversation with Dr Olena. All right. What should I call you by the way? Because you refer to yourself in your book as Lena. I think you said your dad called you Loopy Lena.
Dr Olena Carrick: Oh yeah, my dad calls me Loopy. But my brand name is Dr Olena, so Dr Olena, you don't have to use the doctor all the time. I'm sure you don't get people calling you Dr Rupy.
Dr Rupy: No, I don't.
Dr Olena Carrick: But my website is Dr Olena, so that's the introduction and then.
Dr Rupy: It's funny though, isn't it? Like even on when I do TV and radio stuff, they always insist that they call you doctor, you know, Dr Olena or Dr Rupy or whatever. But, and people think that you should do that in real life as well. I'm like, no, no, you just call me Rupy, that's fine.
Dr Olena Carrick: When I was working in paediatrics, we did used to introduce ourselves as this is Dr Lisa and this is Dr Olena, but I think that was for the kids really.
Dr Rupy: Actually, it's weird because within A&E, the fashion changed over the last couple of years, after I qualified as a GP. So they no longer wanted you to formalise you as a doctor in the hospital and instead come up with a friendlier approach. So my standard intro whenever I see patients in either A&E or GP clinic is, my name's Rupy, I'm one of the doctors working here. And so that that, that little shift in the way you address yourself. But certain people, I think they like the authority of having a doctor in front of them so they can ask them all those questions. But I guess it really just depends. I mean, how would you introduce yourself now?
Dr Olena Carrick: Now, I would say, I would introduce myself if it was a professional thing as Dr Olena, but that's more because my website is Dr Olena and my brand name is Dr Olena. And then, it's funny though, some of my clients like to call me Dr Olena. And I'm like, just call me Olena. But I think they like that. They like that, you're a doctor kind of thing.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Funny. Anyway, let's talk a little bit about you and your history because I think that's really interesting. You sort of describe yourself as someone who wants to chop and change a lot and have new experiences. So tell us about how you even got into medicine in the first place.
Dr Olena Carrick: Oh, that's a long, long story. So yeah, I guess when I was growing up, I didn't know at all what I wanted to do. I wanted to travel, typical itchy feet. Like you, I ended up going to Australia. I love travelling. It just, you know, fills you with that excitement. And the first thing I did when I was 18, this was a long, long, long time ago, is I went to South Africa and I worked in a school there. Really interesting time. It was just before Nelson Mandela was voted in, so you can tell how long ago it was. And I remember just helping with the kids were having their vaccinations actually, and there was a doctor vaccinating them. And I just had this kind of moment of, oh my goodness, you've never really properly considered medicine. Like that's it. I want to be a doctor. And there's been times in my life where it's just been like decision made in two seconds. And that was one of them. It did mean I have to go, had to go and, you know, get into medical school, which by that time I'd left school, so it wasn't as easy as, oh, your teachers are helping you. To cut a long story short, I took three years out and then went to medical school. But three exciting years. At that time I was really young and, you know, desperate to get to university and enjoy that university life. But yeah, that's how it happened.
Dr Rupy: Okay, wow. So you, you had to redo A levels, I'm assuming, and do the correct ones so that you could apply for medical in the first place. And then you went to, where'd you go to medical school?
Dr Olena Carrick: Bristol, Bristol. So I had, I love Bristol. It was brilliant at that time. I had such a great time there. But it and it was really great training and I loved, you know, being involved in patients. I remember in our first year, like itching to get into the hospital. But I had maths and physics and I needed chemistry. So I couldn't do pre-med because I had maths and physics. So I had to go back and do chemistry. And I remember this one time doing work experience in Exeter hospital, at Wonford hospital, and this doctor was a paediatrician actually. And he was talking to us and he said, oh, you know, he asked me a question and I sort of said, well, I didn't get in this year, so I'm not going to, I'm not going to be a doctor. And later on, he found me in the foyer just waiting to go home and he basically said, you know, if it's something you really want in your life, you will make it happen. As in, go back, reapply, make that thing happen. And that's what I did essentially.
Dr Rupy: Amazing. That's so cool. And then so from there you did all your pre-med stuff and then I'm assuming you went straight into paediatric training?
Dr Olena Carrick: Well, at that time, we had to do a year of what they called us house plants. I don't know if you were called the house plant.
Dr Rupy: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. I remember the house officer years.
Dr Olena Carrick: So I did that in Cheltenham and then I went to Australia because I still love travelling. And I worked in Brisbane for a bit and was working in A&E there and there was a kids' hospital next door and I ended up working there and that was the beginning of my paediatric career. So after I finished in Brisbane, I came home and got onto, they didn't have the training schemes that they have now. It wasn't like, you know, you start at the bottom and you work your way through. It was go and get an SHO job here and another job here. But essentially that was the beginning of my paediatric career.
Dr Rupy: Amazing. And so then what happened? Because you're not doing paediatrics anymore. You've moved into a whole different approach to healthcare, I guess, which obviously is built on the foundations of everything that you've done previously.
