The Habit Healers

Can someone at 220 pounds be metabolically healthier than someone at 155? In this episode, I explain why the real driver of type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance isn’t how much fat you carry, but whether you’ve exceeded your own personal fat storage capacity.

I walk you through what I call the garage model of metabolic health: the idea that your fat tissue has a fixed number of parking spaces, and trouble begins only when that garage fills up and fat starts spilling into your liver, muscles, and the space around your organs. This is where fatty liver disease, rising triglycerides, and high blood sugar actually come from. I break down the cascade one domino at a time, from overloaded fat cells to visceral fat, to a fatty insulin-resistant liver, to the cholesterol changes that standard testing often misses.

Then comes the hopeful part. I explain why this cascade reverses in a predictable order, why your pancreas may be recovering rather than failing, and why diabetes remission depends far more on losing enough weight than on where you started.

What you’ll learn:

* Why metabolically healthy obesity and thin people with high blood sugar both come down to fat storage capacity

* How visceral fat and fatty liver disease quietly drive insulin resistance

* Why your triglyceride-to-HDL ratio and ApoB can catch problems years before a glucose test

* The order in which liver, lipids, and the pancreas recover during diabetes reversal

Which blood markers and labs to request, including HOMA-IRCheck out the Habit Healers Community: https://www.skool.com/habithealers/about

Dr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/your-fat-cells-just-walked-off-the

Your blood sugar looks normal, your HbA1c is fine, and your doctor says you’re healthy. So why are you exhausted by 2pm, carrying weight around your middle that won’t budge, and walking into rooms forgetting why? In this episode, I explain why standard blood work misses insulin resistance, the upstream driver behind so many of the symptoms people are told to ignore.

I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, and on The Habit Healers Podcast I walk you through what fasting glucose and HbA1c actually measure, and what they leave out. We talk about why fasting insulin is the test almost no one orders, how your pancreas can keep your numbers looking perfect for years while damage builds underneath, and the link between insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver, PCOS, and even brain health. Then we get to the good news: this is reversible. I share the exact sequence of small daily habits, starting with blood sugar, that builds metabolic health the way a flywheel builds momentum.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

* Why a normal fasting glucose can hide insulin resistance for years

* The one blood test to ask your doctor for: fasting insulin

* How insulin resistance connects to type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s

* Why walking 10 minutes after your largest meal steadies blood sugar

* How a continuous glucose monitor turns your body into a real-time experiment

The habit-stacking system that makes healthy choices automaticCheck out the Habit Healers Community: https://www.skool.com/habithealers/about

Dr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/what-if-your-fatigue-your-belly-fat

Your fasting glucose is normal, but your A1c keeps climbing, and no one can tell you why. In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’m walking you through exactly what that gap means, why post-meal blood sugar spikes are the hidden driver of rising A1c in most people, and the nine habits that target the hours your fasting blood draw never sees.

I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, a board-certified lifestyle medicine physician, and this is one of the most common patterns I see in my practice. A patient comes in with a “normal” fasting glucose of 95 and an A1c that’s quietly drifting from 5.1 to 5.4 to 5.6, and they’re told everything is fine until suddenly it isn’t. The research actually shows that for people in this early-warning zone, postprandial glucose accounts for roughly 70% of the total problem, and it deteriorates years before fasting numbers move. We’ll cover the labs most doctors don’t order, including fasting insulin and HOMA-IR, why a whole food plant-based diet remains the most powerful lever for reversing insulin resistance, and the small, doable habits that smooth out blood sugar spikes after meals.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

* Why fasting glucose misses postprandial blood sugar spikes and what that means for prediabetes risk

* The specific lab tests to ask for, including fasting insulin, HOMA-IR, fructosamine, and CGM time-in-range

* How meal sequencing and a 10-minute post-meal walk can lower post-meal glucose by up to 37%

* Why a whole food plant-based diet improves insulin sensitivity at the cellular level

* How sleep, stress, and hydration quietly drive glucose dysregulation

* When to ask your doctor about iron deficiency and other conditions that distort A1c

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

Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/what-does-it-mean-when-your-fasting

Fast eaters are more than three times as likely to carry belly fat, even when they’re eating the same food as slower eaters. In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I walk you through the science of why eating speed quietly shapes weight, blood sugar, and metabolic health, and what to do about it.

