Want Healthier Kids: Listen up! with Dr. Sheila Carroll

Dr. Tamar: 1:15

As parents, we want the best for our kids, but in today's world of ultra-processed foods, technology, overload and lack of movement, children's health is declining at an alarming rate. Our special guest, Dr Sheila Carroll, reveals practical strategies any parent can implement right away to start turning this around. If you want to empower your kids with habits and life skills that will serve them for years to come, you don't want to miss this episode. Listen in. Your kids will thank you for it. Welcome to Pivoting Pharmacy with Nutrigenomics. Part of the Pharmacy Podcast Network, A must-have resource for pharmacists, entrepreneurs seeking to enhance patient care while enjoying career and life. Join us as we pivot into Nutrigenomics, using pharmacy and nutrition for true patient-focused care. Explore how to improve chronic conditions rather than just manage them. Celebrate entrepreneurial triumphs and receive priceless advice. Align your values with a career that profoundly impacts patients. Together, we'll raise the script on health and pivot into a brighter future. Before you listen in, I want to thank our listener of the week, who says who would have thought that a person who spent a large part of their life to be a doctor of pharmacy would stretch their mind into wanting to do more than just give people drugs? I love this so much and looking forward to a healthier future. Thank you for this new approach to helping us all. You are so welcome. I love thinking outside the box and helping others do the same Healthcare professionals and patients alike. When you see the results, your patients get more energy, more confidence and an optimistic outlook on their health and life. You'll love taking a new approach to health as well. So remember, when you leave us a five-star review, you'll get the chance to be featured as our next listener of the week and I'll give you a shout out right here on the show. Hello, hello and welcome to Pivoting Pharmacy with Nutrigenomics. I'm Dr. Tamar, Lawful, doctor of pharmacy and certified nutritional genomics specialist. In today's empowering exchange of ideas, we're decoding the essence of your child's health. What truly matters when it comes to nourishment, vitality and wellbeing are a load of ones. Now that's a question worth exploring, don't you think? If you've been listening into Pivoting Pharmacy for a while, you know by now that, by using the unique lens of Nutrigenomics, we can shine a light on those areas where we may need a little extra care and attention, and that includes areas our kiddos might need to work on as well. But once we get the results, how do we help our patients or clients take action, especially children. How on earth do we teach our children to embrace these recommendations? Joyfully, Speaking from experience as a mom of an energetic five year old, I'm eager to dive into these questions, and even more excited because we have an ally on our side today the remarkable Dr. Sheila Carroll, pediatrician, obesity medicine physician, life and weight coach and, perhaps most importantly, a fellow mom navigating the same twists and turns on this roller coaster of parenthood. So are you ready, my friends? Plug in those earbuds, adjust the volume and let's dive into learning, growth and transformation together. Let's listen in. Sheila, thank you for joining us on the show today. I'm looking forward to our conversation. Talk about nutrition and how do we get our kids to make these changes as parents, and also how can we make these changes ourselves as parents? We have to start with us first, but can you first tell us about your personal and professional journey that led you to the life coaching that you're doing now?

