The Habit Healers

Your body already makes GLP-1, the same hormone behind Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro. The question is whether your meals are actually triggering it. In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I walk you through ten science-backed habits that quiet food noise, calm cravings, and tune your natural satiety signals.

If you have ever eaten what felt like a perfectly reasonable dinner and found yourself rummaging through the pantry ninety minutes later, this episode is for you. I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, board-certified lifestyle medicine physician, and today we go deep on the gut hormone system that controls real, lasting fullness, the same one GLP-1 medications like semaglutide and tirzepatide are engineered to mimic. The truth is, your gut is already producing GLP-1, PYY, CCK, and ghrelin after every meal. Whether those signals actually reach your brain depends almost entirely on what you eat, how you eat it, and what you do in the hour after. I’ll walk you through ten habits, grounded in randomized trials and plant-based lifestyle medicine, that work together to reduce hunger naturally, stabilize blood sugar, and end the cycle of cravings that no amount of willpower can outlast.

What you’ll learn:

* Why eating vegetables and plant protein before starch can reduce your post-meal glucose spike by 53% and boost natural GLP-1 production

* How fiber, plant protein, and resistant starch activate the gut hormones that quiet food noise and end constant hunger

* The “protein leverage” effect that explains why low-protein, ultra-processed meals drive overeating

* Why a ten-minute walk after meals lowers blood sugar more than standing breaks alone

* How ultra-processed foods can drive you to eat roughly 500 more calories a day, even when sugar, fat, and fiber are matched

* A simple weekly plan to layer all ten habits in without overwhelm

Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/what-if-you-could-eat-less-and-neverCheck out the Habit Healers Community: https://www.skool.com/habithealers/about

Most of us assume hip stiffness is just part of getting older. The research tells a very different story. In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’m walking through why your tight hips have far less to do with aging than you think, and why the fix is closer than you’ve been led to believe.

I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, and in this conversation I unpack the largest study ever conducted on joint-specific flexibility, which found that age explains only about half of the change in hip range of motion across the lifespan. The bigger driver is something most of us do for eight to twelve hours every day. We sit. Hip extension, the exact motion sitting eliminates, is the first to go. I also walk through what actually changes when you stretch consistently, and it is not what most people assume. Your muscle fibers do not lengthen. What changes is your nervous system’s stretch tolerance, the point at which your brain decides a range is safe to allow. The range you think is gone is almost certainly still there, waiting to be retrained.

I close with a simple four-move daily hip mobility routine, a sit-to-stand benchmark you can run at home, and the maintenance rule for keeping the flexibility you build.

What you’ll learn:

* Why hip stiffness has more to do with sitting than aging

* What the research shows about stretching, nervous system stretch tolerance, and range of motion

* A daily four-move hip mobility routine for tight hips and hip flexors

* How to test your hip mobility with a simple sit-to-stand benchmark

* The maintenance rule for keeping the flexibility you gain

* When hip pain is a medical issue worth checking with your doctor

Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/if-your-hips-could-talk-theyd-begCheck out the Habit Healers Community: https://www.skool.com/habithealers/about

If cooking feels like a bigger project than you have energy for at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday, this episode is for you. I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, and today on The Habit Healers Podcast, I’m walking through why the people with the highest cooking standards actually cook the least, and how a simple five-minute bowl can be one of the most metabolically sound meals you eat all week.

For years, the message has been that healthy eating means scratch cooking, fresh herbs, and thirty minutes at the stove. But the research tells a different story. A nationally representative survey found that the people who defined cooking most narrowly were the most confident in the kitchen, but they also got dinner on the table the least often. Meanwhile, a long-term study of nearly 100,000 health professionals found that the people who prepared the most meals at home had a significantly lower risk of type 2 diabetes and gained less weight over time, regardless of how elaborate those meals were. In this episode, I unpack what the research on legumes, whole grains, and ultra-processed foods actually says, and why a bowl of canned beans, microwavable brown rice, raw vegetables, and a good sauce qualifies as a real, blood-sugar-friendly meal.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

* Why the people most confident in scratch cooking cook dinner the least often

* How canned beans, microwavable whole grains, and bagged greens deliver real metabolic benefits

* What the research says about home-cooked meals and type 2 diabetes risk

* The four-part Five-Minute Bowl formula: grain, legume, vegetable, and a simple sauce

* Why ultra-processed convenience meals affect your body differently than minimally processed whole foods

* How to build a satisfying plant-forward dinner with no recipe and no stovetop

Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/what-if-you-never-had-to-cook-againCheck out the Habit Healers Community: https://www.skool.com/habithealers/about

If you’ve ever felt lost reading a nutrition label or a health headline, full of words like polyphenol, phytochemical, carotenoid, prebiotic, and postbiotic, this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast is for you. I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, and today I’m sharing the visual mnemonics methodology I developed in medical school to make complex science stick, and I’m applying it to the most confusing vocabulary in modern nutrition.