We dig into the gut hormones that tell your brain you’re full, GLP-1, CCK, and PYY, and why they need about twenty minutes to catch up to your fork. I share what researchers found when seventeen volunteers ate the same ice cream in five minutes versus thirty minutes, why chewing alone changes your hormone response, and what a six-year study of nearly 60,000 adults revealed about people who shifted from fast to slower eating. I’ll also tell you about a small German trial where six men lost a median of eleven percent of their body weight by simply slowing down at the table, and kept it off for almost two years.

Then I walk you through this week’s habit, The Slow Bite, a simple twenty-minute mindful eating practice you can start at your next meal.

What you’ll learn:

* Why fast eating is linked to belly fat, metabolic syndrome, and weight gain

* How GLP-1, CCK, and PYY create your natural “stop eating” signal

* Why chewing more slowly may reduce calorie intake by around twelve percent

* The connection between stress, eating speed, and overeating

A simple twenty-minute mindful eating habit you can start this weekCheck out the Habit Healers Community: https://www.skool.com/habithealers/aboutDr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/why-are-the-fast-eaters-three-times

When Tim Gannon walked into the kitchen at the Pyramid Bistro in Aspen, Chef Martin Oswald figured he was a salesperson. Martin let him stand there for ten minutes. Gannon didn’t seem to mind. When Martin finally acknowledged him, Gannon rattled off every flavor on the menu that night, sage and allspice and the rest, with the precision of someone who had spent his life thinking about food at this level. Then he introduced himself as the founder of Outback Steakhouse and asked Martin to develop the sauces and spice blends for a new restaurant chain.

What Martin learned from that project is something most home cooks never think about. Chain restaurants succeed or fail based almost entirely on their sauces. The rice and broccoli are more or less the same from kitchen to kitchen. What makes people come back, what makes a thousand different locations taste like the same place, is what goes on top. Martin went through five rounds of tastings with the CEO team before a single sauce was approved. That’s how much it mattered.

And here’s what makes this relevant to your Tuesday night dinner. The same principle applies at your kitchen table. Martin keeps about forty sauce recipes in his portfolio, but his advice for home cooks is to find three to five that your household genuinely loves and get comfortable making them on repeat. When he caters events for a thousand people, the strategy is identical. Good sauces on the table, everyone’s happy.

The problem is that most of the sauces people reach for work against them. A standard barbecue sauce starts with ketchup, which is roughly half corn syrup, then piles more sugar on top. An Alfredo runs about five hundred calories of butter, cream, and cheese before you’ve touched the pasta. These sauces taste good because fat and sugar are the easiest buttons to push for flavor. But they aren’t the only buttons.

The Habit Healers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Two Sauces, One Principle

During our live session this week, Martin built two completely different sauces to demonstrate a single idea. Every sauce, whether it’s barbecue or cream-based or a vinaigrette, needs four things working together. Something for viscosity, something for acidity, a spice layer, and a backbone ingredient that keeps the whole thing from tasting flat. Once you understand those four components, you can build dozens of sauces without ever opening a bottle.

For the barbecue sauce, dates replace corn syrup. They handle both jobs that corn syrup does in a traditional recipe, providing sweetness and that thick, sticky texture that makes barbecue sauce cling to food. Passata, a thick Italian tomato puree, replaces the ketchup. Toasted spices go in layered rather than singular. Martin uses chili powder alongside chipotle flakes rather than picking just one, because layering different forms of heat creates complexity that a single spice can’t. Dijon mustard acts as an emulsifier, binding everything together the same way it holds a vinaigrette in suspension. Mulberry or pomegranate molasses provides the deep, dark tartness that traditional molasses would. Apple cider vinegar adds acidity. Everything goes into the blender.

The finished sauce has no salt, no refined sugar, and no oil. And when Martin tasted it on camera, his eyebrows went up and he went quiet, which is how you know it’s actually good.

One detail worth stealing from his process. He tasted the sauce on a carrot stick, not off a spoon. A sauce eaten straight should taste intense. What matters is how it tastes on the food you’ll actually serve it with. That’s a professional habit most home cooks skip.

Thanks for reading The Habit Healers! This post is public so feel free to share it.

The Sauce Nobody Expects

The second sauce started with frozen English peas, which sounds like the least promising sauce ingredient imaginable. But peas bring three things to a blender that most people don’t realize. Their soluble fiber creates a smooth, creamy viscosity without any cream. They carry about four to five grams of natural sugar per hundred grams, which is enough sweetness to keep a sauce from tasting flat. And they puree into a bright green that looks genuinely beautiful on a plate.