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 4:56

Sure, and thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to this discussion too. I have been a person who has struggled with my own weight ever since I was a kid. So as a 10 year old little kid, I weighed more than my brothers and sisters. I weighed more than I wanted to, and I struggled off and on throughout my whole adulthood until about five years ago I also became a doctor. My dad wanted me to be a pharmacist, actually, really, but he was a doctor and somehow I ended up becoming a doctor and a pediatrician, and I was a pediatrician for about 23 years, trying to help families and help kids live super healthy lives. And I also became board certified in obesity medicine a year or two ago. And how I became a life coach was that I joined a life coaching program myself about five years ago to help myself lose weight and learn a new way of eating, and that was really a transformative experience for me personally, as a person who had struggled with her weight since I was a kid up until I was 50 years old. So a long time, 40 years and in a way, I laugh because as a physician, I actually needed a life coach to teach me how to lose weight as opposed to like the medical community, but it's just so true, and this is exactly what happened. I learned two important things in the life coaching program that I was in. Well, I learned a lot of different things, but the main thing was this they call it a think, feel, act cycle. It's it's understanding that our thoughts are creating our feelings and our feelings are driving our actions. And so, especially when you're talking about health behaviors or, for example, weight, or if your goal is weight loss but you can use it with anything for improving your health, getting more sleep or getting more movement when you can look at what are the thoughts that you're having that are creating your feelings of either taking the actions you want to take or taking actions you don't want to take, or not doing any action at all, this is where the whole meat of the matter comes in for behavior change for all of us, and what I learned in that life coaching program was how to think about my own thinking and how my thoughts were translating into the results I was currently having. And if I didn't like the results I was currently having in any aspect of my life, I could trace them back to the thoughts I was having, and not to judge myself or beat myself up or anything like that, but to be like, oh OK, I see what I'm thinking. And then I learned that my thoughts are optional, I don't actually have to be thinking that, and that I can choose different thoughts. And I learned how to think on purpose and to create new thoughts which created new feelings, which generated new actions, which gave me a 50 pound weight loss and people knew a whole new approach to every aspect of my life. And so I saw, when I went through this personally and kind of had this personal shift and transformation, I saw how this could be so helpful for my patients, and really when I say my patients, I kind of mean their parents, because as a pediatrician my patient is the child, really the whole family, but technically the child, but kids, by definition, they're just developing and their brains are just developing. So to understand your thinking and like the metascale of thinking about your thinking, you need a very well defined prefrontal cortex, which we know doesn't develop fully until you're 25 or 26 years old. I have a 12 year old son now and he's able to think about his thinking a little bit, but not to the extent that I'm able to think about my own thinking. And so when we're talking about health behaviors or behavior change, the medical approach has always people used to bring their children to me. If they had a child who was carrying extra weight or struggling with weight, the traditional medical model is to bring the child to the doctor and then I was supposed to talk to the child a 10 year old, 11 year old, seven year old, I mean whatever age. I was supposed to talk to them to try to get them or to educate them and to instruct them and, I don't know, inspire them to change their habits.

Dr. Tamar: 9:43

And how can a seven year old change their habits? And they're not in the grocery shop.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 9:47

Yeah, that's exactly the problem, Right? So this is the problem. This is the problem we're facing. Who I really needed to be talking to is the parents, and of course, I always tried to talk to the parents, but with the little child sitting there too, you have to be super. I was very cognizant of the fact. I didn't want to be saying anything. I don't want to meaning anything negative. I like to focus on people's health and total health, and not even the number on the scale, especially for kids. It's so stigmatizing and so painful. I remember a little kid, when I was a little kid and my doctor told me I needed to lose weight. He actually told my mom in front of me he's like you just got to get her to stop eating. And I remember that and feeling I felt like so small and so ashamed. And so that's the last thing our kids need from us. They just need to well, all the things they need. Their parents love complete, unconditional acceptance of how they are, and the parents are the ones who can make the changes, decide what family changes they are going to make, and then my recommendation is for the parents to make the changes to themselves first, before even trying to make any lifestyle changes for their kids, but to make the changes themselves and then shift to changing as a whole family.

Dr. Tamar: 11:17

Wow, that's very powerful, sheila. So, from your personal journey with your weight loss and a life coaching program that led you to where you are now, now coaching parents yes and children families to implement better nutrition on a day to day basis. Now you don't just focus on diet, right, you also look at emotional regulation skills, or something I write about from you. So can you shed some light on how emotional well-being can affect eating habits?