In this episode I walk you through the two big families that organize almost every nutrition term you’ll ever encounter: nutrients and bioactive compounds. You’ll learn why phytochemicals are a subset of bioactive compounds, how fat-soluble and water-soluble vitamins behave differently in the body, the difference between major and trace minerals, why omega-3 and omega-6 essential fatty acids compete on the same pathway, and why the old soluble vs insoluble fiber split misses what fiber actually does in your gut. I also cover the four major drawers of plant compounds, polyphenols, carotenoids, organosulfur compounds, and phytosterols, and close with how prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics fit together in gut health.

What you’ll learn:

* Why bioactive compounds is a more accurate umbrella term than phytochemicals

* The difference between fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K) and water-soluble vitamins (B, C)

* How omega-3 and omega-6 essential fatty acids compete on the same enzymatic pathway

* Why prebiotic fiber and resistant starch matter for gut health beyond the soluble vs insoluble fiber framework

* What polyphenols, carotenoids, organosulfur compounds, and phytosterols actually do

* How prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics work together as a sequence

Dr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/all-those-confusing-nutrition-terms

Check out the Habit Healers Community: https://www.skool.com/habithealers/about

What if your entire cardiovascular health could be captured in a single score from 0 to 100? In this episode, I walk you through Life’s Essential 8, the American Heart Association’s heart health score, and why the average American adult lands at just 65, the equivalent of a D+.

I see it constantly in my practice. Someone walks in managing one number, their cholesterol, their blood pressure, their blood sugar, with no idea how it connects to their sleep, their activity, or their weight. Life’s Essential 8 is what happens when you finally put all of it on one page. I break down all eight components, four health behaviors and four health factors, so you can score yourself today and find the one area that’s quietly pulling your average down. I also share what the research since 2022 shows about longevity and biological age, including findings that link higher scores to more disease-free years and a body that ages more slowly. Then I give you the one piece of advice the framework’s own authors recommend, the move most people get backwards when they try to fix everything at once.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

* How the Life’s Essential 8 cardiovascular health score works and how to calculate yours

* Why diet, physical activity, sleep, and nicotine exposure are the upstream metrics to target first

* How heart health connects to longevity, healthy aging, and your biological age

* The science of lowering cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar through lifestyle medicine

* The single most effective place to start if you feel overwhelmed by where to begin

Dr. Marbas Substack: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/whats-your-hearts-gpaCheck out the Habit Healers Community: https://www.skool.com/habithealers/about

Chef Martin Oswald was in his Austrian kitchen today toasting mustard seeds in a dry pan while I sat in our RV in Bend, Oregon, where we’ve parked for the summer because Las Vegas in June is not for the faint of heart. He was making a beet tartare and a high-nitrate summer salad, and at some point the conversation drifted from cooking into chemistry, which is what tends to happen when you put a chef and a doctor in the same room.

Every ingredient Martin picked for today’s session was loaded with inorganic nitrate. Beets, arugula, mâche, celery, radish, parsley, rhubarb. That wasn’t accidental. And the reason it matters has to do with what happens to that nitrate once you eat it.

The conversion pathway goes like this. You eat the food. Specific bacteria on your tongue reduce the nitrate into nitrite. That’s the first step, and it happens entirely in your mouth. When you swallow, the nitrite hits the acidic environment of your stomach, where some of it gets converted directly into nitric oxide. Whatever nitrite is left over enters your bloodstream and can be converted into nitric oxide later in your tissues, particularly in low-oxygen areas like working muscles.

Nitric oxide tells the smooth muscle in your blood vessel walls to relax. Your blood vessels open up, blood pressure comes down, and your tissues start getting better oxygen delivery. This is real physiology with real cardiovascular consequences.

It’s also why I wrote a piece a while back about antibacterial mouthwash. Those bacteria on your tongue that perform the first conversion? If you nuke them with mouthwash, you’ve cut the pathway off at the start. You can eat beets all day long and blunt the cardiovascular benefit because the bacteria weren’t there to begin the conversion.

Martin brought up the question about nitrate in bacon and sausage, which is something I hear constantly. People see “nitrate” on the package and assume they’re getting the same benefit as a beet salad. The molecule is technically identical. But what it’s packaged with changes the outcome completely.