Martin built this one as what he called a freestyle, applying the same four-component framework with completely different ingredients. Fenugreek, coriander, and black pepper toasted in a dry pan for the spice layer. Almond butter as the binder and a source of fat to help absorb fat-soluble vitamins. Lemon rather than vinegar for a gentler acidity that pairs better with the peas. And fresh horseradish, grated directly in, for backbone. Horseradish is a cruciferous vegetable, nutritionally in the same family as broccoli, and it provides enough heat to balance the natural sweetness of the peas without overpowering them.

The finished sauce can stand in anywhere you’d reach for a cream-based sauce. Pasta, roasted vegetables, grain bowls, crudités. At a fraction of the caloric load and with actual nutrients instead of saturated fat.

Why This Changes More Than You Think

The real takeaway from watching Martin work is that the viscosity and richness you associate with butter and cream and sugar can come from whole foods you already have access to. Dates, peas, cauliflower, corn, silken tofu, soaked cashews. Each one creates a different style of sauce base, and each one lets you skip the calorie-dense ingredients that make most sauces a metabolic problem rather than a metabolic asset.

If you’ve been buying bottled sauces because you assumed the homemade alternative would be complicated or bland, this is the week to test that assumption. Pick one of these two sauces, make it once, and taste it on whatever you’re already eating.

Here is Martin’s 40 Sauce Recipe Index.

Join Us in The Habits Healers Community

Everything we covered in this episode is part of a bigger system. The Habit Healers Community on Skool is where I teach the full Insulin Resistance Reversal Roadmap and where Chef Martin Oswald's recipes are matched to each stage of your healing. You get the complete course, live coaching with me every Tuesday, the tools to see what is happening inside your body, and a community doing this together. Join the Habit Healers Community here. I'll see you inside.

What if your annual physical is missing the tests that matter most? Most standard lab panels were built to catch disease, not to tell you where your health is heading. On this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’m walking you through eight blind spots in the typical yearly checkup, four blood markers your doctor can add to your next requisition, and four simple physical assessments you can do at home in under five minutes.

I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, board-certified lifestyle medicine physician, and these are the tests I think every adult should know about. We’ll talk about why fasting insulin and HOMA-IR can flag insulin resistance years before fasting glucose ever moves out of normal range. Why ApoB is a more accurate measure of heart disease risk than the LDL cholesterol on your standard lipid panel. Why Lipoprotein(a), or Lp(a), only needs to be tested once in your entire life but rarely is. And why hsCRP, a marker of chronic inflammation, may help explain the half of heart attacks that happen in people with normal cholesterol.

Then we’ll cover the at-home assessments most doctors never do. Grip strength, single-leg balance, walking speed, and the chair sit-to-stand test. Each one is linked to long-term mortality risk in large studies, and each one gets better with practice.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

* The fasting insulin and HOMA-IR test that detects early insulin resistance

* Why ApoB is a better predictor of cardiovascular disease than LDL cholesterol

* How a one-time Lp(a) blood test can change your heart disease risk picture

* What hsCRP reveals about chronic inflammation and heart attack risk

* Four at-home longevity tests, including grip strength and gait speed, that predict healthy aging

* How to talk to your doctor about adding these markers to your next physical

Check out the Habit Healers Community: https://www.skool.com/habithealers/aboutDr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/what-are-the-8-tests-your-doctor

Most of what you’ve been told about sleep is wrong, and the science has shifted in ways your doctor probably hasn’t caught up on yet. In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’m walking you through fourteen of the most common sleep myths, from the eight-hour rule to weekend catch-up sleep, and showing you what the latest research actually says.

Some of these will surprise you. Sleep regularity, meaning how consistent your bedtime and wake time are from day to day, may predict all-cause mortality better than total sleep duration. Weekend recovery sleep can make insulin sensitivity worse, not better. Evening exercise does not ruin your sleep. A glass of wine is dismantling your sleep architecture even when it feels like it’s helping you drift off. And women are dramatically underdiagnosed with sleep apnea because the classic stereotype tells the wrong story.

I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, a board-certified lifestyle medicine physician, and in my practice I see how much suffering comes from following outdated sleep advice. This episode replaces myth with mechanism so you can build a sleep routine that actually works.