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 11:49

Sure, and we oftentimes don't think about kids being emotional eaters or eating for reasons other than hunger, but it's oftentimes, it's our culture and how we sometimes teach kids to eat for reasons other than hunger. For example, even we do it in the medical office right, oh, here's, you're getting an immunization, here's a lollipop. Or right, it'll make you feel better and so, or, oh, you're upset, well, let's go get ice cream. Or, oh, have a snack or something. So, just to take one step back, before I answer this question is one thing I think it's so important for all of us, and especially for parents, to understand is the current food system, the modern food system that we are living in. It is such a challenge for us as human beings. We weren't designed to really eat these highly processed foods and our bodies literally weren't designed to eat this amount of sugar, this amount of you know, all of these processed foods with these refined grains and the seed oils which are causing a lot of inflammation, and your average kids dietary intake is somewhere around 65, 67% of highly processed foods makes up all the calories of a child's diet, right? So what's happening is that our kids brains and their bodies are kind of being hijacked is one word you could use by these highly processed foods and they make you want to eat more of these foods. They mess with your body's hormones, your true hunger signals. You know the hormones that tell you if you're full. We know that highly processed foods affect that. So we've really kind of lost touch. I know I did and I'll speak to for my son as well. When he eats a lot of highly processed foods you can't really tell when you're hungry or not hungry anymore.

Dr. Tamar: 14:01

Right.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 14:01

And that's one skill we really want our kids to learn is eat when you're physically hungry and stop when your body has had enough. And so emotional eating comes in. You know the definition of emotional eating. The simple definition is eating for any reason other than physical hunger. So eating when you're bored, eating when you're sad, eating when you're happy, celebrating you know, good news, or Thanksgiving and Christmas, whatever eating for all of these reasons other than hunger. But one skill that's really amazing for parents to be able to teach their kids and it speaks to the emotional regulation skills that you and I were just talking about is for kids to be able to actually identify what they're feeling and name it and actually kind of feel it in their actual body. And that goes. That helps in a lot of things. It helps with behavior and it's really it's emotional regulation what am I actually feeling? And then for a child to have the vocabulary over time, depending on how old they are, to name what they're feeling. And Dan Siegel, dr Dan Siegel, he's, he's written some. Really, you know I'm talking about some amazing parenting books and he's the term. Name it to tame it, yeah, and so. So naming the feeling kind of allows, it's an allowance of that feeling. So you're not, you're not looking to do things to make that feeling go away. So in the coaching world we call that buffering. You're having an emotion that you don't want to be having frustration, irritation, whatever. So buffering would be eating even if you're not hungry, but eating to tamp down that negative feeling over shopping. Sometimes people shop when they're upset or shop to try to change their emotional feeling over scrolling on social media, over drinking over, you know, overing anything kind of is. But what we really need is to be able to feel our feelings Right Such an important like eye opening skill for me. My coach said to me but she says it to everyone, but when she said it to me I was really like whoa? She said you don't have a overeating problem so much as you have an under feeling problem.

Dr. Tamar: 16:35

Wow, yeah, under feeling, under feeling. I thought you were going to say over feeling, but it's under feeling because you're suppressing those feelings.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 16:44

Yeah, you're not willing to feel the feeling. Yeah, if I was bored, for example, or for me, like with my job, working really long hours, feeling so fatigued, feeling frustrated, feeling, tired, feeling, you know, all some of these negative feelings that go along with these high pressure jobs are in response to that. I didn't realize I was doing that. Of course, I had no idea, and when I realized that that's what I was doing, the first step is just the awareness of it, and then you can get that little pause between oh, I should eat something, to actually not even really hungry, what am I? Oh, I'm really just irritated, or I'm irritated, frustrated or tired. You know, you realize your feeling and then you're like, okay, I'll feel that feeling in my actual body. So it's really just kind of connecting your body and your body. It's such a wonderful skill for well for adults for sure, but kids like wow, it's so powerful for them to understand that.

Dr. Tamar: 17:52

Right and really be able to name that feeling. It's interesting because I might have a five year old daughter. So we have this book that is about feelings, that goes over a different type of emotions and things like that, and when she is upset or feeling any type of way where she's not even wanting to talk to me about it, like you know, just being grumpy, I'll say you know, let's look on her book of feelings and help tell me which one it is you're actually feeling today. So that does. It does actually work for them to just get in tune and really even with the, with anything right and raising our kids to really identify those feelings. I love that, that strategy.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 18:30

Well, good for you, because that's such a powerful gift to your daughter to for her to really be able to to, kind of you know, understand what she's feeling.