Dr Olena Carrick: Yeah. Well, long story short, we moved to Spain and, you know, there's a backstory to that, another pandemic, swine flu at that time. Complicated history there. But a long story was, you know, I still, I wanted to live abroad for lifestyle reasons. And I say I moved to Spain with my eyes wide shut. I just thought I would move across, start doing paediatrics here. It just, it wasn't as simple as that. It took me an entire year to get my degree recognised here. And this was years ago when the UK was part of the European Union. And eventually I did work here, but they have a very different structure here and I would essentially have had to go back and do all of my training again in Spanish, including my finals. And I was, and by this time I've got four young kids. I'm like, oh, this just.
Dr Rupy: Do you have four young kids throughout this, this period of time where you're training and you're trying to.
Dr Olena Carrick: No, no, no. When I was training, I had two and then when we moved to Spain, so I moved when my oldest was just about to turn three and my youngest was one. And then we got here, soon after that I fell pregnant with twins. My husband blames me for that, blames me, thanks. I'm sure he thinks they're a bundle of joy now. Life is never dull, put it that way. So, yeah, no, the four kids were in Spain and, you know, thinking, do I want to go and redo my training? Because I never meant to give up clinical work. I love clinical work, but you know what it's like. It's stressful, nights, weekends, it comes with a lot of sacrifices for your family. So I did try working in here in Spain, but essentially I was doing like GP work, which wasn't what I had been trained to do. It wasn't what I was used to doing in the UK. And yeah, that also came to a bit of an end. But at the time I had been building up my online business. So I started off, you know, thinking about picky eating for kids. So, hey, guess what? Two of my kids were picky eating. And one of the things, you know, when I was a paediatric doctor, we had so many people would come into clinic and say, oh, my child's got a tummy ache. And so many of them had constipation. And I always remember saying, hey, the good news is, this is so easy to treat. You don't need any medicines. You just need to eat a healthy diet. Get those vegetables in your kids, it's going to be fabulous. And then fast forward to being a parent and realising, oh my goodness, you know, I'm presenting my kids with vegetables, with healthy foods. And you know what? One day, my three-year-old crying on the toilet, tears rolling down his face because he is in agony because disaster, guess what? He's, he's constipated because essentially what kids do, or what my kids did, was pick out the, you know, I would say, for example, give them vegetable pasta, eat all that pasta, leave all those delicious vegetables. And I realised at that point, it's not as easy as just presenting them with healthy foods. So that was the beginning of me looking at nutrition and all the things that we hadn't been taught at medical school. You know, I know that you know all of these things, but so, so much interesting information coming out now about, you know, vegetables and biomes and plant-based life. But for me at that time, it was, how do you, how do we help our picky eaters and how do we teach children healthy eating in a way that when they grow up, what they're doing is just eating normally. They think they're eating normally because that's just what they do.
Dr Rupy: It's almost that culture of building a healthy relationship with food definitely starts at such a young age. And that's why our counterparts in the, in the Mediterranean really have nailed it because they have this normal way of eating that is diverse and colourful and lots of plants, etc. So, and I think that explains some of the differences that we see in health outcomes. And also, I think we've all been guilty of having that sort of near patronising conversations with parents where we're like, yeah, just, you don't need Movicol, you don't need to have any of these sort of liquid laxatives. All you need to do is increase their water content, increase their fibre content, have lots of diversity and vegetables, and they'll be fine. And you really kind of brush over the fact that implementation of that advice is super, super hard. And that's where the crux of the matter is. And I guess, you know, you've had personal experience with this. So why don't we talk about the issues around picky eaters? Why, why are kids picky eating? Because this is a very common phenomena. And, and, and what kind of practical solutions you've come up for for your patients?
Dr Olena Carrick: Well, it's a, yeah, it's a really interesting topic of conversation. Like, what is picky eating and why? And I, I like to look at it as a spectrum. So when you talk to parents, some people will say, you know, my kids don't eat mushrooms, they're a picky eater. And I'm like, that's kind of normal to be perfectly honest. So there is, yeah, I never used to like mushrooms myself and I changed my opinion in my 20s. Yeah, exactly. Me too. So there are some poor vegetables. I don't know what it is. Some vegetables are just like, we don't like them. And then there are children, you know, there's different spectrums of children. So, you know, children who have are on the autistic spectrum, they have problems with texture and certain different things, you know, sensory issues that affect them. But there are also children who have, what I kind of think of like quite anxious children. And I this fits the profile of a couple of my kids, is that they're anxious and they expect things to happen in a certain way. It's almost like they want to control what's going on and food is a way of being able to control that. So we have to essentially work with our kids and in short, essentially, the way you get round picky eating is you give them choice out of all of those healthy foods. Now, if you take a step back, really what that means is the best way to teach your children healthy eating is to demonstrate healthy eating yourself. And this is one of the reasons why I moved into moving away from focusing on kids to focusing on mothers and parents because so many people would be in that situation going, oh, I want my kids to eat healthily. And when we really looked at their diet, their diet was very high in what I call white refined carbohydrates, packaged foods and things like that. And so that's a really difficult place to teach your kids. So the good news is, if you eat healthily, essentially, your children are going to eat healthily. There are a few caveats with that. So one big piece of the puzzle, I think is don't create an emotional link to food with your children. And that means don't punish them, you know, don't, you know, you're being disobedient, you can't have pudding or you've been really great, let's go and have ice cream. And I'm not saying you can't eat ice cream, but don't attach it to a reward. And I think that's a really interesting part of the puzzle. And a lot of the people I work with now who want to lose weight or just get more healthy, a big part of the puzzle for them is emotional eating. You know, and if you think about it, if you're eating, if you're, if you've got too much weight, you've eaten more than your body needs. Why have you eaten more than your body needs? And that essentially is emotional eating, which essentially is a habit that you just need to change. But what you want to be really aware of is not to show that to your children, not to teach that to your children essentially. So fixing your emotional eating will help you not pass it on to your children that, you know, everybody wants to have a good relationship with food. We eat food to nourish our bodies. And we can enjoy our food, but essentially the reason is to nourish our bodies rather than because we're stressed or feeling unworthy or bored, whatever the trigger is.