What you’ll learn:

* Why sleep regularity may matter as much as total sleep hours for longevity and brain health

* The truth about weekend catch-up sleep and your circadian rhythm

* Why melatonin is a chronobiotic, not a sleeping pill, and when to actually use it

* How sleep apnea presents differently in women and lean adults

* What CBT-I is and why it outperforms medication for chronic insomnia

* Why hitting snooze is probably fine, and the one habit to start Monday

Dr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/how-many-of-these-14-sleep-myths

A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:

If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62

Every cuisine on the planet figured out the same trick. Asian stir-fries pair tamarind with palm sugar. Moroccan tagines fold dried apricots into braised lamb. German cooks set sauerkraut next to pork. The contrast of sweet and sour is one of cooking’s oldest and most universal principles, and it exists because without it, flavor stays flat.

Most of us understand this instinctively when it comes to desserts or salad dressings. But what about a bowl of risotto? A pasta sauce? A side dish of roasted vegetables? In this week’s Habit Healers live, Chef Martin Oswald made the case that savory food needs sweetness too, and that the best place to find it is not in the sugar bowl. It is already sitting in your produce drawer.

The Sweetness You Never Noticed

Martin started the session with a question, “How much sugar is in a tomato?” The answer, per 100 grams of ripe tomato, is about 2.4 grams. That is roughly a quarter of a teaspoon. Not much, until you consider how that sweetness plays off the acidity of a good vinaigrette.

Then he walked through the lineup. A sweet potato comes in at about 2.8 grams of sugar per 100 grams, raw. A red bell pepper has around 4.2. Carrots sit at about 4.7. English peas are higher still. Corn tops them. And beets land at roughly 6.8 grams per 100 grams.

But the real surprise was shallots. That tiny onion, the one most home cooks use sparingly, packs about 7.9 grams of sugar per 100 grams. More than a teaspoon in a single small handful.

Now, before anyone panics about the sugar in their vegetables, Martin was quick to point out the obvious. These sugars come packaged with fiber and a range of vitamins and minerals. They are nothing like the tablespoon of refined sugar lurking in a burger bun or the sweetened dressings you get at most restaurants. The goal is not avoidance but awareness, learning to let those natural sugars do the work that refined sweeteners usually handle.

Why Roasting Changes Everything

If you bite into a raw onion, you are not going to taste sweetness. You are going to taste something sharp enough to make your eyes water. The sugar is there, but so are pungent sulfur compounds that overwhelm the palate.

Roasting changes the equation. Heat drives off water, which concentrates whatever sugar is present in the vegetable. It also triggers chemical reactions between sugars and amino acids that produce entirely new flavor compounds. The effect is dramatic. A raw sweet potato tastes starchy. A roasted sweet potato at 330 degrees for an hour tastes like dessert.

Chefs have known this for decades. Martin described how, early in his career at European health resorts, the standard approach was to steam everything. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, he and his colleagues had shifted to roasting because the flavor difference was so stark. Roasted carrots, roasted beets, roasted peppers. The produce was the same. The technique made it taste completely different.

One important note on temperature. Martin roasts at 330 to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, never higher. Going above 400 degrees risks creating acrylamide, a compound formed when starchy foods are heated to high temperatures and browned too aggressively. The goal is golden color, not dark brown. As Martin put it, go for the gold.

Two Ways to Roast Onions (and Why You Should Make a Big Batch)

Martin demonstrated two methods for turning raw onions into something sweet and deeply flavored.

The stovetop method is faster and more hands-on. Slice two onions about a quarter-inch thick, put them in a dry pan over medium heat, and let them cook for three to five minutes. When they start to stick, add a small splash of water and let that cook off. Repeat the process, adding water and letting it evaporate, until the onions turn golden.

The oven method is what Martin called the lazy version, and it is the one I am more likely to use. Slice two onions, put them in a covered pan, and roast at around 330 degrees for about 50 minutes. Then remove the cover and let them cook another 15 minutes to finish browning. Set a timer, walk away, come back to golden onions.

Either way, Martin’s strong recommendation was to cook in big batches. These roasted onions freeze beautifully and save time every night of the week. You can toss them into a bolognese, spread them on hummus toast, pile them onto a pizza, or fold them into a grain bowl. One session at the stove or oven sets you up for a week of meals.

A bonus tip from the session that had nothing to do with sweetness but earned the biggest reaction from the audience. If you refrigerate your onions overnight before cutting them, the cold suppresses the enzyme responsible for making you cry. Martin said it is not a perfect fix if you are processing 200 pounds of onions for a catering event, but for a home cook doing two or three, it makes a real difference.