Dr. Tamar: 18:41

Yeah.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 18:42

And then for adults too, totally. You know, I think they do. There's data that suggests like most people can name five emotions or something. It's like mad, sad, happy, you know it's there, these there, but they, you know they're very vague things but if you ever look up you could your listeners could just Google like the feelings wheel or emotions wheel, and they're pretty nuanced feelings and being able to kind of pinpoint that or tie into that it's really liberating, you know. It's freeing really when you really realize, like what you're actually feeling. And then the really amazing part is to understand why you're feeling. That you kind of go backwards and say, well, what thought am I having? That's creating that feeling for me, even thought you might not realize that you're having. But when you can take that moment and, oh, I'm feeling well, for example, I'll give you an example this weekend my son's playing. He's plays hockey and he's not allowed to check. His age group is not yet allowed to check people but he checked his buddy on purpose. I saw him do that on purpose. He was mad, he was frustrated because he felt that the Raph missed a call for him, anyways. And so I, because I knew, I saw what he did, I knew what his feeling must have, or I presumed what his feeling was, and I know the thought he should have had. But then I realized, oh, now I'm frustrated with him. I'm feeling super frustrated with him because I'm and my thought that was causing my frustration was he shouldn't do that, he shouldn't be acting like that. And so I was frustrated with him by my own thought. My thought was he didn't actually make me frustrated, he was just being him. Theo was just being Theo. Because if I had thought like, oh, it's fine, that's totally, that's reasonable what he did, I wouldn't have been frustrated at all. So I think this skill is really awesome for parents to learn, because it's so freeing, because now your kid doesn't make you frustrated, your child is just being your child. You are in charge, you are the owner of your thoughts and your feelings and your actions, and so to me like that's just great news because I can control all of those things, and it was really liberating.

Dr. Tamar: 21:22

It's definitely empowering, empowering a strategy to learn, for parents and for the child themselves as well. Now I want to get back to this process food thing. On it we mentioned. So you know, we in a modern world we revolve. Everything is quick, easy, right, our meals are quick, easy, door dash to your door. And I'm guilty of using door dash because you're not really knowing what's in your food for sure, right, and then there are a lot of processed foods out here. But what kind of practical advice or tools can parents have who might struggle with time management and healthy food preparation? So it's just easy for them to just pack the bag of chips for their kids to go to school, or you know what would you recommend for them if their time is an issue?