Dr Rupy: I wonder because you work with a lot of adults for a variety of different reasons as well. And one of them you just mentioned there was weight. I wonder how far down the rabbit hole you go of discussing their relationship with food when they were growing up and if they had those reward slash for one of a better word punishments for for eating when when they were growing up. Is that something that comes up quite often? And is this a pattern that we can intentionally.
Dr Olena Carrick: That's interesting. And to be honest, I haven't asked, but one thing I do notice, which kind of breaks my heart a little bit, is when I talk to people who are very much in this diet culture of, I'm going to do a diet. A lot of them did things like go to Weight Watchers when they were eight years old. You know, it was part of their culture, like their mother was doing it. And so they were taught this sort of relationship with food of, oh my goodness, you know, you've got a party coming up or it's the summer holidays, you want to look good in your swimming suit, let's, let's go on a diet for a couple of months, as opposed to, hey, this is food, we enjoy food and we've got limits with food, but essentially, you know, I genuinely don't think people need to be hungry to lose weight. But that kind of, oh my goodness, I have to really be disciplined, I have to really punish myself in order to get to the weight that I want to. And that has been passed on and learned from a very early age.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I always like to look at the evolutionary lens of why kids, for example, are picky eaters. There's got to be a reason as to why they are picky eaters because it's such a common phenomena. Is there anything that you've come across perhaps from research or population studies or maybe just, you know, looking at how communities interact with kids that can explain the picky eating phenomena?
Dr Olena Carrick: Well, there are theories and I think there's two sort of facets to this, but there is a theory that having a certain amount of, you know, fear of certain foods was a survival instinct. You know, don't go and pick all the berries because some of them are going to be poisonous. So that was a survival instinct. But I think the sort of flip side is, now we live in a society where food is so readily available. You know, in the past, a treat would be go and get a handful of blackberries, go and pick them yourself or, you know, if you want a handful of nuts, you have to climb up the nut tree, you have to take the shell off and now you're rewarded with some nuts. But what happens now? We go to the supermarket, we literally open a packet and we've got these foods that are so, so calorie dense and we're so used to eating them. And the reality is that both parents and children know that if they don't like what's on their plate, it's so easy to get something else. Like even when I was growing up, I think my parents didn't feel that there was that option. It was like, here's, here's your food, take it or leave it. If you're hungry, you're going to eat it unless it's something super, super disgusting. You're essentially going to eat it because you know there's no option. And I have to be honest, my mom cooked some things that I didn't really like, but I ate them. Curried parsnip soup. Oh, sorry, mom, if you're listening, I'm sorry. I didn't like your curried parsnip soup. And when she cooked it, I'd be a bit like, but I ate it because I was hungry and there was, there's no option. But the problem parents face now is that essentially that's a limit that was put in and my mother put that limit in really without knowing about it. She didn't do it from a, hey, I'm thinking about limits. It's just she didn't have an option. And so now we have to artificially enforce that limit. You don't have to do it in a mean and horrible way and you definitely have to make sure there are some acceptable foods in front of your children. The idea isn't to starve them, but when there's always an option of something else, it's really easy for that child to just go, do you know what, this isn't my favourite food. I'm not eating it. And my kids are like that. You know, if I gave my kids the option, they'd eat cake and spaghetti bolognese all the time, but they don't have that option. So, you know, we have to teach that to our kids.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. Okay. So we're collecting a nice little sort of selection of of different strategies here for for picky eaters. So demonstrating healthy eating through action yourself, making sure that you're giving them as much variety as possible, giving some sort of guides, I don't want to say restrictions, but some sort of guides as to what's available in front of them. What are the other sort of things that you've come across perhaps from your own personal experience of of four children that I'm sure.