The Soubise, Reinvented

The centerpiece of this week’s session was a sauce most home cooks have never heard of. A soubise is a classic French onion sauce, and in its traditional form, it starts with about a pound of butter. The butter does two things. It provides richness and it creates the smooth, creamy texture that makes the sauce cling to food.

Martin’s version skips the butter entirely. Instead, he blends roasted onions with soaked cashews, roasted garlic, and vegetable stock. The cashews, once soaked and blended smooth, provide the same creamy body that butter would, without the saturated fat. The roasted onions deliver the sweetness. The garlic adds depth. The stock adjusts the consistency.

The ingredients for this version are simple. Roasted onions (from the batch you already made), a handful of soaked cashews, a couple of cloves of roasted garlic (which you roasted right alongside the onions), vegetable stock, and whatever fresh herbs you have on hand. Martin mentioned basil and thyme as favorites, though rosemary works just as well. Blend everything until smooth, adjust the thickness with more stock if needed, and season.

Martin tasted it on camera and could not stop eating. Three bites turned into an extended sampling session, and his reaction told you everything you needed to know.

One Sauce, a Dozen Meals

What makes this soubise so practical is its versatility. Martin used it as the base for a risotto made with rye berries, though any whole grain works. Quinoa and barley are obvious substitutes, but so are buckwheat and millet. He tossed in English peas and corn for sweetness, spooned the sauce over a roasted sweet potato with sunflower seeds and a drizzle of pomegranate molasses, and kept going from there. You could stir in tomato paste for a different direction, or blend in basil puree to make something closer to a basil cream sauce. Add more cashew butter and it becomes an alfredo.

For anyone managing blood sugar, Martin offered a sensible approach. The demonstration layered several sweet elements together for visual effect, but in practice, you would choose one or two rather than stacking them all. A roasted sweet potato with the soubise is one meal. The grain risotto with peas and corn is another. And if you are watching your glucose response, eating a small salad with bitter greens like radicchio or Belgian endive before the main course can help moderate the spike.

The deeper lesson of the session was not really about any single recipe. It was about rethinking where sweetness comes from. Most of us reach for sugar or honey without considering that the vegetables already in our refrigerator have their own sweetness waiting to be unlocked. Roasting is the key. Patience is the only ingredient it requires.

If you want to get guidance on how these techniques fit your own health goals, join us in The Habit Healers community on Skool. It is where we take everything from these live sessions and put it into practice together.

What if the simplest way to lower your blood sugar after meals was a tiny seated movement you can do at your desk? In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, and I’m walking you through the science of the soleus push-up, a research-backed exercise that targets a deep calf muscle uniquely built to pull glucose straight out of your bloodstream while you sit.

We sit for ten or more hours a day, and most of our muscles are doing almost nothing during that time. But there’s one outlier: the soleus, a small, flat muscle deep in your calf that is roughly 88% slow-twitch endurance fibers, the highest ratio of any muscle ever measured. A 2022 University of Houston study found that activating this muscle through a simple seated heel-raise dropped post-meal blood sugar spikes by up to 52% and cut insulin demand by 60%. An early replication in people with prediabetes showed a 32% reduction. The science is still early, but the muscle biology is well-established, and the early lab results are hard to ignore.

What you’ll learn:

* Why the soleus muscle is uniquely designed to burn blood sugar without fatiguing

* How the soleus push-up reduces postprandial blood glucose and insulin spikes

* The exact technique for performing soleus push-ups at your desk

* Why bending your knee at 90 degrees is the key to activating the right muscle

* What the research actually shows, and what we still don’t know

* How to build this micro-movement into long stretches of sittingI am running a few minutes late; my previous meeting is running over.

Dr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/your-body-has-a-built-in-blood-sugarA Big Thank You To Our Sponsors:

If you want the best supplement to help you on your plant-based journey, you have to try Complement: https://lovecomplement.com/?aff=62

I’ll be honest with you. I schedule these live conversations with Jud Brewer MD PhD partly so I can get free therapy. He’s a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Brown University, and I figure if we’re going to have a conversation about perfectionism, I might as well get something out of it too.