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 22:07

Yeah for sure. The ease and convenience of these foods are as one of their best selling points. So my recommendation for parents is to really think about I think about it as a safety issue. You know, in my opinion, in my medical opinion, it is so serious, such a bad thing for our kids to be eating so much highly processed foods that for me it's like a safety issue. It's like a seatbelt. You know, I don't let my son ride in the car without wearing a seatbelt. I feel like these foods are. They're not neutral, they're not harmless, they're actually really bad for us as humans. We weren't designed to handle them. So you have all the added sugars in these highly processed foods usually. So that's one tip. What's one easy thing parents could do to potentially start becoming aware of the situation is look at the back of the package and see how many grams of added sugar is in the serving size. The recommendation if you're between zero and two years old, you're supposed to have zero grams of added sugar a day, and if you're between two and 19, or two an adult, it's somewhere around 25 grams of sugar a day, which is about six teaspoons of sugar. But if you look at a Gatorade or a Coca-Cola. Sometimes those have upwards of 50, 60, 70 grams of sugar in one little bottle, wow. And so our human bodies? We evolved not eating these foods. We didn't evolve with the only sugars we used to be able to eat were fruit, some vegetables and honey if we ever stumbled across that, you know, out in the wild. So our physical body, our livers, we weren't designed to handle this kind of food, not to mention all the chemicals, the preservatives. They're disrupting, like the gut microbiome which is creating this leaky gut is a term people use, but it's creating like these little holes, so that now problems are occurring between the body and the brain. And so we need to understand that the processed foods that we're eating and that our kids are eating are bad for us. And so, getting back to the question about time, you know, when I realized, oh, this is not just harmless for him, you know, or it's not like, oh, it could be better, I could be doing a better job I realized like whoa, this is actually hurting him. And even if you don't have a child who's struggling with extra weight right now, the highly processed foods are still. They're just not good for any of us. They're contributing to anxiety, depression and an older people, cognitive decline. Alzheimer's is being now being called, like type three diabetes, insulin resistance of the brain cells, and all of this is coming from our reliance on these foods. So I would just say, as a parent, you have to find a way to make the time to not necessarily make everything from scratch, but if you're not making any, if you're, if you're only serving or own or really relying on highly processed foods, what's one thing you can do today that would take some of that away and that might be prepping the night before some vegetables or some fruit to pack in your child's lunch. And I don't think parents realize and honestly I didn't realize either, and it wasn't until I took, like a very, very deep medical dive, which most people can't do because they're not doctors, they're not pharmacists, they don't have the time, frankly, or the interest in understanding the body's hormonal responses to these foods.

Dr. Tamar: 26:21

Right.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 26:22

And it's super complicated. I didn't realize how bad they were for us, and so I think now nowadays we have somewhere between 20 to 30% of kids and the teens are struggling with extra weight or obesity, being overweight or or clinically classified as obese. We have kids with anxiety, rising rates of anxiety and depression and mental health problems, and a lot of this can be well, maybe, cured. Number one is what I would like to offer. I think there's so many powerful benefits to switching to trying to eat minimally processed foods. You know focus changing what we eat, moving away from these highly processed foods, is going to be. We just have we have to do it. There's no other way. In my opinion. I don't see us being healthy eating these highly processed foods until and unless the highly processed food companies make them more healthy.

Dr. Tamar: 27:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I first found out that some they have food scientists that are actually there to have the food tastes more addictive, you know, be more addictive. That's why when someone eats like a bag of chips, they have to have another one or another one. There's no off button and I don't know.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 27:48

So yeah, I was telling my son I read this thing called the Dorito effect.

Dr. Tamar: 27:52

Doritos are the worst.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 27:54

Well, they so addictive they don't make every Dorito. Every single chip doesn't taste the same. Every single Dorito chip has a different amount of seasoning on it, and so you might get one. That's like, whoa amazing. This Dorito was the best. The next one might be, huh, not that great, and then you're like, oh well, then I need another one, because the last one you know.

Dr. Tamar: 28:15

so, yeah, yes this is what they have scientists paying people money to do this, yeah, and I think we just don't know that.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 28:25

But the other thing that's really happening. We have to be aware that, yes, these food companies are just trying to make money, they're just trying to sell their product, but the way those products are interacting with our physical body, our brain, our brain chemicals and our hormones, it's making us want to eat more of them and it's, like we said before, kind of blocking our ability to tell when we're hungry or not hungry but we get that back when we switch to eating real food and I don't think that we would have be having the problems that we're having in our society with with weight and lots of other problems diabetes things- like that If we were only offered, if all the processed foods just went away magically, our health would dramatically improve.

Dr. Tamar: 29:17

I agree with you. 100%, sheila, 100%. Just eating your natural, natural food, real food.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 29:25

You don't have to count calories, you don't have to go on a diet, you just eat real food, eat when you're hungry, when you've had enough, and drink water, and that's another thing that I think is hopefully low hanging fruit for parents. I always really, really want parents to stop having their kids drink liquid sugar like any soda, gatorade, even juices. Yeah they're just really unhealthy for us as a human and we don't need them. Your child doesn't need them water after they're one, you know, they can really just have water.