In vegetables, nitrate comes packaged with vitamin C and polyphenols and a bunch of other antioxidants that steer the chemistry toward nitric oxide and block harmful byproducts from forming. In processed meat, you’ve got the opposite situation. Nitrite meets amino acids from the protein under high heat, and that combination can produce nitrosamines, which are carcinogenic. Heme iron from the meat accelerates the reaction, and there are no antioxidants in the mix to pump the brakes. Same molecule, very different ending.

So that’s the biology. The cooking was just as good.

Martin made two dishes. The first was a beet tartare, which is a plant-based take on what’s traditionally a raw meat preparation. He diced the beets small, then mixed in chopped cherries, toasted almonds, fresh-grated horseradish, and pickled rhubarb. The dressing was almond butter with pomegranate molasses, and he added black lentils to round out the protein and mellow the horseradish bite. The whole thing went into a ring mold and came out looking like something from a restaurant in Aspen, which is where Martin spent years cooking professionally.

The second dish was an everyday summer salad built on the same high-nitrate idea but much simpler to throw together. He started with arugula and mâche. If you haven’t tried mâche, it’s worth seeking out. It’s sweet enough to calm arugula’s peppery kick, and it’s also one of the highest nitrate greens you can buy. Martin calls it Vogerlsalat in Austrian German, though you’ll probably find it labeled as lamb’s lettuce at the store. He added celery and radish, plus a big handful of flat-leaf parsley, which he pointed out is wildly underrated as a nitrate source. Blackberries went in for sweetness and chopped hazelnuts for crunch. Then thick-cut red onions, which add a textural punch you wouldn’t get from fine dice.

Click below to get the recipe!

The dressing was toasted hazelnuts blended with mustard and a bit of miso for umami, then loosened with vinegar and enough water to get it creamy. Martin’s tip was to roast the hazelnuts low and slow, around 160 degrees for about 20 minutes, to develop that deep toasted flavor you recognize from Nutella.

What I appreciate about the way Martin cooks is that he’s always thinking about how flavors and textures work against each other. Beets are soft, so he pairs them with something that crunches. Arugula is spicy, so he brings in something sweet. He borrowed the thick-cut red onion idea from Greek salads, where those big rough chunks give you a burst of raw onion flavor that disappears just as fast as it arrived. Once you understand those principles, he says, you don’t really need the recipe anymore.

He also said something practical about sweeteners that I want to pass along. Rhubarb is extremely tart, and when you’re pickling it you need some sweetness. Martin’s not precious about it. Date syrup is great if you have it. But a small amount of brown sugar in the pickling liquid, when you’re eating the fruit and discarding the liquid, is not something to lose sleep over. Getting so rigid about a teaspoon of sweetener that you skip the rhubarb entirely would be a bad trade, given how much nitrate rhubarb contains.

One last thing, because I love telling this story. Research suggests that eating about one medium beet, or a two-ounce shot of beet juice, roughly two hours before exercise can improve endurance performance. The mechanism is exactly what we already covered. More nitric oxide, better blood flow, better oxygen to the muscles. My youngest son ran cross-country in high school, and we used to “dope” him with beets before meets. He turned out to be one of the 10 to 15 percent of people who get beeturia, meaning his urine and stool went bright red. If you’re not expecting it, that’s a memorable bathroom trip. But it’s completely harmless.

Summer is a good time to lean into these foods. The produce is at its best and most people are already reaching for lighter meals. Martin’s salad works as a full lunch, and the tartare is the kind of thing you bring to a dinner party when you want people to ask how you made it.

Looking for a supportive community?

If you’re working on healing insulin resistance, these are exactly the kinds of meals that add up over time. Inside The Habit Healers community on Skool, you’ll find the Insulin Resistance Reversal Roadmap course, which walks you through building these habits step by step. Martin’s Healing Kitchen recipe vault lives there too, with videos and an ever-expanding recipe library. And every Tuesday at 4 PM Pacific, I go live for 90 minutes of coaching and Q&A.

Click below to join us!

If you finish every meal feeling overstuffed and wondering why, the problem may not be willpower. It may be speed. Eating too fast quietly outruns your body’s own fullness signals, and slowing down can change how much you eat without any dieting at all.

In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, and I walk you through the science of eating speed and your satiety hormones, the natural GLP-1, CCK, and PYY that tell your brain you’ve had enough. The catch is timing. These fullness hormones take time to build, so when you eat quickly, the food is gone before the signal ever arrives. I share what the research shows about chewing more, eating slower, and even a striking study where slowing meals down led to lasting weight loss with no calorie counting. Then I give you a simple, doable habit called The Slow Bite that helps you eat mindfully, feel full sooner, and stop overeating, starting with a single meal a day.