Dr Olena Carrick: Yeah, I think routine is really important. I think routine for adults, for kids, our bodies like routine. And lots of people don't like routine and they find routine restrictive. I personally, and all about habits, routines and systems because I think it actually buys us time. When we're busy thinking about, oh my goodness, what have I got to cook for dinner? And this was definitely me a few years ago. My thought would be, what do I have to cook for dinner? Not that my kids are going to eat it anyhow. But once you have taken all of that away, suddenly your brain is freed up to do so many more interesting things than think about what's for dinner. So I think routine is really important. So kids and parents know, you know, we have breakfast, snack, it doesn't matter what it looks like as long as it's the same. Breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner. And you've got that routine. And then within that framework, you're offering healthy choices. I'm just, I always say, the best thing you can give your kids is your own happiness. And the second best thing you can give them is vegetables. So please, please make sure there's some vegetables. I'm all about, like, just add vegetables. You don't have to say, oh my goodness, I'm, you know, Friday night pizza, don't want pizza. But a reasonable portion of pizza and vegetables that your kids like. And, you know, I know there's lots of people who say, my kids don't like vegetables. They get used to them. They do get used to them.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, that was going to be my pushback because I get pushback on that a lot. Oh, they don't like butternut squash. Oh, they don't like broccoli. Oh, they won't, they won't have that. Oh, I've tried this number of times and it, you know, it hasn't worked. What, what sort of sense of positive information can we give those people? Because I'm sure there's a lot of people listening who are like, those are my kids. That's literally my kid right there. And I've tried and I've tried and I failed so many times. Like, what, what do you do when you're in that desperate, desperate situation?
Dr Olena Carrick: Yeah, well, it's really interesting. And I think there's two, two aspects again. And number one is you have to look at everything that you are eating and everything that you're eating as a family. And if you're eating a diet that is really, really high in salt and sugar and packaged foods, then those fruit and vegetables are not going to compete. So I always talk about something called the strawberry test. One Easter, my kids have chocolate. They're normal kids. We have chocolate at Easter. Easter time for us here in Spain is beautiful, delicious strawberries. So I eat a strawberry, like amazing Spanish strawberries, bursting with flavour, delicious, delicious. And then have a little bit of chocolate. I sort of steal a bit of my child's chocolate. And then I go back and have another strawberry. Now my mouth is full of sugar from the ridiculously sweet chocolate. And I have this strawberry, the same strawberry, but now it tastes really acidic, not very nice. I'm like, why would I eat this strawberry? It's not very nice. And the reason is because we have just flooded ourselves with sugar. And we do that, you know, if you're eating packaged food, that's what you're doing all the time. And in fact, it's really interesting, our taste buds grow back, they regenerate, and it takes about two weeks for our taste buds to regenerate. So, two weeks, wow. Yeah. If you're, I always recommend people do like a two week reboot where you just eat perfectly, I say perfectly in scare quotes. Yeah, yeah. For a couple of weeks, partly to prove that you can do it, but also because it retrains your mind and it retrains your brain to say, hey, this isn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. And actually, these fruit and vegetables are tasty. And so it's the same with our kids. Our kids, if they're constantly eating packaged foods, which are high in calories, why do they want to eat these fruit and vegetables? So one thing is to look at everything that you're presenting and think about the whole week. And, you know, it's not like, oh my goodness, you can never eat ice cream or chocolate, but it's about eating it in moderation and realising that the more of that that they eat, the less of the fruit and vegetables they're going to eat. And so then we come down to individual fruit and vegetables. And, you know, I think children often say, I don't like something when what they really mean is, I'm a bit scared of it and I have no idea what it is. And there is a certain, you know, you have to repeat, repeat, repeat. You know, if you present things more times, they are going to get used to it. There are also children who, like it's in their mind here. Do you know what I mean? It's like, I have this fear of certain vegetables. Now you can't fight that. There are tests, there are things you can do. I do this really amazing thing called magic thinking and it really just, or the magic likes and dislikes. It helps you tune up and tune down what you like and what you don't like. And it's just like really getting involved in how you perceive that fruit or vegetable within your brain. And you can change it. However, you do have to want to do it in the first place. So for example, my 13 year old doesn't like bananas and he's quite happy not liking bananas, thank you. And he doesn't want to do this exercise so that he can like bananas. But my nine year old, I did it with him for red apples. He wouldn't touch red apples. Now he eats them. Strangely, they're the same as green apples, but he didn't used to believe that. So a lot of it is in their brain as opposed to the flavour, the texture. Now, obviously flavour and texture are important as well. But they, I think kids have this accepted list. And once something's on the accepted list, it is accepted and they will just eat it. But then they have the yuck list. This is really disgusting. I hate it. I never want to eat it. And then a lot of things in the middle of, you know, I say I don't like it, but I'm a bit unsure about it. And our job as parents is really to move all of those unknown things onto the accepted list. If there's yuck, disgusting, just leave it alone. Just accept that they don't like it and work around that. But ideally, you just want to grow that accepted list.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I think it's interesting, isn't it? Because there's lots of parallels amongst adults as well. Like I always talk about how to lead a healthier lifestyle where you naturally opt in for the ingredients that are fruit, vegetables, whole foods, minimally processed. You almost have to retrain your taste buds and you have to grow an acceptance for those foods and an appreciation for them. And that has to take time. I'm really interested to to know about how the taste buds regenerate after two weeks. And I think, you know, those little reboots or or patterns of eating for short periods of time without in mind could be really useful for people. I wonder if there are natural stages within infancy into young adulthood where kids taste buds actually naturally change and you can reintroduce foods in particular periods. Is that something you've come across in your practice or.