Dr. Tamar: 30:04

So anyways well, thank you for that. So for our busy parents out there, with time and not on your side, we can you can consider prepping the night before, switching out the sugars for healthy sugars that you can get from fruits and eating real food, putting real food in those lunch boxes for your kids. So I want to, you know, get into change over time, because with two decades of experience in pediatrics, have you noticed any significant shifts in children's nutrition habits over the years and, if so, what have been the biggest impacts on their health in your opinion and it might be what we just talked about- yeah, it is what we just talked about.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 30:47

I've seen kids' health honestly getting worse. And that's been super. It's hard to see. Number one it's hard for parents to see and parents don't know why. Parents don't know why their, their kids are suffering from some of these other health problems that we're seeing younger and younger. We never used to see almost never. When I first started in medicine did we see kids with. They call it non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, but it's. It's basically fat being deposited in your liver, which used to only happen for people who drank too much alcohol. Alcoholics would get alcoholic fatty liver disease. Now there's this non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. We're certainly seeing it in adults. It's one of the leading causes of need for liver transplant, but we're seeing this in kids too. So because of the usually because of all the sugar that's being drunk or drinking what's the right word consumed in liquid form, that fructose is going getting turned right into fat fats getting stored in the liver and kind of crushing out the healthy liver cells. So yeah, over the course of the past 20 years, seeing kids physical health decline, their weights go up, and also kids who are have a normal weight or quote normal weight on the on the scale, or who don't appear to have a problem with weight, they're still having kids having some anxiety going up, depression going up, and to me that's also heavily tied to this processed food diet that we're having. The highly processed foods are creating this whole body inflammation state, which is also inflammation of your the brain cells and the chemicals and the neurotransmitters that are needed to kind of make you feel good. So it's a challenge because parents are busy. Like you said, I'm a busy parent to single mom. You know, when I was working full time one point I was working almost two full time jobs because I was busy in the hospital and these foods are so easy to buy, they're economical usually and we know our kids are going to eat them and our kids aren't going to give us a hard time and then we don't have to worry that our kids are hungry, you know. So there's all of these forces kind of conspiring to make this an uphill walk for us to get on top of it. But I just think there is no other way except to back off the amount of highly processed foods you know now they're offering you probably know, as a pharmacist and all your listeners if they're pharmacists like the medications, the new medications that are coming out they're offering, offering GLP, one agonist and up. Yeah, I just saw a paper that they're now studying it for six years old and up, and bariatric surgery for 12 year olds. I think maybe those medications have a place as a jumpstart for people. But I also feel like we can help people with their lifestyle. But they need help. They need intensive support. It's not easy to make these changes by yourself. Of course, the insurance companies won't pay for that, which makes no sense. What's absolutely no sense? This is you know, I don't know what this is you know, health system where we don't pay for preventative medicine. We'd rather give you a drug after the fact that you're sick as opposed to helping you just avoid all of those problems in the workplace. But this is why parents this is why parents need the education, they need the support and they need to figure out themselves how am I going to get myself to do this to help my child? And they can. They definitely can do it, and we just have to keep helping parents figure out this, how to do it.

Dr. Tamar: 34:56

Yeah, so definitely with making those habits and educating the parents so they know how to do it to help their kids. It's very important and it's amazing to me where a child, six years old, is presented like an adult that has alcoholism with the fatty liver, you know, because of the way we're eating now in our society at such a young age. And you know you did mention that part of your program involves teaching moms so that they can impart knowledge to their kids. Have you noticed any recurring misconceptions that moms have about their kids nutrition?