So here’s my problem. My Substack is ranked number five in health and wellness. I started it about sixteen months ago from nothing. And I still lie awake some nights thinking I should be doing better. I should reach more people. I should write better articles. I could help more. It’s ridiculous when I say it out loud, and I know that, and it doesn’t stop the feeling.

Dr. Jud had just published an article called “Perfectionism Is a Calibration Problem”, and I wanted to dig into it with him because I recognized myself in almost every paragraph.

The Gambler Who Wasn’t Gambling

One of his patients described his own perfectionism this way. He said he felt like a gambler going deeper into debt, thinking the only thing he could do was gamble more, because stopping wouldn’t solve the debt.

He wasn’t talking about money. He was talking about his work.

Dr. Jud said he loved that description because it captured something he’d been seeing in patients for decades. The man knew he was never going to win. Perfectionism, for him, wasn’t about reaching a standard. It was about constantly moving the goalposts. He’d get close to whatever he was aiming for, and then he’d raise the bar on himself. Again and again and again.

I told Dr. Jud that I do this too. I go back and revise articles I’ve already published. Articles that people have already read and commented on and liked. He looked at me and said, essentially, your articles are fine, Laurie. They’re working. The fact that you’re going back to change them is the loop in action.

I know. I have a problem. Hence the free session.

The Most Disturbing Love Story Ever Composed

Dr. Jud brought up something unexpected during our conversation. He referenced a symphony by Hector Berlioz, the Symphonie Fantastique, which he had written about in his article. He played it in college, and the backstory is wild.

Berlioz was a French composer who fell madly in love with an Irish actress named Harriet Smithson. She didn’t speak French. He didn’t speak English. He pursued her relentlessly anyway and wrote an entire symphony to woo her. The whole piece is built around a musical theme called the idée fixe, which translates to “fixed idea.” It represents total obsessive fixation.

In the symphony, the main character descends into an opium dream. That theme keeps coming back in every movement, but each time it returns more distorted, more unrecognizable. By the fourth movement, the character has murdered his love interest and marches to the guillotine. You can hear the drumroll, the blade, and then the head bouncing into the basket. The fifth movement is a witch’s sabbath where the beloved dances over his grave.

Dr. Jud pointed out that Berlioz likely borrowed the idée fixe concept from French psychiatry at the time. It was a term floating around in medical circles in the 1800s. So a symphony about romantic obsession has its roots in clinical descriptions of how the mind gets stuck.

That’s the whole point of pairing these two things, Dr. Jud said. If you get too consumed by anything, it doesn’t end well.

If you want to hear it, here’s a full documentary and concert performance. Fair warning, it’s dark, but the music is extraordinary, and understanding the story behind it changes how you hear every movement.

An Uncalibrated Gauge

So what do you actually do about it? Dr. Jud didn’t go to the usual place of willpower or discipline. He went to measurement.

He compared perfectionism to a blood glucose monitor that isn’t calibrated. If the device keeps shifting its readings, you’ll never get a number you can trust. That’s what happens when we rely on our own internal sense of “good enough” as the only standard. We keep changing what good enough means. On a bad day, nothing passes. On a good day, we might let something through, but we’ll second-guess it within the hour.

His suggestion was to get external reference points. For his patient, that meant working with a coach. For me, it’s been reader feedback.

I learned this the hard way. Early on, I used some attention-grabbing titles, the kind marketing courses teach you to write. One of my readers told me that a headline I’d written caused her so much anxiety that she didn’t even open the article. She said she loved my work but that title made her feel afraid.

I could have taken that personally. For a second, I did. My heart rate went up. I felt defensive. But then I sat with it and thought about where she was coming from. And she was right. That wasn’t the kind of writer I wanted to be. So I changed how I write titles. That one piece of feedback has shaped hundreds of articles since.

When Are You Spending Too Much Time?

I asked Dr. Jud if there’s a way to tell when you’ve crossed from healthy effort into the perfectionism zone. He said to pay attention to two things.

First, look at whether the time you’re investing is producing any real change. When you’re swapping individual words in an article, and none of those swaps would make any difference to a reader, you’ve passed the point of useful revision. You’re spending more and more time for less and less return.

Second, ask yourself if you’re taking feedback personally. When we take things personally, Dr. Jud said, we close down. We get defensive. We can’t learn anything in that state. He connected this to Carol Dweck’s work on mindset. When we’re contracted and defensive, whether from internal self-judgment or from someone else’s comment, we’re in a fixed mindset. Learning requires the opposite. It requires being open enough to wonder what you might not know yet.