Dr Olena Carrick: I don't know. That's a really good question actually. I don't know the answer to that question. I do know that children, like they develop their feeding habits by the age of three. It's really, really, really early on. The good news is, if your children are older than three, you can retrain them. It's not like, oh my goodness, this is how they're going to eat. But, you know, what I would say is when they're weaning, when you're introducing foods, introduce as many things as you can. What I do see is in toddlerhood, actually, children almost change. So, you know, when you've got a baby and you introduce foods, my oldest son, he would eat a banana every single day. And something happens in toddlerhood. Partly they learn the word no. But, you know, they're also like getting this autonomy, they want to be in charge. Things change then. And I think taste buds, or it might be that they start thinking about things differently. I don't know. And there can be certain situations where you have like a really nasty yuck response. So for example, my oldest son, he used to like fish when he was quite young. He had a very unfortunate event where we'd been to a friend's house and they had all these amazing bright, bright pink plums. And then came home and had fish for dinner. And then unfortunately vomited this disgusting pink fishy vomit. And since that day, he has not liked fish. And that's a disgust reaction. And unless you go in and sort of like start looking at your brain and rewiring your brain, that's not going to disappear. That's going to stay with him, you know, until he decides he wants to do something about it. That's going to stay with him for for life.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I have a similar story. It was with bangers and mash when I was a kid and I there was nothing else that my mom would give me and she said I need to finish my my plate. And then I did and I promptly vomited afterwards. Probably because I'd found some chocolate earlier in the day and I'd eaten it and I hadn't told my mom or something like that. But but yeah, no, that that's given me like a nasty reaction to to bangers and mash ever since then. I think I must have only been like seven or eight. But looking at the other side of the equation, considering there is so much more information about the hazardous effects of processed food, UHPs, you know, there's a lot more information online. You know, this podcast, for example, is a source of information that could lead to an unhealthy relationship with healthy eating. And that knowledge from a parent's perspective could potentially imprint onto a child, particularly when you know about like, you know, the impact of sugar sweet and beverages and fructose and how it mainlines to the liver and the rising rates of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in children in Westernized nations. I wonder if there is a way of presenting this sort of information to your your clients and and the general public in a way that isn't going to create fearmongering. You mentioned the word moderation before. What what does that mean to you? And and how do you how do you get around that this this issue of of over information and how that can create health anxiety?
Dr Olena Carrick: Yeah, a great question. And to be honest, I don't think adults need to count calories. I know that we, we want to eat, you know, we don't want to eat calorie dense foods, but I personally don't think counting calories creates a good relationship with food. Now, the good news is that vegetables are naturally low in calories. Like if you do the maths, it is amazing. So a hobnob biscuit is around like 70 kilocalories for one. 100 grams of cabbage is something like 25 calories. So how much cabbage can you eat? Like 300 grams of cabbage for one biscuit. Now, it's really easy. I will put my hand on my heart and say, you know, when I was revising for my finals, I think it was chocolate digestives that I used to eat, like an entire packet in one sitting. And I love cabbage. I really do, but I have never eaten an entire cabbage in one go because you just can't do it. So if you're steering yourself and your kids towards more vegetables, you will naturally, if you're your aim is weight loss as a parent, then you will lose weight and your children will grow up naturally eating those foods which are going to nourish them, but aren't going to give them that extra weight. So, you know, and I think this question of protein is really interesting. A lot of people are worried that we don't get enough protein. In the Western world, we get so much protein, it's ridiculous. Most people eat far, far, far more protein than they need. We don't actually need that much protein and we can get protein from plant sources as well, which, you know, typically people eat meat every single day. You don't need to do that. A small amount of meat if you're going to eat meat or plant-based proteins. My policy that I have in my house, my kids love bread, refined white carbohydrates, which, you know, you don't have to cut them out entirely. I personally don't eat very much bread, but I give them a portion. So, you know, I might say, hey, there's two small slices of bread. Like we make our own bread, so it's little bits, it's not like a big loaf. But here's the portion of bread, here's some protein, you know, that isn't plant-based protein, because my kids would just eat all of that. And so you give them a reasonable portion of that, and then you can eat as much fruit and vegetables as you want. And I do include fruit in that as well, because I think, particularly, well, for adults as well, but particularly for children, what I want is for them to think, okay, I'm hungry, I'm going to eat fruit, as opposed to, okay, I'm hungry, I'm going to go and get a packet of something. I would much rather you're eating fruit. And fruit comes with so many, you know, good bits and pieces as well. And if they're hungry, they will eat fruit and vegetables. If it's, you know, acceptable fruit and vegetables. My kids love carrot sticks, they love broccoli, they'll eat tomatoes. They have to be nice ripe tomatoes. They can't be. My kids are, you know, quite picky about the foods that they have growing up in Spain, we're just so spoiled in terms of fruit and vegetables. But if they're there going, I'm only hungry for chocolate, I'm like, there's no such thing as only hungry for chocolate. If you're hungry, you will eat celery. If you won't eat celery, if celery is acceptable to you, if you're saying, I'm only going to eat chocolate, that's, that's an emotion. That's not true hunger. That's, I've got into habit and you haven't kind of untangled it.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I sort of agree with your kids sometimes. Sometimes I'm hungry for chocolate and there's nothing else that's going to satisfy my my hunger for that. I mean, I do have dark chocolate to be fair, so it's sort of the healthier type of chocolate, which has mostly cocoa butter, fats and the cocoa bean and not very much sugar. But yeah, sometimes I do like, I just need that that taste of something, you know, bitter and warming and.