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 35:33

Yes, for sure I think there's some. I call them thought errors or limiting beliefs is another term. But you know, we think our kids need candy to have a happy childhood, and I'm not saying they can never have candy, that's not what I'm saying at all. And it's fine. My son eats candy here and there. But what I'm saying is sometimes I think there's a lot of parents that are like my kid, my kid will never eat, and then fill in the blank broccoli, my kid would never eat. Salmon, my kid would never eat, you know, whatever. Yeah, if you are a parent who thinks your kid is never going to eat that, then they won't eat that. Right. But every child, just like you and I, they might, okay, they might really not like the taste of salmon, fine, okay, but what that? That only comes after they've tried it several times, the, after they've tried it cooked a couple different ways. You've offered it, you know, and they just really don't have a taste for that. Okay, move on. Then move on to the next healthy thing. But sometimes I think parents not necessarily the clients that I have right now, because the clients I have are actually looking for like they're working on, they're trying to figure this out. But in my clinical practice when I was a pediatrician, part of the issue was like the parents would come and they're like he won't eat that, he won't eat that, she won't eat that, and I didn't have the time number one and they didn't have the interest number two in shifting that. So I think over time, if you were able to spend enough time with someone, you might be able to help the parent shift the thought a little bit like oh, my child could eat that or wouldn't it be beneficial for them to eat that? Or how can I work to get them to eat that? But that's one of the main things I think is that sometimes parents have limiting beliefs about what their child is capable of. And then we have all of these cultural beliefs about what makes childhood fun, and food is really tied into that Usually sugary foods, right.

Dr. Tamar: 37:46

We want them to be happy. Of course we want our children to be happy, but we want them to be healthy. I think a lot of parents don't realize that what they do for their kids now impacts them not just now, but also later in the future. We may not see certain things exhibiting right now, but especially when it comes to genetics and things like that, we're flipping on or off some kind of switches for, in terms of, for analogy purposes that are going to manifest later on.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 38:16

People who are being diagnosed with, say, type 2 diabetes in their 40s and 50s. That didn't start in their 40s and 50s.

Dr. Tamar: 38:24

It did not.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 38:24

That probably started when they were kids and teens and finally their body is just like I don't know. I don't know what to do anymore. The thing is, you said we want our kids to be happy and we want our kids to be healthy. The truth is, you can't really be happy if you're not healthy. We have to figure out a way and we can, and it just takes a shift of your mind. Like, for example, we live up here in Maine and in the summer we go to the beach and a lot of families get an ice cream cone every single time they're coming home from the beach because that makes it better Quote. You know that's more fun. It's more fun to get ice cream. But the truth is like, when you really start to think about it and you can understand that ice cream once in a while, totally fine. But if you're getting an ice cream three, four, five times a week, that's really not healthy for your child.

Dr. Tamar: 39:25

Not healthy for you, not healthy for your child.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 39:28

And then you just have to ask the question like, well, what is fun? And oh, the fun of going to the beach was being together, being connected, you know, being outside, enjoying, you know, the water, all of the things. And all through marketing and advertising and our culture, we think like somehow food is fun, our food is love, when we can just untangle those things. And then the fun of going to the beach is like the things we just talked about being together, being outside. It's not getting an ice cream and that doesn't mean you can never get an ice cream, but just understand and teach your kids that the ice cream isn't what's making it fun, fun right. Yeah, and frankly you know, again we'll just go back to that whole thought-feeling action cycle. It's just your thought about the ice cream that's making it fun.

Dr. Tamar: 40:27

Right. And when they say the mind is powerful, our thoughts are powerful, there was nothing but the truth. Then it applies in so many aspects of our lives, especially with our nutrition and lifestyle changes. Now, we know that making changes is not easy, but we want them to be sustainable, right? So that's why, although they might have an injection or a pill, or even surgery to help with weight loss, is it sustainable? And the answer to that is not necessarily because we're not getting to the core of the problem. We're not getting to that root cause of why or how they ended up that way in the first place, right? But we have to start somewhere. So, for parents listening who want to start making positive changes in their family's nutrition, that happens right away. Where would you suggest they begin? And we'll wrap up with this, sheila.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 41:17

Well, one thing I think holds people back from even being willing to try to make a change is the black or white thinking, the all or nothing, the perfectionism, thinking like if I can't make it perfect or if I can't make all of these changes, if I can't get rid of 100% of the ultra processed food in our life, it's totally not worth doing. Forget it. And I would just say that's just your brain's way of trying to keep you safe and it's normal to think that way, but it's not helping you in any way. So I always ask people well, what's the lowest hanging fruit? What's one thing you think you could do? Ok, could you eliminate soda? Don't buy soda anymore. Don't bring home. We call it soda up here. What do you guys call it?