What you’ll learn:

* How your natural GLP-1 and other satiety hormones control appetite and fullness

* Why eating slowly and chewing more can help you eat less without trying

* The link between fast eating, weight gain, and metabolic health

* A step-by-step way to practice mindful eating and slow down at meals

* How putting your fork down between bites can help curb overeating

Dr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/why-are-the-fast-eaters-three-times

Check out the Habit Healers Community: https://www.skool.com/habithealers/about

Can an NMN supplement really make you run faster after menopause? I started taking NMN and resveratrol after hearing Harvard scientist David Sinclair tell a story on a longevity podcast, and what happened to my running data did not fit anything I’d expect as a physician.

In this episode, I share my own timeline honestly: a personal record at the Boston half-marathon, then menopause, a broken ankle, and eighteen months of detraining at fifty-five. Then, about four weeks after starting NMN and resveratrol, I was running faster than my lifetime baseline at a heart rate fifteen beats per minute lower. I can’t prove the supplements did it, and I won’t pretend to. Instead, I walk you through what the science actually says about NAD+, mitochondria, and healthy aging, including the famous “marathon mouse” study, the human trials in postmenopausal women and runners, and the real controversy around resveratrol’s bioavailability. We also talk about why so much of the NMN supplement market is mislabeled, and the lab tests I’d want before starting.

In this episode you’ll learn:

* Why NAD+ levels decline with age and what that means for energy and metabolic health

* How NMN may improve insulin sensitivity and exercise performance in postmenopausal women

* What the research on resveratrol and David Sinclair’s longevity claims really shows

* Which labs to check before and after starting NMN, including homocysteine

* Why third-party testing matters when choosing an NMN supplement

* Why resistance training, protein, and sleep still matter more than any capsule

Dr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/can-a-pill-make-an-aging-runner-fasterCheck out the Habit Healers Community: https://www.skool.com/habithealers/about

GLP-1 weight loss medications are evolving faster than most people can track, and a lot of what you’ve heard is already out of date. In this episode I give you the updated map: how Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound, and the new triple agonist retatrutide actually differ, and why it matters for your results.

Here’s what I want you to know. These drugs aren’t a willpower fix, they’re correcting the hormonal signals that drive hunger and metabolism, and each generation adds another dial. I walk through semaglutide, tirzepatide, and retatrutide in plain language, then tackle the question that frustrates so many patients: why the scale stops moving. The weight loss plateau isn’t your body becoming immune to the medication. It’s metabolic adaptation, and once you understand it, you have real options. We also cover the new higher-dose semaglutide, the oral GLP-1 pill, and the lifestyle habits, protein, strength training, fiber, and sleep, that amplify whatever your medication is doing.

What you’ll learn:

* How semaglutide, tirzepatide, and retatrutide differ in how they work

* Why the GLP-1 weight loss plateau happens and what to do next

* How to protect muscle with protein and strength training on a GLP-1

* What the research shows about weight regain after coming off these drugs

* New options: higher-dose semaglutide and the oral GLP-1 pill

Dr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/why-your-weight-loss-drug-stoppedCheck out the Habit Healers Community: https://www.skool.com/habithealers/about

What if your heart, your kidneys, and your blood sugar were never separate problems at all? In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I break down cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic syndrome, or CKM syndrome, the framework that connects insulin resistance, high blood pressure, kidney health, and heart disease into one picture, and why most adults are already affected without knowing it.

I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, a board-certified lifestyle medicine physician, and I walk you through how these four systems share the same wiring, how trouble in one quietly accelerates damage in the others, and how the American Heart Association’s five CKM stages map that progression from healthy to high risk. The part most people miss is that standard lab work can look completely normal while a problem is building underneath. I explain the tests worth asking for, including fasting insulin and your HOMA-IR score, the triglyceride-to-HDL ratio, apoB, and the two kidney tests almost nobody orders, UACR and eGFR. Then we get practical with five evidence-based habits for better metabolic health, from a DASH-style, plant-based eating pattern to movement, sodium, and the overnight repair window of good sleep.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

* Why cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic syndrome (CKM syndrome) ties heart, kidney, and metabolic health together

* How fasting insulin and HOMA-IR can reveal insulin resistance years before blood sugar rises

* The kidney tests most people never get, UACR and eGFR, and why they predict heart risk

* What the five CKM stages mean and how to find where you stand

* Five habits that can slow or even reverse the cascade, including a DASH and plant-based diet

Dr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/the-5-habit-prescription-nobody-gaveCheck out the Habit Healers Community: https://www.skool.com/habithealers/about