Dr Olena Carrick: Yeah, from time to time, that's okay. But you know when you're saying, okay, it's always. So yeah, there are and also, there are times when we're like, yeah, I just want that. But that's not hunger. That's like a, hey, I need this thing. And even if that is emotional, like I think everyone does emotional eating. Emotional eating is only a problem when it's, like there's a line that you go over and it becomes too much. So my thing is, I bored a meat. I'm sitting at my desk, I'm a bit bored, I go and get some nuts or an apple. Also, I'm eating healthy foods, so it becomes less of a problem. But the reality is humans do emotionally eat. It's part of our society to eat emotionally. But yeah, when it becomes a problem, it's something that needs to be addressed.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I guess because food is so attached to not just the nutrient value, it's more the pleasure of eating. It's why it's hardwired in our brains. It's why we have such a a dopamine response to certain foods and stuff. We're we're hardwired to love and be part of communities, but also eat as well. And that's why, you know, one of the best pleasures of of life is is going out to a restaurant or sharing a meal with friends or inviting people over and, you know, having something celebratory as a as a meal. So, yeah, I guess why that's probably why it's so easy to fall into that habit of emotional eating where you're you're trying to fill a void perhaps with with food. Is that something that you you come up with a lot with because you do a lot of work with adults these days as well as a health coach. How do you instill those values? And what what sort of tips do you have for for perhaps the adults as we as we step change?
Dr Olena Carrick: Yeah. Yeah, really, really good question. So, I think there are two approaches. So the first thing, like I teach four pillars. So healthy eating, I say exercise or movement that lights you up, delicious healthy sleep, and your emotional pillar. So those are the four pillars. And building up good habits and systems in all of those pillars is going to help you with emotional eating because, for example, emotional eating might be because you're stressed. What's the cure for that? Well, you need to do more exercise, you need to sleep well, you need to make sure that you're using what I call maintenance tools, which can be different for everybody, but it might be meditation, it might be reading, it might be colouring, but making sure that your life has got all of those things in. And then you need to have what I call like, um, emergency tools. So it's really looking at what is going on when you're doing that. It's essentially self-awareness and getting to that stage of, okay, why, when do I emotionally eat and why do I emotionally eat? And once you've unravelled that, then you can start to think, okay, now I'm tempted to emotionally eat. Quite often, a lot of people find that actually, once they've used those tools and reset all their habit systems and routines, then a lot of that emotional eating comes away. But not everybody. Some people, for example, if you binge eat, that's a much trickier, sort of, you know, you're starting much further back. You've got more, sorry, more work to do. And it can take longer to get to the stage where you're on a more even keel. So everybody has a different starting place. But having tools that you use in that moment, and for different people it's different, but it's understanding that this emotion is happening. And emotions don't tend to last a very long period of time. Like we might think that they last a long period of time, but what's happening is they're being triggered again and again and again. So if I get cross with my child, a lot of it, you know, I feel this emotion, understanding what that emotion feels like to me, it's different to everybody. It might be, oh my goodness, my heart is racing or I've got this, you know, constriction in my neck. Why am I getting cross with my child? Because I think that they should be behaving in a different way. So that's like how I'm thinking about it. Now, if I keep on thinking about it like that, then I'm going to keep feeling that emotion and it feels like that emotion goes on forever and ever and ever. But the reality is that that emotion only lasts for around 90, 90 seconds or so. So if you can keep yourself distracted for that period of time and not re-trigger it, then you can move on and do something else. So it might be that you have something like, when I feel frustrated, I'm going to do star jumps, or I'm going to count to 200, or I'm going to look out for green objects. For different people, it's different, but you just have to build that into a habit. But what you need to do is the work away from the moment because once you're triggered, it's not like, hey, what am I going to do about this? You have to build that habit up out of the the trigger zone.
Dr Rupy: creating systems so you can mellow whatever your desired action is or to to mellow what is identified as something that is net negative for you is something that people can can practice. And you've got this um this lovely system of like imagining your vision of what healthy is for you. I mean, I think a lot of people have have sort of come across different pillars of health, some some are four, some are five, you know, it's all about sleep and you know, tick box of things that you can do, you know, eat more vegetables, you've got to exercise, you've got to move more, etc, etc. The science of that is super interesting and complicated. The solutions are relatively simple if you just look at them blankly on a piece of paper. The implementation of that, that's the hard stuff, the habit change, the things that are ingrained, um, and actually creating a culture, going back to the top of our conversation, that's where I think people struggle. So what are some of the solution, what are some of the sorts of practices that you teach people to tick off that list of that of that perfect vision of them looking healthy that they can implement perhaps after listening to this?