I had a great example of this from my own Substack. One of my very first articles that went viral, the one about habits of people who age well, got two negative comments out of hundreds of positive ones. Two people felt offended by it. I could have fired back. I could have pointed out that hundreds of other people loved it and these two were outliers. Instead, I responded with questions. I asked, gently, what about the piece had landed that way for them. Their second responses softened. It turned into a real conversation. We both grew from it.

Dr. Jud called that a growth mindset in action. Curiosity instead of defensiveness. You can feel the difference in your body when you shift from one to the other.

The Valley of Disappointment

I see a version of perfectionism in my clinic all the time, though it doesn’t always look like perfectionism. It looks like impatience.

Patients with blood sugar challenges come in motivated. They change their diet, they start exercising, and they expect their numbers to transform right away. When the labs don’t budge after a week or two, they get discouraged. I call this the valley of disappointment, and it swallows a lot of people.

What I try to explain is that a hemoglobin A1C reflects your blood sugar trend over three months. Not three days. Your cells are already responding to the changes you’ve made. Your metabolism is already shifting. But those changes take time to show up in lab results, and we live in a world that has trained us to expect instant feedback on everything.

That’s perfectionism applied to your body. You’ve decided what the timeline should be, and when your biology doesn’t cooperate, you assume the effort was wasted. But the effort is working. Your body just hasn’t had time to show you yet.

My early Substack articles were not as good as the ones I write now. They weren’t. And the only reason the newer ones are better is that I kept hitting publish on the ones that were good enough. If I’d waited until I thought something was perfect, I would have published nothing.

Fear Is the Cheapest Room in the House

We spent a good chunk of our conversation talking about fear as a motivator, because this comes up constantly in my practice. In primary care, we’re short on time. So we go to the thing that feels logical. Your blood pressure is high. Your labs are getting worse. You need to make changes or you’re shortening your life.

I had a patient not long ago who was diagnosed with diabetes. The diagnosis scared her, and she did well for about six months. Then something stressful happened in her family and she went back to her old habits. After that, the worsening lab numbers didn’t faze her at all. She’d become immune to the fear. What finally got through to her was when she physically couldn’t do the things she wanted to do. That had nothing to do with a number on a lab report. It was about her actual life.

Dr. Jud mentioned a colleague at Yale who studied tobacco packaging. All those graphic images of diseased lungs that Congress required on cigarette packs? His research showed they didn’t actually change behavior. You can scare someone into paying attention for a moment, but the effect wears off fast. Then you need a bigger scare, and a bigger one after that, and eventually there’s nowhere left to go.

He quoted a 14th-century poet named Hafiz. Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I want to see you in better quarters.

That line has stuck with me. I made a decision early on not to use fear or rage bait to grow this newsletter. Every marketing course I’ve taken says that’s the fastest path. Common enemy, polarizing takes, urgency that borders on panic. I refuse to do it. Growth has been slower. But my readers are here because something about this work feels right to them, not because they’re running from something.

You can apply the same idea to parenting, by the way. You can scare your kids into compliance for about ten seconds. After that, you’ve just damaged the relationship.

What You Get From Letting Go

Dr. Jud’s final point was the most practical one. He said the way out of these loops, whether it’s perfectionism or the fear trap, is to actually pay attention to how it feels when you do things differently. Not in some forced positive-thinking way. Through actual lived experience.

What does it feel like to hit publish and move on to the next thing instead of agonizing for another hour? What does it feel like when someone gives you tough feedback and you get curious about it instead of defensive?

It feels better. Your brain can learn from that, the same way it learned the old pattern.

And if you catch yourself beating yourself up for being a perfectionist? Dr. Jud laughed at that one. That’s just another loop, he said. Same approach. Notice it. Ask yourself what you’re getting from it. See if kindness works better than the beating.

I’ll add my own practical note. I’ve learned that I’m more vulnerable to my inner critic when I’m tired or hungry or trying to work late at night. So I write first thing in the morning, after my walk, when I’m rested and fed. I exercise early because I know I won’t do it later, and I know that skipping it gives the critic more to work with. That’s not some grand strategy. It’s just knowing myself well enough to stay out of my own way.

You’re worth that kind of honesty with yourself. And your good enough is probably a lot better than you think.

To read Dr. Jud Brewer’s full article, visit “Perfectionism Is a Calibration Problem” on his Substack, Inside the Curious Mind.