Dr. Tamar: 42:11

Well, I'm from the East Coast because I call it soda, but I've heard people out here in California call it pop.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 42:16

Yeah, pop or soft drinks or whatever. That doesn't mean you can never drink it, although really honestly, the truth is you really should never drink it. It is so bad for you. But at least maybe a low hanging fruit is. Just don't buy that anymore. Or if you're buying three two liter bottles, okay, buy one two liter bottle this week. Okay, and then you can cut that back even more. I think that there's no wrong way to start and you just have to be willing to make these like tiny little changes 1% change, 1% change, 1% change and over time that really adds up. I know it's boring advice and people want, you know, a quick fix and a quick win. You know, and there are so many, there are so many, you know. Make one small food change. Get a little bit more sleep. If you're a parent, make sure your child is getting the right amount of sleep, because if your child, especially our teenagers, with their devices and their phones, they're not sleeping well at all and they're not getting the right amount of sleep, which then we know throws off our insulin regulation our hunger hormones. So you're hungrier the next day, so you eat more and you're not eating healthy food. You're eating your body's craving kind of unhealthy, junky carb food, and also then your mood is off, and when you're in a bad mood you tend to eat worse. And so you know, try to make sure your child is getting the right amount of sleep, or help them get the right amount of sleep, and then moving our ancient body. As humans, we evolved over the thousands and thousands of years really moving our bodies every day. We had to. That's how we evolved, and today, in today's world, we don't have to move at all. You mentioned Door Dash.

Dr. Tamar: 44:13

We don't have to do anywhere. We don't have to do anywhere.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 44:17

And our devices and our cars, and it's really comfortable to not move, but it's just not healthy for us, so okay. So if you're not doing anything right now, what could you do? All right, how about five minutes, could you? If you don't wanna go outside and walk, could you walk around your apartment or walk around your house or go up and down the stairs a couple times you know kids like a little dance party or something. Could you do something to get you and your kids moving a little bit more today than you did yesterday? And if you do a little change in your food, a little change in your sleep, a little change in your movement and in your emotional regulation skills and really learn how to feel your feelings, that's gonna move the needle like a huge amount. And then when you start to feel a little bit better or notice like whoa, I have a little bit more energy, then you have more energy to do more good things for yourself. It will build on itself over time.

Dr. Tamar: 45:21

Great advice. So from getting proper sleep nutrition. It made me think when you were talking what we learned in pharmacy school when it comes to adjusting doses of medications start low and go slow, right. So we're not gonna go cold turkey and empty out your pantry of everything that's processed Not a bad idea but what we're trying to establish are sustainable habits, right. So we kind of have to just take out a little bit at a time and replace it with something that's healthier, right.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 45:55

It's a long game.

Dr. Tamar: 45:56

Yeah, it's a long game. Hang in there. It's not hang in there, just stick with it. Make those small changes from each aspect that Sheila mentioned and those results will be seen. So thank you so much, sheila. Thank you for joining us today. This was very insightful and a lot of information that I enjoyed speaking with you.

Dr. Sheila Carroll: 46:16

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on your show. I appreciate it.

Dr. Tamar: 46:19

You're welcome. That's all I have for you today. Friends, If any part of this conversation interested you or resonated with you, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Your five star review and comments can guide others on a similar journey. Subscribe, rate and download this episode to ensure you're always in the loop. Coming up next week on the show, we'll dive into the amazing world nutrigenomics and discuss quick, effective strategies to integrate it into your practice. This could be your game changer, helping you empower your patients to take control of their health with fewer medications. Talk to you next Friday. I'll see you then.