Dr Olena Carrick: Yeah, another really interesting question. And I think if we take a step back and have a look at habits and think, well, why do we have habits and what are habits? And essentially, habits are a shortcut to doing something. And the positive thing about habits is that they're super efficient. Like, can you imagine if you had to wake up every morning and figure out how to brush your teeth and go, oh my goodness, what's this toothbrush? What's toothpaste? And you had to go through that every single day. So luckily, our subconscious brain has this thing called habits. And they are essentially things that we do without thinking. Now, the great thing about habits is we don't have to think about them, but our brain doesn't care whether that habit is a habit that is good for your health or a habit that is bad for your health. Now, habits are those things that we do in the period of time when life happens. And what happens to people is, you know, typically January the 1st, we go, right, I'm going to build a new habit. And you're thinking about building this new habit and you're like, oh, okay, I'm going to walk around the block. I'm going to walk around the block. And you're still thinking about this habit. When you're thinking about it, it's what I call an acorn habit. It's not really a habit. And then life happens. And then this is what I call the rickety bridge, getting from A to B. You fall off this rickety bridge and you go back to your old habits because you never had that habit. You hadn't built that habit up. What really happens is if you build that habit up, is one day you forget about it. You're still doing it. You forget about it. And then you look back two years later and go, oh, I did build up that habit two years ago and I just, I haven't noticed it. Time has just gone and I do it without thinking. But whilst you're looking at the habit, it's not a habit. So I think that's the thing and people get disillusioned and they go, oh, I can't do it. I can't build habits. And I just say, no, you just have a human brain and a human body and that's just it. But you didn't build the habit. You're not broken. You just didn't get all the way across the bridge and that's just it. So the question then becomes, well, how do you create a habit? And the simple answer is, you just repeat, repeat, repeat. There's lots of ways to make it easier for yourself, but the bottom line is a habit is something that you just do without thinking. And how do you build up that habit? You just keep repeating it.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I like that perceptual element of of the toothbrush analogy. Most people don't think of brushing their teeth as a habit, but it is something that we've we've definitely learned, many of us from a young age, obviously, but, you know, that that's definitely something that has been trained into us. We don't naturally evolve to want to brush our teeth. Um, and I think if you can think of your habit in that respect, that's how it becomes ingrained in your day-to-day. So for example, I've meditated now for many years. When I started, I made myself meditate for 60 seconds every day because I made it small enough, I made it achievable enough, and I initially had to push myself to get to that very, very small achievement every single day, such that now I can't really start my day without doing a meditation in the same way I can't start my day without brushing my teeth. And when you think about things like that, they just stack on top of each other. So a concept that I've perhaps a lot of people have come across is habit stacking. And in the same way, I always have greens on the side of my meal. That's just a, I don't see it as a habit. I just see it as something that I do now. And I wonder if there are any other sort of ways that you've come across using your health coaching practice to make it that much easier. Repetition is definitely, definitely one of them. Are there any other sort of tricks of the trade that you can share?
Dr Olena Carrick: Where do I start? I think one habit, and I say as well, we have habits in our how we think about things and habits in our emotions. And I think one integral habit that is really important is how we think about ourselves. So if we have this identity of I am somebody who looks after myself, then from that, you're going to be making decisions that are going to benefit you. So I am somebody who always eats vegetables. When COVID happened for me, I didn't suddenly go and start buying packaged food because I never did that. That wasn't what I did before. So I still went to the vegetable market, I still bought fruit and vegetables, I still ate healthy, just not because I'm superhuman, just because that was my identity and that habit of how I think about myself was still there. So I think that is a really, really integral part that if you can start thinking of yourself as somebody who looks after yourself, prioritizes your health, from that, you will be making far better decisions. If we're thinking about everyday things, I always say it's a bit like a train. We have two different parts of our brain and I think people don't quite understand this. Now, I'm clearly not a neuroscientist, so don't expect a technical definition. But essentially, we have what we call our thinking part of our brain, which is that part that goes, hey, let's give up chocolate. That's going to be really good for our health. And then the habit part, which goes, hey, it's three o'clock, it's chocolate time. And if you think about those two things as separate things, it makes it much easier to untangle. So the role of your thinking brain is almost to lay out the train track. You know, those trains that the kids have. My living room is cluttered with this at the moment. But the kids lay it out, then they get a little wooden train and they push the little wooden train around. Your thinking brain is laying out the track for your day and your habit brain is just the train that's doing it. So an example for me is I used to go swimming in the swimming pool. Now I swim in the sea. It's a bit cold at the moment. But this is back before COVID happened. My kids go back to school. In Spain, we have morning school and afternoon school. So I would walk them back to school and then I would go down to the swimming for swimming training that I had paid for. Where does that habit start? It starts when I leave the door to walk my kids back. And, you know, I'm not going to not take my kids to school unless they're unwell. My kids are going to school. And so by the time I've got to school, I'm carrying my swimming stuff. I've paid for my swimming class. I'm going to go swimming. Like it's more difficult for me to do something else because I've got this identity of I look after myself. But, you know, what else am I going to do than it is to not go swimming? So it's really easy for me to go swimming to do that. Another one is, you know, going to the vegetable market. We have amazing vegetable market. What can I buy at the vegetable market? I can buy vegetables. So it's not like I'm this superhuman person who, you know, never buys cakes. It's not like, you know, when you see a cake, you go, oh my goodness, that looks good. You want to not make decisions. You don't want your brain to be making decisions in the moment because you're always going to make the wrong decision. You want to make it such that you only have the healthy decisions to make. Go to vegetable market, you can buy vegetables.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, to to personalize it for myself. So someone who doesn't really have an issue with with healthy eating and can generally make the right decisions when it comes to what I'm going to eat because I've been practicing this for so long now. Some of the decisions that I struggle with are, am I going to watch another episode of a series that I'm watching on Netflix or or BBC or whatever? And I I ask myself the question, what would healthy Rupy do? And healthy Rupy is someone who wakes up in the morning and has had eight hours of refreshing sleep and then does their morning activities, which includes exercise, etc, etc. And so by being intentional and asking myself that question before I press play again and I'm looking at the time and it's like 9:15 and I know that it's going to be 10:00 p.m. before I put this down, that that helps me stay on the straight and narrow. Obviously, sometimes I'm going to be like, yeah, whatever, I'm going to watch the movie. I'm going to I'm going to have a bit of a blowout and and stay up this weekend. But, you know, those that that little question, what would healthy Rupy do and having a clear idea about what healthy Rupy is and how he behaves, I think is a practice that people could personalize for themselves. So what does healthy Zoe, what does healthy Deepak, what does healthy Rosie look like? You know, what what is what is that for them? Is that something that that you you you teach or.
Dr Olena Carrick: Yeah, yeah. And I think that comes back to the identity. It's like having this avatar. Exactly. And, you know, there are things that you can do as well to decide in front. So what you basically want to be doing is separating the decisions. So you're making the decision ahead of time. So, you know, when you think, okay, I do want to watch some television, how can I make it such that it's easy for me to watch an hour or whatever you want to watch rather than three hours? And think about how you can do that. So, you know, I basically avoid the series because I know they're so addictive.
Dr Rupy: I do as well. I avoid series. When I see a series that's like, it has more than eight episodes, it's a straight no. If it's like four or five or six episodes and there's like 10 seasons, straight no. Like I I've I've missed out on a lot of really good TV. I haven't watched Sopranos. I never watched The Wire. I didn't watch, um, the method, who's the one with the meth lab breaking back? I never watched that. Just because I knew it was.
Dr Olena Carrick: I watched that in Spanish. So it's part of learning Spanish. Absolutely. Oh, there you go. That was an educational reason. Yeah. But when you watch it in Spanish, you're not so addicted to it. It's not like, oh. So there you go. You could watch it in a different language and after one, you'll be like, my brain hurts. But yeah, absolutely. There are other ways. You could do something like, I've got an important meeting afterwards. So I've got a firm cutoff or, you know, for my kids, they love screen times and have, I don't know, Xboxes and all of this stuff. But we put a time limit on it and it just cuts out. So they know they've got an hour and they can't go beyond that. And yeah, they're upset at times. But when you create that limit, and it's partly for yourself, like you might just go, okay, my limit is 10 o'clock. And at 10 o'clock, no screens or 9:30, whatever you want. Once you've made that a really firm limit within yourself, you've made that decision, then it becomes much easier. I find another one that people do is eating after dinner time. It's so easy to not eat after dinner. It's such an easy, um, health trick, if you see what I mean, to just, you know, give yourself a little bit more break after dinner, to not, you know, push your glucose levels up for just a little bit of extra enjoyment. And once you get into the habit of doing that, it's really easy. Obviously, changing that habit, you need to do a little bit of work around it. And a lot of it is the way we think about things.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, no, I think there are some incredible tips there. You know, creating a vision for yourself, having a systems approach, repetition, and also being being easy on yourself as well at times as well, because it can be hard. I think habit change can be made easier, but in itself, you know, certainly if you're starting, depending on where you're starting, it is tough. Um, so, yeah, having having all those different tools in your toolbox of habit change, I think is is brilliant. Do you recommend any resources for for people, obviously other than your your lovely website, uh, that would, uh, that would help people with these tools of change?
Dr Olena Carrick: Well, obviously my book that's just about to come out. So yeah, I've just written a book and I'm going to shamelessly plug it. Um, it's called Building Simple Habits to a Healthy Me. And essentially, it's a really short book. It's not meant to be loads and loads of information. It it has worksheets. It goes over my four pillars and in brief what is healthy living, but you have worksheets of where you are now and where you would like to be and what does life look like there. And then more importantly, it has habit trackers. So you can decide, like there's a suggested habit tracker, but you get 13 weeks of habit tracking. So there's habit trackers, there's a food, you know, a diary, a meal planner essentially, which you have to fill in yourself. And then a gratitude, like to write down gratitude because gratitude and, you know, the way we think about things, getting yourself in that positive energy is just a, you know, a game changer essentially. So the idea is you can do it all by yourself with my amazing habit tracker.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, the sword of change is gratitude. That's what I like to think. Well, this has been great. Thank you so much, Olena. Thank you so much for your tips and advice and uh, I wish you well with the book. It sounds wonderful.
Dr Olena Carrick: Fabulous. Thank you so much for having me.
